From "Orphans Preferred - The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express" by Christopher Corbett:

…Russell, Majors & Waddell … No one remembers their rolling armada of tens of thousands of oxen, vast fleets of wagons, or armies of bullwhackers-the greatest such venture of its kind ever assembled.

Their legacy would be the most obscure of footnotes in the history of the opening of the American West but for the little venture into which they poured their fates and fortunes. They spun the business off their stage line operations linking the Missouri with Denver and Salt Lake City, calling it the Central Overland California & Pike's Peak Express Company. The name was too long - even its initials, COC&PPEC, were too cumbersome - and so it was called simply the Pony Express.

Louisa P. Johnston, the great-granddaughter of Alexander Majors, recalled more than a century later: "A clerk of the firm wrote that all the company's wagon trains together would stretch forty miles. Russell, Majors and Waddell were freighting to Santa Fe and to all the U.S. Army posts in the West. They ran stage lines to Denver and Salt Lake City. So they were uniquely equipped to start a pony express. "

The Pony Express was a daring and madcap and foolish idea. It was thought to be impossible (men wagered against it ever happening) to race a satchel, a saddlebag called a mochila, holding about twenty pounds of important mail written on the lightest tissue paper, across nearly two thousand miles of largely uninhabited and hostile country, country where there were no railroads, no telegraphs, and few towns. Two thousand miles. They would do this in ten days, less than half the time that it was then taking to move mail from "the Atlantic states" to "the far coast." They would do this eventually in even fewer days: the news of Abraham Lincoln's inaugural message crossed the country in a record seven days and seventeen hours.

Colonel Henry Inman, a great historian of nineteenth-century western travel, called the transcontinental feat "the quickest time for horseback riding, considering the distance made, ever accomplished in this or any other country. "

Russell, Majors & Waddell would move a horse and rider across the continent, night and day, in all weather and in all seasons of the year. Their critics would say later that it was all a wild publicity stunt. What did it really prove? What did it matter? But on the frontier in 1860 when there was no railroad and no telegraph and "the states" were far, far away, when the known world ended at the Missouri River and mail could take months coming back and forth from east to west, men who had not had a letter from home for a year stood in the streets of California and cheered the coming and going of the Pony Express.