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The Pony Express is again running the 1,966 miles from St. Joseph, Mo., to Sacramento, Calif. It's an annual re-enactment, but this time they're also celebrating its 135th anniversary. At each relay station, a rider grabs the packet and gallops westward to pass it on; they plan to meet the original schedule of 10 days.
Actually, it shouldn't be called the
Pony
Express, for there was another one: the Northern Overland
Pony Express, across North Dakota and Montana in 1867 and
1868. The famous one was formally the Central Overland Pony
Express. It operated from April, 1860, until October, 1861,
when telegraph lines were completed across the
continent.
Its origins demonstrate that hustling the federal government for a subsidy is not only a modern vice. Go back to the 1850s, and you've got an America that was about to fall apart on account of sectional differences.
Some inland city was going to claim the West -- the spoils of the Mexican War -- for a hinterland. Southerners naturally preferred that this city lie south of the Mason-Dixon line, just as Yankees wanted it on their side.
The federal often government compromised -- for instance, railroad surveys of the 1840s and 50s generally ran in triplicate -- a northern, central and southern route.
When it was time to dole out real money for maintaining postal connections to California, the South was in control and made sure the routes ran across southern territory.
Before the Pony Express, the mail took 25 days via the Butterfield Overland Line, which was more than indirect. It started in St. Louis, and veered southwest to Fort Smith, Ark. and thence to El Paso, Texas, across the desert to San Diego, and then up the coast to San Francisco.
Why not a direct route? The postmaster general at the time, Aaron Brown, was a southerner. He justified his regional prejudice by claiming that blizzards would strike a northern route so service would be unreliable.
It appeared to California Sen. William Gwin that the only way to change federal policies -- that is, the awarding of huge subsidies for hauling mail and express to the West -- would be a demonstration of the year-round feasibility of the central route.
Gwin talked to William H. Russell, senior partner in
Russell, Majors & Waddell, which freighted across the
central route -- roughly, the Great Platte River
Road
as far as South Pass in Wyoming, thence to Salt
Lake City and Sacramento.
If Russell could show that the central route would operate in all weather conditions, then his firm might get those lucrative contracts away from the South.
And so, the Pony Express was actually as a publicity stunt. It succeeded at that, but it lost money for Russell, Majors & Waddell, which soon went bankrupt; the company never did get those big contracts.
By 1861, the big government contracts were in the East, anyway -- procurement for the Civil War, which settled the issue of whether the West would be organized as part of the South or the North (actually the Midwest).
Our part of the world did not become an agrarian commonwealth; it got integrated into an industrial network thanks to federal actions like the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862. Railroads running east-west got generous federal subsidies in the form of land grants; western lines running north-south, like Gen. William Jackson Palmer's original Denver & Rio Grande, didn't get that kind of help.
Now, this all may sound like mere history, interesting perhaps to buffs, but hardly relevant today. But we live with the effects of such decisions.
In 1949, Carey McWilliams observed that
Communications are of vital importance in a region of
such vast distances [the American West]. Yet the rail and
highway traffic arteries run east and west, not north and
south. This is no accident, nor is it a misfortune dictated
by geographic consideration; the mountain ranges, for
example, happen to run north and south. The plain truth is
that the West's communications were designed to serve
national rather than regional needs. The establishment of
... institutions in the West was determined, not by local
needs, but by the necessities of national ...
politics.
The result of these federal decisions has been summarized recently by Ed Marston, publisher of High Country News, who argues that the West lacks institutions that serve its regional needs.
But how could the West possibly develop as a region with institutions when it was organized so that the only way for Montana to converse with New Mexico was through Chicago or San Francisco?
Today we complain that the West continues to be treated
like a colony,
and some Western counties are up in
arms about federal land policies. What else could you
expect when the West was organized to serve some other
regions' needs, and that the West has always been operated
to serve something called the national interest
?
The roots of these issues go back a long ways, and part of the explanation is that there were federal subsidies for a Pony Express that ran from St. Joseph to Sacramento, but none for a route from Helena to El Paso.
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