Profiles in Folly by Alan Axelrod

Author:Alan Axelrod
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Sterling
Published: 2012-01-20T05:00:00+00:00

RUSSELL HAD HAD A DREAM, which he shared with the nation. Much as the nation relished that dream—and stories about the Pony Express continue to be told—it was unwilling to pay for it. In an irony of history, had Russell not succumbed to the temptation of breaking the law, he and his company might have been saved after all. The outbreak of the Civil War meant that the United States could no longer subsidize the southerly Butterfield Route. The Central Route, which went through secure Union territory, was now in favor, and a million-dollar annual subsidy was in the offing. Of course, awarding a major contract to a firm tainted by criminal fraud was out of the question. The Butterfield Overland Mail got the prize.

“Nothing great was ever accomplished without enthusiasm,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, and yet enthusiasm alone—even in the form of vision coupled with boundless optimism—is not sufficient to achieve greatness. That the Pony Express endures in legend attests to the power of a dream. That it failed as a financial fact attests to the inadequacy of dream alone.

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