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UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Instant Messenger: The Pony Express, Media, and Modern Virtuality Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7425331x Author Corfield, Christina Publication Date 2018 Supplemental Material https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7425331x#supplemental License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ INSTANT MESSENGER: THE PONY EXPRESS, MEDIA, AND MODERN VIRTUALITY A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction Of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In FILM AND DIGITAL MEDIA By Christina Corfield December 2018 The Dissertation of Christina Corfield is Approved: Assistant Professor Jennifer Horne, chair Professor Shelley Stamp Professor Rick Prelinger Professor Zoe Beloff Lori G Kletzer Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Table of Contents List of Figures…...…………………………………………………………………....iv Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….vi Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………viii Introduction…………………………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter One: The Pony Express and Technological Modernity in America……...…16 Chapter Two: The Pony Express as Media, the Pony Express in Media………….…82 Chapter Three: Virtual Communication, Virtual Subject…...…………………...…140 Chapter Four: De-Virtualizing the Pony Express in the Pony Express Museums, St. Joseph, Missouri…………………………..……………………………………..…178 Conclusion………………………...……………………………………………..…214 Appendix .…………………………………………………………………...…….. 219 Bibliography and Mediagraphy……………………………………………...…..…281 iii List of Figures 1. A handmade peep box with Smartphone installed behind……………...…………22 2-8. The imaginative terrain of the U.S., constructed by a network too big for any one person to see……………………..…………………………………………………...31 9. White Trucks advertise their new “Highway Post Office”…………...…………...36 10. The Pony Express is used as a symbol of instantaneous, reliable information delivery in the marketing of Crosley Radios in 1924…...…………………………...38 11. The Pony Express as an American Tradition..…………………………………..40 12-13. The Pony Express route envisioned as a seamless landscape…..……………46 14. Cover of Hutchings California Magazine, July 1860……..…………………….53 15-18. Images from a video of the Pony Express route, and peep box views that frame the video…………..…...…………………………………………………………….55 19-22. The town of Crescent City grows as the result of the ingenuity of two former Pony Express riders…………………..……………………………………………...71 23-24. The saloon in west “St. Joe”, and the Banker’s ball in east “St. Joseph”..…..73 25-26. The trigger-happy cowboys who ride through the streets, followed by a dignified carriage on its way to the Banker’s ball……..…………………………….73 27. An original heavy paper letter sent by steam ship, and its copied tissue paper counterpart, sent by Pony Express……..……………………………………………91 28-29. Reenacted scenes from Pony Players’ Review………..……………………..92 30-33. The Pony Express is imaginatively reconstructed by a Boy Scout……..…...94 34. Advertisement for CNP’s Pony Express, (1959-60)………..…………………...95 35. Cover of dime novel that dramatizes Buffalo Bill Cody’s life, including his tenure as a Pony Express rider……………..………………………………………………102 36-39. The wild, idealized spirit of America is symbolized by the horse that runs from the forest into the town in HBO’s Deadwood…………………………..………….112 iv 40-43. The physical force and speed of the Pony Express shown through mid- and close-up shots of a galloping horse…………………………………..…………….114 44-45. The mail is passed on from rider to rider………………………………..….116 46-48. A speculative scene in Pony Players’ Review depicts mail arriving at a station and being processed…………………………..……………………………………117 49-51. Excited young men group together and later share the pain of a rider’s death………………………………..……………………………………………... 126 52. In Pony Players’ Review riders are recast as women…………………………..129 53. The interface of Pony Players’ Review………………..………………..............165 54. Winner and runners-up for the Miss. Pony Express competition in Utah…..…167 55. The frontier tradition alive and well in the Fisher family…..………………….170 56. A shawl on display in the Pony Express National Museum…..……………….192 57-58. Stills from Pony Players’ Review……………………………..……………194 59-60. A recreation of the stables in the Pony Express National Museum, St. Joseph, Missouri…………………………..………………………………………………..195 61. The original Pony Express office in the Patee House Museum, St. Joseph Missouri……………………………..……………………………………………..197 62-64. A panorama and details of the miniature diorama installation at the Pony Express National Museum, St. Joseph, Missouri………………………………..…200 65. Installations of the Conestoga wagon and the Pony Express station replicas in the Pony Express National Museum, St. Joseph, Missouri………………………..…...202 66. A theatrical reconstruction of a meeting between the three Pony Express founders. Pony Express National Museum, St. Joseph, Missouri……………………..……...204 67-68. The main space of the west wing of the Patee House Museum and an empty box of commemorative candies……………………..…………………………......208 69-70. The original Pony Express office in the Patee House Museum, St. Joseph Missouri, and photographs on display in the same room………………..…………210 v Abstract Instant Messenger: The Pony Express, Media, and Modern Virtuality Christina Corfield This dissertation explores the power that messaging systems play in the symbolic structures of American identity by focusing on the legendary status of the Pony Express in film, literature, commemorative events, and historical site museums. In four chapters and two multi-dimensional installation artworks combining performance, painted sets, and digital viewers, I examine persistent myths surrounding modern American identity and American exceptionalism as articulated through technological development and communications infrastructures. Using a media archeological method to examine the idea of media as message bearers and organizational frameworks, this project engages with theorists of media and modernity from Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan, to infrastructural theorist John Durham-Peters, as well as Lisa Gitelman and Jussi Parikka. Situating the Pony Express as a feature of an American cultural mythology that supports a wide array of twentieth and twenty-first century modes of conveyance, this project seeks to understand what is at stake with the mythological deployment of communications infrastructures past and present. This is a project about the role of media in media history, and the role of absence and historical loss in shaping the underlying meaning of technologies of communication that are themselves portrayed as empire-building entities. Using a mixture of traditional archival methods (spanning rare materials, artifactual vi collections, official histories) and new media tools (digital code and videography) the dissertation brings questions of virtual communication into the present moment to ask the reader and viewer about the immediate context of our message delivery habitats. vii Acknowledgements Certain materials used in the publication of this work were obtained from the Charles F. Curry Library, William Jewell College, Liberty, Missouri. I would also like to thank John G. Hoff for very generously sharing his private collection of Pony Express materials with me, when I first began researching this project. viii Introduction This dissertation has been guided by three key motivations. First, to add to an expanding body of scholarship that challenges the parameters by which we classify and define “media”, and in which media’s relationship to “newness” can likewise be questioned or interrupted. Second, to historically trace the role of media in constructing a technologically defined sense of American modernity and thus American identity as it has shifted from the early- to mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth century, and third, to demonstrate the importance of how media are imagined to how they are understood, valued, and put to use in culture by individuals, communities, private companies, and governing institutions. Through the imaginative projections of popular culture, which refigure media as subjects - content rather than as the physical devices, social protocols and geographical and political networks that have made communication immediate - we can see the ways in which media frame our connection to concepts of pasts and futures, geo-political boundaries, and the representation of group identities as configured through nationalism and technology. Running for a mere eighteen months between spring 1860 and fall 1861, the transcontinental Pony Express was a messenger service that prefigured the telegraph and the railroads in the American West. Carrying letters, telegrams, and special edition, aggregated newspapers all printed on tissue paper to reduce weight, the Express was the fastest long-distance courier in North America at the time covering almost 2000 miles from St. Joseph in Missouri to Sacramento in California. Privately owned and operated by the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express 1 Company, it was the latest venture for business partners William Russell, Alexander Majors and William Waddell who made their vast fortunes and solid reputation through freighting.1 Horses were ridden at full speed for as long as they could stand, usually ten to fifteen miles, and so relay stations were built roughly that far apart
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