Pony Express Days

One of the movies I watched off my DVR recently had almost 25 minutes between the end of the film and the start of the next feature, so it gave TCM the chance to run a two-reel short. That short was one of the films from the series of Technicolor historical movies Warner Bros. did in the years just before World War II, Pony Express Days.

The US gained a lot of land to the west of the Louisiana Purchase after defeating Mexico in the Mexican-American War. Gold was discovered in California, swelling the population enough that it could apply for statehood. Ten years later, it was realized that a better connection was needed with the west coast since the Civil War was rapidly approaching and the northern states wanted California (and Oregon) to remain in the Union. To that end, a couple of retired army men set up the "Pony Express", a chain of stations that kept fresh horses for young, thin men to ride in a relay to get the mail across the west much quicker than anything crossed the land before. In reality, the express only ran for about 19 months until the first transcontinental telegraph line was completed, and by the end of the 1860s the first transcontinental railroad had been built.

Anyhow, two young men come in to the Pony Express office wanting to ride. One is Johnny Frey, claiming to be 5'11" and 125 pounds, that last number being important because the horses can only carry so much weight. The other man is one Bill Cody (George Reeves), but he's already too tall and heavy to ride for the express. Cody would have been 14 at the time, and while he claimed to have ridden for the Pony Express, he probably only ran errands for the company that set up the express, and possibly did some work at the corrals and stations that this short has him doing.

Cody works together with a man called Nevada Jim (J. Farrell MacDonald), who tells Bill a whole bunch of tall tales that if you believe this version of history form the backbone of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Meanwhile, it's the autumn of 1860, and a presidential election is brewing. Who wins will be critical to whether California stays in the Union, and the Pony Express realizes they have to get the news west as quickly as possible. The previously mentioned Johnny Frey is one of the riders bringing the news west, but he gets killed in an Indian attack and it's left to Bill Cody to get the news through. Yeah, right.

I doubt there's much accuracy in Pony Express Days, although Warner Bros. at least had the decency to point out how the express only ran for those 19 months as well as getting the names of the men who founded the company correct and the fact that they felt they needed a government contract to survive economically. All that aside, however, the short is entertaining enough and certainly would have served its purpose in 1940 of entertaining audiences before the feature.