In March 1860, William H. Russell established the Overland Express Route, colloquially called the Pony Express, to carry express mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and California; an area with no colonialist settlements between. Russell failed repeatedly to get funding from the Senate Post Office for the project, as most considered year-round transportation between the two areas impossible due to extreme weather conditions, but Russell forged ahead on his own for two reasons:
Because he thought he could prove otherwise. Because an express route was needed.
Riders for the express service were recruited rapidly; waystations between the two points were established, and old ones readied, in the span of three months. By April 3rd of the same year, Russell’s riders connected Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California, with riders covering an average of 75 to 100 miles daily.
This legend endures, in spite of the service ending only eighteen months later after the transcontinental telegraph line was established—and with Russell’s company deeply in debt—because it worked, and was an incredible feat. At its fastest, a message (Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Address) was carried between St. Joseph and Sacramento in only 7 days and 17 hours.
With modern technology, the USPS estimates that a similar sized letter would take a maximum of five days. With planes, trains, and automobiles available to us, we’ve shaved off about two days.
Two days. In 165 years.
The Circulatory System of Civilization
Logistics is a hard business to be in, on account of the variables that can affect your services. Weather delays, lack of available labour, crime, and transportation issues have plagued the industry since Roman couriers travelled on foot between cities. It is the nature of the business to occasionally have delays, but anyone who works closely alongside, or relies on, logistics companies as part of their business will tell you that these delays have become a lot more common.
The cursus publicus—Rome’s state-run courier and transportation service—was the circulatory system of the empire. Established by Augustus around 20 BCE, the network of relay stations stretched across 80,000 kilometers of roads, with waystations spaced every 20 to 30 miles where couriers could swap exhausted horses for fresh ones. Messages could travel hundreds of miles in days. The system functioned so well that it outlasted the Western Empire itself, surviving in diminished form into the Byzantine period.
When the cursus publicus declined, it was a leading indicator of something terminal. As the empire fractured in the 3rd and 4th centuries, the system came under increasing pressure—inflation ate into budgets, barbarian incursions destroyed stations, and local elites resisted providing resources. The mail stopped working. Then the empire stopped working. Cause and effect blur, but the correlation is instructive: a state that cannot move information cannot coordinate anything else.
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