The Pony Express leg

Early in the planning process, I was looking for a place to stop in Kansas on the way to Iowa and came across the small town of Marysville.  A video about the town evoked a sense of Hallmark Channel Christmas Movie quaintness, so I decided to place Marysville on our agenda.  At that point, we hadn't thought about going to Dodge City; Marysville was our Kansas destination point.  [Kansas is one of the states I still need to visit.]

While Marysville is a small town, it is rich in history, and a significant part of that is its position along the Pony Express route.  The Marysville Pony Express Home Station and Museum is located there and is the first home station headed west from St. Joseph, Missouri.  I admit, I don't know much about the Pony Express, but along our drive from Marysville to Marceline, Missouri, I found there are several opportunities to learn more.  The town of Seneca, Kansas, has a Pony Express Museum, and  St. Joseph is home to the Pony Express National Museum.  I reached out to the museums to see if they could recommend any books or documentaries that might be good for some background information to make our visits more meaningful.

One book, Riders of the Pony Express by Ralph Moody, was available at our public library.  I would recommend it as a place to start if you are like me and don't know much about this 18-month period in our nation's history.  And that's the first thing I learned about it - that the Pony Express was so short-lived; it was made obsolete by other forms of communication and transportation (the telegraph and the railroad).  There's more information from the National Park Service including a map.

Today, people refer to the middle states as the "fly-over states" without understanding the important role the people and places of what is now Middle America held in the settling of the country.  Ventures like the Pony Express passed through this land to serve an important purpose - to provide information to settlers in the western part of the country.  The first riders of the Pony Express paved the way for new methods of communication by showing what was possible.  And six or so generations later, I can communicate with you, dear reader, through means such as this blog.  

If you want to learn more about the Pony Express, here's a video from Weird History.

I am referring to this leg of our trip as the Pony Express leg.  Other legs include the Mark Twain leg, the Abraham Lincoln leg, and the Family History leg.  If you have a question or comment, you don't have to use the Pony Express - just put it in the comments below. 

~ Cindy D.