When the West Was Young/The Overland Mail
The Overland Mail
FROM the time when the first lean and bearded horsemen in their garments of fringed buckskin rode out into the savage West, men gave the same excuse for traveling that hard road toward the setting sun.
The early pathfinders maintained there must be all manner of high-priced furs off there beyond the sky-line. The emigrants who followed in the days of '49, informed their neighbors that they were going to gather golden nuggets in California. The teamsters who drove the heavy freight-wagons over the new trails a few years later told their relatives and friends that they were going West to better their fortunes. And when the Concord coaches came to carry the mail between the frontier settlements and San Francisco, the men of wealth who financed the different lines announced there was big money in the ventures; the men of action who operated them claimed that high wages brought them into it.
So now you see them all: pathfinder, argonaut, teamster, stage-driver, pony-express rider, and capitalist, salving their consciences and soothing away the trepidations of their women-folk with the good old American excuse that they were going to make money.
As a matter of fact that excuse was only an excuse and nothing more. In their inmost hearts all these men knew that they had other motives.
There was one individual who did not try to hoodwink himself or others about this Western business, and if you will but take the time to look into his case you will be able easily to diagnose an itching which was troubling all the rest of them.
That Individual was usually taken most acutely with his ailment on a warm May morning, one of those mornings when the lawless youths of the village decided to play hooky in the afternoon and test the temperature of the swimming-hole. On such a morning he was to be found somewhere near the center of the school-room, this being the point most remote from the distraction of open windows and hence selected for him by the teacher. He was seated at a small desk whose top was deeply scored by carven initials and monograms of rude design, all inked in to give them the boldness of touch necessary when one would have his art impress the beholder. An open book lay on that desk-top but the eyes of the Individual were not focused on its pages.
He was gazing—aslant so that the teacher would not detect him at it—through one of those remote open windows. And he was not seeing the roofs of the little town or the alluring line of low wooded bluffs across the river. He was seeing swarms of Indians mounted bare-back on swift ponies.
Swarms and swarms of them, stripped to the waist, befeathered, trousered in tightly fitting buckskin, they were defying all the laws of gravitation by the manner in which every one clung by a single heel to his mustang, allowing his body to droop alongside in a negligently graceful attitude. These savages were circling round and round a stage-coach. And on the top of that stage-coach, with his trusty rifle at his shoulder—while the driver beside him died a painful death,—sat the Individual himself. None other. And he was certainly playing havoc with those redskins.
We need not undergo the weary ordeal of waiting with him while the clock's slothful hands creep around the dial. We may skip the interval—as he would do ever so gladly if he only could—and see him that night as he climbs from his bedroom window, crawls down the woodshed roof, and drops from the low eaves to make his way across the vacant lot next door and thence—out West.
As far perhaps as the next town, which lies seven miles or so away; where he is overhauled and ignominiously dragged back to civilization.
That Individual—the only one of them all who did not attain the consummation of his hopes, the only one who had to stay at home—is the sole member of the foregoing list who acknowledged his true motives. For he asserted loudly, and with lamentations, that the spirit of adventure was blazing within him; he wanted to go out West to fight Indians and desperadoes.
Resisting the temptation to indulge in dissertation concerning the beneficial effects of the dime-novel on the morale of successive younger generations, we return to the men who said that they went beyond the Mississippi to gain money. Like the schoolboy they were hot with the lust for adventure. The men of action wanted to risk their lives, and the men of wealth wanted to risk their dollars.
Which does not imply that the latter element were anxious to lose those dollars any more than it implies that the former expected to lose their lives. But both were eager for the hazard.
Like the schoolboy all of them dreamed dreams and saw visions. And the dreams were realized; the visions became actualities. Few of them justified their excuse of money-making; many came out of the adventure poorer in this world's goods than when they went into it. But every man of them had the time of his life and lived out his days with a wealth of memories more precious than gold; memories of a man's part in a great rough drama.
The Winning of the West, that drama has been called. Perhaps no act in the play attained the heights which were reached by the last one before the coming of the railroad, the one with which this story has to deal, wherein bold men allied themselves on different sides to get the contract of carrying the mails by stage-coaches on schedule time across the wilderness.
And in the tale of this great struggle there is another motive in addition to the love of adventure—and like that love, unacknowledged by those whom it stirred,—the strong instinctive desire for a closer union which exists among all Americans.
In the beginning there was a frontier two hundred miles or so west of the Mississippi River. Behind that frontier wide-stacked wood-burning locomotives were drawing long trains on tracks of steel; steamers came sighing up and down the muddy rivers; cities smeared the sky with clouds of coal smoke; under those sooty palls men in high hats and women in enormous hoop-skirts passed in afternoon promenade down the sidewalks; newspapers displayed the day's tidings in black head-lines; the telegraph flashed messages from one end of that land to the other; and where the sharp church steeple of the most remote village cut the sky, the people read and thought and talked the same things which were being discussed in Delmonico's at the same hour.
Beyond the Sierra Nevadas there was another civilization. In San Francisco hotel lobbies men and women passed and repassed one another dressed in Eastern fashions—some months late, but Eastern fashions none the less. Newspapers proclaimed the latest tidings from the East in large type. Men were falling out over the same political issues which embroiled men by the Atlantic seaboard; they were embarking in the same sort of business ventures.
But two thousand miles of wilderness separated these two portions of the nation. That vast expanse of prairies as level as the sea, of sage-brush plains, of snow-capped mountains and silent, deadly deserts, was made more difficult by bands of hostile Indians.
In Europe such an interval would have remained for centuries, to be spanned by the slow migration of those whom ill-fortune and bad government had driven from the more crowded communities on each side. During that time these two civilizations would have gone on in their own ways developing their own distinct customs, until in the end they would have become separate countries.
But the people east of the Mississippi and the people west of the Sierras were Americans, and the desire for a close union was strong within them. Their business habits were such that they could not carry on commercial affairs without it. Their political beliefs and their social tendencies kept them chafing for it. And furthermore it was their characteristic not to acknowledge nature's obstacles as permanent. Two thousand miles of wild prairie, mountain ranges, and deserts simply meant a task, the more blithely to be undertaken because it was made hazardous by the presence of hostile savages.
So now the East began to cry to the West and the West to the East, each voicing a desire for quicker communication, and to get letters from New York to San Francisco in fast time became one of the problems of the day.
The first step toward solution was the choice of a route, and while this was up to Washington, the proof on which it rested was up to the men of wealth and the men of action. Immediately two rival groups began striving, each to prove that its route was the quickest. Russel, Majors & Waddel, who held large freighting contracts on the northern road, from Independence, Missouri, via Salt Lake to Sacramento, bent their energies to demonstrating its practicability; the Wells-Butterfield coterie of stage and express men undertook to show that the longer pathway from St. Louis by way of the Southwestern territories to San Francisco was best.
In 1855 Senator W. M. Gwinn of California, who had conceived the idea with F. B. Ficklin, general-superintendent of the Russel, Majors & Waddel Co., introduced a bill in Congress for bringing the mails by horseback on the northern route, but the measure was pigeonholed. Snow in the mountains was the main argument against it.
In 1857 James E. Birch got the contract for carrying a semimonthly mail from San Antonio, Texas, to San Diego, and the southern route's champions had the opportunity to prove their contention.
Save for a few brief stretches in Texas and Arizona there was no wagon road. El Paso and Tucson were the only towns between the termini. A few far-flung military outposts, whose troops of dragoons were having a hard time of it to hold their own against the Comanches and Apaches, afforded the only semblance of protection from the Indians.
Horsemen carried the first mail-sacks across this wilderness of dark mountains and flaming deserts. On that initial trip Silas St. Johns and Charles Mason rode side by side over the stretch from Cariso Creek to Jaeger's Ferry, where Yuma stands to-day. That ride took them straight through the Imperial valley. The waters of the Colorado, which have made the region famous for its rich crops, had not been diverted in those days. It was the hottest desert in North America; sand hills and blinding alkali flats, and only one tepid spring in the whole distance. One hundred and ten miles and the two horsemen made it in thirty-two hours—without remounts.
The company now began to prepare the way for stage-coaches. During the latter part of November, St. Johns and two companions drove a herd of stock from Jaeger's Ferry to Maricopa Wells. The latter point had been selected for a relay station because of water and the presence of the friendly Pima and Maricopa Indians, who kept the Apaches at a distance. During that drive of something like two hundred miles the pack-mule lost his load one night in the desert. The men went without food for three days, and for thirty-six hours traveled without a drop of water in their canteens.
The first stage left San Diego for the East in December with six passengers. Throughout the trip a hostler rode behind herding a relay team. The driver kept his six horses to their utmost for two hours; then stock and wearied passengers were given a two hours' rest, after which the fresh team was hooked up and the journey resumed.
In this manner they made about fifty miles a day. Luck was with them. There were several runaways along the route; at Port Davis, Texas, they found the garrison, whom they had expected to supply them with provisions according to orders from Washington, short of food, and they subsisted for the next five days on what barley they felt justified in taking away from the horses; they arrived at Camp Lancaster just after the departure of a Comanche war-party who had stolen all the stock, and were obliged to go two hundred miles further before they could get a relay. But these incidents, and a delay or two because of swollen rivers, were accounted only small mishaps. They came through with their scalps and the mail-sacks—only ten days behind the schedule.
Thereafter the Birch line continued its service; and letters came from San Francisco to St. Louis in about six weeks. Occasionally Indians massacred a party of travelers; now and then renegade whites or Mexicans robbed the passengers of their belongings and looted the mail-sacks. But such things were no more than any one expected. James Birch had proved his point. The southern route was practical, and in 1858 the government let a six years' contract for carrying letters twice a week between St. Louis and San Francisco, to John Butterfield of Utica, New York.
Thus the Wells-Butterfield interests scored the first decisive victory.
Butterfield's compensation was fixed at $600,000 a year and the schedule at twenty-five days. The route went by way of Fort Smith, Arkansas, El Paso, Tucson, and Jaeger's Ferry. Tie one end of a loose string to San Francisco and the other to St. Louis on your wall-map; allow the cord to droop in a semicircle to the Mexican boundary, and you will see the general direction of that road, whose length was 2760 miles. Of this nearly two thousand miles was in a hostile Indian country.
Twenty-seven hundred and sixty miles in twenty-five days, meant a fast clip for horses and a lumbering Concord coach over ungraded roads. And such a clip necessitated frequent relays. Which, in their turn, demanded stations at short intervals. While a road gang was removing the ugliest barriers in the different mountain passes—which was all the smoothing away that highway ever got during the stage-coach era—a party went along the line erecting adobe houses. These houses were little forts, well suited for withstanding the attacks of hostile Indians. The corrals beside them were walled like ancient castle-yards.
William Buckley of Watertown, New York, headed this party. Bands of mounted Comanches attacked them on the lonely Staked Plains of western Texas. Apaches crept upon them in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico. Of the battles which they fought history contains no record; but they went on driving the Mexican laborers to their toil under the hot sun, and the chain of low adobe buildings crept slowly westward.
In those days Mexican outlaws were drifting into Arizona and New Mexico from Chihuahua and Sonora; and these cutthroats, to whom murder was a means of livelihood, were almost as great a menace as the Indians. Three of them got jobs on the station building gang and awaited an opportunity to make money after their bloody fashion.
At Dragoon Springs they found their chance.
Here, where the Dragoon Mountains come out into the plain like a lofty granite promontory that faces the sea, the party had completed the walls of a stone corral, within which enclosure a storehouse and stage station were partitioned off. The roofing of these two rooms and some ironwork on the gate remained to be completed. The main portion of the party moved on to the San Pedro River, leaving Silas St. Johns in charge of six men to attend to these details. The three Mexican bandits were members of this little detachment. The other three were Americans.
The place was right on the road which Apache war-parties took to Sonora. For this reason a guard was maintained from sunset to sunrise. St. Johns always awoke at midnight to change the sentries. One starlight night when he had posted the picket who was to watch until dawn, St. Johns went back to his bed in the unroofed room that was to serve as station. He dropped off to sleep for an hour or so and was roused by a noise among the stock in the corral. The sound of blows and groans followed.
St. Johns leaped from his blankets just as the three Mexicans rushed into the room. Two of them were armed with axes and the third with a sledge.
The fight that followed lasted less than a minute.
St. Johns kicked the foremost murderer in the stomach, and as the man fell, sprang for a rifle which he kept in the room. The other two attacked him with their axes. He parried one blow, aimed at his head, and the blade buried itself in its hip. While the man was tugging to free the weapon St. Johns felled him with a blow on the jaw. The third Mexican struck downward at almost the same instant, severing St. Johns' left arm near the shoulder.
Then the white man got his right hand on his rifle and the three murderers fled. They had killed one of the Americans who was sleeping in the enclosure, left another dying near him and the third gasping his last outside the gate.
St. Johns staunched the blood from his wounds and crawled to the top of a pile of grain-sacks whence he could see over the unroofed wall. Here he stayed for three days and three nights. With every sunrise the magpies and buzzards came in great flocks, to sit upon the wall after they had sated themselves in the corral, and watch him. With every nightfall the wolves slunk down from the mountains and fought over the body outside the gate. Night and day the thirst-tortured mules kept up a pandemonium.
A road-grading party came along on Sunday morning. They gave him such first aid as they could and sent a rider to Fort Buchanan for a surgeon. The doctor amputated the arm nine days after the wound had been inflicted. Three weeks later St. Johns was able to ride a horse to Tucson.
Silas St. Johns is offered as a sample of the men who built and operated the overland mail lines. Among the drivers, stock-tenders, and messengers there were many others like him. Iron men, it was not easy to kill them, and so long as there was breath in their bodies they kept on fighting.
John Butterfield and his associates were made of the same stuff as these employees.
How many hundred thousand dollars these pioneer investors put into their line before the turning of a single wheel is not known; it must have been somewhere near a cool million, and this was in a day when millions were not so common as they are now; a day, moreover, when nothing in the business was certain and everything remained to be proved.
They established more than a hundred stage-stations along that semicircle through the savage Southwest. They bought about fifteen hundred mules and horses, which were sent out along the route. To feed these animals, hay and grain were freighted, in some cases for two hundred miles, and the loads arrived at the corrals worth a goodly fraction of their weight in silver. There was a station in western Texas to which teamsters had to haul water for nine months of the year from twenty-two miles away. At every one of these lonely outposts there were an agent and a stock-tender, and at some it was necessary to maintain what amounted to a little garrison. Arms and ammunition were provided for defense against the savages; provisions were laid in to last for weeks. One hundred Concord coaches were purchased from the Abbot-Downing Co., who had been engaged in the manufacture of these vehicles in the New Hampshire town since 1813; they were built on the thorough-brace pattern, and were regarded as the best that money could buy. Seven hundred and fifty men, of whom a hundred and fifty were drivers, were put on the pay-roll and transported to their stations.
Nearly all this outlay was made before the beginning of the first trip. It was the greatest expenditure of money on a single transportation project of its kind up to this time in America. And there were a thousand hazards of the wilderness to be incurred, a thousand obstacles of nature to be overcome before the venture could be proved practical.
The men of money had done their part now. The line was ready for the opening of traffic. On September 15, 1853, the mail-sacks started from St. Louis and San Francisco. It was up to the men of action to get them through within the schedule.
Twenty-five days was the allowance for the 2760 miles. The westbound coach reached San Francisco about twenty-four hours inside of the limit. On that October evening crowds packed Montgomery Street; the booming of cannon and the crashing of anvils loaded with black powder, the blaring of brass bands and the voices of orators, all mingled in one glad uproar, to tell the world that the people by the Golden Gate appreciated the occasion.
In St. Louis, the eastbound mail was an hour earlier. John Butterfield stepped from the Missouri Pacific train with the sacks, and a great procession was on hand to escort him to the post-office.
Bands and carriages and a tremendous display of red, white, and blue bunting enlivened the whole city. President Buchanan sent a telegram of congratulation.
It looked as if the northern route were out of it for good now, but it remained for the men to keep the southern line in operation. What had been done was only a beginning; the long grind of real accomplishment still lay ahead.
Storm and flood and Indian massacre were incidents; hold-ups and runaways mere matters of routine in carrying on the task. The stock was for the most part unbroken. At nearly every change the fresh team started off on a mad gallop, and if the driver had a wide plain where he could let them go careering through the mesquite or greasewood, while the stage followed, sometimes on two wheels, sometimes on one, he counted himself lucky. There was many a station from which the road led over broken country—along steep side hills, across high-banked washes, skirting the summits of rocky precipices; and on such stretches it was the rule rather than the exception for the coach to overturn.
The bronco stock was bad enough but the green mules were the worst. It was often found necessary to lash the stage to a tree—if one could be found near the station, and if not to the corral fence—while the long-eared brutes were being hooked up. When the last trace had been snapped into place the hostlers would very gingerly free the vehicle from its moorings and, as the ropes came slack, leap for their lives.
They called the route a road. As a matter of fact that term was a far-fetched euphemism. In some places approaches had been dug away to the beds of streams; and the absolutely impassable barriers of the living rock had been removed from the mountain passes. But that was all. What with the long climbs upgrade and the bad going through loose sand or mud, it was always necessary for the driver to keep his six animals at a swinging trot when they came to a level or a downhill pull. Often he had to whip them into a dead run for miles where most men would hesitate to drive a buckboard at a walk.
During the rainy seasons the rivers of that Southwestern land proceeded to demonstrate that they had a right to the name—to which they never pretended to live up at other times—by running bank full. These coffee-colored floods were underlaid by thick strata of quicksands. Occasionally one of them simply absorbed a coach; and, unless the driver was very swift in cutting the traces, it took unto itself two or three mules for good measure.
The Comanche Indians were on the war-path during these years in western Texas. On the great Staked Plain they swooped down on many a stage, and driver and passengers had to make a running fight of it to save their scalps. The Indians attacked the stations, two or three hundred of them in a band. The agents and stock-tenders, who were always on the lookout, usually saw them in time to retreat inside the thick adobe walls of the building, from which shelter they sometimes were able to stand them off without suffering any particular damage. But sometimes they were forced to watch the enemy go whooping away with the stampeded stock from the corral. And now and again there was a massacre.
Under Mangus Colorado, whom historians account their greatest war-chief, the Apaches were busy in New Mexico and Arizona. They worked more carefully than their Texan cousins, and there was a gorge along the line in that section which got the name of Doubtful Cañon because the only thing a driver could count on there with any certainty was a fight before he got through to the other side.
Nor were the Indians the only savage men in that wilderness. Arizona was becoming a haven for fugitives from California vigilance committees and for renegade Mexicans from south of the boundary. The road-agents went to work along the route, and near Tucson they did a thriving business.
Yet with all these enemies and obstacles, it is a matter of record that the Butterfield overland mail was only late three times.
In spite of runaways, bad roads, floods, sand-storms, battles, and hold-ups, the east and west bound stages usually made the distance in twenty-one days. And there was a long period during 1859 when the two mails—which had started on the same day from the two termini—met each other at exactly the half-way point. Apparently the Wells-Butterfield interests had won the struggle. Service was increased to a daily basis and the compensation was doubled. The additional load was handled with the same efficiency that had been shown in the beginning.
It is hard, in these days of steam and gasolene and electricity, to understand how men did such things with horse-flesh. The quality of the men themselves explains that. One can judge that quality by an affair which took place at Stein's Pass.
“Steen's Pass,” as the old-timers spelled it—and as the name is still pronounced—is a gap in the mountains just west of Lordsburg, New Mexico. The Southern Pacific comes through it to-day. One afternoon Mangus Colorado and Cochise were in the neighborhood with six hundred Apache warriors, when a smoke signal from distant scouts told them that the overland stage was approaching without an armed escort. The two chieftains posted their naked followers behind the rocks and awaited the arrival of their victims.
When one remembers that such generals as Crook have expressed their admiration for the strategy of Cochise, and that Mangus Colorado was the man who taught him, one will realize that Stein's Pass, which is admirably suited for all purposes of ambush, must have been a terribly efficient death-trap when the Concord stage came rumbling and rattling westward into it on that blazing afternoon.
There were six passengers in the coach, all of them old-timers in the West. And they were known as the Free Thompson party, from the name of the leader. Every one of these men was armed with a late model rifle and was taking full advantage of the company's rule which allowed the carrying of as much ammunition as one pleased. They had several thousand rounds of cartridges.
Such a seasoned company as this was not likely to go into a place like Stein's Pass without taking a look or two ahead; and six hundred Apaches were certain to offer some evidence of their presence to keen eyes. Which probably explains why the horses were not killed at once. For they were not. The driver was able to get the coach to the summit of a low bare knoll a little way off the road. The Free Thompson party made their stand on that hilltop.
They were cool men, uncursed by the fear of death, the sort who could roll a cigarette or bite a mouthful from a plug of chewing-tobacco between shots and enjoy the smoke or the cud; the sort who could look upon the advance of overwhelming odds and coolly estimate the number of yards which lay between.
These things are known of them and it is known that the place where they made their stand was far from water, a bare hilltop under a flaming sun, and round about them a ring of yelling Apaches.
There were a few rocks affording a semblance of cover. You can picture those seven men, with their weather-beaten faces, their old-fashioned slouching wide-rimmed hats, and their breeches tucked into their boot-tops. You can see them lying behind those boulders with their leathern cheeks pressed close to their rifle-stocks, their narrowed eyes peering along the lined sights; and then, as time went on, crouching behind the bodies of their slain horses.
And you can picture the turbaned Apaches with their frowzy hair and the ugly smears of paint across their grinning faces. You can see them creeping on their bellies through the clumps of coarse bear-grass, gliding like bronze snakes among the rocks, slowly enough—the Apache never liked the music of a rifle-bullet—but coming closer every hour. Every gully and rock and clump of prickly pear for a radius of a half-mile about that knoll sheltered its portion of the venomous brown swarm.
Night followed day; hot morning grew into scorching noontide; the full flare of the Arizona afternoon came on; and night again. The rifles cracked in the bear-grass. Thin jets of pallid flame spurted from behind the rocks. The bullets kicked up little dust-clouds.
So for three days and three nights. For it took those six hundred Apaches that length of time to kill the seven white men.
But before the last of them died, the Free Thompson party slew between 135 and 150 Indians.
In after years Cochise told of the battle.
“They were the bravest men I ever saw,” he said. “They were the bravest men I ever heard of. Had I five hundred warriors such as they, I would own all of Chihuahua, Sonora, New Mexico, and Arizona.”
That was the breed of men who kept the Butterfield stage line open, and the affair at Stein's Pass is cited to show something of their character, although it took place after the company began removing its rolling-stock. For in 1860 Russel, Majors & Waddel accomplished a remarkable coup and brought the overland mail to the northern route.
They performed what is probably the most daring exploit in the history of transportation. The story of their venture bristles with action; it is adorned by such names as Wild Bill Hickok, Pony Bob Haslam, Buffalo Bill, and Colonel Alexander Majors.
Colonel Majors held the broadhorn record on the old Santa Fé trail, ninety-two days on the round trip with oxen. He was the active spirit of the firm of Russel, Majors & Waddel. In 1859 these magnates of the freighting business had more than six thousand huge wagons and more than 75,000 oxen on the road between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Salt Lake City, hauling supplies for government posts and mining companies; they were operating a stage line to Denver where gold excitements were bringing men in droves.
One day in the winter of 1859-60 Senator W. M. Gwinn of California had a meeting with Majors' senior partner, William H. Russel, and several New York capitalists in Washington. Senator Gwinn proposed a plan to show the world that the St. Joseph-San Francisco route was practical throughout the year.
That scheme was the pony express; men on horseback with fresh relays every ten or twelve miles, to carry letters at top speed across the wilderness. Congress had pigeonholed his bill to finance such a venture. He urged now that private capital undertake it, and he talked so convincingly that Russel committed himself to enlist his partners in the enterprise.
Russel went back to Leavenworth, Kansas, the headquarters of the firm, and put the matter up to Majors and Waddel. They showed him in a very few minutes that he had been talked into a sure way of losing several hundred thousand dollars. But he reminded them that he had committed himself to the undertaking. They said that settled it; they would stand by him and make his word good.
Their stage line had stations every ten or twelve miles as far as Salt Lake; beyond that point there was not a single building; but within two months from the day when Russel had that talk with Senator Gwinn, the firm had completed the chain of those stations clear to Sacramento, purchased five hundred half-breed mustang ponies which they apportioned along the route, hired eighty riders and what stock-tenders were necessary, and hauled feed and provisions out across the intermountain deserts. They had droves of mules beating down trails through the deep drifts of the Sierras and the Rockies.
On April 3, 1860, Henry Roff swung into the saddle at Sacramento and Alexander Carlyle leaped on a brown mare in St. Joseph, Missouri. While cannon boomed and crowds cheered in those two remote cities, the ponies came toward each other from the ends of that two-thousand-mile trail on a dead run.
At the end of ten miles or so a relay mount was waiting for each rider. As he drew near the station each man let out a long coyote yell; the hostlers led his animal into the roadway. The messenger charged down upon them, drew rein, sprang to the earth, and while the agent lifted the pouches from one saddle to the other—as quickly as you read these words describing the process—gained the back of his fresh horse and sped on. At the end of his section—the length of these intervals varied from seventy-five to a hundred and twenty-five miles—each rider dismounted for the last time and turned the pouches over to a successor.
In this manner the mail went across prairie and sage-brush plain, through mountain passes where the snow lay deep beside the beaten trail and across the wide silent reaches of the Great American Desert. And the time on that first trip was ten days for both east and west bound pouches.
The riders were light of weight; they were allowed to carry no weapons save a bowie-knife and revolver; the letters were written on tissue-paper; the two pouches were fastened to a leathern covering which fitted over the saddle, and the thing was lifted with one movement from the last horse to the relay animal. When one of these messengers came within earshot of a station he always raised his voice in the long shrill coyote yell, and by day or night, as that signal came down the wind to them, the men who were on duty scrambled to get the waiting horse into its place.
Many of these half-breed mustangs were unbroken; some were famous for their ability at bucking. There is a man in my town, Joe Hand—he would hate to acknowledge that he is getting on in years even now—who used to ride the western end, and he said:
“They'd hold a bad horse for a fellow long enough to let you get the rowels of those big Mex spurs fastened in the hair cinch. Then it was you and that horse for it. The worst of it was that the pony would usually tire himself out with his pitching, and you'd lose time. I remember one that left me pretty badly stove up for a while, but I had the satisfaction of knowing he'd killed himself trying to pile me.”
But bad horses were a part of the game; like bad men every one in the business expected them and took them as a matter of course. The riders of the pony express hardly recall such incidents because of the larger adventures with which their lives were filled.
There was the ride of Jim Moore, for a long time famous among the exploits on the frontier. His route went from Midway station to old Julesburg, one hundred and forty miles across the great plains of western Nebraska. The stations were from ten to fourteen miles apart. Arriving at the end of that grueling journey, he would rest for two days before making the return trip.
One day Moore started westward from Midway station, knowing that his partner, who carried the mail one way while he was taking it the other, was sick at Julesburg. It was a question whether the man would be able to take the eastbound pouches, and if he should not be there was no substitute on hand.
Realizing what might lie ahead of him, Moore pressed each fresh horse to its utmost speed during that westward ride. A man can endure only so long a term of punishment, and he resolved to save himself what minutes he could at the very beginning. He made that one hundred and forty miles in eleven hours.
The partner was in bed, and there was no hope of his rising for a day or two. The weary messenger started toward one of the bunks to get a bit of rest, but before he had thrown himself on the blankets, the coyote yell of the eastbound rider sounded up the road.
It was up to Moore to take the sick man's place now. While the hostlers were saddling a pony and leading it out in front of the station, he snatched some cold meat from the table, gulped down a cup of lukewarm coffee, and hurried outside. He was just in time to swing into the saddle. He clapped spurs to the pony and kept him on a run. So with each succeeding mount; and when he arrived at Midway he had put the two hundred and eighty miles of the round trip behind him in twenty-two hours.
In western Nevada, where the Paiute Indians were on the war-path, several of the stations were little forts, and riders frequently raced for their lives to these adobe sanctuaries. Pony Bob Haslam made his great three hundred and eighty mile ride across this section of scorching desert.
He rode out of Virginia City one day while the inhabitants were frantically working to fortify the town against war-parties whose signal-fires were blazing at the time on every peak for a hundred miles.
When he arrived at the Carson River, sixty miles away, he found that the settlers had seized all the horses at the station for use in the campaign against the savages. He went on without a relay down the Carson to Fort Churchill, fifteen miles farther. Here the man who was to relieve him refused to take the pouches.
Within ten minutes Haslam was in the saddle again. He rode thirty-five miles to the Carson sink; got a fresh horse and made the next thirty miles, without a drop of water; changed at Sand Springs and again at Cold Springs; and after one hundred and ninety miles in the saddle turned the pouches over to J. G. Kelley.
Here, at Smith's Creek, Pony Bob got nine hours' rest. Then he began the return trip. At Cold Springs he found the station a smoking shambles; the keeper and the stock-tender had been killed, the horses driven off by Indians. It was growing dark. He rode his jaded animal across the thirty-seven-mile interval to Sand Springs, got a remount, and pressed on to the sink of the Carson. Afterward it was found that during the night he had ridden straight through a ring of Indians who were headed in the same direction in which he was going. From the sink he completed his round trip of three hundred and eighty miles without a mishap, arriving at the end within four hours of the schedule time.
Nine months after the opening of the line the Civil War began, and the pony express carried the news of the attack on Fort Sumter from St. Joseph to San Francisco in eight days and fourteen hours.
Newspapers and business men had awakened to the importance of this quick communication, and bonuses were offered for the delivery of important news ahead of schedule. President Buchanan's last message had heretofore held the record for speedy passage, going over the route in seven days and nineteen hours. But that time was beaten by two hours in the carrying of Lincoln's inaugural address. Seven days and seventeen hours—the world's record for transmitting messages by men and horses!
The firm of Russel, Majors & Waddel spent $700,000 on the pony express during the eighteen months of its life; they took in something less than $500,000. But they accomplished what they had set out to do. In 1860 the Butterfield line was notified to transfer its rolling-stock to the west end of the northern route; their rivals got the mail contract for the eastern portion.
The Wells-Butterfield interests were on the under side now. The change to the new route involved enormous expense; and with the withdrawal of troops at the beginning of the Civil War, Apaches and Comanches plundered the disintegrating line of stations. The company lasted only a short time on the west end of the overland mail and retired. Its leaders now devoted their energies to the express business.
At this juncture a new man got the mail contract. Ben Holliday was his name, and in his day he was known as a Napoleon. Perhaps it was the first time that term was used in connection with American promoters. Holliday, who had begun as a small storekeeper in a Missouri village, had made one canny turn after another until, at the time when the mail came to the northern route, he owned several steamship lines and large freighting interests and was beginning to embark in the stage business. The firm of Russel, Majors & Waddel was losing money, owing in part to bad financial management and in part to the courageous venture of the pony express. Holliday absorbed their property early in the sixties. He was the transportation magnate of his time, the first American to force a merger in that industry.
One of his initial steps was to improve the operation of the stage line. Some of the efficiency methods of his subordinates were picturesque to say the least. In Julesburg, which was near the mouth of Lodge Pole Creek in northeastern Colorado, the agent was an old Frenchman, after whom the place had been named. This Jules had been feathering his own nest at the expense of the company, and the new management supplanted him with one Jack Slade, whose record up to that time was either nineteen or twenty killings. Slade was put in charge at Julesburg with instructions to clean up his division.
While the new superintendent was exterminating such highway robbers and horse-thieves as Jules had gathered about him in this section, his predecessor was biding in the little settlement, watching for a chance to play even.
One day Slade came into the general store near the station, and the Frenchman, who had seen a good opportunity for ambush here, fired both barrels of a double-barreled shotgun into his body at a range of about fifty feet.
Slade took to his bed. But he was made of the stuff which absorbs much lead without any great amount of permanent harm. He was up again in a few weeks. He hunted down Jules, who had taken refuge in the Indian country to the north on hearing of his recovery. He brought the prisoner back to Julesburg, and bound him to the snubbing-post in the middle of the stage company's corral.
Accounts of what followed differ. Some authorities maintain that Slade killed Jules. Others, who base their assertions on the statement of men who said they were eye-witnesses, tell how Slade enjoyed himself for some time filling the prisoner's clothing with bullet holes and then exclaimed,
“Hell! You ain't worth the lead to kill you.” And turned the victim loose.
But all narrators agree on this; before Slade unbound the living Jules—or the dead one, whichever it may have been—he cut off the prisoner's ears and put them in his pocket.
It may be noted in passing that this truculent efficiency expert went wrong in after years and wound up his days at the end of a rope in Virginia City, Montana.
Ben Holliday carried the mails overland throughout the early sixties. But during the summer of 1864 the Indians of the plains, for the first time in their history, made a coalition. They united in one grand war-party against the outposts along the line, and for a distance of four hundred miles they destroyed stations, murdered employees, and made off with live stock. The loss to the company was half a million dollars.
It crippled Holliday. And the government so delayed consideration of his claims for reimbursment that he was glad to sell the property. The firm of Wells Fargo, who had been increasing their express business until they virtually monopolized that feature of common carrying throughout the West at the close of the Civil War, took the line over. Wells Fargo! It was the old Wells Butterfield Co. again. The first winners in the struggle were the last.
The railroad came. Men said that the day of adventure was over. But this adventure has not ended yet.
While this story was being written another pioneer died on that overland mail route. And when his aëroplane came fluttering down out of a driving snowstorm to crash, in a mass of tangled wreckage, on the side of Elk Mountain, Wyoming, Lieutenant E. V. Wales went to his death within a rifle-shot of the road where so many of his predecessors gave up their lives trying—even as he was then striving—to quicken communication between the Atlantic and the Pacific.