CHAPTER XII.

STORY OF THE PONY EXPRESS.

The glamour and pageantry of the crusaders in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth by Columbus, Cortez, and Pizarro, and repeated in the nineteenth by Taylor, Scott, Doniphan, and Fremont. As a resultant were the wonderful gold discoveries of 1849, in California, and a State born full-fledged and armed in a day, as Minerva from the brain of Jove. Among the wonderful and prolific accomplishments of Western thought and genius was the conception and successful fruition of the Pony Express, a scheme that could only have been conceived and launched amid the mountain grandeur of the Western plains. It could have birth in no other place, and can be duplicated nowhere else. The world presents no theater for its reënactment. It was formulated by Senator Gwinn of California, and fashioned and matured to success by Russell, Majors & Waddell of the overland mail coach system of 1859, as established by Congress.

The telegraph extended from the Atlantic seaboard to St. Joseph and from San Francisco to Sacramento. Two thousand miles of desert intervened. The ocean communications, via Central America, occupied twenty-two days, with propitious sea voyages. Could this be reduced? The stages took from twenty-one to twenty-five days, according to the weather. Duke Gwinn, as he was afterward called, suggested to W. H. Russell of the stage line that if the time could be shortened for communication on a central line, and kept open all the year, a great increase of travel and emigration, and the location of a railroad by the Government on a central route, would be the result. The conference resulted in the habiliment of the Pony Express, which eventuated in carrying a telegraph mail upon ponies from St. Joseph to Sacramento, 1,982 miles, regularly, from April, 1860, to September, 1861, in ten days, schedule time, and the special express in December, 1860, with a message of President Buchanan to Congress, on secession, in seven days and seventeen hours, a feat never before and never again to be accomplished. This was done through a desert country occupied by prowling savages and swept by violent storms, furious blizzards, and blinding snows. Crossing immense mountain ranges and trackless wastes of sand and sage-brush, grappling with mountain torrents and with nature’s wildest orgies, the hardy riders, whose watchword was “excelsior,” always made (Deo volente) the schedule time to the objective point. At St. Joseph and Sacramento, until the completion of the telegraph across the continent, the expectant crowd was never held in wait over an hour before the messenger waved his red flag of safety, and in the next instant slid from his panting steed and hastened to the office of the company with his bag of dispatches, worth its weight in gold.

During the Mexican War Congress added two new regiments of mounted volunteers to the regular army under orders to lay out a military road on the route taken by Fremont in 1843 to Oregon. They were to locate posts, and changed old Fort Kearney, then at the mouth of Tabor Creek, where Nebraska City is now located, to the crossing of the Platte River, where Kearney is now situated, and called it New Fort Kearney, one at Laramie on the Platte River, fifty miles north of Laramie City, now a station situated on the Union Pacific Railroad, and one at old Fort Hall, a Hudson Bay trading-post near the present site of Pocatella. This was called the military route, and was the road traveled by most of the emigrants to California in 1849. Passing by Soda Springs and south of Snake River to the headwaters of the Humboldt, or St. Marys River, through Nevada, it passed through the South Pass and struck Bear River, now in Idaho and Utah. The emigration of 1850 diverged southward from Laramie and past Green River at its junction with Hams Fork, through Echo Cañon and Salt Lake Valley westwardly via Reese River, striking the Humboldt lower down, and crossing the Sierra Nevada at the Truckee Pass and by Donner Lake. This was a much more direct trail to California and was used mostly thereafter by emigrants in 1850-51. In 1854 two stage routes were established, one by Texas and El Paso, on the Gila River, to Southern California, and one via Salt Lake, the latter much the shorter, but mountainous. McGraw & Co. had the route on the military road from Independence by Fort Leavenworth under a government subsidy, and in 1859 Russell, Majors & Waddell became the owners of this mail line and operated it successfully for years.

In 1859 Senator Gwinn, then United States Senator from California, and a devoted Union man, appealed to the stage company to expedite travel and communications on the military road, so as to have a central line available to the North and South alike, and to demonstrate the possibilities of operating it in midwinter. Strange to say, this grand Union man and able statesman went into the Rebellion and lost his wonderful prestige and influence in California, as well as a fortune, in his fealty to his native State of Mississippi, and in 1866 was made the Duke of Sonora by Maximilian, in the furtherance of some visionary scheme of Western empire, but soon died. His propositions were duly considered and responded to by that famous firm, representatives of thrift, enterprise, energy, and courage, who well deserve the commendation of history and the gratitude of their countrymen.

Russell was a Green Mountain boy, who before his majority had gone West to grow up with the country; and after teaching a three-months’ school on the frontier of Missouri had hired to old John Aull of Lexington, Mo., at $30 per month, to keep books, and was impressed in lessons of economy by the anecdotes of Aull that a London company engaged in the India trade had saved £80 per annum in ink by omitting to dot the “i’s” and cross the “t’s,” when he was emptying his pen by splashing the office wall with ink. Alexander Majors is still living, venerable with years and honors, a mountain son of Kentucky frontier ancestry, the colleague and friend of Daniel Boone; and William Waddell, an ancestral Virginian of the blue-grass region of Kentucky, bold enough for any enterprise, and able to fill any missing niche in Western wants.

The Pony Express was born from this conference, and the first move was to compass the necessary auxiliaries to assure success. Sixty young, agile, athletic riders were engaged and 420 strong and wiry ponies procured, and on the 9th of April, 1860, the venture was simultaneously commenced from St. Joseph and Sacramento City. The result was a success in cutting down the time more than one half, and it rarely missed making the schedule time in ten days, and in December, 1860, making it in seven days and seventeen hours. The stations were from twelve to fifteen miles apart, and one pony was ridden from one station to another, and one rider made three stations, and a few dare-devil fellows made double duty and rode eighty or eighty-five miles. One of them was Charles Cliff, now a citizen of St. Joseph, who rode from St. Joseph to Seneca and back on alternate days. He was attacked by Indians at Scotts Bluff, and received three balls in his body and twenty-seven in his clothes. Cliff made Seneca and back in eight hours each way.

Another of these daring riders of this flying express was Pony Bob.

But the one of these pony riders who has won greatest fame was William F. Cody (“Buffalo Bill”), who passed through many a gauntlet of death while in his flight from station to station bearing express matter that was of the greatest value.

The express was closed on the completion of a telegraph line by Ed Creighton of Omaha from that point to Sacramento City. The mail-bags were two pouches of leather, impervious to rain and weather, sealed, and strapped to the rider’s saddle before and behind, carrying two ounce letters or dispatches at $5 each.

The keepers of the stations had the ponies already saddled, and the riders merely jumped from the back of one to another; and where the riders were changed the pouches were unbuckled and handed to the already mounted postman, who started at a lope as soon as his hand clutched them. As these express stations were the same as the stage stations, the employes of the stage company were required to take care of the ponies and have them in readiness at the proper moment. The bridles and saddles were light weight, as were the riders, and the pouches were not to contain over twenty pounds of weight. There were two pouches of two pockets each, and secured by oil-silk, then sealed, and the pockets locked and never opened between St. Joseph and Sacramento.

This channel of communication was largely used by the Government and by traders and merchants, and was a paying venture, first semi-weekly and then daily, and but for the building of the telegraph would have become a wonderful success.

Every two or three hundred miles there were located at the stations division agents to provide for emergencies in case of Indian raids or stampedes of ponies, and at the crossing of the Platte at Fort Kearney there was then employed the notorious Jack Slade, a Vermont Yankee, lost to the teachings of his early and pious environments, turned into a frontier fiend. He shot a Frenchman named Jules Bevi, whose patronymic is preserved in the present station of Julesburg on the Union Pacific Railroad. Slade nailed one of his ears to the station door and wore the other several weeks as a watch-charm. He drifted to Montana, and in 1865 was hanged by the vigilantes on suspicion of heading the road agents who killed Parker of Atchison and robbed a train of $65,000. His tragic end, as related by Doctor McCurdy, formerly of St. Joseph, contains an element of the pathetic. He lived on a ranch near Virginia City, Mont., and every few days came into town and filled up on “benzine,” and took the place by shooting along the streets and riding into saloons and proclaiming himself to be the veritable “bad man from Bitter Creek.” The belief that he was connected with matters worse than bad whisky had overstrained the long-suffering citizens. The suggestive and mysterious triangular pieces of paper dropped upon the streets, surmounted with the skull and arrows, called the vigilantes to a meeting at which the death of Slade and two companions was determined. On the fated morning following the meeting he came to town duly sober and went to a drug-store for a prescription, and while awaiting its preparation he was suddenly covered with twelve shotguns and ordered to throw up his hands. He complied smilingly, but proposed to reason with them as to the absurdity of taking him for a bad man. The only concession was permission to send a note to his wife at the ranch, and an hour was allotted him to make peace with the Unknown; ropes were placed around the necks of the three, and at the end of the time they were given short shrift, and were soon hanging between heaven and earth. While the bodies were swaying the wife appeared on the scene, mounted, with a pistol in each hand, determined to make a rescue; but seeing that it was too late she quailed before the determined visages of the vigilantes, and soon left the vicinity, carrying away, as it was believed, a large amount of the proceeds of Slade’s robberies.

Most of the famous actors in that memorable enterprise known as the Pony Express have passed beyond the confines of time and gone to join the great majority. In the summer of 1861 the Pony Express passed, with the overland stage line, into the ownership of Ben Holliday, one of those wonderful characters developed from adventure and danger, and nurtured amid the startling incidents of frontier life. Born near the old Blue Lick battle-field, he was at seventeen Colonel Doniphan’s courier to demand from Joe Smith and Brigham Young the surrender of Farwest. At twenty-eight he entered Salt Lake Valley with fifty wagon-loads of merchandise and was indorsed by Brigham as being worthy of the confidence of the faithful. This secured him a fortune. At thirty-eight, at the head of the overland mail route, and at forty-five, the owner of sixteen steamers on the Pacific, carrying trade and passengers to Panama, Oregon, China, and Japan. The stage route was sold to Butterfield, and ran until the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad.

On the streets of Denver daily can be seen the grand figure of Alexander Majors, carrying his four-score years with a vigor that would shame half of the youth of the city. Six feet, lithe and straight as the red man he so often dominated, he is noted as the last of the Mohicans, and only waits, without fear and without reproach, for the final summons to that better land where the expresses are all faithfully gathered and the faithful rewarded by commendations for duty well performed.

And more wonderful than the express itself is the history of the six lustrums since it ceased to exist. Two thousand miles of desert waste have been largely developed in a rich and valuable agricultural and pastoral region. The iron horse has supplanted the fiery bronco, and thought flashes with lightning rapidity from ocean to ocean. Civilization has crowned that terra incognita with seven States and built large and beautiful cities. Peace has spread her halo of beauty over the savage haunts and churches have supplanted the horrible orgies of Indian massacre. The mountains have yielded their treasures to the steady hand of industry--richer by far than the fabled Ophir--and the pactolian streams have gladdened the hearts of toiling thousands. All honor to the pioneers who blazed the way for this civilization.

With this page of frontier history--the days of the Pony Express--will forever be associated the name of Billy Cody.