On Sunday, we started the day with the 7 a.m. Mass in Seneca, KS. We saw our friends from last week. They asked us if we were having a nice trip. On the way out of church, some other people, recognizing that we were tourists, began a conversation with us. They invited us to their county fair which was happening this weekend. I think the friendly people of St. Peter and Paul Church in Seneca, KS have adopted us.

After Mass, we drove to St. Joseph, Missouri and went to the Pony Express Museum. The museum was excellent and detailed the history of the Pony Express and contained many interesting exhibits. In the 1860s, the extent of the westward expansion of the country was right around St. Joseph, Missouri. There were people settled further west, but they were few and far between, until California, which was more populous. Hence a sort of a gap between a north-south line going through St. Joseph, Mo. and California.

The Pony Express began because the people in California needed a quicker way to exchange communications with the eastern part of the US. At that time, news took weeks to make it to California. Someone came up with the idea of using horses to deliver communications between the east and west, and the Pony Express was born!

The eastern terminus of the Pony Express was St. Joseph and the western terminus was Sacramento, CA, a distance of about 2000 miles. Young men around the age of 18 or 20 were usually the riders, although the youngest rider was 11 and the oldest was in his 40s. The first rider of the Pony Express left St. Joseph, Mo. on April 3, 1860. As this new method of mail delivery had been highly anticipated, all the townsfolk showed up to celebrate the departure of the historic first rider. They lined the road on both sides parade-like, shouted, waved their arms, and applauded, accompanied by the ringing of bells, firing of guns and cannons, and bonfires that lit up Main Street. What a celebration! 

Interesting trivia: The boots that were worn by the riders (and others) could be worn on either foot. It wasn’t until after the Civil War that people began wearing right and left shoes.

Each rider rode about 100 miles. They changed horses every 8 or 10 miles at various Pony Express Stations that were established along the way. When a rider reached his 100 miles, he would hand off his saddlebag full of mail to the next rider at a “Home Station”. His 100-mile trip took about 10 to 12 hours. At the Home Station, the rider would await mail coming from the opposite direction and retrace his steps back to the Home Station where he started from.  

Riders traveled through many different geographic features of the west: beginning at St. Joseph and the Missouri River, they traveled through tall grasses of the prairie, across the High Plains, over the Rocky Mountains and the Continental Divide, across the Salt Lake desert, and over the Sierra Mountains. They encountered tornadoes, buffalo stampedes, blizzards, and some unpleasant battles with Mormon settlers in Utah.

The mail pouches of the saddlebag were locked to protect the mail, in case someone had in mind to steal valuable news, I suppose. Each horse and rider could only carry 20 pounds of mail. The cost to mail a letter was 5 dollars per ounce, payable in gold. Wow, our postage costs today of 58 cents per ounce seems like a bargain!

It took 10 days for the mail to get from St. Joseph, Mo. to Sacramento, Ca. At that time, it was a huge improvement in speed of communications and people were thrilled. The fastest delivery time was 7 days when they carried the news to California that Abraham Lincoln had been elected president.

The Pony Express, ingenious innovation that it was, only lasted 18 months, because of – well, technology. The telegraph was invented in 1861, and then news could be sent from New York to California in a matter of minutes rather than days.

When we traveled through the state of Kansas on previous days, we traveled the route that was used by the Pony Express riders. There were signs along the highway designating it as the Pony Express route.

After we left the Pony Express Museum, we continued traveling east across Missouri to Hannibal. St. Joseph is on the Missouri-Kansas border on the west, and Hannibal is on the Illinois-Missouri border on the east, so we basically travelled across the state of Missouri, west to east. We did not carry any news with us to deliver to the people of Hannibal. They already know who the president is.

Stagecoach, then and now