Pony Express Read online

  Pony Express

  When fifteen-year-old Jack Taylor is offered a job with the newly formed Pony Express Company, it looks as though he will be able to rescue his family from the financial problems which are troubling them. However, he injures his ankle, and it is likely his job will fall through. His twin sister, Beth, decides to ride in his place; this is the story of the only girl to ever ride for the Pony Express.

  By the same author

  The Homesteader’s Daughter

  The Marshal’s Daughter

  Saddler’s Run

  Teacher with a Tin Star

  Pony Express

  Harriet Cade

  © Harriet Cade 2016

  First published in Great Britain 2016

  ISBN 978-0-7198-2119-6

  The Crowood Press

  The Stable Block

  Crowood Lane

  Ramsbury

  Marlborough

  Wiltshire SN8 2HR

  www.crowood.com

  This e-book first published in 2016

  Robert Hale is an imprint of

  The Crowood Press

  The right of Harriet Cade to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  CHAPTER 1

  My family, which is to say my mother and me and my brother, lived in the town of St Joseph in 1860. This was at the end of the railroad line in those days and so was an important point for those heading off to California or the new territories. Me and my brother were twins and we looked as alike as two peas in a pod. Whether I was a boyish sort of girl or he was a girlish sort of boy, I don’t rightly know, but the fact is if we hadn’t worn different clothes and one of us with long hair and the other short, you would have been hard pressed to tell us apart. We were fifteen, coming up to sixteen in that year.

  My pa had been killed when we were twelve. I don’t recollect that we were ever given the details of this unfortunate event, but I do recall that he was shot in a bar-room somewhere in town. I never heard why. One thing I do know is that we were left with a whole heap of debts after his death. Neither he nor my mother had any idea of how to handle money and those three years, between his death and the time of which I am about to tell you, were hard. We all three of us had to work and make money as best we could.

  One day my brother came home and said, ‘Look here! This is the very thing for me.’ He took out from his jacket a crumpled little poster which he had pulled down from a post where it had been pinned. There was a picture of a boy on horseback and under it some printed words. We smoothed it out and read the following:

  Pony Express

  St Joseph, Missouri to California

  in 10 days or less

  WANTED

  YOUNG, SKINNY, WIRY FELLOWS

  not over eighteen. Must be expert riders, willing

  to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.

  Wages $50 per month

  Apply, PONY EXPRESS STABLES

  St Joseph, Missouri

  Ma said to my brother, ‘Well, you ain’t no orphan, Jack, so I reckon that lets you out. Besides, mark what it says here about risking death daily. I do not care for the sound of this business at all.’

  Jack said, ‘First off is where I am half an orphan, on account of my father is dead. But that don’t signify overmuch in any case, Ma. It does not say that you have to be such, only that it is preferred. Look though at what they are offering.’

  My mother read out the figure of fifty dollars in amazement.

  ‘Why’ she exclaimed, ‘You are only making a dollar a week at that building you are working on. It would take you nigh on a year to collect fifty dollars. Are you sure it is not a mistake?’

  Notwithstanding my mother’s apprehensions about that part of the notice touching upon death and orphans, it was agreed that my brother Jack would apply for a job with the new company. Our creditors were pressing and if we did not find some more money soon, it was beginning to look as though our only option would be to dig up and leave town without furnishing anybody with a forwarding address.

  I guess I should say a few words about how we were living that March in the year of 1860. We had a little place on the edge of town, with some land around it. This property was heavily mortgaged, which was the chief of our debts. My father had raised money on it shortly before his death and we had no means of paying back the principal. It was all we could do to keep up with the interest payments. Me and Jack had ponies and had both ridden almost as soon as we could walk. The shoeing and suchlike were paid for by lending the horses out to a livery stable from time to time.

  ‘I guess it will be all right,’ said my mother, as we talked over the Pony Express idea while Jack was at work. ‘Surely, they would not advertize a job of that sort if it were not perfectly safe. Perhaps the mention of risking death was meant by way of a joke.’

  ‘It will be fine, Ma,’ I told her. ‘Jack can ride like the wind and if it comes to danger of death, he is a dab hand with a pistol as well as being a good rider.’

  This seemed to set my mother’s mind at rest and we carried on working. It is nothing to the purpose to relate what we were doing to make money at that time, but I will mention it anyway. My mother was taking in sewing from people in town, Jack was hiring out by the day to do rough work such as digging and I was making little boxes, jars, vases and also trinkets to wear. How this came about is a curious story in itself.

  Near to our place was an Indian family, who were living in a little log cabin, the kind of thing you might expect Abe Lincoln to have grew up in. They were Cherokees, but I don’t know how they fetched up in St Joseph, so far from their homeland. Anyways, there was a little girl who was roughly the same age as me. Although her English wasn’t nothing remarkable and I didn’t know a word of Cherokee, still and all we became friends. Her father worked in town but she and her mother made little baskets, boxes, vases and trays out of pretty well whatever come to hand and these they would sell in the market. Mostly, they would use birch bark, willow switches, twigs and suchlike and those items they made looked as neat as anything you might buy in a shop. They would decorate them with feathers, dried grasses and so on.

  After a while I learned to make stuff that way as well, although it was nothing compared with what she and her mother turned out. But then they were Indians and I guess they had been learning that kind of thing for hundreds of years. Howsoever, I got pretty good at it and used to sell the things I made to people changing stage on their way east or west.

  None of the three of us were getting much from all these various enterprises. If we had five dollars a week coming in, that was not a bad week for us. Otherwise, it was a dime here and a nickel there. I relate this in order that you will understand the amazing news that my brother could end up earning fifty dollars a month for just riding. It looked like it could rescue us from all our worries, at least on the financial side.

  To cut a long story short, my brother was interviewed by William Russell himself. Russell knew what a set of rascals boys that age can be and he made sure that he would weed out any obvious rogues. He enquired closely into their background and raising, so that he could identify those who would be prone to fighting, stealing and suchlike. Another thing he was particular about was that none of the boys could weigh in at more than 135 pounds. This was to keep up the speed of the ponies. Each boy that was taken on had to swear an oath to Russell. My brother told me that he had to stand there with his hand on the Bible and say:

  ‘I, Jack Taylor, do hereby swear, before the Great and Living God, that during my engagement, and while I am an employee of Russell, Majors and Waddell, I will, under no circumstances, use profane language, that I will drink no intoxicating liquors, that I will not quarr
el or fight with any other employee of the firm, and that in every respect I will conduct myself honestly, be faithful to my duties, and so direct all my acts as to win the confidence of my employers, so help me God.’

  William Russell was a religious man and he also gave each boy a Bible of his own. There was a practical reason behind all this and that was, that if any of those young men took to drink or began brawling, it could interfere with the smooth running of the whole system. He thought that if they were reading scripture on a regular basis, they might be less apt to get into mischief.

  After taking the oath and being engaged, my brother came home and told us, ‘Well, I reckon that has solved our money troubles for a spell. I will be riding out for eighty miles at a trip, changing horses every ten miles. It is money for nothing.’

  My mother was still not convinced, saying to him, ‘I hope that Mr Russell will not really let you be in danger of death. This does not sound like a respectable business. I hope the neighbours will not talk.’

  ‘I don’t see why it should only be boys in on this game,’ I said, ‘I can ride as well as you any day of the week and better sometimes. I would like to sign up too.’

  My brother laughed at that, saying, ‘Ha, imagine a girl riding so! It is not to be thought of. She would be stopping every few yards to check her appearance and so on.’

  We exchanged a few sharp words after he said this and then I threw myself upon him and we fell to the ground wrestling, until Ma said, ‘You two don’t cease that, I’ll take a riding crop to the pair of you. You ain’t so old that I can’t whip you.’

  Now to understand the next part of the tale, you need to bear in your mind that old saying: the one as touches upon counting chickens before they even hatched out of their eggs. The three of us were living on such slender means at that time that the prospect of having fifty dollars a month suddenly coming to us was quite intoxicating. We owed a heap of money, and not just to the bank that owned the mortgage on our house. We were forever soliciting credit from the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker and anybody else who would advance us goods without first having had sight of any cash money. In short, that first month’s fifty dollars had been spent before my brother even set off for his first ride. That’s how it is sometimes, when folk are as hard up as we were in those days.

  So there it was, the whole family was now depending upon my brother Jack to restore our fortunes. You can picture, then, our dismay when he took a tumble while fooling around play-fighting with some friend of his and sprained his ankle so badly that he couldn’t put his weight on that leg. Like I said earlier, we’d all been counting on that first month’s wages and making plans for spending the money he’d earn after that first month. The consequence was that we all felt keenly that we had actually lost something by his mishap and that our family had been deprived of something to which it was entitled: namely that fifty dollars a month that we believed would have been coming in our direction.

  ‘Lordy,’ said my mother, the evening after this accident. ‘Just when I began to believe that things might be going in our direction for a novelty and now this happens. We surely must be the unluckiest family hereabouts.’

  ‘Don’t take on so, Ma,’ I told her. ‘It’ll come out right in the end, you’ll see.’

  ‘I’m blessed if I know how,’ she replied. ‘We never been deeper in debt. Why, that first month’s money would have pulled us clear and set us on an even keel again. After that, we’d have been in clover, with fifty dollars amonth coming in regular.’

  My brother Jack didn’t say anything. He felt guilty about having fooled around and hurt himself so he missed the opportunity. There was no point waiting ’til his leg was healed and then him going after the job again. There were any number of others who were after those jobs and it was only because he’d been so quick off the mark in applying that he’d got the position in the first instance.

  It was then that the first stirrings of an idea came to me. At first I thrust the notion back out of my head, because it was so crazy that it wasn’t really worth entertaining the scheme for a second. But then it came back again and I thought to myself, why wouldn’t it work? It has to be worth a try, because we wouldn’t lose anything, even if it didn’t come off.

  I said to Jack, ‘Nobody at the Pony Express office knows aught yet about you doing your ankle so, is that how the matter stands?’

  ‘I thought at first that it might heal up in time, which is to say by April the fifth. But I don’t look for that to happen now, not by looking at the state of my shin and ankle.’

  ‘So you’ve told nobody?’ I pressed him patiently. ‘Nobody at the office knows that you aren’t going to be turning up there to ride out next Thursday?’

  At this point, my mother intervened, saying, ‘Happen you best let them know about it son, so’s they can make other arrangements. I don’t like to think o’ letting folk down.’

  This didn’t at all accord with my own plans and so I said, ‘No Ma, I don’t think we should do that.’ My mother looked at me enquiringly and I said haltingly, reasoning the case out as I spoke, ‘What’s to hinder me riding out on that pony on Thursday? I’m as good a rider as Jack, any day o’ the week and I can shoot straighter than him as well. I could keep his job going until his ankle’s better.’

  There was a dead silence when I’d finished speaking, broken only by Ma saying, ‘Of all the crazed schemes I ever did hear of in my life, that has to be the winner. What ails you, child, that you should even talk so?’

  I had expected Jack to be dead set against the plan, on account of we were always fighting and each of us mocking anything the other put forward, but he sat up straighter and said, ‘Beth, that is one solid gold idea. I reckon as my ankle will be well enough for riding in two weeks, always provided that I rest up and don’t put any weight on it for that time. Thursday’s five days away, so all you’d need do is ride for nine days and then I could take over.’

  ‘I thought better of your sense, Jack,’ said my mother sharply, ‘Don’t encourage her in this lunacy.’

  ‘But it ain’t lunacy at all, Ma,’ said my brother. ‘Don’t you see, it’s the best thing in the world. Beth’s right, she can ride as well as me and shoot better, too.’

  I was pleased to hear him confess this. In the normal course of affairs my brother would sooner have been torn apart by wild horses than admit that a girl could shoot better than him. But this was by way of being an emergency and was no time for polite pretence. If we were to pull this off, then it would need plain speaking and common sense.

  ‘I never heard the like,’ said Ma. ‘Has the child bewitched you or what?’

  Slowly though, we talked my mother round and showed her that this was the only way of rescuing ourselves from the situation. We were in desperate need of that fifty dollars a month that we’d been counting on and without it, it was hard to see how we’d be able to manage. The very real prospect was staring us in the face: of having the bank foreclose on the mortgage and turning us out of our house.

  It was this grim possibility which I think finally decided Ma in favour of what I was suggesting. Not that she was keen on it, mind, but it was about the only way out of the hole we were in. The idea of this fifty dollars a month had come just as we were out of options and now to see it being snatched from us in this way was cruel.

  ‘You say that these pony folk were only wanting you to travel eighty miles from here?’ asked my mother of Jack. ‘If Beth goes ahead with this wild idea, she ain’t going to be expected to ride all the way to San Francisco or anything like that?’

  ‘No Ma,’ said Jack, trying to hide his smile, ‘that would be a good long way. No, she’d ride eighty miles west, changing mounts every ten, fifteen miles or so and then ride back again in the same way. It’s money for nothing.’

  I was at that time a little hazy myself on the distances and routes of this business. I don’t believe that I had ever been more than twenty miles from St Joseph in the whole course of
my life and although I’d heard of cities like San Francisco and so on, they meant no more to me than if they’d been in China. But years later I learned about the background to all this and so maybe if I explain some of it, it will make it easier to understand what later befell me.

  Until that Pony Express started up it took twenty-four days to get a message from New York or Washington to California. When I was born it had taken more like two months. It was the Butterfield Overland Mail, which began running in the fall of 1858, that shaved the time below a month for the first time. Of course, there were railroads and telegraph wires running here and there, but nothing of that sort west of St Joseph. Just 2,000 miles of empty land, full of deserts, mountains, Indians and I don’t know what-all else. So the idea of having a faster way of sending messages to California was greeted with enthusiasm.

  The man who really got things moving was a fellow called William Gwin, who was the first senator for California. He was worried that his state was getting left behind the rest of the union, and only hearing of what had been going on in the rest of the country a month or two after everybody else. Gwin had an old friend called William Russell, who happened to be a partner in a firm of wagoners called Russell, Majors and Waddell. After William Gwin spoke to his friend and put a little money into the enterprise, Russell persuaded his partners to start cutting into the Butterfield’s business and so they came up with the notion of the Pony Express.

  Like I say, I knew nothing of all this back in March 1860. All I had in mind was to help out my family by hanging on to that fifty dollars a month that we so desperately needed to stave off our creditors and keep the wolf from the door. I asked Jack what I would be expected to know if, that is, I was going to pull this off and pretend to be him. He thought about it for a spell, scratched his head, and then said,

  ‘I don’t mind that there’s much to know. There’s a kind of leather thing called a mochila and that gets thrown over the saddle. When you change horses, it’s just slung on to the next pony you’re using.’