Made In America - Bill Bryson [105]
Such highways as existed were not only few and far between, but perilous, uncomfortable and slow. Early coaches (the word comes from Kocs, a town in Hungary where the first such carriages were built; how it then became attached to a person who trains football players and the like is a mystery) were decidedly short on comfort, largely because a seemingly obvious invention – the elliptical spring – occurred to no one before 1804 and didn’t become common on vehicles until much later. The best roads, called corduroy roads because they were made of felled trees laid side by side giving a ribbed effect like corduroy, were torturous enough, but they were a rarity. Most were simply rough clearings through the wilderness. That perhaps doesn’t sound too bad, but bear in mind that the technology of the time didn’t allow the easy removal of tree stumps. Even on the great National Road, the pride of the American highway system, the builders were permitted to leave stumps up to fifteen inches high – slightly under knee height. Imagine if you will bouncing for day after day over rocks, fallen branches, and tree stumps in an unsprung carriage and you may get some notion of the arduousness of a long-distance trip in nineteenth-century America.
Something of the flavour of the undertaking is reflected in the candid name of the most successful of the stagecoach companies running along the National Road: the Shake Gut Line. (It was an age of colourful names. The Shake Gut’s principal rival was the June Bug Line, so called because its rivals predicted that it would survive no longer than the average June bug. They were wrong.) Coaches not only shook their occupants mercilessly, but routinely overturned. In 1829, according to Paul Johnson, ‘a man travelling from New York to Cincinnati and back reported the coach had been overturned nine times’.15
It is perhaps little wonder then that when railways (and to a lesser extent steamboats and canal barges) began to provide an alternative form of transportation, people flocked to them. Even so, early trains were also slow, uncomfortable and dangerous. Cars were connected by nothing more sophisticated than chains, so that they were constantly shunting into one another, jarring the hapless occupants. Front-facing passengers had the choice of sitting with the windows closed – not an attractive option in hot weather – or suffering the assault of hot cinders, jocularly called ‘eyedrops’, that blew in a steady stream back from the locomotive (a word coined in 1657 to describe any kind of motion, but first applied to railway engines in 1815). Fires, derailments and breakdowns were constant possibilities, and until late in the nineteenth century even the food was a positive hazard. Until 1868 when a new word and phenomenon entered the language – the dining-car – customers were permitted to detrain at way stations and given twenty minutes to throw a meal down their gullets. The proprietors of these often remote and Godforsaken outposts offered what food they could get their hands on – or, more often, get away with. Diners at Sidney, Nebraska, were routinely fed what most presumed to be chicken stew; in fact, its basic component was prairie dog.16 Some said they were lucky to get that.
Despite the discomforts, the railways became hugely popular and offered many thousands of people their first chance to leave home. By 1835, according to one estimate, fifty times as many people were travelling by rail as had travelled by all other means put together just five years earlier. From virtually nothing in 1830, the mileage of American railways rose to 30,000 by 1860 – that is, more than all the rest of the world put together17 – and to a staggering 200,000 by 1890. Rail travel so dominated American travel that for