THE PONY EXPRESS: BUFFALO BILL & THE POSTAL SERVICE

Buffalo Bill

Today, The Grandma is having an intensive and bureaucratic day. She's sending lots of mails, attending her whatsapp groups, revising her Twitter account and improving her Instagram one. It's a hard work to keep your 2.0 tools a day.

While she was doing these tasks, The Grandma has been thinking about the importance of the Social Networks in our days and about how they were and how they were used two centuries ago. She has thought in a wonderful history, the origin of Pony Express, an American Postal Service that officially ceased operations on a day like today in 1861 and about one of its most memorable members, Buffalo Bill.

More information: English Revealed

The Pony Express was a mail service delivering messages, newspapers, and mail. Officially operating as the Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express Company of 1859, in 1860 it became the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company; this firm was founded by William H. Russell, Alexander Majors, and William B. Waddell, all of whom were notable in the freighting business.

During its 18 months of operation, it reduced the time for messages to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to about 10 days. From April 3, 1860 to October 1861, it became the West's most direct means of east–west communication before the transcontinental telegraph was established in October 24, 1861, and was vital for tying the new state of California with the rest of the United States.

More information: National Pony Express

The idea of a fast mail route to the Pacific coast was prompted largely by California's newfound prominence and its rapidly growing population.

The Pony Express

After gold was discovered there in 1848, thousands of prospectors, investors and businessmen made their way to California, at that time a new territory of the U.S. By 1850, California entered the Union as a free state. By 1860, the population had grown to 380,000. The demand for a faster way to get mail and other communications to and from this westernmost state became even greater as the American Civil War approached.

In the late 1850s, William Russell, Alexander Majors, and William Waddell were the three founders of the Pony Express. They were already in the freighting and drayage business. At the peak of the operations, they employed 6,000 men, owned 75,000 oxen, thousands of wagons, and warehouses plus a sawmill, a meatpacking plant, a bank and an insurance company.

Russell was a prominent businessman, well respected among his peers and the community. Waddell was co-owner of the firm Morehead, Waddell & Co. After Morehead was bought out and retired, Waddell merged his company with Russell's, changing the name to Waddell & Russell.

More information: Smithsonian

In 1855 they took on a new partner, Alexander Majors, and founded the company of Russell, Majors & Waddell. They held government contracts for delivering army supplies to the western frontier, and Russell had a similar idea for contracts with the U.S. Government for fast mail delivery.

By utilizing a short route and using mounted riders rather than traditional stagecoaches, they proposed to establish a fast mail service between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, with letters delivered in 10 days, a duration many said was impossible. The initial price was set at $5 per 14 g, then $2.50, and by July 1861 to $1. The founders of the Pony Express hoped to win an exclusive government mail contract, but that did not come about.

The Pony Express Route

Russell, Majors, and Waddell organized and put together the Pony Express in two months in the winter of 1860. The undertaking assembled 120 riders, 184 stations, 400 horses, and several hundred personnel during January and February 1861. Majors was a religious man and resolved by the help of God to overcome all difficulties. He presented each rider with a special edition Bible and required this oath, which they were also required to sign.

The Pony Express demonstrated that a unified transcontinental system of communications could be established and operated year-round. When replaced by the telegraph, the Pony Express quickly became romanticized and became part of the lore of the American West. Its reliance on the ability and endurance of individual young, hardy riders and fast horses was seen as evidence of rugged American individualism of the Frontier times.

More information: History

From 1866 until 1889, the Pony Express logo was used by stagecoach and freight company Wells Fargo, which provided secure mail service. The United States Postal Service (USPS) used Pony Express as a trademark for postal services in the US. Freight Link international courier services, based in Russia, adopted the Pony Express trademark and a logo similar to that of the USPS.

In 1860, there were about 186 Pony Express stations that were about 16 km apart along the Pony Express route. At each station stop the express rider would change to a fresh horse, taking only the mail pouch called a mochila, from the Spanish for pouch or backpack, with him.

The National Pony Express Association, INC

The employers stressed the importance of the pouch. They often said that, if it came to be, the horse and rider should perish before the mochila did. The mochila was thrown over the saddle and held in place by the weight of the rider sitting on it. Each corner had a cantina, or pocket. Bundles of mail were placed in these cantinas, which were padlocked for safety.

The mochila could hold 9 kg of mail along with the 9 kg of material carried on the horse. Eventually, everything except one revolver and a water sack was removed, allowing for a total of 75 kg on the horse's back. Riders, who could not weigh over 57 kg, changed about every 120–160 km, and rode day and night. In emergencies, a given rider might ride two stages back to back, over 20 hours on a quickly moving horse.

It is unknown if riders tried crossing the Sierra Nevada in winter, but they certainly crossed central Nevada. By 1860 there was a telegraph station in Carson City, Nevada. The riders received $100 a month as pay. A comparable wage for unskilled labor at the time was about $0.43–$1 per day.

More information: Mental Floss

Alexander Majors, one of the founders of the Pony Express, had acquired more than 400 horses for the project. He selected horses from around the west, paying an average of $200. These averaged about 147 cm high and averaged 410 kg each; thus, the name pony was appropriate, even if not strictly correct in all cases.

The approximately 3,100 km route roughly followed the Oregon and California Trails to Fort Bridger in Wyoming, and then the Mormon Trail, known as the Hastings Cutoff, to Salt Lake City, Utah. From there it followed the Central Nevada Route to Carson City, Nevada before passing over the Sierra into Sacramento, California.

The route started at St. Joseph, Missouri on the Missouri River, it then followed what is modern-day U.S. Highway 36, US 36 the Pony Express Highway, to Marysville, Kansas, where it turned northwest following Little Blue River to Fort Kearny in Nebraska. Through Nebraska it followed the Great Platte River Road, cutting through Gothenburg, Nebraska, clipping the edge of Colorado at Julesburg, Colorado, and passing Courthouse Rock, Chimney Rock, and Scotts Bluff, before arriving at Fort Laramie in Wyoming.

The Pony Express statue, Julesburg

From there it followed the Sweetwater River, passing Independence Rock, Devil's Gate, and Split Rock, to Fort Caspar, through South Pass to Fort Bridger and then down to Salt Lake City.

From Salt Lake City it generally followed the Central Nevada Route blazed by Captain James H. Simpson of the Corps of Topographical Engineers in 1859. This route roughly follows today's US 50 across Nevada and Utah. It crossed the Great Basin, the Utah-Nevada Desert, and the Sierra Nevada near Lake Tahoe before arriving in Sacramento. Mail was then sent via steamer down the Sacramento River to San Francisco. On a few instances when the steamer was missed, riders took the mail via horseback to Oakland, California.

More information: Wells Fargo

There were 184 stations along the long and arduous route used by the Pony Express. The stations and station keepers were essential to the successful, timely and smooth operation of the Pony Express mail system. The stations were often fashioned out of existing structures, several of them located in military forts, while others were built anew in remote areas where living conditions were very basic.

The route was divided up into five divisions. To maintain the rigid schedule, 157 relay stations were located from 8 to 40 km apart as the terrain would allow for. At each swing station, riders would exchange their tired mounts for fresh ones, while home stations provided room and board for the riders between runs. This technique allowed the mail to be whisked across the continent in record time. Each rider rode about 120 km per day.

More information: National Geographic

 Excitement was plentiful during 

my two years' service as a Pony Express rider.

Buffalo Bill

William Frederick Buffalo Bill Cody (February 26, 1846-January 10, 1917) was an American scout, bison hunter, and showman. He was born in Le Claire, Iowa Territory, now the U.S. state of Iowa, but he lived for several years in his father's hometown in Toronto Township, Ontario, Canada, before the family returned to the Midwest and settled in the Kansas Territory.

William Frederick Cody aka Buffalo Bill

Buffalo Bill started working at the age of eleven, after his father's death, and became a rider for the Pony Express at age 14. During the American Civil War, he served the Union from 1863 to the end of the war in 1865. Later he served as a civilian scout for the US Army during the Indian Wars, receiving the Medal of Honor in 1872.

One of the most colorful figures of the American Old West, Buffalo Bill's legend began to spread when he was only twenty-three. Shortly thereafter he started performing in shows that displayed cowboy themes and episodes from the frontier and Indian Wars. He founded Buffalo Bill's Wild West in 1883, taking his large company on tours in the United States and, beginning in 1887, in Great Britain and continental Europe.

More information: Buffalo Bill

Probably more than any other rider in the Pony Express, William Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, epitomizes the legend and the folklore, be it fact or fiction, of the Pony Express. Numerous stories have been told of young Cody's adventures as a Pony Express rider.

At the age of 15 Cody was on his way west to California when he met Pony Express agents along the way and signed on with the company. Cody helped in the construction of several way-stations. Thereafter, he was employed as a rider and was given a short 72 km delivery run from the township of Julesburg which lay to the west.

More information: Wyoming History

After some months he was transferred to Slade's Division in Wyoming where he made the longest non-stop ride from Red Buttes Station to Rocky Ridge Station and back when he found that his relief rider had been killed.

Buffalo Bill

The distance of 518 km over one of the most dangerous sections of the entire trail was completed in 21 hours and 40 minutes, and 21 horses were required to complete this section. On one occasion when carrying mail he unintentionally ran into an Indian war party but managed to escape.

Cody was present for many significant chapters in early western history, including the gold rush, the building of the railroads and cattle herding on the Great Plains. A career as a scout for the Army under General Phillip Sheridan following the Civil War earned him his nickname and established his notoriety as a frontiersman.

In 1869, the twenty-three year-old Cody met Ned Buntline, who later published a story based on Cody's adventures, largely invented by the writer, in Street and Smith's New York Weekly and then published a highly successful novel, Buffalo Bill, King of the Bordermen, which was first serialized on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, beginning that December 15.

Many other sequels followed by Buntline, Prentiss Ingraham and others from the 1870s through the early part of the twentieth century. Cody later became world-famous for Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a touring show which traveled around the United States, Great Britain, and Continental Europe. Audiences were enthusiastic about seeing a piece of the American West.

Emilio Salgari, a noted Italian writer of adventure stories, met Buffalo Bill when he came to Italy and saw his show; Salgari later featured Cody as a hero in some of his novels.

More information: Buffalo Bill-Center of the West

 

But the West of the old times, with its strong characters, 

its stern battles and its tremendous stretches of loneliness, 

can never be blotted from my mind.

Buffalo Bill