History Revisited: Pony Up

Was the Pony Express integral to the continued existence of the United States or was it merely one of the most elaborate - and costly - stopgaps in history?

In 1861, the American Civil War began, the Kingdom of Italy came into being with Victor Emmanuel II as its king, and the Pony Express ceased operation.

In fact, the Pony Express ceased operation on October 26, 1861, just 18 months after it commenced in April of 1860. That's just about two present-day baseball seasons. A mere blip on the radar in American history.

Not to mention the Pony Express was a huge undertaking. It was a more involved process than anything short of war, in those days. So, why did it last only two years? And why would someone set it up in the first place?

Let's journey back from 1861 to the Feast of the Epiphany, 1838. (That's January 6th for all y'all who don't know the Epiphany.) On that day, a Mr. Samuel Morse sent the sentence 'A patient waiter is no loser' across two miles of wire in New Jersey. Six years later, the same man sent the rather famous quotation, 'What hath God wrought' from Washington D.C. to Baltimore. It was the birth of a new and faster way to communicate, i.e. the electrical telegraph. It was that era's internet.

Fast forward again to 1860. By that time, there were telegraph lines all over the east coast. And there were telegraph lines up and down the California coast. But no telegraph line connected east and west. In essence, California - although a state - was all by its lonesome on the Pacific. In 1860, the Pacific Telegraph Company in Nebraska - created by the then president of Western Union (like at the end of Back to the Future 2) - and the Overland Telegraph Company of California agreed to build telegraph lines from Omaha and Carson City respectively to Salt Lake City, Utah where they all proceeded to jump in the lake.

Yeah, I know, this story's about the Pony Express; I'm getting there. But just after I get to the date when the two companies met in Salt Lake City. That was October 24, 1861. Two days before the Pony Express went the way of the dodo. In present day IT terms, those two days were part of the post production implementation of the transcontinental telegraph. Good luck saying that any times fast.

So, you want to know about the Pony Express? There were 157 stations over a 2000 mile route. There were about 80 riders employed at any one time. And there were about 400 other people working the stations along the way. In addition, there were about 400 horses used.

Then there was the process. Riders would ride each horse a maximum of 20 miles - the approximate maximum distance between two stations along the route - and would then switch the horse out with another at each station. Most riders traveled up to 75 miles a day. At approximately 9 miles per hour. That's first gear on an auto, folks. For 2000 miles.

Why? To get messages from east to west in 10 days. That's it. It was all about information. It wasn't like the riders could lug anything larger than a small box of books in that time. Any message that I can now send in under a second via internet / phone would have required 10 days of at least one rider riding more than 100 horses from Missouri to California.

What in the name of all that's holy possessed anyone to create such a costly stopgap just to deliver information, especially when the transcontinental telegraph was being built?

I turn your attention to the first part of the first sentence I wrote in this post. In 1861, the Civil War began. The Civil War and the time immediately preceding it, that great big zit on the nose of American history, dominated all decisions in all parts of the United States in the late 1850s leading into 1861.

I won't go into all the details because I'd bore the majority of you to death, but the time between the Mexican American War and the start of the Civil War was like a young brother and sister nagging each other in the back of a car on a 12 hour trip, except there were no parents in the front seat to pull over and threaten them with bodily harm. The South wanted more slave states. The North wanted fewer. They straddled the middle for about 15 years so that they didn't have to fight. But they reached an impasse. Then, Abraham Lincoln was elected. And all hell broke loose.

Always off on these tangents. So, what the hell does this have to do with the Pony Express? Well, each side wanted to extend their respective influence. And the way to extend influence is to control both information and communication. Just ask China.

In that critical time between April 1860 and October 1861, it just so happened that the Union controlled the Pony Express, which subsequently kept the lines of communication open with California and all points in between, an effective stopgap until the telegraph lines met in Salt Lake City. And when that happened, the South lost all hope of exerting influence out west, which meant they had nowhere to expand with their states rights and pro-slavery dogma, not to mention they had few places to seek reprieve when they started losing the war.

A look back shows that the Pony Express was a rather big and costly finger in the dike, but that finer just may have kept the dike from tumbling down entirely.