[27] Known throughout the West as “Pony Bob.”

[28] So called because the trail ran through a canyon where the Sweetwater reached from wall to wall, and had to be crossed three times in a short distance.

[29] “Cayuse” means horse in some Indian dialects.

[30] Cy Warman vouches for this story in his Frontier Stories.  Copyright by Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898.

[31] Related to Harriet MacMurphy (to whom we are indebted for this truthful account) by Mrs. Elton Beckstead, who at the age of thirteen was Jules’ wife and saw her husband murdered.

[32] The child-wife does not tell (perhaps never knew) that Slade nailed one of her husband’s ears to the door of the Pony Express station, and wore the other for several weeks as a watch-charm.

[33] Mr. Creighton died of paralysis in 1874, and his widow endowed a college named for him.

[34] Major John Burke thus briefly in a biographical sketch of these men tells of their antecedents:  “Russell was a Green Mountain boy, who before his majority had gone West to grow up with the country, and after teaching a three months’ school on the frontier of Missouri, hired himself to an old merchant of Lexington at thirty dollars to keep books. . . .  Alexander Majors was a son of Kentucky frontier mountain parentage, his father a colleague and friend of Daniel Boone.  William Waddell, of Virginian ancestry, emigrants to the Blue Grass region of the same state as Majors, was bold enough for any enterprise, and able to fill any niche the West demanded.”

[35] This stream was named by Fremont on his second expedition of exploration to the regions of the then unknown “Far West.”

[36] The initial starting-point of the stage line was Leavenworth, on the Missouri, but after a few months it was changed to Atchison.

[37] This was the route of the Pony Express which was inaugurated some years afterward.

[38] Ben Holliday was one of those wonderful characters developed by a life of adventure and danger, having been nurtured amid the most startling incidents of the frontier.  He was born near the old Blue Lick battlefield.  At seventeen he was Colonel Doniphan’s courier.  When only twenty-eight years old he entered Salt Lake Valley with fifty wagonloads of goods, and was endorsed by Brigham Young as being worthy of the confidence of his people.  Ten years later he was the head of the Overland Route; at forty-five the owner of sixteen steamers on the Pacific Ocean, with an immense trade to Central America, China, and Japan.

[39] Near the station of Ogallala, on the Union Pacific Railroad.