By the 1850s, the railroads had reached the Midwest. From there freight, mail and passengers had to travel further west by stagecoach. But as we have seen, the stagecoaches were not quick – it took around 20 days to travel from Missouri, the end of the rail line, to California, and could take much longer if the weather was bad. This was especially a problem for the U.S. government, which was often frustrated by how long it took to get a message from one end of the country to the other. A government official sending a letter to Washington from California might wait three months for a response.

Then, in 1860, William Hepburn Russell, had an idea for carrying the mail more quickly than the stagecoaches could manage. Russell was head of a stagecoach company named the Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express Service Company, which ran stagecoaches from Kansas to California. The stagecoach business was not as profitable as Russell would have liked and Russell realized that by using individual riders, he could carry the mail in a fraction of the time of the stagecoach. With the backing of a California Senator, Russell quickly won a government mail contract.

Russell had just three months to put his plan into operation. He bought 500 suitable horses and stationed them along the route from Missouri to California at intervals of about ten miles – the longest distance a healthy horse could gallop at full tilt. Around 190 stations were set up with a simple building for the stationmaster, a well and a stable for the horses. At each station, riders would change to a fresh horse. Every seven to ten stations, a new rider would take over. It took around 75 horses to make one complete trip. The entire route was almost 2,000 miles long and stretched from St Joseph, Missouri, across Nebraska to Fort Laramie in Wyoming, on to Salt Lake City and Carson City, Nevada and then through the Sierra Nevada mountains to Sacramento in California. From Sacramento the mail was put on a steamer that traveled down the Sacramento River to San Francisco.

The service was brilliantly organised, but on October 24, the transcontinental telegraph line was completed and the first message was tapped out. It was now possible to get a message from Washington, D.C. to California in just a few minutes. Overnight, the Pony Express had become obsolete. Russell and his partners went bankrupt two days later, and the Pony Express was consigned to history.

In its 18 months of operation, 308 runs were made each way, delivering 34,753 pieces of mail. It became a legend of history because of its spirit of adventure.