Today we visited a few attractions in St. Joseph. We began at Western Missouri State College, where they have the Walter Cronkite Memorial…
Walter Cronkite lived 1916 to 2009. He was a reporter during WW II and began leading the news on CBS TV in 1953 until his retirement in 1981. He was an eye witness to all major news stories in the second half of the 20th century.
The exhibit has photos, videos, and memorabilia. It was a very interesting place…
The have a reproduction of his TV news studio…
There was also an interesting but rather bizarre piece of art commemorating Apollo 11 and the space program in general…
The Kennedy assassination…
Famous news stories… Can you find Patty Hearst?
And that’s the way it was…
We then went to the well-visited Stetson Hat Outlet… No, I didn’t buy a cowboy hat. Never wore one, never will..
In downtown St. Joseph we visited the Patee House Hotel.
When John Patee opened his luxurious four-story brick hotel in 1858, he knew it was an innovation for its time, but little did he suspect that 134 years later it would still be attracting visitors from across the United States.
Patee built it as a hotel, a role that was not to be because of its location more than a mile from downtown St. Joseph. Yet it was a hotel three times, a girl’s college twice, and finally a shirt factory for more than 80 years.
I’m always fascinated by these old hotels, exactly because they so rarely last very long. The Patee House was built in 1858. It housed the headquarters of the Pony express in 1860. Then the Civil war came and the army moved in; we had the industrial evolution, and all the “modern” innovations rendered the building obsolete.
This was the grand ballroom, furnished as it was in 1860…
The Dining Room in one of the suites…
The Bridal Suite…
Another suite…
We saw typical bedrooms, bathrooms as renovated in the 1920s, and lots of other historic memorabilia. I would have loved to see more. But we had to gather for the obligatory group photo… Yes, the women are all wearing period-appropriate bonnets…
The Pony Express was a mail service delivering messages, newspapers, and mail using relays of horse-mounted riders that operated from April 3, 1860, to October 26, 1861, between Missouri and California.
The Pony Express was not a mail service of the USPS. It was owned and operated by the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company. It was of great financial importance to the U.S. During its 18 months of operation it reduced the time for messages to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to about 10 days. It became the West’s most direct means of east-west communication before the transcontinental telegraph was established in October, 1861. It was vital for tying the new U.S. state of California with the rest of the United States.
The Pony Express was not a financial success and went bankrupt in 18 months, when faster telegraph service was established. Nevertheless, it demonstrated that a unified transcontinental system of communications could be established and operated year-round. When replaced by the telegraph, the Pony Express quickly became romanticized and became part of the lore of the American West. All of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows featured information on the Pony Express. Its reliance on the ability and endurance of individual young, hardy riders and fast horses was seen as evidence of rugged American individualism of the frontier times. As we are finding out on this caravan, every small town along the route today has a Pony Express Museum…
Many people don’t know that the Pony Express only ran for 18 months, and, in fact, it was doomed from the start. The construction of the transcontinental telegraph also began in 1860, The founders of the Pony Express must have known this… Very odd…
So our caravan begins here, at the eastern terminus of the Pony Express. The Oregon Trail follows the west-bound path of the Pony Express for the first few hundred miles…
Tomorrow we head west!
An enjoyable time was had by all…
Adventures in the Villa 
