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October 21, 2009

Pony Express nears 150th birthday

By Christine Tibbetts

CNHI News Service



Three hand-written letters arrived in my mail a few weeks ago. Real notes. Personal and intended just for me.

I was so flabbergasted I quivered. You believe the mail might hold something special, don’t you, even though that’s rare?

People waiting for the mail in 1860 hoped so too.

Perhaps that’s why celebrating the 150th birthday of the Pony Express next year seems like a good journey. Real mail versus stuff to recycle.

St. Joseph in northwest Missouri is the place, telling the story of those 1860-61 mail riders in a wide variety of ways and serving up fine meals and museum visits along the way.

There’s more to this town and its story than the horses and their lightweight riders.

Elegant Victorian and Italianate homes line many streets in St. Jo, thanks largely to wealth earned with post-Civil War manufacturing and wholesale trades, and recently chefs, opera singers, musicians and historic preservationists have moved here from both coasts, opening bed and breakfast inns and restaurants, restoring historic homes and participating in the local symphony, theater, chorus, gardens and nature centers.

The original folks, meanwhile, have kept right on presenting their community stories in remarkable museums. Allow a couple of hours for the Pony Express National Museum and a couple of days for the Patee House Museum.

Jesse James lived and died here so his house is a museum too.

Lunch at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum and all afternoon with the 18th, 19th and 20th century American art is definitely a good plan in St. Joseph; their Western art collection is doubling thanks to a recent bequest — just in time for sesquicentennial celebrations.

Don’t eat before you go to the Glore Psychiatric Museum. Officially it was known as State Lunatic Asylum No. 2 and the story it tells about treatments for mental illness is not a pretty one.

Horses and riders can capture your attention all next year for the sesquicentennial. For all their notoriety, riders with the Pony Express had short-lived careers — April 3, 1860, was the first ride with Johnny Fry leaving St. Joseph and Oct. 22, 1861, the last.

The focus will be April 1 - 3, 2010, so go then if you like honoring history with big crowds; because St. Joseph is an interesting year-round town, I’d be inclined to show up some other time.

The drive north from Kansas City is only an hour, the KC airport is streamlined and easy to navigate and that city looks worth exploring too with loads of new downtown districts, sports and performance facilities and eateries.

Why St. Joseph? Or St. Jo and sometimes St. Joe depending on who’s in charge of spelling.

The train from the east coast reached here and no further and the stagecoach needed 2,000 miles veering north or 3,000 miles taking the southern route.

Horses with riders weighing no more than 120 pounds were faster, and with a shortcut or two, they could deliver the mail from St. Jo to Sacramento in 10 days, riding 1,966 miles.

That demanded non-stop saddle time, changing horses every 10-15 miles at relay stations and switching riders every 75-100 miles at home stations. Some business plan eh, and what an organizing challenge to set up.

They delivered 30,835 letters that way, secured in a leather bag called a mochila; it fit snugly, some say under and some say over the saddle with three locked pouches and a fourth for adding mail along the way.

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