The Pony Express sought to provide speedy and dependable mail service between Missouri and California, and before its first ride an essential task was to create a shorter route across the open country between Utah and California. With only two months to prepare, its owners needed a route more expedient than the established California Trail. Because settlements and homesteads between Utah and California were rare, they benefited from recent explorations southwest of Salt Lake City and work already underway by private companies that cut nearly 300 miles from the Humboldt River route. In the mid-1850s, Mormon settler Howard Egan scouted and developed a trail across Utah's west desert to drive cattle between Salt Lake City and California markets. After learning of Egan's route, entrepreneur George Chorpenning, who had previously developed three different routes along the Humboldt River, recognized its value for mail and freight, and he and Egan began building the road and establishing provisioned way stations for stagecoaches, freight wagons, and mail. After learning of their roadwork, U.S. Topographical Engineer Captain James H. Simpson explored the desert southwest of the Great Salt Lake in late fall 1858, and the following spring the U.S. Army ordered him to survey the full route as a possible supply road to Camp Floyd. On Simpson's recommendation, the Army adjusted the route in 1859 and 1860 and greatly improved the road and its water holes for military freight wagons. When the Pony Express made its first run in early April 1860, only a few way stations stood along the new Central Overland Route, spaced roughly 20 to 25 miles apart. Riders had to push their mustangs 50 to 70 miles between stations at Salt Lake City, Faust, Willow Springs, and Deep Creek until new 10-mile relay stations were established, and with so little preparation time these often began as no more than a tent canopy for the station keeper and a makeshift corral for the horses. The Central Overland Route, a more direct and shorter road between Utah and California, left Lake City, turned south of the Great Salt Lake, and passed through the mountains of Utah and central Nevada to Carson City, then continued for the next decade as a vital route for emigrants, mail, freight, and passengers between Salt Lake City and California.