Shorty Carries the Mail

In an Arizona canyon shack a few weeks ago a cowboy cooked eggs and made coffee. Breakfast over, he saddled a pony and rode up-canyon. It was still dark. At daybreak he dismounted in front of a small, wooden U. S. post office. Back with a mail-sack, he settled himself firmly in the saddle and kicked his pony off into country that shames hell's craggiest canyon.

The cowboy was Shorty Neal, the sack held the United States mail, the post office was called Sombrero Butte and he was headed for Copper Creek.

Shorty was riding the mail pony express for the last time it will ever be ridden. He was riding it between two Arizona towns which have held out for half-a-century against an ever-encroaching civilization.

War, modern engineering and improved road making machinery have conspired to put Shorty out of a job and end the last hangover of transportation's most colorful era.

In days when railroads were new-fangled, automobiles unheard of and people were not sure that even the bicycle Was there to stay, the Pony Express rider was of a breed apart. He lived in the saddle, ate on the run, wore out a dozen horses a day, slept in a stable and drank raw whiskey and ran horse races for a pastime. Death from an Indian arrow was an occupational disease and he managed to get the mail a hundred miles farther by sundown.

The Pony Express was spurred into existence by the daring of men whose business sense was intoxicated by the lusty fever of the California goldfields. With its living chain of foam-flecked ponies and riders racing madly across the continent, it was the most spectacular venture ever made in an age accustomed to the spectacular. Privately sponsored, even its losses were spectacular; its bankers sank hundreds of thousands of dollars into its brief life span of 18 months. When Johnny Frey dug a spur into an already impatient pony and ran headlong out of St. Joseph, Missouri, 85 years ago, the calendar read: April 3, 1860. He was carrying the air mail for your grandfather's grandfather. In no other period could there have been bred so fantastic a fiasco. Fiasco it was, in the business sense; yet, as long as there are Americans to appreciate bravery, courage, audacity, romance and thrilling adventure, the Pony Express will have its place in man's book of admiration. From that day in April, 1860, until the last rider flung off his sweat-soaked saddle, there was never an hour but somewhere, along the 2,000 mile trail, an epic story was being born.

Typical of the men it took to ramrod the Pony Express through on its breath-taking schedule was Joseph A. Slade, toughest boss of the toughest division. Ambushed by the man whose place he had been sent to take, Slade soon recovered from a load of buckshot and returned with guns ablaze. He caught his rival, had him tied to a post in a corral and used him for target practice. He cut the ears off the riddled carcass and cured them. Using the dried ears of his predecessor as a badge of identity and authority, Slade raged up and down the trail, startling bartenders by reaching into a vest pocket and flinging one of the ears on the mahogany, asking for change as he did so. Slade's two-fisted, two gunned methods of administering the business of the express company became legendary throughout the west. One pioneer, drinking with Slade, for some unknown reason turned to him and said: "I dare you to shoot me."

It was the last dare he ever made. Slade immediately drew and fired. Military officials, who were the only law-men of the time, evidently thought that had been provocation enough, for Slade was never punished.

Wanton as some of his killings now appear to have been, he was the only man who ever succeeded in keeping a semblance of order along the trail. His bravery was outstanding even among men to whom derring-do was common. He once tracked four men whom he suspected of having had to do with a holdup, to a ranch house; he drew his gun, kicked in the door and started firing. He killed two and fatally wounded a third. The fourth jumped out a window and ran for his life. Slade leaned out the window and dropped him in his tracks.

His favorite and only sport was to go on a spree and wreck a saloon. His method never varied. He would drink until "the spirit moved him," whereupon he shattered all the mirrors, drove out all the customers and shot out the lights. This he indulged in periodically, never failing to apologize and pay for damages when sobered up.

Playing hard, fighting hard, working harder this was the kind of spirit it took to force the express across a country peopled for the most part with two groups: vicious out-laws and Indians on the warpath.

The feats of horsemanship needled to life by the hypo-dermic charge that "the mail must go through" will never be equalled. Time has eaten away most of the records and much has been forgotten; but rides which today would excite the nation were then accepted as commonplace. A cowboy today considers thirty-five to forty miles as a hard day a-saddle. The supermen who rode the Pony regularly did 75 to 100 miles and sometimes, when an Indian arrow had killed his relief rider, rode double that. Thirty miles or so was nothing to such a courier. He would travel that far just to get a good breakfast. "Pony Bob" Haslam is on record as having ridden 380 consecutive miles, not leaving the saddle for 36 hours.

From Missouri to California, these hardy horsemen pounded across the country at top speed, changing horses every 10 or 15 miles, with two minutes allowed for a change. Blizzards, mountain ranges, hostile Indians and outlaws were brushed aside, fought off or outrun by riders who kept to a schedule people set their clocks by.

The horses, picked for their speed and stamina more than for their ease of gait, were generally wild and commonly "broke in two" on being mounted. This was accepted by the Pony rider as a break in the monotony. With a raking spur he lined him out on a dead run and was thankful for a spirited horse.

East to west and west to east, day or night, summer or winter, twenty riders young, small, lithe, were in the saddle carrying news that has since made stirring history. South Shorty makes his way past Sombrero Butte and to his shack where a nearby stream affords a refreshing spot for him and his horse.

Carolina Secedes! Fort Sumter Fired On! Lincoln Elected! Civil War!

The bulk of the mail, carried at $5.00 the half-ounce in the cantinas (pockets) of the mochila (leather saddle covering), was news releases and, when news was breaking, the chain of riders quickened pace, cutting days from the ten day coast-to-coast schedule.

Five dollars for half an ounce did not amount to much to men who paid "a buck and a quarter for a bowl of stew and six bits for a hunk of pie," particularly when that five dollars meant quicker news from home. Yet stiff as the tariff was, the expense of keeping up the string of horses, riders and attendants at stations all along the route was stiffer.

The Pony continued to sink deeper and deeper in debt each month of its action-packed life. When the last hoof beats had been stillled by the clacking of the transcontinental telegraph, it was estimated that the Pony had cost almost half a million dollars, an uncommon sum in the 1880's. It had been a colossal gamble. With a million a year postal contract in the pot, the promoters of the Pony anted up an idea which was to cost them their shirts. Coast-to-coast in ten days! It was incredible!

At the time the Pony was first quirted into life there was a fiery rivalry between two transcontinental stage companies, the Central Overland (later to become Wells Fargo) and the Butterfield. The colorful freighters of the Central Overland, in a dramatic bid for the mail contract then held by Butterfield, tied the nation together with the galloping hoofs at a time when seeds of internal unrest were swelling to split it in civil strife. The gold, men and horses they had thrown into the gamble were lost when the contract was again awarded to Butterfield by a congress which had consistently refused to admit that the Pony was superior to its clumsy attempts a postal delivery which shuttled the mail at a snail's pace of sometimes three months from New York to San Francisco.

In its 79 weeks of operation the Pony sped the mail twice weekly for a total distance which would reach around the world 25 times. Each of those weeks cost between five and seven thousand dollars. Yet no one who read his news under the dateline: By Pony Express smirked at the Pony. It was adventure and romance on a scale which could satisfy even the rapacious appetities of the gold-seekers. When the singing wires and clicking keys of the telegraph company, later to become Western Union, carried to San Francisco the first congratulatory messages from Washington, the Pony Express was at an end. The calendar read: October, 1861. There were few among men who did not sense with regret the Pony's passing.

The quick clatter of staccato hoofbeats was not completely silenced. The tentacles of the mechanized age had not yet spread up the canyons in the by-ways. It still remained for the Pony to pick up the flimsies from the end of the wire and spread it to the men and women who were building the other side of America.

The same "Pony Bob" Haslam, who had made the record race across 380 miles of rugged country in 36 hours at the peak of an Indian war, was found as late as 1868 pushing a pony across the wilds of Nevada between Reno and Virginia City. "Pony Bob" was probably the most colorful of all the employees of the Pony Express among which were Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody. Haslam - the man who once flung himself and his pony at full gallop through the middle of more than a score of armed and hostile Indians - only reneged on one ride. After the Pony Express had been discontinued, he was riding the mail in Idaho between Queens and Owyhee rivers, when a Mo-doc Indian war broke out and Bob, at the start of a run, counted 90 dead in the first ten miles. He turned back. He was not, he said, that ready to quit riding. A more fool-hardy successor was found and was killed before he reach-ed a relay station.

So it was not until 1945 that the final chapter of the Pony Express could be written. When Shorty Neal saddled up and rode off into that Arizona canyon a host of gallants were at his heels. In country where it had been thought impossible to build a road Shorty had been carrying the mail-on government contract by pony. The stepped-up demand for minerals to feed the maw of the Second World War forced a ribbon of road across the country between Sombrero Butte and Copper Creek, two Arizona mining towns, and a Ford replaced the pony.

Nowhere today in the United States is the mail being carried by pony. It is highly unlikely that it will ever be carried that way again since America's youngest state is now mechanized. But the fire that shot from a pony's heels as it ran at midnight across the nation crept into the hearts of men who could appreciate adventure and romance. It still burns brightly. A tale of the Pony never goes begging for a listening ear.

The Alta California, an early San Francisco newspaper, published an editorial the day after the official end of the Pony: "Suspension of the Pony Express Wells, Fargo & Co., having received a dispatch from the East directing the stopping of the Pony Express, that active animal may be considered as withdrawn from the Overland course. Peace to his manes!" Peace, indeed, to his manes.