Responding to the enduring lure of the West that captured his imagination as a child, Jerry Ellis decides to follow the trail of the Pony Express, a short-lived, hell-for-leather mail delivery service that lasted just one and a half years starting in 1860 but has marked itself in national memory ever since. Starting his journey in St. Joseph, Missouri, Ellis follows the Pony Express trail across Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada to the end of the line in San Francisco.

Ellis succeeds in completing his twenty-one-hundred-mile journey by foot, horseback, covered wagon, hitchhiking, and canoe. Open to what he finds, including his own frailties, Ellis reports with sympathy and humor on the strange variety of the modern West.

Jerry Ellis is the author of Walking the Trail: One Man's Journey along the Cherokee Trail of Tears, also available in a Bison Books edition.

"[Jerry] Ellis sets out along the old Pony Express trail on foot, carrying a backpack and looking for rides and friendship along the way. . . . Musing both about the past and the present, Ellis travels with a wagon train for a spell, sleeps in a homeless shelter another night, and celebrates his arrival in California with a slice of pizza. Written in the present tense from diary entries, the story is full of a sense of discovery."—Booklist