June 16 – The Pony Express Trail will be back in action on Monday for its annual Re-Ride.
The Re-Ride is a 10-day, 24-hour event celebrating the 164th anniversary of the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company, which transported letters and telegrams from April 1860 to November 1861.
This year, 600 riders from the eight State Pony Express Divisions will ride horses in relays of one to five miles each.
Patee House Museum director Gary Chilcote said he is preparing for the revival of Patee House this year.
“Well, mostly I’ve been trying to figure out how to stay calm,” Chilcote said. “Because it’s going to be 97 degrees on Monday, so that’s what’s going to happen. We’ve got three riders out front here, they’re going to go, they’re actually going to ride all the way to Elwood, Kansas. But there they are riding. I’ll turn it over to the Kansas chapter. Every state has a division. We have twelve blocks of track. But Kansas has 120 miles and Nebraska has 500, and so on.
However, when it came to planning the 1860 ride, Chilcote said it was no joke.
“Imagine if there were no telephones or telegraphs or any way to communicate 2,000 miles to California,” Chilcote said. “And yet they had to hire workers and buy horses and talk for every station along the route, so it was a huge job to put it all together.”
This year, the riders will start at the Patee House Museum on Monday, June 17 at 3:00 PM and end at the Pony Express Plaza in Sacramento, California on Thursday, June 27 around 4:30 PM.
“We will recreate what happened on April 3 in 1860 and Russell, Majors and Waddell, the people who started the Pony Express, spent about three months here in this building in 1860 getting ready to start the Pony Express, Chilcote said.
“Each rider rides in their own territory,” Chilcote said.
Riders will bring memorial letters and personal mail in a mochila. Each rider will also take the Pony Express Oath and receive a Bible prior to riding.
There will be a GPS device in the mochila and real-time locations of the ride can be found on the National Pony Express Association website.
Whether you’re a rider or a viewer, you can also post reports of the route on the NPEA website.
