June 2, 2010 • 14 mins
The Pony Express used a system of riders and horses to safely deliver mail between Missouri and Sacramento -- a distance of over 1900 miles. But how did it work? Join Katie and Sarah as they trace the rise and fall of the Pony Express in this podcast.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And Sarah, I
think our boss asked us to read a classified ad
(00:22):
for a new How Stuff Works position, didn't he Yeah?
Here those wanted young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen,
must be expert pony riders willing to risk death daily
orphans preferred. Oh wait, doesn't sound right, doesn't know. That's
actually a different ad. It's for the Pony Express. It's
(00:42):
a made up one, just f y I as often
as it's been printed. Katie didn't make it up, though.
And in the days of email, Sarah and I constantly
email each other, even though we sit in cubes right
next to each other. We often hear laments about the
death of the letter. And that's because, of course, letter
writing is a very romantic type of pursuit, and your
(01:03):
letters can get lost and perilous things can happen, as
Romeo and Juliet could attest. But if you wanted to
exchange messages in a fairly reliable way and do it quickly,
there was a mail service in the eighteen hundreds that
might have just worked for you the Pony Express. And
let's take a moment just to picture the life of
(01:25):
a Pony Express rider. You're a young, determined guy, and
you have a mission to traverse the wilds of the
West at breakneck speed to deliver history making news like
a Lincoln's inaugural address or the taking of Fort Sumter.
You have a very long way to go, and on
the way you might run into disaster, terrible weather, and
(01:46):
injury to you your horse, hostile Indians or thieves. But
this mission is necessary. So let's talk about why. So
we needed the Pony Express to connect the East coast
to californi Ania because California was quickly becoming a popular
place to live and with the gold and everything it was, uh,
(02:07):
you know, it's got lots of good natural resources. It's
becoming a business destination as well. So having it stranded
all the way out there on the West coast is
not good for California or for the people back on
the East coast. Right as long as we can't communicate,
they're just in complete isolation. Also, in the late eighteen fifties,
the rumblings of an impending civil war were felt, and
(02:30):
the government felt it needed to be in contact with
those far away lest they accidentally get mixed up with
the South, say, and lines of communication need to be open.
So before the Pony Express, mail took a really, really
long time to get to the West coast, about three
or four weeks. And the route was incredible sounding. It
(02:50):
would go by steamship and then across Panama on horses
and by railroad, and then come back up again by ships.
So you can imagine what an effort to send one letter.
And we do have a stage coach system, but that
took forever to forever, as in twenty days forever. According
to the National Postal Museum, the citizens of Los Angeles
(03:13):
learned that California had been admitted to the Union six
weeks after it happened. They were essentially cut off from
the rest of the country. And we need to fix it.
At which point to enter Senator William M. Gwynn, And
he's very attuned to the threat of a civil war,
and so he suggests a news system, one that's going
(03:33):
to be faster and better than the stage coaches. And uh,
the men behind the Pony Express are all businessmen with
a lot of experience, and history sometimes paints them as
these tricky villain types, but that's not exactly true. We've
got William Hepburn Russell, who liked the finer things in
life and was later embroiled in an embezzlement scandal, William
(03:57):
Bradford Waddell, and Alexander Major Ers and our businessmen already
have a company that they can use to start up
this service. The jumps start from the Central Overland, California
and Pike's Peak Express company, which we all have to
admit isn't quite as catchy as the Pony Express and
has a good ring to it at all. And they
(04:17):
figure that if there's a war, their services will be
much more in demand and they can get rich. There's
also this really lucrative government contract that they're hoping they
can get. Whoever can set up a mail service and
take the business from the stage coach guys is going
to get a million dollars, and so our little group
of businessmen desperately want that million. So now it's time
(04:42):
to set up the Pony Express see if they can
win this contract. And they put their headquarters in St. Joseph, Missouri.
The idea is to get mail all the way to Sacramento,
covering Kansas and beyond, and the trail that their riders
will follow will cover about two thousand miles, and there's
two thousand miles are going to be interspersed with somewhere
(05:04):
between one hundred and sixty and one hundred ninety stagecoach stations,
and they're betting that the horses will need to be
changed every ten miles or so to stay really fresh
and to keep up that pace that will get the
mail there fast. And of course we'll need lots of personnel,
including riders, station hands and farriers. And perhaps we should
(05:25):
mention that they need to set up this entire operation
in two months, which is one of the first amazing
statistics about the pony. Very tight deadline. So the official
opening is on April third, eighteen sixty and the first
trip west takes about ten days, which is obviously a
huge improvement over the stagecoach route, and the riders greeted
(05:48):
by huge celebrating crowds. Everybody's glad. This is a new
era in in communication and talking about our riders, Mark
Twain called them the swift fan Ms of the Desert.
There were about five hundred horses that were part of
the Pony Express, and between eight and two hundred riders,
depending on which account you're reading. The horses were very
(06:12):
small and of different breeds, but they weren't actually ponies.
That's not completely accurate, and the app that we mentioned
uh wasn't actually ever circulated at the time of the Express.
But it's true that they really did need light riders
under a hundred and twenty five pounds or so, because
the horses are carrying mail and gear along with a
(06:32):
rider and they do have to be moving pretty quickly.
The riders were paid twenty five dollars a week, which
was a very handsome proposition, but it was well deserved.
After a one hundred and twenty five mile ride. Often
they were going seventy five to twenty five miles in
one trip with no stops. And this wasn't an ambling
(06:54):
sort of pace. They're riding really hard, but not actually galloping.
I think we all imagine them racing at top speed
across the West, but they're not galloping because that's a
really good way to break a horse's leg on rough terrain. Um.
But they had a lot of obstacles to avoid. You
another reason to not go at top speed. There were
(07:15):
Buffalo like back when Buffalo actually rode the West, and
they had a lot of rules from this company. There
was no swearing, which reminded us of our Vaudevillians. I
guess that means no son of a gun, no fighting,
no drinking. And they handed a bible to each of them.
All those supposedly those were later taken away to lighten
the load further, maybe take a pamphlet or something instead.
(07:38):
And their disputes about whether they carry guns or not.
But I mean, how surprising would it be if you
if you've got all these dangers out on the road
for them to be m attempted. Yeah, and some other
dangers were losing your trail when it was dark and
traveling through snowstorms. They did have places to stay along
the way. These home stations um into some accounts they're
(08:01):
absolutely disgusting, and according to others they were pretty awesome.
But part of our problem putting together a reliable story
is that our Express founders weren't into writing memoirs of
their business ventures, so it was left up to the
public imagination to fill in the details. So in case
you're wondering about how the actual transferring of the mail happened.
(08:25):
They carried all the mail in a mochila, which was
a type of leather saddle bag that could be really
quickly switched from horse to horse when one rider rode
into a station and either um finished his run entirely
or just switched horses. And um, it had all these
different pockets in it, and some of them were locked up.
They could didn't you say? They could only be could
(08:47):
only be opened at military station. Yeah, so maybe if
you have a really top secret government document, you don't
want it to get lost on the way. And um,
they actually wrapped the letters in oil silk, so nothing
bad what happened to them. And the backs also had
a time card just say you would know exactly how
fast the mail was getting to see you better hurry up.
(09:08):
It cost of five bucks to send a letter, so
only the rich and important we're sending mail diplomats and
bank officials for example. And later the price went down
to a dollar for a half ounce, which was still pricy.
But that's when the business was failing, which will discuss
a little bit later. We do want to talk about
some of the famous riders of the Pony Express. Probably
(09:30):
the most famous is Robert pony Boy haslum, which is
not We're not talking about outsiders here with pony Boy,
and he's known for his three hundred and eighty mile
ride straight through during which he comes across a station
hand who's been murdered by paiutes, and they had also
burned down the station, so I guess he was thinking
he better just keep on going facing imminent danger. He
(09:54):
was fearless, and he also carried Lincoln's inaugural address two
hundred miles and just over eight hours after he'd been
shot in the face with an arrow. Yeah, we're kind
of imagining one of those fake arrow hats, but it
must have been much more painful than that. Our next
one is Buffalo Bill Cody, who is of course known
(10:15):
for shooting a lot of buffalo shooting a lot of everything,
and setting up these Wild West shows, and he kept
the Pony Express alive through his Wild West show. Even
though he was never actually a rider, you will always
see his name connected to the Pony Express. And another
one who's in the same league is Buffalo Bill is
wild Bill Hickock, and again he may or may not
(10:37):
have actually been a rider for the Pony Express, probably not,
but either way, he was very famous for it and
uh again for shooting people. And yes, but nothing lasts,
and neither did the Pony Express. After eighteen months. It's
shut down in October eighteen sixty one. And we should
(10:58):
say that this whole thing was a financial disaster for
our business men. They didn't make a penny. In fact,
they lost a lot of pennies, two hundred thousand dollars
worth of them. I wonder if they had insurance for
this project, would hope, But I think they went bankrupt.
Um well. And the second thing that ends the Pony Express,
(11:18):
and I think we all know this is that new
technologies around the way. We have a railroad that crosses
the continent, and we have a telegraph system which makes
these reckless, expensive rides absolutely unnecessary. So how did the
Pony Express do all? In all, it lost money, but
it didn't lose mail. It said, only one or two
(11:40):
bags of mail were ever lost. And although it didn't
last long, in reality, it's lived for a long time
in the American consciousness. You've got this story of danger
and romance and the pioneering spirit, and of course that's
what we like, and people still ride the trail today,
so history lives. It sounds like kind of a fun
(12:02):
thing to do. It kind of reminds me of the
Natchez Trace and how this wild, dangerous highway becomes a
lovely scenic roadway. Well, I read another story about a writer,
a Pony Express writer who was killed and they found
his bag of letters later and one of them actually
made it to where it was supposed to go. But
(12:23):
that envelope is now at the National Postal Museum, if
you're looking for a tangible connection to the Pony Express.
And speaking of mail, it is time for listener mail.
Inappropriately enough, we're doing real mail today. First, we have
a really lovely original watercolor that's from Donna and Moldova
(12:47):
that was handmade by a local artist, and she also
wrote us a letter in really beautiful, beautiful plan writing
saying that she was a big fan and that she
recently moved to the Republic of Moldova due to her
husband's work and she was helping we could cover some
of those topics because it would be utterly fascinating to
(13:07):
walk the streets of the capital city listening to my
favorite podcast discuss the sites which surround me, so Donna
will add them to our list. In contrast to Donna's watercolor,
we have three postcards from Technical Sergeant Elkins who's based
in Kuwait, and one of them has a bodybuilder with
(13:27):
flames behind him, another has a ship, and another one
has hawk. So thank you for these lovely additions to
our wall of letters. Those bodybuilders totally going on the wall.
So if you'd like to send us some real mail,
please do. If you're more of an email person, where
at History podcast at how stuff works dot com, and
(13:48):
you can also keep an eye on what we're researching
and reading if you follow us on Twitter at Missed
in History or join our Facebook fan page, and as always,
check out our home page at www dot how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be
(14:09):
sure to check out the Stuff you Missed in History
class blog on the how stuff works dot com home
page
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And Sarah, I
think our boss asked us to read a classified ad
(00:22):
for a new How Stuff Works position, didn't he Yeah?
Here those wanted young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen,
must be expert pony riders willing to risk death daily
orphans preferred. Oh wait, doesn't sound right, doesn't know. That's
actually a different ad. It's for the Pony Express. It's
(00:42):
a made up one, just f y I as often
as it's been printed. Katie didn't make it up, though.
And in the days of email, Sarah and I constantly
email each other, even though we sit in cubes right
next to each other. We often hear laments about the
death of the letter. And that's because, of course, letter
writing is a very romantic type of pursuit, and your
(01:03):
letters can get lost and perilous things can happen, as
Romeo and Juliet could attest. But if you wanted to
exchange messages in a fairly reliable way and do it quickly,
there was a mail service in the eighteen hundreds that
might have just worked for you the Pony Express. And
let's take a moment just to picture the life of
(01:25):
a Pony Express rider. You're a young, determined guy, and
you have a mission to traverse the wilds of the
West at breakneck speed to deliver history making news like
a Lincoln's inaugural address or the taking of Fort Sumter.
You have a very long way to go, and on
the way you might run into disaster, terrible weather, and
(01:46):
injury to you your horse, hostile Indians or thieves. But
this mission is necessary. So let's talk about why. So
we needed the Pony Express to connect the East coast
to californi Ania because California was quickly becoming a popular
place to live and with the gold and everything it was, uh,
(02:07):
you know, it's got lots of good natural resources. It's
becoming a business destination as well. So having it stranded
all the way out there on the West coast is
not good for California or for the people back on
the East coast. Right as long as we can't communicate,
they're just in complete isolation. Also, in the late eighteen fifties,
the rumblings of an impending civil war were felt, and
(02:30):
the government felt it needed to be in contact with
those far away lest they accidentally get mixed up with
the South, say, and lines of communication need to be open.
So before the Pony Express, mail took a really, really
long time to get to the West coast, about three
or four weeks. And the route was incredible sounding. It
(02:50):
would go by steamship and then across Panama on horses
and by railroad, and then come back up again by ships.
So you can imagine what an effort to send one letter.
And we do have a stage coach system, but that
took forever to forever, as in twenty days forever. According
to the National Postal Museum, the citizens of Los Angeles
(03:13):
learned that California had been admitted to the Union six
weeks after it happened. They were essentially cut off from
the rest of the country. And we need to fix it.
At which point to enter Senator William M. Gwynn, And
he's very attuned to the threat of a civil war,
and so he suggests a news system, one that's going
(03:33):
to be faster and better than the stage coaches. And uh,
the men behind the Pony Express are all businessmen with
a lot of experience, and history sometimes paints them as
these tricky villain types, but that's not exactly true. We've
got William Hepburn Russell, who liked the finer things in
life and was later embroiled in an embezzlement scandal, William
(03:57):
Bradford Waddell, and Alexander Major Ers and our businessmen already
have a company that they can use to start up
this service. The jumps start from the Central Overland, California
and Pike's Peak Express company, which we all have to
admit isn't quite as catchy as the Pony Express and
has a good ring to it at all. And they
(04:17):
figure that if there's a war, their services will be
much more in demand and they can get rich. There's
also this really lucrative government contract that they're hoping they
can get. Whoever can set up a mail service and
take the business from the stage coach guys is going
to get a million dollars, and so our little group
of businessmen desperately want that million. So now it's time
(04:42):
to set up the Pony Express see if they can
win this contract. And they put their headquarters in St. Joseph, Missouri.
The idea is to get mail all the way to Sacramento,
covering Kansas and beyond, and the trail that their riders
will follow will cover about two thousand miles, and there's
two thousand miles are going to be interspersed with somewhere
(05:04):
between one hundred and sixty and one hundred ninety stagecoach stations,
and they're betting that the horses will need to be
changed every ten miles or so to stay really fresh
and to keep up that pace that will get the
mail there fast. And of course we'll need lots of personnel,
including riders, station hands and farriers. And perhaps we should
(05:25):
mention that they need to set up this entire operation
in two months, which is one of the first amazing
statistics about the pony. Very tight deadline. So the official
opening is on April third, eighteen sixty and the first
trip west takes about ten days, which is obviously a
huge improvement over the stagecoach route, and the riders greeted
(05:48):
by huge celebrating crowds. Everybody's glad. This is a new
era in in communication and talking about our riders, Mark
Twain called them the swift fan Ms of the Desert.
There were about five hundred horses that were part of
the Pony Express, and between eight and two hundred riders,
depending on which account you're reading. The horses were very
(06:12):
small and of different breeds, but they weren't actually ponies.
That's not completely accurate, and the app that we mentioned
uh wasn't actually ever circulated at the time of the Express.
But it's true that they really did need light riders
under a hundred and twenty five pounds or so, because
the horses are carrying mail and gear along with a
(06:32):
rider and they do have to be moving pretty quickly.
The riders were paid twenty five dollars a week, which
was a very handsome proposition, but it was well deserved.
After a one hundred and twenty five mile ride. Often
they were going seventy five to twenty five miles in
one trip with no stops. And this wasn't an ambling
(06:54):
sort of pace. They're riding really hard, but not actually galloping.
I think we all imagine them racing at top speed
across the West, but they're not galloping because that's a
really good way to break a horse's leg on rough terrain. Um.
But they had a lot of obstacles to avoid. You
another reason to not go at top speed. There were
(07:15):
Buffalo like back when Buffalo actually rode the West, and
they had a lot of rules from this company. There
was no swearing, which reminded us of our Vaudevillians. I
guess that means no son of a gun, no fighting,
no drinking. And they handed a bible to each of them.
All those supposedly those were later taken away to lighten
the load further, maybe take a pamphlet or something instead.
(07:38):
And their disputes about whether they carry guns or not.
But I mean, how surprising would it be if you
if you've got all these dangers out on the road
for them to be m attempted. Yeah, and some other
dangers were losing your trail when it was dark and
traveling through snowstorms. They did have places to stay along
the way. These home stations um into some accounts they're
(08:01):
absolutely disgusting, and according to others they were pretty awesome.
But part of our problem putting together a reliable story
is that our Express founders weren't into writing memoirs of
their business ventures, so it was left up to the
public imagination to fill in the details. So in case
you're wondering about how the actual transferring of the mail happened.
(08:25):
They carried all the mail in a mochila, which was
a type of leather saddle bag that could be really
quickly switched from horse to horse when one rider rode
into a station and either um finished his run entirely
or just switched horses. And um, it had all these
different pockets in it, and some of them were locked up.
They could didn't you say? They could only be could
(08:47):
only be opened at military station. Yeah, so maybe if
you have a really top secret government document, you don't
want it to get lost on the way. And um,
they actually wrapped the letters in oil silk, so nothing
bad what happened to them. And the backs also had
a time card just say you would know exactly how
fast the mail was getting to see you better hurry up.
(09:08):
It cost of five bucks to send a letter, so
only the rich and important we're sending mail diplomats and
bank officials for example. And later the price went down
to a dollar for a half ounce, which was still pricy.
But that's when the business was failing, which will discuss
a little bit later. We do want to talk about
some of the famous riders of the Pony Express. Probably
(09:30):
the most famous is Robert pony Boy haslum, which is
not We're not talking about outsiders here with pony Boy,
and he's known for his three hundred and eighty mile
ride straight through during which he comes across a station
hand who's been murdered by paiutes, and they had also
burned down the station, so I guess he was thinking
he better just keep on going facing imminent danger. He
(09:54):
was fearless, and he also carried Lincoln's inaugural address two
hundred miles and just over eight hours after he'd been
shot in the face with an arrow. Yeah, we're kind
of imagining one of those fake arrow hats, but it
must have been much more painful than that. Our next
one is Buffalo Bill Cody, who is of course known
(10:15):
for shooting a lot of buffalo shooting a lot of everything,
and setting up these Wild West shows, and he kept
the Pony Express alive through his Wild West show. Even
though he was never actually a rider, you will always
see his name connected to the Pony Express. And another
one who's in the same league is Buffalo Bill is
wild Bill Hickock, and again he may or may not
(10:37):
have actually been a rider for the Pony Express, probably not,
but either way, he was very famous for it and
uh again for shooting people. And yes, but nothing lasts,
and neither did the Pony Express. After eighteen months. It's
shut down in October eighteen sixty one. And we should
(10:58):
say that this whole thing was a financial disaster for
our business men. They didn't make a penny. In fact,
they lost a lot of pennies, two hundred thousand dollars
worth of them. I wonder if they had insurance for
this project, would hope, But I think they went bankrupt.
Um well. And the second thing that ends the Pony Express,
(11:18):
and I think we all know this is that new
technologies around the way. We have a railroad that crosses
the continent, and we have a telegraph system which makes
these reckless, expensive rides absolutely unnecessary. So how did the
Pony Express do all? In all, it lost money, but
it didn't lose mail. It said, only one or two
(11:40):
bags of mail were ever lost. And although it didn't
last long, in reality, it's lived for a long time
in the American consciousness. You've got this story of danger
and romance and the pioneering spirit, and of course that's
what we like, and people still ride the trail today,
so history lives. It sounds like kind of a fun
(12:02):
thing to do. It kind of reminds me of the
Natchez Trace and how this wild, dangerous highway becomes a
lovely scenic roadway. Well, I read another story about a writer,
a Pony Express writer who was killed and they found
his bag of letters later and one of them actually
made it to where it was supposed to go. But
(12:23):
that envelope is now at the National Postal Museum, if
you're looking for a tangible connection to the Pony Express.
And speaking of mail, it is time for listener mail.
Inappropriately enough, we're doing real mail today. First, we have
a really lovely original watercolor that's from Donna and Moldova
(12:47):
that was handmade by a local artist, and she also
wrote us a letter in really beautiful, beautiful plan writing
saying that she was a big fan and that she
recently moved to the Republic of Moldova due to her
husband's work and she was helping we could cover some
of those topics because it would be utterly fascinating to
(13:07):
walk the streets of the capital city listening to my
favorite podcast discuss the sites which surround me, so Donna
will add them to our list. In contrast to Donna's watercolor,
we have three postcards from Technical Sergeant Elkins who's based
in Kuwait, and one of them has a bodybuilder with
(13:27):
flames behind him, another has a ship, and another one
has hawk. So thank you for these lovely additions to
our wall of letters. Those bodybuilders totally going on the wall.
So if you'd like to send us some real mail,
please do. If you're more of an email person, where
at History podcast at how stuff works dot com, and
(13:48):
you can also keep an eye on what we're researching
and reading if you follow us on Twitter at Missed
in History or join our Facebook fan page, and as always,
check out our home page at www dot how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be
(14:09):
sure to check out the Stuff you Missed in History
class blog on the how stuff works dot com home
page
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