Episode 164: Mormon Mail and the Pony Express

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:13)
I had to wait in line for coffee this morning.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:17)
I'm so sorry. That must have been incredibly brave of you.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:21)
It was six minutes, six.
I aged, I reflected. I almost became a different person.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:28)
Yeah, like at four minutes, you start thinking about your childhood. Minutes six, you're like, maybe I should change my life.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:34)
Exactly, and that's when it hit me. We are no longer a people who wait. We don't stand in lines. We don't sit with uncertainty. We don't just exist in the gap between wanting something and getting it. We have smartphones now, damn it.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:47)
No, that's right. We optimize it, eliminate it. If there's friction, we assume something is broken.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:52)
Right, I can order a phone charger at breakfast and it shows up before I've even fully admitted I lost the last one. I can summon food, a ride, a person, anything instantly. And if a text bubble appears and then disappears, I start to think, did I piss them off? What's happening?

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:10)
You could just be like me and ignore all the text messages because of your crippling anxiety.

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:16)
Well, the point is, we don't wait anymore. We track, we monitor, we expect constant confirmation that the world is responding to us.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:25)
Which is why today is going to be a challenge. Not that we're going to make you wait, but if you try to imagine what waiting was like in the 1850s, it's going to feel like psychological warfare.

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:37)
Truly, because picture this, you leave Ohio, your comfy house, for California during the gold rush, 3,000 miles away. You say goodbye to your family, that might be the last time you ever see them.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:50)
The only way to communicate with them is this old-fashioned thing called a letter.

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:55)
An honest, tajeebus letter, ink, a quill pen and a piece of paper that may or may not actually serve as your envelope also. A letter that will take three to six months to arrive if it arrives at all.
No tracking, no updates, no out for delivery. You write it, hand it off, and then it vanishes into the void.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:15)
That silence isn't alarming, it's just normal. People expected that.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:20)
That's the part that's hard to wrap your head around. Not the distance, not even the danger, just waiting. Living your entire life inside that kind of uncertainty. That's just what you did.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:30)
Meanwhile, I'm watching a tiny car icon on an app and getting mad when it turns the wrong way to not bring our tacos here fast enough.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:37)
That is the modern outrage. Now, here's the big question of the episode. What does it feel like to wait for a letter?

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:45)
I mean, I feel like I need to recalibrate my brain to even imagine it. Like, not waiting for a text, a letter. I used to, I wrote a missionary, so I know what that was like, but that was, you know, it was a week back and forth to Melbourne, Australia. And back then, six months, waiting to hear from your beloved. I don't think so.

**Bryan Buchanan** (3:04)
In the modern era, we occasionally wait for an email, but that's different. We're not waiting a few days. We're talking weeks, months. You moved to California in 1850 The Gold Rush has taken you 3000 miles from your lovely family in Ohio. Your mother doesn't know if you're alive. You don't know if your father's health has improved. Did the dreaded consumption finally get him?
You left a wife behind. You left children. You might have one that you've never seen yet.
And a letter from home takes anywhere from three to six months to reach you again, if it reaches you at all.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (3:37)
This is genuinely distressing to sit with. I'm going to work on my box breathing.

**Bryan Buchanan** (3:42)
It is distressing. And that's the emotional entry point for today's episode because the story we're going to tell about Pony Express, about Mormon Freighting and Mail Carrying, the YX. Company, Howard Egan, Porter Rockwell. It's not a logistic story. It's a story about human beings desperate to stay connected across an almost incomprehensible distance.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (4:03)
And if you think this title, The Mail, is boring, if you think this is a boring subject, well, you're kind of dumb. Because understanding how these things work is essential to understanding why people make choices the way that they do, how they're getting information, how they're distributing information. And it's also a story with enormous political stakes. Like, this isn't just about letters to your mom. Control of the mail in the 1850s is control of information. And we're talking economic power here.