The Stage Waggon.
While the old waggoner is stopping to drink, poor Jack the soldier is bidding his wife good bye.—She has come a long way with her children to see him once more: and now is going home again in the waggon. She does not know whether she shall ever see him again.—Jack was obliged to leave his country life, and his good master, and his plough and his comfortable cottage, and his poor wife and little ones to go and be a soldier, and learn to fight, because other people would quarrel.
In England a huge, clumsy wagon was used for common carrier and passenger transportation, until our own day. It was inferior to the Conestoga wagon in detail and equipments. Illustrations from an old print in a child’s story-book are given of these wagons on [page 251]. Their most marked characteristic was the width of wheel tire. From the middle colonies the Conestoga wagon found its way to every colony and every settlement; nor did its life end in the Eastern states or with the establishment of railroads. Renamed the “prairie schooner,” it carried civilization and emigration across the continent to the Golden Gate. Till our own day the white tilts could be seen slowly travelling westward. The bleaching bones of these wagons may be still seen in our far West, and are as distinct relics of that old pioneer Western life as are the bones of the buffalo. A few wagons still remain in Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County; the one painted by Hovenden in “Westward Ho” is in the collection of the Bucks County Historical Society. One toiled slowly and painfully, in the year 1899, up the green hillsides of Vermont, bearing two or three old people and a few shattered household gods—the relics, human and material, of a family that had “gone West” many years ago.
CHAPTER XII
EARLY STAGE-COACHES AND OTHER VEHICLES
The story of the stage-coach begins at a much later date than that of the tavern; but the two allies reached the height of their glory together. No more prosperous calling ever existed than that of landlord of an old-time stage-tavern; no greater symbol of good cheer could be afforded. Though a popular historical novel by one of our popular writers shows us the heroine in a year of the seventeenth century conveyed away from her New England home in a well-equipped stage-coach, there were no stage-coaches at that date in New England, nor were they overfrequent in Old England.