Orphans Preferred: Pony Express Book Review
A Legend Built on 18 Months
The Pony Express operated for barely a year and a half, yet it occupies a permanent place in American mythology. Christopher Corbett’s Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express (Broadway Books, 2003) takes that contradiction as its starting point and pulls apart the threads of legend, half-truth, and documented fact that make up the story.
Corbett, a journalist and professor at the University of Baltimore, spent years researching primary sources, newspaper archives, and the surprisingly thin historical record left by the actual Pony Express operation. The result is a 288-page narrative that reads more like investigative journalism than dry academic history.
The Title Says It All
The book takes its name from the most famous recruitment ad in American history: “Wanted: young, skinny, wiry fellows not over 18. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.” The problem, as Corbett demonstrates with convincing evidence, is that this ad almost certainly never existed. No contemporary newspaper printing of it has ever been found. It first appeared decades after the Pony Express shut down, likely invented by a dime novelist looking for a dramatic hook.
This single detail captures the book’s entire thesis. The Pony Express story as most people know it is largely a construction built after the fact, assembled from exaggeration, nostalgia, and commercial interests.
What the Pony Express Actually Was
Corbett does not neglect the real history. The service launched in April 1860 as a venture by the freighting firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell, covering nearly 2,000 miles from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California. The relay system placed approximately 190 stations along the route, spaced 10 to 15 miles apart. Riders switched to fresh horses at each station, maintaining speeds that cut cross-country mail delivery from weeks to roughly ten days.
The operation required substantial infrastructure: station keepers, stock tenders, hundreds of horses, feed supplies, and armed guards at remote outposts. At its peak the service employed around 80 riders, 400 station workers, and maintained roughly 500 horses along the route. The cost to mail a letter started at $5 per half ounce, equivalent to well over $150 in today’s money, limiting the service to urgent business correspondence rather than personal mail.
The fastest recorded run covered the full route in just ten days during the relay of Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address in March 1861. Riders earned roughly $100 per month, a respectable wage, but the enterprise itself never turned a profit. The entire venture cost its founders over $700,000 and contributed directly to their bankruptcy.
Debunking Buffalo Bill
One of the book’s strongest sections examines William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s claim to have ridden for the Pony Express at age 14. Cody made this a centerpiece of his autobiography and his enormously popular Wild West shows, and it became one of the most repeated facts about the service.
Corbett assembles the counter-evidence methodically. Contemporary records placing Cody on the route are thin to nonexistent. The stories Cody told about his rides grew more dramatic with each retelling, a pattern Corbett recognizes from other frontier self-mythologizers. The dime novels that made Cody famous before he even started his shows had already established a template of exaggeration that Cody happily adopted and amplified.
The book does not conclude definitively that Cody never rode for the Pony Express. What it does establish is that the version of events Cody promoted bears little resemblance to anything verifiable, and that the historical community’s uncritical acceptance of his claims says more about America’s appetite for frontier heroes than about what actually happened on the trail.
The Real Riders and Their Hardships
Where the Buffalo Bill legend falls short, the documented experiences of actual riders provide more than enough drama. Corbett profiles several riders whose stories survived in station records, letters, and contemporary newspaper accounts.
These men and teenagers faced genuine dangers: extreme weather ranging from desert heat to mountain blizzards, isolation at stations that could go weeks without contact, and occasional violent encounters with Paiute warriors during the 1860 conflict known as the Pyramid Lake War. Several riders and station keepers were killed during these raids, and the service was temporarily suspended along parts of the Nevada route.
The physical demands were extreme by any standard. Riders covered 75 to 100 miles per shift, switching horses every 10 to 15 miles but staying in the saddle for hours at a stretch. They carried no more than 20 pounds of mail in a specially designed leather mochila that draped over the saddle and could be transferred to a fresh horse in seconds.
The Telegraph Killed It
The Pony Express ended in October 1861 when the transcontinental telegraph reached full operation. The telegraph could transmit a message coast to coast in minutes rather than days, making even the fastest horseback relay obsolete overnight. Russell, Majors & Waddell were already in severe financial trouble, and the telegraph simply finished what poor business planning had started.
Corbett frames this ending not as tragedy but as inevitability. The Pony Express was always a gamble, a proof of concept meant to secure a government mail contract that would make the operation sustainable. That contract never came. The service proved that coast-to-coast communication was commercially viable, but the infrastructure it created, the stations, trails, and community networks, ended up serving the Overland Stage route and telegraph line builders rather than its founders.
How the Legend Grew
The book’s second half traces how the Pony Express transformed from a failed business venture into an enduring national symbol. Corbett identifies the key amplifiers: dime novelists who needed frontier material, Wild West shows that needed acts, early Hollywood westerns looking for ready-made stories, and a public that wanted to believe in a simpler, more heroic version of westward expansion.
By the early twentieth century, the Pony Express had been thoroughly mythologized. Towns along the old route built monuments and museums. The U.S. Postal Service issued commemorative stamps. The story became a standard chapter in American history textbooks, often presented without any of the caveats that Corbett’s research reveals.
This process of legend-making is where Corbett’s journalistic instincts serve him best. He traces specific claims through their evolution, showing how a minor detail in one source becomes an established fact in the next, then an unquestioned truth in the one after that. The methodology is meticulous without being pedantic.
Strengths and Limitations
What works well:
- The investigative approach to separating fact from legend is consistently engaging
- Corbett writes with dry humor that keeps the narrative moving without descending into the forced jokes that plague many popular history books
- The research into the “Orphans Preferred” ad and Buffalo Bill’s claims is thorough and persuasive
- The book balances debunking with genuine appreciation for what the real Pony Express accomplished
Where it falls short:
- Some sections on the post-Pony Express mythologizing could be tighter; the point about legend-building gets repeated more than necessary
- The book focuses heavily on the most famous aspects of the story and gives less attention to the station keepers, stock tenders, and other workers who kept the operation running
- Maps and route illustrations are minimal, which is a missed opportunity for a book about a 2,000-mile trail
Who Should Read This
Anyone interested in American frontier history will find value here, but the book’s real audience is readers who enjoy having their assumptions challenged. If the Pony Express exists in your mind as a straightforward tale of brave young riders galloping across the plains, Corbett will complicate that picture in ways that make the real story more interesting than the myth.
The writing is accessible enough for general readers while maintaining the sourcing standards that make it useful as a reference. At 288 pages, it does not overstay its welcome.
Final Assessment
Orphans Preferred earns its place as the definitive modern account of the Pony Express by asking the right question: not just what happened, but how what happened became what we think happened. Corbett demonstrates that the process of American myth-making is often as revealing as the events themselves. The real Pony Express, a money-losing, 18-month mail relay that employed fewer than 100 riders, is a more compelling story than the legend precisely because it raises harder questions about why we need our history to be larger than life.
