The Pony Express was an Early Attempt at Viral Marketing?!

This is Lei Habib, and this is Our American Stories, a show where America is the star and the American people. The Pony Express is synonymous with speed, endurance, and the American spirit to just get things done. While the name is recognizable not just throughout the States but also all over the world, it is not widely known that the Pony Express was part of a larger corporation, or that it only lasted eighteen months, or that it was never meant to last in the first place. Here to tell the story of the Pony Express is Jim de Felice, author of Westlike Lightning: The Brief, Legendary Ride of the Pony Express.

Take it away, Jim. America in the late 1850s, going into 1860, is an extremely exciting, vibrant place. You have a lot of innovation, a lot of manufacturing kind of just starting. But one of the things that that’s tough is to, especially for us these days, is to think back about how huge the country, you know, really was. It went from, from the Atlantic Coast, from the Atlantic Ocean all the way out to the Pacific in California. California, by the way, was very, very important at the time because they were, you know, it was the place where you were digging. You’re actually literally digging money out of the ground—gold. And the biggest problem with this huge country is that to Communica, to simply to get from New York City, say, or Washington, D.C., the seat of our government, all the way to where that, to where they were digging out the money in California, it literally took weeks and often months. As a matter of fact, something as simple as sending a letter from Washington to California could involve as much as six months. It would typically, an important letter, would typically go by steamer. It would go down to roughly where the, to the area of the Panama Canal, though obviously the Panama Canal wasn’t, wasn’t up and running yet. It would go overland by coach to meet another steamer on the other side of the Isthmus, and from there would then be taken up north to California and then on its go, on its merry way. There were other ways you could send something by stagecoach. People were dreaming about connecting the entire country with a railroad, which had not yet happened; and there was also this new invention called the telegraph, which showed a lot of promise, but stringing—simply stringing—the lines from one place to another was a massive challenge. And it’s kind of, it’s in that atmosphere, in that need that the Pony Express is born.

To break down the three owners of the Pony Express and kind of the related companies, you have these really unique and very interesting individuals. You have Alexander Majors, who the best way to describe him really is as a teamster. He, and ox carts. He knew everything about running ox carts; he knew everything about ox trains; he knew, he knew how to get really heavy stuff from one place to another. Now, he had other—certainly other—qualities. Very devoted Christian, gave out, supposedly, to every, every member of the company, but certainly to many. We’ll leave it at that: a small Bible, and he also gave them some rules. If you’re going to work for Russell, Majors, and Woodell, there were a lot of different rules that you had to follow, one of which, a very important rule, was not to curse or take the Lord’s name in vain. Now, I don’t know. We don’t have many ox drivers these days. But it’s, but from what I’ve read about, about them, typically, I think it’s, it’s very, very difficult to believe that they, that every ox driver that worked for these guys, followed that rule. Nonetheless, that was one of his rules. He was also right, hands-on. I can’t say he knew every employee, but he knew a lot of them, and he knew, he certainly knew the area, and he was really the hands-on, the hands-on guy.

Then he had William Waddell. And what Dell’s a little bit; there’s not a huge amount of information about Wadell. He’s usually looked on, as you know, as kind of the quieter business type, the guy that’s keeping the books and the behind-the-scenes manager, and that does seem, that does seem to be, you know, kind of his pattern. And then you have William Russell. Now, William Russell was in some ways the most interesting of them. Uh, they’re all entrepreneurs, but he was kind of a master entrepreneur, and he had the vision—he had the vision—for the Pony Express portion of their business, and he always, he had the kind of the aggrandizing imagination that, that kind of led them, led them to expand and expand, led them to start the Pony Express. He saw the potential, but he saw the publicity was very important, and ultimately he becomes the fellow who’s dealing with, with Washington, with the congressman, with the banks, and he’s ultimately going to be the reason that the Pony Express and their whole, the whole connected enterprise, go to hell, unfortunately.

And you’re listening to Jim Dave Felice, author of Westlike Lightning: The Brief, Legendary Ride of the Pony Express, us, and giving us a context, which we love to do on this show: give an historical context for the things we now know or take for granted. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, the story of the Pony Express, or that is, the story behind the story of the Pony Express. Here on Our American Stories.

Lei Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and get.

And we’re back with Our American Stories and the story of the Pony Express. Jim D. Felice, author of Westlike Lightning: The Brief, Legendary Ride of the Pony Express, was just telling us about the Pony’s origin and how three businessmen, Alexander Majors, William Russell, and William Waddell, formed it as a subsidiary of their larger freighting empire. Back to Jim with the story.

Their goal was to deliver anything that needed to be delivered, whether it was people, government supplies, ammunition, maybe cattle, money, especially newspapers, whatever. They wanted to be the ones that would get it to you wherever you were west of the Missouri River. And they thought that they could basically build an empire and make a lot of money doing that. And, you know, it sounds, in some ways, it sounds like a maybe a little bit like a harebrained scheme, but the reality is that another company had done exactly the same thing a few years before, based around or using strategically using the Erie Canal in New York, and that company became fabulously wealthy, fabulously rich—all of the people involved—and it’s still around today. As a matter of fact, we know it as American Express, and basically Russell, Majors, and Waddell wanted to do the same thing with the company that we know best as the parent company of the Pony Express.

Now, the Pony Express was a very, very kind of specific subset of their enterprise. Its goal was to deliver mail, which they also had other ways of doing, but to deliver mail very quickly. They’re basically the overnight service, if you will, of the time, although overnight in their case would be ten days. They promised to deliver the mail from Saint Joe, Missouri, over to Sacramento and end down to San Francisco in exactly ten days. That was an amazing, amazing amount of time. We’re talking actually 2,000 miles, specifically; it’s a little bit closer than 1,900, but in order to do that in ten days, it just shocked people. It would be like going from, I guess, dial-up, putting phones down into these odd modems which made weird sounds, and going from that to kind of the high-speed internet that we’re, that we’re used to now; so to go from six months to ten days was just absolutely mind-blowing, and it captured the imagination of pretty much everybody that heard it. And to tell you the truth, that, that whole idea of capturing people’s imagination was probably as important as any other reason that the company invented the Pony Express.

I should also point out that it wasn’t just this fantastic idea of gating publicity for their company and having everybody say, ‘Yeah, well, we have to, we have to go with Russell, Majors, and Waddell to for the service, because these guys can, if they can get mail from Saint Joe to Sacramento in ten days, they can get Aunt Louise, you know, the birthday cake that I want to send her.’ They were also after a million-dollar contract from the government to deliver mail. That was very important because in expanding their empire, and, you know, they had, they had ox trains, they had stagecoaches, they even had stores, and, believe it or not, they had banks, which, by the way, included some of their, their banknotes included portraits of themselves. Not too egotistical, they’re right, but in kind of doing all of this expanding in the late 1850s, they ran into—wow—they ran into what we’ll call a cash problem, or, I guess my Irish grandmother would have put it. You know, their eyes were a bit bigger than their stomachs, and so they kind of bit off more than they could choose, and they needed money. They needed infusions of cash for various, for various reasons. And so they saw this million-dollar contract and the guarantee of delivering the mail so quickly as kind of a way not only to deliver mail, which they were committed to doing and getting publicity for their company, but also getting a million dollars.

So the route that they proposed, they already had a network of stagecoaches throughout the West and stagecoach stops and other infrastructure. So they basically did, is they looked at the infrastructure that they had and they mapped out a route in order to kind of give a, I mean, over the roughly 1,900 miles. We’re talking about 186, 190 stations, and there would be places a rider would ride roughly 100 miles at a shot, and every 10 miles or so, there would be a post where he would hop off. There’d be a fresh horse waiting. He would throw his, the mail bags or the mochilas which had the Pony mail in it, over the, over the fresh horse, new saddle, and off they’d go for another, again, roughly 10 miles. And that would happen at the, at the major stations, the riders would actually change, and a fresh rider and fresh horses would, you know, would continue the ride either east or west. It would do that—generalize a little bit—but it would do that twice, twice a week. Each, each way, the same rider would go from Point A to Point B and then from Point B back to Point A. The riders tended to be independent, where you were, but almost always they were from the area. They were very familiar with. They’re very familiar with the route. The routes were very expeditious. There, missed up. Must have been a few places where there were, you know, shortcuts that only the riders knew, but for the most part they were along relatively well-known trails. The records are, for the most part, the records that the company had. They were destroyed, and so we really, we don’t even, to be honest, we don’t have an actual full ledger of, you know, who exactly was on, you know, was a rider. Now, a lot of great work has been done, and in terms of kind of sussing a lot of that out. Among other places, there’s a phenomenal museum of the Pony Express in Saint Joseph, and they have a great list. They’ve done more; various people have done detective work on figuring it out on who was and there. But, but there’s still there. There’s a massive amount of information we don’t really have. We don’t even know. We can’t even say who the first fellow was who rode, you know, in the Pony Express, and that was, you know. And that’s kind of remarkable because, to be honest, I was like, a really famous, it’s a really famous ride.

And you’re listening to Jim Dave Felice, author of Westlike Lightning: The Brief, Legendary Ride of the Pony Express, us, and giving us a context, which we love to do on this show: give an historical context for the things we now know or take for granted. When we come back, more of this remarkable story: the story of the Pony Express, or that is, the story behind the story of the Pony Express. An American dreamer’s story in a way par excellence, an American mythology story as well, here on Our American Stories.

And we return to Our American Stories and author Jim Dave Police with the story of the Pony Express. Before the break, we were hearing about how many of the records that the Pony Express’s parent company, run by Alexander Majors, William Russell, and William Waddell, had been lost over time. I mean, imagine, we don’t know who the first Pony Express rider was. Remarkable. Let’s return to Jim Day Phelice, author of Westlike Lightning: The Brief, Legendary Ride of the Pony Express.

We don’t even know. We can’t even say who the first fellow was who rode, you know, the Pony Express, and that was, you know. And that’s kind of remarkable because, to be let us up, was like a really famous, it’s a really famous ride. I kind of like Johnny Frye as the possible, you know, the possibly the first guy. But there are other candidates. Admittedly, one of the reasons there’s a lot of stories associated with different riders. This one kind of got attached to Fry, and like everything—like many things related to the Pony Express—it may or may not be a park. Well, actually, when you hear it, you’re gonna tell me it’s definitely a poker. But I’ll tell them—I’ll tell it. Anyways. Now, these guys, would you have to know about the Pony Express riders? For the most part, they’re, they’re in their early twenties. Some of them are, are certainly married. But on the other hand, a lot of the riders were, you know, they hadn’t quite found the right one yet—mostly in their younger twenties. They’re certainly athletic. I mean, to be able to ride a horse for 100 miles, 80 miles, 100 miles, uh, and, you know, do it in all sorts of weather. You have to be fairly athletic to do that. You’re being paid pretty well.

Now, there are a couple of different estimates on how much a rider was paid. One of the figures that’s largely accepted is $100 a month. They were certainly, which is a lot of money at that time, and they certainly were very well paid, and they were kind of, they were also kind of like rock stars of their time. They were, they were very, you know, ‘There’s a Pony rider,’ and they’re very, you know, they’re very famous, looked up, up to for, you know, for all the reasons that, I guess, you know, we still admire baseball stars or football stars these days. But the story about Johnny, Johnny Fry, is that being an attractive fellow and getting $100 or whatever he was being paid eight a month, you know, he was still, was certainly an eligible bachelor. And it is said that many, many of the young women in the area right near Saint Joe, well, you know, they were trying to catch Johnny’s eye. And it’s reputed that one of the ways that they were trying to catch his eye was actually through, um, through another bodily asset that happens to be the stomach, because, you know, the way to a man’s heart is often through his stomach, and they would make different, you know, different things, and, you know, he would allegedly, would grab them as he rode by. You know, it’s very difficult.

So, allegedly, this young woman… You know, history has kind of clouded out her identity, but so we were to call her Becky just because it’s, it’s a common name at the time. And it’s alleged that Becky got this brilliant idea and knowing that Johnny kind of was partial to sweets, she went and she invented a delicious concoction that could be eaten on horseback and, as a matter of fact, could be speared as he rode by. And it is said that Becky invented for Pony Express rider the first donut, which the Pony Express rider could stick his forefinger through and then eat at his leisure, as he wrote on his roof. Yeah, I’d be honest. I don’t know how true that story is, but it does kind of summarize some of the, some of the fun stuff about and some of the fun legends that were connected with a, with a Pony Express. So as the, the Pony Express itself was always seen, as you know, as a means to an end. It was seen as a way to get publicity, to kind of shore up their system of delivering the mail, and most of all was seen as a way of getting a million dollars out of the federal government. As things turn out, they ended up only getting half of that. It’s questionable whether a million dollars, by the way, would have, would have kept them going anyway, but a half-million certainly would.

Now, Russell was back East. They had opened an office in one of the fanciest—what was at the time the fanciest—building in New York, is one of the first skyscrapers on Wall Street. And he was going back and forth between New York and Washington, D.C., working on the federal contracts, also trying to get business, various business, I should say, not just, just trying to get five-dollar letters. And as the, as the company’s cash problems grew more and more, he came up with a solution to solve, to solve some of those problems by asking the Feds to advance them money that would be owed under the contract that started out. Okay, but you know, this—I don’t know—the second or third time somebody comes to asking you to pay them for a job you haven’t quite done yet, you know, you get a little bit, you might get a little testy. And so when the government refused, Russell said, ‘I’ll tell you what, tell you what, let’s make a deal rather than, I don’t really need the money from you, just give me.’ ‘Just give me a note that says that I have a contract with you, and once I fulfill that contract, yo—’