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
Proud of the independence its riches brought, it had still reached for contact with the eastern U.S., first by stagecoach, then by the pony express, then by the transcontinental railroad.
From Time Magazine Archive
During the rest of the summer of '76 I was a pony express rider, carrying the U. S. mails between Deadwood and Custer, fifty miles over some of the roughest trails in the Black Hills.
From Down the Yellowstone by Freeman, Lewis R. (Lewis Ransome)
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.
