The B. F. Hastings Bank Building was constructed in 1852, in the frantic rebuilding that followed Sacramento's devastating fire that same year. The city had burned before and would flood repeatedly, but its residents kept rebuilding along the waterfront because the Sacramento River was their lifeline to San Francisco and the outside world. The Hastings Building rose as a two-story brick structure, architecturally modest by any standard. Four bays face J Street, nine face 2nd Street, and a single-story canopy extends over both sidewalks on simple square posts. A metal staircase on the 2nd Street side leads to a second-floor entrance. It is, by the description of the National Park Service itself, 'architecturally undistinguished.' What made it extraordinary was never its appearance but its purpose.

The Pony Express launched on April 3, 1860, when a rider departed St. Joseph, Missouri, heading west. The route covered roughly 1,800 miles through Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada before reaching California. Riders changed horses every ten to fifteen miles at relay stations and handed off the mail pouch to a fresh rider every 75 to 100 miles. The whole journey took about ten days, an astonishing speed for the era. The B. F. Hastings Building became the western terminus because it housed the offices of several express companies, including what would become Wells Fargo. The service captured the American imagination but hemorrhaged money. When the transcontinental telegraph was completed in October 1861, the Pony Express shut down after just eighteen months of operation, already a legend.

Before the Pony Express riders arrived, the Hastings Building had already played a role in shaping California. It served as the first location of the California Supreme Court, in the years when the state was so new that its highest judicial body had to share space with a bank. California had been admitted to the Union in 1850, just two years before the building was constructed, and its institutions were assembling themselves from scratch. The court held sessions in the Hastings Building while Sacramento was still figuring out how to keep its streets above water. The fact that a commercial bank building doubled as the state's supreme courthouse says everything about the improvised, anything-goes character of Gold Rush Sacramento.

The building was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966 and is designated as California Historical Landmark No. 606. Today it houses the Wells Fargo History Museum, one of two such museums in Sacramento. Inside, a recreated 19th-century Wells Fargo Express Company office gives visitors a sense of what the building looked like during its years as a nexus of Western commerce. Artifacts from the California Gold Rush era fill the displays, and exhibits trace the evolution of Wells Fargo from frontier express company to modern financial institution. The building sits within Old Sacramento State Historic Park, itself a National Historic Landmark District, surrounded by boardwalks, restored buildings, and the kind of carefully maintained nineteenth-century atmosphere that makes it easy to imagine a dust-caked rider pulling up with a mailbag from Missouri.