Nevada’s best preserved Pony Express station

Famed British explorer Sir Richard Burton wasn’t much impressed by the Sand Springs Pony Express Station when he spent a night there on October 17, 1860.

“The water near this vile hold was thick and stale with sulphury salts: it blistered even the hands,” he wrote in his diary. “The station house was no unfit object in such a scene, roofless and chair less, filthy and squalid, with a smoky fire in one corner and table in the center of an impure floor, the walls open to every wind, and the interior full of dust.

“Of the employees, all loitered and sauntered about as cretins with the exception of the cripple who lay on the grounds crippled and apparently dying by the fall of a horse upon his breast bone.”

But while his words were a bit harsh, they do serve as a first hand account describing the type of place Sand Springs Station was during the heyday of the Pony Express, which operated from April 1860 to October 1861.

For eighteen months, brave, young riders regularly traveled on horseback more than 2,000 miles from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California to deliver mail.

In Nevada, the Pony Express route crossed the center part of the state. The western half of the original route was roughly parallel to modern-day Highway 50 from Carson City to Austin. East of Austin, the route veered north of Highway 50 to the Ruby Marshes and into Utah.

Within Nevada, there were approximately 30 Pony Express stations. Since few of the stations were built to last, little remains at most of the sites. However, explorers can find a few places that offer an intriguing glimpse into the difficult life of the Pony Express riders.

The stations were important to the riders because they were places to change horses, replenish supplies and pick up news before riding off to the next stop.

Sand Springs Station, located south of massive Sand Mountain, is one of the best preserved of the original station sites. Visitors will find the reconstructed dark, stonewalls of the station, which once provided something of a refuge for the riders (although, according to Burton, an extremely dismal one).

A few yards from the station is a depression in the ground that indicates the former site of a crude, hand-dug well. This was probably the source of the foul, sulphury water mentioned in Burton’s report.

Out here, listening to the wind whistle through the cracks in the rock walls, it is easy to understand how isolated the place must have felt to the riders. While alcohol was banned at the stations, archaeologists note with some amusement that among the most common things found during an excavation of Sand Springs were fragments of liquor bottles.

A large part of the reason that the Sand Springs Station is so well preserved is that shortly after it was abandoned it became buried under sand, where it remained for more than a century.

In the late 1970s, a team of archaeologists from the University of Nevada, Reno excavated the site and stabilized the station walls. Today, it is a protected site listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Pony Express records indicate that Bolivar Roberts, J.G. Kelly and a crew of workers constructed the station in March 1860. James McNaughton was the first station manager before becoming a rider.

The Sand Springs site is located 20 miles east of Fallon and a half-mile north of U.S. 50 (follow the signs to the ruins).

For more information go to www.blm.gov/nv/st/en/fo/carson_city_field/blm_programs/recreation/pony_express.html

Rich Moreno covers the places and people that make Nevada special.