Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express - Rilegato

One
"CAPITAL FELLOWS"--RUSSELL, MAJORS & WADDELL
My design is to give a truthful and not an exaggerated and fanciful account of the occurrences of the journey, and of the scenery, capabilities, and general features of the countries through which we shall pass, with incidental sketches of the leading characteristics of the populations.

--Edwin Bryant, What I Saw in California, 1848
In the spring of 1859 with carpetbag in hand, Horace Greeley, legendary editor of the New York Tribune, took the celebrated advice so often attributed to him and went west. He was no longer a young man that year--he was forty-eight--but he had the curiosity and energy of a young man.

"Want to learn what I can of that country with my own eyes," Greeley wrote, "and to study men in their cabins and at their work instead of reading about them in books."

Greeley, whom Harper's Weekly had called "the most perfect Yankee the country has ever produced," left New York City on May 9, traveled at first by rail and riverboat and then much of the way in a Concord coach, pitching and tossing across the continent. He would be on the road for five months. He traveled alone much of the time, too. "I then hoped, rather than confidently expected, that, on publicly announcing my intention, some friend might offer to bear me company on this journey; but my hope was not realized. One friend did propose to go; but his wife's veto overruled his not very stubborn resolve. I started alone . . ."

Horace Greeley was arguably the most influential and powerful opinion maker in the nation in those days. At the time of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln compared Greeley's support to that of an army of 100,000 men in the field.

He was a flinty Yankee from poor New Hampshire who left his family farm and was apprenticed to a Vermont printer at fifteen, a printer's devil. When he was twenty, Greeley walked to New York City. He had ten dollars in his pocket. His first job was printing a tiny Bible.

He opposed slavery. He opposed the antiforeign, anti-Roman Catholic ravings of the Know-Nothings (he coined that term). He opposed tobacco (a bad experience with a cigar when he was five years old had turned him against smoking), he opposed alcohol (he took the pledge when he was but twelve), and he had reservations about the eating of meat. He rarely drank tea and had long forsworn coffee. He was a sometime vegetarian and a fairly strict disciple of the celebrated crank Dr. Sylvester Graham, whose cracker we remember a century and a half later. One biographer claimed that Greeley crossed the West eating graham crackers and drinking milk, but Greeley makes no mention of this diet in his travels. He met his wife at the Graham House, a New York City boardinghouse kept by Dr. Graham. She was an eccentric from New England, too.

A colleague described Greeley at the time as "careless and disheveled in dress as if he had put his clothes on in the dark, with the round and rosy face of a child and a cherubic expression of simplicity and gentleness . . . The power that he wielded was not equaled by any editor of his time--neither has it been equaled by any editor since."

He looked like an old baby from a very early age, with a soft, unlined pale face, a nearly bald head. He had poor eyesight made worse by his trade.

Greeley corresponded with Abraham Lincoln and Henry David Thoreau. Worshiped at a Unitarian Church in Manhattan with P. T. Barnum. Hired Karl Marx as a European correspondent. Published Charles Darwin for the first time in this country. Printed Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" in an American newspaper for the first time, too.

But he was first and foremost the founder and editor of the New York Tribune, the most influential newspaper in all of the United States in its heyday. Its weekly edition had 1 million readers. At the time of Greeley's western adventure, one of his reporters, Bayard Taylor, reported to him, "The Tribune comes next to the Bible all through the West."

Horace Greeley had been eager to turn his face westward, as he told his readers. The famous social reformer filed back to his newspaper a series of dispatches reporting on everything from his disapproval of shooting buffalo (he was quite certain that he had seen a million of them), to the plight of the abused Chinese miners in the West, to his prediction that the next great cities of the United States would be in Kansas: Atchison and Leavenworth.

He saw wild Indians (he thought little of them) and desperadoes (he disapproved) and drunkards (he disapproved) and gunplay (he disapproved). He survived a stampede of buffalo; they overturned his stagecoach, leaving him shaken but uninjured. He hit Denver when it was a remote mining town, six months old. The West was, indeed, wild. Greeley reported:
There is a fighting class among the settlers in the Rocky Mountains. This class is not numerous, but it is more influential than it should be in giving tone to the society of which its members form a part. Prone to deep thinking, soured in temper, always armed, bristling at a word, ready with the rifle, revolver, or bowie knife, they give law and set fashions which, in a country where the regular administration of justice is yet a matter of prophecy, it seems difficult to overrule or disregard. I apprehend that there have been, during my two weeks' sojourn, more brawls, more fights, more pistols shot with criminal intent, in this log city of one hundred and fifty dwellings, not three fourths completed nor two thirds inhabited, nor one third fit to be, than in any community of no greater numbers on earth.
Greeley moved on to Salt Lake City, the Mormon Jerusalem, where he visited Brigham Young at a time when Mormons were regarded as variously dangerous and ridiculous. They discussed polygamy, the apostle Paul, slavery. Greeley crossed the Great Basin when Utah and Nevada were nearly uninhabited. He estimated that there were fewer than five thousand people living in all of Nevada. Carson City was a handful of shacks. Virginia City was a mining claim.

Wherever Horace Greeley went, he was grandly received. His opinion mattered and his impressions did, too. Greeley's was a whirlwind trip; often he stopped only briefly to see the sights and then raced on in the next westbound stage. "Greeley has come and gone," reported the Sacramento Union. He had stopped in the California capital for a mere thirteen hours. He was out west in support of a transcontinental railroad.

Enormous crowds turned out to see Greeley when he alighted from the stagecoach. He wore "a very rusty and well-worn white coat, a still rustier and still more worn and faded blue-cotton umbrella . . ." A famous photograph of the time shows Greeley wearing a tall white hat. And his ever-present spectacles. His eyes were always poor. He squinted.

Writing about Greeley's western sojourn more than forty years later, George Tisdale Bromley, a celebrated Californian of that era, recalled its importance. "He was looked upon at that time as the greatest man who had ever visited California, and glorious results were anticipated on his return East, from his efforts in behalf of the great Atlantic and Pacific Railroad." The trip resulted in a book the next year: An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859.

During Horace Greeley's "celebrated journey across the Plains to California," he encountered the greatest force of progress on the frontier in the years before the telegraph and the railroad crossed the countryside. In eastern Kansas, on the edge of the wilderness, Greeley observed the mighty freight-hauling firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell, the major carrier of all freight in the United States west of the Mississippi River in the middle of the nineteenth century, an organization that later narrators dubbed "an empire on wheels."

The firm made its headquarters at Leavenworth, Kansas--a riverfront town fifty miles southwest of St. Joseph, Missouri. Horace Greeley found it an impressive operation:
. . . Russell, Majors & Waddell's transportation establishment, between the fort and the city, is the great feature of Leavenworth. Such acres of wagons! such pyramids of extra axletrees! such herds of oxen! such regiments of drivers and employees! No one who does not see can realize how vast a business this is, nor how immense are its outlays as well as its income. I presume this great firm has at this hour two millions of dollars invested in stock, mainly oxen, mules, and wagons. (They last employed six thousand teamsters, and worked forty-five thousand oxen.)
The firm that bore the names of William Russell, Alexander Majors and William Waddell (Greeley described them as "capital fellows," though it's not clear whether he actually met them) was in its heyday the greatest force in shipping goods west in the country. Fueled by a virtual monopoly on providing freight service for a vast network of U.S. military outposts, the firm was prosperous and respected all along the frontier. Very little went west if it did not travel on an ox-drawn wagon owned by Russell, Majors & Waddell.

In the years before the Civil War, travelers into the West would have known well the names Russell, Majors & Waddell. They were the Mayflower Van Line of their time, the United Parcel Service of the prairie, the FedEx of the frontier. In the years before the railroads crossed the Great Plains, when there were still wolves in Kansas and Nebraska and wild Indians, no freight--either military or domestic--went west down the Santa Fe Trail or out to Fort McKay or to Fort Kearny or one of the handful of remote army posts that dotted the Great American Desert unless it did so on a miles-long train of Conestoga wagons pulled by plodding oxen teams. Most of those outfits were owned by Russell, Majors & Waddell.

John D. Young, a Chica...