The Last Ride of the Pony Express by Will Grant;

Author:Will Grant;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

Roy and Bill marked my crossing of a cultural fault line not unlike what Walter Prescott Webb described at the 98th meridian, some three hundred miles behind me. In central Wyoming, I was a lot deeper westward than the 98th. The nights were cooler, the sagebrush more prevalent, and the distances between towns longer. One of the biggest changes to the landscape, though, was open range. Open range is the lack of fences on the sides of roads so that livestock, mostly cattle, can wander freely to graze. It’s usually marked by a yellow road sign with a black cow on it, but there are many roads in the West without such signage, where it’s possible to come around a corner and find a group of steers blocking the way. Where a fence crosses the road, a cattleguard maintains the barrier. For me, open range meant that I’d have to open and close a gate every time I met a fence (cattleguards nearly always have some sort of gate beside them), but it allowed me plenty of room to ride off the road, away from traffic.

West of Fort Laramie, I was able to ride down the original trace of the Platte River Road. It was a shallow depression in the prairie, and though it’s most commonly referred to as the Oregon Trail, anyone going east or west along the Platte, including the Pony Express, used the same road. Wagon ruts in the soft bedrock near the town of Guernsey have been preserved as the Oregon Trail Ruts State Historic Site, managed by the National Park Service, but I didn’t see them because I didn’t want to detour the horses or deal with the Fourth of July weekend crowds.

I was in Glenrock, Wyoming, for the Fourth of July. Claire drove up to spend the holiday with me. She brought our two dogs, an ice chest full of prepared dinners, and our horse trailer. We camped in the yard of former president of the National Pony Express Association Les Bennington. Les put up my horses in one of his pastures so that Claire and I could drive into the nearby town of Casper, population 58,656, to buy me a pair of spare boots, some new underwear, and a decent meal. We hauled the horses around Casper in the horse trailer because I didn’t want to navigate the dangerous urban congestion. We spent two restful days at the site of the Willow Springs Pony Express Station, and on the morning of July 7, Claire left to drive home. I turned to the Sweetwater River Valley, my path up to the Continental Divide, and for the first time, I was on large tracts of public land.

Public land in the West is land that’s government owned. The land is most often managed by the BLM or the Forest Service, and it’s usually designated as multiple-use land. Multiple-use means that you can camp, hunt, cut firewood, mountain bike, target shoot, or walk your dog. It also

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