The Pony Express was an American express mail service that used relays of horse-mounted riders. It operated from April 3, 1860, to October 26, 1861, between Missouri and California. It was operated by the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company.
The Oregon Trail was a 2,170-mile (3,490 km) east–west, large-wheeled wagon route and emigrant trail in the United States that connected the Missouri River to valleys in Oregon. The eastern part of the Oregon Trail spanned part of what is now the state of Kansas and nearly all of what are now the states of Nebraska and Wyoming. The western half of the trail spanned most of the current states of Idaho and Oregon.
The California Trail was an emigrant trail of about 1,600 mi (2,600 km) across the western half of the North American continent from Missouri River towns to what is now the state of California. After it was established, the first half of the California Trail followed the same corridor of networked river valley trails as the Oregon Trail and the Mormon Trail, namely the valleys of the Platte, North Platte, and Sweetwater rivers to Wyoming. The trail has several splits and cutoffs for alternative routes around major landforms and to different destinations, with a combined length of over 5,000 mi (8,000 km).
Butterfield Overland Mail was a stagecoach service in the United States operating from 1858 to 1861. It carried passengers and U.S. Mail from two eastern termini, Memphis, Tennessee, and St. Louis, Missouri, to San Francisco, California. The routes from each eastern terminus met at Fort Smith, Arkansas, and then continued through Indian Territory (Oklahoma), Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Mexico, and California ending in San Francisco. On March 3, 1857, Congress authorized the U.S. postmaster general, at that time Aaron V. Brown, to contract for delivery of the U.S. mail from St. Louis to San Francisco. Prior to this, U.S. Mail bound for the Far West had been delivered by the San Antonio and San Diego Mail Line since June 1857.
The Hastings Cutoff was an alternative route for westward emigrants to travel to California, as proposed by Lansford Hastings in The Emigrant's Guide to Oregon and California. The ill-fated Donner Party infamously took the route in 1846.
The Central Overland California and Pike's Peak Express Company was a stagecoach line that operated in the American West in the early 1860s, but it is most well known as the parent company of the Pony Express. It was formed as a subsidiary of the freighting company Russell, Majors, and Waddell, after the latter two partners bought out Russell's stage line, the Leavenworth and Pikes Peak Express Company. The stage line had made its first journey from Westport, Missouri, to Denver on March 9, 1859.
Alexander Majors was an American businessman, who along with William Hepburn Russell and William B. Waddell founded the Pony Express, based in St. Joseph, Missouri. This was one of the westernmost points east of the Missouri River from its upper portion beyond that state. It was a major supply point for migrants and pioneers headed west to Oregon Country.
Interstate 80 (I-80) traverses the northern portion of the US state of Nevada. The freeway serves the Reno metropolitan area and passes through the towns of Fernley, Lovelock, Winnemucca, Battle Mountain, Carlin, Elko, Wells, and West Wendover on its way through the state.
Ruby Valley is a large basin located in south-central Elko and northern White Pine counties in the northeastern section of the state of Nevada in the western United States. From Secret Pass it runs south-southwest for approximately 60 miles (96 km) to Overland Pass. To the west is the steep escarpment of the Ruby Mountains, and to the north is the East Humboldt Range and Clover Valley. The east side of the valley is less well defined, but its maximum width is about 10 miles (16 km) near Franklin Lake. At its south end lies the Ruby Lake National Wildlife Refuge.
George W. Chorpenning Jr. (1 June 1820 - 3 April 1894) was a pioneer in the transportation of mail, freight, and passengers through the arid and undeveloped western regions of nineteenth-century United States. His efforts in the 1850s were vital to the integration of the then-new state of California with the established government and economy east of the Mississippi River.
James Hervey Simpson (1813–1883) was an officer in the U.S. Army and a member of the United States Corps of Topographical Engineers.
The first transcontinental telegraph was a line that connected the existing telegraph network in the eastern United States to a small network in California, by means of a link between Omaha, Nebraska and Carson City, Nevada, via Salt Lake City. It was a milestone in electrical engineering and in the formation of the United States of America. It served as the only method of near-instantaneous communication between the east and west coasts during the 1860s. For comparison, in 1841, the news of the death of President William Henry Harrison had taken 110 days to reach Los Angeles.
The Overland Telegraph Company was one of the organizations responsible for constructing the telegraph line which resulted in the first transcontinental telegraph network in the United States. The company built the section of line between Fort Churchill, Nevada Territory and Salt Lake City, Utah Territory.
The Lahontan Valley is a basin in Churchill County, Nevada, United States. The valley is a landform of the central portion of the prehistoric Lake Lahontan's lakebed of 20,000-9,000 years ago. The valley and the adjacent Carson Sink represent a small portion of the lake bed. Humboldt Lake is to the valley's northeast. Pyramid Lake is west. Walker Lake is to the south. The valley is part of the larger Great Basin Desert, however during the California Gold Rush the valley was often called the Forty Mile Desert.
The Overland Trail was a stagecoach and wagon trail in the American West during the 19th century. While portions of the route had been used by explorers and trappers since the 1820s, the Overland Trail was most heavily used in the 1860s as a route alternative to the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails through central Wyoming. The Overland Trail was famously used by the Overland Stage Company owned by Ben Holladay to run mail and passengers to Salt Lake City, Utah, via stagecoaches in the early 1860s. Starting from Atchison, Kansas, the trail descended into Colorado before looping back up to southern Wyoming and rejoining the Oregon Trail at Fort Bridger. The stage line operated until 1869 when the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad eliminated the need for mail service via stagecoach.
Fort Halleck was a military outpost that existed in the 1860s along the Overland Trail and stage route in what was then the Territory of Idaho, now the U.S. state of Wyoming. The fort was established in 1862 to protect emigrant travelers and stages transporting mail between Kansas and Salt Lake City, Utah, and named for Major General Henry Wager Halleck, commander of the Department of the Missouri and later General-in-chief of the Union armies.
In the history of the American frontier overland trails were built by pioneers throughout the 19th century and especially between 1829 and 1870 as an alternative to sea and railroad transport. These immigrants began to settle much of North America west of the Great Plains as part of the mass overland migrations of the mid-19th century. Settlers emigrating from the eastern United States were spurred by various motives, among them religious persecution and economic incentives, to move to destinations in the far west via routes including the Oregon Trail, California Trail, and Mormon Trail. After the end of the Mexican–American War in 1849, vast new American conquests again enticed mass immigration. Legislation like the Donation Land Claim Act and significant events like the California Gold Rush further lured people to travel overland to the west.
The Butterfield Overland Mail route in Baja California was created as a result of an act by the United States Congress on March 3, 1857, and operated until June 30, 1861 as part of the Second Division of the route. Subsequently other stage lines operated along the route until the Southern Pacific Railroad arrived in Yuma, Arizona.
Mormon Road, also known to the 49ers as the Southern Route, of the California Trail in the Western United States, was a seasonal wagon road pioneered by a Mormon party from Salt Lake City, Utah led by Jefferson Hunt, that followed the route of Spanish explorers and the Old Spanish Trail across southwestern Utah, northwestern Arizona, southern Nevada and the Mojave Desert of California to Los Angeles in 1847. From 1855, it became a military and commercial wagon route between California and Utah, called the Los Angeles – Salt Lake Road. In later decades this route was variously called the "Old Mormon Road", the "Old Southern Road", or the "Immigrant Road" in California. In Utah, Arizona and Nevada it was known as the "California Road".
The California State Telegraph Company was a business originally organized to provide telegraph service between San Francisco and Marysville, California. By the spring of 1861, the company had expanded its service area south to Los Angeles, north to Yreka, and east to Fort Churchill by absorbing the other telegraph companies in California. In 1861, the company formed the Overland Telegraph Company, which was responsible for constructing part of the telegraph line which resulted in the first transcontinental telegraph network in the United States.
