The Slower Road

One of our members sent this link to an online collection of old photos of the Western U.S.

The first six or so, especially, plus a few near the end of the collection, are wonderful images of late-nineteenth-century vehicles, horses, and oxen.

If you’ve read some of the recent posts in the “history” and “early roads” categories, you may remember a description of Stagecoach travel in the eighteenth-century America. 

And then, late last week, I posted two stories of Stagecoach travel in New York in 1898 (the first part is here, and the second part here).

You’ve probably already guessed that these two types and styles of “coaching” — about a hundred years apart — were not the same.

From the earliest days of long-distance horse-drawn travel (around the middle of the seventeenth century in Europe, and about a century later than that here in the U.S.), Stagecoaches were a primary means of transporting mail, parcels, and travelers.

With the advent of railroads in the early nineteenth century, however, Stagecoaches started to become obsolete as a basic method of (long-distance) transportation in some parts of Great Britain and the United States.

By the late nineteenth century — in England, especially, and on the east coast of the United States — the art of driving a four-in-hand team to a coach had been handed down from the earlier generation of professional coachmen to a new set of wealthy sportsmen. So the two posts about coaching in 1898 were from this later era — known as the “coaching revival.” During these years, horsemen began driving Stagecoaches as sport. Their routes were not entirely practical; instead, they had “social” destinations such as parks, casinos, country clubs, and the like. Sometimes, the fares they collected were given to charities.

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In a book titled The railway journey: The industrialization of time and space in the 19^th century (Munich: 1977), Wolfgang Schivelbusch wrote:

As the new technology terminated the original relationship between the pre-industrial traveler and his vehicle and its journey, the old technology was seen, nostalgically, as having more “soul.”

W.B. Adams’ Pleasure Carriages, published in 1837, was the precursor of a literature of leisure and sports whose ever-increasing growth the century was to witness.* In this book, the use of horse-power was no longer treated nostalgically, but from a point of view that regarded the use of steam as merely unsportsmanlike: “Steam is a mere labourer –- a drudge who performs his work without speech or sign, with dogged perseverance but without emotion. … He may be personified when speaking of him; but no one pats his neck or speaks to him in a voice of encouragement. It is not so with a horse or horses.”

* In the manual on the art of driving published by the president of the Four-in-Hand Driving and Coaching Club, which was revived in 1870 by the Duke of Beaufort, there is a chapter titled “The coaching revival” that deals exclusively with the club members’ new practice of driving coaches on busy routes (e.g., to Brighton, Dover, Tunbridge Wells) and racing the railway trains to those destinations; this activity made the long-abandoned inns of the coaching era come alive again with the neighing of horses and the cracking of whips.” (P. D. Fischer, Betrachtungen eines in Deutschland reisenden Deutschen[Berlin, 1895], pp. 43-44. Fischer also mentions the following coaching titles published in the 1880s: Stanley Harris, Old Coaching Days; W. Ourtram Tristram, Coaching Days and Coaching Ways.)