Just Curious About History, Jeeves

Chapter One: The Wild, Wild West A Cowboy Needs A HorseWhat are jinglebobs, heel chains, and rowels?They're parts of a cowboy's spurs.Did cowboys wear high heels to make them look taller?Well, maybe in some of the movie cowboys. The real-life kind, however, wore them for two reasons: to keep their feet from slipping out of the stirrups and to put some extra distance between their feet and the muck when walking through fields full of cattle excrement.How much water can a ten-gallon hat hold?About three quarts. So, how did it get its name, you may well ask? Some say it was just a cowboy exaggeration about the size of the hat, but those who claim to know say that it's because the hat was advertised as being big enough for 10galions.(Galions are those braids that decorated the crown.) Regardless, what most people don't know is that this classic cowboy hat style was first manufactured by John B. Stetson in that Wild West town of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Why were cowboys called cowpokes or cowpunchers?Because poke and punch is what they literally did to cattle that balked at going up the ramps leading to railcars and packing plants.Where did the Old West ranchers get their horses and cattle if they didn't transport them from back East?Both mustangs and Texas longhorns ran wild through the plains when the first settlers moved west. It was just a matter of catching and domesticating them. Neither animal, though, was indigenous to the Americas -- they were descended from animals that had been brought over to Mexico by Spaniards in the 1500s. Over the intervening three centuries, feral herds of horses and longhorns had grazed their way up and across the continent.When It Absolutely Needs To Get There In A FortnightHow long did it take to get a letter from coast to coast by Pony Express?In the middle of the 1800s, before the U.S. got wired with telegraph, you'd send a piece of mail from the East Coast to the West and not expect it to get there for months. A simple mail exchange of "Here's the contract; do we have a deal?" could require a half year or more before you got a response. In the frontier beyond the Mississippi River, there were no trains, not even roads to speak of, and most mail either went over land on a creeping stagecoach or by ship around South America.People in business, government, and journalism hated waiting that long. So you could see how the Pony Express really seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. Your package was absolutely, positively guaranteed to get the nearly 2,000 miles from Sacramento to St. Louis in 10 days (15 in winter). Even adding a few more days for the trains to take your message the rest of the way to business centers in New York or Chicago, you can still see how a one-month turnaround time could be an exciting prospect.That's how William Russell saw it anyway when the idea of the Central Overland Pony Express Company came to him. In order to have mail traveling at the fastest possible speed -- of horses galloping in a relay race against time -- he realized that was going to take hundreds of horses, scores of riders, and stations at reasonable intervals to trade horses and riders (horses every 10-15 miles, riders every 75). He also knew that traveling through Indian territory would be dangerous. He figured that he'd have to charge a bundle per letter to make it worth his while, but he hoped that would come down once he got the government contracts.It cost $5 per half-ounce to send a package by Pony Express in 1860, which is the equivalent of about $95 in today's dollars. Despite the outrageous cost, the Pony Express still lost money on every letter it carried. Worst of all, the government contracts founder William Russell expected never materialized. With some relief, Russell closed the whole thinMingo, Jack is the author of 'Just Curious About History, Jeeves' with ISBN 9780743427098 and ISBN 0743427092.