Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 July 1890 — RACING ACROSS THE PLAINS. [ARTICLE]

RACING ACROSS THE PLAINS.

' Thrilling Memories of the Famous Pony Express * err ice. Kansas City Times. J There is ever a charm about that ! which relates to the West in ante- | helium times. It was not the same | West as now; the sun is just as bright, 'maybe, and the grass and trees as green, and the waters as clear; but j when the iron wheels of progress swept over her sandy plains'and scaled her mountain tops, there was a change. It is indefinable, for all that, but still one likes to read of the stirring times of the border hardships mmita. ments and of the gradual giving away of nature to the hand of man. A man of middle age may look back within his memory and see the heavy, slow \ freighters measuring their squeaky way across the plains; the Santa Fe trail within his memory wound, serpent i like, from the banks of the Missouri at this city to the lonely Spanish settle- j meat in New Mexico. One by one he saw the relics of earlier days slip out j of existence toward the setting sun, \ the railroad and the telegraph pushed their way from the east, and the pioneer glories of the great West, ware, over. One of the last, and, at the same i time, the most prominent of those feat- 1 ures of the West before the railroads ' and the telegraph came, was the pony : express, by the means of which mes-> sages were oarried from the Missouri river to the Pacific coast in less than j ten days. How remarkable it all seems now ! Ten days from the Missouri to . the Golden Gate on pony back. But, ItTs remarkable after all. Now it is ( ten seconds, but for ponies, over; mountains, plains, through storms and sun, the work was wonderful. One of the founders of the pony express system, eves in this city at a ripe but active old age, prominent in business, and as bright as in the days of his j youth. Col. Alexander Majors is 70. For years he was a member of the firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell, of Leavenworth, Kan., perhaps" the most prominent freighting house in the 1 West in the days before the railroads j came. It was in 1858 that Senator Gwynn, of California, known aa * ‘Duke” Gwynn, by reason of some title conferred upon j him in Mexico, conceived the idea of transmitting the mails across the; plains on swiftly running ponies. Senator Gwynn, by the by, was killed in California, before the war, in a duel with the famous Broderick. Gwynn thought the coast deserved a better mail service than that afforded by the stagecoach route through ern Territory by way of Los Angeles, and he went to Washington with his mind full of plans for a pony service directly across the country, over what was known as the central route. He was laughed at by his colleagues, however, and told that an all-the-year round service across the middle Rockey Mountains, through Colorado, Nevada and Utah, would be an utter impossibility. Nothing daunted, Senator Gwynn sought .Col. Russell, who spent a great deal of hietime in Washington, and the two worked out a plan for the service. The fact that Russell, Majors and Waddell were the heaviest freighters in the West suggested that the firm would give a good service in the new venture. Assistance from the Government was secured, and in 1859 the ponies were started. “They ran across the country for nine months,” said Col. Majors, a few days ago, “never missing schedule time at either of the terminal points. The given time from St. Joseph to Sacramento was ten days, and through sunshine and storm, snow, mud, sand and rocks, the hardy racers pushed on to the west, or back to the east, with the speed of a railroad train. If the ponies lost time through bad weather over one part of the route, they picked it ap on another. On a journey of two thousand miles some of the weather was bound to hq good. The most noteworthy piece of work performed by the ponies.” continued Col. Majors, “was in the delivering of ono of President Buchanan’s messages in a few hours over eight days. The message was received in St. Joseph by wire, immediately placed on light manifolding paper and given to the messenger. The pony was off like the wind. Forty of the little fellows were required to do the work, and it was done to the Queen’s taste. But the telegraph came soon,” said Col. Majors, sadly, “and that broke the pony’s back. Later the railroads came, and we had to close up our business.” At Leavenworth, Kan., the rusty old sign bearing the names Russell. Majors & Waddell mas»yet be seen on a building at the corner of Shawnee and Main streets. Col. Majors, who is Vice President of the Kansas City ! Mining Exchange, is the only survivor of the firm. John W. Waddell died a number of years ago, and Wm. H. Russell passed away in St. Louis over a decade since. The pony express employed about 600 of the hardy little animals indigenous to the West. Post houses were maintained every ten miles, at which several of the ponies were always kept. The run for each animal was ten miles without a rest. And it was a run, too. Not a step of the way was walked or trotted. Foß.ten miles the rider urged his carrier, and the horse fairly flew over the familiar ground, whether it was mountain or prairie, plain or desert. Each rider rode three horses without resting and there was one fellow, a loose, easy-going, dare-devil who always rode sixty miles at that breakneck speed without resting. At the post house the man in charge stood 5 in front of the door holding the chunging pony that was to carry the ap- . proaching rider. With a rush the ex. ! pressman came. There was a cloud of dust, a jump, an instantaneous change „ °i lb® Bmall, light saddle bags carried, and in ten seconds from the moment

!of his arrival the rider was on the ■ rearing little animal that was so anx- ' ious to be off. Away they went with a plunge and a shout, to be lost a .moment later in a cl6ud of flying dust The ponies entered ’ into the spirit of their work quite as fully as the men bestride them. They "never faltered, whether the night was dark or the road uncertain. It was always a plunge ahead as if on a ride where life and death were concerned. In his “Roughing It” Mark Twain ! tells of his first and last sight of the j pony’express from a stage coach window. The humorist pays a high trib- ! ute to the plucky little horses and=4he da ring della wawhorode them, dosing thus: * *So sudden ie it all, and so like a flash of unreal fancy, that but for the 1 flake of white foam left quivering and perishing after a vision had flashed by and disappeared, We might have doubt;ed whether we had seen any actual : man pr horse at all. maybe.” j William Cody, “Buffaloßill, ’’had his : first experience on the plains as a pony j express rider at the age of 18. He rode over a route that lay just along i the eastern slope of the ' Roqkies. He was considered one of the bravest of jail .Ike h i ave Jot. "" The precious stuff carried by these \ messengers was made up of business t communications of the greatest imf portance. No love letters, freighted' i promises and verses ever weighed the , ponies and no bulky newspapers were carried as mail. The ponies were j lightly shod, if they wore any snoes at all. The riders were clothed as . simply as the weather would allow, and [ every message conveyed was written on the thinnest of paper and folded in;to the least possible space. The messages were placed in light saddle bags which were thrown over the small racing saddles used. The hags were the only thing changed, the new pony always having stood, saddled, ready for the expressman to jump on his i back. Li- ■■ The ponies started from Sacramento and St. Joseph daily, so that there was a continuous procession of the little racers extending both ways across ! the great West. Despite the fact that $5 a letter was charged as expressage, the scheme lost money for its managers and Col. Russell died a poor man, I largely as a result of efforts to mainI tain the pony express. The telegraph | came about the time the ponies began 1 paying for themselves, and with it came the ead of one of the mpat remarkable institutions in the always wondrous annals of the great West. No Sunol, Axtell, or Palo Alto ever received better care or more petting than these wild, tough ponies of the plains, and in their rough, bighearted way the miners and pioneers choered the littled fellows as they sped along, and in every camp and within every stockade their virtues and wonderful work were lauded to the skies. The Human Hair, Gook Housekeeping. Hair fropa adult heads, if pure in color, especially pure white, which being the court color throughout Europe, and a mark of distinction in adult life everywhere, is very valuable, and in great demand. If of unusualength—say above four feet—it is all most priceless, and it is related that one Parisian woman, whoso hair had reached the length of six feet, refused an offer of 5,000 francs for it. The present market value of pure white hair, of line texture, in France, l» about 500 francs per ounm, and the price is constantly advancing. Next to the pure white, and even vieing with it, the most valuable shade is that of “virgin gold.” Although, us stated in the preceding number of Good Housekeeping, the craze for dyeing and changing the color of the hair seems at present to have much abated, there is no doubt that pure gold is the favorite color at this tiriie, and where nature bestows the proper shade, and it can be “assisted" by the addition of othei tresses of the same bye to appear in (Quantity, happy is the pos sessor. It is reported tout in the days of her pride, Empress Eugenio, of France, paid 1,000 francs per ounce for a braid of golden hair which exactly matched her own. However, science again comes to the rescue with the assurance that not only is black hair becoming les9 plentiful, but that red is also doomed to follow, and in the course of time—which none of us are likely to see, by the way —all shades have merged into a dark, rich brown, which will become the universal hue of the American hair. Cancer Cared by Klectricfty. A young English physician, attached to the Chelsea Hospital for Women, | has invented and used, it is said with i success, a machine which* in case of cancer, will direct a current of electricity against a dis ased cell strong enough to destroy it, and at the same time will not injure a healthy cell Those that are destroyed are said tc turn into a hard substance, tnnt remains without causing arydneonven ienee. This is a v-'ry important application of electricity, if the account is a true one. and our American physicians should investigate it. We are compelled to express some skeptisLm. Value (ft PdMt inter Train. But few persons who view a passenger train ss it goes thundering pt't have an idea that it represents a cash value of from $75,000 to 41*' 1, 000. but such is the co.se. Ihe oidi.iarv ex ' press t ,- ain represents from SBB,OOO S9O 000. The engine and tender arc valued at SiO,SOG; the baggage car, $1,000; the postal car. $2,0d0; the i smoking car. $5,000; two ord ! nary passenger carß, SIO,OOO end. three palace cars. $x5.000 etoh<—’ctoi V38,000. Many cf the tmies wt-ivn pul: ' up to or out from the 6«ae»* Central Depot are worth 008