The Last Ride of the Pony Express by Will Grant

The more I learned, the surer I became that I was bound to ride the trail. How else could I attain an encompassing grasp of the Pony Express without riding the old mail route? Anything short of doing so was shirking from the truth: that the only way to fully understand the breadth and nature of the Pony Express was to horseback it from one end to the other. It emerged as a challenge, a pinnacle of horsemanship that was high and dangerous. But if I could pull it off, I'd land in rare company. Any horseman worth his salt would agree: the Pony Express is an apex of American horsemanship and to trace its course would be nothing short of transcendental. And so I talked myself into it. Some people look for answers in a library; I'd look for mine between the ears of a horse.

The Pony Express was really something: ten days to deliver a piece of mail between Missouri and California. It took a collection of brave and skilled riders, some not much more than kid, and by writer Will Grant's calculus, thousands of horses, each of whom was pushed to cover about ten miles between stage stops. It's an even more amazing feat when you consider that, when Grant rode the length of the Pony Express with his horses Badger and Chicken Fry, as recounted in The Last Ride of the Pony Express, it took well over one hundred days. Grant's goal, as he puts it, is not just to ride the Pony Express trail to understand the West as it was, but the West as it is: meeting with the ranchers, farmers, and homesteaders who still make up the West's human geography today. Along the way, he explores the history of the American West, but also the problems that face the west today: feral horses, water shortages, and factory farming. 

I enjoyed The Last Ride of the Pony Express; there's almost no chance I wouldn't. I love travelogues, and I love the American West. So it might be considered a kind of praise when I say: this book should have been a lot longer. Grant skillfully weaves three threads together, the physical landscape of the journey, the human landscape--the people--and the history, but I often felt that I never got enough of any one. More than that, I'm thinking of William Least Heat-Moon's River-Horse, about an equally massive undertaking, crossing the entire United States by water. A book like this ought to have the kind of heft and stature that the feat does. Instead, it felt to me like the experience of the ride was left somewhere outside the page. Grant explains that we don't really know that much about the Pony Express, which existed for only eighteen months, so part of that might be the lightness of the historical record. Surely part of it also the pressures of the modern publishing industry, who aren't interested in Least Heat-Moon sized tomes.

OK, enough quibbling. I really did enjoy the way that Grant brings two visions of the West, one modern and one historical, to bear on his incredibly journey. The most interesting and human part of the book might actually be Grant's sojourn among the Peruvian sheepherders of Nevada, whose hospitality is unparalleled, even in a book where people regularly open up their ranches for Grant and his horses to camp in. That's a vision of a new West, but also not so different (as Grant explains) from the Basque sheepherders who once dominated the area. Ultimately, the book gives us a sense of a frontier that is still changing, even as it remains one of the United States' most enduring places of legend.