is momentous trip. The document was
carried through from St. Joseph to Sacramento--1966 miles--in just
seven days and seventeen hours, an average speed of ten and six-tenths
miles an hour. And this by flesh and blood, pounding the dirt over the
plains, mountains, and deserts! The best individual performance on this
great run was by "Pony Bob" Haslam who galloped the one hundred and
twenty miles from Smith's Creek to Fort Churchill in eight hours and ten
minutes, an average of fourteen and seven-tenths miles per hour. On this
record-breaking trip the message was carried the six hundred and
seventy-five miles between St. Joseph and Denver[13] in sixty-nine
hours; the last ten miles of this leg of the journey being ridden in
thirty-one minutes. Today, but few overland express trains, hauled by
giant locomotives over heavy steel rails on a rock-ballasted roadbed
average more than thirty miles per hour between the Missouri and the
Pacific Coast.

The news of the election of Lincoln in November 1860, and President
Buchanan's last message a month later were carried through in eight
days.

Late in the winter and early in the spring of 1861, just prior to the
beginning of the war, many good records were made with urgent Government
dispatches. News of the firing upon Fort Sumter was taken through in
eight days and fourteen hours. From then on, while the Pony Express
service continued, the business men and public officials of California
began giving prize money to the Company, to be awarded those riders who
made the best time carrying war news. On one occasion they raised a
purse of three hundred dollars for the star rider when a pouch
containing a number of Chicago papers full of information from the South
arrived at Sacramento a day ahead of schedule.

That these splendid achievements could never have been attained without
a wonderful degree of enthusiasm and loyalty on the part of the men,
scarcely needs asserting. The pony riders were highly respected by the
stage and freight employees--in fact by all respectable men throughout
the West. Nor were they honored merely for what they did; they were the
sort of men who command respect. To assist a rider in any way was deemed
a high honor; to do aught to retard him was the limit of wrong-doing, a
woeful offense. On the first trip west-bound, the rider between Folsom
and Sacramento was thrown, receiving a broken leg. Shortly after the
accident, a Wells Fargo stage happened along,