Pony Express Route
Churchill County, Churchill County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Pony Express Route 1860 Sesquicentennial 2010. One hundred and fifty years ago, the Pony Express was founded by W.H. Russell, Alexander Majors and William B. Waddell, operators of the Overland Stage Line of Leavenworth, Kansas. During a visit to Washington, Mr. Russell was urged by California Senator William Gwin to expand the Overland Stage operation to facilitate faster mail service. Mr. Russell’s partners hesitated due to projected high costs; he persevered and the first ride began on April 3, 1860.Overland stagecoach stations were located every 10-12 miles as far as Salt Lake City. Eighty skilled and experienced riders, 400 horses and approximately one hundred-eighty-four stations were built in two months. There were thirty stations across Nevada, from Deep Creek, Utah to Genoa at the eastern base of the Sierra. The swift riders carried the mail 2000 miles in 10 days from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California. The “Pony” improved nationwide communication, western expansion and was credited with California’s continued participation in the Union at the beginning of the Civil War.A high price was paid for the improved communication including the cost to post a letter and the trials of the employees during the ride. The cost of mailing a letter as advertised was not economical, “letters less than ¼ oz cost $5.00 and so on.” The riders, station masters and division agents faced hostile environments including poor housing, extreme heat and cold, poor access to potable water, food and dangers due to the conflicts between Native Americans and the newcomers to the West.On October 24, 1861, the telegraph was born and the last ride was completed. What had taken ten days could be achieved in ten seconds thus ending the Pony Express, but the memory of the riders and the route live on.STATE OF NEVADA HISTORICAL
Erected by Nevada Bureau Of Land Management
The Story
Founded in 1860 by freighting partners W.H. Russell, Alexander Majors, and William B. Waddell, the Pony Express strung roughly 184 relay stations across 2,000 miles between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California — thirty of them across Nevada. Eighty riders and some 400 horses carried the mail in about ten days, an astonishing speed for the era, though the five-dollar postage and the brutal conditions of heat, cold, thirst, and frontier conflict made it costly in every sense. When the transcontinental telegraph was completed in October 1861, the service that had taken ten days was rendered obsolete in ten seconds.
Why it matters
For eighteen months the Pony Express knit a divided continent together, keeping distant California bound to the Union on the eve of the Civil War and becoming an enduring symbol of Western grit.
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Related people
- · William H. Russell
- · Alexander Majors
- · William B. Waddell
- · William Gwin
Related events
- · Completion of the transcontinental telegraph, 1861
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Stillwater
Churchill County, NV
Named for the calm pools nearby, Stillwater took shape as an overland stage station in 1862 — two years before Nevada's statehood — gained a post office in 1865, and became Churchill County's third county seat in 1868. Its population peaked around 1880, and when the seat moved to Fallon in 1904 barely thirty residents remained. Though its town center is gone, the valley's fertile fields still testify to its pioneer ranchers, and the 163,000-acre Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge, created in 1949, now adjoins the Stillwater Indian Reservation.
Ragtown
Churchill County, NV
Ragtown was never truly a town but a beloved oasis on the Carson River, its name drawn from the pioneer laundry draped across every bush by emigrants who had just survived the Forty-Mile Desert. For thirst-crazed travelers and their animals, the cottonwoods lining the river were the first water after the trail's most dreaded crossing. In 1854 Asa Kenyon set up a trading post nearby, and through the 1850s and 1860s Ragtown ranked among the most important stops on the Carson branch of the California Trail.
Hazen
Churchill County, NV
Hazen sprang up in 1903 as a rough-and-tumble camp housing laborers on the federal Newlands irrigation project, one of the first reclamation efforts to green the Nevada desert. When the railroad to Tonopah arrived in 1905 and the Southern Pacific built a roundhouse and depot the next year, the town of hotels, saloons, and brothels boomed—alongside a reputation for lawlessness that included the 1905 lynching of 'Red' Wood. Fire nearly wiped it out in 1908, and the town named for Civil War general William B. Hazen never fully recovered.
Buckland's Station
Lyon County, NV
Samuel S. Buckland settled here in 1859, starting a ranch, a station for the Overland Stage Company, and a tent hotel, and building the first bridge across the Carson River below Genoa. In 1860 his station became the assembly point for volunteers in the Pyramid Lake War and a remount stop on the Pony Express. He later ran a store supplying soldiers at nearby Fort Churchill, and built his two-story house from timbers salvaged when the fort was dismantled.