Christopher Corbett: Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth And Lasting Legend Of The Pony Express

Probably the most famous failed business in American history, the Pony Express ran from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento for about 18 months between 1860 and 1861. It provided mail service of unprecedented speed, connecting the East and the West back when they sometimes felt like different countries. A risky business venture initiated by usually cautious businessmen, it lost thousands of dollars, even before the first intercontinental telegraph made it instantly irrelevant. Little more than a blip in the history of the Old West, "the Pony" nevertheless became romanticized almost before it folded, and it's easy to see why. What better embodies rugged individualism, or the reckless plunge into the Western frontier, than the lone rider racing across the open plain? The legend overwhelmed the facts long ago, and journalist Christopher Corbett maintains a healthy respect for both in Orphans Preferred, his history of what one contemporaneous newspaper dubbed "the greatest enterprise of modern times." Though he puts such hyperbole aside, Corbett keeps a healthy awe for the Pony, never selling short the accomplishment of traveling all those miles across so much unforgiving terrain, but also winnowing out the more fabulous accounts to reconstruct the workings of the business, as well as the world in which it operated. Spending as much time on background as on the Pony Express itself, Corbett details the settler-instigated Indian conflicts that sometimes threatened the service and the ramshackle outposts of civilization that served as its stops. Ultimately, however, he has to grapple with the myths attached to the Pony's brief run, beginning with Buffalo Bill (who claimed to be a rider at a tender age, and whose Wild West show helped ensure the Pony's immortality) and extending through its sometimes hilariously inaccurate second life in dime novels and movies. Throughout, Corbett remains a witty guide, and one unafraid to get lost every once in a while in a subject whose established lore frequently contradicts itself. He even admits that his "orphans preferred" title doesn't stand up to scrutiny: Taken from a much-reprinted but apparently apocryphal ad for Pony riders, like so much Old West lore, it seems at once both an undeniable fabrication and the honest-to-God truth.