The Pony Express began carrying mail across the American West
On this day · 3 April 1860
On April 3, 1860, a single rider bolted from a Missouri stable, launching a relay that hauled mail nearly 1,800 miles in about ten days.
On April 3, 1860, at 7:15 p.m., a cannon fired in St. Joseph, Missouri, and the first Pony Express rider galloped toward a waiting ferry. His pouch carried 49 letters, five telegrams, and a few newspapers printed on tissue-thin paper to save weight.
The service stitched together relay stations every 10 to 15 miles, with fresh horses and a new rider roughly every 75 to 100 miles. Averaging about 10 miles per hour, riders covered the roughly 1,800-mile route between Missouri and Sacramento, California in about ten days, slashing a journey that took ships a month or more.
Speed was the whole point, and the riders rarely stopped for long.
The Pony Express dazzled the public but never turned a profit. When the transcontinental telegraph reached completion in October 1861, the relays fell silent after barely eighteen months, outrun by the wire.
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