[Illustration: A prairie schooner.]
The transportation of paddle and portage, of sawbuck saddle and
panniers, however, could not forever serve except in the roughest
of the mountain-chains. The demand for wheeled vehicles was urgent,
and the supply for that demand was forthcoming in so far as human
ingenuity and resourcefulness could meet it. There arose masters in
transportation, common carriers of world-wide fame. The pony-express
was a wonderful thing in its way, and some of the old-time stage lines
which first began to run out into the West were hardly less wonderful.
For instance, there was an overland stage line that ran from Atchison,
on the Missouri River, across the plains, and up into Montana by way of
Denver and Salt Lake City. It made the trip from Atchison to Helena,
nearly two thousand miles, in twenty-two days. Down the old waterways
from the placers of Alder Gulch to the same town of Atchison was a
distance of about three thousand miles. The stage line began to shorten
distances and lay out straight lines, so that now the West was visited
by vast numbers of sight-seers, tourists, investigators, and the like,
in addition to the regular population of the land, the men who called
the West their home.
We should find it difficult now to return to stage-coach travel, yet
in its time it was thought luxurious. One of the United States Bank
examiners of that time, whose duties took him into the Western regions,
in the course of fourteen years traveled over seventy-four thousand
miles by stage-coach alone.