"Militia-men drove narrow treads,
Four horses and plain red Dutch beds,
And always carried grub and feed."

They were farmers or common teamsters who made occasional trips, usually
in winter time, and did some carriage for others, and drove but four
horses with their wagons. The "Regulars" had broad tires, carried no
feed for horses nor food for themselves, but both classes of teamsters
carried coarse mattresses and blankets, which they spread side by side,
and row after row, on the bar-room floor of the tavern at which they
"put up." Their horses when unharnessed fed from long troughs hitched to
the wagon-pole. The wagons that plied between the Delaware and the small
city of Pittsburgh were called Pitt-teams.

The life of the Conestoga wagon did not end even with the establishment
of railroads in the Eastern states; farther and farther west it
penetrated, ever chosen by emigrants and travellers to the frontiers;
and at last in its old age it had an equal career of usefulness as the
"prairie-schooner," in which vast numbers of families safely crossed the
prairies of our far West. The white tilts of the wagons thus passed and
repassed till our own day.

Four-wheeled wagons were but little used in New England till after the
War of 1812. Two-wheeled carts and sleds carried inland freight, which
was chiefly transported over the snow in the winter.

The Conestoga wagon of the past century was far ahead of anything in
England at that date; indeed Mr. C. W. Ernst, the best authority I know
on the subject, says we had in every way far better traffic facilities
at that time than England. In other ways we excelled. Though Finlay
found many defects in the postal service in 1773, he also found the
Stavers mail-coach plying between Boston and Portsmouth long before
England had such a thing. Mr. Ernst says: "The Stavers mail-coach was
stunning; used six horses when roads were bad, and never was late. They
had no mail-coaches in England till after the Revolution, and I believe
Massachusetts men introduced the idea in England."

We are apt to grow retrospectively sentimental over the delights,
aesthetic and physical, of ancient stage-coach days. Those days are not
so ancient as many fancy. The first stage-coach which ran directly from
Philadelphia to New York in 1766--and primitive enough it was--was
called "the flying-machine, a good stage-wagon set on springs." Its
swift trip occupied two days in good weather. It wa