Part of a series of articles titled People of the Pony Express.
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Article
Johnson William Richardson, the Pony Express
Johnson William Richardson – Pony Express[1]
By Angela Reiniche
On 26 March 1860, the New York Herald and the Missouri Republican printed identical articles announcing mail service “[t]o San Francisco in eight days” via the Pony Express. Each announced that the first rider would leave St. Joseph, Missouri, at 5:00p.m. on Tuesday, 3 April 1860. Russell, Majors, and Waddell, the firm that ran the Pony Express, had outlaid an estimated $70,000 for the “great race against time.”[2]
When the day arrived, throngs of cheering onlookers buzzed with anticipatory glee. Unfortunately, a delay in Detroit upended the mail’s meticulously planned schedule. The railroad superintendent ordered a special one-coach locomotive and, although it traveled at top speeds, the mail from the East arrived in St. Joseph two hours late. But even, the horse, rider, and mochila—a four-pocket, leather mailbag designed for quick transfer between mounts—did not leave immediately. First, St. Joseph’s mayor, M. Jeff Thompson, had to deliver a short speech to commemorate the moment; so did William H. Russell and Alexander Majors (of Russell, Majors, and Waddell). At 7:15p.m. Russell turned over the mochila to its first rider, and a cannon fired to signal the start of the westbound run. The crowd cheered as it watched horse and rider sprint toward the Denver, the ferryboat that would take them across the Missouri River into Kansas Territory.[3]
The next day, the Daily West, a St. Joseph newspaper, published an account of the event. Written within a few short hours of the first rider’s departure, the article identified him as “a Mr. Richardson, formerly a sailor." The Weekly West printed the same information three days later. Other local papers, such as the Gazette, offered descriptions of the affair without naming the first rider.[4]
Historians and enthusiasts of the Pony Express have argued about the identity of the first rider ever since his departure from St. Joseph. A variety of sources tell the story of the first ride in rich detail, but without documentation to support their claims. Many historians, however, agree that Johnson William Richardson, also known as “Billy Richardson,” was the rider that rode to the Patee House, picked up the waiting mochila, and began the first Pony Express run to Sacramento, California.[5]
Johnson William Richardson drove ponies for the Express the entire eighteen months it was in operation. According to family history, when the Pony Express ended, Richardson joined his sister, Delaware Richardson Gibson, in Fort Laramie (where she was employed as a teacher). A letter from Elaine Hartnagle, Gibson’s granddaughter, shed some light on Richardson’s life. Delaware and Johnson’s parents were “killed in an Indian raid,” after which the siblings went to St. Joseph to live with an aunt. After attending boarding school in Washington, D.C., Richardson was a “shanghaied sailor for a number of years before he found an opportunity to make a successful escape.”[6]
Interestingly, Hartnagle’s letter mentions that another Billy Richardson, also known as W.B. Richardson and Uncle Billy Richardson, had been mistaken for her great uncle.[7] The “other” Billy also lived in St. Joseph at the time of the first ride, but he was only nine or ten years old in April 1860 and, Hartnagle argues, would not have been entrusted with such an important and dangerous task. She calls him an imposter “beneath the cloak of Billy Richardson, the actual Pony Express Rider [sic].” Hartnagle points to an undated photograph that shows her great-uncle Johnson William Richardson (wearing a sailor’s hat and jacket) standing next to fellow Pony Express riders Johnny Fry, Charlie Cliff, and Gus Cliff. Richardson looks to be a man in late twenties, not a youth of nine or ten years old, and Hartnagle asserts that his “jaw and chin [bear the] family resemblance of the Richardson clan, even today.” Johnson William Richardson contracted pneumonia shortly after arriving at his sister’s place in Fort Laramie. He died there, at the age of twenty-eight, and was buried in the Fort Laramie cemetery. Five years later, in 1867, the cemetery closed and the disinterred were moved to Fort McPherson in Nebraska. [8]
Despite its short lifespan, the Pony Express looms large in public memory. Yet the limited amount of available primary sources, combined with the Express’s near-mythical status, has created a “nexus of myth and fact [that] has become too strong to break.”[9] Johnson William Richardson’s story exemplifies the difficulties in piecing together events from an imperfect archive—especially when the person in question holds the title of “the first” to do something.
[1] Part of a 2016–2018 collaborative project of the National Trails – National Park service and the University of New Mexico’s Department of History, “Student Experience in National Trails Historic Research: Vignettes Project” [Colorado Plateau Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CPCESU), Task Agreement P16AC00957]. This project was formulated to provide trail partners and the general public with useful biographies of less-studied trail figures—particularly African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, women, and children.
[2] “To San Francisco in eight days by the Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Co.,” New York Herald and Missouri (St. Joseph) Republican, 26 March 1860; and reprinted in George A. Root and Russell K. Hickman, “Pikes Peak Express Companies, 4, Part IV, The Platte Route, Concluded,” Kansas Historical Society 14, no. 1 (February 1946), 49.
[3] Root and Hickman, “Pike’s Peak Companies,” 52.
[4] For discussion of the controversy over the identity of the first rider and how it has developed over time, see Raymond W. Settle and Mary Lund, Saddles and Spurs: The Pony Express Saga (University of Nevada Press, 1972); Lee Starnes, “The Pony Express Mystery,” Museum Graphic 3, no. 1 (Winter 1951), 4, 10–11, accessed 23 June 2017, https://billyrichardson.wordpress.com/pony-express-mystery-1/; and Roy S. Bloss, The Pony Express: the Great Gamble (Berkeley, Calif.: Howell-North, 1959).
[5] Interest in reviving the investigation into the identity of the first rider increased as the Pony Express Celebration Committee organized the first re-ride of the route in 1923. After extensive research, Louise Platt Hauck concluded that Johnson William Richardson was indeed his name. See Louise Platt Hauck, “The Pony Express Celebration,” Missouri Historical Review 17 (July 1923): 435–39.
[6] Elaine Hartnagle, “The Correct Identity of Billy Richardson, the Pony Express Rider,” accessed 31 January 2023, http://www.lasrocosa.com/lasrocosahistory6.html. There may be a hard copy of this letter at the Pony Express Museum in St. Joseph where the photo of the four “Expressmen” [see below] is also located.
[7] Interestingly, Uncle Billy credits Johnny Frye (sometimes spelled ‘Fry’) with being the first Pony Express rider. He supposedly rode with Johnny Frye that historic night, but the mail sack was thrown on his pony—and not Frye’s—thus leading to the confusion. “Uncle Billy Richardson, 91 Today, Disclaims Fame,” St. Joseph News-Press, 31 October 1941.
[8] Elaine Hartnagle, “The Correct Identity of Billy Richardson, the Pony Express Rider.” For the photo, discussion of the “stolen identity” of Johnson William Richardson, see Jeanne Joy Hartnagle-Taylor, “Billy Richardson—Stolen Identity,” at Billy Richardson: Pony Express Rider and the Pony Express Mystery, accessed 24 June 2017, https://billyrichardson.wordpress.com/.
[9] Department of the Interior, National Park Service, “Pony Express: Historical Resource Study: Introduction: Myth and Reality of the Pony Express,” accessed 24 June 2017, https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/poex/hrs/hrs0.htm.
Last updated: March 15, 2023