IAPALOAL-L Archives

From: "Cathy Joynt Labath" <>
Subject: [IAPALOAL] "On the Highway"- Early travel
Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2002 10:17:49 -0600

On the Highway
The Palimpsest "Iowa Pioneers"; July 1968;
State Historical Society of Iowa; Iowa City, Iowa


Today streamlined trains whisk Iowans west for the winter, and automobiles
speed comfortably along the straight Iowa roads. But a trip in pioneer days
often meant dislocated bones, wind-broken horses, frozen ears and fingers,
stolen money, and the terrible heartsick feeling of lost trails.

With all the hardships, however, which now seem unbearable, our "Ioway"
grandparents and great grandparents traveled, and traveled often. Knowing
nothing of macadamized roads, they did not stay at home and wait for them.
There were friends to be visited, sermons to be preached, courts to be held,
grist to be ground, fever cases to be bled, and land to be bought or sold.
The first Iowa travelers, the hunters and the home seekers, had for roads
only the trails of the padding Indian or the hoof-marked tracks of the
buffalo, which threaded in and out through dense woods and underbrush or
wound snake-like through the interminable whispering seas of prairie grass.
They went not as the crow flies but as the wind bloweth, and it was an
intrepid, adventurous traveler who pushed on a little farther than his tired
companions and found a field more fertile, a grove more kind, a land more
Utopian.

But twelve-inch Indian paths were not wide enough for a yoke of oxen, so the
backwoods pioneer widened the trails. Nor did he long delay before besieging
the territorial legislature with petitions for roads. The legislature
responded. By 1846, when Iowa had become a state, two hundred road acts were
on the statute books. Even Congress took a hand and authorized, in 1839, the
well-known "Military Road," stretching from Dubuque through Iowa City to the
northern boundary of Missouri. So year by year, as the surveyors blazed
trees and drove stakes into the prairie, as the ox teams slowly cut the
matted sod, Iowa became crisscrossed with highways.

But the roads were built of Iowa soil, which, combined with water,
invariably forms mud, deep and sticky. Transportation in the early spring or
during the fall rains was next to impossible. Those who had to travel often
exhausted their horses by long pulls through heavy gumbo, often had to plank
themselves into higher ground with rails carried for the purpose or pad the
deep ruts with willow twigs and grass, and usually arrived at their
destination after supper was over and the best half of the bed had been
pre-empted by another guest. The first hard-surface highways, of corduroy or
plank, were the wonder of those who saw them and the torment of those who
used them.

Another cause of delay was swollen streams. There were of course few
bridges, and fording was hazardous. At times it was accomplished by calking
the wagon boxes so that they would float better when pulled by the swimming
horses. How like boats the prairie schooners must have looked with their
puffed canvas tops! At the larger towns, ferries transported the traffic
across the deeper rivers. In the dead of winter, when the streams were
frozen, crossing was made easy by the ice. Then the rivers became highways
in themselves, forming unobstructed paths from town to town.

The means of transportation in itself were peculiar to the times. Groups of
white-topped prairie schooners, drawn by slow horses or slower oxen, plowed
up the thick dust of the road. Springless wagons jolted along with corn to
be ground or cordwood to be traded for a bolt of cloth. Horseback riders
wound in and out among the slower traffic, often with the mail in saddle
bags. And if at any time there was the loud sound of a horn around the bend,
the whole company would spread out along the edge of the road, deferentially
and for the safety of their lives. The women looked out from the front of
the wagons, the men chewed a little harder and spat with a grandiose air. A
stage was passing! Drawn by four spanking horses, the oval black body
swinging on its thorough braces and glistening in the sun, a burly,
whip-cracking driver sitting aloft on the high seat, and the luggage jolting
inside the little railing behind him or securely fastened in the triangular,
leather-covered "boot" at the rear, the stagecoach made a spectacular
appearance. The passengers waved as they went rolling by. And after the
stage had passed from sight and the dust had settled again in the road, the
ox teams resumed their plodding gait while the women in the heavy wagons
exclaimed over the bright scenes painted on the stagecoach doors and the
richness of the upholstery, and the men discussed the network of the Western
Stage Company lines that were spreading over Iowa and the mail routes which
the stages were steadily taking away from the postriders.

When a traveler came to the larger towns he probably put up at a tavern such
as fat Bob Kinney's house at Muscatine, built two stories high, of split
logs, and with sawed lumber doors and window casings. The typical tavern,
however, was smaller and more rude. there were several beds in a room, and
they were not considered full unless occupied by two or three people. The
nearby creek often served as the lavatory.

And so it seems that pioneer travel was a procession of hardships. But there
were long, pleasant days on the road, good company in the motley crowd who
traveled it, and sound slumber at the end of the day in somebody's
close-walled, beef-smelling tavern. Any mayhap pioneer hearts were lightened
by thoughts of homes, fortunes, and future satisfaction toward which they
were traveling.

---Pauline Patton Grahame


Cathy Joynt Labath
The Irish in Iowa
http://www.celticcousins.net/irishiniowa/

This thread:

• [IAPALOAL] "On the Highway"- Early travel by "Cathy Joynt Labath" <>