The annual ride reenacts the original trek the Pony Express postal service followed in the 1800s before it became obsolete.

Reporting from Sacramento, Salt Lake City and St. Joseph, Mo. Bill Gates’ career as a Harvard undergrad. Elizabeth Taylor’s second, fourth, fifth, seventh and eighth marriages. Sarah Palin’s tenure as ...

This Smithsonian Snapshot celebrates the April 3, 1860, anniversary of the Pony Express. In 1860, a relay system of horses began to carry mail across the 1,966-mile “central route” between St. Joseph, ...

Rare correspondence—carried by a vanished courier—is one of only "two pieces of what collectors call 'interrupted mail' from the Pony Express," says Postal Museum curator Daniel Piazza. National ...

The Pony Express only lasted 18 months, but the mail delivery service remains one of the most enduring icons of the American West — its story told in dime novels and in Westerns like the 1990s TV show ...

Even prospectors and cowboys need to keep up with their correspondence. In the mid-19th century, there was no transcontinental telegraph line, and as California’s population approached 400,000 with a ...

In May 2019, I set out from St. Joseph, Missouri, with two horses and a plan to ride 2,000 miles to Sacramento, California, along the Pony Express Trail. My book, The Last Ride of the Pony Express, is ...

A rare envelope from the 1860s, the only one ever sent to Vermont via the fabled Pony Express, is going up for auction this month. Bids will start at $2,500, but it’s anyone’s guess how high the price ...

Before there was Federal Express, there was the Pony Express. Here’s a brief history of how the mail got delivered using good old-fashioned horsepower. IMAGINE if you wrote a letter to a friend on ...