Using Up People And Using The Past So You Can Use Up People

- As my journey hath been without a horse, I have had several offers of being assisted on my way in these stage-coaches, but have not been in them; nor have I had freedom to send letters by these posts in the present way of riding, the stages being so fixed, and one boy dependent on another as to time, and going at great speed, that in long cold winter nights the poor boys suffer much. I heard in America of the way of these posts, and cautioned Friends in the General Meeting of ministers and elders at Philadelphia, and in the Yearly Meeting of ministers and elders in London, not to send letters to me on any common occasion by post.

- Stage-coaches frequently go upwards of one hundred miles in twenty-four hours; and I have heard Friends say in several places that it is common for horses to be killed with hard driving, and that many others are driven till they grow blind. Post-boys pursue their business, each one to his stage, all night through the winter. Some boys who ride long stages suffer greatly in winter nights, and at several places I have heard of their being frozen to death. So great is the hurry in the spirit of this world, that in aiming to do business quickly and to gain wealth, the creation at this day doth loudly groan.

John Woolman:  John Woolman's Journal Chapter XII


Google has up one of its cute anniversary cartoons, this one celebrating the Pony Express, a legendary business venture of the old west.  Legendary for its danger to the boys hired to ride horses as fast as possible to carry letters across vast stretches of ground in the fabled West I would expect mostly for rich people.  It didn't last long, not even two years and was a financial failure.  It's legendary status wasn't, apparently, something people were aware of at the time of its failure as a business venture, it was manufactured as the need for material for pulp fiction and then the movies grew. Buffalo Bill Cody made a lot of his role as a Pony Express rider, though I wouldn't buy what he said as more than part of his show biz PR.  The creation of the phony Old West in the late 19th and early 20th century is a lot the junk is being created to feed the 500+ cable channel world is doing today, recycling lots of garbage and pseudo-history to fill those empty hours of empty minded diversion with commercials mixed in.

It should be part of every commemoration of the Pony Express that, though well paid for their work, most of the riders for the Pony Express were young boys, some who died as young as 14 and it wasn't exactly a trot in the park for the horses who were ridden hard under really awful conditions.  I haven't found a lot of mention as to how many of them died.   One ad described the suitable candidate for the job:

That the romantic falsification of history, which is far less ambigiously known,  doesn't get people in a lather in a way that violations of evolutionary propriety does shows that, in the end, what's valued isn't the truth, it's the use to which the past can be put and a lie is often more useful in the present than the truth is.  In fact, the truth is often exactly what isn't useful.  The fact is that this was getting young kids who were too young to think maturely killed so letters could get between California and the Mississippi valley faster for the class of people who could afford such service.  Which wouldn't have provided the young boys who were the fodder fed into that service.  It took the unromantic kind of thinking that John Woolman had, part of his long list of personal hardships he took on so that he would minimize his role in the commerce of exploitation that most people take as a given.