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.
