The Missouri River provided the natural means of access to the Northwest, and as early as 1851 fire-boats began to reach Fort Benton. For a long period only one boat a year made this hard passage; then gold was discovered, and there followed a rush of new settlers, so that in 1866, forty steamers came into the old fur-trading post. For a third of a century the stage-coach had no rival as the means of travel for passengers. One of the most famous stage lines was over Mullen’s Trail, which ran west from Fort Benton for hundreds of miles. This trail was opened through government land by Captain Mullen and his company of soldiers for the use of miners. Holliday’s Overland Stage Line played an important part in the development of the West. It ran from Atchison, Kansas, to Denver, Colorado, and to Salt Lake City, Utah, where other lines connected with it. One of these lines extended to Virginia City in what had been Brother Van’s district, and from there to Helena, a distance altogether of nineteen hundred miles, usually covered in twenty-two days. In order to secure rapid transportation for the mails, the Pony Express was established in 1861 and maintained for three years. A band of swift riders, eighty in number, would cover the vast distances of the prairie in an incredibly short space of time. One rider, for instance, would leave Sacramento, while another rider started from St. Joseph, Missouri, at the eastern end of the route. Each would ride swiftly and as silently as possible, guarding the precious mail at all hazards, and would come, after fifteen to twenty miles of riding, to a station where a fresh horse, saddled and bridled, was held by a waiting agent. The riders were allowed two minutes for the change of horses; then on they went over the ever-widening prairie to the next station. The fastest time in which a piece of mail was ever carried was seven days and seventeen minutes. Sometimes the station was found to be but a smoking pile of ruins, and sometimes, alas, the station-keeper would be discovered scalped by wandering Indians. It is said that only one package was lost in the three years that the Pony Express was operated. This happened when the rider was killed after being robbed. Another time, the faithful pony came in along with the package bound safely to the saddle; his rider had been killed as he rode.