So I’m a bit of a Western History buff, and can’t help but be fascinated by the Western migration of the 1800s and the legends of the wagon trains, stagecoaches, and, in this case, the illustrious riders of the Pony Express detailed in Jim DeFelice’s West Like Lightning (2018). Some of the “facts” here are astonishing. (And I use the quotes around facts to underscore the difficulty of separating fact from fiction about the Old West, which DeFelice points out. He does a good job of framing each “legendary” story with other “facts” that make the legends hard to believe, but not necessarily false.) For instance, one of the keystones of the Pony Express was its sheer speed: They could get mail from St. Joseph, Missouri to San Francisco, California in 10 days. Up until then the average time to travel that distance was closer to three months. But he notes it often took much more than 10 days, due to weather, accidents, Indian conflicts, and the like. The riders were generally skinny, wiry kids, most of them in their 20s, who often seemed superhuman in the saddle, riding at breakneck speed for 50 or 100 miles, though they would usually switch horses at stations every 20 miles or so, and sometimes as often as 10 miles. The “stations” were often muddy hovels where the riders would sleep in the barns with the horses. They rode through blizzards and hailstorms and Indian attacks and somehow usually got through.
Jim DeFelice does a good job of bringing their amazing achievements and horsemanship to light. The heyday of the Pony Express was quite short, about 18 months in 1860-61, until telegraph lines, cost, and the beginning of the Civil War caused the freight company that ran the Pony Express to falter and sell out. It’s a fun read, even if DeFelice pales in comparison to someone like Simon Winchester, author of Krakatoa (2003) and many others.
