Our city owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to Gary Chilcote and Dick and Mignon DeShon.
In the early 1960s, Gary Chilcote saved the Patee House from the wrecking ball. Even his boss at the paper, Arthur Burrowes, was blunt in wanting to tear the place down.
“Quit living in the past. Must St. Joseph forever bleat to the world that a century ago we were quite something!”
After the Patee House was a girls school for a ‘short stint.’ It was a work clothes manufacturing facility for decades. R.L. McDonald turned the structure into a multifloor work and clothing manufacturing facility. In a bit of “loving history” irony, McDonald was my dad, Jake Ford’s grandfather.
Turning a luxury hotel into a factory was hard on the structure. You could understand, after years of deterioration and then abandonment, why people like Burrowes thought it wise to move on.
Lucky for us, Gary Chilcote loves St. Joseph and its history, too. He and his family have restored the grand hotel into one of the premier Western museums in the United States, not only recreating the headquarters of the Pony Express but preserving our city’s bygone days to share with other history seekers from around the world.
Likewise, Dick and Mignon were drawn by the Pony Express stables. Mignon’s father, Michael Karl Goetz Jr., started the process by saving the stables from the clock.
The Pony Express story is important to the legacy and lure of the Old West, again attracting people from all over the globe. No other country ever had a history quite like our West. The struggles, violence, opportunities, freedom and individual spirit add to tales told, exaggerated and retold in books and phenomenally successful movies.
The times and legacy of the Pony Express heading out from St. Joseph add to the Old West attraction of this city.
Seneca, Kansas, 70 miles west of St. Joseph, revels in its Pony Express link with a museum and signage throughout downtown. The last time I was there, the front door of the museum was locked. I stared in a window to see about 20 fifth-graders on the floor, mesmerized, listening to a story of incredibly brave boys risking their lives, outrunning Indians, swimming across creeks and climbing snow-covered mountains — all to deliver the mail!
Thirty miles farther into Kansas is Marysville. If the Pony Express story interests you at all, this is a bucket-list stop. That town displays its Pony Express past like no other, having the only intact home station left along the trail.
At their museum, you get the feeling, walking into the old limestone building and seeing where the riders slept, ate and took care of their horses.
On the western edge of Marysville is the Big Blue River. This is where several trails crossed — the Oregon, California, Mormon and our Pony Express riders. Most wagon trains had to wait their turn, but for a price, the rider slipped on board the next rope ferry, pulling to the opposite shore. The mail had to get through.
Heading 20 miles north from Marysville is Hollenberg Station, one of the few horse exchange stops located on its original site.
North into Nebraska, following the Platte River toward a setting sun, as the Transcontinental Railroad would soon do.
I can’t imagine galloping for hours without seeing a tree, but that’s what you got — a sea of grass.