e for the west bound mail but it was
probably not so heavy.

At this time--Sept., 1861--the telegraph had been extended from the
Missouri to Fort Kearney, Nebraska, and letter pouches from the Pony
Express were sent by overland stage from Kearney to Atchison. Messages
of grave concern were wired as soon as this station was reached.

[11] These were executive divisions and not to be confused with the
riders' divisions. The latter were merely the stations separating each
man's "run."

[12] Slade was afterward hanged by vigilantes in Virginia City, Montana.
The authentic story of his life surpasses in romance and tragedy most of
the pirate tales of fiction.

[13] The dispatch was taken from the main line to the Colorado capital
by special service. Denver, it will be remembered, was not on the
regular "Pony route," which ran north of that city. There was then no
telegraph in operation west of the Missouri River in Kansas or Nebraska.

[14] Roughing It.

Chapter V

California and the Secession Menace

When the Southern states withdrew, a conspiracy was on foot to force
California out of the Union, and organize a new Republic of the Pacific
with the Sierra Madre and the Rocky Mountains for its Eastern boundary.
This proposed commonwealth, when once erected, and when it had
subjugated all Union men in the West who dared oppose it, would
eventually unite with the Confederacy; and in event of the latter's
success--which at the opening of the war to many seemed certain--the
territory of the Confederate States of America would embrace the entire
Southwest, and stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Aside from its
general plans, the exact details of this plot are of course impossible
to secure. But that the conspiracy existed has never been disproved.

That the rebel sympathizers in California were plotting, as soon as the
War began, to take the Presidio at the entrance to the Golden Gate,
together with the forts on Alcatraz Island, the Custom House, the Mint,
the Post Office, and all United States property, and then having made
the formation of their Republic certain, invade the Mexican State of
Sonora and annex it to the new commonwealth, has never been gainsaid.
That these conspiracies existed and were held in grave seriousness is
revealed by the official correspondence of that time. That they had been
fomenting for many months is apparently revealed by this additional
fact: during Buchanan's administration