Last updated: March 7, 2023
Person
Johnson William Richardson
Ernest and Elaine Hartnagle/ Public Domain
Quick Facts
Significance:
Pony Express Rider
Date of Birth:
1834
Place of Death:
Fort Laramie
Date of Death:
1862
The short but fascinating life of the Pony Express began on Tuesday, 3 April 1860. All around St. Joseph, Missouri—the mail route’s eastern terminus—throngs of spectators buzzed with anticipation. 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, the firm that ran the Pony Express). 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.
The next day, the Daily West, a St. Joseph newspaper, published an account of the event. Written within a few 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. Despite this historical confusion, many 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.
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.”
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. 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. 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.
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.” 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.
(Special thanks to UNM PhD candidate Angela Reiniche for compiling this information.)