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It was wonderfully well horsed, and we changed our teams every ten miles; but only then came at the rate of five miles an hour. We both of us started for our sixty-four miles' drive on the box-seat with the driver, who happened to be an extremely nice man and an experienced whip; in former days he had driven the stage-coaches across from Omaha to San Francisco, a journey of three weeks.
During the first half of the present century Groton had one characteristic mark, closely connected with the old taverns, which it no longer possesses. It was a radiating centre for different lines of stage-coaches, until this mode of travel was superseded by the swifter one of the railroad.
That I should be on recruiting service, when my comrades were actually fighting, was intolerable, and I hurried on to my post, Pittsburg. At that time the railroad did not extend west of the Alleghanies, and all journeys were made by stage-coaches.
Any one wishing to travel around the coast from San Juan to Ponce would be obliged to continue their journey by stage-coaches, one from Camuy to Aguadilla, and one from Mayaguez to Yauco. San Juan has about forty thousand inhabitants, and Ponce has almost thirty thousand. There are many towns of between twelve thousand and thirty thousand people. The buildings are low and are of wood.
Do we not find the dead level of barbarism succeeding the saturnalia of popular thought and the last struggles of those civilizations which accumulated the treasures of the world in one direction? The commercial traveller! Is he not to the realm of ideas what our stage-coaches are to men and things? He is their vehicle; he sets them going, carries them along, rubs them up with one another.
To those great geniuses now in petticoats, who shall write novels for the beloved reader's children, these men and things will be as much legend and history as Nineveh, or Coeur de Lion, or Jack Sheppard. For them stage-coaches will have become romances a team of four bays as fabulous as Bucephalus or Black Bess.
At that time the Indians of the great plains, especially along the line of the Santa Fe Trail, were very hostile, and continually harassing the freight caravans and stage-coaches of the overland route. Companies of men were enlisting and being mustered into the United States service to go out after the savages, and young Robert McGee volunteered with hundreds of others for the dangerous duty.
The road to Jimville is the happy hunting ground of old stage-coaches bought up from superseded routes the West over, rocking, lumbering, wide vehicles far gone in the odor of romance, coaches that Vasquez has held up, from whose high seats express messengers have shot or been shot as their luck held. This is to comfort you when the driver stops to rummage for wire to mend a failing bolt.
Reverse the picture, and behold what the energies and good management of the Canada Company have effected. Stage-coaches travel with safety and dispatch along the same tract where formerly I had the utmost difficulty to make my way on horseback without the chance of being swept from the saddle by the limbs of trees and tangled brushwood.
The first enterprise that brought him prominently forward was the establishment of that vast and most perfect system of stage-coaches, of which I have already spoken, on an original capital of $250,000.
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