One of the more glamorous aspects of the old West was the Pony Express. Beginning for about eighteen months in 1860 the Pony Express raced letters across the American frontier from California to St. Joseph, MO where the letters entered the mail stream to their final destination. Their service was expensive, but it cut as much as two weeks off of coast to coast communication and was indispensable to business whose trading was time and event based. Much has been written about the Pony Express, and it is a fascinating story.
This story is about a Pony Express cover. Several weeks ago two older sisters came to our office with a box of stamps. The collection, they said, was their father's. He had collected actively in the 1930s and 1940s, and the vast majority of his stamps had been sold when he died in 1971. The daughters were cleaning out some old family memorabilia and they came across these stamps. Their understanding was that everything of real philatelic value had been sold with the main group of stamps. Well, they were wrong. In the bottom of the box, in a small envelope, was the cover shown above. The ladies walked out of our office $5,000 richer. Care should always be used when selling philatelic material, and expert evaluation is always available from us, for free. Give us a call if you have any items you want evaluated.