While Pony Express rider Billy Hamilton anxiously waited in Sacramento, California for his turn to ride, far away on the Kansas Plains
Johnny Fry was galloping hard through the spring night. Nearly two thousand hoof-pounding miles separated Hamilton and Fry.
Following the Oregon Trail
This was the old Oregon Trail that Fry followed that night. Even in the dark it was easy to discern. Thousands of westward migrating pioneers and freight wagons, since the 1849 California gold rush had started, had traveled this route, turning it into a broad, grassless strip.
In about 45 minutes of riding Fry pulled up at the station in Troy, Kansas. There, he quickly switched himself and his mochila to a fresh horse. In about two minutes time he was off and running once more. Some miles down the dark trail he later changed horses again at Kennekuk, then again at Kickapoo.
Changing Riders
After nearly seventy hard miles Fry reined in at Granada Station. There, Don Rising was waiting, ready to sprint on to Marysville, Kansas.
Fry had made the first leg of the first run westward but now Rising was pounding through the night. His ride would last for more than eight hours. In that time he would change mounts at about 15-mile intervals until he arrived in Marysville, Kansas, at 8:15 a.m. on April 4.
Relay after relay, station after station, horses and riders sped through the hours and days, passing Chimney Rock 535 miles from St. Joseph, crossing over South Pass in Wyoming, then crossing the Rockies that marked the Continental Divide. They would reach Fort Bridger in southern Wyoming just north of the Utah-Wyoming border and sprint on to Salt Lake City. Sometime, somewhere east of Salt Lake City, on Sunday, April 8, one stouthearted Pony Express rider traveling east passed his counterpart traveling west.
Six Days to Salt Lake
The westward mail arrived in the Mormon Capital in Utah on the evening of April 9. It had been not quite six days since it had left St. Joseph. Then on it went towards Carson City, Nevada, across some of America's worst desert that took three broiling days to traverse.
The Pony Express continues at: Lincoln's Words by Pony Express.
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