The Pony Express only lasted a year and a half.

Pony Express rider, 1861

On April 3, 1860, a pair of riders took off from their respective starting points of St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, with the goal of delivering a backpack of mail to the other city within 10 days. The route stretched across the Midwestern plains and Western deserts and mountains, the riders stopping for fresh horses every 10 to 15 miles before handing off to another rider after a few stops.

The mailbags reached their destinations on April 14, just past the 10-day goal but fast enough to demonstrate that the Central Overland California & Pikes Peak Express Company, aka the Pony Express, could deliver mail at a speed that bested existing services by weeks.

The Pony Express was founded by businessmen William Russell, William Waddell, and Alexander Majors, who hoped to secure an exclusive mail contract from the federal government with their new service. For a while they succeeded, despite expensive rates and the disruption caused by various conflicts between Indigenous peoples and settlers.

California grew accustomed to faster communication with Eastern cities, while riders came to be treated like celebrities. The high point for the service came in November 1860, when the Pony Express relayed the news of Abraham Lincoln’s presidential election from Fort Kearny, Nebraska, to Fort Churchill, Nevada, in a whopping five days.

But for all the hoopla surrounding the enterprise, the Pony Express had a short shelf life. The telegraph already stretched from the East Coast to the Mississippi River by the time the first two riders galloped off, and by June of 1860, Congress had authorized the subsidization of a coast-to-coast telegraph system.

Meanwhile, Russell, Waddell, and Majors faced mounting operating losses that forced them to cede control of the service’s western division by the spring of 1861. The completion of the transcontinental telegraph line that October marked the official demise of the Pony Express, ending the service that blazed in and out of existence yet left an indelible imprint as an emblem of the Old West.

By the Numbers

Did you know?

Buffalo Bill falsely claimed to be a Pony Express rider.

Already famous by way of the dime novels that glorified life on the American frontier, William "Buffalo Bill" Cody published an 1879 autobiography that boasted about his two years of service in the Pony Express, highlighted by one particularly impressive 322-mile run. A few years later, he dramatized his life experiences for the famed "Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show," which featured a reenactment of the Pony Express as part of its thrilling opening act.

Of course, Cody was never shy about embellishing stories for the sake of entertainment, and it seems his tenure with the Pony Express was a distortion of the truth. Although he did work as a deliveryman in an earlier enterprise, a teenaged Cody was attending school in Leavenworth, Kansas, during the time the Pony Express was operating. Nevertheless, the deception worked out well for both entities: Buffalo Bill could claim a connection to the celebrated mail service, while his long-running show ensured the legend of the Pony Express, and other touchpoints of frontier life, would endure for generations to come.