Joanne Maugeri, age 10, of Flushing, N.Y., for her question:
What was the Pony Express?
Our TVs, radios and movies hold us spellbound with western tales of wagon trains and wild Indian warfare. Some of the yarns are exaggerated make believe. But without a doubt the most dashing event of the American frontier was the true tale of the galloping Pony Express.
In the 1840s America was bursting with heroic adventure. Wagon trains trudged across the wide prairies as the frontier moved farther westward. There were no phones or radios and no telegraph systems or railroad spanned the continent. Mail was carried by express companies, and letters from the east went on stage coaches by the long southern route and took a month to reach the settlers of the Far West.
Young Henry Vells worked for an express company and knew that relays of fast riders were used to carry mail between the eastern and southern states. He suggested a relay of fast horseback riders to carry mail to the Far West by a shorter route. The staggering route crossed some 2,000 miles of wild prairie and rough mountains, and the express company pooh poohed Henry's bold and daring plan. He searched for others to support him, and 20 years later his dream of the Pony Express came true.
Henry Wells and William Fargo founded Wells Fargo and Co., and on April 3, 1860, the first Pony Express rider galloped forth from St. Joseph, Mo. Ten days and 1966 miles later his leather mail pouch was delivered in the Far West. Later, Pony Express riders cut this travel time to eight days. The ponies were the fastest of fast horses, and their thundering hooves followed the Oregon Trail, along the Platte fiver, through Nebraska and Wyoming, across the dry salt desert of Utah and up the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Carson City. From Sacramento the mail pouch traveled by boat to San Francisco.
Each rider galloped at full speed, and every 10 to 15 miles he reached a relay station where he exchanged his weary horse for a fresh one. In two minutes he was off again at 12 miles an hour, dashing along day and night through all kinds of weather. After 75 miles a fresh rider waited to relay the mail pouch along the next lap of its galloping journey. Each day the mail traveled about 250 miles.
A rider might face bandits or hostile Indians. As a rule he was armed with only a knife and a pair of revolvers, and the Pony Express mail was lost only once. There were about 190 relay stations in the system, and its 80 galloping horsemen were paid $100 to $150 a month. These picked riders included some of the most daring and durable men of the western frontier.
It took Henry Wells 20 years to gain the support needed to make his dream come true. Meantime, plans to span the continent with a telegraph system were underway, and when it was finished the glamorous relay riders were no longer needed to link the East with the western frontier. The glorious, dashing Pony Express ended on Oct. 24, 1861, some 18 months and 650,000 miles after it began.