April 3, 1860 - The Pony Express service began when its first rider left from St. Joseph, Missouri, en route to Sacramento, California. The Pony Express consisted of horseback riders who carried messages in relay across the prairies, deserts, and mountains of the western United States. A total of 190 Pony Express stations were placed at intervals of 10 miles along the approximately 2,000-mile route. The first pouch contained 49 letters, five private telegrams, and some papers for San Francisco and intermediate points. It took mail only 10 days to travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific using the Pony Express. The service offered the West's most direct means of communication with the East, but it only operated from April 1860 to October 1861 when the telegraph diminished its necessity.

April 3, 1882 - The outlaw Jesse James was murdered by one of his own gang members. The most infamous bank robber of the Old West, James was the leader of the James-Younger Gang. Between 1866 and 1876 the gang held up banks, stagecoaches and trains from Iowa to Texas and from Kansas to West Virginia. James disappeared in 1876, after an attempted robbery in Northfield, Minnesota, resulted in the capture or deaths of several members of his gang. After a three-year hiatus he recruited a new gang and returned to a life of crime with the robbery of a train in Glendale, Missouri. In 1881 the newly-elected governor of Missouri, Thomas Crittenden, made Jesse James a top priority. He offered a reward of $5,000 for the death or capture of the outlaw and began carrying on secret negotiations with Robert Ford, a member of James' new gang. On the morning of April 3, 1882, while James was preparing to leave for another robbery, Ford shot him in the back of the head. Ford was indicted for murder and pled guilty; however, two hours after being sentenced to death by hanging he was granted a full pardon by Governor Crittenden.