I was driving south through Beatrice, Nebraska (pronounced Be-a-trice with the accent on the second syllable). Beatrice, meaning she who makes me happy, the unhappy inspiration for Dante, he who wrote about hell. One hundred and fifty-eight summers ago, Wild Bill Hickok was tried and acquitted for the murder of David McCanles at the nearby Red Rock Pony Express Station.
I was making my way into Kansas on Highway 148. It had rained for two days and two nights and time to go home. I should have stayed on Highway 77, but then I would have missed the Hollenberg Pony Express Home Station, just east of Hanover on winding Kansas Highway 148. Inside the Kansas Historical Association was getting ready for a historical reenactment.
interior of a old general store, Hollenberg Pony Express Way Station
The downstairs served as a general store, restaurant and saloon, post office, and home to the Hollenberg family, upstairs sleeping quarters for guests. Outbuildings served as a stable for mounts and a blacksmith shop for travelers on the Oregon and California Trails.
The short brief life of the Hollenberg Pony Express Home Station
Nothing lasts forever.
This one, the Pony Express, its riders, and its Way Stations were brief, little more than a year, from April 3, 1860, to October 1861. Once the concept was proven, i.e. news needed to travel from east to west, and west to east, the telegraph wires were strung and news traveled at the speed of light.
Still, those young hardy riders and their fast horses became American lore, the stuff of legends and movies.
Gerat H. Hollenberg
The Hollenberg station was built in 1858 by Gerat H. Hollenberg. It served as home to his family, stable for mounts, general store, post office, restaurant for travelers, and hotel for guests. After the Pony Express became history, Hollenberg helped start the town of Hanover, named for the German province of Hanover where Hollenberg was born, and served three terms in the Kansas Territorial Legislature. For a while, the Hollenberg house served as a stopping point for the northern branch of the Kansas Butterfield Overland Mail Route. In march of 1860, Wells Fargo took over the failing Butterfield Line, and then in 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad called a halt to the stagecoach.
Upstairs, gentle readers, the guests on the stagecoach slept, if they stayed at all. Downstairs, they ate and drank, shared stories, passed along the news. We are prone to think that news did not spread quickly back then. Not true.
It spread like a wildfire, from one tongue to the next ear, like the snap of a whip.
Wild Bill Hickok
Across the border in Nebraska was the Rock Creek Station, where Wild Bill Hickok shot and killed the owner, David McCanles on July 12, 1861. The next day McCanles’ brother Leroy swore out a complaint for murder.
Hickok plead self defense at his trial and with no witnesses against him, he was quickly acquitted.
In 1867, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine published an exaggerated account of the shoot-out which claimed that Hickok had single-handedly killed nine men. Hickok was quoted as saying, “I was wild and I struck savage blows.”
Thus began the legend of “Wild Bill.”
interior of a old general store, Hollenberg Pony Express Way Station
Abandoned, old, and interesting Kansas 