Henry Avis, the Pony Express Rider Who Rode 220 Miles When Others Refused

Part of the National Park Service series People of the Pony Express, from the Pony Express National Historic Trail.

A horse breaker

Henry Avis started with horses young. Through his teens in the 1850s he travelled from his parents' home in Kansas City to Atchison and Leavenworth, where he became known for breaking wild horses. Major Andrew Dripps, a mountain man turned U.S. Indian agent, noticed him and hired the eighteen-year-old for a supply train to Fort Laramie, where Dripps ran a post for Pierre Chouteau, Jr. and Company. Soon after reaching Wyoming in 1858, Avis began carrying the three-times-a-week mail, in four-mule wagons, from Fort Laramie toward Salt Lake City for J. M. Hockaday and Company; when daily service began, he drove the mail wagon ninety miles from Mud Springs through Fort Laramie to Horseshoe Creek. Skilled, young, tough and small, he was an ideal rider for the Pony Express when it began weekly mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, in April 1860.

The long ride

Division superintendents picked riders the way they picked horses: fast, young and reliable. Russell, Majors and Waddell's ideal rider was under eighteen, highly skilled and fearless, and Avis more than fitted. He became famous for covering 220 miles of dangerous country in a single ride, when other riders refused theirs for fear of fighting with Native Americans; the firm paid him a bonus, about six months' wages.

The story is told in several versions. In outline, Avis reached Horseshoe Station at night, at the western end of his route, and the relief rider refused to go on because he had heard the Sioux were "on the warpath." The fear was not baseless: no Pony Express rider had been killed in Wyoming in the conflicts between the United States and the Plains Indians, but at least three had been killed by American Indians in western Utah and Nevada. Avis changed horses and took the mochila, the mail pouch, on to Deer Creek Station, a home station where he should have handed over the mail, eaten and rested. He found it abandoned, the horses stolen and the keeper gone. When the eastbound rider there also refused to carry the mail, Avis strapped the mochila onto a fresh horse and rode back to Horseshoe Station: at least two hundred miles of hard riding in all.

Forty years with racehorses

The transcontinental telegraph, finished in late October 1861, ended the Pony Express and Avis's job. After some apparently successful gold prospecting in the Far West, he returned to Kansas City and turned his horsemanship into work as a horse trainer and stable manager.

• By 1885 he worked for William Mulkey, a wealthy Kansas City owner of racehorses; the Kansas City Times reported that Avis had won his employer more than ,000 that season. That year he married Mollie, from Virginia, and began judging races.
• In 1892 he and other horsemen met at Chicago's Palmer House to organise a protective association for owners and trainers of thoroughbreds.
• By 1900 he was a horse dealer, renting a home with Mollie in St. Louis's 19th Ward; in the following decade they moved back to Kansas City and bought a house, and he had become an employer in the horse business.

In 1917, aged seventy-six, he told the Kansas City Star about his forty years as a trainer, above all Mulkey's "famous string of horses." He was, he said, "spry as a colt, barring a little rheumatism," and, with Mollie in her rocking chair and fellow horseman "Johnnie" Martin recalling the good old days of Kansas City racing, he longed to get back: "If I could just live long enough... I'd get back in the game yet... the horses ain't gone yet."

Last years

By the 1920 census Avis had retired, and he and Mollie took in boarders, mostly young men, at their home on Prospect Avenue. At the 1921 Missouri State Fair he rode in a Kansas City parade marking the state's centennial as the "last of the living Pony Express riders." He died of lobar pneumonia, a lung infection, in Kansas City on March 20, 1927, and was buried beside Mollie, who had died in the winter of 1922–1923, at Mount Washington Cemetery in Independence, Missouri.

Sources

• National Park Service, National Trails, "Henry Avis, the Pony Express," by Angela Reiniche, part of the 2016–2018 "Student Experience in National Trails Historic Research: Vignettes Project" of the National Park Service and the University of New Mexico Department of History. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/henry-avis-the-pony-express.htm
• In the series: next, Jules Beni. More on the Pony Express National Historic Trail.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.