Silver Tailings: The Pony Express

In April 1860, the Pony Express Company was started. It’s only link to the US Post Office was that the letters it carried had to have stamps on them.

This enabled them to be dropped in the mail when a city with a post office had been reached. The delivery cost of a letter between San Francisco and the Atlantic States was $5.

A relay system for changing horses every 25 miles and riders every 75 miles made the Express the fastest way for a letter to cross from Missouri to California. By changing horses every 10-15 miles, riders in 1861 carried Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address from St. Joseph, Missouri to Carson City in five and three-quarter days.

That translated into almost 13 miles an hour, then a record speed for travel. However fast the Express was, it could not compete with the telegraph.

It went out of business in October 1861, soon after San Francisco was linked by wire to New York City, already by then the economic center of the United States.