The institution then having become the property of Russell, Majors & Waddell, we continued to run it daily. A few months after that, we bought out the semi-monthly line of Hockaday & Liggett, that was running from St. Joseph, Mo., to Salt Lake City, thinking that by blending the two lines we might bring the business up to where it would pay expenses, if nothing more. This we failed in, for the lines, even after being blended, did not nearly meet expenses. Messrs. Hockaday & Liggett had a few stages, light, cheap vehicles, and but a few mules, and 110 stations along the route. They traveled the same team for several hundreds of miles before changing, stopping every few hours and turning them loose to graze, and then hitching them up again and going along. I made a trip in the fall of 1858 from St. Joseph, Mo., to Salt Lake City in their coaches. It was twenty-one days from the time I left St. Joseph until I reached Salt Lake, traveling at short intervals day and night. As soon as we bought them out we built good stations and stables every ten to fifteen miles all the way from Missouri to Salt Lake, and supplied them with hay and grain for the horses and provisions for the men, so they would only have to drive a team from one station to the next, changing at every station. Instead of our schedule time being twenty-two days, as it was with Hockaday & Liggett, and running two per month, we ran a stage each way every day and made the schedule time ten days, a distance of 1,200 miles. We continued running this line from the summer of 1859 until March, 1862, when it fell into the hands of Ben Holliday. From the summer of 1859 to 1862 the line was run from Atchison to Fort Kearney and from Fort Kearney to Fort Laramie, up the Sweet Water route and South Pass, and on to Salt Lake City. This is the route also run by the Pony Express, each pony starting from St. Joseph instead of Atchison, Kan., from which the stages started. We had on this line about one thousand Kentucky mules and 300 smaller-sized mules to run on through the mountain portion of the line, and a large number of Concord coaches. It was as fine a line, considering the mules, coaches, drivers, and general outfitting, perhaps, as was ever organized in this or any other country, from the beginning. And it was very fortunate for the Government and the people that such a line was organized and in perfect running condition on the middle route when the late war commenced, as it would have been impossible to carry mails on the route previously patronized by the Government, which ran from San Francisco via Los Angeles, El Paso, Fort Smith, and St. Louis, for the Southern people would have interfered with it, and would not have allowed it to run through that portion of the country during the war.