As a boy growing up in rural northwest
Missouri, St. Joseph was the nearest big city and a place of fascination to me.
As a schoolboy I no doubt learned that the Pony Express started in St. Joseph, which
we usually called St. Joe. For some reason, however, I grew up not knowing much
about the Pony Express.
Learning about
the Pony Express
Not long after moving to Liberty in 2005,
June and I visited the Pony Express Museum in St. Joe and learned a lot about
it then. That is certainly a place worth visiting, and you can check it out online here.
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| Ms. Kathy Ridge (May 2016) |
I learned the most about the Pony Express,
though, from hearing Ms. Kathy Ridge give a talk about it on May 29 this year
at the Memorial Day gathering at my father’s (long-closed) home church in rural
Worth County, Mo.
Ms. Ridge, a retired elementary school
teacher who works as a volunteer at the Pony Express Museum, told not only
interesting details about those who rode for the Pony Express but also shared something
of its historical significance.
The Pony Express began operation on April 3,
1860, and was a response to the need for faster communication with people who
lived in California. After the discovery of gold there in 1848, the population
of Calif. grew rapidly and it became a state in 1850.
The Pony
Express was made obsolete, though, with the completion of the transcontinental
telegraph on October 24, 1861, and it ceased operation two days after. (The
transcontinental railroad was then completed in May 1869, only 7½ years later.)
The Pony Express
and the Civil War
Because of the Pony Express, people in
California received news of the beginning of the Civil War just 12 days after
it began, rather than weeks later as would have been the case earlier. The Pony
Express helped keep California aligned with the North in spite of many
Confederate sympathizers living in the state.
In addition, partly because of the Pony
Express, California’s gold was secured for funding the Union forces rather than
the soldiers of the South.
The Civil War threatened the operation of
the Pony Express in several ways.
For example, the Hannibal
and St. Joseph Railroad, the first railroad to cross Missouri, was completed in February 1859,
making St. Joe the westernmost point in the U.S. accessible by rail. It is said
to have carried the first letter to the Pony
Express on April 3, 1860.
During the Civil War, the first assignment of Col. Ulysses S. Grant was protecting
that railroad and Pony Express mail.
Grant was
re-assigned in August 1861, and the Platte Bridge Railroad
Tragedy occurred shortly thereafter, on Sept. 3. The bushwhackers
caused the bridge over the Platte River a few miles east of St. Joe to
collapse, and the train from Hannibal, which included a mail car, plunged into
the river, killing about 20 people and injuring 100.
The St. Joseph Newspaper
The St. Joseph News-Press, the main
newspaper of northwest Missouri, traces its roots to the St. Joseph Gazette, which was
first published in 1845 shortly after St. Joe was founded just two years
earlier. The Gazette was the only newspaper to be sent west on the
first ride of the Pony Express.
Earlier this
month the News-Press became only the
second newspaper in the country to endorse Donald Trump for President.
That is not too
surprising, though, as most of its readers across rural northwest Missouri are
strong Republicans and will most likely vote for Trump anyway—even though for
a great many of them that would be against their own best self-interest.
Selected Resources
“The Story of the Pony Express” (1992) by Nancy Pope,
accessible online
here.
The Story of the Pony Express (1960), edited by Waddell F. Smith, grandson of William B.
Waddell, one of the founders of the Pony Express
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