Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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The Pony Express was in sections the same old trail the Astorians had followed, the fur traders and the Oregon Pioneers and the California Argonauts; but its era was short and glorious as a meteor blazing out of the night and back into the dark. “The Boulevards of Steel”—as Miss Pack describes them—took the mail contracts and the telegraph lines, which the Indians first feared as “bad medicine” and then cut down to defeat white man movements, gained much of the Pony Express Mail business; but few episodes in the West are so crammed with thrills—human thrills, too, not “colicky” bull-frog dilations. Just before the Civil War, Fort Kearney, west of Omaha, was counting eight hundred wagons with ten thousand oxen passing a day. How many people were in each wagon is pure guesswork; but the cost and uncertainty of mail post-offices in old plug hats and buffalo skulls and wagon-boxes was no joke. Letters might cost from five dollars to fifty cents from New York to the Pacific Coast. They might require six months in transit or a year. It was a joke that as many of the Western Territories were organized, their representatives in Washington might not receive mail from constituents till the term had expired.