Louis S. Warren by Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody, the Wild West Show Page B

Waddell. Pony Express riders symbolized not only rugged strength and courage, but the anachronism of organic workers—animals and people—and their heroic endurance as they prepared the ground for the machine. The
Sacramento Bee
eulogized the pony soon after the last rider dismounted. “Thou wert the pioneer of a continent in the rapid transmission of intelligence between its peoples, and have dragged in your train the lightning itself, which, in good time, will be followed by steam communication by rail.” 77 As the nineteenth century rolled on, ever more laborers were replaced by an ever wider array of machines, and the horseman as harbinger of technological revolution became ever more apt a symbol for Americans, especially in cities where the Wild West show played to packed stands.
    But there was another, surprising reason behind the pony’s popularity, one which drew on Cody’s experience of boyhood even more directly: the Pony Express represented national unity, in profoundly familial terms. Many were the scribes who evoked the glories of western annexation prior to the war with Mexico, with John O’Sullivan’s call to “manifest destiny” being only the most famous. But in reality, the acquisition of the Far West blew the nation apart. The U.S.-Mexican War began the year William Cody was born and ended when he was two. Its most immediate result was the annexation of California and the Far West, but following fast on the heels of that event was the gathering storm over slavery in the new western territories, the fight which took Isaac Cody’s life and finally ended only at Appomattox in 1865.
    As eastern states grappled over slavery in the West, the West itself became a site of profound familial loss. The gold rush began in 1848, and California’s stunning growth made it a state in 1850. But if statehood signified a legal and republican unity, California was very much a place apart, separated from the rest of the nation by 1,500 miles of plain and desert. Suddenly, east-west crossing of the nation required the ordeal of foreign travel. Whether one chose the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope, or a sea-and-land route through Mexico or Panama, or the Overland Trail through Indian country and the Mormon territories, alienation was unavoidable. Getting from one end of the United States to the other now meant sojourning among Mexicans, Catholics, polygamous Mormons, and half-naked or all-naked Indians, amid parching deserts, towering mountains, awesome storms, and wild, desolate country.
    The journey was all the more fearful because, in most cases, the routes to California pulled families apart. 78 Men went ahead intending to send for families or merely to return rich. Husbands and wives took their kids, pulled up stakes, and left their beloved extended kin behind. Letters took at least three weeks to travel the long stagecoach routes between California and eastern states. If they went by sea, they could go unread for six months.
    By the mid-1850s, the growing threat of a southern secession made the chasm between California and her sister states seem all the more dangerous. Californians numbered half a million by that time, and they were most conscious of the urgent need for closer bonds with nation and family. In 1856, they presented the largest petition in the history of the United States Senate, 75,000 signatures on a memorial complaining, “We are now, as it were, a distant colony.” They requested a federally supported wagon road with army protection from the Mississippi Valley to their new home, so that distant families could join the multitudes of young men toiling in the mines and domesticate this distant, wild frontier. 79
    Thus, when they remembered the Pony Express, Americans—especially Californians—recalled it as a reassuring sign amid rumblings of civil war, as the entity that sealed the bond of union between West and East. To ride the Pony