A horseman turned writer from Santa Fe, NM undertakes a journey along the Pony Express route from Missouri to California. His unique insight into the nature of horses and challenges in supporting them illustrates the enormous challenge faced by the Pony Express during his brief period of operation, and underscores why the venture was such a short duration. His stops along the way as he stops at ranches and watering holes provides further sketches of the people who inhabit this mostly-desolate country. An excellent read and recommended. ( )

This guy rode horseback across the original Pony Express Trail, maybe 2000 miles, over 142 days, with two horses, one for riding and one for carrying gear. It was amazing - and what's truly unbelievable, the point he drove home, is that Pony Express riders used to complete the route in TEN DAYS.

The road goes from St. Joseph, MO, on the Missouri River, to Sacramento. The Midwest did not interest him. The west did. Cities gave him the heebie-jeebies; the biggest one standing in his way was Salt Lake City, and he opted to have the horses trailered around it.

He had LOTS of assistance. His girlfriend mailed him supplies. He used a smartphone. When it came time to cross the dessert, he hired someone to drop off hay and water along the route at given intervals. The desert crossing was scary to consider. There were long stretches with no water sources. If something went amiss with the hay and water dropoffs, well, I was about to say he'd be up shit's creek, but shit's creek would have been an improvement - at least it would have had water.

Color photos in the middle made me glad I didn't read it on Kindle. The picture of the two horses standing utterly alone in the middle of the alkali flat in western Nevada was worth the price. One horse looks at the camera, the other "looks east from where we'd come." I wonder what is going through that horse's mind. Something along the lines of, "What the hell are we doing here and can we go back soon?"

They do not go back, they go forward! After the desert, which was obviously the biggest challenge, near the Nevada/California border, Grant got the heebie-jeebies again at Carson City, and just wanted the trip to be over. He did not want to subject his horses to the big city of Sacramento, he knew the hard part was over, so he had the horses trailered to the endpoint. I thought it was a fine decision.

His lesson is that the real heroes of the Pony Express were the unsung heroes: "the station keepers and stock tenders", the people hauling water out to those waterless spots in the desert, enough to keep ten or so horses in fine condition at all times at each relay station. Astonishing. Astonishing too to think what the whole thing cost. It is very little wonder the enterprise survived for so little time. What in the world piece of mail could have been THAT important? ( )

Excellent ( )

Subtitle: My 2,000-mile Horseback Journey into the Old West

Journalist (and cowboy) Will Grant states that he is a product of the USA West. Raised on a ranch just south of Denver, Colorado, he began riding horses when just a toddler. On a horse is where he wanted to be … always. But he also went to journalism school and began writing articles related to horses for various magazines. One fateful December, a magazine editor asked him what he knew about the Pony Express. “Fast horses and young men, I told him. He encouraged me to look further. So I did.”

I think most of us (or at least most residents of the USA) have heard of the Pony Express – a fast-paced horseback ride to carry the mail in the era before railroads had been completed linking the East and the West coasts. Grant decided to ride the same trail from St Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California (or as close an approximation of it as he could do in modern day) to better understand the challenges and joys encountered by the pony express riders.

While those Western heroes of the 19th century made the nearly 2,000-mile journey in an extremely fast-paced ten days (!), Grant wasn’t trying to set any speed records. He took his two horses, Badger and Chicken Fry, on a walk; they took 142 days to cover the trail. He fills this memoir with his thoughts on the current-day West, sketches of the many people he met along the way, encounters with wildlife, distressing signs of human littering, expansive vistas, the extremes of weather, and much history of the 1860s American West.

I was completely fascinated by his account. And I learned a few things about the history … and myth … of the Pony Express.

The book includes some wonderful photographs of Grant and his horses on the journey. ( )