CHAPTER XIX

BEFORE AND AFTER THE TURNPIKE

Before the nineteenth century, travellers who visited Niagara generally went there by way of Montreal and Lake Ontario, returning to the seacoast by Presque Isle (Erie, Pennsylvania) and Pittsburg to Philadelphia or Baltimore. Occasionally an adventurous tourist struck out from Albany into the “Back Woods”. Such an one was Lieutenant John Harriott, an Englishman, who visited whatever parts of the known world he could reach and recorded his journeyings in a book with the suggestive title,--“Struggles Through Life, Exemplified in the Various Travels and Adventures in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America”. In June, 1796, he set out from New York on a “tour to view the back lands”. He chose the land route to Albany, going the one hundred and sixty miles in a “coachee” drawn by two horses. Albany he describes as a town of “upwards of six thousand inhabitants, collected from various parts.... It is the storehouse for the trade to and from Canada and the lakes, therefore likely to flourish and the inhabitants to grow rich.” The next morning he set off at half-past five and travelled forty miles by stage through the fertile country of the German Flats, every now and then being obliged to alight and walk for a mile or two as the wagon floundered through a bit of swampy road, or up a steep grade.

Across wet places were bits of log causeways. These were made of trunks of pine and oak trees laid down crossways layer upon layer, regardless of uniformity of size or the comfort of those who might travel over them. This kind of road was called corduroy because it resembled the French cloth of that name. In drier places, the settlers cut down trees on the line of the road. Six or eight oxen yoked to a plough would stir up the soil as deeply as possible, pulling out or displacing stumps or rocks. The cleared surface would then be smoothed over a little and left to be worn hard by travel.

The “coachee” or stage-wagon, in which Harriott travelled over this route, was typical of the region and was not supplanted on this road twenty years later, although by that time more modern ones had been put on the line between New York and Boston, and New York and Philadelphia. The body of the coachee was rather long in proportion to its breadth. It had four seats, each holding three passengers, who faced towards the horses. “From the height of the seat,” writes a traveller of the time, “it is open all round, and the roof is supported by slender shafts rising up at the corners and sides; in wet weather a leathern apron is let down at the sides and back, to protect the inmates.” The wagon had no door; the passengers got in by the front, stepping over the seats as they went backward. It was said that these coaches had no outside seats on top, as did those in England, because the vehicle lurched and jolted so violently that passengers sitting on them would have been thrown off. The heavier boxes and trunks were fastened behind, upon the frame of the carriage, but smaller articles and the mail-bag were huddled under the seats, to the great annoyance of the passengers, who were frequently forced “to sit with their knees up to their mouths or with their feet insinuated between two trunks, where they are most lovingly compressed whenever the vehicle makes a lurch into a rut.” The body of the wagon was suspended upon two stout leathern straps passing lengthwise under it and strongly secured before and behind. When these straps gave way, as they sometimes did, the driver selected a stout rail from a neighboring fence. The passengers by united effort thrust in this substitute for a spring and the conveyance jolted on.

At the end of his first day’s journey, Harriott found that the coach in which he was going to proceed had been overturned and broken to pieces, so that he was obliged to stop three days at German Flats Town. As he continued on his way to Fort Schuyler (Utica) he found himself in a rich country with many new settlers, but as the road steadily became worse and worse, although, as he says, he and his fellow-travellers “alighted safe from broken bones, [they were] most miserably bruised from head to foot.” At Whitestown, he stayed several days watching with interest the allotment of land to settlers and visiting the remnant of the Six Nations, some sixteen hundred in number, all that were left of that fierce confederacy that so long had held this region against the white men.

From this point there was no public conveyance, and Lieutenant Harriott bought a horse and proceeded in company with a young farmer from Massachusetts who was making his third trip westward to conclude a purchase of land on the Genesee River and could therefore serve as a guide. It took the travellers three days to reach Geneva, from which place they journeyed fifty miles to the river and thence to Niagara Falls, seventy miles more through the wilderness following the Indian trails. By making haste, they avoided spending more than one night in the woods. As darkness fell, they made a bed of boughs and kept two fires burning “as a guard against wolves and panthers.” Again gaining the Mohawk, he went down-stream in a bateau, managed by five men, which he hired for the trip. On his return, Harriott wrote that “except for a view of the grand falls,” there was nothing to reward him for the fatigue of the journey.

Fifteen years after Harriott’s visit, John Melish, the map-maker, passed over the same route. He had come from Cleveland, Ohio, and Erie, Pennsylvania, to the Niagara River and the town of Buffalo, which had been laid out about five years previously, but already had five hundred inhabitants and was rapidly growing. The buildings were mostly of wood, painted white, but there were a number of good brick houses and a few of stone. There were four taverns, eight stores, two schools, and a weekly paper in this town, which Melish prophesied would become a great settlement. Already roads were being constructed in all directions, and the Albany turnpike had been brought to within a few miles of the village. As he travelled along, he was surprised to find the country so well settled. The houses were so frequent that the traveller was seldom out of sight of one, and every few miles there was an inn. Lands were all taken up for a mile or so on either side of the road. He constantly met parties journeying westward and from inquiry found that a family of seven could travel in their own wagon at the rate of twenty miles a day, making the journey of six hundred miles from Connecticut to Cleveland at an expense of seventy dollars. The emigrants would carry their own provisions but would stop at the inns to feed their horses and eat their food. In the course of one day’s journey, he met more than twenty families thus proceeding westward.

Stage fares would have made the trip much more expensive. By law these fares could not exceed seven cents a mile, and no fees to drivers were expected. Stage travel was at this time made inconvenient by the number of companies operating only on short sections of the road. Each proprietor took up payment for his own portion of the way,--half a dollar here, seventy-five cents there,--and turned the traveller out of his vehicle when he came to the end of his stretch to wait with what patience he could summon till the next stage appeared.

As Melish neared Utica, the houses along the road were so thick that it was for a considerable way like a continuous village. Yet here as everywhere on the route, back of the neat white houses with their green blinds and roomy verandas, and the fertile, cultivated plots of ground around them, the land would be covered with stumps from one to three feet high, and the smoke of the clearing fires could often be seen in the distance. The expense of the trip from Buffalo to Utica had been ten dollars and ninety-one cents.

Melish had made his journey on horseback, although he met many coaches on the way. In 1819 an Englishwoman describes a trip which she made from Albany to Utica in one of the fifteen coaches that made the trip daily. On her way she met the man who eighteen years previously had carried in his coat pocket the weekly mail between the two towns. She found the journey rough, but her companions good-humored, intelligent, and accommodating. She recommended the stage-coach for the traveller who wished “to see people as well as things,--to hear intelligent remarks upon the country and its inhabitants, and to understand the rapid changes that each year brings forth, and if he be of an easy temper, not incommoded with trifles, not caring to take, nor understanding to give, offence, liking the interchange of little civilities with strangers, and pleased to make an acquaintance, though it should be but one of an hour, with a kind-hearted fellow-creature, and if too he can bear a few jolts,--_not_ a few,--and can suffer to be driven sometimes too quickly over a rough road, and sometimes too slowly over a smooth one,--then let him, by all means, fill a corner in the post-coach or stage-wagon.... But if he be of an unsociable humour, easily put out of his way, or as the phrase is, _a very particular gentleman_--then he will hire or purchase his own dearborn or light wagon and travel _solus cum solo_ with his own horse.”

This was turnpike travel in the early nineteenth century, and this was the route over which thousands of families made their way to the lakes. For years the tide of emigration went on until the story of western New York was repeated in every part of the region, and the wilderness of twenty and thirty years before became the seat of thriving towns and cities.