There is a building on Penn Street in St. Joseph, Missouri, that doesn't look like much from the outside. Brick facade. A white iron canopy with scrollwork

But there’s a sign above the door that reads: 1860 — Pony Express — Office. Walk inside and you step into one of the most improbable stories in American history — and one of the most important lessons in leadership I've encountered in all my years on the road.

The Pony Express was born in desperation. William H. Russell, of the freighting firm Russell, Majors & Waddell, launched the idea almost by accident — and over the objections of his own partners. He was convinced that a horse relay mail service from St. Joseph to Sacramento could win the firm a lucrative government mail contract. So, with 67 days to hire riders, buy horses, build stations, and stock them across nearly 2,000 miles of wilderness, he launched the most audacious communications venture in the nation's history.

On April 3, 1860, the first rider galloped west out of St. Joseph. Crowds cheered. Cannons fired. Newspapers declared it a miracle. And for 19 months, it was.

Riders weighing under 120 pounds, carrying 20 pounds of mail and 25 pounds of gear, thundered across prairies and deserts and mountain passes at speeds that stunned the world. They braved Paiute uprisings, Sierra Nevada blizzards, and bandits. They changed horses every 10 to 15 miles and kept riding — sometimes for 75 to 100 miles at a stretch. Mark Twain, watching from a stagecoach, said he heard "only a whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of the windows."

The Pony Express delivered Lincoln's inaugural address to California in just seven days and 17 hours — the fastest communication the continent had ever seen. In a nation on the brink of Civil War, with California's loyalty hanging in the balance, those seven days mattered enormously.

And then, on October 24, 1861 — just 19 months after that first triumphant ride — the transcontinental telegraph was completed. Messages that took seven days now took seven seconds. The Pony Express was finished. Not phased out. Not slowly replaced. Finished. Within days.

I stood in that museum and thought about what we do with that story.

We tend to celebrate the Pony Express as a romantic chapter of the American West — the brave young riders, the mochila saddle bags, the oath not to drink or gamble or use profane language. And it was all of that. But there is a harder lesson underneath the romance.

Any city, any organization, any leader that had built their entire communication strategy around the Pony Express in 1860 would have been left behind by 1862. Not because they made a bad decision in 1860 — they made the best decision available. But because the pace of change didn't care about that.

Now think about where we are today.

Artificial intelligence is being compared to the printing press, the steam engine, and the internet. I think those comparisons are probably right. But here is what I keep coming back to: What is the telegraph in this story? Is there a technology that is going to make the AI tools that are cutting-edge right now look like the Pony Express — not in a century, not in a generation, but in a matter of months?

We don't know. And that's the point.

For most of the history of local government, cities could afford to lag the private sector on technology adoption by five or even ten years. The tools were stable enough. The pace of change was manageable. You could wait and watch and then carefully adopt what had been proven.

That era is over. We are living in Pony Express time now. The window between breakthrough and obsolescence is measured in months, not decades. The cities that wait to adopt AI until it is "fully proven" or "commonly accepted" will find themselves as far behind as a city that kept betting on riders and horses while the telegraph poles were going up across the plains.

The question for every city leader I talk to isn't whether AI will change how local government works. It already is. The question is whether your city will be at the leading edge of that change — shaping what's possible for the communities you serve — or whether you'll be reading about it in a museum someday, wondering how you missed it.

I walked out of the Pony Express National Museum back onto Penn Street, thinking about those riders. And I thought: the ones who should be remembered aren't just the ones who were fast. They're the ones who, when the telegraph came, figured out what to do next.

To learn more about the Pony Express National Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri, visit www.ponyexpress.org.

About Ron on the Road

Ron Holifield speaks to over 2,000 local government officials annually and has coffee with over 250 local government officials each year as part of his travels. If you have a cool site you think he should visit, email Ron@CivicMarketplace.com. You can also learn more about efforts to help local government become architects of their own destiny at www.CivicMarketplace.com.

NOTE: This column was written with the assistance of Melissa Valentine, senior director of operations and support at Civic Marketplace. 

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