Jim DeFelice - West Like Lightning: The Brief, Legendary Ride of the Pony Express

FORT KEARNY, NEBRASKA TERRITORY

November 7, 1860, 1:10 a.m.A young man stomps back and forth on the porch of a building at the edge of the fort, nibbling on a cookie and waiting impatiently for a dispatch from St. Louis. A cold, bitter wind whips across the parade ground nearby, pelting him with bits of sod and grit picked off the plain that stretches forever around the camp, the earth as flat and endless here as any spot in the vast interior of the United States. Theres a romance to that space, and to the darkness as well, but its for others to feel. Hes here to do a job; his main sensation is adrenaline, and a little bit of fear, mixed with anxious anticipation and a keen desire to get moving.

Any other night of the year, the short, sinewy frontier kid pacing in jeans and buckskin jacket would be tucked into bed in his flannels, and dreaming of horses and pretty girls. Officially, anyway. More likely, hed be at the local saloona hovel with a fireplace and ready boozewhooping it up, toasted by eastern tenderfoot travelers and sharing stories of the mountain men hed met. But any nocturnal doings had to stay quiet, given his employer strictly forbade the consumption of intoxicating liquors and went so far as to ban cursing. Most dangerously, the young mans employerAlexander Majors, one of three partners in the master enterprisehad a habit of showing up on the frontier unexpectedly.

But thered be no time for carousing this evening. This was election night, with the countrys future on the line; would it be Lincoln and disunion? The young mans job was to take the answer west, across the great American desert, for he was a proud employee of the Central Overland California & Pikes Peak Express Company, aka the Pony Express.

Or simply, the Pony. Already a legend in its own time.

ALEXANDER MAJORS, TOO, WAS A LEGEND, AT LEAST OUT HERE, A LITERAL whip-cracker, one of the best ox men in the business. As religious as he was hardy, Majors was the third partner of a storied triumvirate: Russell, Majors & Waddell, a company on the brink of becoming a western freighting and delivery empire. Central Overland was a subsidiary of sorts, the brainchild of William H. Russellthe visionary of the team, a raconteur adept at backslapping and political maneuvering, a sometime wizard at finance, and an unabashed booster of the future. Napoleon of the West some called him, meaning it a deep compliment. If Russell and Majors were yin and yang, their third partner, William B. Waddell, was an organizer, thinker, and bean counter, a man more comfortable in the office than among the herds, but a critical spot of glue between the partners and the operation.

The young man looked across the porch at his horse, impatient to be going. You couldnt blame him. Kearny was a fort in name only; the word bestowed on it a martial air that didnt fit the reality. Perched at the edge of civilization near the Platte River, Kearny was a four-acre parade ground fenced off by hastily built wooden structures on each side; even the guardhouse was less than imposing.

What made Kearny important was its location, dead in the middle of the path taken by emigrants to Oregon... Salt Lake City... California... the silver and gold fields of Pikes Peak and the Sierra foothillsin fact, Fort Kearny stood in the way of just about any place you wanted to go west of the Missouri. It was a frontier supercenter where nearly anything you needed to continue along the trailflour, wagon wheels, a nip or twocould be obtained at the fort or the nearby village. You might find a doctor, or at least someone who called himself one; if the local Indians were on the warpath, the soldiers could be roused to protect you.

But its most important offering tonight was the metal device clicking inside the building the Pony rider was pacing around: a telegraph.

A TELEGRAPH?

Pony Express?

Didnt the former kill the latter?

Not exactly.

The real story of the Pony Express, like the history of the Old West and America in general, is far more complicated and nuanced than most of us learned in school. The Ponylegendary conqueror of space and time, harbinger of progressexisted on the cusp of great change, partook of that revolution, and both affected and was consumed by it.