Pony Express honoring the past with Re-Ride

Jun. 16—The Pony Express Trail will be active once again Monday for its annual Re-Ride.

The Re-Ride is a 10-day, 24-hour event honoring the 164th Anniversary of the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company, which carried letters and telegrams from April 1860 to November 1861.

This year, 600 riders from the eight State Pony Express Divisions will ride horses in relays of one to five miles each.

Patee House Museum director Gary Chilcote said he's been making preparations for this year's re-ride from Patee House.

"Well mostly I've tried to figure out how to stay cool," said Chilcote. "Because it's going to be 97 degrees on Monday, so that's what's going to be happening. We'll have three riders out here in front, that will leave, they'll actually ride as far as Elwood, Kansas. But there, they'll turn it over to the Kansas chapter. Each state has a chapter. We have 12 blocks of trail. But Kansas has 128 miles and Nebraska has 500 and so on down the trail. It's 2,000 miles to Sacramento."

However, when it came to planning the ride in 1860, Chilcote said it was no joke.

"If you imagine, there were no telephones or telegraphs or any way to communicate 2,000 miles to California," Chilcote said. "And yet, they had to hire employees and buy horses and talk for each station along the route, so it was a tremendous job putting it all together."

This year, the riders will start out at the Patee House Museum at 3 p.m. on Monday, June 17, and will end at the Pony Express Plaza in Sacramento, California, on Thursday, June 27, at around 4:30 p.m.

"We will recreate what occurred in 1860 on April 3 and Russell, Majors and Waddell, the people who founded the Pony Express spent about three months in 1860 here in this building getting ready to start the Pony Express," Chilcote said.

"Each rider rides in his own or her own territory," Chilcote said.

Riders will carry commemorative letters and personal mail in a mochila. Each rider will also take the Pony Express Oath and be issued a Bible prior to riding.

A GPS unit will be in the mochila and real-time locations of the ride can be found on the National Pony Express Association's website.

Whether you're a rider or a viewer, you can also post reports from the trail on NPEA's website.