Pony Express Rider Quotes

The mythic American character is made up of the virtues of fairness, self-reliance, toughness, and honesty. Those virtues are generally stuffed into a six-foot-tall, dark-haired, can-do kind of guy who is at once a family man, attractive to strange women, carefree, stable, realistic, and whimsical. in the lore of America, that man lives on the Great Plains. he's from Texas, Dodge City, Cheyenne, the Dakotas, or somewhere in Montana. In fact, the seedbed of this American character, from the days of de Tocqueville through Andrew Jackson, Wyattt Earp, Pony Express riders, pioneers, and cowboys to modern caricatures played by actors such as Tom Mix, Gary Cooper, and John Wayne has aways been the frontier. It's a place with plenty of room to roam, great sunsets, clear lines between right and wrong, and lots of horses. It's also a place that does not exist and never has. The truth is that there has never been much fairness out here.

William Frederick ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, hunter, Indian-fighter and showman, joined the Pony Express – the West’s legendary mail service – at the age of fourteen, in response to an ad which ran: ‘WANTED young skinny wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 a week.

Scholars have now concluded that Buffalo Bill’s famous ride never happened, and in fact he was not a Pony Express rider at all.

Hollywood insider Roger D. McGrath was a consultant on the TV series The Young Riders, produced by MGM television. The program was supposed to be about the youthful and daring white horsemen of the Pony Express who delivered mail on the American frontier. McGrath writes: "There were no black Pony Express riders; however...it was decided one of the principal characters would be black. He would be one of the riders. He was named Noah and he was just like the white riders except--he was perfect...He was God. "It was also decided that there should be some Mexicans in the show. A Spanish mission suddenly appeared in Wyoming...That the nearest Spanish mission was actually in the upper Rio Grande Valley, 600 miles south, did not seem to matter. Now we could have Mexican heroes... " I probably do not have to tell you that our Indians were always perfect... Only whites perpetrated atrocities... Story lines that had Indians chasing Pony Express riders were rejected out of hand, although there are several true stories of lone Pony Express riders being chased by dozens of Indians, suffering terrible wounds.

Cody, with his sidekick Wild Bill Hickok standing by, is credited with carrying out the entire Pony Express operation single-handedly. Moreover, he is portrayed as an overbearing braggart, which he could have been but certainly wasn't, and a gunslinger, which he never was and never could have been. Bat Masterson, who was a gunfighter and knew Cody, vouched for that. Cody packed a gun only when he needed to-as a Pony Express rider, a hunter, and a scout. An interesting historical footnote is provided in the last scene of Pony Express, in which the Pony Express statue has this quote from Abraham Lincoln

We are doing 55 on Indiana 65. Jasper County. Flooded fields. Iroquois River spread way out, wide and brown as a Hershey bar. Distances in this glacier-flattened planed-down ground-level ground aren't blue, but whitish, and the sky is whitish-blue. It's in the eighties at 9:30 in the morning, the air is soft and humid, and the wind darkens the flooded fields between rows of oaks. Watch Your Speed - We Are. Severely clean white farmhouses inside square white fences painted by Tom Sawyer yesterday produce a smell of dung. A rich and heavy smell of dung on the southwest wind. Can shit be heady? La merde majestueuse. This is the "Old Northwest." Not very old, not very north, not very west. And in Indiana there are no Indians. Wabash River right up to the road and the oaks are standing ten feet out in the brown shadowmottled flood, but the man at the diesel station just says: You should of seen her yesterday. The essence is motion being in motion moving on not resting at a point: and so by catching at points and letting them go again without recurrence or rhyme or rhythm I attempt to suggest or imitate that essence the essence of which is that you cannot catch it. Of course there are other continuities: the other aspect of the essence of moving on. The county courthouses. Kids on bikes. White frame houses with high sashed windows. Dipping telephone wires, telephone poles. The names of the dispossessed. The redwing blackbird singing to you from fencepost to fencepost. Dave and Shelley singing "You're the Reason God Made Oklahoma" on the radio. The yellow weedy clover by the road. The flowering grasses. And the crow, not the Indian, the bird, you seen one crow you seen 'em all, kronk kronk. CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST on an old plank barn, the letters half worn off, and that's a continuity, not only in space but time: my California in the thirties, & I at six years old would read the sign and imagine a Pony Express rider at full gallop eating a candy cigarette. Lafayette Greencastle And the roadsign points: Left to Indianapolis Right to Brazil. Now there's some choice.

Often all riders had to eat were beans, bacon, corn bread, and coffee.

Oddly enough, our views were shaped quite a bit by the example of the thirteenth-century Mongol campaigns of conquest. Genghis Khan’s “hordes” – often smaller than the armies they faced – benefited immeasurably from what we today call near-real-time reporting on the disposition, composition, and movements of the enemy by their corps of “Arrow Riders,” a Pony-Express-like communication system that gave the Khan a consistent winning advantage.

but every time I run into her in New York, she has a new guy, making me think she’s had more fresh mounts than a Pony Express rider.

There was little room for anecdote or sentiment in a Pony Express pouch; each half ounce of mail cost its sender a five-dollar gold piece plus surcharges, and each rider could carry only ten pounds.