West Like Lightning : The Brief, Legendary Ride Of The Pony Express

West Like Lightning : The Brief, Legendary Ride Of The Pony Express
ISBN: 9780062496782
Publication Date: 2 March 2020

BEFORE IT BECAME LEGEND, IT WAS A REVOLUTION KICKING UP Dust ACROSS 1,900 MILES OF THE AMERICAN WEST. The #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of American Sniper brings the Pony Express to life in this rich and rollicking new history.

In the eve of the Civil War, three American businessmen launched an audacious plan to create a financial empire by transforming communications across the hostile territory between the nation's two coasts. In the process, they created one of the most enduring icons of the American West: the Pony Express. Daring young men with colorful names like "Bronco Charlie" and "Sawed-Off Jim" galloped at speed over a vast and unforgiving landscape, etching an irresistible tale that passed into myth almost instantly. Equally an improbable success and a business disaster, the Pony Express came and went in just eighteen months, but not before uniting and captivating a nation on the brink of being torn apart. Jim DeFelice's brilliantly entertaining West Like Lightning is the first major history of the Pony Express to put its birth, life, and legacy into the full context of the American story.

The Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company or "Pony Express," as it came to be known was part of a plan by William Russell, Alexander Majors, and William Waddell to create the next American Express, a transportation and financial juggernaut that already dominated commerce back east. All that stood in their way were almost two thousand miles of uninhabited desert, ice-capped mountains, oceanic plains roamed by Indian tribes, whitewater-choked rivers, and harsh, unsettled wilderness.

The Pony used a relay system of courageous horseback riders to ferry mail halfway across a continent in just...