He put on the Clarke Centennial Pony Express, supplying all towns in the Black Hills. He was postmaster at Camp Clarke, the government turning all mail over to him, accepting it from him, which was conducted until the government put on mail service. Hay was then from $100 to $150 a ton ; corn, 12c to 15c a pound. The Indians were troublesome. One of the pony riders, Rockafellow, at one time rode into a camp of haymakers and found four white men dead after an Indian attack.

"Henry Tefft -Clarke was born on April 26, 1834, at Greenwich, New York. The rudiments of his education were acquired in a common school on his grandfather's farm at Greenwich, where the late President Chester A. Arthur was a fellow pupil.

"He finished his education at the village academy built by his father, and at the age of nineteen went to Erie county, Pennsylvania, where he was employed as a clerk in a store. In 1855 he moved to Topeka, Kansas, driving from the western terminus of the Rock Island railroad, then in Illinois. He later went to Leavenworth, Kansas, and removed to Bellevue. Xebraska, believing that the town would some time become the western terminus for a railroad.

"In the spring of 1856 Mr. Clarke became the steamboat agent at Bellevue and from dealing in a small way in provisions he soon branched out into a general merchandise business. In 1862 he took a contract to furnish the government with corn and oats at Fort Kearney, on the south side of the Platte river, about two miles east of the present city of Kearney.