The Pony Express was a mail service delivering messages, newspapers, mail, and small packages from St. Joseph, Missouri across the Great Plains, over the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada to Sacramento, California by horseback, using a series of relay stations, while it only lasted for a year and a half, operating from April 3, 1860, to October 1861, it gained a prominent part in the imagination of the American public living on in dime novels, pulps, movies and comics.

Their famous want ad seen in papers across California and the West in 1860 ran thus.

"Wanted. Young, skinny, wiry fellows. Not over 18. Must be expert riders. Willing to risk death. Orphans preferred.”