Welcome to the American Story. Mostly true stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one, Pony Express to GPS.

In mid July 1861, the 24-year-old Samuel Clemens, not yet famous and not yet known as Mark Twain.

Join his older brother Orion in St. Louis

on the eastern side of Missouri.

For a dull, sleepy, and eventless, six-day, 300-mile journey on a steamboat, up the Missouri River across the

state to St Joseph, finally known as St Joe, on the western border of the state.

They were on the first leg of an adventure Mark Twain would memorialize 10 years later

in his entertaining book, Roughing it.

St. Joe at that time was on the frontier until just a few months before

when Kansas became a state.

If you've left St. Joe headed west,

you left the states and entered the territories.

It was the last train stop in America.

It was also the end of the line for Western Union telegraph wires from the east.

Beyond St. Joe, stretching to the Pacific Ocean, lay some 1800 miles of prairies, deserts and mountains,

where what passed for American civilization was largely

an unconfirmed rumor.

To the east, information traveled at the speed of locomotives and telegraphs to the west with a notable exception.

It traveled at the speed of ships or horse-drawn coaches.

...