Across the West are remnants of historic trails, wagon roads, emigrant routes and what’s left of dreams in dry places. In the 19th century, Americans traversed our country on horseback and in wagons, but their plodding pace never caught the public’s attention like the fast-moving riders of the Pony Express.
Most of the trails lasted a few decades, some a few years. The Pony Express only made it eighteen months before it was replaced by a national telegraph system, but in those few short months between April 1860 and October 1861, young, hard-riding men helped knit the country together as we suffered through the Civil War.
As the nation catapulted westward, there was a critical need to send newspapers, letters and business and personal communications overland to California. William B. Waddell, Alexander Majors and William H. Russell started the Leavenworth & Pikes Peak Express Company just after the 1859 Colorado gold rush. But how to get letters quickly across almost 2,000 miles from St. Joseph, Missouri to bustling Sacramento? What evolved was the Pony Express with its slim young riders, remote stage stations with extra horses, hay, grain, water and a few flea-infested bunks. The route came across northeast Colorado at Julesburg, sped west to Salt Lake City with wages of “$50 per month and found,” and then skirting more mountains, entered the formidable Great Basin of Nevada before passing through the Sierras and on to the California capital.
The riders raced construction crews building a transcontinental telegraph line authorized by Congress on June 16, 1860. One of the desperate goals both for Pony Express riders and for the emerging telegraph line was to keep California and Nevada as states in the faltering union. The fastest recorded time on the trail involved the dispatch stating that Abraham Lincoln had been voted president.
Mail cost $5 an ounce to send or roughly $165 per ounce in today’s terms. Despite the cost, Pony Express riders carried 34,753 pieces of mail and rode the same distance as if they’d urged their ponies to race 24 trips around the world. The first rider may have been Johnson William Richardson, also known as “Billy” Richardson who slung the leather-covered mochila with four mail pouches of letters across his saddle and took off at a dead run.
Some of the Pony Express riders lived into old age as local celebrities while others drifted into robbing sprees and even murder. That same eager edge for adventure which had inspired them to be daring, resourceful Pony Express riders galloping across the West to change horses every 10 to 15 miles, caused a few to cross the line into crime.
Eighty riders, “wiry young fellows,” on 500 hardy horses worth $200 each, rode a minimum of 35 miles a day to intersect relay stations 10 to 35 miles apart. For defense, they carried a Navy Colt revolver. No rifle. In 18 months of frenzied travel, the riders lost only one mail pouch. They rode at night, in dust storms, blizzards and pelting rain. Always on the lookout for outlaws or disgruntled Native Americans, the brave young men looked forward to avoid trail hazards and ambushes, but they also constantly glanced over their shoulder to watch their back trail for puffs of dust from horse hooves rapidly coming from behind.
Crossing Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California, much of the trail is now lost to private ranches, Native nations, two-lane gravel roads, or even asphalt, but if the trail itself has mainly disappeared there are places where stage stops and express stations can still be found as part of the BLM’s National Conservation Lands, especially across the sweep of sagebrush and sunshine that is Nevada’s Great Basin.
More than a century later, I parked my truck along U.S. Highway 50, which Nevada proudly proclaims as “the Loneliest Road in America,” and stopped to read a few interpretive signs, initially not knowing that the large and mostly intact roofless relay station of Cold Springs was a two-mile round-trip into the sagebrush. As I walked away from the highway, trekking poles in hand, binoculars on my side, I thought I saw constructed walls out in the distance, but interpretive signs had been vandalized and it was unclear what was out there. The farther I hiked from my truck, the deeper the silence until it was just puffs of wind, scudding clouds, a range of mountain peaks in front of me and yes, a distinctive series of stone walls.
There was the comfort of cairns and the knowledge that someone had passed this way before me. Shimmering ahead was blessed shade from cottonwood trees. At my feet, I found fire rings and .30-06 shell casings. I found where the water course had been and where a spring had trickled down slope near the fort, but no water remained. Only later would I learn that in 2,000 miles of Pony Express trail and 190 former stations what stood in front of me on BLM land was one of the best preserved of all remote relay stations.
The original Cold Springs station of two rooms burned when Paiutes attacked, stealing horses, livestock and killing the station keeper. The second iteration included stone corrals, rocks chinked and plastered, a roof of willow thatch and a dirt floor seasoned with animal blood to reduce dust. The new version had a fireplace in the living quarters, small windows as gun ports, walls 4 to 6 feet high and up to three feet thick in a rectangle of 116 by 51 feet of four rooms including a storage area. Workers erected the stone corral next to the living quarters for better surveillance of the precious horses and to help utilize equine body heat against winter winds.
In 1976, archaeology students from the University of Nevada-Reno dug the site and wryly noted, “The large number of alcoholic beverage containers recovered during excavation shows that contrary to company policy, alcohol was consumed regularly by Pony Express employees.” Sure. Why not? Pass a deck of cards and then a bottle.
As remote as the Cold Springs Pony Express Station is now, and was then, on October 15, 1860, it nevertheless received a distinguished international visitor who was none other than Sir Richard Burton, the explorer who had penetrated closed Muslim cities, wrote 43 books, and translated 16 volumes of The Arabian Nights.
Having seen magnificent ancient walled cities across Asia and the Orient, Sir Burton took a dim view of Cold Springs Station. The writer who had scandalized Europe with his unflinching portrayals of brothels and male and female sex workers, described this Pony Express station as:
"A wretched place, half built and wholly unroofed; the four boys, an exceedingly rough set, ate standing, and neither paper nor pencil was known among them. Our animals ... found good water in a rivulet from the neighboring hills and the promise of plentiful feed ...while the humans, observing that a beef had been freshly killed, supped upon an excellent steak. We slept ... under the haystack, and heard the loud howling of the wolves, which are said to be larger in these hills than elsewhere.“
As for the Pony Express, four days after telegraphers tip-tapped the keys to send the first telegram to the West Coast, the mail service ended. Russell, Majors and Waddell paid off some of their employees, some they didn’t. The young riders scattered to diverse occupations, but the trail remained, soon to be used by west-bound wagons and in other cases to be abandoned with sand and soil filling in the former pounding of horses’ hooves. As with other historic trails, there are route signs along the highway but only a few actual stretches of original trail exist and even fewer relay stations. Part of the system of National Conservation Lands, Cold Springs is largely unchanged by time.
Hand laid stone walls still stand, many of lava rock. At night, the stars come out one by one and sometimes, an hour after twilight, a visitor can hear the sharp hard staccato sounds of a running horse, the creak of saddle leather drenched in sweat, muffled shouts and then the bang of a solid wooden door swinging open. Or maybe it’s just the wind.
Andrew Gulliford, an award-winning author and editor, is a professor of history at Fort Lewis College. Reach him at andy@agulliford.com.
