When it absolutely, positively had to get there sometime next week, Americans of the mid-nineteenth century called upon the Pony Express to deliver their most urgent letters and packages. But as a business venture, the Pony Express was no FedEx. It lasted only a year and a half and cost investors a fortune. So how did the famed mail carrier become such a fixture of Western lore? Christopher Corbett, author of Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express, sorts out the unlikely merger of myth and memory that made an American legend.

Everyone has heard of the Pony Express but few know much about it. What was it really?

The Pony Express was the Central Overland California and Pike's Peak Express Company. It was started in April of 1860 and ended in October of 1861. It was an attempt to create a fast-mail delivery service cross-country. A horseman would ride a hundred miles and be relieved, changing mounts every ten to twelve miles, roughly. The enterprise was started by the freight hauling firm or Russell, Majors, and Waddell. They were, in their time, the FedEx of the American frontier. Some critics said the Pony Express was a just a publicity stunt and, in truth, the venture hemorrhaged money from Day One. It was something of a madcap idea. It worked in that "the Pony" could in fact move a piece of mail across America in ten days or less. But it always lost money, and it had a head-on collision with the Civil War and the transcontinental telegraph, which put it out of business.
The title of your book is Orphans Preferred. Tell us why you selected it.
The phrase "Orphans Preferred" allegedly appeared in an employment ad that ran in newspapers to recruit men to ride for the company. There is considerable opinion that there was no such ad, or that it may have been made up after the fact. But the memory of it--these brave guys riding across an untamed country, taking tremendous risk--eclipsed every thing else. It eclipsed the truth. So in memory these young men became orphans. I picked the title because it evokes two things: the memory of the Pony, and the mythology of the Pony.

What are some of the obstacles a Pony Express rider could expect to encounter along his route?

In 1860 there was a vast, uninhabited expanse of America between the Missouri River and the Pacific slope. With the exception of Salt Lake City, there was virtually nothing out there. So you're talking about a countryside that was inhospitable. It's interesting to note that former Pony riders, who were interviewed during the twentieth century, always talked about the weather. They didn't talk about having to fight their way through Indians or outrun desperados; they talked about it being forty below in Nebraska, riding a horse at night in January--riding in places where it was snowing so hard they had to get off and lead the horse. In terms of terrain, you're talking about crossing lunar landscapes in Utah and Nevada, where there would be no water for tremendous distances. It was a hard world. Riding for the Pony Express was a difficult and dangerous thing to do. But in the mid-nineteenth century there were people who could do it because they were born in the saddle.

Was there a particular rider who became your favorite during the course of your research?

I did a whole chapter on Robert Haslam, who was called Pony Bob. He died in a cold-water flat in Chicago in 1912, forgotten. He was an old man who had been sick. He spent his last years as a kind of porter of a hotel. But in 1861 he was arguably one of the greatest horseman of the American West. People said he could change horses in thirty seconds when, for most, it took two minutes. That's pretty quick. You are essentially getting off a horse and taking the mail pouch, and strapping it on another horse. Speed was everything. Haslam is intriguing because he was the real thing. Newspapers in Nevada and California in the 1860s wrote about him. In 1868, even after the days of the Pony Express, articles covered his career racing horses and never failed to mention his previous experience as a mail carrier. Still, he suffered the fate of the name dying before the man. He became a guy whose whole life was based on what he had once done as a very young man. And the skills that served him in the West did not translate to a city like Chicago at the turn of the century.

Given that the Pony Express ran for such a short period of time, what do you think accounts for its vaunted place in American memory?

Americans love a race and the Pony is an inspiring story. It is a story of the American West that might have been, that should have been. At the beginning of the twentieth century many of our memories of the West were painful--the slaughter of the buffalo, the decimation of the Indian, the exploitation of the land. And then here comes the Pony. The Pony is a good memory of the West. There are not many memories as sweet and endearing as the memory of the Pony.

Talk about how purveyors of American myth such as Mark Twain, Frederic Remington, and Buffalo Bill Cody used "the Pony" and perpetuated the myth.

It's interesting that a lot of these figures appeared on the stage right around the time the Pony Express actually ran. In fact, Mark Twain once saw a Pony Express rider in western Nebraska while traveling by stagecoach. Ten years later, Mark Twain wrote about it in his book Roughing It. But the pivotal figure in terms of the memory and mythology of the Pony Express is without question William Frederick Cody. Buffalo Bill worked for the firm as a messenger boy in the late 1850s. And as a man who never let the facts get in the way of a good story, Buffalo Bill made the Pony Express a fixture of his Wild West Show. All the way up until Buffalo Bill's last performance, in 1916, the Pony Express was a featured act. And Buffalo Bill's Wild West was for Americans, as well as Europeans, the history and memory of the West. That's how people came to remember the West. So Buffalo Bill is responsible for preserving the memory of the Pony, even if the facts are somewhat different from the story he told.

I'm sure you've observed the resurgence in Western subjects. There's Tom Beringer's series, The Peacemakers and Kevin Costner's Open Range, as well as a score of new Hollywood Westerns slated for release during the next eighteen months. Do you think this nostalgic return to our past provides comfort to Americans in a post-9/11 world?

I think that may be so. I believe, like the American Civil War, the story of the West is one that we will always revisit. And our times will always effect our interpretation of the story. I think the opening of the West is one of the great episodes in world history. It's a very natural thing for us to revisit it. It's interesting to note how Western films have come in and out of fashion over time. It may very well be on the upswing right now for lots of reasons, 9/11 included. But I think mainly that the West is just powerfully alluring. It is remembered as a simpler time when a man's best hope, and sometimes his only hope, was himself.