Mel Baughn: A Pony Express Rider Who Died on the Gallows

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

The legend of the rider

Early writers made Pony Express riders heroes. W. F. Bailey called them the best men the West had, "looked up to" and ready to "ride their beat and make their time" whatever the hour, season, terrain, weather or "threats of hostiles." Alexander Majors, a partner in the firm that ran the Express, praised them as "faithful, daring fellows... remarkable for their lightness of weight and energy." For Melville "Mel" Baughn the truth was more complicated: in some ways the model rider, fearless, energetic and determined, and in others a challenge to the legend.

A horseman

Born in Virginia and orphaned by fourteen, Baughn, described by people who knew him as a "bright, dashing youth", left home at that age for Franklin, Tennessee, where he tended bar. At the local races his horsemanship drew "the attention of sporting men"; so did his taste for whiskey, which followed him when he became a professional horse trainer. Late in the 1850s he went to Independence, Missouri, with a company of horse racers, and spent a year as a hostler on a big farm, training and managing horses.

Riding for the Express

In 1860 Baughn went to Kansas to ride for the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company, run by Russell, Majors and Waddell. Twenty years old, he rode between Thirty-Two-Mile Station and Fort Kearny, in what is now Nebraska. Thirty-Two-Mile Station, one traveller wrote, was a long log house kept by a "neathanded and thrifty family from Vermont", its rooms "cosy and clean" and "the chickens and peaches... plump"; soldiers from Fort Kearny visited its store and told station keeper George Comstock and the riders of "past fights and future wars."

One story, told again and again, shows his skill. Resting at the home station between runs, Baughn found his favourite horse, the best in the stable, gone. He noticed in time to give chase and, though on a lesser horse, caught the thief at Loup Fork and made him let the horse go. He might have pursued the man further, but he had a job to do; he rode back, picked up the waiting mail bag and made his run on time.

A life of crime

When Baughn left, the firm, then collapsing, owed him about and never paid. In "embarrassed circumstances" he became a jayhawker, one of the men who carried out violent raids against proslavery interests in Kansas before and during the Civil War. He was caught and sentenced to ten years, served two and a half, and went back to St. Joseph, Missouri, where, by one account, he fell in with a band of robbers and murderers. After the Pony Express ended in 1861, by most accounts including his own, his life was one of crime, with a gang of horse thieves and killers that terrorised northeast Kansas and northwest Missouri.

On November 12, 1866, Baughn and three others rode into Seneca, Kansas, with three stolen horses. A week later the owners arrived with a posse, and when three men caught up with Baughn and a companion, a gunfight followed in which Baughn shot Jesse S. Dennis in the back, fatally. He escaped, and a reward was offered for him. Sheriff Abram Kyger finally arrested him on June 27, 1868. His trial began on August 2 and lasted four days; the jury found him guilty of murder, and Judge R. St. Clair Graham sentenced him to hang. In his last days he asked that his wife be told of his death and comforted by a "Reverend Stewart", and wrote to the sheriff thanking his jailers for their kindness and for protection from "mobocracy." He was hanged in September 1868, as of 1883 the county's first and only judicial execution, and is buried at Barry Cemetery in Milford, Kansas.

The Pony Express remains one of the West's great stories, with its image of upright, heroic riders. Baughn's shows that they were fallible people, and some were criminals.

Sources

• National Park Service, National Trails, "Melville 'Mel' Baughn, 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/melville-mel-baughn-the-pony-express.htm
• Its sources include P. L. Gray, Gray's Doniphan County History (1905), and William G. Cutler, History of the State of Kansas (1883).
• The original dates the hanging September 18, 1868, in its text and September 13 in a note.
• In the series: previous, Jules Beni; next, Johnson William Richardson.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.