July 22, 2025: The U.S. Postal System: The Pony Express

[On July 26, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States postal system. So this week for the 250^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and other histories and stories of the USPS, leading up to a weekend tribute to these vital federal workers!]

On three figures who helped shape the short-lived but enduringly iconic Western mail route.

1)      Alexander Majors: The Pony Express was founded by a trio of Missouri businessmen, co-owners of a freight and drayage company: William Russell, Alexander Majors, and William Waddell. But it was Majors who brought his distinct identity and perspective most fully to the enterprise: he was deeply religious, and required every Pony Express rider to carry a special-edition Bible and sign an oath “before the Great and Living God” that they would “under no circumstances, use profane language, … drink no intoxicating liquors,” and so on. Given the stereotypes of the Wild West and its occupants, images to which I would argue our cultural collective memories of the Pony Express have often been connected, this founding fact reminds us that histories are always distinct from the mythos.

2)      Johnson William “Billy” Richardson: The identity of the first Pony Express rider is disputed by historians, with Johnny Fry the other most likely candidate. By even if he wasn’t the definitive “first,” Billy Richardson was unquestionably one of the handful of riders who inaugurated the Westbound route (from Missouri to California) in April 1860, after a formal ceremony in St. Joseph, Missouri which featured speeches by Russell and Majors along with St. Joseph Mayor M. Jeff Thompson. Moreover, Richardson rode for the Express for its entire 18 months of operation, and then, coincidentally but symbolically, passed away from pneumonia just a few months after the Express went out of business in late 1861. He was buried at Fort Laramie, a Pony Express station in Wyoming, one more telling connection between this foundational rider and the route’s iconography.

3)      William F. Cody: That hyperlinked Wyoming History article traces two equally true yet also directly contradictory facts: William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody is without question the most famous Pony Express rider; and yet Cody never rode for the Pony Express. As with so much of Cody’s mythos, and of course the Wild West mythos overall, this particular myth was very much self-constructed, with Cody frequently telling and retelling the story of an iconic Pony Express ride he undertook at the tender age of 14. And that story became an enduring one in the legacies of both Cody and the Pony Express, as illustrated by author Elmer Sherwood’s 1940 children’s biography Buffalo Bill and the Pony Express. Perhaps including Cody in this post will mean that the fictitious association continues, but I don’t think we can AmericanStudy the Pony Express without including such defining and enduring myths.

Next USPStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Postal histories or stories you’d share?