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'Orphans Wanted': The Pony Express |
| Section: MODERN THOUGHT / ESSAYS |
| Author: Jeffrey Meyers |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2004 |
| Size: 2,588 Words, 15,442 Characters |
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The Pony Express, a relay of daredevil teenage horseback riders that began on April 3, 1860, was an enterprising and risky method of delivering the mail. Operated by the Overland Mail Company, it picked up where the train from the East left off, at St. Joseph, Missouri, and took messages (at a premium) across the last half of the continent to San Francisco. First a weekly and then biweekly mail service, it was twice as fast as the stagecoach and the ships that sailed from the East Coast ports through the Panama Canal to California, both of which took about three weeks. Though soon superseded by the telegraph, the Pony Express accelerated the expansion of trade and population and helped to unite the country politically. The young men who took up the challenge exemplified the American drive ...
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...o helped create the legend of the West. It also paved the way for the transcontinental railroad, which was finally completed eight years after the telegraph line, on May 10, 1869. Above all, it shortened the psychological distance between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and helped unite the western regions of the Union during the first year of the war that threatened to split apart the nation.
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