Post road

“ It costs no more for two persons than for one, as the hire of horses and carriages is just the same, exactly as when you hire a cab in London or New York.
SCENE IN A POSTING STATION.
"From one end of Siberia to the other there is a post-road, with stations from ten to twenty miles apart, and there are similar roads leading from the great route to the towns north and south. A traveller must have a paderojnia, or road-pass, which he obtains from the Chief of Police at his starting-point. ”

“ Roads are splendidly sign posted, and in the dragged roads districts, the rain no sooner stops than the big four- and six-horse drags are out. Follow a rainstorm in a few hours, and you will find every road ahead of you as smooth as a new-swept floor. Hence for the patient motorist, who can spare the time, there is always an eventual moment when there are good roads. ”

“ I don’t like the sound of the word “shelf”—why not by calling them mountain-view roads let us keep our tranquillity at least until we get to them? And beyond the precipices is the desert, where there is no place to stop over and Heaven alone knows what fate awaiting us should anything happen to the car.
First Cowboys and Cattle
My companion at luncheon volunteered further that he had unluckily never been farther south than Pueblo himself, but he knew a drug clerk who was the highest authority on road information. ”

“ What does the railway traveller of the present day, who sees a travelling Post Office and its huge tender, crammed with postal matter, think of the idea of carrying all that mass on one, or perhaps two, coaches? The guard, occupying his solitary post behind the coach on the top of the receptacle called, with reference to the constructions of still earlier days, the hinder-boot, sat on a little seat made for one, with his pistol and blunderbuss in a box in front of him. ”

“ He may change his mind at every finger-post, and, where ways meet, follow vague preferences freely and go the low road or the high, choose the shadow or the sun-shine, suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that turns immediately into the woods, or the broad road that lies open before him into the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some city, or a range of mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, along a low horizon. ”

“ Except while still in the Reservation where we passed occasional Navajos we saw no living person or thing the rest of the day. Sometimes we went over rolling, stubbled prairie, fringed again with cedars and pines; next through a veritable desert of desolation with nothing but rocks and sand. Sometimes the road wound tranquilly through timbered glades; again came a straight, monotonous stretch of sandy trail. ”

“ This road up from the great, raw gulch of La Paz was full of life; pack-train after pack-train passed, loaded with the daily supplies for that city. All of the trails of the high plateau above converge to feed it and it broadens out into a 114 real road, no longer a trail, under the needs of the heavier traffic. A group of sandaled soldiers was apparently detailed to act as road-masters; and they would stop the Aymarás and enforce a bit of labor in aid of the gang of prisoners under their guard. ”

“ The [178] easy one is as close to mountain climbing as the ordinary person would want to undertake, though Indian mules and burros make it without difficulty. A burro, and a mule, and a mountain goat must spring from the same species. You clamber, therefore, up the easy road—a stiff, winding defile like the rock-hewn causeway to Valhalla in a Metropolitan production of a Wagner opera, the trail narrowing as it ascends until finally it is nothing but a narrow shelf at a precipice edge. ”

“ For miles and miles after leaving Isleta, a quite large settlement where there are many Indians and also many tourists, you go on and on and on over an easy gradually ascending road not unlike the long Platte Valley drive, but much more uninhabited. The once dangerous fording of the Puerco River is no longer a barrier to motorists, as there is a splendid new bridge that takes you smoothly over. From time to time you come to a few adobe huts or a lonely little packing-box railroad station, but your road stretches uneventfully on, until Laguna. ”

“ The same horse-pond by the roadside, the same trees, only older and more decrepit, the same prehistoric dykes and tumuli on the unchanging downs; it must have been capable of absorbing the fun and jollity of a fair, and still presenting its characteristically dour and dreary aspect; but now that, sitting in the bay window of the parlour that commands the road in either direction, you may watch the highway by the half-hour and see no traveller, the emptiness is appalling.
To this solitary outpost of civilisation came William Hazlitt, critic and essayist, during several years, for quietude. ”

“ Roads are never as bad as report makes them, and this besides being far less narrow than many mountain passes we had been through, was beautifully graded on the turns, and in excellent condition. We passed several steep ravines at curves,—one where a car had overturned the week previous,—but none was as bad as we had been led to expect. Thanks to the sane regulation making it a one way road we had nothing to fear from traffic. Valleys, blue and red with a magnificent sweep of flowers, dropped down, down, and new mountains rose from unexpected coverts. ”

“ Harper sadly says, ‘the Brighton of to-day is no place for the travel-worn;’ but, with his book in hand, the pedestrian, the horseman, the coachman, or the cyclist, may find the road that leads to it from town one of the most interesting and entertaining stretches of highway to be found anywhere.”—Daily Chronicle. ”

“ People traverse it, not with the object of arriving at any particular destination, but for the delight of the road itself, of the joy it gives to the eye and to the imagination. Its only traffic is what the transport agent would call “holiday traffic”; for when the idle season ends the highway is deserted. In earlier days there would rumble along the road the carriage and four of the traveller of great means; then came the humbler vehicle hired from the town; then the sleek motor; and finally, as a sign of democratic progress, the char-à-banc, the omnibus, and the motor-brake. ”

“ Some ten minutes’ driving, up a hill or two, while lamps grow less and less frequent, and we are out of the town, rolling along a road which is as good as an ordinary English turnpike-road—passing every now and then through spots of perfect darkness, where clumps of firs overhang the road on each side, and new again looking over a broad spread of water stretching away from our feet, with a row of distant wooded slopes appearing more and more clearly as the moon slowly rises. ”

“ Travellers’ tales in England during six or seven centuries are concerned with two great evils; highway robbery and the shocking state of the roads; and so deep and dangerous were some of the quagmires that, rather than attempt to cross them, coachmen would drive through wayside fields, and thus make a road for themselves. It was in this way that ancient highways became diverted, and the pedestrian who finds the route between two towns to be extraordinarily circuitous must often look to these circumstances for an explanation. ”

“ It is true that the road is one much used by traffic, and by motorists in especial, whose dust and horrid odours might well disgust any but the hardiest of wraiths; but here is the old garden-pavilion or gazebo on the wall at the fork of roads, with its quaint roof and the windows from which the people of the manor would look out upon the traffic when it was not so dusty and did not stink so much, and here are still the trunks of the magnificent elms that until recently cast a grateful shade upon the road and made the bridge-end so beautiful a scene. ”

“ Although the freight and express traffic of those days lacked the picturesqueness of the passenger coaches, nothing illustrates so conclusively what the great road meant to an awakening West as the long lines of heavy Conestogas and rattling express wagons which raced at "unprecedented" speed across hill and vale. Searight, the local historian of the road, describes these large, broad-wheeled wagons covered with white canvas as
visible all the day long, at every point, making the highway look more like a leading avenue of a great city than a road through rural districts.... ”

“ Even the ghastly loneliness of the long straight road ascending the pass of Smitham Bottom is no more, for little villas, with dank little dungeons of gardens, line the way, and tradesmen’s carts calling for orders compete with the motorists who shall kill and maim most travellers along the highway. ”

“ Those who think that sweepin’ a crossing is idle work, make a great mistake. In wet weather, the traffic that makes it gets sloppy as soon as it’s cleaned. Cabs, and ’busses, and carriages continually going over the crossing must scatter the mud on it, and you must look precious sharp to keep it clean; but when I once get in the road, I never jump out of it. I keeps my eye both ways, and if I gets in too close quarters, I slips round the wheels. I’ve had them almost touch me.
“No, sir, I never got knocked down. ”

“ We found the roads in most places worthy of the name “highways”; but on the steepest grades, where the outside of the road shelves off into space, with a drop of hundreds of feet, there are no walls or fences, not even railings, to prevent accidents. In the main, the roads are sufficiently wide to allow two cars to pass; in some places, however, the smaller car must back down to a siding to allow the Government cars, which have the right of way on the inside of the road, to pass. ”

“ The unfortunate motorist is perhaps ploughing his way steadily along through the gravel, dust, and sand. He encounters a barrier across the road bearing a notice that repairs are going on and that he must follow the detour indicated. The road selected, I believe, is generally the one with the most pot-holes, ruts, mountains, canyons, etc., in its formation in the surrounding district. ”

“ To simplify the matter somewhat, the different classes of traffic to which roads are subjected may be divided into five groups, which may be called city, urban, suburban, highway, and country road traffic, respectively. City traffic is a traffic so great that no macadam road can withstand it, and is such as exists on the business streets of large cities. ”

“ The modern traveller in the United States is sometimes surprised at dusk by finding the highway temporarily blocked by a house which is being moved from one side to the other and has been dumped down at the end of the day’s work, but this is nothing to finding that the road itself has been removed bodily. ”

“ You will not be interrupted if you detach, for your collection of curios, a yard or so of the dislodged statue of the leading municipal genius, and even the old man at the barrier of the eastern gate will only attempt to deter you by friendly advice if you persist in ignoring the notice, "This Road is Unfit for Vehicular Traffic." ”

“ For mile after mile I now alternately ride and trundle along donkey-paths, by the side of an artificial highway that would be an enterprise worthy of a European State. The surface of the road is either gravelled or of broken rock, and well rounded for self-drain- age; it is graded over the mountains, and wooden bridges, with substantial rock supports, are built across the streams; nothing is lacking except the vehicles to utilize it. ”

“ The highway now becomes extremely steep and narrow, with countless hairpin turns, though all danger of collision is eliminated by the regulations which permit no down-traffic in the morning and no up-traffic in the afternoon. During the final fifteen miles, in which is made an ascent of more than six thousand feet, one has the curious experience of passing, in a single hour, from the torrid to the temperate zone. ”

“ None dared travel when the sun had set and darkness brooded over the land, for there were not only the highwaymen to be feared—and they still continued to increase—but the badness of the roads had constituted a danger even more dreaded. Now, however, roads—thanks to Post Office insistence—were greatly improved ”

“ The highways of the present day, radiating from London and the other large centres of industry, and extending their arms to every corner of the land, are wellnigh perfect in their kind, and present a picture of careful and efficient maintenance. Whether we look, for example, at the great north road leading from London, the Carlisle to Glasgow road, or the Highland road passing through Dunkeld, we find the roads have certain features in common: a broad hard roadway for vehicles ”

“ There has scarcely been a portion of the roadway which has not been widened. In most places it has only been to the extent of a yard or a little more, but the heaviest works in connection with the road it has been found necessary to execute have been at its sharp turns or zig-zags, and in passing along the villages which are studded along the entire length of the pass ”

“ This road, which was made last year by subscription, in order to give employment to the poor in a period of great distress, is a good wide macadamized highway, with a footpath on each side; but the people of the country make little use of it, as they have no wheeled carriages. ”

“ Next to the hearty handshake and ready lift at the handspike, where neighbors swapped work at log-rollings, was the greeting when, at fixed periods, all able-bodied men met to open up or work upon the roads. My child-feet pattered along many of the well-constructed thoroughfares of today when they were only indistinct tracings—long lines of deadened trees, deep-worn horse paths, and serpentine tracks of wabbling wagon wheels. ”