Pony Express Terminus

The western terminus of the Pony Express sits on 2nd Street in Old Sacramento, marked at the B. F. Hastings Building, now part of the Sacramento History Museum complex. From here, letters carried by relay riders from St. Joseph, Missouri arrived after a 10-day journey across the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the Nevada desert — the fastest communication link between California and the East before the telegraph.

The original building survives in restored form and contains exhibits on the Pony Express operation. The adjacent Wells Fargo History Museum (free entry) displays one of the original Concord stagecoaches that pre-dated the Pony Express. Both are compact but the artefacts are genuine and the connection to the actual site is tangible in a way that museum reproductions rarely achieve.

things to do sight
A story
The Pony Express operated for only 18 months, from April 1860 to October 1861, when the transcontinental telegraph made it obsolete. In that time its riders covered 650,000 miles, losing only one mail delivery. The Sacramento terminus at the B. F. Hastings Building was also the western office of Wells Fargo and the California Supreme Court — three institutions that define the Gold Rush era sharing one building.