William Hepburn Russell
| William Hepburn Russell | |
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| Born | January 31, 1812 Burlington, Vermont |
| Died | September 10, 1872 Palmyra, Missouri |
William Hepburn Russell (1812–1872) was a United States businessman. He was a partner, along with Alexander Majors and William B. Waddell, in the freighting firm Russell, Majors, and Waddell and the stagecoach company the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company which was the parent company of the Pony Express. His public life is one of numerous business ventures, some successful and some failed. While Russell, described as a good-looking man, lived the majority of his life on the edge on the western frontier, he was always more at home in the upper-class settings of the East coast.
Russell was born in Burlington, Vermont on January 31, 1812. In the early 1820s, he moved as a child with his family to western Missouri. In 1826, at the age of 16 and with little formal education, he began work at the Ely & Curtis general store in Liberty, Missouri. Two years later, in 1830, he began working for the mercantile firm of James Aull and Samuel Ringo, where he learned the wholesale business.
In 1835 he married Harriet Elliot Warder, whose social standing helped his.
In 1837 at the age of 25, Russell left the Aull and Ringo firm to strike out on his own. He helped to organize the Lexington First Addition Company in 1840 with his future partner, William B. Waddell. In 1844, using borrowed money, Russell and James H. Bullard created the partnership of Bullard & Russell to open a general store. This partnership soon welcomed an additional partner in E.C. McCarty and expanded to shipping goods to Santa Fe, New Mexico. He then went on to become a partner in the established firm of Waddell, Ramsey & Co. While some of these early business ventures ended in failure, by 1848, Russell was successful enough to build a 20-room mansion in Lexington, Missouri.
In 1850, in partnership with James Brown, and John S. Jones, Russell entered the military freighting business. This partnership dissolved soon after the death of Brown in 1850. In 1852, he re-partnered with William B. Waddell to form a mercantile firm; by 1854 they were freighting military supplies to Santa Fe.
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