The ad was particular: they were looking for good riders, preferably orphans.
The job was dangerous. Successful applicants may not survive.
The job was a rider for the Pony Express, the pioneering service that connected east and west in 19th century United States via a relay of horses (ponies) and riders galloping mail between the Mississippi River and the West Coast.
An ad recruiting riders for the Pony Express: particular about the kind of person they wanted.
Each horse lasted around 15km. The riders lasted five or six legs, switching horses at staging posts in two-minute turnarounds.
The Pony Express began in April, 1860, but lasted only 18 months before being superceded by the opening of the overland telegraph in October, 1861.
The journey took ten days, with horses (ponies) and riders galloping at frenetic pace from station to station. According to the National Pony Express Association, the owners employed a crew of "young, skinny, wiry fellows... expert riders willing to risk death daily".
Through wild country at such pell-mell pace, the dangers to both pony and rider were enormous: rough country, snakes, bears, wolves, injuns (injuns), outlaws, and more.
And that is why the owners of the service felt that they were best operated by orphans. Apparently, if the riders had no-one to miss them, then no-one would miss them.
The Pony Express Trail follows the Oregon and California trail routes. For those who wish to follow it nowadays, the route is well marked, both along the actual trail and on parallel highways and byways, says the pony express association.
One of the truisms of travel to the United States is that we Australians and New Zealanders identify with American legends, because we grew up with them on television. Their legends are our legends.
Little boys and girls in Australia and New Zealand grew up feeling as warm towards Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley as American kids did.
Pony Express? Wagon trains? We felt as sorry for Colonel Custer and as horrified by Sitting Bull and his injuns (injuns) as white American kids did. (More of poor old Sitting Bull later.)
The bar at the Hotel Irma in Cody, Wyoming. The pub belonged to Buffalo Bill Cody, who named it for his daughter. The bar was a gift to Cody (the cowboy) from Queen Victoria.
Now we can live some of those legends, including the Pony Express.
The National Pony Express Association re-enacts the ride each June, alternating years between a westward ride and eastward, between St Joseph, Missouri, on the Mississippi, and Old Sacramento, near the present day capital of California.
Next year, 2010, is special: it's the Pony Express's sesquicentenary, its 150th anniversary.
Visitors will be able to take part in the re-enactment in some way, perhaps travelling along with the express for part of the way, certainly watching it go through, much like the Olympic Torch Relay.
The re-enactment could be a focal point for a holiday in the US based on reliving the cowboy legend. There is oodles to do there.
Just south-west of Casper, Wyoming, is Independence Rock, where the westward-bound wagon trains rested on their way to a new life.
Visiting Wyoming, you can see why they needed to rest: Casper comes at the end of rolling plains, the prairies, and it's where the westward trails started to run into mountain ranges, with which Wyoming is strewn.
Independence Rock is where the trails bifurcated. The rock is etched with the names of generations of migrants, resting before continuing their westward trek, some of them north-west to Oregon, some to California, some south to Utah, where the Mormons made their home.
It's an honour roll of pioneers. Between 1840 and 1870, about 500,000 people moved across the western plains to a new life, according to the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center, atop a hill outside Casper, in the middle of Wyoming's east.
The Mint Bar in Sheridan, Wyoming, is the most colourful place in town. Why? Look inside...
The Historic Trails Center offers a wealth of material telling the story of the pioneers, even a "covered wagon ride" across a river.
Perhaps it's the North Platte River, just outside of town on the way to Independence Rock: as you sit in the wagon, video screened onto the end wall and springs and levers beneath the floor replicate the ford, with all its bumps, plunges and catastrophes that the pioneers endured.
Casper is a three-and-a-half hour drive from Wyoming's capital, Cheyenne, where, for the visitor, the cowboy experience may as well begin.
Cheyenne's Frontier Day is a week-long tradition that's been running since 1897. It's "the world's largest outdoor rodeo and Western celebration", according to the Cheyenne visitors bureau. In 2010, this week of wrangling and cowpoking runs from July 23-August 1.
Cowboy culture abounds in Cheyenne. By the old railway station, the Wrangler Boot Barn has walls upon walls of 10-gallon stetsons of many different colours and sizes, and rows upon rows of boots with all kinds of fancy designs and stitching, so many cowboy hats and boots you can't imagine there are that many horses to bear them.
The Boot Barn has its annual Stinky Boot Trade-in Sale: trade in your old boots, get $20 off your new ones.
And there are plenty to choose from. Just as the Boot Barn offers row upon row of boots, so they offer wall upon wall o' hats, or titfers, as the poms refer to them. You'll find everything for the cowboy in the Boot Barn, down to string ties. Just one thing is missing: Stimulus money from the Obama government back east. "We don't want any o' his money", said the lady of the Barn, when asked by a reporter. Wyoming is a Republican state.
In Wyoming, however, everyone is a cowboy, or a cowgirl.
Wrangler has shelves of plaid shirts and (Wrangler) jeans, string ties, belt buckles, and all things cowboy. So surprising that the only thing that's hard to find there is a cowboy belt made in the good ol' US of A.
The vast majority of Wrangler's belts are made in China -- something replicated in each and every cowboy store we visit in a week in Wyoming and neighbouring Idaho.
When you raise this with the locals, they drop their faces, in embarrassment, shame, maybe a bit of anger, that even the cowboy culture has fallen victim to globalism.
Wrangler also is conducting its annual "stinky boot sale": trade in your old cowboy boots for new ones, and Wrangler gives you $US20 off your new boots in return.
The old ones go to charity. Cowboys aren't immune from the Global Financial Crisis.
Up in Sheridan, in Wyoming's north, we enter Buffalo Bill territory.
Buffalo Bill Cody was a sharp-shooting local hero who ran a travelling show, and was rumoured, say the locals, to have had a fling with Queen Victoria. Sure.
Her Majesty sent Cody a gift of a bar, that still operates in the Irma Hotel, named for Cody's daughter, in the town of Cody, in Wyoming's north-west.
Cody auditioned talent for his show from the verandah of the Sheridan Inn. There's a statue on the grass outside the inn of a couple dancing, commemorating its role in Buffalo Bill folklore.
The talent included Annie Oakley, the lady sharpshooter.
Buffalo Bill used to audition acts fer his travellin' Wild West Show from the verandah of the Sheridan Inn, in Sheridan, in northern Wyoming. A statue comemorates that fact.
Up there, everything seems to be named after Buffalo Bill in one way or another.
In Cody, just outside the eastern entrance to Yellowstone National park, there is a collection of museums all dealing with the cowboy legend, clustered into the Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
After you lunch in the Irma Hotel, by Queen Victoria's bar, you can walk off lunch down main street to the historical center, dodging the re-enacted shoot out along the way.
The Buffalo Bill Historical Center includes the Buffalo Bill Museum, the Plains Indian Museum, the Cody Firearms Museum -- don't diss guns in Wyoming! -- the Draper Museum of Natural History, and the Whitney Gallery of Western Art.
Together, the centre brings all this cowboy folklore into focus.
The American west also is the story of Indian history, specifically the fate of the native Indian tribes at the hands of the European settlers. It's a familiar story.
Take Sitting Bull. It's a sad story. Not for his role on the greasy grass in the Indian victory over Custer at Little Big Horn, just over the border from Sheridan in Montana, but for his fate when the Lakota chief, recognised by both sides as a great leader, finally came to accept the European invasion, surrendering after the settlers succeeded in wiping out the Indian food supply, the buffalo herds.
Sitting Bull later joined Buffalo Bill's show on $50 a week, we learn from material on issue at the Sheridan Inn.
But he stuck to his traditional ways, his religion, living with his two wives in a cabin on a reservation.
Eventually, the authorities sent a posse out to bring him in for bigamy. Surrounded in his cabin by 43 Indian police, Sitting Bull died, shot through the head, in a hail of gunfire as they tried to arrest him.
Apposite, then, that at your introduction to the wild west, as you exit Denver Airport bound by road for Cheyenne, there is an enormous metal statue of a rampant stallion, the kind that enabled the Europeans to conquer the Indian lands. In construction, the statue fell on its artist builder, and killed him.
Hitchhiker. Yellowstone National Park is way out west where the buffalo roam. Yellowstone has long been thought to have been the world's first national park, but evidence that's just come to light suggests is post-dates Stray'a's Royal National Park.
The only thing missing in Jellystone was Yogi Bear.
Old Faithful shoots its load, as it does every hour or so in Jellystone National Park.
Morning over Yellowstone Lake. It's a pl;easant place.
Casper, Wyoming, near where the western trails bifurcate, some heading nor-west to Oregon, some sou-west to Califor-nigh-ay, some south to Utaw.
IF YOU GO:
* The writer was a guest of United Airlines Australia and Wyoming Tourism.
|
The lobby of the Visitor Centre and hotel at Old Faithful, in Jellystone National Park: worth a visit, if only for a loo break, and a perv at the architecture. |
|
And the lobby at the Plains Hotel, in Cheyenne, where os.c, on our Study Tour of Obama Health Care Reform, was allocated the "Presidential Suite". All very well, but when you're staying only a few hours, the opportunity to appreciate it was limited. They had a DVD player in the room with DVDs. Lots of cowboy ones. No sign of Brokeback Mountain, however. |
| |
|
| |
|
