This channel of communication was largely used by the Government and by traders and merchants, and was a paying venture, first semi-weekly and then daily, and but for the building of the telegraph would have become a wonderful success.
Every two or three hundred miles there were located at the stations division agents to provide for emergencies in case of Indian raids or stampedes of ponies, and at the crossing of the Platte at Fort Kearney there was then employed the notorious Jack Slade, a Vermont Yankee, lost to the teachings of his early and pious environments, turned into a frontier fiend. He shot a Frenchman named Jules Bevi, whose patronymic is preserved in the present station of Julesburg on the Union Pacific Railroad. Slade nailed one of his ears to the station door and wore the other several weeks as a watch-charm. He drifted to Montana, and in 1865 was hanged by the vigilantes on suspicion of heading the road agents who killed Parker of Atchison and robbed a train of $65,000. His tragic end, as related by Doctor McCurdy, formerly of St. Joseph, contains an element of the pathetic. He lived on a ranch near Virginia City, Mont., and every few days came into town and filled up on “benzine,” and took the place by shooting along the streets and riding into saloons and proclaiming himself to be the veritable “bad man from Bitter Creek.” The belief that he was connected with matters worse than bad whisky had overstrained the long-suffering citizens. The suggestive and mysterious triangular pieces of paper dropped upon the streets, surmounted with the skull and arrows, called the vigilantes to a meeting at which the death of Slade and two companions was determined. On the fated morning following the meeting he came to town duly sober and went to a drug-store for a prescription, and while awaiting its preparation he was suddenly covered with twelve shotguns and ordered to throw up his hands. He complied smilingly, but proposed to reason with them as to the absurdity of taking him for a bad man. The only concession was permission to send a note to his wife at the ranch, and an hour was allotted him to make peace with the Unknown; ropes were placed around the necks of the three, and at the end of the time they were given short shrift, and were soon hanging between heaven and earth. While the bodies were swaying the wife appeared on the scene, mounted, with a pistol in each hand, determined to make a rescue; but seeing that it was too late she quailed before the determined visages of the vigilantes, and soon left the vicinity, carrying away, as it was believed, a large amount of the proceeds of Slade’s robberies.
Most of the famous actors in that memorable enterprise known as the Pony Express have passed beyond the confines of time and gone to join the great majority. In the summer of 1861 the Pony Express passed, with the overland stage line, into the ownership of Ben Holliday, one of those wonderful characters developed from adventure and danger, and nurtured amid the startling incidents of frontier life. Born near the old Blue Lick battle-field, he was at seventeen Colonel Doniphan’s courier to demand from Joe Smith and Brigham Young the surrender of Farwest. At twenty-eight he entered Salt Lake Valley with fifty wagon-loads of merchandise and was indorsed by Brigham as being worthy of the confidence of the faithful. This secured him a fortune. At thirty-eight, at the head of the overland mail route, and at forty-five, the owner of sixteen steamers on the Pacific, carrying trade and passengers to Panama, Oregon, China, and Japan. The stage route was sold to Butterfield, and ran until the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad.
On the streets of Denver daily can be seen the grand figure of Alexander Majors, carrying his four-score years with a vigor that would shame half of the youth of the city. Six feet, lithe and straight as the red man he so often dominated, he is noted as the last of the Mohicans, and only waits, without fear and without reproach, for the final summons to that better land where the expresses are all faithfully gathered and the faithful rewarded by commendations for duty well performed.
And more wonderful than the express itself is the history of the six lustrums since it ceased to exist. Two thousand miles of desert waste have been largely developed in a rich and valuable agricultural and pastoral region. The iron horse has supplanted the fiery bronco, and thought flashes with lightning rapidity from ocean to ocean. Civilization has crowned that terra incognita with seven States and built large and beautiful cities. Peace has spread her halo of beauty over the savage haunts and churches have supplanted the horrible orgies of Indian massacre. The mountains have yielded their treasures to the steady hand of industry—richer by far than the fabled Ophir—and the pactolian streams have gladdened the hearts of toiling thousands. All honor to the pioneers who blazed the way for this civilization.
With this page of frontier history—the days of the Pony Express—will forever be associated the name of Billy Cody.