The Pony Express Idea

An Idea that Stretched from Missouri to California

Jul 14, 2006 Mary Trotter Kion

William H. Russell decides to start a Pony Express mail and telegram service.

You've Got Mail

On January 27, 1860, William H. Russell sent his son a telegram. The message was to tell his son that he had decided to establish a Pony Express. It would begin on April 3, 1860, and would carry mail both ways between Sacramento, California and St. Joseph, Missouri. Russell determined that the time it would take to go between these two points would be ten days.

This nearly unbelievable idea of transporting mail between Sacramento and St. Joseph in ten days was not just some spur of the moment idea that William Russell suddenly came up with. Ever since gold had been discovered in California, in 1849, people began pouring into the gold fields from all over the world. Getting mail from east to west, or the other way around, had been a maddening and not always successful process.

But Don't Count on Getting Your Mail Soon

It was a journey that too often saw letters go astray along the way by various means. And once eastern mail did reach California, if it had come by Clipper ships or steamboats, there was no way for either of these vessels to reach the miners in the mountains or to settlers in remote western towns. And if the mail went overland by coach it was transported over rough and unsettled country and through all kinds of weather.

Butterfield Overland Mail Company

But still, other than the long voyage by sea, the only way to get the mail back and forth was by stagecoach, or so every one assumed. Realizing this to be the situation, in 1858, the Untied States Congress voted to give the Butterfield Overland Mail Company three hundred thousand dollars a year to carry the mail east to west and back twice a month.

For three years this worked well enough with the coaches taking three weeks travel time each way through boiling sun, pounding rain and hail, blinding snow, and sometimes the flying bullets of outlaws or the arrows of