stage and freight employees - in fact by all respectable men throughout
the West. Nor were they honored merely for what they did; they were the
sort of men who command respect. To assist a rider in any way was deemed
a high honor; to do aught to retard him was the limit of wrong-doing, a
woeful offense. On the first trip west-bound, the rider between Folsom
and Sacramento was thrown, receiving a broken leg. Shortly after the
accident, a Wells Fargo stage happened along, and a special agent of
that Company, who chanced to be a passenger, seeing the predicament,
volunteered to finish the run. This he did successfully, reaching
Sacramento only ninety minutes late. Such instances are typical of the
manly cooperation that made the Pony Express the true success that it
was.

Mark Twain, who made a trip across the continent in 1860 has left this
glowing account[14] of a pony and rider that he saw while traveling
overland in a stage coach:

We had a consuming desire from the beginning, to see a pony rider; but
somehow or other all that passed us, and all that met us managed to
streak by in the night and so we heard only a whiz and a hail, and the
swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out
of the windows. But now we were expecting one along every moment, and
would see him in broad daylight. Presently the driver exclaims:

"Here he comes!"

Every neck is stretched further and every eye strained wider away across
the endless dead level of the prairie, a black speck appears against the
sky, and it is plain that it moves. Well I should think so! In a second
it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling -