By the 1840s, the
New York Herald (founded by Bennett in 1835) had developed an express route from
Albany, New York (the capital of the state of New York) to New York City. Bennett knew that telegraph lines
were being built, but had rebuffed attempts to sell him on its merits, as he favored his established methods and the advantage it gave him over his competition. But in January 1847, the
New York Evening Express accepted the offer of
Ezra Cornell to use his new
telegraph line from Albany to New York to get legislative news, and the
Express was able to publish a new message from the governor in advance of the
Herald pony express line. Beaten badly to press, the
Herald was forced to abandon its opposition to the telegraph. Pony express systems, however, continued to be developed when and where telegraph lines did not exist, though the systems would always dissolve once telegraph lines went into service. Thus, in 1846, during the
Mexican–American War, the
Baltimore Sun and Philadelphia
Public Ledger established a sixty-pony express route to
New Orleans. This provided Americans with their first taste of close to real-time coverage of warfare. And in 1861,
The Oregonian newspaper organized a pony express and
stagecoach replay to obtain dispatches and
Civil War news days ahead of rival papers in
Portland, Oregon, who relied on reports to arrive by steamer from
San Francisco. ==Nova Scotia Pony Express (1849)==