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San Francisco Bulletin http://tinyurl.com/Pony-Express

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Pony Express

From "The First Pony Arrives," 1860. Read Online

Reader: Kevin Hearle

Californians admire speed and they admire innovation. Put them together and you inspire the imagination.

In 1860 the first Pony Express relay ran from St Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California in just ten days. It took seventy five ponies to make the trip, but it was the last horse that reaped the glory when it was ferried to San Francisco for a hero's reception.

Upon him an enthusiastic crowd were disposed to shower all their compliments. He was the veritable Hippogriff who shoved a continent behind his hoofs so easily; who snuffed up sandy plains, sent lakes and mountains, praries and forests, whizzing behind him like one great river rushing eastward; who left a wake like a clipper's, "carried a bone in his teeth," and sent his fame rippling off north and south as nothing has before for years; who frightened whole tribes of Indians that thought it was an arrow whittled into a pony's shape that whizzed by; who made eagles and all swift-winged birds heart-sick, and sent them into convention to devise measures to keep their reputation up; who crossed the railroad track, fifteen miles out of Sacramento, just as the cars had passed, and got into the City of the Plains just as the same cars arrived!

Despite early enthusiasm, the Pony Express lasted only eighteen months thanks to the telegraph lines strung to California in 1862.