Recalling the runs of fastest mail in the West

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ORPHANS PREFERRED: THE TWISTED TRUTH AND LASTING LEGEND OF THE PONY EXPRESS

By Christopher Corbett

Broadway Books, $23.95, 270 pages

REVIEWED BY BILL CROKE

California's elevation to statehood in 1850 meant that it was geographically isolated by 2,000 miles from the rest of the Union. This fact presented communications problems as mail was sent overland by wagon trains or by sea around South America's Cape Horn. In either case delivery took months.

In 1860, the firm of Russell, Majors and Waddell started a light mail relay service between St. Joseph, Mo. and Sacramento, Calif. that has come down to us as the "Pony Express." It's brief 18-month history is chronicled in Christopher Corbett's "Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express." Mr. Corbett has worked for the Associated Press and various newspapers, and this accounts for his lively and well written book.

The title -- "Orphans Preferred" -- is taken from an 1860 newspaper advertisement seeking riders. Russell, Majors and Waddell hired 80 young men "built like jockeys, weighing an average of 100 to 120 pounds," and supplied them with the fastest horses kept at over150 waystations along the route. The average age of a rider was 19; the average ride was 100 miles, with a change of mounts every 15 miles. They carried a "mochila," a saddlebag filled with just a few pounds of mail.

Joseph Frey, the first westbound rider, left St. Joseph on the evening of April 3, 1860. Early the next morning the first eastbound rider, William Hamilton, left Sacramento. This constant around-the-clock crisscrossing of the route continued for those 18 months. The Pony Express is famous for its personalities and incidents, and that has given it its legendary romantic allure in the history of the American West. Without those dashing young men on their wild rides it would have been just another mail service.