Food on the Pony Express Mail Line
Food served on the Pony Express mail line was basic at best.
When you think of the Pony Express, what comes to mind? Although imagination is by no means universal, most people probably think of a daring rider galloping across the barren prairie. This, of course, is correct. Pony Express riders did gallop their horses down the Great Platte River Road. However, Pony Express riders did have quite a lot of downtime as well. Mail ran from east-to-west, and from west-to-east, leaving a maximum of twice a week. Although this could lead to some busy days for the riders, it also could have resulted in lots of downtime. If you’ve read my post How the Pony Express Worked, or read my book History of the West with Sam Payne; Pony Boy, you know that when riders were not on the road, they stayed at their home stations. Conditions at these home stations were spartan and not for the faint of heart. Food is one aspect of life at a Pony Express station that you may be able to still comprehend.
Before moving on, it might be worth a few sentences to talk about living history. Living history is the idea that if you DO things from the past, or in other words LIVE them, you can better understand a time period. For example, rubbing sticks together to make fire is something that has not changed since humans first accomplished the feat. So, if you create a friction fire, you can better understand the life of our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors. The more you DO things people in history did, the more you can understand the realities of their lives. If you understand that you can share experiences across time with people of the past, you might realize that if you want to know what it was like to live at a Pony Express station, you can start by trying to eat some of the same food they ate.
By the time the Pony Express started running in 1860, the American West was not an unexplored place. True, there were still plenty of places the map had not yet drawn definitive lines around, but for the most part, people knew the general lay of the land. People were also moving in large numbers. It is one of the things I try to highlight in my book History of the West with Sam Payne: And the Wagons Rolled. In posts related to that book, I point out that by 1860 there were easily over 100,000 people living in the “territories.” In order to supply all of those people with goods that made their lives better, freighting outfits were established to carry freight across established trails. This is important to understand because it can help you realize that Pony Express stations were not living without contact and supplies from the outside world. Instead of self-sufficient islands on the prairie, they expected a regular flow of traffic to come through their yard. Some of that traffic would continue to resupply them with food from further east. This means that although food at the stations was spartan, you can’t imagine they weren’t constantly hunting for food like the mountain men.
Perhaps the best witness to food on the Pony Express was Richard Francis Burton. Richard Francis Burton traveled to Salt Lake City in late summer of 1860. Along the way, he kept a journal of his travels. Fortunately for us, his route of travel followed the Pony Express mail route, and he left a detailed account of what life was like along the way.
When you read his book City of the Saints you can’t help but notice Burton is an award-winning whiner. Evidently, he wasn’t prepared for the sort of grim reality that life in the West would be. Thankfully, while documenting his constant stream of complaints, he recorded many people, places, and details that would have otherwise been lost to history. And one of his biggest complaints; food.
Burton did note frequently about the food that he ate along the way. You see, he was traveling by stagecoach and stopping at the road ranches and Pony Express stations. One reason road ranches and stations were built was to accommodate travelers. People stopped for food, water, or to stay the night, and the people who owned the ranch were paid for their services. They were not “ranches” like we think today. Instead, they were more like gas stations.
Now that you have a background of the Pony Express and Richard Burton, take a look at what he had to say about food on the Pony Express.
To give you an idea of Burton, here is part of his description of the people who operated the first roach ranch he stopped at:
“The scene was the rale “Far West.” The widow body to whom the shanty belonged lay sick with fever. The aspect of her family was a "caution to snakes:” the ill-conditioned sons dawdled about, listless as Indians, in skin tunics and pantaloons fringed with lengthy tags … and the daughters, tall young women, whose sole attire was apparently a calico morning - wrapper, color invisible, waited upon us in a protesting way. Squalor and misery were imprinted upon the wretched log hut, which ignored the duster and the broom, and myriads of flies disputed with us a dinner consisting of doughnuts, green and poisonous with saleratus, suspicious eggs in a massive greasy fritter, and rusty bacon, intolerably fat. It was our first sight of squatter life, and, except in two cases, it was our worst. We could not grudge 50 cents a head to these unhappies; at the same time, we thought it a dear price to pay the sequel disabused us — for flies and bad bread, worse eggs and bacon.”
Green and poisonous saleratus, suspicious eggs, greasy fritter, rusty bacon, bad bread, worse eggs and bacon. About the only thing he doesn’t complain about is the doughnuts, and I doubt those are the sugar-coated kind we enjoy today. Although not a Pony Express station, this entry does identify several of the staple foods of the time and place. Bread and bacon. Saleratus is a reference to leavened bread at the time. While still in Kansas, Burton records stopping at another ranch to eat. This one was Guittard’s Station and was a documented Pony Express swing station.
“The improvement upon the native was palpable: the house and kitchen were clean, the fences neat; the ham and eggs, the hot rolls and coffee, were fresh and good, and, although drought had killed the salad, we had abundance of peaches and cream…”
At Guittards, Burton identifies ham, eggs, rolls, coffee, and peaches and cream. As you can tell, he is much more impressed with this station. This is the second entry identifying pork, eggs, and bread. It is the first of many identifying coffee as a frontier staple. It is also the only one that notes enjoying peaches and cream.
While at Fort Kearny he says:
“After satisfying hunger with vile bread and viler coffee — how far from the little forty - berry cup of Egypt ! —for which we paid 75 cents, we left Kearney Station without delay.”
At Plum Creek station west of Fort Kearney, Burton describes being served buffalo meat:
“We dined at Plum Creek on buffalo, probably bull beef, the worst and dryest meat, save elk, that I have ever tasted; indeed, without the assistance of pork fat, we found it hard to swallow. As everyone knows, however, the two-year-old cow is the best eating, and at this season the herds are ever in the worst condition.”
Personally, I find this entry to fit what I understand of Burton to a T. Not only does he complain about the food, but he also spouts off about how he is an expert in buffalo meat. In his defense, most sources indicate bull meat was tough, and that cows were the best eating.
Next comes his description of a meal at Cottonwood station in Nebraska.
“…at Cotton-wood Station, we proceeded by means of an " eye-opener”, which even the abstemious judge could not decline, and the use of the "skillet,” to prepare for a breakfast composed of various abominations, especially cakes of flour and grease, molasses and dirt, disposed in pretty equal parts. After paying the usual 50 cents, we started in…”
More bread, but this time with some molasses.
A little further down the line around Julesburg:
“For a breakfast cooked in the usual manner, coffee boiled down to tannin (ever the first operation), meat subjected to half sod, half stew, and, lastly, bread raised with sour milk corrected with soda, and so baked that the taste of the flour is ever prominent, we paid these German rascals 75 cents, a little dearer than at the Trois Frères.”
Finally, perhaps my favorite Burton description at what I’m guessing was Cold Springs station in present-day Wyoming.
“Our breakfast was prepared in the usual prairie style. First the coffee — three parts burnt beans, which had been duly ground to a fine powder and exposed to the air, lest the aroma should prove too strong for us — was placed on the stove to simmer till every noxious principle was duly extracted from it. Then the rusty bacon, cut into thick slices, was thrown into the fry-pan: here the gridiron is unknown, and if known would be little appreciated, because it wastes the “drippings,” which form with the staff of life a luxurious sop. Thirdly, antelope steak, cut off a corpse suspended for the benefit of flies outside, was placed to stew within influence of the bacon's aroma. Lastly came the bread, which of course should have been "cooked first. The meal is kneaded with water and a pinch of salt; the raising is done by means of a little sour milk, or more generally by the deleterious yeast - powders of the trade.”
You can see Burton describes coffee, meat, bread, and bacon as the “usual prairie style.”
After reading these descriptions of life at a Pony Express station, you should have a better idea of what the food was like. Although Richard Burton didn’t regard the food as very good, it did keep him alive on his journey to Salt Lake City and back again.
Life in the West was not a picnic and was often reduced to its very basic elements. It should not be surprising that the food was so basic. Bread, bacon, coffee, and whatever meat they could shoot. Burton claimed these were common prairie food, and this assumption seems to be backed up by other research. If you are interested in the Pony Express, I’d encourage you to take a day and try living on those foods. Try cooking them in cast iron if you can. The closer you can get to replicating the meals, the better you will understand what life was like at a Pony Express station. While the life of a Pony Express rider was part excitement and adventure, the other part may have been dull boredom and monotonous food. As a matter of fact, that might just sum up life on the American frontier.
