The Story of the Pony Express Trail 1860-1861: The origins and
the reason for a horse-and-rider-mail-delivery system between
the east and west can be summed up in two words—slow mail. Prior
to the Coach and Pony Express mail delivery, time from the east
to the west—by ship down the Gulf of Mexico, across the Panama
by mule, then by ship again up to San Francisco—might take six
weeks, and if the winds were off, eight weeks. With the
discovery of gold in California in 1848, and the increasing
political tensions of the 1850’s which led to the Civil War, it
became imperative to keep the far West in the Union by providing
a more dependable source of information from the East. News was
very slow in reaching eager California readers, and a standing
joke of the time was that events in the East had already been
forgotten by the time they were known by those out West. The
solution to this problem came from a businessman of vision,
William Russell. Russell owned a stage and freight company based
in Leavenworth, Kansas (