Stage-coach and Tavern Days

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 romanceOf covered vehicles of every gradeFrom ox-cart of most primitive designTo Conestoga wagons with their fineDeep-dusted, six-horse teams in heavy gear,High hames and chiming bells – to childish earAnd eye entrancing as the glittering trainOf 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.

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.

Chariots were a distinctly aristocratic vehicle, used as in England by persons of wealth, and deemed a great luxury. One was advertised in Boston in 1743 as “a very handsome chariot, fit for town or country, lined with red coffy, handsomely carved and painted, with a whole front glass, the seat-cloth embroided with silver, and a silk fringe round the seat.” It was offered for sale by John Lucas, a Boston coach-builder, and had doubtless been built by him.

The ancient chariot shown on page 259, formerly belonging to John Brown, the founder of Brown University, is preserved at the old Occupasnetuxet homestead in Warwick, Rhode Island, securely stored in one of the carriage houses on the estate, a highly prized relic of days long ago. In this ancient vehicle General Washington rode from place to place when he made his visit to Rhode Island in August, 1790, escorted by John Brown, the ancestor of its present owners.

The body of this old chariot is suspended on heavy thorough-braces attached to heavy iron holders as large as a man’s wrist, the forward ones so curved as to allow the forward wheels to pass under them, in order that the chariot may be turned within a short compass. It has but one seat for passengers, which will accommodate two persons; and an elevated seat for the driver, which is separate from the main body. The wheels are heavy, the hind ones twice the height of the forward ones, the tires of which are attached to the felloes in several distinct pieces.

It is easy to picture the importance attached to buying or owning a wheeled vehicle in a community which rode chiefly on horseback. Contemporary evidence of this is often found, such as these entries in the diary of Rev. Joseph Emerson of Malden. In the winter of 1735 he writes: —

“Some talk about my buying a Shay. How much reason have I to watch and pray and strive against inordinate Affection for the Things of the World.”

A week later, however, he proudly recalls the buying of the “Shay” for £27 10s., which must have made a decided hole in his year’s salary. His delight in his purchase and possession is somewhat marred by noting that his parishioners smile as he is drawn past them in his magnificence; it is also decidedly taken down by the vehicle being violently overturned, though his wife and he were uninjured. It cost a pretty penny, moreover, to get it repaired. He scarce gets the beloved but sighed-over “Shay” home when he thus notes: —

“Went to the beach with 3 of the Children in my Shay. The beast being frighted when we all were out of the shay, overturned and broke it. I desire – I hope I desire it – that the Lord would teach me suitably to repent this Providence, to make suitable remarks on it, and to be suitably affected with it. Have I done well to get me a Shay? Have I not been too fond & too proud of this convenience? Should I not be more in my study and less fond of driving? Do I not withold more than is meet from charity? &c.”

Shortly afterward, as the “beast” continued to be “frighted,” he sold his horse and shay to a fellow-preacher, Rev. Mr. Smith, who – I doubt not – went through the same elations, depressions, frightings, and self-scourgings in which the Puritan spirit and horseman’s pride so strongly clashed.

On May 13, 1718, Jonathan Wardwell’s stage-coach left Jonathan Wardwell’s Orange Tree in Boston and ran to Rhode Island – that is, the island proper. At any rate, it was advertised in Boston newspapers as starting at that date. In 1721 there was a road-wagon over the same route. In 1737 two imported stage-coaches were advertised for this road, and doubtless many travellers used these coaches, which connected with the boats for New York.

The early coaching conveyances were named. In 1767 it was a “stage-chaise” that ran between Salem and Boston, while a “stage-coach” and “stage-wagon” were on other short routes out of Boston. In 1772 a “stage-chariot” was on the road between Boston and Marblehead. “Flying Mail-Stages” came later, and in 1773 Thomas Beals ran “Mail Stage Carriages between Boston and Providence.” In England there were “Flying-Machines” and “Flying-Waggons.” An old English road-bill dated 1774 ends with this sentence, “The Rumsey Machine, through Winchester, hung on Steel Springs begins flying on the 3rd of April from London to Poole in One Day.” On the Paulus Hook route to Philadelphia in 1772 the proprietor announced a vehicle “in imitation of a coach” – and perhaps that is all that any of these carriages could be rightfully called.

One of the clearest pictures which has come down to us of travelling in the early years of our national existence is found in the pages relating the travels of a young Englishman named Thomas Twining, in the United States in the year 1795. He journeyed by “stage-waggon” from Philadelphia, through Chester and Wilmington, to Baltimore, then to Washington, then back to Philadelphia.

He fully describes the stage-wagon in which he made these journeys: —

“The vehicle was a long car with four benches. Three of these in the interior held nine passengers. A tenth passenger was seated by the side of the driver on the front bench. A light roof was supported by eight slender pillars, four on each side. Three large leather curtains suspended to the roof, one at each side and the third behind, were rolled up or lowered at the pleasure of the passengers. There was no place nor space for luggage, each person being expected to stow his things as he could under his seat or legs. The entrance was in front over the driver’s bench. Of course the three passengers on the back seat were obliged to crawl across all the other benches to get to their places. There were no backs to the benches to support and relieve us during a rough and fatiguing journey over a newly and ill-made road.”

Mr. Jansen, who resided in America from 1793 to 1806, wrote a book entitled The Stranger in America. In it he described the coach between Philadelphia and New York with some distinctness: —

“The vehicle, the American stage-coach, which is of like construction throughout the country, is calculated to hold twelve persons, who sit on benches placed across with their faces toward the horses. The front seat holds three, one of whom is the driver. As there are no doors at the sides, the passengers get in over the front wheels. The first get seats behind the rest, the most esteemed seat because you can rest your shaken frame against the back part of the wagon. Women are generally indulged with it; and it is laughable to see them crawling to this seat. If they have to be late they have to straddle over the men seated further in front.”

It will be readily seen that the description of this coach is precisely like that given by Weld in his Travels, and like the picture of it in the latter book. An excellent representation of this stage-wagon is given in Mr. Edward Lamson Henry’s picture of the Indian Queen Tavern at Blattensburg, Maryland, a copy of which is shown facing page 33. Cruder ones may be seen in the various advertisements of eighteenth-century stage lines.

The coach-body of the year 1818 had an egg-shaped body and was suspended on thick leather straps, called thorough-braces, which gave the vehicle a comparatively easy motion. After being worn these frequently broke, and one side of the coach would settle. The patient travellers then alighted, took a rail from an adjoining fence, righted up the body of the coach, and went on slowly to the next village for repairs.

This coach had a foot-board for the driver’s feet, and a trunk-rack bolted to the axletrees. One is here shown, and an old cut on page 273. A few still exist and are in use.

Ten years later the fashion of coaches had changed, and of boats, as shown by the cut on the opposite page. This view is at the first lock on Erie Canal above Albany.

All the various forms of coaches were superseded and made obsolete by the incomparable Concord coach, first built in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1827.

The story of the Concord coach is one of profound interest, and should be given in detail. It has justly been pronounced the only perfect passenger vehicle for travelling that has ever been built. To every state and territory in the Union, to every country in the world where there are roads on which such a coach could run, have these Concord coaches been sent. In spite of steam and electric cars they still are manufactured in large numbers, and are still of constant use. There is really very little difference between the older Concord coaches, such as the one used by Buffalo Bill, shown on page 266, and one of the stanch, well-equipped modern ones used in mountain travel, such as is shown facing page 268.

The word stage-coach was originally applied to a coach which ran from station to station over a number of stages of the road, usually with fresh horses for each stage. It was not used to designate a coach which ran only a short distance. Mr. Fairman Rogers notes as an example of the curious changes of language the custom in New York of calling a short-route omnibus a stage. We all recall the tottering Broadway stages; we still have the Fifth Avenue stages with us. This debased use of the word is not an Americanism, nor is it modern. Swift speaks of riding in the six-penny stage; and Cowper has a similar usage. The word drag, originally applied to a public road-coach, now is used for a coach for private driving. The incorrect American use of the word tally-ho, as a general name for a coach and four, dates from 1876, when Colonel Delancey Kane first ran his road-coach from the Brunswick Hotel in New York to Pelham. It chanced to be named Tally-ho after English coaches of that name, and the word was adopted from the individual to a class. Barge, as applied to a long omnibus, is apparently a modern Americanism. I heard it first about ten years ago. Alighting from the cars, travel-tired and dusty, at a New England coast town one July afternoon, we asked the distance to a certain hotel; and we were told it was four miles, and we could go either by sloop or barge, and that “the barge got there first.” We gladly welcomed the possibility of closing our journey with a short, refreshing water trip, but decided that the sloop might be delayed by adverse winds, and we would trust to the barge, which we inferred was propelled by steam. On stating our preference for the barge we were waved into a long, heavy omnibus harnessed with a “spike” team of three jaded horses that soon stumbled along the dry road, choking us with the dust of their slow progress. After riding nearly half an hour we called out despondingly to the driver, “When do we reach the wharf?” “We ain’t goin’ to the wharf,” he drawled. “Where do we take the barge then, and when?” “You’re a-ridin’ in the barge now,” he answered, and thus we added another example to our philological studies.