Made In America - Bill Bryson [104]
With no roads to speak of, people travelled from place to place within America by ocean-going coaster or, more often than not, didn’t go at all. Samuel Adams did not set foot out of Massachusetts – indeed didn’t mount a horse – until he was in his fifties, and there was nothing especially unusual in that.11 In 1750, the whole of Massachusetts could boast just six passenger coaches.12 In Virginia, according to a contemporary account, most people had never seen any four-wheeled vehicle but a wagon and many had not seen even that.13
In the circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that American English became particularly rich in terms for unsophisticated rustics. Yokel, a word of uncertain provenance (it may come from the German Jokel, a diminutive of Jakob), entered American English in 1812. Hick, a shortening of Richard, is older still, dating from fourteenth-century England and common in America from its earliest days. Among other similar words were hayseed, bumpkin, rube (from Reuben), country jake and jay (which eventually gave us the term jaywalker – that is, an innocent who doesn’t know how to cross a city street). Hillbilly, perhaps surprisingly, doesn’t appear to have entered the language until 1904 and didn’t become widespread until the 1930s. By 1905 such uninformed rustics were said to come from the sticks. The expression derives from a slang term used by lumbermen for a forest. More recent still is boondocks. It is a Philippines word for mountain and entered English only in 1944.
Until the closing years of the eighteenth century the only real roads in America were the sixty-two-mile-long Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike (turnpike is a British term dating from 1678, and so called because the way was blocked by a studded pole, or pike, which was turned to allow passage once a toll was paid), the Boston Post Road between Boston and New York, the Wilderness Road into the Kentucky territory blazed by Daniel Boone, and the Great Road connecting Philadelphia with the mouth of the Conestoga River. The covered wagons built to negotiate the Great Road were at first called freighters. Later they came to be known as Conestogas, after the Pennsylvania town where they were built. Coincidentally, the town also became famous for a distinctive torpedo-shaped cigar. It was called, naturally, the Conestoga cigar, but the name was soon shortened to stogy (or stogie), and, fittingly, became a favourite of the Conestoga drivers along the Great Road.14 An unusual feature of Conestoga wagons was that they were built with their brakes and ‘lazy boards’ – a kind of extendable running-board – on the left-hand side. If there was a particular reason for putting them there, it has since been forgotten. With drivers compelled to sit on the left, they tended to drive on the right so that they were positioned near the centre of the road, which is why, it appears, Americans abandoned the British custom of driving on the left.
Though it surprises most people to hear it, roads in America are effectively a twentieth-century phenomenon. Instead of having a lot of roads, America fell into the habit of having a few roads but giving them lots of names. The great National Road, the first real long-distance highway in America, was also variously known as the Cumberland Road, the Great Western Road, Uncle Sam’s Road, the Ohio Road, and the Illinois Road. Begun in 1811 in Cumberland, Maryland, it ran for 130 miles to Wheeling, West Virginia, and eventually stretched on across Pennsylvania,