Wagon road

“ With a completed wagon road built from the railway, it should be an easy half day's journey of 80 miles by automobile from the railroad to the center of the park, the whole route traversing mountains of wonderful scenic beauty and teeming with big game. ”

“ The mention of a name or two, perhaps; the rattle of a wagon along a dusty road; the rank, resinous smell of sunflowers and ironweed, which the night damp brought up from the draws and low places; perhaps, more than all, the dancing lights of the motor that had plunged by. He squared his shoulders with a comfortable sense of strength.
The wagon, as it jolted westward, climbed a pretty steady upgrade. The country, receding from the rough river valley, swelled more and more gently, as if it had been smoothed out by the wind. ”

“ It opened indeed a limitless vista for new adventure.
Presently, away ahead of me in the road, I saw a man standing near a one-horse wagon. He seemed to be engaged in some activity near the roadside, but I could not tell exactly what. As I hastened nearer I discovered that he was a short, strongly built, sun-bronzed man in working-clothes—and with the shortest of short hair. I saw him take a shovel from the wagon and begin digging. ”

“ Very soon after this we left the abominable but so-called wagon road, and took a short cut over the mountains. It would be but vain repetition to describe our "ups and downs" for the next few hours. The agony was just as exquisite, the scenery was just as grand and variable, but as far as I know it the English language contains no words of sufficient intensity to express more than I have already iterated and reiterated. ”

“ Of course some of the less-used country roads would be well-nigh impassable.
It was while crossing one of these roads, on a hard macadam highway, that the girls and boys saw, stuck in the mud of the poorer path, a peddler's wagon. The bony horse was doing its best to move the vehicle, which had sunk down in a hole, one wheel being imbedded in the mud to the hub.
"Why, it's that hair-tonic man!" exclaimed Mollie, as she slowed down to avoid a rut in the road.
"No, his wagon is all painted with gaudy signs," said Betty. "That's a boy driving that wagon. Why—why!" ”

“ I met nobody, and passed nothing on the road but a freight wagon, drawn by twenty-two oxen, guided by three fine-looking men, who had some difficulty in making room for me to pass their awkward convoy. After I had ridden about ten miles the road went up a steep hill in the forest, turned abruptly, and through the blue gloom of the great pines which rose from the ravine in which the river was then hid, came glimpses of two mountains, about 11,000 feet in height, whose bald grey summits were crowned with pure snow. ”

“ Here and there wagons pushed on beyond the established limit, and, finding the way not more desperate than much of the preceding "road," had gone on and on, until at last wagons came down the western slopes of the Alleghenies, and wagon traffic began to be considered possible—much to the chagrin of the cursing pack-horse men. No sooner was this fact accomplished than some attention was paid to the road. The wagons could not go everywhere the ponies or even the heavy carts had gone. They could not climb the steep knolls and remain on the rocky ridges. ”

“ This is higher than anything it has cost us on the road in proportion, but we cannot help it. It is better than to waste so much time in a tavern. It rains steadily, and the road is all mush and water. Before I get on a hundred rods I am half-leg deep in mire. Set off about eight o’clock, and overtook the wagon about two miles ahead. ”

“ Frequently ordinary wagon tracks along a bit of valley slope serve as an initial channel to the rapidly accumulating waters and are eaten away in a few weeks so that the road becomes wholly impassable, and must be abandoned for a new one alongside. ”

“ In this connection I find myself thinking about the various modes of travel resorted to in those primitive days, when roads and bridges as we have them today were still far in the future. The wagons were generally drawn by cattle teams, from two to five yokes to the wagon. The number of wagons would be all the way from one to one hundred. The larger trains were difficult to pass, as they took up the road for so long a distance that sometimes we would move on in the night in order to get past them. ”

“ The rapid extension of the railway across the American Continent, and the construction of lateral lines, have greatly diminished the volume of travel with wagons, and other primitive modes, but have by no means made an end of them. There is yet a large area without settlements, and unprovided with the iron road, and for many years to come the wagon of the emigrant and explorer will wend its way through the wilderness. ”

“ So they jolt homeward over the rough, frozen road or toil through sticky mud, as the case may be, well pleased with their purchases and their glimpse of town, and content to take up again the round of monotonous life on their isolated prairie farm.
Sometimes on spring-like days, when the roads are good, two women or a woman and one or two half-grown children drive by in a spring-wagon, bringing chickens, eggs, and butter to market. Heavy wagons loaded with large clear blocks of ice go by every day, the men walking and driving or seated on a board seat at the extreme rear of the wagon. ”

“ The dirt is [Pg 97] always to be found in the roadway, and the water, which comes in rain, snow, and frost, softens it; horses and wagons and narrow wheel tires knead it and mix it, and it soon gets into so bad a condition that a fairly loaded wagon cannot be hauled through it. ”

“ In the road they is a big stout road wagon, with a canopy top over it, pulled by two hosses, and on the wagon box they is a strip of canvas. Which I couldn't read then what was wrote on the canvas, but I learnt later it said, in big print:
SIWASH INDIAN SAGRAW. NATURE'S UNIVERSAL MEDICINAL SPECIFIC. DISCOVERED BY DR. HARTLEY L. KIRBY AMONG THE ABORIGINES OF OREGON.
On account of being so busy, neither Hank nor me had hearn the wagon come along the road and stop. The big man in the plug hat, he says, or they was words to that effect, jest as serious:
"Why are you mauling the aged gent?" ”

“ If a wagon comes along so heavily laden that I cannot pass it, the driver should stop at a convenient place to let me go by. [227] A man on foot, or on horseback, or in a light trap, cannot insist upon a teamster with a heavy load giving up part of the beaten track, if there be sufficient room to pass without his doing so. ”

“ After crossing the Juniata, we pursued our road through a broken country, very hilly, with the river almost always in sight, sometimes on one hand and sometimes on the other, as its bends approached or receded from the road, and sometimes directly under us at the foot of terrifick precipices, down one of which, about twenty years ago, a wagon was carried by the horses, falling 3 or 400 feet perpendicular—The wagonner and horses were killed, and the wagon was dashed to pieces. ”

“ As a result we now have in that province alone several hundred miles of good wagon roads each ten feet wide. We have also made it the law that all roads shall be treated in one respect like a market place. ”

“ Our wagon roads throughout the country are generally a disgrace to civilization and before we undertake to supply Jaeger underwear and sealskin covered bibles with flexible backs to the African it might be well to put a few dollars into the relief of galled and broken down horses that have lost their breath on our miserable highways. ”

“ 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.... ”

“ The wagon with its horses and its driver turned about and tumbled along the roadway on its return, and there were left alone in the forest, miles from civilization, miles from any human being save the driver fast leaving them, the man and woman and the setter dog. ”

“ The great wagons struggling upward, tumbling downward from mountain precipice into mountain gorge, hold under their shaking covers every type of westward moving human life. Here is the mother sitting in the wagon-front, her blue eyes gazing outward, wistfully and far, the baby lying on her lap; one wants to touch the baby’s head, it looks so alive and tender and shelterless in all that dust and turmoil of travel. ”

“ Crossing to the south side, they went sheerly up the steep hill—so steep that it was all but impossible for the straining animals to drag up the heavy wagons, and so narrow that a false step might have dashed wagon and team half a thousand feet on to the rocks below. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the towers archers lolled, and along the walls were pikemen, and now and then a wagon went down some old-world street and lumbered through the gateway and out to the country, and now and then a wagon drew up to the city from the mist that was rolling with evening over the fields. Sometimes folk put their heads out of lattice windows, sometimes some idle troubadour seemed to sing, and nobody hurried or troubled about anything. ”

“ And as the picturesque trail is converted into the eminently modern and respectable macadamized road, the equally picturesque pack-train disappears and in its place we see, and smell, that emblem of the twentieth century, the automobile. ”

“ Every time the big wagon jolted over a stone—and it was jolt over stones all the time—it seemed as if it must topple over the side and roll to the bottom; and then the way the driver talked to the mules to keep them straight, and the creaking and scraping of the wagons, was enough to frighten the most courageous. ”

“ Again and again the wagon train becomes a striking pictorial motif, and, whether it is seen creeping across the prairie, following the bank of a river, climbing toward a pass in the mountains, stretching out, a thin black chain of silhouettes on the horizon, curving itself along the palisade-like walls of an arroyo, or halted in snow against a background of Oregon pines, it always adds emphasis10 to the intense drama of the pioneers battling against the hardships of the trail in ’48 and ’49. ”

“ And if ever a driver needed to keep his head clear it was during this same descent; the road, a mere shelf in the rock, crawls along the precipitous mountainside while a vast abyss yawns below with a mad, boulder-vexed stream at the bottom. It was made far more trying to the nerves by the absence of trees or shrubbery to screen the precipice—a bare foot or two lay between our wheels and a sheer drop of say half a mile. ”

“ It is what is known as a "dirt" road, well kept and level, of the sort beloved of horses and horsemen, and it lies close to the stream, between it and the farm lands. At every turn a new and wonderful panorama of green and yellow landscape and azure expanse of water bursts upon the lucky traveler along this blessed highway. Still, being a "dirt" road, when one drives along it at speed there arises in midsummer a slight pillar of dust as the conveyance passes, and one may from a distance note the approach of a possible visitor. ”

“ Six or eight yokes of oxen drawing two large wagons coupled together is a long thing in itself, stretching out perhaps 150 feet. It may run beautifully on a straight road, but in rounding [376] a short bend in a narrow roadway, where the inside of the bend is on the edge of a precipice, the tendency is to bring the wagons dangerously near the brink.
On the third of October, our train was winding along the narrow roadway among the cliffs of Silver Creek Canyon. ”

“ We found an old horse running about, which seemed to be ownerless, and an abandoned wagon, and proposed to take our journey with the aid of these, in faint remembrance of days of peace, when the wagon trundled over smooth roads, grass-lined, and wound in dusty quiet by the habitations of civilization. ”

“ The roads are completely ploughed up at this season of the year, and almost impassable. The waggoners are even a more independent set of men than with us in England; they keep their waggons in the very middle of the road, and will not move for the highest nobleman in the land; this, however, is contrary to the police regulations. The land carriage here is almost entirety managed by mules. ”

“ There were few to share the highway with me: a farmer with an empty wagon, urging his team on and giving me a churlish glance instead of an invitation to ride; a horseman on an elegant chestnut picking his course carefully among the chuckholes, and a few tramps, each bent on his solitary way, at once defensive and aggressive. The condition of the bridges accounted for the absence of minibiles. ”