Home Stations

April 10th   Dan and Myra Koch outside their house before Dan and I set off for the short ride into Seneca...

 Seneca was the location of the first home station travelling from St Joseph. A home station was where riders were changed as well as horses, and it was here that Johnny Fry would have completed his first ride in the early morning of April 4th 1860.  He is recorded to have covered the distance in around six and a half hours, whereas it took me as many days!  Another famous ride which ended here with the pony rider asleep in the saddle from exhaustion was that of Jack Keetley...

This ride, caused when he had to substitute for another rider en route, was 340 miles and the longest Pony Express ride without any break except to change horses.  He rode east from Big Sandy station to Ellwood's (across the river from St Joe) and doubled back to Seneca, though the estimates of the time he took to cover the distance vary between 24-34 hours.  But quite a feat!
The riders for this section were lucky enough to stay in comparative luxury at the Smith's hotel which was designated as the Pony Express station in Seneca.  Unfortunately it no longer exists, having been moved in 1900 and then destroyed in 1970, but a Pony Express marker denotes the original site...

Diagonally opposite from the site of Smith's Hotel is the Pony Express museum, and here we are with Dan and his lovely black horse...

 It is usually closed at this time of year, but Dan arranged for curator Mary Ann to open up specially for me!   I particularly loved this gothic bed which actually came from Smith's Hotel - one wonders who slept in it....

...perhaps Jack Keetley crashed out here after his epic ride!

 Dan accompanied me to Jayhawk road, where we parted company.  The pony express route ran roughly parallel and about half a mile off to the right in the photo below.....

 The line of the trail in fact then swings further north to the site of Ash Point station, but we continued in a straight line towards Axtell, where Dan had sorted out a place to corral the horses overnight at the farm of Frank and Maryann, who also offered me bed and board.  Frank took me to see his sons' huge hog barns, which hold 2.500 pigs each, and which are leased to Haverkamp Bros, a large Kansas farming and hog raising concern.  The barns are fully automated to feed, water, and adjust temperature for the pigs.   Maryann sent me off over the fields in the morning of April 11th after a good breakfast....

.. heading for Beattie where NPEA President Lyle Ladner had arranged corralling for the horses with the Kopp family.  I had decided to follow the shorter route to Marysville rather than keep religiously to the line of the trail as although Lady had oodles of energy, I wanted to make sure I did not push a young, relatively inexperienced and untried horse such as Mo too hard in the early stages of the ride, particularly as he still needed to put on more weight.    Lady has a good roll on arrival at the Kopp's farm - notice the lovely old barn ...

Lyle compensated by driving me up to Guittard's Pony Express station which is on the northern loop. Here he is by the Guittard's Pony Express marker ..

 Guittard's was a way station sited at the farm in the background.  The riders came in from the far side and then would have followed the tree line off to the right. 

George Guittard and family established their ranch on Vermillion Creek, and George's son Xavier managed the station, which alternated as a home and way station, as well as a stage coach stopover. The original barn had a blacksmith shop and stabling for twenty-four horses.  The barn was pulled down relatively recently, but the timbers were used in the building of the current barn on the same site.  You can identify the old timbers by the wooden pegs, although they have been subjected to vandalism by trophy hunters - note the empty hole in the stanchion at the centre of the photo below which has been robbed of its wooden peg.  

 Laurence and Kathy Kopp with son Paul...

...They invited me to stay and proved great hosts, and we also enjoyed a most convivial evening with Laurence's brother Karl and wife Teresa, who invited us and the Ladners round for a slap up supper that evening.  In fact I was enjoying myself so much I completely forgot to take a photo of the occasion.