Buffalo Bill (see also BuffaloBill) Cody and Wild Bill Hickok were Pony Express riders in their youth.
An early advertisement for Pony Express riders is well known: “Wanted: Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.”
An Americanism dating back to 1840–50
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Stagecoach services, like the pony express, took days to traverse the gutted tracks across the wilderness that still separated America’s nascent cities.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 28, 2025
Why would anyone deliver a thumb drive by pony express or carrier pigeon when the internet was made for the purpose of quickly and easily delivering data electronically?
From Slate ● Dec. 14, 2018
Filippini and other ranchers have sued, staged a "pony express" protest ride on horseback to Washington, D.C., and petitioned for Furtado's ouster.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 14, 2016
Sample awards: "lithograph of President Lincoln, free ride in next stagecoach passing through Cleveland . . . views of pony express for your stereoscope."
From Time Magazine Archive
That scheme was the pony express; men on horseback with fresh relays every ten or twelve miles, to carry letters at top speed across the wilderness.
From When the West Was Young by Frederick R. (Frederick Ritchie) Bechdolt
The Pony Express enabled Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address to be delivered from Nebraska to California a little more quickly, covering 1,500 miles in less than eight days.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 13, 2026
The famed Pony Express, which rushed the news of Abraham Lincoln’s election to California in November 1860, went out of business less than a year later, after the telegraph made coast-to-coast communications infinitely faster.
From MarketWatch ● Nov. 20, 2025
Rosters, schedules and scores were distributed or confirmed sometimes by Pony Express.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 5, 2022
The telegram services that remain have changed greatly since Samuel Morse’s invention of the telegraph put the Pony Express out of business.
From New York Times ● Sep. 9, 2022
It was dated before I even left the States, so I guess the army’s still using the Pony Express.
From "Moon Over Manifest" by Clare Vanderpool
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
