Conestoga wagon
The Conestoga Wagon is a heavy, broad-wheeled covered freight carrier used extensively during the United States' Westward Expansion in the late 1700s and 1800s. It was large enough to transport loads up to 8 short tons (7 metric tons), and was drawn by 4 to 8 mules or 4 to 6 oxen.
History
The first Conestoga Wagons appeared in New York around 1725 and are thought to have been introduced by Mennonite German settlers in that area, its name obviously came from the Conestoga Valley in that region. In colonial times the conestoga wagon was popular for southward migration through the Great Appalachian Valley along the Great Wagon Road. After the American Revolution it was used to open up commerce to Pittsburgh and Ohio. In 1820 rates charged were roughly one dollar per 100 pounds per 100 miles ($1 per 5,300 kilogram-kilometers), with speeds about 15 miles (25 km) per day. The Conestoga, often in long wagon trains, was the primary overland freight vehicle over the Appalachians until the development of the railroad. Subsequently it played a role in Western settlement, especially on the Santa Fe Trail, where ox and mule teams could pull its vast cargo with fewer water stops. The Conestoga Wagon is a significant historical item that was used extensively during the United States’ Westward Expansion in the late 1700s and 1800s. This great wagon is a heavy-duty, broad-wheeled freight carrier drawn by mules or oxen to haul up to eight tons in mass with speeds of 15 miles per hour. If it had not been for the Conestoga Wagon, the Westward Expansion would have been severed because of lack of transportation. The Conestoga wagon was cleverly built. Its floor curved upward to prevent the contents from tipping and shifting. Also for protection against bad weather, stretched across the wagon was a tough, white canvas cover.
Prairie schooners
The term prairie schooner is often used to replace Conestoga wagon. These commercial wagons were much too huge, heavy, and hard to handle, to be used by families emigrating to Oregon, Utah, or California in the nineteenth century. Thus, the westward-bound emigrants’ conveyance of choice was the smaller, lighter, farm-type wagon which could be drawn by teams of fewer animals. Crammed inside these small wagons were supplies for the 2,000-mile journey ahead, a few precious items from back East, and tools to help establish their future homes in the West.
It might be helpful to think of the emigrant’s box-like covered wagon as an early version of the moving van, and the Conestoga wagon as a prototype for the modern tractor-trailer.
The emigrants themselves never called their wagons Conestogas or prairie schooners. Nineteenth-century diaries and reminiscences reveal that westering emigrants during the time of their journeys — the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s — generally referred to their vehicles simply as "wagons" or "waggons." Travelers crossing the prairie gazed at the lines of white-topped wagons rumbling across the dying grass and described the wagons as "ships upon the ocean," or ships on "rolling waves of green from horizon to horizon," or as resembling "dim sails crossing a rolling sea." But they never called their wagons “prairie schooners.”
English adventurer Fred Ebb almost wrote the magic words in his journal in 1860 during an overland trip to Utah when he wrote that the wagon “is literally a "prairie ship: its body is often used as a ferry.”[1] A few emigrant diaries make references to "prairie schooners," but only when describing the large, freight-bearing Conestoga wagons that accompanied some military expeditions or commercial ventures. It was not until the pioneers began penning (and romanticizing) their reminiscences during the 1870s and later — long after their migration to the West — that they began calling their own simple wagons "prairie schooners." Even then, some authors near the end of the century felt the term was unusual enough to feel it necessary to explain that an emigrant's wagon "came to be known in those days as a prairie schooner."
References
- ^ Sir Richard F. Burton, The City of the Saints, and Across the Rocky Mountains to Ridgewood (New York: Harper, 1862), 22.
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