Ruby Valley Pony Express Station

This little log building carried the mail when the mail still came by horse. It served as a Pony Express and Overland stage station in Ruby Valley, sixty miles south of here, from 1860—part of George Chorpenning's earlier mail route before the famous riders took it over. "Uncle Billy" Rogers kept the station; explorer Richard Burton stopped here in 1860 and called it a halfway point between Salt Lake City and Carson Valley. The railroad ended the Pony Express in 1869. In 1960 the cabin was moved to Elko and now stands at the Northeastern Nevada Museum.

What the plaque says

This small building was originally located 60 miles to the south, where it served the Pony Express from April 1860 to 1861. It was moved to this location in 1960.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Elko — 0.8 mi
  The railroad built it, cattle made it, and gold keeps it — the working capital of northeast Nevada, a frontier cow town that never got around to becoming a relic.
• California Trail Interpretive Center — 9.7 mi
  A free, surprisingly ambitious BLM museum of the overland crossing — eight miles west of Elko, on the trail itself, where the California Trail met the Hastings Cutoff that doomed the Donner Party.
• Carlin & the Carlin Trend — 20 mi
  The small railroad town west of Elko that sits beside the largest gold complex on earth — and, because the gold is invisible, shows you almost none of it.
• Lamoille Canyon & the Ruby Mountains — 26 mi
  The great exception to Nevada's sagebrush monotony — a glacier-carved canyon and a wall of eleven-thousand-foot granite peaks an hour southeast of Elko, fairly called the state's Alps.

More markers nearby

• Elko — steps away
• Elko Airport — 1.7 mi
• Oil From Shale — 1.8 mi
• West End of Hastings Cutoff — 10 mi