William Hepburn Russell was born in Burlington, Vt. , the son of William Eaton and Myrtilla (Hepburn) Russell, and grandson of Benjamin and Betsy (Eaton) Russell. His father, a soldier in the War of 1812, died in 1814; some years afterward the widow married a Colonel Bangs, with whom she moved to Missouri.
Beginning work as a clerk at sixteen, Russell in time became a merchant and for a period was a partner in a bank at Richmond, Mo.
By the late forties he was engaged in freighting on government contracts and on December 28, 1854, he joined Alexander Majors and W. B. Waddell in a partnership, with its operating center at Leavenworth, which four years later became the firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell. From the first, the business grew rapidly; in 1857 it underwent a vast expansion when the contract was obtained for supplying the army ordered to Utah.
In May 1859 Russell and John S. Jones, as an independent venture, started a stage line from Leavenworth to Denver, but it was taken over by the firm within a year; in February 1860 the Central Overland California and Pike's Peak Express Company was chartered, with Russell as president, and first-class coaches began running through to California. Though Northern sentiment demanded that the bulk of the Pacific mail should be carried over the central route, Southern dominance in Washington had in 1857-58 dictated the giving of the contract to the Butterfield Company, operating from Memphis, Tenn.
Determined to prove that the use of the central route was not impracticable, Russell persuaded the reluctant Majors to join him in the operation of a Pony Express; on April 3, 1860, with all preparations made, riders set out simultaneously from Sacramento and a point opposite St. Joseph, and relays of dauntless men and swift horses speeded the mail across the western half of the continent in the incredible time of ten days. Russell, now perhaps the most talked-of man in the United States, was hailed as the "Napoleon of the West. "
His period of glory, however, was a brief one. Going to Washington to obtain funds for his ruinously expensive venture, he became involved in the greatest financial scandal of the time. The government was bankrupt and could not fulfil its obligations; John B. Floyd, the secretary of war, when pressed for payment, availed himself of the services of Godard Bailey, a clerk in the Interior Department, who abstracted $870, 000 in bonds from the Indian Trust Fund and turned them over to Russell, substituting for them acceptances given by Floyd to Russell. When the transaction became known in mid-December, both the House of Representatives and the District of Columbia grand jury took action. At the end of December Floyd resigned. On January 30, 1861, Floyd, Russell, and Bailey were indicted; Russell, who had made a statement before a select committee of the House, protested his innocence, and in March the criminal court, evidently with the intent of leaving the matter to Congress, dismissed the last of the three indictments.
The Civil War came on, and the case was swallowed up in the rush of preparation for the conflict, though for many years thereafter it was to reappear in litigation. On April 26, Russell was succeeded as president of the stagecoach company by Bela M. Hughes. With the completion of the overland telegraph, on October 24 the Pony Express came to an end; on March 21, 1862, the company was disposed of at public sale to Ben Holladay, and some time later Russell transferred his interest in the freighting business to Majors. Each of the partners lost a fortune.
Russell attempted a new start in New York City, where he seems to have engaged in several speculative enterprises. In the summer of 1872, while in Washington, he fell ill and was taken to the home of a son, a banker of Palmyra, Mo. , where shortly afterward he died.
On June 9, 1835, at Lexington, Mo. , Russell married Harriett Elliott Warder, daughter of the Rev. John Warder. He had five children.
