Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And Sarah, I think our boss asked us to read a classified ad for a new How Stuff Works position, didn't he Yeah? Here those wanted young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen, must be expert pony riders willing to risk death daily orphans preferred. Oh wait, doesn't sound right, doesn't know. That's actually a different ad. It's for the Pony Express. It's a made up one, just f y I as often as it's been printed. Katie didn't make it up, though. And in the days of email, Sarah and I constantly email each other, even though we sit in cubes right next to each other. We often hear laments about the death of the letter. And that's because, of course, letter writing is a very romantic type of pursuit, and your letters can get lost and perilous things can happen, as Romeo and Juliet could attest. But if you wanted to exchange messages in a fairly reliable way and do it quickly, there was a mail service in the eighteen hundreds that might have just worked for you the Pony Express. And let's take a moment just to picture the life of a Pony Express rider. You're a young, determined guy, and you have a mission to traverse the wilds of the West at breakneck speed to deliver history making news like a Lincoln's inaugural address or the taking of Fort Sumter. You have a very long way to go, and on the way you might run into disaster, terrible weather, and injury to you your horse, hostile Indians or thieves. But this mission is necessary. So let's talk about why. So we needed the Pony Express to connect the East coast to californi Ania because California was quickly becoming a popular place to live and with the gold and everything it was, uh, you know, it's got lots of good natural resources. It's becoming a business destination as well. So having it stranded all the way out there on the West coast is not good for California or for the people back on the East coast. Right as long as we can't communicate, they're just in complete isolation. Also, in the late eighteen fifties, the rumblings of an impending civil war were felt, and the government felt it needed to be in contact with those far away lest they accidentally get mixed up with the South, say, and lines of communication need to be open. So before the Pony Express, mail took a really, really long time to get to the West coast, about three or four weeks. And the route was incredible sounding. It would go by steamship and then across Panama on horses and by railroad, and then come back up again by ships. So you can imagine what an effort to send one letter. And we do have a stage coach system, but that took forever to forever, as in twenty days forever. According to the National Postal Museum, the citizens of Los Angeles learned that California had been admitted to the Union six weeks after it happened. They were essentially cut off from the rest of the country. And we need to fix it. At which point to enter Senator William M. Gwynn, And he's very attuned to the threat of a civil war, and so he suggests a news system, one that's going to be faster and better than the stage coaches. And uh, the men behind the Pony Express are all businessmen with a lot of experience, and history sometimes paints them as these tricky villain types, but that's not exactly true. We've got William Hepburn Russell, who liked the finer things in life and was later embroiled in an embezzlement scandal, William Bradford Waddell, and Alexander Major Ers and our businessmen already have a company that they can use to start up this service. The jumps start from the Central Overland, California and Pike's Peak Express company, which we all have to admit isn't quite as catchy as the Pony Express and has a good ring to it at all. And they figure that if there's a war, their services will be much more in demand and they can get rich. There's also this really lucrative government contract that they're hoping they can get. Whoever can set up a mail service and take the business from the stage coach guys is going to get a million dollars, and so our little group of businessmen desperately want that million. So now it's time to set up the Pony Express see if they can win this contract. And they put their headquarters in St. Joseph, Missouri. The idea is to get mail all the way to Sacramento, covering Kansas and beyond, and the trail that their riders will follow will cover about two thousand miles, and there's two thousand miles are going to be interspersed with somewhere between one hundred and sixty and one hundred ninety stagecoach stations, and they're betting that the horses will need to be changed every ten miles or so to stay really fresh and to keep up that pace that will get the mail there fast. And of course we'll need lots of personnel, including riders, station hands and farriers. And perhaps we should mention that they need to set up this entire operation in two months, which is one of the first amazing statistics about the pony. Very tight deadline. So the official opening is on April third, eighteen sixty and the first trip west takes about ten days, which is obviously a huge improvement over the stagecoach route, and the riders greeted by huge celebrating crowds. Everybody's glad. This is a new era in in communication and talking about our riders, Mark Twain called them the swift fan Ms of the Desert. There were about five hundred horses that were part of the Pony Express, and between eight and two hundred riders, depending on which account you're reading. The horses were very small and of different breeds, but they weren't actually ponies. That's not completely accurate, and the app that we mentioned uh wasn't actually ever circulated at the time of the Express. But it's true that they really did need light riders under a hundred and twenty five pounds or so, because the horses are carrying mail and gear along with a rider and they do have to be moving pretty quickly. The riders were paid twenty five dollars a week, which was a very handsome proposition, but it was well deserved. After a one hundred and twenty five mile ride. Often they were going seventy five to twenty five miles in one trip with no stops. And this wasn't an ambling sort of pace. They're riding really hard, but not actually galloping. I think we all imagine them racing at top speed across the West, but they're not galloping because that's a really good way to break a horse's leg on rough terrain. Um. But they had a lot of obstacles to avoid. You another reason to not go at top speed. There were Buffalo like back when Buffalo actually rode the West, and they had a lot of rules from this company. There was no swearing, which reminded us of our Vaudevillians. I guess that means no son of a gun, no fighting, no drinking. And they handed a bible to each of them. All those supposedly those were later taken away to lighten the load further, maybe take a pamphlet or something instead. And their disputes about whether they carry guns or not. But I mean, how surprising would it be if you if you've got all these dangers out on the road for them to be m attempted. Yeah, and some other dangers were losing your trail when it was dark and traveling through snowstorms. They did have places to stay along the way. These home stations um into some accounts they're absolutely disgusting, and according to others they were pretty awesome. But part of our problem putting together a reliable story is that our Express founders weren't into writing memoirs of their business ventures, so it was left up to the public imagination to fill in the details. So in case you're wondering about how the actual transferring of the mail happened. They carried all the mail in a mochila, which was a type of leather saddle bag that could be really quickly switched from horse to horse when one rider rode into a station and either um finished his run entirely or just switched horses. And um, it had all these different pockets in it, and some of them were locked up. They could didn't you say? They could only be could only be opened at military station. Yeah, so maybe if you have a really top secret government document, you don't want it to get lost on the way. And um, they actually wrapped the letters in oil silk, so nothing bad what happened to them. And the backs also had a time card just say you would know exactly how fast the mail was getting to see you better hurry up. It cost of five bucks to send a letter, so only the rich and important we're sending mail diplomats and bank officials for example. And later the price went down to a dollar for a half ounce, which was still pricy. But that's when the business was failing, which will discuss a little bit later. We do want to talk about some of the famous riders of the Pony Express. Probably the most famous is Robert pony Boy haslum, which is not We're not talking about outsiders here with pony Boy, and he's known for his three hundred and eighty mile ride straight through during which he comes across a station hand who's been murdered by paiutes, and they had also burned down the station, so I guess he was thinking he better just keep on going facing imminent danger. He was fearless, and he also carried Lincoln's inaugural address two hundred miles and just over eight hours after he'd been shot in the face with an arrow. Yeah, we're kind of imagining one of those fake arrow hats, but it must have been much more painful than that. Our next one is Buffalo Bill Cody, who is of course known for shooting a lot of buffalo shooting a lot of everything, and setting up these Wild West shows, and he kept the Pony Express alive through his Wild West show. Even though he was never actually a rider, you will always see his name connected to the Pony Express. And another one who's in the same league is Buffalo Bill is wild Bill Hickock, and again he may or may not have actually been a rider for the Pony Express, probably not, but either way, he was very famous for it and uh again for shooting people. And yes, but nothing lasts, and neither did the Pony Express. After eighteen months. It's shut down in October eighteen sixty one. And we should say that this whole thing was a financial disaster for our business men. They didn't make a penny. In fact, they lost a lot of pennies, two hundred thousand dollars worth of them. I wonder if they had insurance for this project, would hope, But I think they went bankrupt. Um well. And the second thing that ends the Pony Express, and I think we all know this is that new technologies around the way. We have a railroad that crosses the continent, and we have a telegraph system which makes these reckless, expensive rides absolutely unnecessary. So how did the Pony Express do all? In all, it lost money, but it didn't lose mail. It said, only one or two bags of mail were ever lost. And although it didn't last long, in reality, it's lived for a long time in the American consciousness. You've got this story of danger and romance and the pioneering spirit, and of course that's what we like, and people still ride the trail today, so history lives. It sounds like kind of a fun thing to do. It kind of reminds me of the Natchez Trace and how this wild, dangerous highway becomes a lovely scenic roadway. Well, I read another story about a writer, a Pony Express writer who was killed and they found his bag of letters later and one of them actually made it to where it was supposed to go. But that envelope is now at the National Postal Museum, if you're looking for a tangible connection to the Pony Express. And speaking of mail, it is time for listener mail. Inappropriately enough, we're doing real mail today. First, we have a really lovely original watercolor that's from Donna and Moldova that was handmade by a local artist, and she also wrote us a letter in really beautiful, beautiful plan writing saying that she was a big fan and that she recently moved to the Republic of Moldova due to her husband's work and she was helping we could cover some of those topics because it would be utterly fascinating to walk the streets of the capital city listening to my favorite podcast discuss the sites which surround me, so Donna will add them to our list. In contrast to Donna's watercolor, we have three postcards from Technical Sergeant Elkins who's based in Kuwait, and one of them has a bodybuilder with flames behind him, another has a ship, and another one has hawk. So thank you for these lovely additions to our wall of letters. Those bodybuilders totally going on the wall. So if you'd like to send us some real mail, please do. If you're more of an email person, where at History podcast at how stuff works dot com, and you can also keep an eye on what we're researching and reading if you follow us on Twitter at Missed in History or join our Facebook fan page, and as always, check out our home page at www dot how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the Stuff you Missed in History class blog on the how stuff works dot com home page

Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And Sarah, I think our boss asked us to read a classified ad for a new How Stuff Works position, didn't he Yeah? Here those wanted young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen, must be expert pony riders willing to risk death daily orphans preferred. Oh wait, doesn't sound right, doesn't know. That's actually a different ad. It's for the Pony Express. It's a made up one, just f y I as often as it's been printed. Katie didn't make it up, though. And in the days of email, Sarah and I constantly email each other, even though we sit in cubes right next to each other. We often hear laments about the death of the letter. And that's because, of course, letter writing is a very romantic type of pursuit, and your letters can get lost and perilous things can happen, as Romeo and Juliet could attest. But if you wanted to exchange messages in a fairly reliable way and do it quickly, there was a mail service in the eighteen hundreds that might have just worked for you the Pony Express. And let's take a moment just to picture the life of a Pony Express rider. You're a young, determined guy, and you have a mission to traverse the wilds of the West at breakneck speed to deliver history making news like a Lincoln's inaugural address or the taking of Fort Sumter. You have a very long way to go, and on the way you might run into disaster, terrible weather, and injury to you your horse, hostile Indians or thieves. But this mission is necessary. So let's talk about why. So we needed the Pony Express to connect the East coast to californi Ania because California was quickly becoming a popular place to live and with the gold and everything it was, uh, you know, it's got lots of good natural resources. It's becoming a business destination as well. So having it stranded all the way out there on the West coast is not good for California or for the people back on the East coast. Right as long as we can't communicate, they're just in complete isolation. Also, in the late eighteen fifties, the rumblings of an impending civil war were felt, and the government felt it needed to be in contact with those far away lest they accidentally get mixed up with the South, say, and lines of communication need to be open. So before the Pony Express, mail took a really, really long time to get to the West coast, about three or four weeks. And the route was incredible sounding. It would go by steamship and then across Panama on horses and by railroad, and then come back up again by ships. So you can imagine what an effort to send one letter. And we do have a stage coach system, but that took forever to forever, as in twenty days forever. According to the National Postal Museum, the citizens of Los Angeles learned that California had been admitted to the Union six weeks after it happened. They were essentially cut off from the rest of the country. And we need to fix it. At which point to enter Senator William M. Gwynn, And he's very attuned to the threat of a civil war, and so he suggests a news system, one that's going to be faster and better than the stage coaches. And uh, the men behind the Pony Express are all businessmen with a lot of experience, and history sometimes paints them as these tricky villain types, but that's not exactly true. We've got William Hepburn Russell, who liked the finer things in life and was later embroiled in an embezzlement scandal, William Bradford Waddell, and Alexander Major Ers and our businessmen already have a company that they can use to start up this service. The jumps start from the Central Overland, California and Pike's Peak Express company, which we all have to admit isn't quite as catchy as the Pony Express and has a good ring to it at all. And they figure that if there's a war, their services will be much more in demand and they can get rich. There's also this really lucrative government contract that they're hoping they can get. Whoever can set up a mail service and take the business from the stage coach guys is going to get a million dollars, and so our little group of businessmen desperately want that million. So now it's time to set up the Pony Express see if they can win this contract. And they put their headquarters in St. Joseph, Missouri. The idea is to get mail all the way to Sacramento, covering Kansas and beyond, and the trail that their riders will follow will cover about two thousand miles, and there's two thousand miles are going to be interspersed with somewhere between one hundred and sixty and one hundred ninety stagecoach stations, and they're betting that the horses will need to be changed every ten miles or so to stay really fresh and to keep up that pace that will get the mail there fast. And of course we'll need lots of personnel, including riders, station hands and farriers. And perhaps we should mention that they need to set up this entire operation in two months, which is one of the first amazing statistics about the pony. Very tight deadline. So the official opening is on April third, eighteen sixty and the first trip west takes about ten days, which is obviously a huge improvement over the stagecoach route, and the riders greeted by huge celebrating crowds. Everybody's glad. This is a new era in in communication and talking about our riders, Mark Twain called them the swift fan Ms of the Desert. There were about five hundred horses that were part of the Pony Express, and between eight and two hundred riders, depending on which account you're reading. The horses were very small and of different breeds, but they weren't actually ponies. That's not completely accurate, and the app that we mentioned uh wasn't actually ever circulated at the time of the Express. But it's true that they really did need light riders under a hundred and twenty five pounds or so, because the horses are carrying mail and gear along with a rider and they do have to be moving pretty quickly. The riders were paid twenty five dollars a week, which was a very handsome proposition, but it was well deserved. After a one hundred and twenty five mile ride. Often they were going seventy five to twenty five miles in one trip with no stops. And this wasn't an ambling sort of pace. They're riding really hard, but not actually galloping. I think we all imagine them racing at top speed across the West, but they're not galloping because that's a really good way to break a horse's leg on rough terrain. Um. But they had a lot of obstacles to avoid. You another reason to not go at top speed. There were Buffalo like back when Buffalo actually rode the West, and they had a lot of rules from this company. There was no swearing, which reminded us of our Vaudevillians. I guess that means no son of a gun, no fighting, no drinking. And they handed a bible to each of them. All those supposedly those were later taken away to lighten the load further, maybe take a pamphlet or something instead. And their disputes about whether they carry guns or not. But I mean, how surprising would it be if you if you've got all these dangers out on the road for them to be m attempted. Yeah, and some other dangers were losing your trail when it was dark and traveling through snowstorms. They did have places to stay along the way. These home stations um into some accounts they're absolutely disgusting, and according to others they were pretty awesome. But part of our problem putting together a reliable story is that our Express founders weren't into writing memoirs of their business ventures, so it was left up to the public imagination to fill in the details. So in case you're wondering about how the actual transferring of the mail happened. They carried all the mail in a mochila, which was a type of leather saddle bag that could be really quickly switched from horse to horse when one rider rode into a station and either um finished his run entirely or just switched horses. And um, it had all these different pockets in it, and some of them were locked up. They could didn't you say? They could only be could only be opened at military station. Yeah, so maybe if you have a really top secret government document, you don't want it to get lost on the way. And um, they actually wrapped the letters in oil silk, so nothing bad what happened to them. And the backs also had a time card just say you would know exactly how fast the mail was getting to see you better hurry up. It cost of five bucks to send a letter, so only the rich and important we're sending mail diplomats and bank officials for example. And later the price went down to a dollar for a half ounce, which was still pricy. But that's when the business was failing, which will discuss a little bit later. We do want to talk about some of the famous riders of the Pony Express. Probably the most famous is Robert pony Boy haslum, which is not We're not talking about outsiders here with pony Boy, and he's known for his three hundred and eighty mile ride straight through during which he comes across a station hand who's been murdered by paiutes, and they had also burned down the station, so I guess he was thinking he better just keep on going facing imminent danger. He was fearless, and he also carried Lincoln's inaugural address two hundred miles and just over eight hours after he'd been shot in the face with an arrow. Yeah, we're kind of imagining one of those fake arrow hats, but it must have been much more painful than that. Our next one is Buffalo Bill Cody, who is of course known for shooting a lot of buffalo shooting a lot of everything, and setting up these Wild West shows, and he kept the Pony Express alive through his Wild West show. Even though he was never actually a rider, you will always see his name connected to the Pony Express. And another one who's in the same league is Buffalo Bill is wild Bill Hickock, and again he may or may not have actually been a rider for the Pony Express, probably not, but either way, he was very famous for it and uh again for shooting people. And yes, but nothing lasts, and neither did the Pony Express. After eighteen months. It's shut down in October eighteen sixty one. And we should say that this whole thing was a financial disaster for our business men. They didn't make a penny. In fact, they lost a lot of pennies, two hundred thousand dollars worth of them. I wonder if they had insurance for this project, would hope, But I think they went bankrupt. Um well. And the second thing that ends the Pony Express, and I think we all know this is that new technologies around the way. We have a railroad that crosses the continent, and we have a telegraph system which makes these reckless, expensive rides absolutely unnecessary. So how did the Pony Express do all? In all, it lost money, but it didn't lose mail. It said, only one or two bags of mail were ever lost. And although it didn't last long, in reality, it's lived for a long time in the American consciousness. You've got this story of danger and romance and the pioneering spirit, and of course that's what we like, and people still ride the trail today, so history lives. It sounds like kind of a fun thing to do. It kind of reminds me of the Natchez Trace and how this wild, dangerous highway becomes a lovely scenic roadway. Well, I read another story about a writer, a Pony Express writer who was killed and they found his bag of letters later and one of them actually made it to where it was supposed to go. But that envelope is now at the National Postal Museum, if you're looking for a tangible connection to the Pony Express. And speaking of mail, it is time for listener mail. Inappropriately enough, we're doing real mail today. First, we have a really lovely original watercolor that's from Donna and Moldova that was handmade by a local artist, and she also wrote us a letter in really beautiful, beautiful plan writing saying that she was a big fan and that she recently moved to the Republic of Moldova due to her husband's work and she was helping we could cover some of those topics because it would be utterly fascinating to walk the streets of the capital city listening to my favorite podcast discuss the sites which surround me, so Donna will add them to our list. In contrast to Donna's watercolor, we have three postcards from Technical Sergeant Elkins who's based in Kuwait, and one of them has a bodybuilder with flames behind him, another has a ship, and another one has hawk. So thank you for these lovely additions to our wall of letters. Those bodybuilders totally going on the wall. So if you'd like to send us some real mail, please do. If you're more of an email person, where at History podcast at how stuff works dot com, and you can also keep an eye on what we're researching and reading if you follow us on Twitter at Missed in History or join our Facebook fan page, and as always, check out our home page at www dot how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the Stuff you Missed in History class blog on the how stuff works dot com home page