Russell, Majors and Waddell

Russell, Majors and Waddell, business partnership formed by William Hepburn Russell, Alexander Majors, and William Bradford Waddell that operated the most prominent freight, mail, and passenger transportation company in the United States in the mid-19th century and, most famously, established the Pony Express mail service (1860–61).

Until 1854 government freight contracts were awarded to various companies for relatively small shipments. That year the War Department offered a single, enormous two-year contract to transport supplies to most of the U.S. Army outposts in the Southwest and West. Only a very large company could compete. Majors owned a freight company at the time; Russell and Waddell were partners in a wholesale trading company. Realizing that their companies were not big enough on their own to handle this volume of freight, the three men joined forces on December 28, 1854, to form Russell, Majors and Waddell, which successfully landed the contract. Having secured a virtual monopoly of freight transfer in the West, the firm sought to make their newly giant business even more profitable by establishing a new system of rates based on weight and distance rather than on weight alone. They also shifted their base of operation from Lexington, Missouri, to the bigger, more prosperous town of Leavenworth, Kansas.

Russell, Majors and Waddell won the next several federal contracts too, but the large shipments did not always lead to large profits. In 1857, for example, they lost an enormous amount of money as a result of violent Mormon opposition to their shipment of supplies to troops in Utah (the Mormon militia attacked and burned three of Russell, Majors and Waddell’s wagon trains) and bitter cold winter weather. In all, the company lost nearly $500,000 worth of oxen, wagons, and supplies that year. The partners’ fortunes changed for the better in 1858, when the company made a profit of $300,000.

The profits and experience they gained were vital resources in establishing, in early 1860, the nearly 2,000-mile (3,200-km) Pony Express system. That proved to be Russell, Majors and Waddell’s signal accomplishment, although it was short-lived: despite the unprecedented speed with which the Pony Express delivered mail, the firm was unable to make the service profitable, and creditors grew increasingly uneasy as the year progressed. In October 1860 Russell began to prepare for bankruptcy by authorizing the sale of the company’s assets. A bond scandal that resulted in Russell’s arrest in December further shook confidence in the company. In 1861 the federal government combined the operations of Russell, Majors and Waddell with the Butterfield Overland Mail Company, with each held responsible for different legs of the Pony Express route. Two days after the completion of the transcontinental telegraph system in October 1861, however, the Pony Express announced its closure.