April 3, 1860—The Pony Express began its fast-mail delivery service with two riders proceeding in opposite directions—east from Sacramento, Calif., and west from St. Joseph, Mo. Synonymous with breathless adventure and the opening of the American West, the service might also be thought of as a kind of dotcom of the frontier—ushering in a new era in communications, only to die quickly when it was overtaken by a faulty business model, never-ending red ink, and an even more revolutionary competitor.
The courier service—formerly known as the Central Overland California and Peak’s Peak Express Co.—lasted only a year and a half, but its legend has never died. As Christopher Corbett pointed out in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal—and a more detailed article in the Spring 2010 issue of American Heritage—the efforts of dozens of mythmakers (including dime-store novelists, “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West show, filmmaker John Ford, and countless TV scenarists) were aided immeasurably by the scarcity of formal documentation about the business by founders William Hepburn Russell, William B. Waddell, and Alexander Majors. Mythmakers were then free to write whatever they wanted, and they used the freedom with abandon.
One thing you have to say for the firm’s founders: they had certainly identified a huge need in a growing market. With “manifest destiny” providing a philosophy and the California Gold Rush a motivation, settlers had flocked to the West in the decade before the Civil War—more than half a million strong. They certainly wanted goods, but, for now, they would be happy to have mail delivered dependably, and relatively quickly.
Even that would have been an improvement over the state of affairs existing at the time. Transporting mail primarily by water—by ship from New York to Panama, by horseback or rail across the Isthmus of Panama, then by ship again to San Francisco—could, at best, take three or four weeks.
And if you tried it by land? Not necessarily better—maybe even worse. Russell, Waddell and Majors were competing to siphon off business from John Butterfield’s Overland Mail Co., which advertised traveling time for its cross-country stagecoach mail service as 24 days. But you could find news delayed not just by weeks, but even months.
Given these conditions, California Senator William Gwin had little trouble persuading Russell of the necessity of starting this venture that promised mail delivery from New York to San Francisco in 10 days. But Russell had to coax Waddell and Majors to go along with it. Less than two years later, Russell must have surely felt their qualms were well-justified. They not only lost, but lost big--$200,000, a sum that ranked as a catastrophe for that time. It ruined the three men, certainly.
The end of the Pony Express has been attributed to the completion of the transcontinental telegraph in 1861. True enough. But other aspects of the business severely strained the partners’ resources anyway:
* The partners had already lost $300,000 when their wagons were attacked in 1858 under orders of the Mormons’ Brigham Young, who feared the presence of Federal troops sent by James Buchanan.
* Russell’s reputation for cutting ethical corners (he and a Dept. of Interior clerk had schemed to borrow illegally some bonds from an Indian trust fund) made many people think twice about investing in his enterprises.
The courier service—formerly known as the Central Overland California and Peak’s Peak Express Co.—lasted only a year and a half, but its legend has never died. As Christopher Corbett pointed out in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal—and a more detailed article in the Spring 2010 issue of American Heritage—the efforts of dozens of mythmakers (including dime-store novelists, “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West show, filmmaker John Ford, and countless TV scenarists) were aided immeasurably by the scarcity of formal documentation about the business by founders William Hepburn Russell, William B. Waddell, and Alexander Majors. Mythmakers were then free to write whatever they wanted, and they used the freedom with abandon.
One thing you have to say for the firm’s founders: they had certainly identified a huge need in a growing market. With “manifest destiny” providing a philosophy and the California Gold Rush a motivation, settlers had flocked to the West in the decade before the Civil War—more than half a million strong. They certainly wanted goods, but, for now, they would be happy to have mail delivered dependably, and relatively quickly.
Even that would have been an improvement over the state of affairs existing at the time. Transporting mail primarily by water—by ship from New York to Panama, by horseback or rail across the Isthmus of Panama, then by ship again to San Francisco—could, at best, take three or four weeks.
And if you tried it by land? Not necessarily better—maybe even worse. Russell, Waddell and Majors were competing to siphon off business from John Butterfield’s Overland Mail Co., which advertised traveling time for its cross-country stagecoach mail service as 24 days. But you could find news delayed not just by weeks, but even months.
Given these conditions, California Senator William Gwin had little trouble persuading Russell of the necessity of starting this venture that promised mail delivery from New York to San Francisco in 10 days. But Russell had to coax Waddell and Majors to go along with it. Less than two years later, Russell must have surely felt their qualms were well-justified. They not only lost, but lost big--$200,000, a sum that ranked as a catastrophe for that time. It ruined the three men, certainly.
The end of the Pony Express has been attributed to the completion of the transcontinental telegraph in 1861. True enough. But other aspects of the business severely strained the partners’ resources anyway:
* The partners had already lost $300,000 when their wagons were attacked in 1858 under orders of the Mormons’ Brigham Young, who feared the presence of Federal troops sent by James Buchanan.
* Russell’s reputation for cutting ethical corners (he and a Dept. of Interior clerk had schemed to borrow illegally some bonds from an Indian trust fund) made many people think twice about investing in his enterprises.
* The logistics of setting up the service were nightmarish: buying more than 400 ponies; building 200 stations in desolate area;. hiring station managers and riders. That infrastructure was eventually created, but at huge cost to the owners.
1 comment:
But it remains an enduring and endearing bit of the Old West.
Even if much of its story is a tale of truth, half-truth and no truth at all, to quote one early chronicler of the venture.
www.orphanspreferred.com
Post a Comment