of every ten or twelve miles throughout the
long route. The wages of eighty riders and about four hundred station
men, not to mention a score of Division Superintendents was a large
item.

Most of the grain used along the line between St. Joseph and Salt Lake
City was purchased in Iowa and Missouri and shipped in wagons at a
freight rate of from ten cents to twenty cents a pound. Grain and food
stuffs for use between Salt Lake City and the Sierras were usually
bought in Utah and hauled from two hundred to seven hundred miles to the
respective stations. Hay, gathered wherever wild grasses could be found
and cured, often had to be freighted hundreds of miles.

The operating expenses of the line aggregated about thirty thousand
dollars a month, which would alone have insured a deficit as the monthly
income never equaled that amount.

A conspicuous bill of expense which helped to bankrupt the enterprise
was for protection against the savages. While this should have been
furnished by the Government or the local state or territorial militia,
it was the fate of the Company to bear the brunt of one of the worst
Indian outbreaks of that decade.

Early in 1860, shortly after the Pony Express was started, the Pah-Utes,
mention of whom has already been made, began hostilities under their
renowned chieftain Old Winnemucca. The uprising spread; soon the
Bannocks and Shoshones espoused the cause of the Utes, and the entire
territory of Nevada, Eastern California and Oregon was aflame with
Indian revolt. Besides devastating many white settlements wherever they
found them, the Indians destroyed nearly every pony station between
California and Salt Lake, murdered numbers of employes, and ran off
scores of horses. For several weeks the service was paralyzed, and had
it been in the hands of faint-hearted men it would have been ended then
and there.

The climax came with the defeat and massacre of Major Ormsby's force of
about fifty men by the Utes at the battle of Pyramid Lake in western
Nevada. Help was finally sent in from a distance, and before the first
of June, eight hundred men, including three hundred regulars and a large
number of California and Nevada volunteers, had taken the field. This
formidable campaign finally served the double purpose of protecting the
Pony Express and stage line and in subduing the Indians in a primitive
and effective manner. Order was restored and the express service resumed
on June 19. Desultory o