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Certainly not right away, maybe never.
I knew better than to point out the Pony Express operated a good forty years earlier than I’d ask about or — worse — to ask what the heck this had to do with what I’d asked. Not if I wanted answers at any point in the near future to what I wanted answers to.
But my eyebrows missed the memo, because one shot up — the traitor — and she spotted it immediately.
“The current generations believe theirs are the only ones who have responded to challenges from radical innovations, when logic dictates that previous generations have been at a minimum equally adept at such measures or we would all be residing in caves to the present time. One of the benefits of studying history is the humility it instills in us at the recognition of what previous generations have accomplished to allow us to progress to where we are now.”
I kept my other eyebrow under control, but now my mouth acted up. “Have we progressed so much? Hatreds based on where you’re from or how you worship or what you look like?”
She tipped her head at me. With her short stature, she reminded me of a bird. A bird about to peck at me with a very sharp beak.
“You are far too intelligent, Elizabeth, not to recognize that the very fact that you — and others — find such behavior unacceptable represents monumental progress from times past.”
The fact that I agreed with her put me at a huge disadvantage.
I sidestepped by asking, “What about the Pony Express?”
Okay, okay. Not a sidestep. A full-out giving way to what she clearly wanted to talk about. But only because I knew she meant to talk about what she wanted to talk about before there was any hope of getting to what I wanted to talk about.
However, I didn’t surrender completely.
I waved my little flag of knowledge by saying, “Wilson, Wyoming, was named after a Pony Express rider.”
No need to admit how recently I’d acquired that particular flag of knowledge.
She lowered, then raised her head in succinct acknowledgement of my factoid.
Then she got down to business, just not the business I was pursuing.
“The Pony Express was not merely a romantic enterprise of young men dashing across the landscape on relays of fast horses—” That sounded fairly appealing to me, though even more appealing to my brothers. I recalled considerable running around our Illinois back yard that was labeled Pony Express riding. “—but was, rather, an innovative response to a pressing need.”
“To get mail across the country.” I hoped filling in gaps might hurry along this process.
“Indeed. It required three to four weeks to send mail overland, a method subject to poor weather conditions as well as attacks from Native Americans, or months by ship from the East Coast, either around the tip of South America or to a point from which it could be conveyed across land, most commonly in Panama, then re-boarded onto a ship, with further dangers of weather and shipwrecks for those methods. By the beginning of the 1860s, with the political tensions pointing toward the Civil War, finding a more rapid method to connect the West Coast with the rest of the country became a vital challenge.
“The Pony Express was created in mere months to begin operation in April 1860, continuing for only eighteen months before announcing cessation of operations two days after the final link of the transcontinental telegraph was connected.”
“Telegraph killed it, huh?”
“It could be viewed in current terms as a startup technology that lost out quickly to a more efficient technology.”
“Which then happened to the telegraph, too.”
“The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 did not eradicate the telegram. However, its new technology and capacity did narrow the telegraph’s importance, as we see happen with once-innovative technologies in our times, as well. The telegraph’s usefulness was further eroded by the telephone. Though if one considers the need for written confirmation, one could view the fax as more detrimental.”
“And now faxes are a niche market. Point taken. But I didn’t realize the Pony Express only lasted eighteen months. All the movies, the TV shows, the books... It seemed like it was an institution. It’s certainly embedded in our cultural memory.”
“One might attribute that to the fact that the Pony Express filled a need.” Her wording indicated she had reservations about joining the one who might attribute its cultural prominence to that. “Perhaps it could be said that by securing and accelerating communication between the rest of the country and what is now termed the West Coast, the Pony Express played a vital role in the continuation of the United States spreading from sea to shining sea.”
“An east-west split was threatened?”
“The north-south split is undoubtedly more recognized, not the least because it occurred. However, the western region could have split away while the rest of the country was embroiled in the Civil War. That, however, is speculation and not, I believe, why movies are made and books written about the Pony Express.
“Its image captured the popular imagination at the time as well as later. Its prominence in the public’s imagination was not a result of happenstance. It was stirred and tended to with great acumen by William Cody, who said he had ridden for the Pony Express, as part of his selling of the West and its history wrapped in romanticism. He did, in fact, deliver messages as a boy for a precursor of the Pony Express. However, his purported heroics with the Pony Express owed far more to his and others’ adroit polishing of his exploits than accuracy. Although there were heroics displayed by a number of the riders, in addition to the endurance and skill required of their basic job.”
“Buffalo Bill Cody didn’t ride for the Pony Express, yet he’s part of the reason we remember it now?”
She declined her head in acknowledgement of my recap, though it clearly pained her to give him even that credit when he’d perpetuated inaccuracies. I empathized. Accurate is accurate.
