Recently I put a mural in place in the Post Office at Sabetha which was called “The Coming of the New Fast Mail.” It is of the Pony Express rider passing the old Mail Stage. It has made a hit far beyond my wildest hopes and leads me to believe this is the sort of thing the public likes, and particularly our Kansas people—they like something which is out of their past, realistic, romantic, colorful. Possibly you may remember me as the fellow who published the Leavenworth Daily Post for 18 1/2 years and the Kansas Farmer for almost eleven years during that period. I started to stick type on the Clyde papers. Was born up in Concordia and I never saw a railroad train until I was well up to six — just my father’s old stages which ran from Concordia to Waterville and Marysville. So you see why the painting of our old past particularly interests me and why I have a considerable first hand knowledge and feeling for it. The details are most important to me. I made a most careful research for my Pony Express and I want to be very accurate with Old Bob when I start in to paint it. There are a few details I want to get straightened out, so I am imposing on you to help me, thinking you may have some interest in seeing the incident preserved. I gave Mr. Reid the information he desired, but I do not know if he ever finished a canvass of “Old Bob.” Probably not—for it was my impression (from reading between the lines) that if and when it should be completed that I would be expected to approve it, in return for his compliment to me. Bob’s home town would have been the natural place to exhibit it. Albert was concerned most as to whether the stage-team driven by Bob at the time of the Indian attack near Cottonwood Springs, in which he killed three Redskins and wounded a dozen more, were horses or mules. I said in my story that “Ben Holladay gave him a gold watch for saving the stage and the four mules.” And this was Bob’s version of it. So I gathered that Mr. Reid had this incident in mind for his painting. Only recently, Dec. 10, 1950, the Topeka Daily Capital ran a story, with illustration of a canvass by Albert T. Reid, “Main Street—1873” of the Artist’s old home town, featuring his father’s four-horse stage coach on the takeoff from Concordia. The Capital article said the women’s organizations of Concordia were raising a fund of $1,500 to purchase the canvass.