Bridge Sign-board.
The turnpike charters and toll-rates have revealed one thing to us, that all single-horse carriages were two-wheeled, such as the sulky, chair, chaise; while four-wheeled carriages always had at least two horses.
Citizens and travellers deeply resented these tolls, and ofttimes rose up against the payment. A toll-keeper in Pelham, Massachusetts, awoke one morning to find his gate gone. A scrawled bit of paper read:—
“The man who stopped the boy when going to the mill,
Will find his gate at the bottom of the hill.”
CHAPTER XI
PACKHORSE AND CONESTOGA WAGON
Our predecessors, the North American Indians, had no horses. An early explorer of Virginia said that if the country had horses and kine and were peopled with English, no realm in Christendom could be compared with it. The crude means of overland transportation common to all savages, the carrying of burdens on the back by various strappings, was the only mode known.
Travel by land in the colonies was for many years very limited in amount, and equally hazardous and inconvenient. Travel by boat was so greatly preferred that most of the settlements continued to be made on the banks of rivers and along the sea-coast. Even perilous canoes were preferable to the miseries of land travel.