Review: 'Last Ride of the Pony Express' by Will Grant

Nov 30, 2023

When I was 8 or 9 years old, I took horseback riding lessons. The hobby proved short-lived. Every moment around those giant, unpredictable bodies I felt myself on the verge of catastrophe, at risk of being crushed, thrown, bitten or kicked. Decades passed, though, and one lucky day I found myself herding cows along the Montana Hi-Line astride a horse named Bump, who knew his business. Horse and cow and landscape and Western saddle were so of a piece, and Bump such a joy to ride out there in the great expanse, that I was awakened to an equine epiphany: Being atop a good horse was a kind of perfection, and the horse and the American West were the epitome of form and function.

For Will Grant, the apogee of man-and-horse-and-landscape is the Pony Express, the courier service that carried mail between St. Joseph, Mo., and Sacramento from the spring of 1860 to the fall of 1861. It was, he writes in "The Last Ride of the Pony Express: My 2,000-Mile Horseback Journey Into the Old West," "the greatest display of American horsemanship to ever color the pages of a history book." The "fast-horse mail relay" was a tour de force of logistics and horse-craft, with a galloping rider changing mounts at way stations every 10 to 20 miles, covering about 100 miles before handing his saddle bag of letters off to a fresh rider. The entire distance — more than half of the continental United States, much of it uninhabited desert and mountain — was crossed in an unbelievable 10 days, far swifter than any piece of technology then in existence could offer. Grant estimates that the system required up to 2,000 horses and mules, and several hundred riders spread over 190 stations along the thousands of miles.

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When Grant gets the idea of retracing every mile of it on horseback, he can't shake it. "If I could pull it off, I’d land in rare company … and to trace its course would be nothing short of transcendental," his "path to enlightenment between the 98th meridian and the golden shores of California." Acquiring two horses, Chicken Fry and Badger, Grant rode at the speed of a walk, covering the route not in 10 days but in 142. This is no wild, adrenaline-fueled ride: He plods along, ever conscious of his horses’ well-being (a theme running through the book is that a horse mistreated is a horse that doesn't function) over so many days and miles, plotting out his camping spots in advance, most of which are at ranches, as he meets various characters offering bed and sustenance and tales of their lives.

It sounds pretentious but isn't, because Grant is no city-slicker wannabe or Instagram influencer. The native Coloradan dreamed of horses since he was a child and apprenticed himself to a legendary horse trainer in Texas for five years after college, and "Last Ride" reads like a labor of love, one of those first books whose purity and sense of wonder you feel with every page.

The Pony Express itself ends up a somewhat minor character here. The service was so logistically complex and expensive that it ran for just 18 months. Today, it turns out, there's not much left of its material presence over those many miles, save a handful of historical markers and the occasional oddball museum or crumbling structure. Nor are there even all that many contemporaneous accounts by its riders or observers, though some of the best are by none other than Englishman Richard Burton, he of sneaking-into-Mecca fame. Instead, "The Last Ride of the Pony Express" is a paean to the horse and the American West, both of which Grant writes about with beauty and precision and a spareness as dry and sharp as a Nevada summer afternoon. "Where thin runs the fabric of civilization, the hand of the land bears heavily upon those who make from it what life they may," he writes. "The West … becomes more than a region. It is a time and a place and a consciousness."

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There's nothing particularly remarkable about any of the people Grant meets along the way, except the charismatic landscape in which they live, and it's when he leaves Salt Lake City and enters the Great Basin Desert and then Nevada that things turn transcendent. It's not a transcendence found in New Age aphorisms or encounters with God, but simply in the details of a vast environment — rough, dry and little changed over the centuries — and in the stories of working creatures, the horses, that made traveling through it possible. "The air was thin and clean," he writes of a section in which he was joined by a friend. "Fair-weather cumulus clouds ran to the western horizon, and the horizon looked dry. The country was beige, yellow, and red, and it looked rough, as though a thousand folds of scrubland separated the watershed summit where we stood and whatever far-off country lay to the west. We were tired and hungry and dirty. The horses dozed standing right where we’d slid from our saddles. The landscape was quiet. The gentle wind, the breathing of the horses, and the creak of saddle leather as the horses shifted position were the only sounds. … I’d been horseback for seventy-one days. I’d come a thousand miles from Missouri. I had a thousand miles ahead of me. At that moment, what sense I made from the elements was: This is the West."

So it goes. "The Last Ride of the Pony Express" is lean, unhurried. At moments I wished Grant would step back a bit, try to make sense of everything — his journey, the landscape, the nation of which it's such a storied part — to connect the dots and bring a kind of meaning to this West he's taking us through, but he's after something subtler. The details build. By the time he and Badger and Chicken Fry clip-clop into Sacramento you grasp the improbability of the Pony Express — which carried some 39,500 pieces of mail in its year and a half of operation — and the place all those horses and men tried to bridge. And by the time Grant makes it home to New Mexico, having worn through one pair of boots and 12 pairs of socks, but not, pointedly, his mounts, I knew why horses are counted in head, not heads, and I could smell the sagebrush and hear the wind long after I stopped reading.

Carl Hoffman is the author of five books, including "Liar's Circus," "The Last Wild Men of Borneo" and "Savage Harvest."

My 2,000-Mile Horseback Journey Into the Old West

By Will Grant

Little, Brown. 320 pp. $30

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