The Pony Express

The origins and the reason for a horse-and-rider mail delivery system between east and west can be summed up in two words: slow mail. Prior to the Coach and Pony Express mail delivery, time from the east to the west--by ship down the Gulf of Mexico, across Panama by mule, then by ship again up to San Francisco--might take six weeks, and if the winds were off, eight weeks.

With the discovery of gold in California in 1848, and the increasing political tensions of the 1850s which led to the Civil War, it became imperative to keep the far West in the Union by providing a more dependable source of information from the East. News was very slow in reaching eager California readers, and a standing joke of the time was that events in the East had already been forgotten by the time they were known by those out West.

The proposed route was brutally simple; west out of St. Joseph, up the Platte and Sweetwater rivers, through South Pass and the Rockies to Salt Lake City, out across the Utah and Nevada deserts, up and over the Sierra Nevada and into California, as fast as man and animal could go, day and night.

Although the Pony Express lasted only 19 months, the associated glamour, both fact and fiction, has assured it a large and lasting chapter in the history of the West. In October 1861 the Pony Express was officially terminated. It became obsolete by the advent of the telegraph system. Messages that took eight weeks by ship, or eight days by the Pony Express, now took only four hours by wire.