Lone rider galloping through sage and sand captures imagination

It only lasted for 18 months. It never made any money. The company that started it was already having financial trouble and went bankrupt soon after. It should have been a rather small blip on the historic screen.

Yet, few things have captured the imagination, inspired such a passionate following, become so ingrained in the history of the West as the Pony Express.

That image, the one that almost everyone can close their eyes and see, of the lone rider galloping full bore on horseback through the sage and sand, has ridden into our national consciousness.

"It was a disaster in many ways, yet it has stuck with us," said Christopher Corbett, author of "Orphans Preferred," a look at how it became the story it did. "There are few things more endearing or more enduring than the Pony Express," Corbett said at a recent lecture at This Is the Place Heritage Park, held in connection with this year's Pony Express commemoration.

"It is one of those things anchored in fact but layered with a century-and-a-half of truth, half-truth, embellishment and outright lies," he said. Not that he means in any way to "debunk the heroic undertaking that it was." He is interested in how and why it became the lasting legend it did.

This year marks the 150th since the first Pony Express rider set out from St. Joseph, Mo., bound for Sacramento, Calif., with a mohila, or saddle pack, filled with mail — and rode into history.

The Pony Express was the idea of William H. Russell, Alexander Majors and William B. Waddell, owners of a freighting company that provided mail and stagecoach service between Missouri and Salt Lake City.

In 1845, it took six months for President James K. Polk to get a message to California. Since then, however, the migration of the Mormons, the appeal of Oregon and the discovery of gold in California had led more than half a million to migrate West. They not only desired current news, but also contact with the rest of the country.

Russell, Majors and Waddell thought a horseback relay of mail and news would call attention to their company, prove the viability of a central route and give them an edge in further government contracts. They formed a new company, the Central Overland California & Pike's Peak Express Company, and within a little over a month recruited riders, station keepers and mail handlers, bought a fleet of horses, food and supplies — and the Pony Express was off and running as of April 3, 1860.

Stations were scattered about every 10 miles, with home stations about every 25 miles, along a trail that stretched from the Missouri River across the plains of Nebraska and Wyoming, through Echo Canyon into the Salt Lake Valley, across the desert, through the Sierra Nevada and into California, a distance of 1,943 miles.