In a little while all interest was taken up in stretching our
necks and watching for the “pony-rider”—the fleet messenger who
sped across the continent from St. Joe to Sacramento, carrying
letters nineteen hundred miles in eight days! Think of that for
perishable horse and human flesh and blood to do! The pony-rider
was usually a little bit of a man, brimful of spirit and
endurance. No matter what time of the day or night his watch came
on, and no matter whether it was winter or summer, raining,
snowing, hailing, or sleeting, or whether his “beat” was a level
straight road or a crazy trail over mountain crags and
precipices, or whether it led through peaceful regions or regions
that swarmed with hostile Indians, he must be always ready to
leap into the saddle and be off like the wind! There was no
idling-time for a pony-rider on duty. He rode fifty miles without
stopping, by daylight, moonlight, starlight, or through the
blackness of darkness—just as it happened. He rode a splendid
horse that was born for a racer and fed and lodged like a
gentleman; kept him at his utmost speed for ten miles, and then,
as he came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding
fast a fresh, impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mail-bag
was made in the twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair
and were out of sight before the spectator could get hardly the
ghost of a look. Both rider and horse went “flying light.” The
rider’s dress was thin, and fitted close; he wore a
“round-about,” and a skull-cap, and tucked his pantaloons into
his boot-tops like a race-rider. He carried no arms—he carried
nothing that was not absolutely necessary, for even the postage
on his literary freight was worth five dollars a letter.
He got but little frivolous correspondence to carry—his bag
had business letters in it, mostly. His horse was stripped of all
unnecessary weight, too. He wore a little wafer of a
racing-saddle, and no visible blanket. He wore light shoes, or
none at all. The little flat mail-pockets strapped under the
rider’s thighs would each hold about the bulk of a child’s
primer. They held many and many an important business chapter and
newspaper letter, but these were written on paper as airy and
thin as gold-leaf, nearly, and thus bulk and weight were
economized. The stage-coach traveled about a hundred to a
hundred and twenty-five miles a day (twenty-four hours), the
pony-rider about two hundred and fifty. There were about eighty
pony-riders in the saddle all the time, night and day, stretching
in a long, scattering procession from Missouri to California,
forty flying eastward, and forty toward the west, and among them
making four hundred gallant horses earn a stirring livelihood and
see a deal of scenery every single day in the year.
We had had a consuming desire, from the beginning, to see a
pony-rider, but somehow or other all that passed us and all that
met us managed to streak by in the night, and so we heard only a
whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone
before we could get our heads out of the windows. But now we were
expecting one along every moment, and would see him in broad
daylight. Presently the driver exclaims:
“HERE HE COMES!”
Every neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider.
Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck
appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves. Well, I
should think so!
In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and
falling, rising and falling—sweeping toward us nearer and
nearer—growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply
defined—nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs
comes faintly to the ear—another instant a whoop and a hurrah
from our upper deck, a wave of the rider’s hand, but no reply,
and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging
away like a belated fragment of a storm!
So sudden is it all, and so like a flash of unreal fancy, that
but for the flake of white foam left quivering and perishing on a
mail-sack after the vision had flashed by and disappeared, we
might have doubted whether we had seen any actual horse and man
at all, maybe.
We rattled through Scott’s Bluffs Pass, by and by. It was
along here somewhere that we first came across genuine and
unmistakable alkali water in the road, and we cordially hailed it
as a first-class curiosity, and a thing to be mentioned with
eclat in letters to the ignorant at home. This water gave the
road a soapy appearance, and in many places the ground looked as
if it had been whitewashed. I think the strange alkali water
excited us as much as any wonder we had come upon yet, and I know
we felt very complacent and conceited, and better satisfied with
life after we had added it to our list of things which we had
seen and some other people had not. In a small way we were the
same sort of simpletons as those who climb unnecessarily the
perilous peaks of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, and derive no
pleasure from it except the reflection that it isn’t a common
experience. But once in a while one of those parties trips and
comes darting down the long mountain-crags in a sitting posture,
making the crusted snow smoke behind him, flitting from bench to
bench, and from terrace to terrace, jarring the earth where he
strikes, and still glancing and flitting on again, sticking an
iceberg into himself every now and then, and tearing his clothes,
snatching at things to save himself, taking hold of trees and
fetching them along with him, roots and all, starting little
rocks now and then, then big boulders, then acres of ice and snow
and patches of forest, gathering and still gathering as he goes,
adding and still adding to his massed and sweeping grandeur as he
nears a three thousand-foot precipice, till at last he waves his
hat magnificently and rides into eternity on the back of a raging
and tossing avalanche!
This is all very fine, but let us not be carried away by
excitement, but ask calmly, how does this person feel about it in
his cooler moments next day, with six or seven thousand feet of
snow and stuff on top of him?
We crossed the sand hills near the scene of the Indian mail
robbery and massacre of 1856, wherein the driver and conductor
perished, and also all the passengers but one, it was supposed;
but this must have been a mistake, for at different times
afterward on the Pacific coast I was personally acquainted with a
hundred and thirty-three or four people who were wounded during
that massacre, and barely escaped with their lives. There was no
doubt of the truth of it—I had it from their own lips. One of
these parties told me that he kept coming across arrow-heads in
his system for nearly seven years after the massacre; and another
of them told me that he was struck so literally full of arrows
that after the Indians were gone and he could raise up and
examine himself, he could not restrain his tears, for his clothes
were completely ruined.
The most trustworthy tradition avers, however, that only one
man, a person named Babbitt, survived the massacre, and he was
desperately wounded. He dragged himself on his hands and knee
(for one leg was broken) to a station several miles away. He did
it during portions of two nights, lying concealed one day and
part of another, and for more than forty hours suffering
unimaginable anguish from hunger, thirst and bodily pain. The
Indians robbed the coach of everything it contained, including
quite an amount of treasure.
