This site is reportedly about three miles east of Alexandria, in Jefferson County. Sources generally agree about its identity as a Pony Express station, with stagecoaches stopping there as well. Dan Patterson owned and operated the site as a home station until 1860, when he sold it to Asa and John Latham. History also associates the Daniel Ranch, a post office, and the Ed Farrell Ranch with the Big Sandy Station. (NPS)

Note: The location mapped is the Alexandria State Recreation Area, about 3 miles east of Alexandria

A little after midnight we resumed our way, and in the state which Mohammed described when he made his famous night journey to heaven—bayni’l naumi wa ’l yakezán—we crossed the deep shingles, the shallow streams, and the heavy vegetation of the Little Sandy, and five miles beyond it we forded the Big Sandy. About early dawn we found ourselves at another station, better than the last only as the hour was more propitious. The colony of Patlanders rose from their beds without a dream of ablution, and clearing the while their lungs of Cork brogue, prepared a neat déjeûiner à la fourchette by hacking “fids” off half a sheep suspended from the ceiling, and frying them in melted tallow. ' Had the action occurred in Central Africa, among the Esquimaux, or the Araucanians, it would not have excited my attention: mere barbarism rarely disgusts; it 1s the unnatural cohabitation of civilization with savagery that makes the traveler’s gorge rise.

Page 30-1 The City of the Saints