Eyewitness Accounts

Eyewitness Accounts. . , Stories of solitary Pony Express riders valiantly galloping through the western frontier still inspire people around the world. Publishers and editors during the 1860s often developed romanticized tales of the Wild West. Eyewitness accounts paint a more accurate picture of frontier history. , British explorer Sir Richard Burton visited Salt Lake City in September of 1860. His journal entries paint an eerie image of the Overland Stage and Pony Express stations west of the Great Sal Lake. Near the top of Overland Canyon, Burton wrote: "Nothing certainly, could be better fitted for an ambuscade than this gorge, with its caves and holes in snow-cuts, earth-drops, and lines of strata... in one place we saw the ashes of an Indian encampment, in another, a whirlwind, curling, as smoke would rise from behind. a projecting spur, [it] made us advance with the greatest caution." , When en route to California, author Mark Twain vividly recounts his experience as a Pony Express rider gallops past his stagecoach "We had had a consuming desire from the beginning to see a pony-rider, but somehow or other all that passed us... managed to streak by in the night, and... the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of the windows. But now we were expecting one Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves." , "In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling-sweeping toward us nearer and nearer-growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear... another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm!" , [Caption:] , Illustration by Ed Vebell from the 1950s Los Angeles Times, courtesy Dave Thomson Collection. Background image "Coming and Going" by Frederick Remington, courtesy Gilcrease Museum.