mes of one million
people, and has put a girdle around the earth in forty minutes. Verily
the riding is like the riding of Jehu, the son of Nimshi for he rideth
furiously. Take out your watch. We are eight days from New York,
eighteen from London. The race is to the swift.

The Pony Express had been tried at the tribunal of popular opinion and
given a hearty endorsement. It had yet to win the approval of shrewd
statesmanship.

[2] Root and Connelley's Overland Stage to California.

[3] So called because it was about half way between the Missouri River
and Denver.

[4] Reports as to the precise hour of starting do not all agree. It was
probably late in the afternoon or early in the evening, no later than
6:30.

[5] Authorities differ somewhat as to the personnel of the first trip;
also as to the number of letters carried.

[6] On account of the Mormon outbreak and the troubles of 1857-58, there
was at this time much ill-feeling in Congress against Utah. Matters were
finally smoothed out and the bill in question was of course dropped.
Utah was loyal to the Union throughout the Civil War.

[7] Eastbound the first rider carried about seventy letters.

[8] The idea of a Pony Express was not a new one in 1859. Marco Polo
relates that Genghis Khan, ruler of Chinese Tartary had such a courier
service about one thousand years ago. This ambitious monarch, it is
said, had relay stations twenty-five miles apart, and his riders
sometimes covered three hundred miles in twenty-four hours.

About a hundred years back, such a system was in vogue in various
countries of Europe.

Early in the nineteenth century before the telegraph was invented, a New
York newspaper man named David Hale used a Pony Express system to
collect state news. A little later, in 1830, a rival publisher, Richard
Haughton, political editor of the New York Journal of Commerce borrowed
the same idea. He afterward founded the Boston Atlas, and by making
relays of fast horses and taking advantage of the services offered by a
few short lines of railroad then operating in Massachusetts, he was
enabled to print election returns by nine o'clock on the morning after
election.

This idea was improved by James W. Webb, Editor of the New York Courier
and Enquirer, a big daily of that time. In 1832, Webb organized an
express rider line between New York and Washington. This undertaking
gave his paper much valuable prestige.

In 1833, Hale and Hallock of the J