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The Pony Express: St. Joseph to Sacramento

For eighteen months in 1860 and 1861, relays of light riders on fast horses carried letters 1,900 miles from the Missouri River to California. It took about ten days, was never profitable, and was made obsolete by the telegraph within a year and a half — yet it became one of the great legends of the Old West. The route follows the mail west through eight places: the stables where the first rider set out, a surviving station in Kansas, Fort Kearny, Julesburg, the plains where Mark Twain saw a rider flash past his stagecoach, Utah, the Nevada desert and the terminus in Sacramento. Where legend (Buffalo Bill, Twain's eight days) outruns the record, the text says so.