In St Joseph
St Joseph looks like a smaller industrial city that suffered the same fate as St Louis. Buildings are abandoned but it doesn’t seem too unsafe, a high amount people have faces marked by the use of drugs. We do three museums in the city:
- the psychiatric museum which is housed in the old asylum. Exhibits show the history of psychiatric treatments, from spinning the patients, to throwing ice cold water on them, stomping on them, to doing lobotomies and therapies… we end by seeing the morgue in the basement. Creepy!
- The Pony Express Museum. In April 1860 the Pony Express was founded to deliver mail fast from the East to the rapidly growing West. The path riders would take was mostly following the California trail, a 2000 miles route crossing the Rockies and ending in Sacramento (the mail was then sent to SF by boat). Every 10 miles was a Pony Express station were the riders would have two minutes to go to the restrooms and change horse. Each rider would ride up to 100 miles before giving the mail to another one, having a good rest, and carry mail the other way. Riders were between 14 and 41 years old, riding under all kinds of weather including snow blizzards or tornadoes. It would take 10 days for the mail to reach SF from NY. Because St Joseph was linked to the East by the rail and the telegraph it’s where the Pony Express terminus was built. The service became obsolete 18 months after its creation when the telegraph line was completed in October 1861.
- Jesse James home. The famous gangster was shot and killed by Robert Ford in his home in St Joseph in April 1882. Jesse and his brother formed a gang attacking and robbing national properties (banks, trains) after they got attacked by Union soldiers at their family farms when they were children. Robert Ford was planning to rob a bank with the James but instead killed Jesse to get the $10000 bounty. 20 year-old Ford was labeled as a dirty coward as he turned against him and because he killed him from the back while Jesse was fixing a frame in the wall of his own house.