The Story of the Pony Express

This is a story book. This little volume has but one purpose - to give an authentic, useful, and readable account of the Pony Express. This wonderful enterprise played an important part in history, and demonstrated what American spirit can accomplish. It showed that the 'heroes of sixty-one' were not all south of Mason and Dixon's line fighting each other. And, strange to say, little of a formal nature has been written concerning it. I have sought to bring to light and make accessible to all readers the more important facts of the Pony Express - its inception, organization and development, its importance to history, its historical background, and some of the anecdotes incidental to its operation. The subject leads one into a wide range of fascinating material, all interesting though much of it is irrelevant. In itself this material is fragmentary and incoherent. It would be quite easy to fill many pages with western adventure having no special bearing upon the central topic. While I have diverged occasionally from the thread of the narrative, my purpose has been merely to give where possible more background to the story, that the account as a whole might be more understandable in its relation to the general facts of history.