September 3, 2022 • 45 mins
For as long a shadow as it casts across the history of the Old West, the Pony Express was a failed business venture, doomed from the start, that only lasted 18 months. But since the last rider headed out with his bag of mail, its legend has only grown. Learn all about it in this classic episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everybody. It's Chuck here, and I'm about to get
on my pony and deliver the mail because it's July.
Don't you mean eighteen? No? I mean because that's when
this select episode was belched out by Josh and Chuck.
It's called How the Pony Express Work. Yeah, welcome to
(00:30):
stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
you welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles
w Chuck Bryant. There's a cherry over there, and we're
bringing you all the news fast as lightning in this
(00:55):
episode on Pony Express. Hey, you resurrected that don't be
Dumb Josh for a moment. Then you're also staining on
your head in your chair. This is like the end
of Primal fear Man. That Don't be Dumb Josh never
went away. There's nothing but that Don't be Dumb. Who
(01:18):
I hope I didn't ruin that for anybody just now.
I probably did, But come on, it was the eighties. Yeah.
There was a bit of a discussion about on the
movie Crush facebook page about me spoiling things that are
old movies like Jaws, like the Shark Dies, like a
bunch of people came to my defense. They're like, you know,
there's a limit on spoilers, like if you're talking about
(01:40):
a ten year old an older movie, like, come on,
who who was it that chose Jaws? Was it Roman? Roman, Mars?
He's got great taste. Man. I watched that movie twice
in the last two weeks. The first time it was
on mute and I was still like engrossed by it.
And then I recently watched it from like start to
(02:01):
finish um for the first time in well over a decade,
and I was like, oh my god, it is basically perfect. Yea,
everything about it. It's just enjoyable. It's beautifully shot, The
characters are great. It's just wonderful. Here's the swimming with
bow legged women. Oh yeah, man, he's he's quite a character.
(02:22):
Is so good in that movie and drive us Man, Yeah,
all of them. It's just so great. Yeah, even Roy Scheider. Yeah,
my favorite moment in that whole movie. I think, well, gosh,
there's so many, but don't spoil it when that real moment,
like Spielberg peppers in these moments, it just makes it
such a richer film, Like when he's sitting there with
his kid. Before dry Fus comes over for dinner that night,
(02:44):
he just has that moment with his son. We're ask
him for a kiss and it's just leaven In. Just
little tidbits like that make the movie so much more rich. Yeah,
I love it. That's our Spielberg. I have a question
for you. Has there ever have been more attention paid
to a utter failure of a business that was only
(03:06):
open for about nineteen months than the Pony Express? Think
trying to think it's really remarkable. Yeah, it's like the
new Coke of mail service. Because when you said this topic,
I was like, oh, hot, diggity dog, this is gonna
be great and it's an interesting story. But it's like, wow,
the Pony Express was a big fat failure. Yeah, really,
(03:27):
this is so. One of the articles we're working from
is called the Pony Express colon Riders of Destiny in parentheses.
Couldn't resist that, um Er Corbet Christopher Corbett um. And
he basically makes the case that the most interesting thing
about the Pony expresses the fact that we remember it
at all. Yeah, that that's real, the real story behind it,
(03:49):
because it was a big stinking failure business wise, it
was as success as an actual mail service, but as
a business it was terrible. The timing was terrible, The
whole structure of it was just a bad idea. It
was just dumb. But it was as far as the
(04:09):
service goes, if you're looking at the very definition of
the word service, it was invaluable for a lot of people. Yeah.
So just to set the table real quick if you
don't know what we're talking about, the Pony Express was
a delivery a mail delivery system. Uh. When the the
Transcontinental well, I guess pre Transcontinental Telegram when it only
(04:34):
went how far east did that go at the time? St?
Joe Missouri? Okay. St. Joe Missouri, and then it went
west as far as Sacramento, Sacramento. And the idea was
to join those two lines so you would have a
true transcontinental telegram telegraph service. But before that happened, there
were three entrepreneurs who said, we can close this gap
(04:58):
because it takes weeks or months to get mail from
east to west these days, and we can do that.
We want to be able to do that in like
a week to ten days. Yeah, which was enormously ambitious
because if you sent mail overland right from you know,
between Missouri and California. You maybe twenty five days was
(05:20):
a good thing to expect for the mail to get there. Right,
it's Missouri, that's one way, okay, if you wanted to
send it by ship, months a couple of months before
the person ever got the mail, because you gotta dig
a river for Missouri to Sacramento. You gotta flood it,
and then you gotta run the ship down that channel,
and then when you get to the other side, you
(05:41):
have to drain it and fill it back in start
over the next time. It was a terrible idea. This
is back when America was full of just complete idiots.
But nowadays we know what we're doing. We've got the
Internet and Twitter and all that stuff. Right, So there
was this idea where if you were in California, which
by this time was a state, and the reason California
(06:02):
was a state before so much of the other parts
of the country is because of the gold Brush of
eighteen forty nine brought a lot of people out west
and they started to build and and create these cities,
and California as a state. So you had Americans living
in a state that was geographically isolated from the rest
of the country. So they wanted news. They wanted newspapers,
(06:25):
they wanted news of America back east. They wanted all
this stuff. And again the telegraph lines weren't connected, so
they set up this mail service to run in between
them fastest lightning and fastest lightning was about ten days,
like you said, and the whole route from Saint Joseph,
Missouri to Sacramento took them about eighteen hundred miles, which
(06:48):
is a really long way. But the way that they
did it, chuck in just ten days was through a
stroke of genius. Is that where I come in. I
just set you up. Yeah, they had about They don't
have great records, and we'll get into that, but as
far as we can tell, and there's a boy, there's
a lot of misinformation out there from over the years
and not legend and lore and tall tales, but they
(07:10):
had about eighty horseback riders, young wiry young men who
they compared to like a modern day jockey. These were
little guys, and by all accounts they could haul butt
on horses. Though. Uh, they had about eighty of these dudes,
and they had about four or five horses and several
dozen what they called way stations or these stations in
(07:33):
between where you would ride, ride, ride, ride, ride to
a station either switch riders or switch horses or both
and get you know, get a fresh horse, or if
you were worn out, you would hand the mail off
and we'll get to how that worked as well. And
then they would go. And it was just a point
to point thing where you would just move this mail
as fast as you could ride a horse basically yep.
(07:54):
And so the horses would last for ten to fifteen miles,
depending on how rough the terrain was, and tween way stations,
and then at the waist the next way station, the
rider would jump from one horse to another horse with
this mail bag called the Mochila, which you could hold
about twenty pounds of mail, and would ride on to
the next way station and switch horses again. And so
(08:15):
the horses would go ten to fifteen miles and the
riders would go about seventy five miles from what I've seen. Yeah,
And this whole operation was from a business called the
Central Overland, California and Pike's Peak Express Company that was
run by three gentlemen, Russell's Majors and Waddell, William, Hepburn
(08:36):
Russell Alexander Majors and William Bradford Waddell, who had already
been in the freight hauling business for military outposts, which
you would think would be a great money making venture.
But apparently when they started the Pony Express, all accounts
say that their business probably wasn't doing very well when
they even started, right, So they said, well, let's see
(08:57):
what is a money pit we can sink our meaning
money into what makes no sense financially. They said, oh,
the Pony Express. Yeah, because you said, I mean, there's
a lot of reasons why it failed, which we'll get to,
but you said that they held up to twenty pounds
of mail in these uh these saddle bags. Again, by
all accounts, they rarely had that much mail. Sometimes they
(09:20):
would have eight or ten letters, and that's just not
you know, if you're in the shipping business, you're not
maximizing your load. No, I did some a little bit
of math. Wasn't hard, but I'm still proud of it. Okay. Um,
So they charged five dollars per half Graham, Yeah, at first,
and so the Mochila could hold twenty pounds. So twenty
(09:42):
pounds times thirty two is sixty or times five dollars
to six hundred forty dollars and in today's money, that's
about sixteen thousand, six hundred forty bucks. It's not bad,
it's not too bad. Um. But apparently it was way
more to maintain this line then than that. And like
(10:03):
you said, plenty of these things only had a couple
of dozen letters in them at any given time, and
the people who would use the pony Express would write
these letters on tissue paper to cut down on costs
because you know, they charged by the half Graham. Yeah,
and it was generally not just regular American people like uh,
apparently it was mostly like government and military, and you know,
(10:26):
you couldn't just generally people couldn't afford to send a
letter by pony express, right, right, So newspapers would send
cables to other newspapers. Um or yeah, like you said, government,
although the government never officially granted a contract to the
Central Overland. Um, they would use them, but there was
(10:49):
no official contract. And it's I get the impression that
had they ever landed a government contract, they might have
they might have actually made money, although I don't think
it would ultimately kept them from their their fate. But um,
they they the fact that they didn't have a wide
customer base, they didn't have a government contract, and then
this was just such an expensive venture and they couldn't
(11:11):
possibly make their money back from it. It was I
don't know if we've gotten the point across yet or not.
This is a terrible business venture. Yeah. And what made
matters worse? I mean, they were likely doomed. Uh, maybe
we should hold off the final nail in the coff
until later, even though it's pretty obvious if you're paying attention.
But one thing that heard him along the way for
sure was the Pyramid Lake War, Yeah, or the Pie Pieutwar. Yeah.
(11:38):
I even looked it up. That's what Emma Saying says.
It was. Uh, that was in Nevada and Utah mainly,
and that was a war that took a great toll
on especially these way stations. Uh. And if you are
a way station, dude, you've fared much worse than Pony
Express writers as far as activity and attack from Native
Americans because you were sitting duck basically in a station
(12:02):
that that seems to be no more than just like
four walls and a dirt floor and maybe a horse
corral and a thing to put water in, yeah, on
the open prairie. Yeah, you're sitting out there. Yeah. And
during the Pyramid Lake War, hostilities between the Piute and
Shoshonees who had banded together with the Pyramid Lake tribe,
(12:22):
those Um, those three groups rose up together against UM,
these settlers that you're, the Euro American settlers who have
been UM coming out there and just basically encroaching on
their land. The thing that the straw that broke the
camel's back was UM. A pair of Um brothers, Euro
American brothers kidnapped a couple of Piute I think twelve
(12:46):
year old girls and raped them and kept them hidden
at one of these little towns, these little frontier towns,
and the Piute Indians got wind of this and went
and found them killed. Bole of the people burned the
town down and then started going from like towntown or
um town to town, but also a way station to
(13:07):
way station, just like UM, massacring people there, burning down
way stations, just basically like torching all these places, right Um.
And at first, the the cavalry was called in and
grossly underestimated what the Paiu and Shoshone and Pyramid Um
group was capable of uh, and just got got whooped basically,
(13:31):
and then the they further reinforcements that got called in.
We're basically able to bring it to a standoff. But this,
this whole thing just raised tensions from simmering below, you know,
the surface, to out and out right what you would
call a war between these tribes and the Americans who
were pressing into their land. So from that moment on,
(13:54):
it got way more difficult and scarier to be a
Pony Express rider. And as per Pony Express history, this
happened like ten weeks after the first rider disembarked. Yeah,
so they I mean not only did it cost them,
uh men, but it costs them about seventy five grand,
and this is an eighteen sixty it's like to something
(14:17):
million today. Yeah, I mean that was a huge loss.
So they started they ramped up their operation to try
and make up for that, and all of a sudden
they were delivering twice a week instead of once a week. Uh.
And they eventually tried to lower their prices too, but
it just none of it worked, and financially it was
a mess. Uh. Like I said earlier, they didn't really
keep a lot of records. They either didn't keep them,
(14:38):
or they may have destroyed them. That's what I think,
to avoid creditors, because these guys were not the greatest
well I don't know if they weren't the greatest businessmen,
but they surely didn't farewell in this case. Well one
of them was supposedly an outright calm man Russell. Oh yeah,
yeah he was. He was supposedly he was the spokesperson
for this this business venture, and he was good at that,
(15:00):
but he was not, um, not a great stand up
guy as far as business is concerned. So the image
that you get in your head of Pony Express or
these guys riding full bore on these horses being chased
by Native Americans and desperados, and uh, apparently all the
you know, many of the books over the years, even
(15:20):
ones that sound U super official a lot of times
were just made up stories. Uh when and we'll talk
a little bit about who finally got in touch with
a lot of these riders. But apparently when they were
um officially on record, they didn't talk a lot about
fighting the Native Americans or anyone. They talked about the weather,
(15:43):
stinking about being ripped off and not being paid. Uh,
sort of like normal business complaints. And it wasn't like
the thing that you see at the Wells Fargo Bank,
like yeah, we rode horses fast, but it kind of sucked, right.
But the thing is is like this, this was a
(16:03):
a legend in its own time, is how I've seen it. Put. Um, well,
we'll talk about that after a break. How about that.
Let's do it, okay. Um so Chuck, we said that,
(16:40):
like the Pony Express was a legend, and sometimes that's
absolutely true. Like there was again in part of William
Russell's superior spokesperson ship. I think is a word. Um
they like newspapers wrote about it in Sacramento they called it,
there are friend the pony Um. I think they were
(17:02):
referring to drugs. I think they were talking about the
Pony Express. But um, like people love the Pony Express.
It was It was just hugely innovative and the idea
that like these guys were out there riding as fast
as they can for scores of miles with bandits on
their tails, just to bring us the mail. People fell
in love with this thing, even though at the end
(17:24):
of the day the thing lasted like eighteen months. Like
the Pony Express, it was huge legend that we think of.
It was an eighteen month business venture that ultimately failed, right,
but it was a legend um. And one of the
reasons that was a legend is because there there were
a um, I mean, there were real deal exploits going
(17:45):
on on the trail. There were some writers who were
just amazing, Like one guy was called, um, what was
pony Bob's last name? Has them? Right, pony Bob has them.
He was one of the writers for the Pony to
Express who ironically wasn't as legendary as he should have
been because he was the actual real deal, but he
(18:06):
ended up being forgotten because they get the impression he
wasn't much of a self promoter. Yeah, he made a
legendary documented journey of three hundred and eighty miles without relief.
At one point where he basically road to road and
road and road went to his station to switch riders,
and the guy there was like, well, I'm not going,
(18:27):
Like there's there's indians out there trying to kill me.
And so he was like, all right, I'm gonna keep going.
And he kept going and delivered the mail and eventually
made his way back and and it ended up being
a three eighty mile round trip. And he's, like I said,
there's not a lot of great documentation. But even though
he's been lost to history, he was very well documented
(18:48):
as an expert writer. Yeah, he definitely was. Um, there
was another one called Billy Fisher who had a pretty
interesting claim to fame. He was out riding on the
trail and um, it was during a snowstorm. So this
is another thing too. You said that the riders complained
about things like the terrible weather, like they were carrying
(19:08):
mail from um, let's see Missouri to Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California.
Weather especially say like in January, you're gonna run into
some terrible snowstorms, right, And Billy Fisher found himself in
one of these snowstorms and he first he just dismounted.
(19:31):
He's like, I just gotta go over here and go
to sleep for a little while in a blizzard. And um,
he started to fall asleep and he woke up to
something licking his face and it was a jack rabbit
who had basically licked his face till he woke up.
I didn't know they licked. I think this may have
been as his spirit animal actually uh, and the rabbit
(19:52):
like startled Billy Fisher, and Billy Fisher startled the rabbit
and the rabbit ran off, But it woke Billy Fisher up,
and he said, if that rabbit had licked my face
and woke me up, I never would have woken up.
I would have just frozen to death out there in
this blizzard. But he was woken up enough and realized
the gravity of the situation enough they got back on
his horse and kept rioting to safety. Sounds like legend, yeah,
And to to top it off, his great great grandson
(20:16):
is William Fisher, who was one of the U S
astronauts who flew the Space Shuttle. So legend, and these
stories are like going around and like being circulated in
newspapers and among people while the pony expresses going on, Yeah,
I mean there were some very bad, uh not exploit
of sensationalist books written over the years. And then there
(20:38):
was also a couple of real legitimate dudes, Captain Sir
Richard Burton, the famous British explorer, and one Samuel Clemens
year old future Mark Twain. They both individually, um kind
of spent some time out there documenting the Pony Express,
and it seems like Burton didn't have a good time
(21:00):
out there. He didn't like the West. He did. He
always complained about the flies and the fleas and just
the filth and just the people. He just was not
a fan. But he still gave a fairly accurate account
of like the day to day of a Pony Express
writer Clemens, Mr. The Future Mark Twain seemed to have
a good time. And you know, in his true fashion,
(21:22):
wrote some of the uh some really flower flowery eyewitness
testimony about seeing these horsemen coming across the tundra and
the planes. It's pretty cool. You're gonna read that? No, well,
everybody go read that. It's in um Roughing It, which
is his book about traveling the US, and he surfs
(21:43):
in it. Did you know that? I didn't. He goes
to Hawaii and tries surfing when they used to surfing,
like ten ft long wooden boards. Head clean off. Go
go read that quote in your in your best hell
hole brook impression. Really good way to do it. I'm
more a Val Kilmer Mark Twain guy, that's right. I
(22:06):
forgot he did that. Everyone did Chuck man Um. So
you had Mark Twain and Captain Sir Richard Burton providing
like contemporary accounts. But that's like, that is virtually it, right,
there were again this is a failed business venture. Let's
go ahead and tell him what happened? Why it was
failed business venture? Chuck? Why why ultimately died? Well, they
(22:30):
finally hooked up the two, they finally closed that gap
on the telegraph. They're like, well, we can go coast
to coast now, so you're you're sort of immediately literally
immediately out of business. Yeah, the first two days later
they closed. The first rider headed out on April third,
eighteen sixty and it was October twenty six of eighteen
(22:52):
sixty one where the last one headed out from St. Joe's.
And some people will say, well, it didn't actually stop
in October. It was actually in November because those Mochilas
didn't end up into in Sacramento until November. That's fine, whatever.
It was like eighteen months, seventies something weeks of Operation
um and people loved it at the time. But as
(23:14):
with most things, once the new, better, greater thing came
along the telegram, they forgot about it pretty quick and
we really honestly would not have any recollection of the
Pony Express. It would be a footnote to a footnote
in history if it weren't for one guy named Buffalo
Bill Cody, who actually is the reason why we all
(23:38):
remember the Pony Express. He had a soft spot in
his heart for um, not just the Pony Express itself,
but one of um the founders. I think it was
Alexander Major's right, Yeah, I think so who um gave
a h he was a kid, gave him a job
when he was a kid. And while Bill um would
go on or Buffalo Bill would go on to uh
(23:59):
to say, a well, I was actually a Pony Express writer.
All historical evidence suggests that that is not actually the case,
but um, he definitely did work for Alexander Majors, who
was one of the owners of the Pony Express as
a horseback messenger, just not a Pony Express writer, which
if you're talking about Pony Express legend, that's a major distinction. Yeah.
(24:20):
And Buffalo Bill would also go on to say, should
a group brig front girl? Sorry? Is he called Buffalo Bill? Yeah? Okay,
I always for some reason I thought it was a
playoff of Buffalo Bill, like Buffalo Bob or something like that.
It was Buffalo Bill because he skinned his victims. I remember, Uh,
(24:43):
should we take a break? Geez, okay, sure, all right,
let's take a break and we'll talk a little bit
more about Buffalo Bill right after this. Alright, So Buffalo
(25:20):
Bill's Wild West, Uh, I want to always want to
say Wild West Extravaganza. You can call it that, but
it was really Buffalo Bill's Wild West. That was a
name of his big show that he took all over
the country, delighting people with sharp shooting and horseback riding
and all sorts of cool stuff, enchanting America with with
the Old West, not just America, the world. Well, yeah,
(25:43):
and that's that's a solid point. I mean, he went
all over Europe and that's why, and this article points
out that's why to this day you can go to
like a Pony Express themed club in Germany because back
then he performed in front of Queen Victoria and Kaiser
Billhelm and the and the Pope in Rome and basically
kind of he always seemed to have at least one
(26:06):
reported or purported Pony Express writer in the show. It
was like one of the main um segments of his show. Yeah,
so at one point he did have who was the
uh Bronco Broncho Charlie Miller. No, no, no, well he
had him. Oh, pony Bob has them. Yeah, Pony Bob
worked for him for a little while and he is
(26:27):
a definite legit writer. The other guy, what's his name,
Broncho Billy Broncho, Charlie Miller. Oh no, that was Clint
Eastwood Bronco Charlie Miller claimed to have been a Pony
Express writer. A lot of men claim to have been
over the years that were not. Uh, And they traced
his his timeline back and he would have been ten
(26:48):
or eleven, which is really stretching it, like it is possible.
It's possible because they did go as low as like
thirteen and fourteen. But uh, it was never super confirmed
that this guy actually wrote for the Pony Express. But
it kind of doesn't matter because apparently everyone loved him. Yeah,
(27:08):
And and so the reason why it's stretching it but
still in the realm of possibility is because so like
when when William Russell would talk about the Pony Express
and his company would say, like, these men have to
take an oath not to drink or fight, which still,
of course, yeah, we have like eighty eight people in
the saddle and in reality, yeah, they were all drunk
(27:29):
around like at all the way stations and on and
on the trail. Um. And the impression is that you
if you needed a rider and there was somebody who
said i'll go, you, you were a Pony Express rider
right then. So the idea that an eleven year old
kids said i'll go and they said, all right, fine go,
that could have possibly happened. So it's possible Bronco Charlie
(27:52):
Miller did, right. But like you said, he was just
such a great like old West archetype. They were like whatever,
will believe anything you say. Yeah. So uh. Through the years,
like we said, a lot of bad information, a lot
of legend um everything from uh, from movies like N three,
a paramount film called The Pony Express. Charlton Heston is
(28:15):
Buffalo Bill. In the movie, Buffalo Bill teams up with
wild Bill Hillock Hillcock to start the Pony Express. And
as this author said, there is not a shard effect
in the entire film. I don't know if he meant
shred s all right, he could have said ship though,
And then this the um if you read this, it
sounds super cool, like a notice in the St. Louis
(28:36):
and San Francisco newspaper that said wanted young, skinny, wiry
fellows not over eighteen, must be expert writers willing to
risk death. Daily orphans preferred way just twenty five dollars
per week. And that seems like, man, what a great
job listing for the Pony Express orphans That was written
in the twentieth century by a journalist in the Sunset magazine.
(28:59):
To that probably wasn't even true. No, no, that's so
like again there was. It was forgotten like I think
Alexander Major's wrote his um memoirs. Remember he was one
of the three guys who owned the Pony Express. He
wrote his memoirs like thirty forty years after Um, the
Pony Express his last ride. So and by this time
(29:22):
most people had forgotten it. And again it was Buffalo
Bill who came along, actually paid a visit to Alexander
Majors and found him in a fairly sorry state. He
was broke, he was in poor health, and said, you
gave me my first job when I was eleven after
my father died, and I want to repay you by
taking care of you. So he put him in a show.
He let him stay at his old Scouts Rest ranch
(29:43):
in Nebraska, just basically took care of him. But he
also was like, we've got to publish this book. So
he got Rand McNally to actually publish this book about
his life as a freight old West freight legend guy,
including the Pony ex Press, and that was some of
the earliest documentation about it. But it also kicked off
(30:05):
like this history of terrible documentation, of just surrounding the
whole thing with tall tales and embellishments, and it just
very quickly became it's very tough to to root fact
from fiction even today, even at some of these places
that are like, this is actually what this museum is.
A A Pony express Way station may not be the case.
(30:29):
They're not entirely certain what the trail was any longer.
They think that there's some pristine segments that are aren't
covered over by um tracks of some sort that they're
actually like, this was the the course that the Pony
Express took, but they're not a d percent sure. It
just got lost the time. Yeah, I don't even think
we mentioned that Buffalo bill Um. That job he got
(30:52):
was was as a horseback delivery writer for the initial
freight company. But he never wrote for the Pony Express.
Though he did he right claim to or just kind
of let people send that. No. In his in his
in the notes for the Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show,
it talked about how he was and then it would
say you should buy his autobiography it shows even more.
(31:12):
And then they would talk in depth about how he
rode for the Ponty. Was for sure, if you were
from the Old West of this time, you were basically
expected to just lie constantly about some of the things
you've done. And same not just with Buffalo Bill. Wild
Bill Hiccock said the same thing. He worked for the
Pony Express too, and he did. But he was one
(31:32):
of those guys who ran away station intended to the
horses lame well. He was bigger and older, so he
couldn't write. You know, it wasn't his fault. He's a
victim of circumstances. Yeah, there are also a bunch of uh.
There was a series of last living Pony Express riders
throughout the years. Um Various newspapers, even sometimes multiple times
(31:55):
in the same newspaper over the years, would print articles
claiming that the lad Pony Express writer has just died. Um,
so we don't know if you know, any of them
were or not, or if they were the last or not. Uh.
And it finally took a woman named a poet, apparently
not a very good one, named Mabel Loving, who said, well,
(32:15):
why don't you know was this someone actually write letters
and get in touch with some of these people and
get the true dirt. And she did that. She apparently
wrote letters and had some correspondents with the surviving Pony
Express writers as an amateur poet and said this was
right before World War One, And apparently that is some
(32:36):
of the only like real documentation we have from some
of the real writers that she eventually published in something
called The Pony Express Rides on exclamation Point, which apparently
can still buy if you have a lot of money. Uh. Yeah,
it's like a collectible, I'm sure, yeah, I think. And
supposedly the printers lost a couple of the chapters, so
(32:59):
like even if you buy a copy, it's not and
it's intact form because nobody took that very seriously, I
think probably because of the exclamation point. It's never a
good idea. No, Um, you got anything else? Well, I mean,
I guess the PostScript is Uh, after this telegraph that,
like I said, two days after it was hooked up,
(33:20):
they realized that they were done for because they were
already in bad financial straits. So watt l went home
to Missouri. He was broke and in debt. He sold
us home to his son for a dollar and still
lived there. Uh. And apparently he died in April of
eighteen seventy two, never worked again. Um Russell, who was
only forty eight, went to New York. Failed as a stockbroker.
(33:44):
Apparently no one trusted him. He filed for bankruptcy in
eighteen sixty five. Uh and this was what just five
years after it shut down, sold off his assets to
pay his creditors, went back to Missouri finally because of
poor health, and died in eighteen seventy two. And then
Majors lived the longest. Uh. And we know his story,
(34:06):
Like you said, Buffalo Bill helped him publish his book. Right.
And if there if Bronco Charlie Miller really was a
pony Express rider, he definitely by far was the last
one to die. He died at a hundred and five
in nineteen fifty five, and years before that at age
eighty two, he rode from New York to California on
(34:26):
horseback to bring attention back to the uh, the Pony
Express and the glory of it. Wow Pony Express. So
final facts, they ended up losing about two hundred grand
in that day's money, which is millions of dollars now.
The personal best delivery time, apparently was when they carried
(34:48):
Abraham Lincoln's inaugural address. They got it to California in
seven days, seventeen hours, and in the end they delivered
about thirty five thousand pieces of mail over that eighteen
or nineteen months. And I think, isn't it wasn't only
one mail shipment that didn't only one fail to make it?
That's what I understand. Yeah, it's pretty good track record
(35:09):
for a failed business. It's not bad at all. They
all they wrote it combined half a million miles in
that time. Pretty great. And again that's the Pony Express,
totally different than what you thought about, but also sort
of the same. I just didn't know that it was
such a flopt. You just bad timing, terrible timing. Man. Um. Well,
(35:31):
if you wanted more about the Pony Express, we'll get
on out there on the trail. You varm it and
check it out yourself. Uh. And since I said farm
and it's time for listener mail. Oh no, no, it's not.
Oh boy, it's time for administrated all right. Okay, for
(35:58):
the uninitiated, this is where Josh and I and Jerry,
by way of our voices, thank you for the nice
things that you have sent us in the mail. Thank
you gifts, tokens, crafts, books, postcards, letters. By the way,
I didn't log all the postcards and letters. That can
be tough. It can be tough. How about a blanket?
(36:19):
Thank you to everyone who sent us postcards in line Ofsgreed.
Thank you all right, Dan Kent, thank you big time
for sending us Pliny the Elder beer and T shirts. Yes.
Thanks to the Bar Fight Supply Company for all the
awesome leather goods, including the um the Mole skin holder,
(36:40):
which I use a lot. Yeah yeah, the business card
holders all that jam. Thank you very much. Guys. Kelly
Sumski of Two Little Els, she sent us a or
sent me a painted rock in memory of the Wizard
of my cat who passed. Sweet. It was very sweet
and very sad to get, but in a good way.
Uh that bitter sweet. Chris Wallzac sent us beer from Hamburg,
(37:04):
New York, and I p A. Thank you, Chris um
Andy Krueger, you sent me a Ween T shirt that
I wear all the time, including on stage in Atlanta.
I saw it myself. Um. Anna Dyne coffee. Uh they
sent us some coffee from Milwaukee. Thanks Anna Dyne. Jeremiah
and Mason Brandrick, Oh I remember this. They sent us
(37:27):
the F five I p A, which is a beer
I had when I spent some time in Tulsa. So
it's I think a Tulsa beer and some beer in
Bear in Stein Bear shirts soaked in cologne. It seemingly
soaked in cologne. They they they're like, here, huh, you
(37:48):
look like you smell. We're gonna make you pretty. It
was interesting. Julie sent us handmade personalized Christmas ornaments, which
it's been a while since we did this. Or um
for Jerry, you, me, Emily and the kids. Yeah, yeah,
very nice. Those are great. Actually yeah that was on
my tree. Uh. Kaylee Hamar sent uh my dog Niko
(38:10):
some pet treats. Nice pet treater, very nice. Lindsay Lundstrom
sent us some wonderful bottle key cap or bottle cap
key chains. Yeah, there was s y s K one
and don't be dumb one Last Chance Garage Mama Jerry
Red Dragon and she's out of Etsy and Facebook at
(38:32):
Red Dragon Handcrafts. Check them out. You're gonna love him. Yeah,
it's good stuff. Becca sent Uh sent me a library
copy of a book, my children's book that I was
so fond of as a kid, The Great Christmas Kidnapping Caper.
I'm really excited to read this with my daughter, Becca,
So thank you so much for sending that. Kelly Butler
Olson sent Murdered by Death a copy of Murder by Death,
(38:56):
arguably one of the greatest boof movies of all time.
I'm one of my favorites, so thank you. Kelly K.
B oh Taylor Stonehawker sent lovely Christmas card and handmade
caramels which were demons. And nick' Stiglick sent us some
stroop waffles, those amazing things that you put over your
coffee to heat up. Yeah, we've we've got more than
(39:17):
one stroop waffle, so if you also sent stroop waffles Mini,
thanks and just send him again. Nathan for lots. Uh.
He's actually Australian he's an artist and he sent us. Uh.
These are great variety of bookmarks, magnets, coloring books all. Uh.
There are animals with their bodies made of flowers and plants. Yeah,
(39:39):
it's amazing. It's really nice, so you you should check
this out. It's online at uh Marini for Lazzo dot
au m A r I n I f E r
l a z z o dot au and a portion
of these sales go to wildlife conservation. So gorgeous and
well funded. Speaking of gorgeous, Aidan Dale sent us metal
(39:59):
sculpture orchids and you can find them at aiden a
I D E N day old d A l e
dot com. Thank you, Aiden. Just a few more here,
folks alias Pagurko sitting honey from their three colony a pry.
That's pretty great. Thanks. That was awesome. Robin sent us
beer and mead from Wisconsin and it was well appreciated
(40:22):
and didn't last very long. Robin, thank you. We did
not drink Wisconsin bly, Robbin. It was great. That's a
T shirt. I didn't make it up. Bonnie Bowden sent
us Mulda Ramas guitars, which I think it got from
third Man Records in Nashville um. And I think she
(40:43):
also sent the Willis Tower one which I was like,
what the heck is the Willis Tower? And I was like, oh,
that's the Sears Tower. Well, and we got actually more
than one person sent us molda ramas. Yeah, like Luke
and David shirt Skull, father and son. This sent us
elephant molder ramas from war Chuck to leto Zoo fam,
which has probably the largest selection of mole rama's outside
(41:04):
of the Chicago land area. It's right, and you grew
up right there in the gorilla cage. It's right. Nathan
sent us his band c d ep Missouri Loves Company
or Missouri or Missouri Missouri Loves Company. Philip la Palm,
great name, sent Robert Shaw Jaws Christmas card to Chuck.
(41:27):
That's right. And then finally, just a couple of weeks ago,
I got sent some guitar picks from Forever Pick. And
apparently these picks have like a better sustain and better performance.
And I have not yet plucked with him, but I
can't wait to use my Forever picks. That is fantastic.
You have some more, Yeah, We've got just a couple more, Chuck,
if you'll bear with me, take us home. Brother. Um
(41:48):
Josh Jones sent us catfish Head vodka. Oh yeah, thanks
a lot, Josh. Um Doug sent us an amazing poster
congratulating us for a thousand episodes, and old Off and
Millie the Shop Dogs sent us the amazing railroad spike
bottle openers. Remember those you can go to church mouseforge
dot com. And dude, I want to say Ian Newton,
(42:11):
who founded the Baltimore Whiskey Company. Ian has been sending
us stuff like the shot Tower Gin. It's kind of
like a multi gen that I love. Um sent that
bourbon that you love. Just has been sending us some
pretty great stuff. So first of all, Ian, thank you.
Second of all, Ian, keep it coming. And third, everybody
else who's not Ian, go check out Baltimore Whiskey Company's stuff.
(42:35):
The Baltimore Spirits Company. Um, they have just amazing booze
that's locally made in Baltimore and you can tell it's
like craft distilled stuff. You're gonna love it. So thank
you to everybody who sent us anything. Ever, and if
you send us something in between the last administrative details
in this one, and we didn't say your name first
(42:57):
of all, we apologize. Secondly, get in touch of the
and let us know because we do want to thank you,
and it's just an oversight. We're not actually mad at you, okay.
And and I have even more. I want to thank
Doug Sashery. I know how to pronounce the name now.
I don't know if you guys remember or not, but
I mispronounced Tony Cocherri's seasoning creole seasoning. Uh. It turns
(43:20):
out it's Tony Sassaris and Doug let me know by
sending me tons of Tony Sasheries products and they're awesome,
So thank you, Doug. I also want to thank another Doug,
Doug Dixon, the CEO of Joel Cola, who sent us
some Jolke Cola care packages. And then every once in
a while people bring us stuff to our live shows.
(43:42):
So thank you to Ron from Dundee, Michigan for giving
me the um complete DVD set of Thunder the Barbarian,
which I've never seen all the way through because of
swimming lessons. And a very nice person gave us gooey
cakes at the St. Louis show. Uh, our friend Dale
from Australa, you send us a care package of Australian
(44:02):
candy to um acclimate us to Australian Candy for Australia Tour.
And then John from Capastrano Beach who sent us a
giant puzzle wheel that I've yet to begin to even
try to figure out. So thank you John for this madness.
If you want to get in touch with us, whether
to send us something or just to say hi, you
(44:24):
can go onto our website stuff Podcast at how stuff
works dot com, check out our t shirt store at
t Public t e public dot com, slash stuff you
Should Know, and you can just send us a good
old fashioned email to stuff Podcast at how stuff works
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
(44:46):
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, everybody. It's Chuck here, and I'm about to get
on my pony and deliver the mail because it's July.
Don't you mean eighteen? No? I mean because that's when
this select episode was belched out by Josh and Chuck.
It's called How the Pony Express Work. Yeah, welcome to
(00:30):
stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
you welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles
w Chuck Bryant. There's a cherry over there, and we're
bringing you all the news fast as lightning in this
(00:55):
episode on Pony Express. Hey, you resurrected that don't be
Dumb Josh for a moment. Then you're also staining on
your head in your chair. This is like the end
of Primal fear Man. That Don't be Dumb Josh never
went away. There's nothing but that Don't be Dumb. Who
(01:18):
I hope I didn't ruin that for anybody just now.
I probably did, But come on, it was the eighties. Yeah.
There was a bit of a discussion about on the
movie Crush facebook page about me spoiling things that are
old movies like Jaws, like the Shark Dies, like a
bunch of people came to my defense. They're like, you know,
there's a limit on spoilers, like if you're talking about
(01:40):
a ten year old an older movie, like, come on,
who who was it that chose Jaws? Was it Roman? Roman, Mars?
He's got great taste. Man. I watched that movie twice
in the last two weeks. The first time it was
on mute and I was still like engrossed by it.
And then I recently watched it from like start to
(02:01):
finish um for the first time in well over a decade,
and I was like, oh my god, it is basically perfect. Yea,
everything about it. It's just enjoyable. It's beautifully shot, The
characters are great. It's just wonderful. Here's the swimming with
bow legged women. Oh yeah, man, he's he's quite a character.
(02:22):
Is so good in that movie and drive us Man, Yeah,
all of them. It's just so great. Yeah, even Roy Scheider. Yeah,
my favorite moment in that whole movie. I think, well, gosh,
there's so many, but don't spoil it when that real moment,
like Spielberg peppers in these moments, it just makes it
such a richer film, Like when he's sitting there with
his kid. Before dry Fus comes over for dinner that night,
(02:44):
he just has that moment with his son. We're ask
him for a kiss and it's just leaven In. Just
little tidbits like that make the movie so much more rich. Yeah,
I love it. That's our Spielberg. I have a question
for you. Has there ever have been more attention paid
to a utter failure of a business that was only
(03:06):
open for about nineteen months than the Pony Express? Think
trying to think it's really remarkable. Yeah, it's like the
new Coke of mail service. Because when you said this topic,
I was like, oh, hot, diggity dog, this is gonna
be great and it's an interesting story. But it's like, wow,
the Pony Express was a big fat failure. Yeah, really,
(03:27):
this is so. One of the articles we're working from
is called the Pony Express colon Riders of Destiny in parentheses.
Couldn't resist that, um Er Corbet Christopher Corbett um. And
he basically makes the case that the most interesting thing
about the Pony expresses the fact that we remember it
at all. Yeah, that that's real, the real story behind it,
(03:49):
because it was a big stinking failure business wise, it
was as success as an actual mail service, but as
a business it was terrible. The timing was terrible, The
whole structure of it was just a bad idea. It
was just dumb. But it was as far as the
(04:09):
service goes, if you're looking at the very definition of
the word service, it was invaluable for a lot of people. Yeah.
So just to set the table real quick if you
don't know what we're talking about, the Pony Express was
a delivery a mail delivery system. Uh. When the the
Transcontinental well, I guess pre Transcontinental Telegram when it only
(04:34):
went how far east did that go at the time? St?
Joe Missouri? Okay. St. Joe Missouri, and then it went
west as far as Sacramento, Sacramento. And the idea was
to join those two lines so you would have a
true transcontinental telegram telegraph service. But before that happened, there
were three entrepreneurs who said, we can close this gap
(04:58):
because it takes weeks or months to get mail from
east to west these days, and we can do that.
We want to be able to do that in like
a week to ten days. Yeah, which was enormously ambitious
because if you sent mail overland right from you know,
between Missouri and California. You maybe twenty five days was
(05:20):
a good thing to expect for the mail to get there. Right,
it's Missouri, that's one way, okay, if you wanted to
send it by ship, months a couple of months before
the person ever got the mail, because you gotta dig
a river for Missouri to Sacramento. You gotta flood it,
and then you gotta run the ship down that channel,
and then when you get to the other side, you
(05:41):
have to drain it and fill it back in start
over the next time. It was a terrible idea. This
is back when America was full of just complete idiots.
But nowadays we know what we're doing. We've got the
Internet and Twitter and all that stuff. Right, So there
was this idea where if you were in California, which
by this time was a state, and the reason California
(06:02):
was a state before so much of the other parts
of the country is because of the gold Brush of
eighteen forty nine brought a lot of people out west
and they started to build and and create these cities,
and California as a state. So you had Americans living
in a state that was geographically isolated from the rest
of the country. So they wanted news. They wanted newspapers,
(06:25):
they wanted news of America back east. They wanted all
this stuff. And again the telegraph lines weren't connected, so
they set up this mail service to run in between
them fastest lightning and fastest lightning was about ten days,
like you said, and the whole route from Saint Joseph,
Missouri to Sacramento took them about eighteen hundred miles, which
(06:48):
is a really long way. But the way that they
did it, chuck in just ten days was through a
stroke of genius. Is that where I come in. I
just set you up. Yeah, they had about They don't
have great records, and we'll get into that, but as
far as we can tell, and there's a boy, there's
a lot of misinformation out there from over the years
and not legend and lore and tall tales, but they
(07:10):
had about eighty horseback riders, young wiry young men who
they compared to like a modern day jockey. These were
little guys, and by all accounts they could haul butt
on horses. Though. Uh, they had about eighty of these dudes,
and they had about four or five horses and several
dozen what they called way stations or these stations in
(07:33):
between where you would ride, ride, ride, ride, ride to
a station either switch riders or switch horses or both
and get you know, get a fresh horse, or if
you were worn out, you would hand the mail off
and we'll get to how that worked as well. And
then they would go. And it was just a point
to point thing where you would just move this mail
as fast as you could ride a horse basically yep.
(07:54):
And so the horses would last for ten to fifteen miles,
depending on how rough the terrain was, and tween way stations,
and then at the waist the next way station, the
rider would jump from one horse to another horse with
this mail bag called the Mochila, which you could hold
about twenty pounds of mail, and would ride on to
the next way station and switch horses again. And so
(08:15):
the horses would go ten to fifteen miles and the
riders would go about seventy five miles from what I've seen. Yeah,
And this whole operation was from a business called the
Central Overland, California and Pike's Peak Express Company that was
run by three gentlemen, Russell's Majors and Waddell, William, Hepburn
(08:36):
Russell Alexander Majors and William Bradford Waddell, who had already
been in the freight hauling business for military outposts, which
you would think would be a great money making venture.
But apparently when they started the Pony Express, all accounts
say that their business probably wasn't doing very well when
they even started, right, So they said, well, let's see
(08:57):
what is a money pit we can sink our meaning
money into what makes no sense financially. They said, oh,
the Pony Express. Yeah, because you said, I mean, there's
a lot of reasons why it failed, which we'll get to,
but you said that they held up to twenty pounds
of mail in these uh these saddle bags. Again, by
all accounts, they rarely had that much mail. Sometimes they
(09:20):
would have eight or ten letters, and that's just not
you know, if you're in the shipping business, you're not
maximizing your load. No, I did some a little bit
of math. Wasn't hard, but I'm still proud of it. Okay. Um,
So they charged five dollars per half Graham, Yeah, at first,
and so the Mochila could hold twenty pounds. So twenty
(09:42):
pounds times thirty two is sixty or times five dollars
to six hundred forty dollars and in today's money, that's
about sixteen thousand, six hundred forty bucks. It's not bad,
it's not too bad. Um. But apparently it was way
more to maintain this line then than that. And like
(10:03):
you said, plenty of these things only had a couple
of dozen letters in them at any given time, and
the people who would use the pony Express would write
these letters on tissue paper to cut down on costs
because you know, they charged by the half Graham. Yeah,
and it was generally not just regular American people like uh,
apparently it was mostly like government and military, and you know,
(10:26):
you couldn't just generally people couldn't afford to send a
letter by pony express, right, right, So newspapers would send
cables to other newspapers. Um or yeah, like you said, government,
although the government never officially granted a contract to the
Central Overland. Um, they would use them, but there was
(10:49):
no official contract. And it's I get the impression that
had they ever landed a government contract, they might have
they might have actually made money, although I don't think
it would ultimately kept them from their their fate. But um,
they they the fact that they didn't have a wide
customer base, they didn't have a government contract, and then
this was just such an expensive venture and they couldn't
(11:11):
possibly make their money back from it. It was I
don't know if we've gotten the point across yet or not.
This is a terrible business venture. Yeah. And what made
matters worse? I mean, they were likely doomed. Uh, maybe
we should hold off the final nail in the coff
until later, even though it's pretty obvious if you're paying attention.
But one thing that heard him along the way for
sure was the Pyramid Lake War, Yeah, or the Pie Pieutwar. Yeah.
(11:38):
I even looked it up. That's what Emma Saying says.
It was. Uh, that was in Nevada and Utah mainly,
and that was a war that took a great toll
on especially these way stations. Uh. And if you are
a way station, dude, you've fared much worse than Pony
Express writers as far as activity and attack from Native
Americans because you were sitting duck basically in a station
(12:02):
that that seems to be no more than just like
four walls and a dirt floor and maybe a horse
corral and a thing to put water in, yeah, on
the open prairie. Yeah, you're sitting out there. Yeah. And
during the Pyramid Lake War, hostilities between the Piute and
Shoshonees who had banded together with the Pyramid Lake tribe,
(12:22):
those Um, those three groups rose up together against UM,
these settlers that you're, the Euro American settlers who have
been UM coming out there and just basically encroaching on
their land. The thing that the straw that broke the
camel's back was UM. A pair of Um brothers, Euro
American brothers kidnapped a couple of Piute I think twelve
(12:46):
year old girls and raped them and kept them hidden
at one of these little towns, these little frontier towns,
and the Piute Indians got wind of this and went
and found them killed. Bole of the people burned the
town down and then started going from like towntown or
um town to town, but also a way station to
(13:07):
way station, just like UM, massacring people there, burning down
way stations, just basically like torching all these places, right Um.
And at first, the the cavalry was called in and
grossly underestimated what the Paiu and Shoshone and Pyramid Um
group was capable of uh, and just got got whooped basically,
(13:31):
and then the they further reinforcements that got called in.
We're basically able to bring it to a standoff. But this,
this whole thing just raised tensions from simmering below, you know,
the surface, to out and out right what you would
call a war between these tribes and the Americans who
were pressing into their land. So from that moment on,
(13:54):
it got way more difficult and scarier to be a
Pony Express rider. And as per Pony Express history, this
happened like ten weeks after the first rider disembarked. Yeah,
so they I mean not only did it cost them,
uh men, but it costs them about seventy five grand,
and this is an eighteen sixty it's like to something
(14:17):
million today. Yeah, I mean that was a huge loss.
So they started they ramped up their operation to try
and make up for that, and all of a sudden
they were delivering twice a week instead of once a week. Uh.
And they eventually tried to lower their prices too, but
it just none of it worked, and financially it was
a mess. Uh. Like I said earlier, they didn't really
keep a lot of records. They either didn't keep them,
(14:38):
or they may have destroyed them. That's what I think,
to avoid creditors, because these guys were not the greatest
well I don't know if they weren't the greatest businessmen,
but they surely didn't farewell in this case. Well one
of them was supposedly an outright calm man Russell. Oh yeah,
yeah he was. He was supposedly he was the spokesperson
for this this business venture, and he was good at that,
(15:00):
but he was not, um, not a great stand up
guy as far as business is concerned. So the image
that you get in your head of Pony Express or
these guys riding full bore on these horses being chased
by Native Americans and desperados, and uh, apparently all the
you know, many of the books over the years, even
(15:20):
ones that sound U super official a lot of times
were just made up stories. Uh when and we'll talk
a little bit about who finally got in touch with
a lot of these riders. But apparently when they were
um officially on record, they didn't talk a lot about
fighting the Native Americans or anyone. They talked about the weather,
(15:43):
stinking about being ripped off and not being paid. Uh,
sort of like normal business complaints. And it wasn't like
the thing that you see at the Wells Fargo Bank,
like yeah, we rode horses fast, but it kind of sucked, right.
But the thing is is like this, this was a
(16:03):
a legend in its own time, is how I've seen it. Put. Um, well,
we'll talk about that after a break. How about that.
Let's do it, okay. Um so Chuck, we said that,
(16:40):
like the Pony Express was a legend, and sometimes that's
absolutely true. Like there was again in part of William
Russell's superior spokesperson ship. I think is a word. Um
they like newspapers wrote about it in Sacramento they called it,
there are friend the pony Um. I think they were
(17:02):
referring to drugs. I think they were talking about the
Pony Express. But um, like people love the Pony Express.
It was It was just hugely innovative and the idea
that like these guys were out there riding as fast
as they can for scores of miles with bandits on
their tails, just to bring us the mail. People fell
in love with this thing, even though at the end
(17:24):
of the day the thing lasted like eighteen months. Like
the Pony Express, it was huge legend that we think of.
It was an eighteen month business venture that ultimately failed, right,
but it was a legend um. And one of the
reasons that was a legend is because there there were
a um, I mean, there were real deal exploits going
(17:45):
on on the trail. There were some writers who were
just amazing, Like one guy was called, um, what was
pony Bob's last name? Has them? Right, pony Bob has them.
He was one of the writers for the Pony to
Express who ironically wasn't as legendary as he should have
been because he was the actual real deal, but he
(18:06):
ended up being forgotten because they get the impression he
wasn't much of a self promoter. Yeah, he made a
legendary documented journey of three hundred and eighty miles without relief.
At one point where he basically road to road and
road and road went to his station to switch riders,
and the guy there was like, well, I'm not going,
(18:27):
Like there's there's indians out there trying to kill me.
And so he was like, all right, I'm gonna keep going.
And he kept going and delivered the mail and eventually
made his way back and and it ended up being
a three eighty mile round trip. And he's, like I said,
there's not a lot of great documentation. But even though
he's been lost to history, he was very well documented
(18:48):
as an expert writer. Yeah, he definitely was. Um, there
was another one called Billy Fisher who had a pretty
interesting claim to fame. He was out riding on the
trail and um, it was during a snowstorm. So this
is another thing too. You said that the riders complained
about things like the terrible weather, like they were carrying
(19:08):
mail from um, let's see Missouri to Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California.
Weather especially say like in January, you're gonna run into
some terrible snowstorms, right, And Billy Fisher found himself in
one of these snowstorms and he first he just dismounted.
(19:31):
He's like, I just gotta go over here and go
to sleep for a little while in a blizzard. And um,
he started to fall asleep and he woke up to
something licking his face and it was a jack rabbit
who had basically licked his face till he woke up.
I didn't know they licked. I think this may have
been as his spirit animal actually uh, and the rabbit
(19:52):
like startled Billy Fisher, and Billy Fisher startled the rabbit
and the rabbit ran off, But it woke Billy Fisher up,
and he said, if that rabbit had licked my face
and woke me up, I never would have woken up.
I would have just frozen to death out there in
this blizzard. But he was woken up enough and realized
the gravity of the situation enough they got back on
his horse and kept rioting to safety. Sounds like legend, yeah,
And to to top it off, his great great grandson
(20:16):
is William Fisher, who was one of the U S
astronauts who flew the Space Shuttle. So legend, and these
stories are like going around and like being circulated in
newspapers and among people while the pony expresses going on, Yeah,
I mean there were some very bad, uh not exploit
of sensationalist books written over the years. And then there
(20:38):
was also a couple of real legitimate dudes, Captain Sir
Richard Burton, the famous British explorer, and one Samuel Clemens
year old future Mark Twain. They both individually, um kind
of spent some time out there documenting the Pony Express,
and it seems like Burton didn't have a good time
(21:00):
out there. He didn't like the West. He did. He
always complained about the flies and the fleas and just
the filth and just the people. He just was not
a fan. But he still gave a fairly accurate account
of like the day to day of a Pony Express
writer Clemens, Mr. The Future Mark Twain seemed to have
a good time. And you know, in his true fashion,
(21:22):
wrote some of the uh some really flower flowery eyewitness
testimony about seeing these horsemen coming across the tundra and
the planes. It's pretty cool. You're gonna read that? No, well,
everybody go read that. It's in um Roughing It, which
is his book about traveling the US, and he surfs
(21:43):
in it. Did you know that? I didn't. He goes
to Hawaii and tries surfing when they used to surfing,
like ten ft long wooden boards. Head clean off. Go
go read that quote in your in your best hell
hole brook impression. Really good way to do it. I'm
more a Val Kilmer Mark Twain guy, that's right. I
(22:06):
forgot he did that. Everyone did Chuck man Um. So
you had Mark Twain and Captain Sir Richard Burton providing
like contemporary accounts. But that's like, that is virtually it, right,
there were again this is a failed business venture. Let's
go ahead and tell him what happened? Why it was
failed business venture? Chuck? Why why ultimately died? Well, they
(22:30):
finally hooked up the two, they finally closed that gap
on the telegraph. They're like, well, we can go coast
to coast now, so you're you're sort of immediately literally
immediately out of business. Yeah, the first two days later
they closed. The first rider headed out on April third,
eighteen sixty and it was October twenty six of eighteen
(22:52):
sixty one where the last one headed out from St. Joe's.
And some people will say, well, it didn't actually stop
in October. It was actually in November because those Mochilas
didn't end up into in Sacramento until November. That's fine, whatever.
It was like eighteen months, seventies something weeks of Operation
um and people loved it at the time. But as
(23:14):
with most things, once the new, better, greater thing came
along the telegram, they forgot about it pretty quick and
we really honestly would not have any recollection of the
Pony Express. It would be a footnote to a footnote
in history if it weren't for one guy named Buffalo
Bill Cody, who actually is the reason why we all
(23:38):
remember the Pony Express. He had a soft spot in
his heart for um, not just the Pony Express itself,
but one of um the founders. I think it was
Alexander Major's right, Yeah, I think so who um gave
a h he was a kid, gave him a job
when he was a kid. And while Bill um would
go on or Buffalo Bill would go on to uh
(23:59):
to say, a well, I was actually a Pony Express writer.
All historical evidence suggests that that is not actually the case,
but um, he definitely did work for Alexander Majors, who
was one of the owners of the Pony Express as
a horseback messenger, just not a Pony Express writer, which
if you're talking about Pony Express legend, that's a major distinction. Yeah.
(24:20):
And Buffalo Bill would also go on to say, should
a group brig front girl? Sorry? Is he called Buffalo Bill? Yeah? Okay,
I always for some reason I thought it was a
playoff of Buffalo Bill, like Buffalo Bob or something like that.
It was Buffalo Bill because he skinned his victims. I remember, Uh,
(24:43):
should we take a break? Geez, okay, sure, all right,
let's take a break and we'll talk a little bit
more about Buffalo Bill right after this. Alright, So Buffalo
(25:20):
Bill's Wild West, Uh, I want to always want to
say Wild West Extravaganza. You can call it that, but
it was really Buffalo Bill's Wild West. That was a
name of his big show that he took all over
the country, delighting people with sharp shooting and horseback riding
and all sorts of cool stuff, enchanting America with with
the Old West, not just America, the world. Well, yeah,
(25:43):
and that's that's a solid point. I mean, he went
all over Europe and that's why, and this article points
out that's why to this day you can go to
like a Pony Express themed club in Germany because back
then he performed in front of Queen Victoria and Kaiser
Billhelm and the and the Pope in Rome and basically
kind of he always seemed to have at least one
(26:06):
reported or purported Pony Express writer in the show. It
was like one of the main um segments of his show. Yeah,
so at one point he did have who was the
uh Bronco Broncho Charlie Miller. No, no, no, well he
had him. Oh, pony Bob has them. Yeah, Pony Bob
worked for him for a little while and he is
(26:27):
a definite legit writer. The other guy, what's his name,
Broncho Billy Broncho, Charlie Miller. Oh no, that was Clint
Eastwood Bronco Charlie Miller claimed to have been a Pony
Express writer. A lot of men claim to have been
over the years that were not. Uh, And they traced
his his timeline back and he would have been ten
(26:48):
or eleven, which is really stretching it, like it is possible.
It's possible because they did go as low as like
thirteen and fourteen. But uh, it was never super confirmed
that this guy actually wrote for the Pony Express. But
it kind of doesn't matter because apparently everyone loved him. Yeah,
(27:08):
And and so the reason why it's stretching it but
still in the realm of possibility is because so like
when when William Russell would talk about the Pony Express
and his company would say, like, these men have to
take an oath not to drink or fight, which still,
of course, yeah, we have like eighty eight people in
the saddle and in reality, yeah, they were all drunk
(27:29):
around like at all the way stations and on and
on the trail. Um. And the impression is that you
if you needed a rider and there was somebody who
said i'll go, you, you were a Pony Express rider
right then. So the idea that an eleven year old
kids said i'll go and they said, all right, fine go,
that could have possibly happened. So it's possible Bronco Charlie
(27:52):
Miller did, right. But like you said, he was just
such a great like old West archetype. They were like whatever,
will believe anything you say. Yeah. So uh. Through the years,
like we said, a lot of bad information, a lot
of legend um everything from uh, from movies like N three,
a paramount film called The Pony Express. Charlton Heston is
(28:15):
Buffalo Bill. In the movie, Buffalo Bill teams up with
wild Bill Hillock Hillcock to start the Pony Express. And
as this author said, there is not a shard effect
in the entire film. I don't know if he meant
shred s all right, he could have said ship though,
And then this the um if you read this, it
sounds super cool, like a notice in the St. Louis
(28:36):
and San Francisco newspaper that said wanted young, skinny, wiry
fellows not over eighteen, must be expert writers willing to
risk death. Daily orphans preferred way just twenty five dollars
per week. And that seems like, man, what a great
job listing for the Pony Express orphans That was written
in the twentieth century by a journalist in the Sunset magazine.
(28:59):
To that probably wasn't even true. No, no, that's so
like again there was. It was forgotten like I think
Alexander Major's wrote his um memoirs. Remember he was one
of the three guys who owned the Pony Express. He
wrote his memoirs like thirty forty years after Um, the
Pony Express his last ride. So and by this time
(29:22):
most people had forgotten it. And again it was Buffalo
Bill who came along, actually paid a visit to Alexander
Majors and found him in a fairly sorry state. He
was broke, he was in poor health, and said, you
gave me my first job when I was eleven after
my father died, and I want to repay you by
taking care of you. So he put him in a show.
He let him stay at his old Scouts Rest ranch
(29:43):
in Nebraska, just basically took care of him. But he
also was like, we've got to publish this book. So
he got Rand McNally to actually publish this book about
his life as a freight old West freight legend guy,
including the Pony ex Press, and that was some of
the earliest documentation about it. But it also kicked off
(30:05):
like this history of terrible documentation, of just surrounding the
whole thing with tall tales and embellishments, and it just
very quickly became it's very tough to to root fact
from fiction even today, even at some of these places
that are like, this is actually what this museum is.
A A Pony express Way station may not be the case.
(30:29):
They're not entirely certain what the trail was any longer.
They think that there's some pristine segments that are aren't
covered over by um tracks of some sort that they're
actually like, this was the the course that the Pony
Express took, but they're not a d percent sure. It
just got lost the time. Yeah, I don't even think
we mentioned that Buffalo bill Um. That job he got
(30:52):
was was as a horseback delivery writer for the initial
freight company. But he never wrote for the Pony Express.
Though he did he right claim to or just kind
of let people send that. No. In his in his
in the notes for the Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show,
it talked about how he was and then it would
say you should buy his autobiography it shows even more.
(31:12):
And then they would talk in depth about how he
rode for the Ponty. Was for sure, if you were
from the Old West of this time, you were basically
expected to just lie constantly about some of the things
you've done. And same not just with Buffalo Bill. Wild
Bill Hiccock said the same thing. He worked for the
Pony Express too, and he did. But he was one
(31:32):
of those guys who ran away station intended to the
horses lame well. He was bigger and older, so he
couldn't write. You know, it wasn't his fault. He's a
victim of circumstances. Yeah, there are also a bunch of uh.
There was a series of last living Pony Express riders
throughout the years. Um Various newspapers, even sometimes multiple times
(31:55):
in the same newspaper over the years, would print articles
claiming that the lad Pony Express writer has just died. Um,
so we don't know if you know, any of them
were or not, or if they were the last or not. Uh.
And it finally took a woman named a poet, apparently
not a very good one, named Mabel Loving, who said, well,
(32:15):
why don't you know was this someone actually write letters
and get in touch with some of these people and
get the true dirt. And she did that. She apparently
wrote letters and had some correspondents with the surviving Pony
Express writers as an amateur poet and said this was
right before World War One, And apparently that is some
(32:36):
of the only like real documentation we have from some
of the real writers that she eventually published in something
called The Pony Express Rides on exclamation Point, which apparently
can still buy if you have a lot of money. Uh. Yeah,
it's like a collectible, I'm sure, yeah, I think. And
supposedly the printers lost a couple of the chapters, so
(32:59):
like even if you buy a copy, it's not and
it's intact form because nobody took that very seriously, I
think probably because of the exclamation point. It's never a
good idea. No, Um, you got anything else? Well, I mean,
I guess the PostScript is Uh, after this telegraph that,
like I said, two days after it was hooked up,
(33:20):
they realized that they were done for because they were
already in bad financial straits. So watt l went home
to Missouri. He was broke and in debt. He sold
us home to his son for a dollar and still
lived there. Uh. And apparently he died in April of
eighteen seventy two, never worked again. Um Russell, who was
only forty eight, went to New York. Failed as a stockbroker.
(33:44):
Apparently no one trusted him. He filed for bankruptcy in
eighteen sixty five. Uh and this was what just five
years after it shut down, sold off his assets to
pay his creditors, went back to Missouri finally because of
poor health, and died in eighteen seventy two. And then
Majors lived the longest. Uh. And we know his story,
(34:06):
Like you said, Buffalo Bill helped him publish his book. Right.
And if there if Bronco Charlie Miller really was a
pony Express rider, he definitely by far was the last
one to die. He died at a hundred and five
in nineteen fifty five, and years before that at age
eighty two, he rode from New York to California on
(34:26):
horseback to bring attention back to the uh, the Pony
Express and the glory of it. Wow Pony Express. So
final facts, they ended up losing about two hundred grand
in that day's money, which is millions of dollars now.
The personal best delivery time, apparently was when they carried
(34:48):
Abraham Lincoln's inaugural address. They got it to California in
seven days, seventeen hours, and in the end they delivered
about thirty five thousand pieces of mail over that eighteen
or nineteen months. And I think, isn't it wasn't only
one mail shipment that didn't only one fail to make it?
That's what I understand. Yeah, it's pretty good track record
(35:09):
for a failed business. It's not bad at all. They
all they wrote it combined half a million miles in
that time. Pretty great. And again that's the Pony Express,
totally different than what you thought about, but also sort
of the same. I just didn't know that it was
such a flopt. You just bad timing, terrible timing. Man. Um. Well,
(35:31):
if you wanted more about the Pony Express, we'll get
on out there on the trail. You varm it and
check it out yourself. Uh. And since I said farm
and it's time for listener mail. Oh no, no, it's not.
Oh boy, it's time for administrated all right. Okay, for
(35:58):
the uninitiated, this is where Josh and I and Jerry,
by way of our voices, thank you for the nice
things that you have sent us in the mail. Thank
you gifts, tokens, crafts, books, postcards, letters. By the way,
I didn't log all the postcards and letters. That can
be tough. It can be tough. How about a blanket?
(36:19):
Thank you to everyone who sent us postcards in line Ofsgreed.
Thank you all right, Dan Kent, thank you big time
for sending us Pliny the Elder beer and T shirts. Yes.
Thanks to the Bar Fight Supply Company for all the
awesome leather goods, including the um the Mole skin holder,
(36:40):
which I use a lot. Yeah yeah, the business card
holders all that jam. Thank you very much. Guys. Kelly
Sumski of Two Little Els, she sent us a or
sent me a painted rock in memory of the Wizard
of my cat who passed. Sweet. It was very sweet
and very sad to get, but in a good way.
Uh that bitter sweet. Chris Wallzac sent us beer from Hamburg,
(37:04):
New York, and I p A. Thank you, Chris um
Andy Krueger, you sent me a Ween T shirt that
I wear all the time, including on stage in Atlanta.
I saw it myself. Um. Anna Dyne coffee. Uh they
sent us some coffee from Milwaukee. Thanks Anna Dyne. Jeremiah
and Mason Brandrick, Oh I remember this. They sent us
(37:27):
the F five I p A, which is a beer
I had when I spent some time in Tulsa. So
it's I think a Tulsa beer and some beer in
Bear in Stein Bear shirts soaked in cologne. It seemingly
soaked in cologne. They they they're like, here, huh, you
(37:48):
look like you smell. We're gonna make you pretty. It
was interesting. Julie sent us handmade personalized Christmas ornaments, which
it's been a while since we did this. Or um
for Jerry, you, me, Emily and the kids. Yeah, yeah,
very nice. Those are great. Actually yeah that was on
my tree. Uh. Kaylee Hamar sent uh my dog Niko
(38:10):
some pet treats. Nice pet treater, very nice. Lindsay Lundstrom
sent us some wonderful bottle key cap or bottle cap
key chains. Yeah, there was s y s K one
and don't be dumb one Last Chance Garage Mama Jerry
Red Dragon and she's out of Etsy and Facebook at
(38:32):
Red Dragon Handcrafts. Check them out. You're gonna love him. Yeah,
it's good stuff. Becca sent Uh sent me a library
copy of a book, my children's book that I was
so fond of as a kid, The Great Christmas Kidnapping Caper.
I'm really excited to read this with my daughter, Becca,
So thank you so much for sending that. Kelly Butler
Olson sent Murdered by Death a copy of Murder by Death,
(38:56):
arguably one of the greatest boof movies of all time.
I'm one of my favorites, so thank you. Kelly K.
B oh Taylor Stonehawker sent lovely Christmas card and handmade
caramels which were demons. And nick' Stiglick sent us some
stroop waffles, those amazing things that you put over your
coffee to heat up. Yeah, we've we've got more than
(39:17):
one stroop waffle, so if you also sent stroop waffles Mini,
thanks and just send him again. Nathan for lots. Uh.
He's actually Australian he's an artist and he sent us. Uh.
These are great variety of bookmarks, magnets, coloring books all. Uh.
There are animals with their bodies made of flowers and plants. Yeah,
(39:39):
it's amazing. It's really nice, so you you should check
this out. It's online at uh Marini for Lazzo dot
au m A r I n I f E r
l a z z o dot au and a portion
of these sales go to wildlife conservation. So gorgeous and
well funded. Speaking of gorgeous, Aidan Dale sent us metal
(39:59):
sculpture orchids and you can find them at aiden a
I D E N day old d A l e
dot com. Thank you, Aiden. Just a few more here,
folks alias Pagurko sitting honey from their three colony a pry.
That's pretty great. Thanks. That was awesome. Robin sent us
beer and mead from Wisconsin and it was well appreciated
(40:22):
and didn't last very long. Robin, thank you. We did
not drink Wisconsin bly, Robbin. It was great. That's a
T shirt. I didn't make it up. Bonnie Bowden sent
us Mulda Ramas guitars, which I think it got from
third Man Records in Nashville um. And I think she
(40:43):
also sent the Willis Tower one which I was like,
what the heck is the Willis Tower? And I was like, oh,
that's the Sears Tower. Well, and we got actually more
than one person sent us molda ramas. Yeah, like Luke
and David shirt Skull, father and son. This sent us
elephant molder ramas from war Chuck to leto Zoo fam,
which has probably the largest selection of mole rama's outside
(41:04):
of the Chicago land area. It's right, and you grew
up right there in the gorilla cage. It's right. Nathan
sent us his band c d ep Missouri Loves Company
or Missouri or Missouri Missouri Loves Company. Philip la Palm,
great name, sent Robert Shaw Jaws Christmas card to Chuck.
(41:27):
That's right. And then finally, just a couple of weeks ago,
I got sent some guitar picks from Forever Pick. And
apparently these picks have like a better sustain and better performance.
And I have not yet plucked with him, but I
can't wait to use my Forever picks. That is fantastic.
You have some more, Yeah, We've got just a couple more, Chuck,
if you'll bear with me, take us home. Brother. Um
(41:48):
Josh Jones sent us catfish Head vodka. Oh yeah, thanks
a lot, Josh. Um Doug sent us an amazing poster
congratulating us for a thousand episodes, and old Off and
Millie the Shop Dogs sent us the amazing railroad spike
bottle openers. Remember those you can go to church mouseforge
dot com. And dude, I want to say Ian Newton,
(42:11):
who founded the Baltimore Whiskey Company. Ian has been sending
us stuff like the shot Tower Gin. It's kind of
like a multi gen that I love. Um sent that
bourbon that you love. Just has been sending us some
pretty great stuff. So first of all, Ian, thank you.
Second of all, Ian, keep it coming. And third, everybody
else who's not Ian, go check out Baltimore Whiskey Company's stuff.
(42:35):
The Baltimore Spirits Company. Um, they have just amazing booze
that's locally made in Baltimore and you can tell it's
like craft distilled stuff. You're gonna love it. So thank
you to everybody who sent us anything. Ever, and if
you send us something in between the last administrative details
in this one, and we didn't say your name first
(42:57):
of all, we apologize. Secondly, get in touch of the
and let us know because we do want to thank you,
and it's just an oversight. We're not actually mad at you, okay.
And and I have even more. I want to thank
Doug Sashery. I know how to pronounce the name now.
I don't know if you guys remember or not, but
I mispronounced Tony Cocherri's seasoning creole seasoning. Uh. It turns
(43:20):
out it's Tony Sassaris and Doug let me know by
sending me tons of Tony Sasheries products and they're awesome,
So thank you, Doug. I also want to thank another Doug,
Doug Dixon, the CEO of Joel Cola, who sent us
some Jolke Cola care packages. And then every once in
a while people bring us stuff to our live shows.
(43:42):
So thank you to Ron from Dundee, Michigan for giving
me the um complete DVD set of Thunder the Barbarian,
which I've never seen all the way through because of
swimming lessons. And a very nice person gave us gooey
cakes at the St. Louis show. Uh, our friend Dale
from Australa, you send us a care package of Australian
(44:02):
candy to um acclimate us to Australian Candy for Australia Tour.
And then John from Capastrano Beach who sent us a
giant puzzle wheel that I've yet to begin to even
try to figure out. So thank you John for this madness.
If you want to get in touch with us, whether
to send us something or just to say hi, you
(44:24):
can go onto our website stuff Podcast at how stuff
works dot com, check out our t shirt store at
t Public t e public dot com, slash stuff you
Should Know, and you can just send us a good
old fashioned email to stuff Podcast at how stuff works
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
(44:46):
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.