The Prologue is here!

The following is an excerpt from Entangled, a novel by Thomas W. Baker. Look for Entangled in ebook format soon.

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Prologue

WANTED

Pony Express - St. Joseph, Missouri to California in 10 days or less. Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 per week.

In the 1860’s, a half million people sprawled west of the Rocky Mountains, many driven there by a rush of golden dreams in California a decade earlier. They were desperate for news from the Eastern United States where the bulk of the Civil War was fought. One news service, The Pony Express, formed from a government mail contract already given to a stage coach service operating on both the Butterfield route through the southern U.S. and the even slower route by ship–stagecoach-ship over the Isthmus of Panama.

Two thousand miles separated St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. With twenty riders, a hundred and sixty-three stations, and two hundred horses along the route, a mochila, a specially designed mailbag, carried the news and important letters along the central route in ten days at one week intervals. The first express mail started on April 3, 1860 with young, skinny, and wiry Johnny Fry holding the reins.

In only one and a half years, the Pony Express was abandoned. What killed the Pony Express was not the golden spike joining the first Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, but an electric spike running along wires.

On October 24, 1861, the first transcontinental telegraph completed its first transmissions and what used to take ten days now took minutes. A paradigm shift in communication, a spooky action at a distance, had toppled the Pony Express. Then came radio, a wireless wonderment that first zipped across the English Channel before the 20th century, shifting communication to broadcast for the masses. Another shift quickly approaches, launching new human abilities yet again.