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The Pony Express Byway Is an Interstate

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The Pony Express Byway Is an Interstate Utah’s Pony Express Trail National Back Country Byway by Lee Foster The Pony Express Trail National Back Country Byway, southwest of Salt Lake, causes a traveler to ponder what life was like for those legendary Pony Express Riders, icons of the American experience. Along the route one learns that the Riders were physically small men, 120 pounds or lighter, because that body weight and 20 pounds of mail were all the horses could carry. These wiry, tiny men rode quickly, averaging seven miles per hour day and night over rough terrain, which is still rugged today on the authentic back country road that is the celebrated trail. There were 80 Riders at the peak of operations, using 420 horses at 190 stations. The men wore a uniform consisting of a bright red shirt and blue pants, and, at first, carried a bugle. The bugle was to announce their arrival at a station. However, management soon discovered that the sound of hooves was bugle enough, so the bugle, precious weight, was dropped. Management was ever responsive to costs when an ounce of mail yielded $5. The journey across this vast, untamed landscape was both physical and metaphysical. Management issued a Bible for all Riders. Said Bible was a constant companion when faced with Indian attacks, bandits, vicious blizzards, and killing heat. The pledge taken by every Rider harkens back to an earlier era, when the confidences of the country were entirely Christian. All Riders took the following Oath of Employment, which suggests the corporate culture of the era: “I ___ do hereby swear, before the great and living God, that during my engagement, and while I am an employee of Russell, Majors, & Waddell, I will, under no circumstances, use profane language. I will drink no intoxicating liquors; that I will not quarrel or fight with any other employee of the firm, and that in every respect, I will conduct myself honestly, faithful to my duties, and so direct my acts as to win the confidence of my employers. So help me God.” After taking that pledge, and after riding 60- to 120-mile relays, a Rider received a compensation per month of $120-125 uninflated dollars. It was an era before medical insurance, retirement benefits, or collective bargaining securities. Expect the Byway road to be a passable gravel road, as it should be, negotiable except in heavy rains or winter snow. Disabuse yourself of the expectation that the Pony Express Byway is an Interstate. BEGINNING THE DRIVE The Pony Express drive begins at Lehi on State Highway 73, south of Salt Lake, and proceeds 133 miles west to Ibapah. You pass the first pony express station at Fairfield/Camp Floyd, adjacent to what is now Stage Coach Inn State Park. Bureau of Land Management has organized the Back Country Byway program throughout the West, celebrating the most delicious landscapes in the 230 million acres it manages. BLM wisely decided to save the Pony Express Byway for the honorary 50th designation due to the beauty of the landscape and the wide public interest in the historical subject. The Byways program is part of BLM’s increasing emphasis on non-consumptive recreational use of its lands. If you want to drive a scenic byway, direct the horsepower under your hood to follow those Pony Express mustangs of yesteryear. The Pony Express was a quintessentially American effort at an entrepreneurial delivery service. It was the Fed Exp of its day. Messrs. Russell, Majors, & Waddell, the proprietors, promised to deliver a piece of mail in 10 days time from Missouri to California, for a price. Many consumers of that period were impatient with the alternative, sending mail on a six-to-eight-week trip down to the Gulf of Mexico by ship, then across Panama by mule, then by ship up to San Francisco. The standing joke of the era was that news events in the East were long forgotten by the time they became known out West. With American entrepreneurial efforts, there is always the risk of failure, especially at a time before government subsidies could be arranged. Few citizens realize that the Pony Express, so enshrined in our heroic imagination, did also heroically fail, bankrupted by the competition after only 19 months of operations, closing in October 1861. The competition was not another provider with faster horses. No, the competition was a new technology, also a particularly American matter to contemplate. Less than a year after the hooves of the first pony echoed over the lonely stretches of the West, the new technology of telegraph poles punctuated the landscape. The telegraph promised to transmit the news in dits and dahs at a speed that must have seemed digital for its day. The news that had taken eight weeks by ship, then only ten days by Pony Express, could now be conveyed in seconds by telegraph across the far-flung landscape, coast to coast. A man on a horse, riding day and night, could make heroic efforts, transmitting the Abraham Lincoln Inaugural Message to California in only 7-1/2 days, not 10 days. And yes, there were hotshot Riders, like William C. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who once rode 322 miles in 21 hours and 40 minutes, leaving behind 21 exhausted horses. But finally, there was the humbling reality that no horse rider could equal the telegraph, which could convey news in what seemed like an instant. And soon, if you needed the hard copy, there was the Iron Horse, whose track was already envisioned on the landscape by dreamers such as Theodore Judah. For those bulky packages, not just the contracts and the love letters and the life-defining missives, the railroad would deliver the goods by 1869. The record shows that the Pony Express never turned a profit, though its founders could assert that it served monumental civic purposes, such as assisting to keep California in the Union during the Civil War. Cowboy who is driving cattle along the Pony Express Trail in Utah FAUST STATION The next station west is Faust Station, now only a ghost station, but a traveler can’t help but speculate. Was this named for some Faustian urge in the whole operation? Was this some literary Rider’s salute to the enterprise, as one might find in the California Gold Rush, where there were so many literary miners, the second sons of well-bred families, with the finest education that the era provided? No, this is not a stop named for Goethe’s Faust. This is “Doc” Faust’s two-story structure, the enterprise of a German migrant surviving on the edge of the Frontier. Such lore can be learned at the official Pony Express Trail National Back Country Byway Kiosk, 1.8 miles west of Faust Junction. What most intrigues a traveler at Faust Station is not the Riders, but their horses. What were these horses like? Originally, they were 600 mustangs, purchased along the route by Russell, Majors, & Waddell. It must have been like a massive Boeing Airline purchase of its era. Sell 600 mustangs to the Pony Express, invoicing the proprietors. What astounds today is that, west of Faust Station, those same horses are running wild in the imagination and across the physical landscape. The mustangs were originally a spirited and wild blood line, and today, you may spot their blood-line descendants in the Onaqui Mountain Wild Horse Management Area, adjacent to the official Pone Express Byway on the north side of the road. There’s something inspiring about wild horses, especially when they are, in part, the certified blood-line descendants of Pony Express ponies, as BLM expert Glenn Foreman asserts. Since 1971 these wild horses have been protected by The Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act, declaring that these beasts be maintained for posterity as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” Ten states boast wild horse populations. Utah has 2,600 wild horses in some 22 herds. The last winter aerial survey, in 1991, counted 169 horses in the Onaqui herd. Bring your binoculars and scan the landscape at Onaqui. You may spot wildness in yourself destined ever to roam free. Some citizens have both the will and the resources to adopt wild horses as the herd is periodically rounded up by BLM and culled to protect itself from the self-destruction otherwise inevitable with over-population and over-grazing.?? SIMPSON SPRINGS AND BEYOND Proceeding west, the next station stop is Simpson Springs, the main fully restored station along the trail. The operative word here is springs, a dependable water source, the great prize in any desert crossing. Simpson Springs is typical of the stops on the 1900-mile route from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California. Here BLM celebrates the restored, historic building, a stone skeleton that testifies to the lonely and isolated existence of the two agents, one station keeper, and one assistant who manned each station. Monotony was broken by the arrival and immediate departure of two riders each day. An adjacent BLM campground serves as a respite in a terrain otherwise devoid of traveler services. Beyond Simpson, the most panoramic view of this range landscape occurs at elevated Dugway Pass, whose crest is a good spot for a picnic lunch. More observations on the landscape can be made as you proceed west, toward Boyd Station. Much of the land is rangeland, used for cattle and sheep. If fortunate, you may run into an authentic cattle roundup as horseman move the herds to new grazing grounds. Shepherds also guide large flocks of sheep across the landscape.
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