Читать книгу The Overland Trail - Agnes Christina Laut - Страница 9

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There is no mistaking the appropriateness of the Indian names from now on, “Omaha—Above the Waters,” “Nebraska—Shallow Waters,” and “the Platte—Flat-Muddy-Bottoms.” You realize that whether you go on from Kansas City over the Overland Trail by rail or motor; and Council Bluffs hardly needs its name explained. There, under the self-same oaks where Lewis and Clark spread their awning and met the Indian chiefs of a dozen tribes a hundred years ago, you can park your car below the high bluffs and think about the past and the future of the two cities on the heights above the flats. The rivers, themselves, here, are not wide, but from ledge to ledge where the cities stand, it is about eight miles. As in the Kansas Cities, the dividing state line between Iowa East and Nebraska West is right on the viaduct highway.

It is worth while to pause on this viaduct, too. You can see where the river below has shifted its tortuous course twice in a century—once in recent years, once in what became known as the great Madrid earthquake about a hundred years ago. No city was possible on the flats but it was feasible to find foundations for bridges, though you can see where one bridge planned had to be abandoned, with piers left standing, because engineers could not overcome the quicksand bottoms. It is plain, too, why General Dodge and President Lincoln had to choose this spot for the crossing of the first great transcontinental. Northwest, the Missouri Channel widens to a lake seven miles across. Though in two states with separate civic governments, commercially the two cities may be regarded as one, Omaha with over two hundred and sixty thousand people, Council Bluffs with more than sixty thousand.

Again telescoping the mind back to the old days, you can see why the Astorians, following soon after Lewis and Clark, avoided the great circle of the Missouri as well as the raids of Blackfeet north, and came to grief in the Rocky Mountain passes westward of the Platte. You see why missionary and colonist essayed to cross the plains overland rather than attempt any river route by canoe and rowboat. To have followed the river routes would have been akin to tracing the course of a long wriggling snake. The best air line was directly west.

Be it acknowledged frankly, both cities show signs of having suffered declines—perhaps I should say setbacks—following the War; but as the causes of the setbacks are also the causes of the comebacks, the swing of the pendulum is worth analyzing.

Let it be acknowledged frankly also—Panama is working a silent inevitable revolution in the Middle West. Chicago is not the Middle West. It is the western terminus of the East. Draw a line down equal distances from the Mississippi and the Pacific. The 100th Meridian marks the dividing line. That is the Middle West. Canals have never lastingly helped nor hurt any other section in America. Only where they deepened natural waterways to the ocean have they created new central cities by moving the ocean farther inland; but Panama is more than a canal. It is the shortest portage between two oceans; and ocean transport is cheaper than rail as one to seven. It must always be. There is no track bed to be built. There are no rails to be bought and replaced. There are no ties to be laid and replaced. There are no track crews to go out daily and clean up the cluttered highway. There are no spikes to be driven, no weeds to be sprayed out, no washout to be repaired, no bridges, no fill-ins, no sidings, no stations every few miles, no freight sheds, no round houses, no water tanks, no freight cars to be built, repaired, no tunnels. Compare these with any corresponding costs of ocean transport. The difference totals thousands of dollars a mile in places, millions in sections with long tunnels and long bridges.

Has, then, the Middle West suffered a vital final blow from Panama? By no means. Why not? Because in that Middle West dwell sixty million people, who must always be heavy buyers of all that the factories produce. Because that Middle West is the great producer of all the staples that the whole world eats. Across it must always shuttle the carriers of what is bought and sold. Can freight rates be reduced to meet ocean rates? They cannot. Such rates would throw every carrier in the Middle West into bankruptcy. Can the waterways of the Missouri and the Mississippi be deepened and improved to move the ocean inland as in the case of the St. Lawrence up to Montreal? There is a violent controversy over that right now. The Army engineers say the Missouri and the Mississippi cannot. The civil engineers say these river highways can be improved to become cheap feeders to ocean traffic. In other words—can the Missouri which is the longest water highway in the world be humanly controlled? It is a big job. It would cost as much as Panama and would be worth as much as its cost to the Middle West in a single year. Panama required a century to be conquered. Can the Missouri be conquered in this century? Will Hoover be the Saint George to slay the Dragon Snakes, the Pythons Missouri and Mississippi? Who can answer? Sixty million people buy and sell in the Middle West. Though the Atlantic and Pacific seaboard cities enjoy advantages no inland centers can, no inland centers that are the hubs of a wheel turning round such an empire can be sufferers from a final setback. From what are these prosperous Atlantic and Pacific cities prospering? From what the Middle West buys and sells.

Other causes that came as hard back-kicks from the Great War are another example in the swing of the pendulum from low to high. Try to see clearly here. There is no use doing anything else. It is a lesson for all time. A great deal of the Middle West was settled by the thriftiest, hardest-working type of German settlers in the immigration movement from 1848 to 1870. In fact, during the Civil War, St. Louis was known as a “Dutch town.” They did not love their native land less because they came to America, but they loved the freedom of America more. I, who am of British and American ancestry, acknowledge that the aspersions cast on these people during the War were unjust. When War Bonds came to be sold, their thrift enabled them to be eager and ready cash buyers. War prices had bulged their bank accounts and the proof of their fealty to Uncle Sam was that they bought War Bonds eagerly. But War prices had also sent up new factories for hides, beef, hogs, flour, sugar; and when bonds had to be floated to expand these factories, further proof of the German-American’s loyalty was demanded—may I say forced?—to buy the bonds of these factories. One of these in the beef-packing industry went into bankruptcy, another went so close to the bankrupt dead-line that its stock fell to seven and six from a hundred and reduced one of the biggest packing fortunes in America to such a residuum that the public gasped.

With the added pressure of the banks, the Middle West thrifty German-American, to prove his loyalty, had bought these inflated factory securities. He had not bought as Americans buy—for a quick profit. He had bought to hold and lock up; and when the smash came, he was locked up all tight in bad losses, in many cases, in total losses. Now recall, too, that in the inflated period of the War, even the canny stolid German-American had also lost his head and over-expanded his holdings of live stock and farm lands. Against those the banks held his paper.

When the smash in prices came after the War, fell tragedy, dire tragedy—terrible tragedy, for those in debt, more terrible for older folk past fifty and sixty years of age. They could not live long enough to recover and swing back with the ascending pendulum of the eternal balances. Those not in debt were safe. Those in debt were caught between the blades of two scissors—debts to banks for live stock and investments, and loss on live stock hurried to market on a glut of lowered prices and sold under pressure to pay interest overdue and overdue instalments on investments. The banks, themselves, were on no easy street. They had underwritten those bonds. They had advanced money on notes to expand factory and farm. Lands that ought to have been left in pasture had been plowed up for wheat. Now wheat from dry farm areas west of the Rockies is one thing and wheat on the eastern foot-hills of the Rockies is quite another. Wheat on the dry-farm areas of the Inland Empire, the country between the Rocky Mountains and the Cascades Range, grows from the glacial silt of millions of years. Give it moisture in winter rains or snowfall, and it will hold that moisture for summer use, but the eastern foot-hills will not. They have a top humus of thin soil that grows bunch grass (buffalo grass) forever; but they haven’t a depth of soil to hold moisture. It runs off to bottom lands, which are rich as the richest; but to let shallow land revert back to pasture requires from ten to twenty years. The interval is an era of weeds high as barb-wire fences drifting in terrible tumbling waves of dry seeds spreading ruin. Then back gradually comes the grass and back comes the pasture and back comes the vast herd of cattle or sheep. Both Nebraska and Wyoming have hinterlands in the Northwest belt with thousands, yes, millions, of such acres.

Now ride round Omaha and you will read the whole story in a moving human picture film ticked off by life’s balance wheel. It is a speaking human picture, too; but it ends well; and all’s well that ends well, as Shakespeare says. You see the oozing prosperity of the banking and hotel section, but on the bridges near the packing plants, the prosperity doesn’t ooze quite so noisily as it did. Circle round the stock yards. Not gloomy, but still distinctly disturbing—stock yards being ripped up; miles of little houses for workmen, needing paint if not empty; miles of little shops looking lame and moribund if not dead. Something forced these occupants to move away. It was necessity. The Pacific Coast got many of them and gained as the Middle West lost.

But wait a minute! What is happening now? The live stock beginning to come back is rising in price weekly from ten to twenty-four cents a hundred. Those hinterlands are beginning to ship again from Nebraska and Wyoming. I think of one little German burg of perhaps two hundred people, where a gruff old burly fellow, part farmer, part banker, who is now yearly sending to market for himself and his neighbors, a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of furs and six times that value in cattle and sheep. “What do the farmers chiefly need?” I asked one taciturn old chap. “To be let alone—to cut out the middleman—cheap water rates if we can get ’em.” I have no comment to add to his answer. He hit what is called “a problem” on its head and he hit it with a mallet from annealed experience. Only you must not be surprised if some folks in the Middle West are a little sore on their banking experiences and some politicians perfectly conscientiously a little muddled on remedies.

From the present let us turn to the past long before Lewis and Clark’s day.

It will jolt Eastern feeling of aged experience a bit to realize that Nebraska and Wyoming are two of the oldest sections in the United States. As Alfred Sorenson says in his admirable narrative of Omaha: eighty years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, sixty years before Hudson came poking into New York harbor, three years before Shakespeare was born, when Queen Elizabeth of England was yet a toddling baby—Nebraska and Wyoming had been discovered by Coronado with his three hundred Spaniards and eight hundred Indians seeking the Seven Mythical Cities of Indian lore. Proof? Coronado’s own record and the fact that an antique Spanish stirrup of that date was dug up on the very streets of Omaha.

We may hate to shatter some illusions here but truth compels it. From paintings and drawings on this Spanish period, one’s mental picture is of soldiers clad in mail from helmet to leg greaves and metal boot, with a flag held high aloft and a holy padre with cross upraised in one hand. Far different was the real scene. The soldiers were for the most part ragamuffin convicts wearing little but canvas shirts belted at the waist, broad hats of Indian weave and such foot-gear as would protect from cactus spines. They were—as we know from priest annals—both lawless and evil in all their relations with the Indians; but they were armed, heavily armed with bayonets and pistols and swords. They raided Indian camps for food for themselves and forage for their poor scrubs of starveling horses. This probably explains the perpetual enmity between Spaniards and all Indian tribes. The Indians had at first regarded the Spanish as gods. Too often the gods acted like evil demons of untellable cruelty; and the young Spanish officers could not control their mutinous convict troops.

The Overland Trail is not only the longest in history, but it is one of the oldest.

While Lewis and Clark camped first ten miles below the present cities to send their scouts out to call the tribal chiefs, the council under the tent awning was held a few miles above Omaha on the west bank. If you ask yourself why Lewis and Clark’s estimate of the tribes is so much lower in figures than Catlin’s, you had better umpire the difference with the estimate of General Grenville Dodge of Union Pacific fame, who knew these tribes better than any man except General Miles. He puts their fighting force in the 1860’s at twenty-five thousand, higher than Catlin or Lewis and Clark, and he gives the explanation. He would not touch the construction of the Union Pacific without an entirely free hand on the railroad in laying the tracks up the best roadbed—the Platte—and adequate protection from the Army. He had had his bitter experience of directing Western affairs from the East during the Civil War; and on this stand he had the full support of Lincoln and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan—who knew the West as he did. He knew the Pawnees were huge fellows, tough as whalebone and ferocious fighters, though they might squat and lounge round frontier towns in rags, acting as beggars and petty pilferers. Every Indian tribe they conquered they absorbed in their own numbers, so they might speak in a dozen dialects and as many distinct languages. This accounts for Lewis and Clark’s different names and totals. Dodge had fought them first, but later employed them in the Civil War. That didn’t exempt him from their raids. Not in the least. Every tribe from the Upper Missouri to the Kansas was by Dodge’s time leagued against the white man’s advance—first, because he now knew the white men were divided among themselves; second, because from Lewis and Clark’s day, each tribe had been increasing its use of white man firearms and knew its fighting ground as the white scout couldn’t. He had learned a lot, too, from the white man—scouting, spying, semaphoring, cutting off from base supplies, weakening first by running off enemy horses—then a pounce on the encircled enemy marooned on the ocean of prairie as completely as ever crew could be marooned by pirates. Where he couldn’t beat a white force, he maneuvered to split it and defeat first one end of it and then the other. That was Custer’s undoing. Once Custer and Dodge met in a great rail office in the East. Everybody had had a good dinner and was feeling pretty “heady.” Custer was boasting any well-trained white soldier finely mounted and armed could defeat six times as many Indians. “Custer,” said Dodge in his blunt way, “that may be brave but it is no longer true. It is rash madness. You talk like a fool. The Indian has learned a lot in a century.”

But we are anticipating our story.

Lewis and Clark noted “the sand bars so rolling we were unable to steer with our oars,” “the great muddy river so rapid” below its oily yellow surface, the hot temperature at midday, the sudden fall to chill at night, the gobble of wild turkeys in the high grass of July, the wild oaks and walnuts you see today, the lonely threnody of the whippoorwill all night, the thick fogs of night and morning, which acted as such a dangerous screen for spying Indians, a little river coming in on the west called Elkhorn from a chief. Please note that name. You will meet it again presently in one of the most terrible episodes of the Overland Migration—seldom told. At or near Council Bluffs, Lewis and Clark camped under oaks, walnut, elms. When the chiefs came together, Lewis and Clark found the Pawnees had many lodges, many clans, many tribes—Wolf Pawnees from the Platte well named; Kites back from the river, so called because they rode so furiously that their passing raiders were like hawks pouncing on victims of “extreme ferocity,” never yielding in battle. It was the first week of August the council was held. The Indians expressed joy because they “wanted firearms.” Of course they did, and you will learn how they used them for half a century.

About sixteen to twenty miles north of Omaha, General Henry Atkinson from 1821 to 1828 held his Fort Atkinson as a sort of breakwater to hold these Pawnees in check till, the flats proving too unsafe, the fort had to be moved down to Leavenworth. Atkinson is another of the old soldier heroes whom Fort Leavenworth has as completely forgotten as though he had never existed.

Then began to drift past the Bluffs the fur trade up the Platte because it was shorter than up the far Northern Missouri from the river route across to the headwaters of the Snake; and after the fur traders came the missionaries of the 1830’s and the Pioneers of the 1840’s—then the Overland rush to California from 1848, then the rail era.

In the 1850’s, when the Oregon Massacre had temporarily stopped the Oregon Pioneer rush, the Mormon migration had been in full flood west. Kanesville—modern Council Bluffs—was the jumping-off place for the Mormons to the great unknown West. It is said at this period as settlers approached Council Bluffs (then Kanesville) the converging lines of travel to the river, the covered wagons resembled a great flat iron pointing to water front. There were ferries of every variety on the Missouri at this time—flatboats propelled by polesmen, which swirled and whirled like tops to the current; steamers, side-wheelers, which puffed and grunted day and night from side to side of the broad river; wagons calked with tar and tallow, which were unsafe in flood waters of spring; Indian canoes, rowboats, log rafts for single passengers; and the flats below the cliffs on the west side resembled a tent city roofing every sort of frontier character from scoundrel riff-raff to such saints as the Whitmans. Crime was, of course, rampant.

Logan Fontenelle, a fur trader, by marriage had allied himself to the protection of the Pawnees. You will see his portrait in the rotunda of the Fontenelle Hotel in Omaha—a clean, strong, terribly strong face. He was finally killed by fourteen arrows in a battle defending the Pawnees from Northern Sioux. To give you an example of the ferocity of those halcyon days before white men came: an Iowa Indian had killed an Omaha boy by spearing his living body to the ground. The Iowa who did it was drunk. No matter. Fontenelle’s Indian wife took an ax, watched her chance when the drunk slept off his torpor, entered the shanty where he slept, plunged the ax in the murderer’s head and escaped by jumping through the shanty window.

Five miles out on Elkhorn River, between the site of General Dodge’s first cabin and the modern city of Omaha, you will find the name on rail maps commemorating an almost unknown episode. In 1852 the flood tide of Westward Ho was at its height to Utah and California. A brutal blacksmith on his way to California had sworn he would shoot the first Indian he saw just to “have a nick in his gun.” He did. His victim was a Pawnee boy. Now when the Mormons began moving across from Kanesville (Council Bluffs) to Omaha (Florence) they had made a treaty with Big Elk for a lease of land during five years till they could move the people gradually westward; and both parties had respected and observed that treaty; but here was a frightful crime unprovoked against the Pawnees. The Mormons did not want to stain their hands by becoming hangmen. Neither did any of the other Pioneers, though crimes later along the Trail compelled them to overcome that reluctance. They handed the white murderer over to the Pawnees for punishment. The Pawnees tied him to a wagon wheel and skinned him alive. For years this gruesome spot was known as Rawhide.

Still graver was the danger to lonely outpost cabins along the Trail from white man thugs perpetrating outrages on the Pawnees and the Pawnees’ demand for blood atonement falling on these unprotected families. So great was the danger, Colonel Dodge moved his family across to Council Bluffs. Buffalo Bill at this time scout, sometimes Pony Express rider to Fort Kearney, moved his family to Fort Leavenworth. When six thousand Mormons moved across to Florence (Omaha) to begin their long trek, this suburb of the city was named after Brigham Young’s favorite wife, a relative of President Cleveland’s wife. Mormon trade was worth two million dollars a year to the little shops of what is now a beautiful suburb. Purchases by Overlanders ran at two thousand dollars a day in Omaha. Lots were selling at twenty-five dollars each or nothing to people who would build and improve. Omaha had numbered only five hundred before the Mormons came. As emigrants passed westward, the first post-office was a man’s hat. He would come from his shop and yell the name of the emigrant and hand the letter out of his hat. Farther along the Trail, a buffalo skull was marked Post-Office and letters of advance parties were picked out by following relatives. Later still, a wagon-box was rigged up with pigeonholes and set behind the counters of outfitters’ shops in whose care letters were left. It was all very primitive, but it answered.

Of course fur traders with Indian wives resented the slurs on their families by newcomers and the story is told of Peter Sarpy challenging a bully to settle the question on the spot with a duel. The bully accepted the challenge and onlookers got out of the way; but as the two duelists left the shop, Peter turned and shot out the candle. When he looked for his antagonist to pace off distances, the fellow had dived in the dark.

By the time Nebraska became a territory, 1854, a stage ran between the two cities and gaiety began to intersperse hard living.

To the barn dances came ladies from Fort Leavenworth, hoops, bustles, fine slippers, with the officers in full regalia. The old Spanish fandangoes and minuets were stepped off gracefully as in any ballroom; but on the same floor danced “mountain men” in thick boots pegged for the rocks, and in traders’ moccasins. The rough floors were not waxed. They were worse. They were cottonwood fresh peeled. Now cottonwood fresh peeled is about as glassy as slippery elm. The moccasin dancers were all right. They could keep on the perpendicular, but as the German fiddlers played faster and faster to the final whirl of the fandangoes, fiddling so their heads almost bounced from the beer barrels on which the orchestra sat, those mountain men came to awful grief. They sat down expectedly on the slippery planking. It added to the fun of the unexpected.

The first murder of a white man came from claim jumping; for titles were to a hundred and sixty acres with “squatters’ rights” till survey could be made. Ruffians used to come in, defiant of law, and jump a claim by planting a whisky bottle upside down at the four corners, just as, in stage days, in defiance of law, they would drive their wagons with a whisky bottle on the end of a pole and crossbones drawn on a flag. They proclaimed themselves land pirates and gloried in it. The first time a jumper tried tricks on a squatter’s right, he was ducked in the river. Three duckings usually cured the habit. Still, white vagabonds would run off stock and sell it to the Pawnees, or steal firearms from lonely settlement cabins and trade them to the Indians. The first policy was to pay the Indians to arrest the thieves, when the culprit would have his beard or head half shaved and be given thirty-nine lashes on the bare back. Still, no white man wanted the dirty job of flogging a human skunk. So the emigrants hired a Madagascar negro; and it is said he did his job very thoroughly. But the attacks and threats against women alone in cabins while their men were on the trail were a graver crime that had to be stopped. They would enter a cabin whetting their hunting knives against high boots and bid the wife jump to cook a meal, or hand over spare cash, or give up her absent husband’s firearms, and then if drunk or emboldened by the woman’s fear—worse was likely to follow. Where two blackguards guilty of this had been thoroughly identified, the self-called jury pronounced sentence of death; but no one wanted the dirty job of executing the sentence, or the memory that if half a dozen executioners fired simultaneously, no man would know which bullet caused the death. Again the frontier carried out law in its own way. The men weighed about the same. They were not blindfolded to spare their feelings. Two poles were erected. A crossbeam connected the tops. The criminals were placed on props. The drop noose was fastened to each neck so it would tighten and strangle—then the prop knocked from their feet. Each man’s weight strangled and broke his partner’s neck. Where the bullies had not succeeded in terrorizing a settler’s wife but had been perhaps cordially received with a pot of lye, the rascals were given so far to outrun punishment, then a vigilante committee fired at the racing heels. These methods were very effective in stopping crimes. The methods had to be drastic till law could be established and proper courts with military protection set up.

After the gold rush of 1848 set in, as many as twenty thousand were on the Overland Trail in a year, with at least eleven thousand men on horses and families under the tent of the covered wagon, oxen for beef, cows for milk trailing behind or parallel. When you add these totals to the Mormon migration and Oregon Pioneers, it matters little how many reached their destination, how many turned back discouraged, how many perished by the way. It gives a faint idea of what the Overland Trail was in the great epic of a nation.

In 1847, two thousand Mormons were on the trail, some moving with hand carts across the plains. By 1856, the Mormons were on the trail literally in thousands. That treaty with the Pawnees stood them in mighty good stead. By 1847, five thousand Oregon Pioneers were on the Trail, a thousand Californians, though gold had not become the magnet of the stampede that followed in the next few years. Wagons required rough corduroy bridges across some streams and mud holes; from which one Pawnee got a bright new inspiration. He would post himself on the bridge and demand toll to cross. A long rawhide mule whip, or rifle handed out by the wife in the covered wagon usually sent him scampering. Long dresses became Turkish bloomers. Boots were exchanged for the easier moccasin and hats for sun bonnets extemporized from superfluous petticoats to screen the face from the blazing sun and awful powder of cloudy dust.

Storms broke the heat with terrible violence of balls of lightning bouncing over the ground; but what was lightning to a peppering rain of Indian bucks’ small shot hitting the tent roof? The rains laid the dust and permitted a good wash of faces and clothing, as well as swelling the dried wagon frame threatening to rattle apart from sheer sun-scorch. Repairs could only be made at few and far intervals, we shall visit as we pass; and I do not know whether those travelers were wiser whose pace quickened to the watch word, “Faster—faster—today,” or those who slowed up to avoid breakdowns. All knew they must get across South Pass before snow blocked the way.

Lincoln was one of the most picturesque figures in 1859. He had loaned money on a mortgage at Council Bluffs. He came out to look over the ground. It was while sitting with his feet on the railing of the old Pacific House that he dug out of Dodge, the young surveyor, all the facts for a route up the Platte, which later materialized in the Union Pacific. A shaft commemorates his visit to Council Bluffs, but he was quick to see that the real Western terminus must be Omaha, and he enforced that, when he later became president.

One would give a good deal to know his thoughts as he sat with his long legs braced against the railing of the old Pacific Hotel, which you can see to this day. Lincoln was at this time an exceedingly handsome young man in spite of his ungainly lank long shambling figure. He was clean shaved. His hair was thick over his temples, brushed back. His forehead was very white, his face fuller and healthier in color than a few years later and quite untrenched by the terrible lines of care that soon after trenched eyes and forehead with a sculpture of agony. It was really the face of a young prophet. We know that even in the 1850’s, he grasped what few in the nation did—that here westward must grow up a new republic to be held in national unity at any cost. He had been an attorney for Eastern railroads and knew they must be projected across the Missouri—again at any cost, though the nation must pay the cost. He knew roads—rail and wagon—must be built and protected by troops.

I have spoken of the Pony Mail Express preceding rails. It deserves more than passing notice. It was one of the most picturesque things on the Trail. It developed some of the finest types of booted and spurred knights known to history; and nearly all have passed to oblivion or died on duty in their boots. Far as I know only one—Buffalo Bill—came down in history and he came by the showman’s route. Yet I know sons and daughters of some of those Pony Express riders, who have told me tales of their fathers, who lost a leg or arm by being frozen as they reeled off the dizzy miles in winter blizzard; but—they got the mail through and for that duty received five dollars a day and keep.

The Pony Express was in sections the same old trail the Astorians had followed, the fur traders and the Oregon Pioneers and the California Argonauts; but its era was short and glorious as a meteor blazing out of the night and back into the dark. “The Boulevards of Steel”—as Miss Pack describes them—took the mail contracts and the telegraph lines, which the Indians first feared as “bad medicine” and then cut down to defeat white man movements, gained much of the Pony Express Mail business; but few episodes in the West are so crammed with thrills—human thrills, too, not “colicky” bull-frog dilations. Just before the Civil War, Fort Kearney, west of Omaha, was counting eight hundred wagons with ten thousand oxen passing a day. How many people were in each wagon is pure guesswork; but the cost and uncertainty of mail post-offices in old plug hats and buffalo skulls and wagon-boxes was no joke. Letters might cost from five dollars to fifty cents from New York to the Pacific Coast. They might require six months in transit or a year. It was a joke that as many of the Western Territories were organized, their representatives in Washington might not receive mail from constituents till the term had expired.

Courtesy of Kansas City Chamber of Commerce

KANSAS CITY, 1855

The Pony Express began in 1860. It averaged two hundred and fifty miles a day! Look at these figures. Alexander the Great’s express riders over the best roads the East ever knew made ninety miles a day and President Washington’s Army Express did well to make twenty. Stage lines and covered wagons were already on the Trail when the Pony Express began. Miss Pack says, forty thousand emigrants were on the Trail by 1849; and those figures are nearer the truth than the ridiculous estimates of from twelve hundred to five thousand a year. One firm’s freight teams numbered six thousand wagons and seventy-five thousand oxen. Of course, the Eastern senators and congressmen ridiculed the possibility of the new fast Pony Express, but a government expenditure of two millions a year for mails did ultimately beat into Eastern heads that something must be done to connect Pacific and Atlantic to handle mails faster and cheaper. The outlay involved by the private firm undertaking the Pony Express was enormous. Cool-headed, light-weight young fellows were picked for the riders from the Missouri to the Pacific. Hardy, lean fast horses—cross-bred from best plains cayuses and domestic racing strains—were selected—our typical fine broncho, at two hundred dollars to four hundred each. Almost two hundred changing stations with four hundred helpers and eighty riders were placed at these stations. Spectators came out to cheer the riders at each way house, and one of the first races was made in nine days and twenty-three hours from the Missouri to Sacramento. Each rider’s division was limited to seventy-five miles. Saddle, bridle, saddle bags, could not exceed thirteen pounds and the mail was limited to twenty pounds a runner. Riders could not exceed one hundred and thirty-five pounds weight. Arms were two revolvers and a sheathed knife. A buckskin coat, trousers tucked in high boots and a slouch hat were the picturesque costume. The mail was tied in water-proof bags. Each rider had to take oath, “I ... , do hereby swear, before the Great and Living God, that during my engagement, and while I am an employe of Russell, Majors & Waddell, I will under no circumstances, use profane language; that I will drink no intoxicating liquors; that I will not quarrel or fight with any other employe of the firm, and that in every respect, I will conduct myself honestly, be faithful to my duties and so direct all my acts as to win the confidence of my employers. So help me God.”

Courtesy G. C. Hebard Collection

INDEPENDENCE ROCK, SHOWING AUTOGRAPHS OF DESERT TRAVELERS AND MODERN DESECRATION

Courtesy Union Pacific Historical Museum

WAGON TRAIN MOVING DOWN ECHO CANYON, BRINGING SUPPLIES TO THE BUILDERS OF THE UNION PACIFIC

Often all that the emigrants saw was a flashing horseman riding at mad speed through the dust, who waved his hat, vanished and perhaps at the next turn of the trail ran into a peppering shot of Indian bucks’ raid, which he dodged by sheer speed or ducking down on the far side of his horse. Into the night, out of the night, through winter blizzard and summer heat he rode.

Though Fort Leavenworth was the army destination of much eastbound mail, owing to growing commercial requirements, Kansas City and Omaha received and sent the bulk of the mail; and it is at these points and on the Pacific Coast, you will find the best traditions of the Pony Express service.

One night as I paused at one of the great Air Mail stations across the continent, where a hailstorm had stalled many of the young air pilots, I watched the skirts of the gale sweeping the snowy peaks in dusky majesty. I thought of Narcissa Whitman with her high dreams of a beautiful service—how she used to sing in her lovely soprano voice the hymns of her childhood home to the rough campers at nightfall; how she used to quell their wild lawless passions with memories of a childhood almost fading from their memories; how she must have watched just such sunsets amid storms and blood-red clouds; how the blaze of translucent light in the West must have seemed a paved path of consecrated glory straight to God. As I watched, the sun was setting in the blaze of a gold shield to the far West. The young aviators charting a new trail through the skies were singing lustily in rooms all down the corridor. They were not chanting Old Hundred either, but they were chanting the timeless chant of youth’s high endeavor to new trails, to new eras in human progress. Of youth’s quest there is no toll. I glanced down the head-lines of the evening paper in my lap—six dead that day among the air pilots. Yet the reckless daring of the Pony Express conquered one difficulty long ago in the 1860’s. Without the recklessness of youth, where would we troglodytes of earth be today? Where Snake Indians and Bannock Indians were—in our caves of life, of soul, of foreshortened vision. The sun was sinking. Darkness was falling in a pansy blue curtain over the snowy peaks, but before the day’s curtain had fallen over the darkening valleys, the setting sun sent a shot of light that created against the receding storm that rainbow of eternal hope for the next day; and sure enough, the next day dawn, these air birds were off in their blue-winged beautiful aeroplanes. Was it symbolic of today and tomorrow—I asked.

And again as the Mexican says—Quien sabe?

METROPOLITAN OMAHA