Sea to Shining Sea

by Michael Phillips

  The first was a letter to Pa from Alexander Dalton. He said the time was getting very close when Pa would have to make up his mind about whether to run or not. He stressed again his assurance that Drummond Hollister was exactly the kind of man the state of California needed, and his confidence that if Pa made up his mind soon, there would be victory in November. He would handle the whole campaign and all the details, he said. It would not cost Pa a cent. All he had to do was give his consent and perhaps make two or three speeches between Miracle Springs and Sacramento—Grass Valley and Auburn, and maybe one or two other towns besides.

  The second letter was addressed to me. My heart jumped for a moment, but then settled back into place when I saw the familiar handwriting of my editor at the Alta. Not so long ago, a note or letter from Mr. Kemble would send me into a positive tizzy. Now I found myself opening it almost with disappointment. His words, however, were sufficient to bring a tingle to my skin.

  You always continue to astound me, Corrie Hollister. I never gave you two cents’ worth of a chance of succeeding in this business, but you’ve been writing for me for six years and are one of the most well-known reporters I have. And now you’ve taken up speechmaking and politics besides! Is there anything you don’t do?

  In any case, I have heard the reports from Sacramento where, as I understand it, you were quite impressive. My Republican friends are badgering me for an article under your byline in support of the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket. Dalton says he will pay half if I will offer you enough myself to encourage you to set your pen to paper again as you did, unfortunately in vain, for the Fremont cause. He also assures me that, for the right article, he could almost guarantee publication in most of the major eastern cities. We would like an article of some length, which men and politicians would heed as well as the women who make up your customary readership. This is the title we would like to use: “Why Abraham Lincoln Should Be President—A Woman’s Point of View.”

  Can you do it? We will pay you a total of ten dollars. We would need the finished article by September 15 in order to get it to the east and published within the first week or two of October.

  I remain, sincerely yours,

  EDWARD KEMBLE

  Chapter 26

  A Bold Decision

  I don’t know what Pa intended to do about the letter he had received, but I needed something to occupy my mind for a while, and I liked what Mr. Kemble had suggested. I started on the article right away.

  I had no sooner begun when thoughts of Zack began to intrude into my mind. Maybe it was from seeing Pa wrestling with his decision, and knowing Zack was part of what he was thinking about in it all. There still had been no word from or about Zack, and even though we didn’t talk about it much, we were all worried.

  I couldn’t help feeling personally involved. I didn’t feel responsible for his leaving, but I did feel that maybe I’d let Zack down too, that a lot of the things he’d said to Pa applied to me as well. I even felt that some of what I’d done, the opportunities I’d had and the attention I’d received, all went into making him feel less important. It wasn’t true, of course, but his outburst surely made it seem like that’s how he felt. I thought we were about as close as a brother and sister could be, and then I found out that he was hurting about all kinds of things no one knew about. It wasn’t right for him to suffer like that, and I began to feel that it was important for me to do something about it.

  At first I thought of writing Zack a letter. What better way to get in touch with him? He’d have his hands on it in just a few days!

  Then I realized what a stupid idea it was. He might have his hands on it, but a letter would just be stuck inside a mail pouch in his saddlebags, and he would never see it! We had no idea where he was staying, so there was no way to address a letter actually to him.

  All the while I was working on my Lincoln article, Zack kept running through my mind. I’d see his face, first laughing, then serious. I’d see him riding on a horse like the wind. I recalled our first coming to California and how he’d tried so hard to act grown up. I remembered the pain I could see underneath the brave exterior. I remembered how he and Pa had a hard time at first, but how they had become friends—or so I’d thought. I remembered the first gun Pa gave him that Christmas and how proud Zack had been, and how much he’d loved working at the mine with the three men.

  So many memories kept rising and falling into my thoughts, all now clouded over with the pain and hurt of his bitter words of anger the day he’d left.

  One day a daring plan came into my mind—in its own way almost as daring, I suppose, as Zack’s going off as he had. I went to talk to Pa about it.

  “What would you think,” I asked, “if I was to go find Zack?”

  “Tarnation, girl!” he exclaimed. “How you figure on doing that?”

  “I’ll follow the Express route east till I get to Zack’s leg.”

  “You’re gonna ride along with the Pony Express! You’re a decent rider, Corrie. But you ain’t gonna keep up with them skinny young wild men!”

  “I don’t have to keep up with them, Pa,” I said. “I only have to follow the route. I figure I’ll go from station to station, asking as I go about Zack. Somebody’s bound to know of him, and somewhere along the line I’ll run into him.”

  Pa rubbed his chin and made like he was thinking. “It’s a foolhardy enough notion for my daughter to have thought of,” he said after a while, breaking into a grin.

  “Is it all right, Pa?” I asked eagerly.

  “‘Course it ain’t all right. This is crazier than any of your schemes four years ago!” Pa’s tone was lighthearted, but I could tell he meant it, too.

  I laughed kind of sheepishly.

  “What do you want me to say?” he went on. “That I like the idea? It’s dangerous out there.”

  “We have to find out about Zack sometime, Pa,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Pa sighed. “And I reckon by now you have proved yourself, and I trust you. But I don’t like the idea of you being out there alone. I don’t like it for a second, and I don’t see how I could do anything but try to keep you from it just like I did Zack.”

  “But I’d only be gone for a short time, Pa. Not like what Zack wanted to do—not to take a job.”

  Pa sighed. “I’m as anxious about Zack as you are. Why don’t you take the stage?”

  “The stage doesn’t follow the same route till it gets to Wyoming.”

  “The wagon trail?”

  “There are no wagon trains going east this late in the year. I wouldn’t find anybody to hook up with that way, either. Besides, the California Trail goes north of the Express route. There’s no way I can see to find him except to go straight out to Placerville and Carson City and then straight across Nevada toward Salt Lake City.”

  “I tell you, it’s dangerous territory, Corrie. Your ma died out there from the heat. You know that better than I do. There’s Indians, desert, sometimes no water.”

  “That was almost ten years ago, Pa. It’s more civilized now. There are horse-changing stations every twenty or twenty-five miles. There are people, food, water, a place to rest. If I just told them my brother was a rider, they’d be hospitable enough, and even let me sleep the night.”

  Pa thought again. “Yeah, I reckon that’s so,” he said. “Still, I don’t much like the idea of you being that far from home alone.”

  All of a sudden another wild idea struck me.

  “Why don’t you come with me, Pa?” I said. “Let’s go find Zack together!”

  Pa’s face remained blank, not twitching so much as a muscle. But his eyes betrayed that somewhere deep behind them, his mind was spinning fast to take in the words I had said and to figure out what to do about them.

  “You know his being gone’s eating at you, Pa,” I said after a minute, “just like it is me. Let’s both go out there and find him and tell him we’re sorry for not letting him know how we felt, and tell him we love him.”

  Still Pa was
silent, thinking it all over. He stood there for a long time, looking out into the distance. Finally he turned to me.

  “You think he’d listen to me?” he said softly, the pain and uncertainty all too clear in his voice.

  “Of course he would, Pa,” I said. “What son’s going to turn his own pa away?”

  “Seems like that’s just what he wanted to do.”

  “Oh, Pa, no he didn’t. He was just feeling pain and confusion. He didn’t know what to do with it all. I think you got in the way, that’s all.”

  “But I was the cause of it all.”

  “No you weren’t, Pa. Kids blame their parents for all kinds of things that are really no one’s fault but their own. They just don’t want to look down inside themselves, so they blame the nearest person around.”

  “Did you ever do that, Corrie?” asked Pa. He and I had lots of personal talks together. But when he said those words, there was an earnestness in his voice I’d never heard before. Never in my life had I seen a man so vulnerable as Pa was at that moment, so stripped of all the barriers men usually put up to shield themselves from other people. I felt I was looking all the way to the bottom of Pa’s very soul, where there was a tender human being just as capable of feelings and suffering and questions and pain and worry as any woman or any child. It’s not the kind of thing most kids ever get the chance to see in their parents, but I saw it right then in my pa, and it pulled me all the deeper into him and made me love him all the more.

  He was looking at me intently, almost as if he were afraid of the answer I would give him.

  “When we first got here,” I said, “there were a couple of times I felt hurt, Pa. But Ma had just died. I was so confused about everything, and I was only fifteen.”

  “Did you blame me for what happened?” Pa asked, still with the earnest, transparent, questioning probing in his eyes.

  Again, I thought hard. “I can’t say as there wasn’t any pain, Pa,” I said. “That was a hard time for all of us. But no, after we were together awhile, I never blamed you, Pa. I got to know you too well. I got to know what was inside that heart of yours. I found out how much you loved Ma, how much you loved all of us and missed us . . . and how much you loved me. How could I blame you for anything, Pa, once I really knew who you were . . . once I knew how full of love you were?”

  Pa was still gazing straight at me with those manly, loving, almost pleading eyes of his. But as I was speaking they had slowly filled with tears. His lips remained unmoved, but in those sparkling eyes I could see his relief.

  We just stood, holding each other’s gaze for a minute. Then finally Pa did smile, and as he did he took me in his arms, drew me to him, and embraced me with a strength that almost squeezed the breath out of me.

  “Thank you, Corrie,” he said, his voice just the slightest bit quivery.

  “Yes, Pa,” I whispered.

  “I’m sorry for the pain you felt.”

  “It’s long past now.”

  “Not for Zack,” he said.

  “For me it is, Pa. And you have to remember that I know you better than he does.”

  “It means more to me than you can know, Corrie, that you believe in me, and don’t blame me. That means more to a man than his kin can ever realize.”

  We stood for another minute or two in each other’s arms. “I love you, Pa,” I said finally.

  Just a moment more we stood; then Pa withdrew his hands from around me, pulled back, and looked at me, his blinking eyes drying again. He smiled broadly.

  “Then let’s you and me go find Zack!” he said.

  Chapter 27

  The Pony Express

  The idea for the Pony Express came from a businessman by the name of William Russell, who hoped that the government would pay his company—Russell, Majors, and Waddell—to have mail delivered speedily coast to coast. He proposed that they be paid one thousand dollars a week for two trips in both directions. The government never did pay for the service, and the costs involved turned out to be as high as ten to fifteen thousand dollars a week instead.

  Before the Pony Express began in April of 1860, mail took twenty-five days to go from the East Coast to California—if the stagecoach didn’t break a wheel, run into snow, or get attacked by Indians! Compared with how isolated California had been from the rest of the country in the early 1800s, even that was mighty fast. But when the organizers of the Pony Express said they would take mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento in ten days or less, everyone was amazed and wondered if such speed was possible.

  Naturally, with Zack’s fondness for horses, we had been curious and had followed the development of the idea with interest. Like all the papers, the Alta carried detailed stories about the first few mail crossings. Even in the midst of all the political news of 1860, some of the Pony Express riders became nationally known heroes. I read all the news articles that had been written for over a year now about it. Zack had sent off for some pamphlets too, and I had saved all the articles I’d read from different papers. So now with Pa and me planning to go find him, I pulled out everything I’d accumulated and read through it again.

  Actually, the idea wasn’t really Russell’s at all, because there had been something like the Pony Express during the Roman Empire. And in the 1200s, Kublai Khan, the emperor of China, had a huge system of communication with stations stretching all the way from China to Europe, and with as many as four hundred fresh horses at every station, and thousands and thousands of messengers.

  But for the United States the idea was new. And with mountains and deserts and Indians and bandits and no roads and no station houses, it was all a pretty big undertaking for Mr. Russell’s company to get started. We had been reading about it in the papers for months before the horses actually began carrying mail.

  There were to be eighty expert light riders riding between eighty relay stations, and making use of four to five hundred fast and hardy top-quality Indian horses. Forty of the riders would be stretched out in a line going east, the other forty in a line going west—all of them going back and forth both ways from their home base. It turned out later that there were two hundred riders in all—eighty in the saddle at all times, and the others resting between rides and replacements.

  The mail would be carried by a leather cover that fit right over the saddle, called a mochila. There were four pouches on all four corners of the mochila, each of which had a lock on it. The keys were kept only in St. Joseph and Sacramento—the two end points of the Express—and at Salt Lake City in the middle.

  From California, the route of the Express went to Placerville, up over the Sierra Nevadas and down into Carson City, Nevada. From there it went straight across the high desert of the Great Basin and over the awful salt flats to Salt Lake. That was the only real city along the way, and was about a third of the whole distance. From Salt Lake the riders went gradually north up into the Rockies, past Fort Bridger, through South Pass, and to Casper, Wyoming. Then they started south, to Fort Laramie, and down onto the plains of Nebraska, following the same routes as the Mormon Trail and the Oregon Trail, down to Fort Kearny, into northeastern Kansas and to St. Joseph. The whole distance from Sacramento was 1,966 miles.

  So many eager young boys wanted to join the Pony Express right at first that they could have probably been hired cheaply. But Russell, Majors, and Waddell decided to pay them over a hundred dollars a month—high pay for anybody! As time went on, though, even that much money wasn’t enough to keep some of them riding for the Express!

  I don’t know how God-fearing the owners of the company were, but they must have had some religious beliefs, because every rider that signed on, besides being given a lightweight rifle and a Colt revolver, was also given a Bible to carry with him. Riders also received the clothes that became the “uniform” of the Pony Express—a bright red shirt and blue dungarees. I never did understand, given as much trouble as they had with the Indians, why they made the riders dress so brightly!

  Before he was h
ired, every rider had to sign a pledge that read:

  I do hereby swear, before the Great and Living God, that during my engagement, and while I am an employee of Russell, Majors, & Waddell, I will, under no circumstances, use profane language; that I will drink no intoxicating liquors; that I will not quarrel or fight with any other employee of the firm, and that in every respect I will conduct myself honestly, be faithful to my duties, and so direct all my acts as to win the confidence of my employers. So help me God.

  At least if Zack had to leave home, I was glad it was to work for a company with high standards of morality like that. I just hoped all those who signed that pledge kept to their word and lived by it!

  Chapter 28

  Pa and I Take to the Trail

  With the history it had and the reputation the Pony Express had already gained, when Pa and I left Sacramento it was almost as if we were following in the footsteps of George Washington. It seems odd to talk about California and the West as being part of history when everything was so new out here. But if the gold rush and the Pony Express didn’t make us westerners part of history, nothing ever would.

  A fellow named Sam Hamilton rode the first leg between Sacramento and Sportsman’s Hall. The Express left Sacramento every Tuesday and Saturday. Since we had arrived late Monday, we stayed at Miss Baxter’s and decided to leave at the same time. Pa was excited, and wanted to see how long we could keep pace with him.

  But Sam was a skinny little fellow, and his horse not much bigger. To give them an advantage when trying to outrun Indians, each animal’s load was limited to 165 pounds—20 pounds for the mail, 25 pounds for equipment, and 120 pounds for the rider. Zack must have lied about his weight, because I knew he weighed at least 130 or 140 pounds. But little Sam Hamilton might have been only 110!