The old arched stone bridges are ever a delight to the eye and the thoughtful mind. Look at the picture of the old Topsfield Bridge shown on the opposite page. It was built in 1760 over the Ipswich River. It shows the semicircle – simplest of all arched forms – which is happily within the compass and ever the selection of rustic builders. The shallow voussoirs speak of security and economy rather than of monumental effect; the irregular shape and size of the stones tell a similar tale, that there was ample and fitting material near by, in every field. The arched stone bridge is a primitive structure; the sort of construction that may be found in the so-called “Cyclopean” walls of earliest Greece; and this very simplicity is a distinct beauty, that, added to its fitness and durability, makes the bridge a thing of satisfaction.
How charming are the reflections in the stilly waters, the arch making the perfect circle, ever an attractive and symbolic form. How cool and beautiful is the shadowy water under these stone arches; but it cannot be reached by the rider in stage-coach or on horseback, as can the brook spanned by a wooden bridge. This has often a watering place which spreads out on one side of the road, a shoal pool of clear, crystal, dancing water. The bottom is cut with the ruts of travellers’ wheels, but the water is pure and glistening; the pool is edged heavily with mint and thoroughwort and a tangle of greenery pierced with a few glorious scarlet spires of cardinal flowers, and some duller blooms. How boys love to wade in these pools, and dogs to swim in them, and horses to drink from them. The wooden bridge seems in midsummer a useless structure, fit only to serve as a trellis for clematis and sweet brier and many running vines, and to be screened with azalea, clethra, and elder, and scores of sweet-flowered shrubs that add their scent to the strong odor of mint that fills the air, as the sensitive leaves are bruised by careless contact.
There was a closeness of association in stage-coach travel which made fellow-passengers companionable. One would feel a decided intimacy with a fellow-sufferer who had risen several mornings in succession with you, at daybreak, and ridden all night, cheek by jowl. Even fellow-travellers on short trips entered into conversation, and the characteristic inquisitiveness was shown. Ralph Waldo Emerson took great delight in this experience of his in stage-coach travel. A sharp-featured, keen-eyed, elderly Yankee woman rode in a Vermont coach opposite a woman deeply veiled and garbed in mourning attire, and the older woman thus entered into conversation: “Have you lost friends?” “Yes,” was the answer, “I have.” “Was they near friends?” “Yes, they was.” “How near was they?” “A husband and a brother.” “Where did they die?” “Down in Mobile.” “What did they die of?” “Yellow fever.” “How long was they sick?” “Not very long.” “Was they seafaring men?” “Yes, they was.” “Did you save their chists?” “Yes, I did.” “Was they hopefully pious?” “I hope so.” “Well, if you have got their chists (with emphasis) and they was hopefully pious, you’ve got much to be thankful for.” Perhaps this conversation should be recorded in the succeeding chapter, but in truth the pleasures and pains of stage-coach travel ran so closely side by side that they can scarce be separated. Many pleasant intimacies and acquaintances were begun on the stage-coach; flirtations, even courtships, were carried on. One gentleman remembers that when he was a big schoolboy he rode on the coach from Pittsfield, New Hampshire, to Dover, and he cast sheep’s-eyes at a pretty young woman who was a fellow-passenger. He had just gathered courage to address her with some bold, manly remark when the coach stopped and a middle-aged man of importance entered. Soon all other passengers got out and the three were left in the coach; and the Boy heard the Man recall himself to the Girl as having been her teacher when she was a child. He soon proceeded to make love to her, and made her a proposal of marriage, which she did not refuse, but asked a week’s time to consider. “And during all this courting,” said my informant, with indignant reminiscence after fifty years, “they paid no more attention to my presence than if I had been Pickwick’s Fat Boy.”
The pleasures of coaching days have been written by many an English author in forcible and beautiful language. Thomas De Quincey sang in most glowing speech the glories of the English mail-coach. He says: —
“Modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, not, however, as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence; as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we are far from feeling it as a personal experience; or upon the evidence of a result, as that we actually find ourselves in York four hours after leaving London. Apart from such an assertion, or such a result, I myself am little aware of the pace. But seated on the old mail-coach we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity… The vital experiences of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our speed. We heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it a-thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate energies that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest among brutes, in his dilated nostril, his spasmodic muscles and thunder-beating hoofs.”
Nothing more magnificent and inspiring could be written than his Going Down with Victory– the carrying the news of the victory at Waterloo on the mail-coach to English hamlets and towns; it is a gem of English literature.
CHAPTER XVII
THE PAINS OF STAGE-COACH TRAVEL
In describing the pleasures and pains, the delights and dangers, the virtues and vicissitudes of the travel of early days by stage-coach in America, I have chosen to employ largely the words and descriptions of contemporary travellers rather than any wording of my own, not only because any such description of mine would be simply a transcription of their facts, but because there is a sense of closeness of touch, a pleasant intimacy, and indeed a profound sympathy thereby established with those old travellers and modes of travel which cannot be obtained by modern wording; nor indeed can their descriptions and travellers’ tales be improved. Careless or ignorant writers often portray early stage-coach travel in America in the same terms as would be used of similar travel in England, and as having the same accessories; it was in truth very different in nearly all of its conditions, as different as were the vehicles used in America.
I do not believe that travellers in coaching days found much pleasure in long journeys by stage-coach. They doubtless enjoyed short trips, or possibly a day on a coach, as we do now, but serious travel was serious indeed. In winter it must have appeared a slow form of lingering death.
Grant Thorburn, the New York seedsman, tells of the first journey he ever made by land. It was in the winter of 1831; he was then fifty-eight years old.
“We left Hoboken with about fifteen passengers closely packed in a stage with wheels, and a very neat coach, and so foolish was I and ignorant (never having travelled on land) I thought this same fine close carriage would go through thick and thin with me all the way to Albany: in two short hours my eyes were opened. We stopped in Hackensack at a tavern grocery grogshop and post-office all under one roof, for we carried Uncle Sam’s letter bags, which was another grievance, as we had to stop every few miles to change the mails. The keeper of the office began to bluster and swear he had neither carriages covered or uncovered to forward so many passengers. He said the Jockey Club in New York took all the money and gave him all the trouble. In short, says he, unless you remain here till four o’clock P.M. you must go on with such conveyance as I can furnish. We applied to our Hoboken driver. He said his orders were to drop us at Hackensack and bring back the coaches; and sure enough he turned about and back he went. I stepped into the barroom – a large place. In the centre stood a large old-fashioned tin-plate stove, surrounded by fifteen or twenty large lazy fellows. After waiting an hour we were sent forward, viz. two in an open chair, four in an open wagon, and the remainder, eight I think, in a common Jersey farming wagon, all the machines being without covers. It now commenced raining, and by the time we got to the next stage, we looked like moving pillars of salt, our hats and coats being covered to the thickness of an eighth of an inch with ice transparents. At the town of Goshen we changed the mail, thawed our garments, and ate our dinner. As we got north the sleighing got better, so we were accommodated with a covered box and runners, but alas! it was like the man’s lantern without a candle. The cover was of white wood boards placed a quarter of an inch apart without paint, leather, or canvas to protect them from the weather.
“We travelled all night. The rain and snow descending through the roof, our hats were frozen to our capes, and our cloaks to one another. In the morning we looked like some mountain of ice moving down the Gulf Stream. I thought the machine used at the Dry Dock would have been an excellent appendage to have lifted us bodily into the breakfast room: and this is what the horse-flesh fraternity in New York advertise as their safe, cheap, comfortable, and expeditious winter establishment for Albany.”
Dalton Winter Stage
This latter account is certainly a hard blow to the lover of the “good old times.” Of tough fibre and of vast powers of endurance, both mental and physical, must have been our grandfathers who dared to travel overland in winter time. Coaches were often “snowed up” and had to be deserted by the passengers, who were rescued in old pods and pungs, such as are shown on page 318, and the journey had to be continued in some of the awkward coach-bodies or “boobies” set on runners like those on pages 362 and 364. Coaches were also overturned or blown off bridges by heavy winds.
Somewhat varied was Captain Hall’s experience on the trip from Fredericksburg to Richmond during the following January. The stage-coach was appointed to start at 2 A.M., but at the blank looks of the captain, the stage agent said, “Well, if it is so disagreeable to the ladies, suppose we make it five?” The fare was five dollars. It took seventeen hours to travel the sixty-six miles, and the coach stopped at ten taverns on the way. At each his fellow-passengers all got out and took a mint julep; perhaps he did likewise, which might account for the fact that he pronounced the trip a pleasant one, though it rained; “your feet get wet; your clothes become plastered with mud from the wheel; the trunks drink in half a gallon of water apiece; the gentlemen’s boots and coats steamed in the confined air; the horses are draggled and chafed by the traces; the driver got his neckcloth saturated” – and yet, he adds, “the journey was performed pleasantly.”
There were days in July, in midsummer, when in spite of the beauties of Nature, the journey by stage-coach on the unwatered roads was not a thing of pleasure. Whether on “inside” or “outside,” the traveller could not escape the dust, nor could he escape the fervor of the July sun. And when the eye turned for relief to green pastures and roadsides, there was reflected back to him the heated gold of the sunlight, for the fields flamed with yellow and orange color. Sometimes accidents occurred. One may be described, using the contemporary account of it to show what danger was incurred and through what motive powers. In January, 1823, there was a sharp competition between the two stage lines running between Albany and New York, and apparently the stage-drivers on the rival lines could no more be kept from racing than the old-time steamboat captain. The accident was thus told in a newspaper of the day: —
“To the Public: The stage from New York to Albany was overset on the Highlands, on Friday last, with six passengers on board; one of whom, a gentleman from Vermont, had his collar-bone broken, and the others were more or less injured, and all placed in the utmost jeopardy of their lives and limbs by the outrageous conduct of the driver. In descending a hill half a mile in length, an opposition stage being ahead, the driver put his horses in full speed to pass the forward stage, and in this situation the stage overset with a heavy crash which nearly destroyed it, and placed the wounded passengers in a dreadful dilemma, especially as the driver could not assist them, as it required all his efforts to restrain the frighted horses from dashing down the hill which must have destroyed them all. It was, therefore, with the greatest difficulty, and by repeated efforts, the wounded passengers extricated themselves from the wreck of the stage. Such repeated wanton and wilful acts of drivers to gratify their caprice, ambition, or passions, generally under the stimulus of ardent spirits, calls aloud on the community to expose and punish these shameful aggressions.”
It should be added, in truth, that accidents on stage-coaches were seldom with fatal results. Stage-coach travel was more disagreeable than deadly. A stage-coach driver who had driven three hundred days a year for thirty-five years, could boast that there had never been a serious accident while he was driving, and scarcely any injury had been received by any passenger.
Before the days of the turnpike the miserable bridges, especially of the Southern colonies, added to the terrors of travel, though I have not learned of frequent accidents upon them. The poet Moore wrote in the year 1800 of Virginia bridges: —
“Made of a few uneasy planks
In open ranks,
Over rivers of mud.”
Near Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1812, a traveller by coach thus found the bridge: —
“Three large logs were stretched across the creek, called sleepers, and these supported a number of misshapen pieces called rafters, thrown on at random, without being fixed either by nails or pins. They had been disturbed by a freshet, and the driver alighted to adjust them. On entering the bridge, the fore wheels gathered the rafters in a heap which stopped the progress of the coach. This was just as the driver was whipping up the fore horses. They sprang forward, and disengaging themselves with a jerk, by pulling out the staple of the main singletree, they set off at full speed with the singletree rattling at their heels.”
One horse was killed, the patient passengers alighted and pulled the coach free themselves. At the next creek the horses plunged in the water and swam across, while the passengers held up the mail-bags to keep them dry. Weld tells of similar bridges and experiences in 1795 in Virginia.
Many of the bridges were rickety floating bridges. Mr. Twining experienced the sense of insecurity, the dread of sinking, which I have also felt in crossing a floating bridge in a heavy vehicle.
Mr. Twining tells also of the constant necessity of trimming and balancing of the stage-wagon by all the passengers leaning to one side to prevent it from overturning in the deep ruts which abounded. Mr. Weld wrote that the driver “frequently called out, ‘Now, gentlemen, to the right,’ upon which all the passengers stretched their bodies halfway out of the carriage to balance on that side. ‘Now, gentlemen, to the left,’ and so on.”
One traveller tells of a facetious travelling companion, —
“‘A son of Neptune and of Mars also,’ and could adapt the technical language of these professions to the different movements of the stage. When the coach heeled to one side he would call out, ‘To the right and left and cover your flanks – Whiz!’ – and when we passed a stream or ford he would sing out, ‘By the deep nine,’ accompanied with all the movements of heaving the lead. The day was clear, pleasant, and healthy; and in this strain of merriment and good humor we prosecuted our journey much to our satisfaction.”
Folk were easily amused in coaching days. One of the old stage-drivers tells the following incident of stage travel. He was driving from Dover, New Hampshire, to Haverhill, Massachusetts. During the spring months the roads were often in a bad condition, and six horses and sometimes ten were needed to draw the coach. In Epping, New Hampshire, was a particularly hard place, locally known as the “Soap mine.” Through this mine of mud the driver hoped to guide his coach and six. But the coach was heavily loaded, and in spite of the efforts of the skilful driver the team was soon fast in the mud, the wheels settling to the hubs. All attempts of the horses to start the coach were in vain. The driver finally climbed down from his seat, opened the coach door and told the passengers the condition of things, and politely asked them to get out and thereby lighten the load. This they all positively refused to do; they had paid their fares and did not think it their duty to get out into the mud. The driver said, “Very well,” quietly closed the door, and seated himself by the roadside. In a few minutes the passengers asked, “What are you doing there?” The driver calmly replied: “The horses cannot draw the load. There is only one thing I can do. I shall wait until the mud dries up.”
It is needless to say that they did not wait for the mud to dry.
The state of the roads and the regard of some persons for stage-coach travelling is shown in a letter written early in this century by a mother to a girl of eighteen, visiting at Cambridge, and impatient to return home. As the roads were bad her father delayed his going for her. Her mother says: —
“Your papa would not trust your life in the stage. It is a very unsafe and improper conveyance for young ladies. Many have been the accidents, many the cripples made by accidents in those vehicles. As soon as your papa can go, you may be sure he will go or send for you.”
There was one curious and most depressing, even appalling, condition of stage-coach travel. It seemed to matter little how long was your journey, nor where you were going, nor whence you started, your coach always started before daybreak. You had to rise in the dark, dress in the dark most feebly illumined, eat a hurriedly prepared breakfast in the dark, and start out in the blackness of night or the depressing chill of early morning. We read that the greatest number of deaths take place in the early morning, at daybreak, and it is not surprising, since it is the time, of all the hours of the day, when earth offers the least to the human soul to tempt it to remain here. It is no unusual thing to read in travellers’ accounts of journeys by stage-coach, of riding ten miles on the coach, and then – breakfasting. We cannot wonder, therefore, at the records of incessant dram-drinking during coach travel which we always find in any minute accounts.
An English eye-witness, Captain Basil Hall, thus described the beginning of a trip from Providence to Hartford in October, 1829: —
“The nominal hour of starting was five in the morning; but as everything in America comes sooner than one expects, a great tall man walked into the room at ten minutes before four o’clock to say it wanted half an hour of five: and presently we heard the rumbling of the stage coming to the door upwards of thirty minutes before the time specified. Fortunately there were only five passengers, so we had plenty of room; and as the morning was fine we might have enjoyed the journey much, had we not been compelled to start so miserably early. At the village of Windham we dined in a cheerful sunny parlour on a neatly dressed repast excellent in every way, and with very pleasant chatty company.”
So forehanded were American coach-agents and coach-drivers that such premature starts were not infrequent. Many a time an indignant passenger, on time, but left behind, was sent off after the coach in a chaise with a swift horse at full gallop.
Josiah Quincy tells thus of a trip on the Lancaster road during the winter of 1826: —
“At three o’clock this morning the light of a candle under the door and a rousing knock told me that it was time to depart, and shortly after I left Philadelphia by the Lancaster stage, otherwise a vast illimitable wagon, capable of holding some sixteen passengers with decent comfort to themselves, and actually encumbered with some dozen more. After riding till eight o’clock we reached the breakfast house, where we partook of a good meal.”
Longfellow wrote of his first acquaintance, in the year 1840, with the Wayside Inn, otherwise Howe’s Tavern, at Sudbury, Massachusetts: “The stage left Boston about three o’clock in the morning, reaching the Sudbury Tavern for breakfast, a considerable portion of the route being travelled in total darkness, and without your having the least idea who your companion might be.”
Charles Sumner, writing in 1834 of a trip to Washington, says: “We started from Boston at half-past three Monday morning with twelve passengers and their full complement of baggage on board, and with six horses. The way was very dark, so that, though I rode with the driver, it was some time before I discovered we had six horses.”
The unfortunate soul who wished or was forced to travel from Boston to New York in 1802 was permitted a very decent start at ten in the morning. He arrived in Worcester at eight at night. Thereafter at Worcester, Hartford, and Stamford he had to start at three in the morning and ride till eight at night. We can imagine his condition when arriving in New York. The Lancaster and Leominster stages left Boston at sunrise. John Melish, the English traveller, in 1795, was called to start at two in the morning, when he set out from Boston to New York. Badger and Porter’s Stage Register for 1829 gives the time of starting of the stage to Fitchburg as 2 A.M.; the Albany stage was the same hour. The stage for Keene set out at 4 A.M., and the one for Bennington at 2 A.M. The stage for Norwich, Connecticut, in 1833 started at 3 A.M. In 1842, the Albany coach left at 4 A.M. When we remember the meagre “light of other days,” the pale rays of a candle, usually a tallow one, the smoky flicker of a whale-oil lamp, the dingy shadow of an ancient lantern, we can fancy the gloom of that early morning departure; and when it was made in snow, or fog, or rain, there seemed but scant romance in travel by stage-coach. A fine picture by Mr. Edward Lamson Henry, “A Wet Start at Daybreak,” is reproduced opposite page 370. It is interesting and picturesque – to look at; but it was not interesting to experience.