According to Fred Reinfeld's book on the Express, only one rider died on route - and his horse still made it to the next station with the mail. The route from East to West was dangerous, but passable.
Weight was far more important than Hollywood-famous cowboy skills like gunslinging, because a light rider could move faster.
They were the 19th-century equivalent of bike messengers - young, skinny guys who wanted to ride fast and make cash. The company bought strong horses and ponies to ride, and the riders matched the pedigree of the animals. Each rider went for an average of 50 miles, day or night, and then handed off his pouch of letters to the next rider and horse for the next leg. What made the Pony Express work were the stations that dotted the route to switch out horses and riders. The Pony Express began when three freighters, Alexander Majors, William Russell, and William Waddell, devised a relay system of a series of riders that would gallop across the country as quickly as possible. The Pony Express was a breakthrough in a few key waysĪ Pony Express rider speeds across the country. The only other option was even more indirect: shipping from New York to Panama, then across Panama via train, and then onto another boat to San Francisco. In The Pony Express, author Tim McNeese describes the arduous delivery process for a typical letter: down a river, on a stagecoach to Arkansas, and then along poor roads on a stagecoach to El Paso and all the way across the desert. But getting mail across the continent took about three weeks. The 1850s saw a population explosion in California, as settlers from the Oregon Trail and California gold rush flooded into the West. Before the Pony Express, moving information was a huge pain But also because it fits with our romantic ideas about the Old West. So why do we remember the Pony Express at all? Partly because it was a genuine breakthrough in mail delivery. "In the American memory, that man is still riding across the country," says Christopher Corbett, author of Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express. Oddly enough, though, most of us don't think of the Pony Express as a flash in the pan. "In The american Memory, That Man Is Still Riding." It was 155 years ago, but that first journey remains memorable today, even though the service only operated until October 1861 - closing just 81 weeks after it began, killed off by the telegraph and other factors. Near midnight on April 14, 1860, the mail reached its destination in San Francisco. The first mail delivered via the Pony Express was sent on Apwhen it left St.
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