ED: We've got one more story for you today, and it's about one of history's most famous attempts to deliver the mail. The Pony Express. Now just to be clear, the Pony Express was not a service of the United States Post Office itself. It was a private venture, like FedEx or UPS. And at the time, it was seen as a huge achievement, moving the mail across the country on horseback in just 10 days. People were fascinated by the pony and the legend lives on today.
But as you might have guessed, the Pony Express was not as glamorous as the myth suggests. BackStory producer Eric Mennel tells the story.
ERIC MENNEL: I grew up hearing the same story you did about the Pony Express. But as it's not exactly a topic of everyday conversation, I called up my childhood expert source for a refresher.
ERIC'S MOM: Hello?
ERIC MENNEL: Hey Mom.
ERIC'S MOM: Hey.
ERIC MENNEL: Hey.
In the interest of full disclosure, my mom has no formal training in American history. Most of what she knows about the Pony Express comes from stories. Stories she heard from someone who heard them from someone who heard them from someone. I asked her what exactly she remembers.
ERIC'S MOM: That was the mail system in the wild west. I mean I can't give you by dates or anything, I'm thinking early 1800s-ish. And a lot of times they would have younger men do it, crossing the mountain ranges and riding through the desert on a horse with no name. That's how the delivered the mail. If that's not the real Pony Express? Is there more to the story than that?
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: Well, with no disrespect to your mother.
ERIC MENNEL: This is Christopher Corbett, he's a journalist and an author who's written a book on the Pony Express. I told him how my mom and I thought that the Pony Express was the main method of mail delivery for years and years.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: No one ever gets that right.
ERIC MENNEL: Really?
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: People guess 10 years, 20 years, 25 years, it more or less operated for 78 weeks.
ERIC MENNEL: A year and a half. EAnd Corbett says, not only was the Pony Express short lived, but the kind of mail they delivered, was pretty bland too.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: They were carrying government documents, they were carrying bank transfers, they were carrying important business matters, they were not carrying love letters, Christmas cards, junk mail, and they weren't carrying packages. But other than that, mom was right.
ERIC MENNEL: So other than everything, mom was right.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: Yes.
ERIC MENNEL: Yeah.
The basic details of the Pony Express don't necessarily make it seem like such a bad idea. It's official name was the Central Over Land California and Pikes Peak Express, catchy, I know. It was a private venture sort of like the FedEx of 1860. And it stretched from Saint Joseph, Missouri in the east to Sacramento in the west, about 2,000 miles. Each rider, a young man, would cover 10 or so miles before switching horses. He's switch horses maybe eight or nine times, before a new rider would take over. The trip would take less than 10 days. A remarkable improvement on the six months the post office would take by steam ship.
Logistically however, the business was a disaster. Each rider only carried about 20 pounds of mail at a time, that's like two and a half gallons of milk per trip. Each piece of mail cost $5 to send across the country, a full week's pay at the time.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: You could almost teach this at Wharton or Amos Tuck or Harvard as how not to run a business.
ERIC MENNEL: Again, Chris Corbett. He says the term, "hemorrhaged money." And often times they didn't even pay their riders.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: That's one of the things they used to complain about, was not getting paid. They didn't talk about having to shoot their way through a horde of Indians or they didn't have any of those kinds of romantic kind of western dying novel, Hollywood stories. They said they didn't get paid.
ERIC MENNEL: The conditions were terrible. The food was inedible. A few riders died from the weather. One guy's horse fell on him. Sounds miserable. So you've got to wonder how people came to remember the Pony Express as so great. Corbett says there are two guys to blame. The first, Mark Twain.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: Mark Twain was a 26 year old Confederate Army deserter who was going west on the top of a stagecoach in western Nebraska, and he was hoping to see the Pony Express. And the driver of the coach told him, if you sit up on the top here, you might see the rider of the Pony Express come through.
And along after a while, near Mud Springs, Nebraska, Twain saw a Pony Express rider. And writing entirely from memory, 10 years later, in Hartford, Connecticut, having not taken a single note, he got a whole chapter of Roughing It our of this.
"No matter what time of day or night his watch came on. And no matter whether it was winter or summer, raining, snowing, hailing or sleeting, or whether his beat was a level straight road or a crazy trail of a mountain track and precipices. Or whether it lead through peaceful regions or regions that swarmed with hostile Indians, he must be always ready to leap into the saddle and be off like the wind."
And he completely enshrined the memory of the pony, and his description is not inaccurate, it's just wildly enthusiastic, and it's very romantic. I mean, okay, he's Mark Twain.
ERIC: Ten years later, the second guy came around, Buffalo Bill Cody. He added a reenactment of the Pony Express to his traveling show.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: And from the day that show opened in Omaha, Nebraska in 1881 until the day it closed, wherever Cody took that show, in rain or in shine, drunk or broke, he took the Pony Express. It was a permanent fixture in the show. Literally hundreds of thousands of people saw the pony express. Queen Victoria came out of mourning to see the Pony Express.
The Pope allowed the Pony Express to come into Vatican City. When Buffalo Bill got done, Eric, no one was going to forget the Pony Express, and they weren't going to let the facts get in the way.
ERIC MENNEL: The Pony Express shut down literally within hours of the first telegraph message reaching the west. Technology wiping out the need for in person delivery. Sound familiar?
I asked Corbett why he felt the memory of the Pony Express is so strong, even today.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: I think it is a thrilling and powerful memory of the old west. I think it's a benign memory of the west, and we don't have a lot of benign memories of the west. We have memories of the west that make us understandably plainly uncomfortable. The slaughter of the buffalo, what was done to the American Indian, the exploitation of the land, whatever, there's a lot of things about the 19th century west that a lot of people are uncomfortable with.
But then along comes the pony, no pun intended, he carries no baggage. Americans love that memory.
ERIC MENNEL: It's a memory that's not going away. It's hard to imagine door to door mail carriers 150 from now. We'll probably have robots or something. Or automated cars that shoot your mail directly to your doorstop, I don't know. But I'm willing to bet, when it comes time to brand those robots, to stamp a logo on their sides, somebody in the room's going to make the suggestion, "What about a man on horseback? You know, the Pony Express."
BRIAN: Eric Mennel is one of our producers.
That's going to do it for us today. But we'd love to hear what you think about the future of the US Post Office. How do you imagine the mail being delivered 50 or even 100 years from now? Tell us at our website, BackStory.org. You can also find us on Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. BackStory radio is the handle.
Now if you're feeling really gung ho about the post office after hearing this show, you could mail us a physical letter, with paper and a stamp and everything. Our address, 145 Ednom Drive, Charlottesville, Virginia, 22903. Seriously we love hard copy.
Today's episode of BackStory was produced by Neal [inaudible 00:51:34], Jess [inaudible 00:51:34], Eric [inaudible 00:51:35] and Alison Quance. Jamal Milner is our technical director. Our senior producer is Tony Field.
PETER: Frank Cirillo is our intern. We had help from Alan Chen. BackStory's executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.
Special thanks today to WVTF here in Virginia and to our Mark Twain gatherer. Christopher Corbett's book about the Pony Express is called, Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express.
Major support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the University of Virginia, Weinstein Properties, an anonymous donor and the History Channel, history made every day.
SPEAKER 3: Peter Onuf and Brian Balogh are professors in the University of Virginia's Corchran Department of History. Ed Ayers is President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
BRIAN: On the next BackStory with the American History guys. America the Beautiful is a song about American exceptionalism, about how America is the greatest, most beautiful country in the world.
SPEAKER 20: The third verse ends with the words, "America, America, God shed his grace on thee. Til selfish gain no longer stain the banner of the free."
BRIAN: Really? Selfish gain? American exceptionalism on the next BackStory.