What it means
The Hashknife is a line of riders coming down the canal path. Every winter, on the Friday that opens Scottsdale’s Western Week, a few dozen men and women in dusters and hats ride the last miles of a 200-mile trip from Holbrook along the Arizona Canal into Old Town, carrying saddlebags of real mail. They are the Navajo County Sheriff’s Posse, the ride is the Hashknife Pony Express, and when a local says “the Hashknife is in,” the Parada del Sol weekend has officially begun.
The word does two jobs. It names the ride and the riders, who are sworn in each year as honorary posse members and deliver about 20,000 letters hand-stamped “Via Pony Express” to the Scottsdale post office. And it names a piece of Arizona cattle history, the 1880s brand of the roughest outfit on the high plateau, which the posse borrowed with permission. The full story of the ride, the route and how to send a letter is on the Hashknife Pony Express page; the week it opens is covered at Scottsdale Western Week.
Where you’ll meet it
Late January or early February, along the canal path and at the Old Town finish; in the Parada del Sol parade the next morning, where the riders lead; on postmarked envelopes in collectors’ albums; and in the site’s guide to the city’s Western heritage.
Where the word came from
The name is older than the ride by seventy years. In the 1880s the Aztec Land and Cattle Company took up a vast tract of railroad grant land across northern Arizona and ran tens of thousands of cattle on it under a brand shaped like the broad, curved knife a chuck-wagon cook used to chop hash. Its cowboys, a famously hard crew, were the Hashknife Outfit, and the brand’s reputation for rustling and gunplay survives in Zane Grey novels and Holbrook’s own folklore. When the Navajo County Sheriff’s Posse organized in Holbrook in the 1950s as a mounted search-and-rescue group, it asked the rancher who then held the brand for permission to use the name and the knife as its emblem, and got it.
The ride came in 1958. The posse decided to deliver a letter by horseback to Governor Paul Fannin, inviting him to an event; the sources disagree about which one, with Scottsdale’s accounts saying the Parada del Sol and Holbrook’s saying the Hashknife Stampede rodeo back home. Either way, the riders carried the letter 200 miles to the Valley, the Post Office took notice, and the next year there was more mail. The ride has run every winter since, and the Postal Service describes it as the longest-running officially sanctioned Pony Express in its history; the riders are sworn in as temporary mail carriers for the trip.
The route follows the state highways down off the Mogollon Rim: State Routes 77, 377 and 277 to Heber-Overgaard, 260 to Payson, 87, the Beeline, to Fountain Hills, then west to Scottsdale along the canal. The Arizona Department of Transportation posts the schedule because the horses share the shoulder.
What it is not
The Hashknife is not a reenactment of the 1860 Pony Express, which never ran through Arizona; it is a sanctioned mail delivery that borrows the romance. And “Hashknife” is not a Scottsdale organization, though Scottsdale is the destination; the posse belongs to Navajo County, 150 miles northeast.
The fine print
The mail is real, which is the whole point and the rule set. Letters must carry ordinary postage and the words “Via Pony Express,” reach the Holbrook post office by a deadline the posse publishes in early January, and are hand-cancelled with the ride’s cachet before the riders leave. In Scottsdale they go into the regular mail stream, so a letter you mail to yourself arrives a few days after the riders do, with a cancellation that philatelists collect. About 20,000 pieces make the trip each year; the posse has also carried ceremonial items, including a Super Bowl game ball carried from Holbrook when the game came to Glendale.
The ride is three days and about 200 miles, with relays of riders and horses. The riders are volunteers who buy their own gear and take vacation to do it, which is why the arrival has the feel of a family reunion rather than a show.
What the record lacks: a precise founding date for the posse (the site’s earlier version of this entry said 1955, which we could not reconfirm and have softened to the 1950s), the name of the rancher who granted the brand, and a settled account of the 1958 letter’s purpose. The Aztec Land and Cattle Company’s own history is well documented in Navajo County sources; the posse’s is mostly oral, told at the finish line.