 You saw some of our special effects. Today, we're going back to Mark Twain on the Chamber Street Theater. And of course, Mark Twain is wonderful. There's no question of it. And it's a delight to read his work. Today, we're going to be reading Mark Twain, The Pony Express. Now, Mark Twain has a tendency to jump around a little bit, so I'll try to help you and make it clear what we're jumping around to. And then, of course, we're going to follow it up with my own story about the Pony Express from The Weight of Gold. That's my book. And it's, I've got a Pony Express story too, but it's with the widow chambers. So we have a male's perspective, and then we have the female perspective. So it should be, what, a male-female show? Okay, we have lots of special effects. And we want to thank our people in the control room. It's just the three of us, you know. Alex Silver-Satter and Bryce Parker. And they've worked very hard to make this as interesting as possible. So we're going to give it a go. Now, The Pony Express, during the time of The Pony Express, the people did not know they were going to be part of history. So the records aren't very good. And you'll hear a little bit of, one thing is one way, and in another place it's another way. And you just have to sort of roll with that, because whoever is speaking is speaking the truth for that particular place. And it could be the scenery or the activity in the area. But things will be different from one station to another. And that's why some of the records are different. Well, let's start off with Mark Twain. We're going to be reading from Roughing It. This is a wonderful book. It comes out in paperback. A lot of people think Huckleberry Finn is his best book. I love Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn is great. There's no question. But my favorite Mark Twain book is Roughing It. And it is available in paperback. So it's not as expensive. OK, we're going to start off here in Chapter 8. In a little while, all interest was taken up with stretching our necks and watching for the pony rider. The fleet messenger who sped across the continent from St. Joe to Sacramento, carrying letters, 1900 miles in eight days. Think of that for perishable horse and human flesh and blood to do. The pony rider was usually a little bit of a man, brim full of spirit and endurance, no matter what the time of day or night his watch came on, and no matter whether it was winter or summer, raining, snowing, hailing or sleeting, or whether his beat was a level straight road or a crazy trail over mountain crags and precipices. Or whether it led through peaceful regions or regions that swarmed with hostile Indians, he must be always ready to leap in the saddle and be off like the wind. There was no idling time for a pony rider on duty. He rode 50 miles without stopping by daylight, moonlight, starlight, or through the blackness of darkness, just as it happened. He rode a splendid horse that was born for a racer and fed and lodged like a gentleman. Kept him at his utmost speed for 10 miles, and then as he came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding fast a fresh, impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mailbag was made in the twinkling of an eye, and a wave flew the eager pair and were out of sight before the spectator could hardly get the ghost of a look. Both rider and horse went flying light. The rider's dress was thin and fitted close. He wore a roundabout and a skull cap and tucked his pantaloons into his boot tops like a race rider. He carried no arms. He carried nothing that was not absolutely necessary, for even the postage on his literary freight was worth $5 a letter. He got but little frivolous correspondence to carry. His bag had business letters in it mostly. His horse was stripped of all unnecessary weight too. He wore a little wafer of a racing saddle and no visible blanket. He wore light shoes or none at all. The little flat mail pocket strapped under the rider's thighs would each hold about the buck of a child's primer. They held many and many an important business chapter and newspaper letter, but these were written on paper as airy and thin as gold leaf. The stagecoach traveled about 100 to 125 miles a day. That's the stagecoach, 24 hours. The pony rider about 250. There were about 80 pony riders in the saddle all the time, night and day, stretching in a long scattering possession from Missouri to California, 40 flying eastward and 40 towards the west. And among them, making 400 gallant horses, stirring livelihood and see a deal of scenery every single day of the year. We had had a consuming desire from the beginning to see a pony rider, but somehow or other, all that passed us and all that met us managed to streak by in the night. And so we heard only a wheeze and a hail and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of the window. And I've got two pages stuck together. But now we were expecting one along any moment and would see him in broad daylight presently. The driver exclaimed, here he comes. Every neck is stretched further and every eye strained wider. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie, a black speck appears against the sky and it is plain that it moves. Well, I should think so. In a second or two, it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling, sweeping towards us nearer and nearer, growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined. Nearer and nearer and the flutter of the hoofs come faintly to the ear. Another instant, a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider's hand and no reply and man and horse burst past our excited faces and go wingin' away like a belated fragment of a storm. So sudden is it all and so like a flash of unreal fantasy that but for the flake of white foam left quivering and perishing on a male sack after the vision has flashed by and disappeared, we might have doubted whether we had seen any actual horse and man at all, maybe. And now we get back to the stage. We rattled through Scott's bluff's pass by and by. It was along here somewhere that we first came across genuine and unmistakable alkali water in the road and we cordially hailed it as a first-class curiosity and a thing to be mentioned with a lawn in letters to the ignorant at home. This water gave the road a soapy appearance and in many places the ground looked and as if it had been whitewashed. I think the strange alkali water excited us as much as any wonder we had come upon yet and I know we felt very complacent and conceited and better satisfied with life after we had added it to our list of things which we had seen and some other people had not. In a small way we were the same sort of simpletons as those who climb unnecessarily the perilous peaks of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn and derive no pleasure from it except that the reflection that it isn't a common experience. We crossed the sand hills near the scene of the Indian robbery and massacre of 1856 wherein the driver and conductor perished and all the passengers but one it was supposed but this must have been a mistake for at different times afterwards on the Pacific Coast I was personally acquainted with 133 or 4 people who were wounded during that massacre and barely escaped with their lives. There was no doubt of the truth of it as I heard it from their own lips. One of these parties told me that he kept coming across arrowheads in his system for nearly seven years after the massacre and another of them told me that he was struck so literally full of arrows that after the Indians was gone he could rise up and examine himself and he could not restrain his tears for his clothes were completely ruined. The most trustworthy tradition of ours however that only one man a person named Babbit survived the massacre and that he was desperately wounded. He dragged himself on his hand and knee for one leg was broken to a station several miles away. He did it during portions of two nights lying concealed one day and part of another and for more than 40 hours he suffered unimaginable anguish from hunger, thirst and bodily pain. The Indians robbed the coach of everything it contained including quite an amount of treasure. About two hours and a half before we arrived at La Porelle station the keeper in charge of it had fired four times at an Indian but he said with an injured air that the Indian had skipped around so to spile everything and ammunition so blame scurse too. The most natural inference conveyed by his manner of speaking was that in skipping around the Indian had taken unfair advantage. The coach we were in had a neat hole through the front reminiscent of its last trip through this region. The bullet that made it wounded the driver slightly but he did not mind it much. He said the place to keep a man huffy was down on the southern overland among the Apaches before the company moved the stage line up on the northern road. He said the Apaches used to annoy him all the time down there and that he came as near as anything to starve into death in the midst of abundance because they kept him so leaky with bullet holes that he couldn't hold his vitals. This person's statements were not generally believed. The tiresome minutes and decades of minutes dragged away until at last our tents forms filled over with adult consciousness and we slept. For it was a sleep set with a hair trigger. It was a sleep seething and teeming with a weird and distressed confusion of shreds and faggants of dreams, a sleep that was a chaos. Presently dreams and sleep and the sullen hush of the night were startled by a ringing report and cloven by such a long wild agonize and shriek. Then we heard 10 steps from the stage. Help! Help! Help! It was our driver's voice. Kill him! Kill him like a dog! I'm being murdered! Will no man give me a pistol? Look out! Head him off! Head him off! Two pistol shots, a confusion of voices and the trample of many feet as if a crowd were closing and surging together around some object. Several heavy doll blows as with a club a voice that said appealingly, Don't, gentlemen! Please don't! I'm a dead man! Then a fainter groan and another blow and a way sped the stage into the darkness and left the grisly mystery behind us. What a startle it was. Eight seconds would amply cover the time it occupied. Maybe even five it would cover. We only had time to plunge out a curtain and unbuckle and unbutton part of it in an awkward and hindering flurry when our whip crept sharply overhead and we went rumbling and tumbling away down a mountain grade. We fed on the mystery the rest of the night what was left of it, for it was waning fast. It had to remain a present mystery for all we could get from the conductor and answer to our hails was something that sounded through the clatter of wheels like, Tell ya in the mornin'! So we lit our pipes and opened the corner of a curtain for a chimney and lay there in the dark. Listening to each other's story of how he first felt and how many thousand Indians he first thought and hurled themselves upon us and what his remembrance of the subsequent sounds was and the order of their occurrence. And we theorized, too, but there was never a theory that would account for our driver's voice being out there nor yet account for his Indian murderers talking such good English if they were Indians. So we chatted and smoked the rest of the night comfortably away, our boating anxiety being somewhat marvelously dissipated by the real presence of something anxious about. We never did get much satisfaction about that dark occurrence. All that we could make out of the odds and ends of information we gathered in the morning was that the disturbance occurred at a station and that we changed drivers there and that the driver that got off there had been talking roughly about some of the outlaws that infested the region. For there wasn't a man around there but had a price on his head and didn't dare show himself in the settlements, the conductor said. He had talked roughly about these characters and ought to have drove up there with his pistol cocked and ready on the seat alongside of him and begun business himself because any softie would know they'd be laying for him. That was all we could gather and we could see that neither the conductor nor the driver was much concerned about the matter. And that ends the Mark Twain story of the Pony Express and a stagecoach ride and I think we should add that by the way the Apaches never broke any agreement they had with the White Settlers. It was the White Settlers who broke the agreements and so the massacre that they refer to as the massacre done by the Indians was in retaliation for something the White Settlers did. And by the way White Settlers or anybody around there could get cash money for bringing in the scalp of an Apache whether it was an adult male a woman or a child. And now we're going to read my story about the Pony Express from The Weight of Gold. Oh, I got a little out of control about living history and recreating the time period and I wound up writing a book. And here's the chapter on the Pony Express and the person telling the story is the widow Chambers who's out here in Sacramento City earning her living by selling fruit pies on the street. April 13, 1860 was the day the Pony Express came to town and we were all so excited. The streets were lined with people waiting for William Hamilton the first rider between St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California. Now that doesn't mean Will rode the whole 1840 miles. He rode the last few stations worth and that was rough enough. As I stood there I thought back to before and how I took a letter down to the Sacramento River and to a ship's captain. I'd asked the captain to take my letter to Nantucket with him on his trip. I figured four to six months time would make the voyage from here down the South American coast and up the other side and on to Nantucket. Captain Dodd told me it would take a long time and I said I knew it would so he took my letter and I felt good that my letter was on its way. I thanked the captain and gave him a freshly baked fruit pie for his dinner dessert. I thanked him again and started to cry. It sounds silly to say it but I did. Family and friends being so far away. I was standing on a ship that would soon set sail again on a terrible and wonderful adventure. The truth was the ship may not even make it round the horn of South America. My letter could sink to the seas floor with saltwater washing away my words with the current. Enough of this and all the awful things that can happen. My letter is off to sea with Captain Dodd. All this was going through my head as we heard the first shouts greeting the rider Hamilton. There were celebrating riders coming in ahead of Hamilton and leading him in in truth poor tired Hamilton and his poor tired horse couldn't keep up with the celebrants and was eaten dust all the last mile. Here he is now. It took the Pony Express 10 days to make the trip from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento. Later I learned it took my letter two years to get to the East Coast. Captain Dodd had gone to the Sandwich Islands later called the Hawaiian Islands and many other places before returning to the East Coast. Also he had many misfortunes. Ships don't carry people one way and go home empty. They load up with whatever can be sold and return home full. I didn't think about this but I knew it was true. It must have been wishful thinking to believe my letter was just months away from the East Coast. When the Pony Express first set up business in the BF Hastings Building on 1000 Second Street they put an ad in the papers. They wanted orphaned young men slight of frame. The pay was $100 a month. On the more dangerous runs the pay hit $150. The youngest rider was 14. Most were around 18. They didn't need a gun. They could outrun any Indian or bandit. Pony Express riders had the best horses and were fed best and cared for best. Weight was everything so these skinny young men often didn't wear their boots on the ride. Boots could be heavy. So off they came. Well here was William Hamilton just a handsome as a handsome as a rider should be and there was the first male just 10 days out of Missouri. We were clapping and shouting. The male was here. The Mochella was taken off the saddle and the horse led away but William had just gained a city's worth of new friends patting him on the back and leading him to the nearest saloon for a refreshing bed beverage. There still weren't a lot of women in Sacramento but the few of us were cheering. One 72 year old woman cried out I love you Mary. Let's make this clear. It wasn't me. I wasn't that old then. Of course that day I love the handsome rider too and I probably would have married him as well but that romantic 72 year old was ahead of me. And now I'd like to tell you what a Mochella is in case you don't already know. There's the horse and there's a saddle and then on top of the saddle is a Mochella. It's not tied to the saddle. The Mochella is basically a rectangle of leather with pockets in it for I think we're showing a Mochella now. There it is and you see the pockets and you can see the horn of the saddle and the back of the saddle sticking through the Mochella. The Mochella has the hole so it slips over the real saddle. So when the rider comes to a station he gets off the horse pulling the Mochella with him that's not tied down and he throws it over the next horse and over the saddle that's already on the next horse jumps on top and off he goes. So that's the Mochella. I'm glad we have a picture of that. Well, that's our show for today. If you have any questions be sure and let us know. We'd be glad to answer them. We've got Alex Silver-Satter in the control room and Bryce Parker and me. I'm Ruth Chambers. I'm the reader of all the stories and the author of some of them but not all of them. Mark Twain of course is a really fine rider and we read a lot of Mark Twain because he's a fine rider and that's our show for today and we'll see you next week. Bye bye now.