foxtales

Down by the River: St. Joseph, Part 2

Through the Gold Rush, St. Joseph learned to focus on the here and now, not to chase fanciful dreams as the ’49ers had. As a 1920s advertisement for the Empire Trust Company put it, “St. Joseph was then and is now in the vanguard of the Westward course of Empire. Shall we too be tricked by the color and glitter of distant sands, and leave behind, undeveloped, our fallow acres of potential diamonds–the countless opportunities for independence and fortune that lever lie in the accessible levels of our soil, industry, and commerce?”

Still, there was great profit to be made in moving people and materials west. The Pony Express was part of that trade. John M. Hockaday was said to have made $190,0o00 a year carrying mail and other cargo west; he eventually sold his business out to Russell, Majors & Waddell, the firm that founded the Pony Express. In 1915 E. L. McDonald and W.J. King looked back on those rough-and-tumble days of mail deliver by horse, writing, “People who travel to California in cushioned cars in these days can have but little conception of this gigantic enterprise and its offspring, the Pony Express.”

It was, in fact, a Californian who came up with the idea. California senator W.M. Gwin, traveling east from the Golden State with B.F. Ficklin, general superintendent of Russell, Majors & Waddell in the fall of 1854, realized the political value of establishing a faster mail route to California. The joke was that the senator’s term would expire before he made the trip from California to Washington, but more important was the need to keep California in the Union in the days leading to the Civil War.

At the time, mail took 21 days to reach California via Panama, and the Union forces in the state needed to know what was happening in Washington and elsewhere more quickly than that–not to mention the thousands of settlers anxious to quicken their correspondence with friends and relatives back east.

So, as Gwin and Ficklin bumped over the “Central Route” from Sacramento through Salt Lake City to St. Joseph, the senator discussed his concerns with the cargo company representative. Several years later, Gwin finally convinced W.H. Russell of the need for a quick overland route, and Russelll convinced his partners to at least go along with, if not actually endorse, the Pony Express.

It is interesting to note that the Pony Express was designed, in part, to save California for the Union. Mayor M. Jeff “Swamp Fox” Thompson may have been unaware of that fact as he loaded the first mailbag on the first horse and sent it on its way on April 3, 1860, almost exactly a year before the

Battle of Fort Sumter. St. Joseph was largely a Southern town, and when the war started and the mayor’s term had expired, he stormed the St. Joseph post office and tore down the United States flag there.

Another consideration is that the enterprise was a financial failure. The Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company, the firm Russell, Majors & Waddell organized to run the Pony Express, sought to convince the government to buy into the route. Secretary of War John B. Floyd promised Russell $2,000,000 in government contracts, but Congress refused to approve them. That, combined with stretching of the telegraph from St. Jo to Salt Lake City, doomed the enterprise, and Russell, Majors & Waddell went belly up. Finally, for an enterprise that has become the center of a community’s dreams about its past and hopes for the future, some of the most basic information about the Pony Express is simply missing.

For example, who was the first rider? No one seems to know, though “a large crowd whooped and applauded” as he–whoever he was–left town on April 3. Some say it was a young man named Alex Carlyle, some Billy Richardson, and some Johnny Fry. Similarly, some accounts have the first horse leaving at 5:00, some at 7:30. Other details of the trip, however, are crystal clear; several accounts offer the image of members of the crown plucking hairs from the horse’s tail as souvenirs.

Whatever the truth of this first historic ride, the newspapers went to work on the story immediately, instantly romanticizing the event. When the St. Joseph rider’s hooves reached California soil, the St. Joseph Free Democrat rhapsodized,

They are in California, leaping over its golden sands, treading its busy streets. the courser has unrolled to us the great American panorama, allowed us to glance at the home of one million people, and has put a girdle around the earth in 409 minutes. Verily the riding is like the riding of Jehu, the son of Nimshi, for he rideth furiously. Take out your watch. We are eight days from New York, 18 from London. The race is to the swift.

Flowery rhetoric aside, the young men–boys, really–who ran the Pony Express for that year and a half indeed accomplished something great. The trip from St. Joseph to Sacramento was nearly 2,000 miles over every obstacle imaginable. A network of stations were set up along the route, one ever ten miles or so, for a total of 190 stations between Missouri and California; here, riders turned in their horses, which were good for only about ten miles each. the riders themselves rode up to to thirty miles a day before passing the reins to a fresh horseman. the entire route was completed in ten days, meaning that on any given day about seven riders needed to cover 190 miles. By comparison, the average speed for a wagon pulled by an ox or mule was fourteen miles a day.

But the facts and statistics tell only part of the store. The Pony Express’ real power as a civic symbol, then and now, lay in the legend and mythology that grew up around the enterprise and made it a key part of St. Joseph’s civic identity.

Down by the River: St. Joseph, Part 4

Down by the River: St. Joseph, Part 1

The man who founded St. Joseph, Joseph Roubidoux, foresaw the bustling city of the 1930s dimly, if at all, when he first lay eyes the site in 1825.

Joseph Roubidoux IV had been born on August 10, 1783, to Joseph Roubidoux III, owner of 1,725 acres in St. Louis’ St. Ferdinand’s common fields. In 1789, at the tender age of sixteen, Joseph IV headed north to Council Bluffs, Iowa, and began trading there as an independent agent. In 1822 John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company bought him out and asked him to stay away from Council Bluffs so that they could establish a chain of trading posts. Three years later, the company offered Roubidoux $1,800 a year to work for them on Roy’s Branch, a tributary of Blacksnake Creek, which still flows underneath St. Joseph. He stayed for a year, then moved his post to where the Blacksnake enters the Missouri River, about where the city’s Jules Street–named for one of Roubidoux’s eight children–ends today.

At the time, Roubidoux’s Black Snake Post was not yet in the state of Missouri; it was in Indian Territory, controlled and populated by the Sac, Fox, and Iowa tribes. The Missouri border shot straight north from Arkansas, cutting off what we now know as northwest Missouri. Roubidoux didn’t mind –he relied on Indians for his trade , after all–but the other settlers who were beginning to enter the area did. It meant that they had to cut across Indian Territory to get to the Missouri River, and it also meant that the beautiful, rolling, fertile land was not open to settlement.

In 1835, General Andrew S. Hughes, the first Indian agent for the United States in northwest Missouri, asked to include the land west of the border to the river as part of the state. On September 17, 1836, Superintendent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs William Clark granted his wish. Clark gave the Indians $7,500 for the land, moved them across the Missouri River–partly into what is now Doniphan County, Kansas–and presented them with “five comfortable houses . . . an interpreter, a farmer, a blacksmith, and a schoolmaster,” as well as “rations for one year and agricultural implement for five years.” As an early twentieth century history of Missouri’s Buchanan County romantically put it: “The red man was told to move on, and resumed his pilgrimage toward the setting sun, and the white man promptly built his cabin where the Indian’s tepee erst had stood.”

With the “Platte Purchase” completed, settlers streamed in to be near Roubidoux’s trading post. He began selling and leasing land to settlers, finally having the town platted and registered in St. Louis on July 26, 1843.

At the time, the town’s population was five hundred; three years later, it had almost doubled. Of its 936 residents,nearly a third were white men over 45 years of age.

Meanwhile, elements of “civilization” came quickly to the growing settlement. Charles and Elias Perry set up their dry-goods shop in 1843. Hull and carter and E. Livermore & Co. built their “business house” a year later. By 1845, the first three-story building had risen from Main and Francis Streets, and the first newspaper, William Ridenbaugh’s Weekly Gazette, had begun publishing. the years 1848-49 saw “many hopes fulfilled.” According to one history, 143 buildings were built, 19 stores were operating with a combined stock worth some $400,000, and the city’s first brewer appeared–a sign of civilization if ever there was one.

By the winter of 1849 Gold Rush fever had come to St. Joseph, a jumping-off point for those who dreamed of riches in California and other western lands. Between April 1 and June 15, 508 wagons left the city bound for the west, carrying more than six thousand people. The next year, emigration west was estimated to be more than 100,000 people, half of whom are thought to have left from St. Jo–a staggering number for a town that had been one-fiftieth as large just three years earlier.

“The city was so packed full of people,” Swiss artist Rudolph Frederick Kurz wrote, “that tents were pitchedabout the city and the opposite bank of the river in such numbers that we seemed to be besieged by an army,” but the merchants loved it. Many of St. Joseph’s great fortunes–the Wyeths, the Tootles, the Krugs–can trace their beginnings to the gold seekers of 1849.

Things didn’t turn out as well for many of the adventurers. Having spent most or all of their money on supplies in St. Joseph, they had to come back, tails between their legs, days, weeks, or months later when they found themselves without funds on the unforgiving prairie. It was a hard lesson for them, and one that would shape the city’s identity for decades to come.

Down by the River: St. Joseph, Part 3