Egan’s Canyon/Egan’s Station (N39 51 37.8 W114 56 09.5)

Located ~30 miles north of Ely west of US 93 on Eagan Canyon Road. White Pine County Road 18 west to CR 23 and Eagan Canyon Road junction, turn southwesterly ~ 2 miles. It is currently marked with a stainless steel stake and once you find it, you’ll likely find the foundations of the old station building.

The canyon was named for Howard Egan who had been in the area since the 1850s. He later became a Pony Express agent. Egan Canyon was the site of many Indian ambushes. In July 1860, U.S. troops travelling from Fort Ruby to Schell Creek came upon an Indian attack at the station barely saving the lives of the 2 station masters. Indian survivors of that skirmish took revenge on the next Pony Express stop, Schell Creek Station, killing the stationmaster and 2 assistance and running off all of the livestock.

The original Pony Express Trail through Egan Canyon is suitable for motor vehicle travel, hiking, and horseback riding. When you travel through the canyon you can easily see why it was an ideal ambush place. Go 1/2 mile south from junction and turn west on the County Road to Egan Canyon. Travel time by vehicle through the canyon and back is about ~1 hour.

http://www.expeditionutah.com/featured-trails/pony-express-trail/nevada-pony-express-stations/

EGAN'S CANYON/EGAN'S STATION 

Sources generally agree on the identity of this station site, known as Egan Canyon or Egan's Station, which also appeared on the 1861 mail contract.  Howard Egan and others established the station in Egan Canyon in the spring of 1860. On July 15 or 16, 1860, approximately eighty Indians arrived at the station, took stationkeeper Mike Holten and a Pony Express rider named Wilson as prisoners, and helped themselves to station food supplies. Rider William Dennis, enroute from Ruby Valley Station to Egan Station, saw the Indians and slipped away before they discovered him. He found Lieutenant Weed and sixty soldiers, whom he had passed shortly before reaching Egan, and returned with them to the station. The soldiers killed about seventeen or eighteen Indians and freed the two captives.  In early October of that same year, Indians returned to the station, killed the men there, and burned the buildings, according to Burton, "in revenge for the death of seventeen of their men by Lieutenant Weed's party." When Richard Burton arrived on October 5, he found part of the chimney, a few pieces of burned wood, and evidence of partially buried bodies. 

Sometime later, workers rebuilt the station, which served as an Overland Mail Company stop until 1869. In 1979, the station's stone foundations existed in a dense tangle of rabbit-brush.

http://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/poex/hrs/hrs7b.htm#128