April 3 · This Day in America
At dusk in St. Joseph, Missouri, a cannon fires and a young rider spurs his horse toward a ferry on the Missouri River. On the far bank, the West opens — almost two thousand miles of plain, desert, and mountain between him and Sacramento. The Pony Express is a wild bet: a relay of lone riders and fast horses, swapping mounts every few miles, day and night, through territory that does not care whether they live. The promise is ten days, coast to coast, when mail has always taken weeks. Ten days later the bet pays. For eighteen months these riders are the fastest thing in America, until the telegraph wire catches up and makes them legend. They carried the country's letters in their hands, and they almost never lost one.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1968
Tired, feverish, almost not coming, King steps to the pulpit at Mason Temple before a storm and three thousand striking workers. He speaks without notes about the mountaintop, about a long life and a longer struggle, and says he is not worried about anything, not fearing any man. It is the night before he is killed. The speech reads now like a man who already knew, and went anyway.
Source: kinginstitute.stanford.edu
“I've been to the mountaintop. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land.”Martin Luther King Jr., April 3, 1968