exciting drama
contribution lies in fabling
that it inspired
The significance of the Pony Express is not as apparent as its execution is memorable. The value of what happened during those eighteen months has transgressed the tangible effects carried in the padlocked saddle bags. The Pony Express as a cultural symbol has enjoyed a lot of traction over the years, and among the many artists, authors, journalists, and historians to depict and describe it, few have been able to resist romanticizing it. The apocryphal horseman has galloped off into the sunset so many times that exaggeration has adulterated fact. One exception is the 1930 book Six Horses, written by Captain William Banning and George Hugh Banning. William’s father was a transportation tycoon in California in the late 1800s. The book covers communication, freighting, and passenger conveyance in the West in the nineteenth century. Its title refers to a team of horses drawing a stagecoach. Banning dedicates two chapters to the Pony Express, and his observations are telling:
It did not involve more than 150 round trips. It did not cover a full nineteen months. Like a belated fragment of a storm, it came and was gone. Yet the fact remains: a more glamorous contribution to our historic West than that of this ephemeral Pony would be difficult to name.37
Banning refers to the Pony Express as an “immortal Pegasus” that was “able to identify himself with the new empire as permanently as though he had come racing up from the gold rush to the last spike driven for the Pacific Railroad.” History has lauded the Pony Express as a bold stroke of transcontinental progress, but Banning argues that the Pony Express “neither caused nor hastened the developments that followed his trail” and that “had he never existed, all must have been the same.” It was an exciting drama while it lasted, but it was little more than a drama. Its contribution to our historic West, therefore, lies in the fabling that it inspired:
From The Last Ride of the Pony Express: My 2,000-mile Horseback Journey into the Old West by Will Grant, Little, Brown and Company (June 6, 2023).
Seeming as American as any American enterprise could ever get.
According to legend, the help wanted notice read:
Wanted:
Young, skinny, wiry fellows, not over 18.
Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily.
Orphans preferred.
It should be pointed out that the Pony Express ran from April 3, 1860, to October 26, 1861.
October 26, 1861 was the day the transcontinental telegraph went into service.
It cost more money than it made.
It didn’t last longer than technology.
But it has a permaemnt place in the history of this country.
A place based on fable than fact.
But who cares.
No Haiku For You 