The Last Ride of the Pony Express

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For information, please contact your local bookseller or the Hachette Book Group Special Markets Department at [email protected] by Mike Reagan, www.mreaganmaps.comPrint interior design by Abby ReillyISBN 9780316422314 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934894E3-20230322-DA-NF-ORI Contents CoverTitle PageCopyrightDedicationAuthor’s NoteMapPrologueChapter 1: The Making of the WestChapter 2: A Few Good HorsesChapter 3: A Fish out of HistoryChapter 4: “You’ll always need the farmer out there”Chapter 5: A Short History of the Great PlainsChapter 6: No Country for Old WaysChapter 7: “The Mormon 500”Chapter 8: A Hundred Miles of MirageChapter 9: “They weren’t all bad—some were just wild”Chapter 10: The Final Miles of the Pony ExpressEpiloguePhotosAcknowledgmentsDiscover MoreNotes About The Author For my mother Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.Tap here to learn more. Author’s NoteIn May 2019, I set out from St. Joseph, Missouri, with two horses and a plan to ride to Sacramento, California, along the Pony Express Trail. This book is the story of what I saw, who I met, and what happened. I undertook the journey as a largescale exercise in horsemanship with the goal of achieving a boots-on-the-ground understanding of the famed Pony Express mail service. I also wanted to make a transect of the cultural West. I wanted to meet the people and learn about their lives in all the places that I’d never been to along the trail. I hope that I have portrayed those people with the same levels of respect and grace with which they treated me. I owe a debt of gratitude to everyone who helped and supported me during my summer on horseback. The journey would not have been possible without them. PROLOGUE I WATCHED THE roan horse wallow in a mudhole a mile below me. You wouldn’t have thought that amid all that wind and sky and rock of Utah’s West Desert there’d be water enough to make a mudhole, but there in front of me on a yellow plain that seared under a high sun, the dusky horse flopped from side to side, kicking its legs in the air like a dog scratching fleas. The horse’s solitude told me it was a stallion. Four hundred wild horses, known as the Onaqui herd, summer in this valley, and the only ones that range alone are mares about to foal, old horses about to die, and stallions without harems of mares. This horse didn’t look old and wild mares don’t foal in August, so I assumed he was a stallion. He stood from rolling, and when he walked out of the mud, he appeared a much darker horse. He hadn’t seen me and my two horses—Chicken Fry and Badger—enter the valley from the east, but I figured it was only a matter of time.Chicken Fry and Badger showed no signs of agitation, but why would they? For the past three months, we’d been traveling west on rural roads, past farms and ranches and suburban subdivisions, and they’d seen many horses. But those horses posed no threat; they were domesticated. This one was different.This was a wild horse, a mustang, a free-roaming member of feral equines that became part of the Western landscape after sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadors brought the first horses North America had seen since the last ice age, ten thousand years ago. The Spanish, and countless others since, lost horses that stampeded to freedom in the middle of the night or wandered off in search of fresh grass or otherwise untethered themselves from their owners. Those strays gathered in herds and became known as mesteños (Spanish for “escaped livestock”). The word was later anglicized into “mustang,” and today it’s a common term for a wild horse of the American West. Over the centuries, one enduring trait has been that they’re apt to harass domestic horses. The roan mustang before me posed a problem because I wanted to camp at a corral beside the mudhole that he’d just rolled in. That corral was the only safe haven for my horses for a day’s ride in any direction.Wild stallions will kill a domestic gelding, a castrated horse, in the same way that wolves will kill a domestic dog. Chicken Fry and Badger, therefore, were vulnerable. Mares may be absorbed into a harem, but geldings are a threat. And since domestic geldings rarely mature with the sparring and fighting that establishes social hierarchy within a wild herd, Chicken Fry and Badger would likely not last long. They’d also be wearing their saddles and carrying my gear—trappings of domestication that would hinder their survival. I was more than halfway up the Pony Express Trail—ninety-two days and more than a thousand miles out from its eastern terminus in St. Joseph, Missouri—and I hadn’t come this far just to lose my horses in a running fight with a mustang stallion.So I decided to take a nap. Better to do nothing and potentially avoid a wreck than walk right into one. I figured the situation might work itself out,