It so happened that the great Pony Express had just been established between Omaha and Pike’s Peak, and other far Western points, including San Francisco. This route ran by Julesburg, where the company had an agent in the person of George Chrisman, who was well acquainted with Billy, the two having freighted together for Russell, Majors & Waddell.
Finding Billy out of employment, and express riders being scarce, Chrisman offered him a position as rider, which was gladly accepted.
The requirements for this occupation were such that very few were qualified for the performance of the duties. The distance and time required to be made were fifteen miles per hour. Only courageous men could be employed on account of the dangers to be encountered, and such laborious riding could be endured by very few. Nevertheless Billy was an expert horseman, and having the constitution and endurance of a bronco he braved the perils and duties of the position and was assigned to a route of forty-five miles.
CHAPTER XII.
STORY OF THE PONY EXPRESS.
The glamour and pageantry of the crusaders in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth by Columbus, Cortez, and Pizarro, and repeated in the nineteenth by Taylor, Scott, Doniphan, and Fremont. As a resultant were the wonderful gold discoveries of 1849, in California, and a State born full-fledged and armed in a day, as Minerva from the brain of Jove. Among the wonderful and prolific accomplishments of Western thought and genius was the conception and successful fruition of the Pony Express, a scheme that could only have been conceived and launched amid the mountain grandeur of the Western plains. It could have birth in no other place, and can be duplicated nowhere else. The world presents no theater for its reënactment. It was formulated by Senator Gwinn of California, and fashioned and matured to success by Russell, Majors & Waddell of the overland mail coach system of 1859, as established by Congress.
RIDING PONY EXPRESS.
The telegraph extended from the Atlantic seaboard to St. Joseph and from San Francisco to Sacramento. Two thousand miles of desert intervened. The ocean communications, via Central America, occupied twenty-two days, with propitious sea voyages. Could this be reduced? The stages took from twenty-one to twenty-five days, according to the weather. Duke Gwinn, as he was afterward called, suggested to W. H. Russell of the stage line that if the time could be shortened for communication on a central line, and kept open all the year, a great increase of travel and emigration, and the location of a railroad by the Government on a central route, would be the result. The conference resulted in the habiliment of the Pony Express, which eventuated in carrying a telegraph mail upon ponies from St. Joseph to Sacramento, 1,982 miles, regularly, from April, 1860, to September, 1861, in ten days, schedule time, and the special express in December, 1860, with a message of President Buchanan to Congress, on secession, in seven days and seventeen hours, a feat never before and never again to be accomplished. This was done through a desert country occupied by prowling savages and swept by violent storms, furious blizzards, and blinding snows. Crossing immense mountain ranges and trackless wastes of sand and sage-brush, grappling with mountain torrents and with nature’s wildest orgies, the hardy riders, whose watchword was “excelsior,” always made (Deo volente) the schedule time to the objective point. At St. Joseph and Sacramento, until the completion of the telegraph across the continent, the expectant crowd was never held in wait over an hour before the messenger waved his red flag of safety, and in the next instant slid from his panting steed and hastened to the office of the company with his bag of dispatches, worth its weight in gold.