Tag: pony express

The Pony Express in Nevada

In 1860 and 1861, the Pony Express delivered mail and packages from St. Joseph, Missouri to San Francisco, a distance of roughly 1,800 miles. The first westbound trip left St. Joseph on April 3, 1860 and reached San Francisco ten days later.

The mail was carried by riders on horseback. Each rider rode a shift of up to 100 miles, changing horses every ten miles or so, depending on the terrain, which influenced the distance a horse could be expected to cover at a gallop. When the rider completed his shift, he handed the mail off to the next rider, who was waiting at a relay station.

In the most remote parts of the country, relay stations were built for the purpose. One such station was at Sand Springs, Nevada. Its remains are shown in the photo below.

Horses were vital to the success of the Pony Express and the survival of the riders. The floor plan of the Sand Springs station shows how much room was devoted to those horses, and how much to the humans who rode and took care of them. (The “telegraph battery room” shown in the plan was added after the completion of the telegraph.)

When a rider emerged from his quarters at Sand Springs and prepared to mount up, no doubt he scanned his surroundings. The photo below shows what he saw — nothing but desert, relieved by a mountain or two and possibly some hostile Native Americans. Little wonder that a recruiting poster for riders specified, “Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.”

Famous riders included Robert “Pony Bob” Haslam. When he was carrying eastbound mail in 1860, Pony Bob found his relief rider at the Cold Springs station too frightened of Native American unrest to take the mail, so he continued on for a total distance of 190 miles. After resting for nine hours, he retraced his route. Returning to Cold Springs, he found the frightened rider had been right: the station had been raided and the station keeper killed. Pony Bob once again carried on. Despite being shot through the jaw with an arrow, he successfully reached his original starting point. His round trip of 380 miles was the Pony Express’s longest.

Another rider, Jack Keetley, once rode 310 miles without rest or food. When he finished that ride, relay station workers had to lift him from the saddle, because he was sound asleep on his horse.

William “Buffalo Bill” Cody also rode. He later popularized the Pony Express through his Wild West show.

During its eighteen-month lifetime, the Pony Express delivered an estimated 35,000 letters. It had competition, including the Butterfield Overland Mail, which also left from Missouri, but there was one competitor it couldn’t overcome.

The Pony Express closed on October 26, 1861, two days after telegraph wires reached Salt Lake City.

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Highway 50 follows part of the route taken through Nevada by the Pony Express riders. It passes both the Sand Springs and Cold Springs stations.

Fort Churchill, Nevada

Fort Churchill State Historic Park is south of Route 50 on U.S. Highway 95A, forty miles east of Carson City, Nevada.

A little history: After victory in the Mexican-American war in 1848, the United States annexed the land that includes the fort’s location and made it part of the Utah Territory. In 1861, the land was included in the Nevada Territory, created in response the the discovery of silver in the Comstock Lode near Virginia City. Nevada became the 36th state just three years later, on October 31, 1864. The date was chosen to provide political support for Abraham Lincoln’s second presidential election. All these events played a role in Fort Churchill’s existence.

Today the fort’s location feels remote, but back then things were happening nearby, as immigrants settled the Nevada Territory. The Overland Stagecoach line passed through beginning in 1858. In 1860, the neighboring Buckland’s Ranch became a Pony Express station. Construction of telegraph lines through the area began later that year. Most important, the Comstock Lode silver mining communities of Virginia City and Dayton, Nevada, were just over 20 miles away, and the 1859 discovery of silver brought miners and others across the mountains from California.

All this activity distressed the Native Americans living in the area, who had once occupied the land exclusively. Disputes with newcomers arose over hunting and other land rights. For example, the smelting of silver ore required large quantities of wood, which was converted to charcoal for use in the smelting process. This stripped the surrounding land of trees, and with them pine nuts, an important part of the ecology of the dry desert area, already difficult to live in. The Native Americans, dispossessed from their normal existence, became increasingly hostile.

Then, in 1860, white men based at Williams Station, a Pony Express stop in the area, kidnapped several Native American women from the Paiute tribe. In response, the Paiutes burned Williams Station and killed those they found there. This led to the formation of a force of 105 white vigilantes. Loosely organized and under the nominal leadership of William Ormsby, they set out to punish the Paiutes. The resulting battle, near what is now Pyramid Lake, did not go as the vigilantes expected. The Paiutes, led by their chief, Numaga, defeated the revenge party, killing 76 of them, including Ormsby.

Alarmed, those living and working in the nearby Comstock Lode area requested the protection of regular army troops. Fort Churchill was built to house those soldiers.

Construction of the fort began in the summer of 1860, and 58 adobe brick buildings were completed by autumn of the same year. The fort was intended to be a staging area and supply depot, so no surrounding walls were built, but the layout of the buildings in a quarter-mile square can still be seen today. It was named for Sylvester Churchill, the Inspector General of the U.S. Army, and 337 men were stationed there.

Twelve women, some of them wives of soldiers stationed at the fort, also lived and worked there. The women were “laundresses,” who washed, ironed, and mended the soldiers’ uniforms. They were paid for these services by the soldiers themselves, not the Army, but the Army required them to have a “certificate of good character.” This was intended to discourage any hanky-panky.

Even after the fort was completed, hostilities with the Native Americans continued. In 1865, Fort Churchill’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles McDermit, was killed in an ambush. At the time, he was leading an expedition against the Paiutes.

During this period, the Civil War was being fought in the states to the east, and Fort Churchill played a role in the conflict. There were rumors that Southern sympathizers arriving from California intended to take over Virginia City. The presence of Union troops discouraged them, and helped keep the new state of Nevada oriented toward the Union and not the Confederacy.

But by 1870, only ten years after its construction, Fort Churchill’s usefulness had come to an end. It was abandoned that year and sold at public auction for $750 to Samuel Buckland, the Buckland of the nearby Buckland’s Ranch Pony Express station. The fort fell into ruin, pillaged for building materials that were used elsewhere.

In the 1930’s, sixty years later, the Civilian Conservation Corps renovated the fort, and in 1970 it became part of the Nevada State Park System. Today, 150 years after it was abandoned, remnants of Fort Churchill still exist, preserved by the dry desert climate.

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Historical accounts about the origin of Fort Churchill vary. The version told here is based largely on material presented in today’s state park.