During 2010 and 2011, writer and researcher Kirby Sanders was selected by the National Park Service to prepare a series of maps and reports outlining the routes and stations used by the iconic old west stagecoaches for the first overland transcontinental mail service from 1858 until 1861. The study was mandated by Act of the United States Congress under the Omnibus Public Lands Act of 2009. Based upon over a decade of research, contained herein are those reports as supplied to the National Park Service. Part of a series that includes the states of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California; this volume includes both the railroad and stagecoach routes from St. Louis, Missouri into Arkansas. Original routes and modern driving equivalents are mapped and stage station locations are identified as nearly as possible by latitude and longitude. The study and these reports were designed as a field guide to facilitate further in-depth local research to establish the exact route and station locations of this historically significant but rapidly vanishing trail.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

The encyclopedia takes a broad, multidisciplinary approach to the history of the period. It includes general and specific entries on politics and business, labor, industry, agriculture, education and youth, law and legislative affairs, literature, music, the performing and visual arts, health and medicine, science and technology, exploration, life on the Western frontier, family life, slave life, Native American life, women, and more than a hundred influential individuals.

Features: The Elusive Mr. Sanderson by Ken Wheeling - Page 270 Carts of India by Susan Green - Page 282 Driving the Trails - Page 296 Additional Articles: CAA "In the Neighborhood" Learning Weekend of Cincinnati, Ohio - Page 259 Pickpocket Arena Driving Clinic A Success by Linda and Eric Wilking - Page 265 Bits, Bits, and More Bits by Kathleen Haak - Page 276 The "R" Files by Jeremy Masterson - Page 290 My Father's Livery Stable by George J. Reilly - Page 293

“Orphans preferred” was the call that went out to the daring of heart when the Pony Express was organized nearly 150 years ago in April 1860. Called “The Greatest Enterprise of Modern Times,” the endeavor—which lasted only nineteenth months—recruited young men willing to risk life and limb in a relay race that crossed the frontier on a route from St. Joseph, Missouri, to San Francisco, California, speeding the delivery of mail to an astonishing ten days. The Pony Express combines the legends and lore of this remarkable mail service with contemporary photography and archival images and documents from the past, and celebrates the sesquicentennial of the start—and end—of those daring rides, which ended with the completion of the transcontinental railroad. It is a befitting tribute to an American icon whose legacy is marked to this day by Pony Express museums all along the route from Missouri to California.