Stage-coach and Tavern Days

We were slow in abandoning our water travel and water transportation. Water lines controlled in the East till 1800, in the West till 1860, and have now great revival.

Transportation was wholly done by water. When horses multiplied, merchandise was drawn short distances in the winter time on crude sledges. Packhorses were in common use in England and on the Continent, and the scrubby, enduring horses raised here soon were used as packhorses. Their use lingered long over the Alleghany Mountains, as it did on the mountains of the Pacific coast; in fact the advance guard of inland commerce in America has always employed packhorses.

The first appearance of the Conestoga wagon in history (though the wagons were not then called by that name) was in 1755, when General Braddock set out on his ill-fated expedition to western Pennsylvania. There led thither no wagon-road, simply an Indian trail for packhorses. Braddock insisted strenuously to the Pennsylvania Assembly upon obtaining their assistance in widening the trail to a wagon-road, and also to secure one hundred and fifty wagons for the army. The cutting of the road was done, but when returns were made to Braddock at Frederick, Maryland, only twenty-five wagons could be obtained. Franklin said it was a pity the troops had not been landed in Philadelphia, since every farmer in the country thereabouts had a wagon. At Braddock’s earnest solicitation, Franklin issued an ingenious and characteristic advertisement for one hundred and fifty four-horse wagons, and fifteen hundred saddle- or packhorses, for the use of this army. The value of transportation facilities at the time is proved by Franklin’s terms of payment, namely: fifteen shillings a day for each wagon with four horses and driver, and two shillings a day for horse with saddle or pack. Franklin agreed that the owners should be fairly compensated for the loss of these wagons and horses if they were not returned, and was eventually nearly ruined by this stipulation. For the battle at Braddock’s Field was disastrous to the English, and the claims of the farmers against Franklin amounted to twenty thousand pounds. Upon his appeal these claims were paid by the Government under order of General Shirley. Franklin gathered these wagons and horses in York and Lancaster counties, Pennsylvania, and I doubt if York and Lancaster, England, would have been as good fields at that date.

Braddock’s trail became the famous route for crossing the Alleghany Mountains for the principal pioneers who settled southwestern Pennsylvania and western Virginia, and all their effects were carried to their new homes on packhorses. The only wealth acquired in the wilds by these pioneers was peltry and furs, and each autumn a caravan of packhorses was sent over the mountains bearing the accumulated spoils of the neighborhood, under the charge of a master driver and three or four assistants. The horses were fitted with pack-saddles, to the hinder part of which was fastened a pair of hobbles made of hickory withes; and a collar with a bell was on each horse’s neck. The horses’ feed of shelled corn was carried in bags destined to be filled with alum salt for the return trip; and on the journey down, part of this feed was deposited for the use of the return caravan. Large wallets filled with bread, jerked bear’s meat, ham, and cheese furnished food for the drivers. At night the horses were hobbled and turned out into the woods or pasture, and the bells which had been muffled in the daytime were unfastened, to serve as a guide to the drivers in the morning. The furs were carried to and exchanged first at Baltimore as a market; later the carriers went only to Frederick; then to Hagerstown, Oldtown, and finally to Fort Cumberland. Iron and steel in various forms, and salt, were the things most eagerly desired by the settlers. Each horse could carry two bushels of alum salt, each bushel weighing eighty-four pounds. Not a heavy load, but the horses were scantily fed. Sometimes an iron pot or kettle was tied on either side on top of the salt-bag.

Ginseng, bears’ grease, and snakeroot were at a later date collected and added to the furs and hides. The horses marched in single file on a road scarce two feet wide; the foremost horse was led by the master of the caravan, and each successive horse was tethered to the pack-saddle of the one in front. Other men or boys watched the packs and urged on laggard horses.

I do not know the exact mode of lading these packhorses. An English gentlewoman named Celia Fiennes rode on horseback on a side-saddle over many portions of England in the year 1695. She thus describes the packhorses she saw in Devon and Cornwall: —

“Thus harvest is bringing in, on horse backe, with sort of crookes of wood like yokes on either side; two or three on a side stands up in which they stow ye corne, and so tie it with cords; but they cannot so equally poise it but ye going of ye horse is like to cast it down sometimes on ye one side sometimes on ye other, for they load them from ye neck to ye taile, and pretty high, and are forced to support it with their hands so to a horse they have two people women as well as men.”

At a later date this packhorse system became that of common carriers. Five hundred horses at a time, after the Revolution, could be seen winding over the mountains. At Lancaster, Harrisburg, Shippensburg, Bedford, Fort Pitt, and other towns were regular packhorse companies. One public carrier at Harris Ferry in 1772 had over two hundred horses and mules. When the road was widened and wagons were introduced, the packhorse drivers considered it an invasion of their rights and fiercely opposed it.

It is interesting to note that the trail of the Indians and the horse-track of these men skilled only in woodcraft were the ones followed in later years by trained engineers in laying out the turnpikes and railroads.

We are prone to pride ourselves in America on many things which we had no part in producing, on some which are in no way distinctive, and on a few which are not in the highest sense to our credit. Of the Conestoga wagon as a perfect vehicle of transportation and as an important historical factor we can honorably and rightfully be proud. It was a truly American product evolved and multiplied to fit, perfectly, existing conditions. Its day of usefulness is past, few ancient specimens exist; and little remains to remind us of it; the derivative word stogey, meaning hard, enduring, tough, is a legacy. Stogeys – shoes – are tough, coarse, leather footwear; and the stogey cigar was a great, heavy, coarse cigar, originally, it is said, a foot long, made to fit the enduring nerves and appetite of the Conestoga teamsters.

This splendid wagon was developed in Pennsylvania by topographical conditions, by the soft soil, by trade requirements, and by native wit. It was the highest type of a commodious freight-carrier by horse power that this or any country has ever known; it was called the Conestoga wagon from the vicinity in which they were first in common use.

These wagons had a boat-shaped body with curved canoe-shaped bottom which fitted them specially for mountain use; for in them freight remained firmly in place at whatever angle the body might be. This wagon body was painted blue or slate-color and had bright vermilion red sideboards. The rear end could be lifted from its sockets; on it hung the feed-trough for the horses. On one side of the body was a small tool-chest with a slanting lid. This held hammer, wrench, hatchet, pincers, and other simple tools. Under the rear axletree were suspended a tar-bucket and water-pail.

In the interesting and extensive museum of old-time articles of domestic use gathered intelligently by the Historical Society of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, are preserved some of the wagon grease-pots or Tar-lodel, which formed part of the furniture of the Conestoga wagon. A tree section about a foot long and six inches in diameter was bored and scraped out to make a pot. The outer upper rim was circumscribed with a groove, and fitted with leather thongs, by which it was hung to the axle of the wagon. Filled with grease and tar it was ever ready for use. Often a leather Tar-lodel took the place of this wooden grease-pot. The wheels had broad tires, sometimes nearly a foot broad. The wagon bodies were arched over with six or eight bows, of which the middle ones were the lowest. These were covered with a strong, pure-white hempen cover corded down strongly at the sides and ends. These wagons could be loaded up to the top of the bows and carried four to six tons each, – about a ton’s weight to each horse.

Sleek, powerful horses of the Conestoga breed were used by prosperous teamsters. These horses, usually from four to seven in number, were often carefully matched, all dapple-gray or all bay. From Baltimore ran wagons with twelve horses. They were so intelligent, so well cared for, so perfectly broken, that they seemed to take pleasure in their work. The heavy, broad harnesses were costly, of the best leather, trimmed with brass plates; often each horse had a housing of deerskin or bearskin edged with scarlet fringe, while the headstall was gay with ribbons and ivory rings, and colored worsted rosettes.

Bell-teams were common; an iron or brass arch was fastened upon the hames, and collar and bells were suspended from it. Each horse save the saddle-horse had a full set of musical bells tied with gay ribbons; among these were the curious old ear-bells. In England these ear-bells dangled two on each side on a strap which passed over the horse’s head behind the ears and buckled into the cheeks of the headstall. On the forehead stood up from this strap a stiff tuft or brush (a Russian cockade) of colored horsehair fixed in a brass socket. Even the reins were of high colors, scarlet and orange and green. The driver walking alongside, or seated astride the saddle-horse, governed the perfectly broken and intelligent creatures with a precision and ease that was beautiful to see. A curious adjustable seat called a lazy-board was sometimes hung at the side of the wagon, and afforded a precarious resting place.

These teamsters carried a whip, long and light, which, like everything used by them, was of the finest and best materials. It had a fine squirrel-skin or silk “cracker.” This whip was carried under the arm, and the Conestoga horses were guided more by the crack than by the blow.

All chronicles agree that a fully equipped Conestoga wagon in the days when those wagons were in their prime was a truly pleasing sight, giving one that sense of satisfaction which ever comes from the regard of any object, especially a piece of mechanism, which is perfectly fitted for the object it is designed to attain. An American poet writes of them: —

“The old road blossoms with romance
Of covered vehicles of every grade
From ox-cart of most primitive design
To Conestoga wagons with their fine
Deep-dusted, six-horse teams in heavy gear,
High hames and chiming bells – to childish ear
And eye entrancing as the glittering train
Of some sun-smitten pageant of old Spain.”

The number of these wagons was vast. At one time over three thousand ran constantly back and forward between Philadelphia and other Pennsylvania towns. Sometimes a hundred would follow in close row; “the leaders of one wagon with their noses in the trough of the wagon ahead.” These “Regulars” with fully equipped Conestoga wagons made freighting their constant and only business. Farmers and teamsters who made occasional trips, chiefly during the farmers’ dull season – the winter – were called “Militia.”

A local poet wrote of them: —

“Militia-men drove narrow treads,
Four horses and plain red Dutch beds,
And always carried grub and feed.”

“Grub,” food for the driver, and feed for the horses was seldom carried by the Regulars; but the horses when unharnessed always fed from the long troughs which were hitched to the wagon pole.

All these teamsters carried their own blankets, and many carried also a narrow mattress about two feet wide which they slept upon. This was strapped in a roll in the morning and put into the wagon. Often the teamsters slept on the barroom floor around the fireplace, feet to the fire. Some taverns had bunks with wooden covers around the sides of the room. The teamster spread his lunch on the top or cover of his bunk; when he had finished he could lift the lid, and he had a coffinlike box to sleep in – but this was an unusual luxury. McGowan’s Tavern was a favorite stopping place. The barroom had a double chimney and fire-places; fifteen feet of blazing hearth meant comfort, and allured all teamsters. The blood of battle stained the walls and ceiling, which the landlord never removed to show that he “meant business.”

The Conestoga wagons were in constant use in times of war as well as in peace. They were not only furnished to Braddock’s army, as has been told, but to the Continental army in the War of the Revolution. President Reed of Pennsylvania wrote to General Washington in 1780 that “the army had been chiefly supplied with horses and waggons from this state (Pennsylvania) during the war,” and it was also declared that half the supplies furnished the army came from the same state. Reed deplored the fact that a further demand for over one thousand teams was to be made on them, and said the state could not stand it.

During the War of 1812 these wagons transported arms, ammunition, and supplies to the army on the frontier. Long lines of these teams could be seen carrying solace and reënforcements to the soldiers.

The Stage Waggon

While the old waggoner is stopping to drink, poor Jack the soldier is bidding his wife good bye. – She has come a long way with her children to see him once more: and now is going home again in the waggon. She does not know whether she shall ever see him again. – Jack was obliged to leave his country life, and his good master, and his plough and his comfortable cottage, and his poor wife and little ones to go and be a soldier, and learn to fight, because other people would quarrel.

In England a huge, clumsy wagon was used for common carrier and passenger transportation, until our own day. It was inferior to the Conestoga wagon in detail and equipments. Illustrations from an old print in a child’s story-book are given of these wagons on page 251. Their most marked characteristic was the width of wheel tire. From the middle colonies the Conestoga wagon found its way to every colony and every settlement; nor did its life end in the Eastern states or with the establishment of railroads. Renamed the “prairie schooner,” it carried civilization and emigration across the continent to the Golden Gate. Till our own day the white tilts could be seen slowly travelling westward. The bleaching bones of these wagons may be still seen in our far West, and are as distinct relics of that old pioneer Western life as are the bones of the buffalo. A few wagons still remain in Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County; the one painted by Hovenden in “Westward Ho” is in the collection of the Bucks County Historical Society. One toiled slowly and painfully, in the year 1899, up the green hillsides of Vermont, bearing two or three old people and a few shattered household gods – the relics, human and material, of a family that had “gone West” many years ago.

CHAPTER XII

EARLY STAGE-COACHES AND OTHER VEHICLES

The story of the stage-coach begins at a much later date than that of the tavern; but the two allies reached the height of their glory together. No more prosperous calling ever existed than that of landlord of an old-time stage-tavern; no greater symbol of good cheer could be afforded. Though a popular historical novel by one of our popular writers shows us the heroine in a year of the seventeenth century conveyed away from her New England home in a well-equipped stage-coach, there were no stage-coaches at that date in New England, nor were they overfrequent in Old England.

Stow says, in his Survey of London (1633): “Of old time, Coaches were not known in this Island but Chariots or Whirlicotes.” The whirlicote is described as a cot or bed on wheels, a sort of wheeled litter, and was used as early as the time of Richard II. The first coach made in England by Walter Rippen was for the Earl of Rutland, in 1555. The queen had one the next year, and Queen Elizabeth a state coach eight years later from the same maker. That splendid association – “The Company of Coach and Harness Makers,” was founded by Charles II. in May, 1667.

Venomous diatribes were set in print against coaches, as is usual with all innovations, useful and otherwise. Of them the assertions of Taylor the “Water Poet” are good examples. He said that coaches dammed the streets, and aided purse-cutting; that butchers could not pass with their cattle; that market-folk were hindered in bringing victuals to town; that carts and carriers were stopped; that milkmaids were flung in the dirt; that people were “crowded and shrowded up against stalls and stoops” – still coaches continued to be built.

The early English stage-coaches were clumsy machines. One of the year 1747 is shown on the opposite page. With no windows, no seats or railing on top, and an uncomfortable basket rumble behind, they seem crude and inconvenient enough when compared with the dashing mail-coaches which were evolved a century later, and were such a favorite subject with English painters, engravers, and lithographers for many years. Those pictures expressed, as Dickens said, “past coachfulness: pictures of colored prints of coaches starting, arriving, changing horses, coaches in the sunshine, coaches in the snow, coaches in the wind, coaches in the mist and rain, coaches in all circumstances compatible with their triumph and victory, but never in the act of breaking down or overturning.”

A copy of one of those prints of an English mail-coach, in the height of its career, is shown opposite page 256 (#Page_257).

Stage-wagons were used throughout England as a means of cheaper conveyance. They were intolerably slow and equally clumsy. On page 251 a leaf from an old-time English story-book shows two of these lumbering vehicles, which ill compare with the English mail-coaches.

Coaching days in England have had ample and entertaining record in instructive and reminiscent books, such as: Brighton and its Coaches, by William C. A. Blew, 1894; The Brighton Road, etc., by Charles G. Harper, 1892; Old Coaching Days, by Stanley Harris, 1882; Annals of the Road, by Captain Malet, 1876; Down the Road, etc., by C. T. S. Birch Reynardson, 1875; Coaching Days and Coaching Ways, by W. Outram Tristam, 1888.

We have no similar anecdotic and personal records of American coaching life, though we have the two fine books of modern coaching ways entitled Driving for Pleasure, by Francis T. Underhill, and A Manual of Coaching, by Fairman Rogers, both most interesting and valuable.

We began early in our history to have coaches. Even Governor Bradstreet in his day rode in a hackney coach. John Winthrop, of Connecticut, had a private coach in 1685; Sir Edmund Andros had one in Boston in 1687. At the funeral of the lieutenant-governor in 1732 in Boston there were plenty of coaches, though there were few in New York; the provincial governors usually had one. Watson, in his Annals of Philadelphia, gives a list of all private citizens who kept carriages in that city in 1761 – there were but thirty-eight. There were three coaches, two landaus, eighteen chariots, and fifteen chairs. Eleven years later only eighty-four Philadelphians had private carriages. In 1794, when the city had a population of about fifty thousand, eight hundred and forty-seven carriage-owners appear: among them were found thirty-three coaches and one hundred and fifty-seven coachees.

The testimony of the traveller Bennet, who was in Boston in 1740, is most explicit on the subject of travel and transportation in that city and vicinity: —

“There are several families in Boston that keep a coach and a pair of horses, and some few drive with four horses; but for chaises and saddle-horses, considering the bulk of the place, they outdo London. They have some nimble, lively horses for the coach, but not any of that beautiful black breed so common in London. Their saddle-horses all pace naturally, and are generally counted sure-footed; but they are not kept in that fine order as in England. The common draught-horses used in carts about the town are very small and poor, and seldom have their fill of anything but labor. The country carts and wagons are generally drawn by oxen, from two to six according to the distance, or the burden they are laden with.”

The traveller Weld thus described the peculiarly American carriage called a “coachee”: —

“The body of it is rather longer than a coach, but of the same shape. In the front it is left quite open down to the bottom, and the driver sits on a bench under the roof of the carriage. There are two seats in it for passengers, who sit in it with their faces to the horses. The roof is supported by small props which are placed at the corners. On each side of the door, above the panels, it is quite open; and, to guard against bad weather, there are curtains which let down from the roof and fasten to buttons on the outside. The light wagons are in the same construction, and are calculated to hold from four to twelve people. The wagon has no doors, but the passengers scramble in the best way they can over the seat of the driver. The wagons are used universally for stage-coaches.”

A vehicle often mentioned by Judge Sewall and contemporary writers is a calash. It was a clumsy thing, an open seat set on a low and heavy pair of wheels. A curricle had two horses, a chaise one; both had what were called whip springs behind and elbow springs in front. A whisky was a light body fixed in shafts which were connected with long horizontal springs by scroll irons. A French traveller tells of riding around Boston in a whisky. The chair so often named in letters, wills, etc., was not a sedan-chair, but was much like a chaise without a top.

The French chaise was introduced here by the Huguenots before the year 1700. The Yankee “shay” is simply the fancied singular number of the French chaise. We improved upon the French vehicle, and finally replaced it by our characteristic carriage, the buggy.