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Courtesy G. C. Hebard Collection

INDEPENDENCE ROCK, SHOWING AUTOGRAPHS OF DESERT TRAVELERS AND MODERN DESECRATION

Courtesy Union Pacific Historical Museum

WAGON TRAIN MOVING DOWN ECHO CANYON, BRINGING SUPPLIES TO THE BUILDERS OF THE UNION PACIFIC

Often all that the emigrants saw was a flashing horseman riding at mad speed through the dust, who waved his hat, vanished and perhaps at the next turn of the trail ran into a peppering shot of Indian bucks’ raid, which he dodged by sheer speed or ducking down on the far side of his horse. Into the night, out of the night, through winter blizzard and summer heat he rode.

Though Fort Leavenworth was the army destination of much eastbound mail, owing to growing commercial requirements, Kansas City and Omaha received and sent the bulk of the mail; and it is at these points and on the Pacific Coast, you will find the best traditions of the Pony Express service.

One night as I paused at one of the great Air Mail stations across the continent, where a hailstorm had stalled many of the young air pilots, I watched the skirts of the gale sweeping the snowy peaks in dusky majesty. I thought of Narcissa Whitman with her high dreams of a beautiful service—how she used to sing in her lovely soprano voice the hymns of her childhood home to the rough campers at nightfall; how she used to quell their wild lawless passions with memories of a childhood almost fading from their memories; how she must have watched just such sunsets amid storms and blood-red clouds; how the blaze of translucent light in the West must have seemed a paved path of consecrated glory straight to God. As I watched, the sun was setting in the blaze of a gold shield to the far West. The young aviators charting a new trail through the skies were singing lustily in rooms all down the corridor. They were not chanting Old Hundred either, but they were chanting the timeless chant of youth’s high endeavor to new trails, to new eras in human progress. Of youth’s quest there is no toll. I glanced down the head-lines of the evening paper in my lap—six dead that day among the air pilots. Yet the reckless daring of the Pony Express conquered one difficulty long ago in the 1860’s. Without the recklessness of youth, where would we troglodytes of earth be today? Where Snake Indians and Bannock Indians were—in our caves of life, of soul, of foreshortened vision. The sun was sinking. Darkness was falling in a pansy blue curtain over the snowy peaks, but before the day’s curtain had fallen over the darkening valleys, the setting sun sent a shot of light that created against the receding storm that rainbow of eternal hope for the next day; and sure enough, the next day dawn, these air birds were off in their blue-winged beautiful aeroplanes. Was it symbolic of today and tomorrow—I asked.