Christopher Corbett: The Pony Rides Again (and Again)
[Christopher Corbett, a former news editor and reporter, is author most recently of The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West (Atlantic Monthly 2010) and Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express (Broadway Books 2003).]
Shortly before last Christmas, a prominent New York auction house put up for bid a collection of 63 postmarked envelopes and stamps that the daring riders of the Pony Express had carried 150 years ago. Experts estimated that the rare collection, owned by Thurston Twigg-Smith, an 88-year-old philanthropist and former publisher of the Honolulu Advertiser, might net $2.5 million. It drew $4 million.
That the Pony Express generated such income would have gladdened the hearts of the venture’s original founders—William Hepburn Russell, Alexander Majors, and William Bradford Waddell—who never made a dime from the business. The heroic, nearly 2,000-mile delivery of mail across the country hemorrhaged money, from the first day a rider saddled up until the click of the transcontinental telegraph shut it down 78 weeks later. The Pony Express was one of the most colossal and celebrated failures in American business history, but its legacy, as the sale at Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries suggests, remains an enduring and revered piece of the Old West myth. Even today, old-timers in the remotest parts of the American West still speak of “the days of the Pony.” Few figures in that region’s history loom larger than those true riders of the purple sage, whom Mark Twain called “the swift phantoms of the desert.”
In its own day, the Express caused quite a stir. By beginning where the train and the telegraph line stopped at St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1860, the service closed an information gap that had long frustrated both coasts. The Pacific slope was a far country in those days: mail from the East took not days or weeks but many months to cross the nation by stagecoach or to be shipped around the stormy Cape Horn or through the fever-ridden Isthmus of Panama. The Pony cut the time of moving information overland to 10 days or less, and on this count at least it proved a spectacular success. It initially cost customers $5 to send one letter, although rates would crumble as the firm desperately tried to generate business. Still, that was a lot of money in 1860, when a laborer in Kansas might make only that in a week. Patrons of the fast service thus tended to be banks, newspapers, and officials, including diplomats. “[The riders] got but little frivolous correspondence to carry,” noted Mark Twain....
The undertaking was thrown together so quickly that riders seem often to have been simply drafted on a temporary basis. Alexander Majors wrote that the Pony had 80 riders in the saddle, generally well-mounted, lightweight young men and boys. All told, perhaps slightly more than 300 trips were made....
The Express left virtually no records of its short life span—and that’s where myth has stepped in to fill in the blanks. Although we have scraps of information about the business from its start, the first book-length examination was published nearly a half century after the venture folded. A Thrilling and Truthful History of the Pony Express with Other Sketches and Incidents of Those Stirring Times was the imaginative effort of one Col. William Lightfoot Visscher, an alcoholic journalist whose legal address on occasion was the bar at the Chicago Press Club....
Ultimately, the Pony became an American epic along the lines of Paul Revere’s ride, a tale rooted in fact but layered with a century and a half of embellishments, fabrications, and outright lies. There is still no agreement even on the identity of the first rider. William Floyd, an early 20th-century chronicler of the Pony from St. Joseph, once called it “a tale of truth, half-truth and no truth at all.”
But what a story; what an American memory. The legend of the Pony Express was worth every nickel generated by that fancy stamp auction in New York City last December. On that count Russell, Majors, and Waddell would be in solemn agreement. Its memory remains priceless.
Read entire article at American Heritage
Shortly before last Christmas, a prominent New York auction house put up for bid a collection of 63 postmarked envelopes and stamps that the daring riders of the Pony Express had carried 150 years ago. Experts estimated that the rare collection, owned by Thurston Twigg-Smith, an 88-year-old philanthropist and former publisher of the Honolulu Advertiser, might net $2.5 million. It drew $4 million.
That the Pony Express generated such income would have gladdened the hearts of the venture’s original founders—William Hepburn Russell, Alexander Majors, and William Bradford Waddell—who never made a dime from the business. The heroic, nearly 2,000-mile delivery of mail across the country hemorrhaged money, from the first day a rider saddled up until the click of the transcontinental telegraph shut it down 78 weeks later. The Pony Express was one of the most colossal and celebrated failures in American business history, but its legacy, as the sale at Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries suggests, remains an enduring and revered piece of the Old West myth. Even today, old-timers in the remotest parts of the American West still speak of “the days of the Pony.” Few figures in that region’s history loom larger than those true riders of the purple sage, whom Mark Twain called “the swift phantoms of the desert.”
In its own day, the Express caused quite a stir. By beginning where the train and the telegraph line stopped at St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1860, the service closed an information gap that had long frustrated both coasts. The Pacific slope was a far country in those days: mail from the East took not days or weeks but many months to cross the nation by stagecoach or to be shipped around the stormy Cape Horn or through the fever-ridden Isthmus of Panama. The Pony cut the time of moving information overland to 10 days or less, and on this count at least it proved a spectacular success. It initially cost customers $5 to send one letter, although rates would crumble as the firm desperately tried to generate business. Still, that was a lot of money in 1860, when a laborer in Kansas might make only that in a week. Patrons of the fast service thus tended to be banks, newspapers, and officials, including diplomats. “[The riders] got but little frivolous correspondence to carry,” noted Mark Twain....
The undertaking was thrown together so quickly that riders seem often to have been simply drafted on a temporary basis. Alexander Majors wrote that the Pony had 80 riders in the saddle, generally well-mounted, lightweight young men and boys. All told, perhaps slightly more than 300 trips were made....
The Express left virtually no records of its short life span—and that’s where myth has stepped in to fill in the blanks. Although we have scraps of information about the business from its start, the first book-length examination was published nearly a half century after the venture folded. A Thrilling and Truthful History of the Pony Express with Other Sketches and Incidents of Those Stirring Times was the imaginative effort of one Col. William Lightfoot Visscher, an alcoholic journalist whose legal address on occasion was the bar at the Chicago Press Club....
Ultimately, the Pony became an American epic along the lines of Paul Revere’s ride, a tale rooted in fact but layered with a century and a half of embellishments, fabrications, and outright lies. There is still no agreement even on the identity of the first rider. William Floyd, an early 20th-century chronicler of the Pony from St. Joseph, once called it “a tale of truth, half-truth and no truth at all.”
But what a story; what an American memory. The legend of the Pony Express was worth every nickel generated by that fancy stamp auction in New York City last December. On that count Russell, Majors, and Waddell would be in solemn agreement. Its memory remains priceless.