The Story of the Pony Express

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he Pacific Coast. It was a system by means of which messages were carried swiftly on horseback across the plains and desert

he greatest importance in binding the East and West together at a time when overland travel was slow and cumbersome,

h it preceded nine years. It, in fact, proved the feasibility of a transcontinental road and demonstrated that such

n, the horse. The history of this organization should be a lasting monument to the physical sacrifice of man and beast in an effort

s, on behalf of the South, had introduced his famous resolutions in the Senate of the United States. This document was the ultimatum of the dissatisfied slave-holding commonwealths. It demanded that Congress should protect slavery throughout the domain of the United States. The territories, it declared, were the common property of the states of the Union and hence open to the citizens of all s

e Democratic platform of 1860 which led to the great split in that party, the victory of the Republicans under Lincoln, the subsequent secession of the more

For generations the two sections had been drifting apart. Since the middle of the seventeenth century, Mason

wo thousand miles from the Missouri river which was then the nation's western frontier, this intervening space comprised trackless plains, almost impenetrable ranges of snow-capped mountains, and parched alkali deserts. And besides the

erable population, great natural wealth, and unsurpassed climate and

sion which would afford her a strategic base for waging war against her northern foe; it meant a romantic field in which opportunity might be given to organize an allied republic of the Pacific, a power which would,

d this region would give the North a base of operations to check her opponent in any campaign of aggression in the far West, should the South presume such an attempt. A

s in retaining California for the Union, and in helping incidentally to prese

perations of the Pony Express involved, its identity with problems of nation-wide and world-wide importance make its story see