That these splendid achievements could never have been attained without a wonderful degree of enthusiasm and loyalty on the part of the men, scarcely needs asserting.  The pony riders were highly respected by the stage and freight employees — in fact by all respectable men throughout the West.  Nor were they honored merely for what they did; they were the sort of men who command respect.  To assist a rider in any way was deemed a high honor; to do aught to retard him was the limit of wrong-doing, a woeful offense.  On the first trip west-bound, the rider between Folsom and Sacramento was thrown, receiving a broken leg.  Shortly after the accident, a Wells Fargo stage happened along, and a special agent of that Company, who chanced to be a passenger, seeing the predicament, volunteered to finish the run.  This he did successfully, reaching Sacramento only ninety minutes late.  Such instances are typical of the manly cooperation that made the Pony Express the true success that it was.

Mark Twain, who made a trip across the continent in 1860 has left this glowing account[14] of a pony and rider that he saw while traveling overland in a stage coach: 

We had a consuming desire from the beginning, to see a pony rider; but somehow or other all that passed us, and all that met us managed to streak by in the night and so we heard only a whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of the windows.  But now we were expecting one along every moment, and would see him in broad daylight.  Presently the driver exclaims: 

“Here he comes!”

Every neck is stretched further and every eye strained wider away across the endless dead level of the prairie, a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves.  Well I should think so!  In a second it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling — sweeping toward us nearer and nearer growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined — nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of hoofs comes faintly to the ear — another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider’s hands but no reply and man and horse burst past our excited faces and go winging away like the belated fragment of a storm!

So sudden is it all, and so like a flash of unreal fancy, that but for a flake of white foam left quivering and perishing on a mail sack after the vision had flashed by and disappeared, we might have doubted whether we had seen any actual horse and man at all, maybe.

[9] This was the same pledge which the original firm had required of its men.  Both Russell, Majors, and Waddell, and the C. O. C. and P. P. Exp.  Co., which they incorporated, adhered to a rigid observance of the Sabbath.  They insisted on their men doing as little work as possible on that day, and had them desist from work whenever possible.  And they stuck faithfully to these policies.  Probably no concern ever won a higher and more deserved reputation for integrity in the fulfillment of its contracts and for business reliability than Russell, Majors, and Waddell.