Author Interview: Will Grant, The Last Ride of the Pony Express 

• Tom Fowlks

At one point in his non-fiction book The Last Ride of the Pony Express, writer Will Grant—who spent the summer of 2019 on horseback re-tracing the route of the original Pony Express from Missouri to California—attempts to sum up why the mail route has become so iconic in the popular consciousness, despite lasting just over 18 months from 1860 – 1861. "The details don't matter," Grant writes. "The immutable essence of the Pony Express is what matters. The spanning of the West by horseback couriers as a bold expression of the frontier psyche is what matters."

"'Why do we remember the Pony Express' is a question that I found very difficult to answer," Grant says by phone. "It's very digestible for people, sort of self-explanatory: It involves some swashbuckling young men running horses with the mail."

As Grant sets out on his own journey in Last Ride, he's clear about the fact that he's not attempting to duplicate that "swashbuckling" spirit from 150 years ago. Where those riders took only a matter of days to transfer mail over some 2000 miles, Grant planned to spend months on a route through Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada before reaching California. Along the way, he hoped to learn something not just about a historical event from the Wild West, but about the nature of the contemporary American West.

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• Hachette Books

What he discovered is that there's still a connection between some Western mythology and the way people still live in the region. "Most clearly, it's a sense of independence," Grant says. "I think this sense comes from remoteness, the distance between towns, so the landscape is certainly part of it. But ... the people make the West. They are the ones who live there. And a lot of places, it's still a very organic relationship between the people and the land. There are some 'role-players' out there, but for the most part, I felt the demographic of the West is still a product of the land."

Grant also believes that his encounters with these people couldn't have resulted in such honest conversations if he hadn't chosen the particular method of travel that he did, lending him immediate credibility with his interview subjects. "A lot of the rural west is agricultural people, ranches," he says. "So for a traveling horseman, this is a pretty good environment to travel through. ... Because I was traveling by horseback, I was familiar with their way of life, so there was common ground. ... I think they wanted a very non-judgmental, straight-faced account of who they are, and what they deal with."

As much as he was interested in today's real people, however, Grant was also interested in the way the history of the West has become entangled with mythology—of the Pony Express in particular, and of the West in general. Over the course of his journey, he encounters several museums and monuments to the Pony Express, with the expected mix of fact and hero-worship. "Some were pretty interested in the history, really the specifics of where the stations were, and whether this man rode for the Pony Express or not," he says. "There were certainly people dedicated to ... clearing up misinformation. That said, there were plenty of people for whom the mythology was important. My conclusion was that the riders traveled at a slower pace, but a lot of people I encountered really didn't want to hear that."

Even while taking a much slower pace than the actual Pony Express riders, Grant came to understand how remarkable that achievement was, as well as why it couldn't last—simple realities like the distance between water sources in Utah's West Desert and Nevada. And as a horseman himself, he knew that the amount of riding and pace required "would beat you up. A month of that would be hard work."

Yet as he traversed a part of the country that at times felt exactly like it would have been in 1860, and at other times radically changed by human intervention, he learned that there were both positives and negatives associated with the mythos of the American West.

"It helps us because it gives us an optimism," Grant says. "It can provide you with a sense of identity and context for the present. The worst is that we can misinterpret history and fail to make sound decisions about the future. My personal opinion is, romanticizing the Pony Express by thinking they ran their horses all the time is not to great detriment; it's just horses we're talking about. But if we misinterpret some of the nature of the settlement of the West, or the character of some of the men manning the stations, then we can get ourselves in trouble. You've got to recognize the mysticism. Let's all make sure we know that those ideas are out there."