Overview

Responding to the enduring lure of the West, Jerry Ellis sets out-on foot-to follow the trail of the Pony Express, a short-lived, hell-for-leather mail delivery service that lasted barely a year but has marked itself in national memory ever since. Open to what he finds, including his own frailties, Ellis reports back with sympathy and humor on the strange variety of the modern West. Jerry Ellis is the author of Walking the Trail: One Man's Journey Along the Cherokee Trail of Tears, also available in a Bison Books edition.

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9780803267466

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Reviews

Ellis sets out along the old Pony Express trail on foot, carrying a backpack and looking for rides and friendship along the way. Without a horse or relief riders, the trip takes Ellis three months rather than the ten days advertised by the nineteenth-century mail delivery company. Musing both about the past and present, Ellis travels with a wagon for a spell, sleeps in a homeless shelter another night, and celebrates his arrival in California with a slice of pizza. Written in the present tense from diary entries, the story is full of a sense of discovery. -Booklist [The author] ... Strikes out on his own and meets a variety of fellow travelers-a poet-bartender; wilting 'flower children'; a young, pregnant Austrian woman with whom he has a brief affair; and, perhaps most divertingly, 'the Rabbit Man,' a gentle semi-recluse who's addicted to Eskimo Pies and who's been holed up in a Kansas storm cellar. -Kirkus

"""Ellis sets out along the old Pony Express trail on foot, carrying a backpack and looking for rides and friendship along the way. Without a horse or relief riders, the trip takes Ellis three months rather than the ten days advertised by the nineteenth-century mail delivery company. Musing both about the past and present, Ellis travels with a wagon for a spell, sleeps in a homeless shelter another night, and celebrates his arrival in California with a slice of pizza. Written in the present tense from diary entries, the story is full of a sense of discovery.""-Booklist ""[The author] ... Strikes out on his own and meets a variety of fellow travelers-a poet-bartender; wilting 'flower children'; a young, pregnant Austrian woman with whom he has a brief affair; and, perhaps most divertingly, 'the Rabbit Man,' a gentle semi-recluse who's addicted to Eskimo Pies and who's been holed up in a Kansas storm cellar.""-Kirkus"

Author Information

Jerry Ellis is the author of Walking the Trail: One Man's Journey Along the Cherokee Trail of Tears, also available in a Bison Books edition.

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