Jesuit Travel: Old School

Many stages that crisscrossed Illinois were nine-passenger, four-horse “post coaches” manufactured by Abbot and Downing of Concord, N.H. According to historian Frink, the first “real coaches” in Bloomington (“swung by four massive straps above a sturdy gear”) appeared in the late 1840s. Travel conditions were unpleasant at best and appalling at worst, and the trials and tribulations of stage passengers is a lively sub-genre of frontier literature.

A July 16, 1836, letter (written in Latin but later translated into English) by Jesuit Pierre Verhaegen to his superior in Rome detailed a stage trip from St. Louis to Springfield.

The six-seat coach, crammed with nine passengers, was no match for a prairiescape dotted with stagnant water. Passengers, already tormented by gnats, had to disembark and “proceed on foot through horrid places if they would not see the coach sink in the mud.” At a crude wayside, eight men, including Father Verhaegen, had to share four beds in a 20-by 20-foot-square room.

Link (here)

Photo of a four horse coach