Certainly much consideration was shown the old employees of the stage roads.
It was said by an old coachman of the Eastern Stage Company that all its men were given positions on the railroads if so desired; “All who wished had something to do,” and facilities were given them also to benefit by the new railroads. For instance, after the steam cars were running between Salem and Boston the stage-drivers from Portsmouth and other towns were given free passes on the railroad. They could thus go to Boston and transact their old “errand-business,” from which they had so much profit. The fast-growing express companies of Harnden and Adams also employed many of the old workers on the stage-coach lines. Some resisted the new mode of travel. Major Shaw of Salem threatened to ruin the railroad with a new opposition stage line, but Americans in general have been ever quicker to accept changes and innovations than the English. They were more “uptaking,” as the Scotch say,—that is, quicker to perceive, accept, and adopt; we breathe in that trait with the air of the new world; so American coach employees accepted the railroad and profited by it.
CHAPTER XVI
THE ROMANCE OF THE ROAD
The traveller in the old stage-coach was not tantalized by the fleeting half-glimpse of places which we gain in railroad travel to-day. He had ample time to view any unusual or beautiful spot as he passed, he had leisure to make inquiry did he so desire, he had also many minutes, nay hours, to hear any traveller’s tale that could be told him by a fellow-journeyer or by the driver. This last-named companion, going over the stage road day after day, talking constantly, querying frequently, grew deeply versed in its lore, its history. He knew the gossip, too, of each house he passed, he knew the traditions and tales of each locality; hence in his company every mile of the road had some point of deep interest.
Roger Mowry’s Tavern was the first one established in the town of Providence. It escaped destruction in King Philip’s War, when nearly all the town was burned, and stood till the present day. When a coach started out from that old tavern, it passed the burying ground and a dense growth of barberry bushes which grew along the roadside. There seems to have been, in many places, a suspicion of uncanny reputation connected with barberry bushes. In one spot a dense group of bushes was said to harbor a vast snake; in another it shaded an Indian’s grave; a third concealed a ghost. The barberry was not a native of America; it is an immigrant, and has the further ill name of blasting any wheat near which it is planted. The grewsome growth of barberry bushes near Mowry’s Tavern was the scene of the first serious crime of the settlement of Providence Plantations. The town carpenter, a thrifty and much respected young man named Clauson, much beloved by Roger Williams, was found dying one winter morning in 1660 near “a clump of barberry bushes” at the parting of the paths “near Roger Mowry’s Tavern.” His head was cloven open with an axe, and the dying man accused a neighbor named Herndon of being the instigator of the crime; and with a spirit never learned from his old master, the gentle Williams, he left a terrible curse upon the children and children’s children of John Herndon, that they should ever “be marked with split chins and be haunted by barberry bushes.” An Indian named Wanmanitt was arrested for having done this terrible deed, and was locked up in the Mowry Tavern. He was probably executed for it, though the town records only contain a preliminary story of his trial. With bills for interpreters and for a boat and guard and powder and shot and liquor, all to go with the prisoner to Newport jail, the Indian murderer vanishes down the bay out of history. John Herndon lived on peacefully for many years, branded, doubtless, in the minds of many; but there is no record that the futile imprecation of the dying man ever was fulfilled.
As the stage-coach runs along through old Narragansett, it comes to another scene of crime, of horrible crime and horrible punishment—that of hanging in chains. This demoralizing sight was almost unknown in America. You can scarcely read a tale, a history of old English life, without hearing of men “hanging in chains.” That most popular of children’s books, The Fairchild Family, has a typical English scene, wherein the solemn English father, in order to make his children love each other the more, takes them through a lonely wood to see the body of a man hanging in chains on a gibbet, a horrible and revolting sight. Travellers on the Portsmouth Road in England, after the year 1786, passed at Hind Head a gibbet with three men swinging in chains, three barbarous murderers of an unknown sailor—not a pleasant outlook for tired riders on the coach. By the old South Ferry in Narragansett, a man was murdered by a fellow-traveller. At the inn where they had rested the last night one of them spent on this earth, a woman had dressed his hair, and she noted a curious white lock which grew like our artist Whistler’s in a thick head of black hair. On this single identification was built a chain of evidence which ended in that unusual and terrible sight in the new world, the body of a criminal hanging in chains. It swung there till the poor bones dropped to the earth, and finally the great chains rusted apart. Then schoolboys took the heavy links which had bound a sight they had not seen, and with equal bravado and apprehension cracked open their winter store of hickory nuts and butternuts with the last emblem of an obsolete law.
Not far from this scene is a crossroads which could be viewed from the stage-coach, but I trust no traveller saw there the execution of a law as obsolete and as barbaric as hanging in chains.