[10] Exact figures are not obtainable for the west bound mail but it was probably not so heavy.

At this time — Sept., 1861 — the telegraph had been extended from the Missouri to Fort Kearney, Nebraska, and letter pouches from the Pony Express were sent by overland stage from Kearney to Atchison.  Messages of grave concern were wired as soon as this station was reached.

[11] These were executive divisions and not to be confused with the riders’ divisions.  The latter were merely the stations separating each man’s “run.”

[12] Slade was afterward hanged by vigilantes in Virginia City, Montana.  The authentic story of his life surpasses in romance and tragedy most of the pirate tales of fiction.

[13] The dispatch was taken from the main line to the Colorado capital by special service.  Denver, it will be remembered, was not on the regular “Pony route,” which ran north of that city.  There was then no telegraph in operation west of the Missouri River in Kansas or Nebraska.

[14] Roughing It.

Chapter V

California and the Secession Menace

When the Southern states withdrew, a conspiracy was on foot to force California out of the Union, and organize a new Republic of the Pacific with the Sierra Madre and the Rocky Mountains for its Eastern boundary.  This proposed commonwealth, when once erected, and when it had subjugated all Union men in the West who dared oppose it, would eventually unite with the Confederacy; and in event of the latter’s success — which at the opening of the war to many seemed certain — the territory of the Confederate States of America would embrace the entire Southwest, and stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Aside from its general plans, the exact details of this plot are of course impossible to secure.  But that the conspiracy existed has never been disproved.

That the rebel sympathizers in California were plotting, as soon as the War began, to take the Presidio at the entrance to the Golden Gate, together with the forts on Alcatraz Island, the Custom House, the Mint, the Post Office, and all United States property, and then having made the formation of their Republic certain, invade the Mexican State of Sonora and annex it to the new commonwealth, has never been gainsaid.  That these conspiracies existed and were held in grave seriousness is revealed by the official correspondence of that time.  That they had been fomenting for many months is apparently revealed by this additional fact:  during Buchanan’s administration, John B. Floyd, a southern man who gave up his position to fight for the Confederacy, was Secretary of War.  When the Rebellion started, it was found[15] that Floyd, while in office, had removed 135,430 firearms, together with much ammunition and heavy ordnance, from the big Government arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts, and distributed them at various points in the South and Southwest.  Of this number, fifty thousand[16] were sent to California where twenty-five thousand muskets had already been stored.  And all this was done underhandedly, without the knowledge of Congress.