Long Day's Journey: The Steamboat and Stagecoach Era in the Northern West (review)

Long Day's Journey: The Steamboat and Stagecoach Era in the Northern West. By Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Pp. 408. $60.

This is a large book in every respect. It covers an enormous area that is bounded on the east by St. Louis and on the west by San Francisco and Seattle. It addresses all aspects of early travel, from oceangoing sailing vessels to river steamers, ferries, and stagecoaches. The time frame is 1831 to 1900, with some spillover on both ends. The text is expansive, as is the pictorial coverage and the documentation in the endnotes. The book itself is ten inches square and weighs almost five pounds. Considering the intellectual and pictorial heft, it is a good value even at sixty dollars.

Carlos Schwantes has based his text on the large secondary literature available for the history of travel in the nineteenth-century West. Because so much has already been published on the subject, it is not likely he has uncovered much that is new in a literal sense, but he has surely been successful in distilling this plethora of information into a flowing and often elegant narrative.

The difficulties of getting around in the early West were the stuff of everyday experience: getting on, getting off, and getting back on again, as travelers switched from horseback to steamboat to stagecoach. The stagecoach was surely the most uncomfortable and dangerous conveyance in early America, its miseries just as intense in New England as they were in the Oregon Territory, and Schwantes goes into the fine points of stagecoach design as developed by its premier fabricator, Abbot, Downing and Company of Concord, New Hampshire.

Deep canyons, high ridges, and shallow but treacherous streams made the job of pioneer transportation companies all the more difficult. Communications were no better. In the 1840s, the closest post office was in Missouri. Mail to the east via San Francisco and thence by ship around Cape Horn required about 180 days for transit. The overland stage, when finally established by a very southern route in 1858, cut that time to around a month. It was not until the coming of the telegraph in the next decade that residents of the Northwest could hope to contact friends and family back east quickly.

Two features of this book particularly impress me: the quotes used as chapter headings and sidebars, and the illustrations. Both reflect the eye of an artist, something lacking in many historians. The quotes speak directly to the feelings of those involved in the wonderful and terrible experience of traveling in a new land, while the illustrations are among the best I have seen in any book on American travel. The compelling 1886 photograph of the Missouri River steamer Rosebud, for example, shows the shallow-draft stern-wheeler in all of its spartan glory, stripped to essentials so it can skim over the surface of the shallow river. Viewers of this book--for it is intended to be viewed as much as read--should be thrilled by haunting scenes of sailing ships at dockside, and it would take a soulless creature not to react to the photograph of a stagecoach posed on the rim of the Snake River Canyon.

I am disturbed by one aspect of the book, which may have had nothing to do with Schwantes's preferences: the picture credits almost never identify the actual source of the illustrations, particularly engravings. In times past, engravings were discussed with an offhand credit such as "from an old print," but now it is considered proper to designate sources more exactly. If it is important to document the text, it should be just as important to document the illustrations in a book that suggests both are of equal significance. That said, it still seems to me that Long Day's Journey has all the makings of a prizewinner...