The Pony Express Museum preserves the history of a failed business that captured the imagination of a nation. The museum also seeks to document how the legend grew through the years.

One way is by showing some of the history of the Hotel Robidoux, formerly at Fifth and Francis streets. The hotel identified itself with the Pony Express and other elements of local history. In the mid-1930s, Otto Strucksberg became the hotel manager and made major changes in the operation, including opening the Pony Bar’n as a convivial gathering place. Mr. Strucksberg also arranged to bring George Gray, a 30-year-old artist, to St. Joseph late in 1937.

Hired by the American Hotels Corp.. Mr. Gray, who was born in Harrisburg, Pa., in 1907, traveled from town to town creating the paintings that are now valued by museums and businesses alike. He created four murals: a map of the Pony Express route, the signing of the Platte Purchase and two St. Joseph soldiers in action — Missouri’s “Swamp Fox,” the Civil War general and former Mayor M. Jeff Thompson, and World War I leader Clay MacDonald.

The hotel provided an eighth-floor room where Mr. Gray lived, venturing out in the day to do research and painting at night. He bumped into a history professor at St. Joseph Junior College, Frank S. Popplewell, who wrote the words that adorn the map.

“I had to work quick,” Mr. Gray remembered in 1992. “There was always another hotel ahead.”

The 24-foot-long map of the Pony Express trail became the centerpiece of Mr. Strucksberg’s hotel-drinking establishment.

A mural dedication occurred in the hotel’s Crystal Room, with no less a personage than Eleanor Roosevelt. The wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated the mural on Oct. 15, 1938. The mural hung in the bar until 1976, when the hotel was razed.

Mercantile Bank built a new bank on the site two years later and hung the map in its new building. The bank donated the map in 1992 to the museum. The map — newly cleaned and now hanging in the Pony Express Museum — was unveiled to a crowd of about 300 in 1995. Moving and restoring the painting would not have been possible without the $10,000 that five St. Joseph Questers chapters secured. Mr. Gray returned for that event.

“A city that preserves its past is a city that looks forward to the future,” Mr. Gray said.

The museum also acquired photos of Mr. Gray painting, and hotel memorabilia including china, menus, silverware and other items, such as a place mat that reprints Mr. Gray’s map. Mr. Gray passed away on Jan. 12, 2004, at the age of 96.