Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1910-07-02

FREIGHTERS LEAVE PRAIRIES.
Last of Vanishing Western Types.
Where Freighter Is Still at Work.

From the Kansas City Star.
No adequate attempt has ever been
made to compile statistics of overland
travel and freight shipment from ls45 to
1889 Such compilation, In fact, is not
possible. In the sixties ii was not I'M
common for 800 heavily laden wagons to
pass Fort kearney westward bound In
day. In 1866 it is said that in a
period of six weeks 5000 wagons. each
carrying from one to four tons OF freight.
passed that point. One writer In remi-
niscent vein says that in one days ride
between Fort Kearney and Julesburg he
counted SIS westbound wagons, drawn by
1850 draught animals.
Probably the largest firm of overland
freighters was that Of Majs. Russell and
Waddell of Leavenworth and Kansas
City At one time they owned 5000
wagons and 1900 oxen. 1t is estimated
that their rolling stock and motive
power" equipment would have made a
caravan at least forty miles in length.
Greatest of the transportation magnates
of wagon freighting days was Ben Holli-
day; but the major part of his business
consisted i'm running stage coaches and
carrying the mails. His Concord coaches
constituted the limited trains of that
ever possessed the unquestioned control
of transcontinental transportation that
lay in Holidays hands from 1861 to
1866. The first stages over Holidays
Central Overland route left st. Joseph.
Mo-. and Placerville. Cal. simultaneously
July /. 1861. covering the two-thousand-
mile trip in seventeen days.
For the traffic between these two points
roo Concord coaches were required and
2,7JO horses. However. these were only
q fraction of Holidays equipment. He
operated scores of smaller lines. branches
and feeders, covering routes aggregating
5000 miles in length with 5000 mules and
horses. an unknown number of oxen. 1000
freight wagons. However, this Napoleonic
transportation magnate was crippled by
the Indian depredations of 1864. 1865 and
1856. All his stations for a distance or
100 miles were burned. scores of his men
were killed and hundreds of head of his
live stock stolen. In 1866 he sold out and
transcontinental traffic by stage and
wagon was nearly ended.
The great difficulty the long-haul wagon
freighters had to contend with was to
obtain feed and water for the live stock.
Supplies of that kind could not be taken
along so the route had to be laid out
with view to obtaining grass and water.
When the mules and oxen on single
route across the plains were numbered by
the tens of thousands pasturage at times
was a matter OF grave anxiety. Fuel,
also, in the treeless regions was scarce
and difficult to obtain, wood being sold
at points In Colorado and Wyoming at
$50 a cord. But for the supply of buffalo
chips-plentiful in most sections-the fuel
problem would have been much more
serious.
The western freighter is one OF the few
archetypal western characters still left
us. The bad man. the cowboy. the
vigilante, the scout and the trapper live
for this generation only in musty pages
of little read chronicles or i'm the mis-
leading and overdrawn accounts of fiction
writers. The stage driver is still with
us-but he is now but a decadent and
degenerate successor to the strenuous
leather pushers'' of the days of the
Overland But the freighter is in the
full flush of prosperity. He no longer
starts off on a long haul of thousand
miles or more, and the locomotive has
banished him from the trade routes of
earlier days; but the progress of civiliza-
ton in the west has been so much more
rap id than the progress of railroad bIfld-
ing that the wagon freighter CONTROLS a
greater traffic today than he ever did be-
lore.