Frederic Remington: The Coming and Going of the Pony Express, 1900
Between 1860 and 1861, before it was put out of business by the transcontinental telegraph, the Pony Express bragged that it could carry the mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, in ten days. It took somewhat longer than that for TPL to help protect a section of the route east of Lake Tahoe in Nevada—but it is great to hear that the project is now complete.
The Record-Courier, a local Carson Valley newspaper, carried a short story on the project yesterday.
A 123-acre site near the top of Kingsbury Grade has been purchased for $750,000 and added to the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, according to the Trust for Public Land.
The Daggett Pass property connects Carson Valley with the Lake Tahoe Basin along the old Vansickle Toll Road, which includes a section of the Pony Express trail.
During the years that I roamed California and northern Nevada writing about the outdoors and the environment for the San Francisco Chronicle, one of my favorite story techniques was to trace a historic trail. I have traveled quite a bit of the Pony Express route in the Silver State.
This was often hot and dusty work. One requirement of the original Pony Express riders was that they be “skinny fellows”—probably to spare the horses, but this must have also been an advantage to the riders themselves in crossing baking expanses of the West. How relieved they must have been to climb this section of the trail, out of the desert and into Lake Tahoe’s sparkling realm, with only 90 miles left to Sacramento.
Money for the purchase came from the Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act, which permits money from lands sold by the BLM to be used to acquire private lands within national parks, national forests, and BLM conservation areas.
The land will be managed by Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in conjunction with Douglas County, which is turning part of the route into a formal segment of the Pony Express National Historic Trail.
