Recently enjoyed a visual trip through Long Day's Journey: The Steamboat & Stagecoach Era in the Northwest by Carlos Arnaldo Schwates, published in 1999. What an eye-opener! This book was "a study of transportation in American life, focusing on the era defined by the steamboat and stagecoach." Boy oh boy did it ever!
The many pictures in the book tell the tale. Here are men in hats, vests and white shirts. Here are women in hats, long skirts with babies and baggage. All are waiting to board a river steamboat heading west. (Pause to imagine this: lots of uncomfortable clothing, no rest rooms or privacy, babies howling, bring all your own food and mud everywhere. Would YOU survive?) Not until the completion of the railroad link in the late 1800s (Great Lakes to Puget Sound) did the trip from east to west become quicker, easier and less dangerous.
Stagecoach travel was no less daunting by our modern standards. Stage routes did wind from Omaha, Kansas City or St. Joseph and could get you to Salt Lake City, Boise, Helena, Sacramento, Portland or Tacoma. An ad in Denver's Rocky Mountain News in 1864 proclaimed that taking the overland stage route "would take passengers in quick time and with every convenience offered from Atchison, Kansas, to Salt Lake City in "only" five days. Pause to imagine those five days: Packed elbow to elbow on wooden seats, jostling along in a carriage with bad springs, open windows letting in dust and insects (or rain and snow), dressed in way too many clothes and with other unwashed people, smelly babies and men smoking. Potty stops were spare, with no privacy, and no food or water unless you brought your own. There were frequent stops to help get the coach out of the muddy road ruts. And of course there were Indians and bandits. I won't speak for you, but I doubt that I would have survived with my sanity intact and my bowels impacted.
Part Two next time.... "Advice to Passengers."
