While each rider was supposed to average seventy-five miles a trip,
riding from three to seven horses, accidents were likely to occur, and
it was not uncommon for a man to lose his way. Such delays meant serious
trouble in keeping the schedule, keyed up, as it was, to the highest
possible speed. It was confronting such emergencies, and in performing
the duties of comrades who had been killed or disabled while awaiting
their turns to ride, that the most exciting episodes took place.

Among the more famous riders[23] was Jim Moore who later became a
ranchman in the South Platte Valley, Nebraska. Moore made his greatest
ride on June 8, 1860. He happened to be at Midway Station, half way
between the Missouri River and Denver, when the west-bound messenger
arrived with important Government dispatches to California. Moore "took
up the run," riding continuously one hundred and forty miles to old
Julesburg, the end of his division. Here he met the eastbound messenger,
also with important missives, from the Coast to Washington. By all the
rules of the game Moore should have rested a few hours at this point,
but his successor, who would have picked up the pouch and started
eastward, had been killed the day before. The mail must go, and the
schedule must be sustained. Without asking any favors of the man who had
just arrived from the West, Moore resumed the saddle, after a delay of
only ten minutes, without even stopping to eat, and was soon pounding
eastward on his return trip. He made it, too, in spite of lurking
Indians, hunger and fatigue, covering the round trip of two hundred and
eighty miles in fourteen hours and forty-six minutes an average speed of
over eighteen miles an hour. Furthermore, his west-bound mail had gone
through from St. Joseph to Sacramento on a record-making run of eight
days and nine hours.

William James, always called "Bill" James, was a native of Virginia. He