The coach-body of the year 1818 had an egg-shaped body and was suspended on thick leather straps, called thorough-braces, which gave the vehicle a comparatively easy motion. After being worn these frequently broke, and one side of the coach would settle. The patient travellers then alighted, took a rail from an adjoining fence, righted up the body of the coach, and went on slowly to the next village for repairs.
This coach had a foot-board for the driver’s feet, and a trunk-rack bolted to the axletrees. One is here shown, and an old cut on [page 273]. A few still exist and are in use.
Stage-coach of 1818.
Ten years later the fashion of coaches had changed, and of boats, as shown by the cut on the opposite page. This view is at the first lock on Erie Canal above Albany.
All the various forms of coaches were superseded and made obsolete by the incomparable Concord coach, first built in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1827.
The story of the Concord coach is one of profound interest, and should be given in detail. It has justly been pronounced the only perfect passenger vehicle for travelling that has ever been built. To every state and territory in the Union, to every country in the world where there are roads on which such a coach could run, have these Concord coaches been sent. In spite of steam and electric cars they still are manufactured in large numbers, and are still of constant use. There is really very little difference between the older Concord coaches, such as the one used by Buffalo Bill, shown on [page 266], and one of the stanch, well-equipped modern ones used in mountain travel, such as is shown facing [page 268].
Stage-coach of 1828.
The word stage-coach was originally applied to a coach which ran from station to station over a number of stages of the road, usually with fresh horses for each stage. It was not used to designate a coach which ran only a short distance. Mr. Fairman Rogers notes as an example of the curious changes of language the custom in New York of calling a short-route omnibus a stage. We all recall the tottering Broadway stages; we still have the Fifth Avenue stages with us. This debased use of the word is not an Americanism, nor is it modern. Swift speaks of riding in the six-penny stage; and Cowper has a similar usage. The word drag, originally applied to a public road-coach, now is used for a coach for private driving. The incorrect American use of the word tally-ho, as a general name for a coach and four, dates from 1876, when Colonel Delancey Kane first ran his road-coach from the Brunswick Hotel in New York to Pelham. It chanced to be named Tally-ho after English coaches of that name, and the word was adopted from the individual to a class. Barge, as applied to a long omnibus, is apparently a modern Americanism. I heard it first about ten years ago. Alighting from the cars, travel-tired and dusty, at a New England coast town one July afternoon, we asked the distance to a certain hotel; and we were told it was four miles, and we could go either by sloop or barge, and that “the barge got there first.” We gladly welcomed the possibility of closing our journey with a short, refreshing water trip, but decided that the sloop might be delayed by adverse winds, and we would trust to the barge, which we inferred was propelled by steam. On stating our preference for the barge we were waved into a long, heavy omnibus harnessed with a “spike” team of three jaded horses that soon stumbled along the dry road, choking us with the dust of their slow progress. After riding nearly half an hour we called out despondingly to the driver, “When do we reach the wharf?” “We ain’t goin’ to the wharf,” he drawled. “Where do we take the barge then, and when?” “You’re a-ridin’ in the barge now,” he answered, and thus we added another example to our philological studies.