Long Day's Journey: The Steamboat and Stagecoach Era in the Northern West Review

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(More customer reviews)While researching Michigan Ghost Towns, left from the lumbering era in Ogemaw County, I found little information about the stagecoach lines that connected the small lumbering towns in an era before telegraph, telephone and railroad spurs. What was it like to ride in a stagecoach from one little rustic town through the wilds and woods to another? Sure I had riden in a replica stagecoach, but how real was that ride when I was a kid? Afterall, it was over an asphalt parking lot? How real could that be? But I remembered the size and shape and interior. The small windows with a rolled up canvas blind. It was suffocating hot that day and as any eight year old I was dressed in shorts and summer top, what would it have been like for females of the eralier era?
Amazon to the rescue! I purchased this book strictly as a research reference. However, it soon became an interesting read as well as research material on traveling by stagecoach and steamboats. Thanks to this book I was able to recreate in words the travel conditions of an era long long past that most people will never physically experience.
An added plus, the pictures, illustrations and ads are excellent quality.

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In LONG DAY'S JOURNEY Carlos Schwantes gathers historical photographs, advertisements, posters, and contemporary accounts to recreate one of the most colorful periods in the American West.He traces the rapidly evolving saga of miners and settlers struggling to get from here to there in the days before railroads reached the West, trying to establish methods of transportation and communication between the eastern United States and the new territories that became Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming-first by sea, around continents, then by land and water routes across America.Many of the enduring images and myths of the West derive from this era: the Pony Express, mule trains and plodding oxteam freighters, the picturesque side-wheelers and sternwheelers that churned along the rivers, the colorful Concord stagecoaches drawn by four or six jingling, fleet horses.Schwantes describes in detail the technology of preindustrial modes of transportation.He explains the economics that linked the birth and death of western towns and cities, the business history of entrepreneurs and stagecoach and steamboat companies, and the challenges facing passengers and employees on the stages and steamers of the northern West.Integrating more than 200 historical photographs and other illustrations with vivid contemporary accounts, Schwantes presents a fascinating history of Americans forging the first working connections between the West and the rest of American-connections that the railroads would soon smooth and strengthen.His book RAILROAD SIGNATURES ACROSS THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST detailed that story; here he tells of the people and animals and equipment supplanted by the twin ribbons of steel.