AS A COMMERCIAL enterprise, the Pony Express of 19th-century America belongs in the museum of spectacular failures, alongside the Titanic, the Ford Edsel, and Guinness Light.
It was founded by men who may have been bankrupt to start with, and were certainly so by the venture’s end. And that end came after only 18 months, when the early completion of the transcontinental telegraph rendered the equine courier, already unprofitable, redundant.
But in the 150 years since it was born, in April 1860, the Pony Express legend has grown in inverse proportion – and then some – to its viability as business. Rather than being remembered as a failure, the company’s brief story has expanded into one of the epic myths of the Old West.
If anything, commercial ruin helped the process. The many tales that grew from “the Pony” were not restrained by records, after all: either because the company didn’t keep any, or because it destroyed them while fleeing the creditors.
What is known about the service, however, is epic enough. It was set up to carry mail between the Missouri River – then the telegraph terminus – and California, via 2,000 miles of mountain, desert, and “Indian country”. The line was linked by “stations”, often mere huts, where riders changed horse as they galloped to and fro, ensuring high-speed postal delivery (in 10 days or under).
A famous newspaper advertisement hints at their working conditions: “Wanted. Young, Skinny, Wiry fellows not over 18. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 per week.” Unfortunately the ad is a fake, written in 1935. But its description may not be too far from the truth.
Mark Twain, who saw them in action, said the typical pony rider was “a little bit of a man, brimful of spirit and endurance”. “Little” is the key word. Like race-jockeys, Pony Express couriers could not add any unnecessary burden, along with the 20lb mail-bag, to their mounts.
None seem to have been interviewed then, or for years afterwards. By the time they attracted interest, they had become unreliable memoirists: especially the last of “the last of the Pony Express riders” (there had been many claimants) who expired in 1955, aged 105. Even so, the fact that the man in question would have been only 10 or 11 while riding for the Pony was not, in itself, considered incredible. Buffalo Bill also claimed to have worked for the company, aged 14.
For the short while it lasted, the service was a sensation. It was the new media: spreading news in half the time the stage-coaches took. The couriers’ arrivals in California, and the content of their mail-bags, were reported excitedly in the press. Unfortunately, despite charging an exorbitant $5 a letter – way beyond the ordinary public’s reach – the service never turned a profit, even before the civil war expedited work on its nemesis.
The lack of Pony Express records is partly compensated by eye-witness accounts from two major writers. One was the British explorer Sir Richard Burton, who spent the autumn of 1860 travelling the route, hating every minute. A recurring theme of his memoir is the awfulness of the accommodation and food.
Here he describes Cold Springs, Kansas: “Squalor and misery were imprinted upon the wretched log hut, which ignored the duster and broom. Myriad’s (sic) of flies disputed with us a dinner consisting of doughnuts, which were green and poisonous with saleratus, suspicious eggs in a massive greasy fritter, and intolerably fat rusty bacon.” When not complaining about the food, he complains about the ubiquitous “Irishry”. He appears to have had what are now called “issues” in this regard. At Ham’s Fork, Wyoming – apparently even worse than Cold Springs – he explains conditions thus: “. . . the stationmaster was married to two sisters of the Irish persuasion and the house was full of ‘Childer’, the nosiest and most rampageous of their kind. I could hardly look upon the scene without disgust. As my readers should be aware there are only three physiognomies in the Keltic (sic) family, the pig-faced, the horse-faced and the monkey-faced.” After a while in Burton’s company, it is a relief to turn to the other witness: Twain. He found the West much more congenial. And he left us a description of a Pony rider – spotted from his stagecoach in Missouri – that, alongside the many paintings of the theme, helped create the romantic image.
“Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky . . . In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling – sweeping towards us nearer and nearer – . . . another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider’s hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm! So sudden is it all . . . that but for the flake of white foam left quivering and perishing on a mail sack after the vision had flashed by and disappeared, we might have doubted whether we had seen any actual horse and man at all . . .” It is likely some of the riders were Irish too: the spiritual cousins of those jockeys who risk their necks at Cheltenham. But in Twain’s account, the horsemen retain heroic anonymity, even when – further up the trail – he learns that a lurking Indian ambush had left the most recent courier with a bullet hole in his jacket. “He had ridden on just the same,” reports Twain, “because pony riders are not allowed to stop and inquire into such things except when killed.”