This post is by Phil.
Michael Graham Richard has posted some great maps from the 1932 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States; the maps show how long it took to get to various places in the U.S. from New York City in 1800, 1830, 1857, and 1930. (I wonder if the atlas has one from around 1900 as well, that didn’t make it into the article? I’d like to see it, too, if it exists.) Worth a look.
This post is by Phil.
There’s a rather obvious division, into parts that were already reached by railroads, and parts that weren’t.
It takes less than 3 days to ride the train to from New York to Saint Louis, but it takes almost 3 weeks to travel roughly the same distance from Saint Louis to Denver by horse and buggy.
It also looks like there are two established routes (wagon trails?) west out of Saint Louis, one north via Cheyenne to San Francisco, and one south via El Paso to San Diego.
Actually, I’m not sure what’s represented by the southern route. Wikipedia describes the San Antonio-San Diego Mail Line, which went into operation in 1857, and it says that it took 5 weeks for the mail to get just from San Antonio to San Diego.
OK, that was Butterfield Overland Mail. 16 days from Saint Louis to Yuma and 22 days to San Francisco.
Great graph. The first thought that came to my mind is that on many days, the 1 day travel line is about the same 155 years later. Mainly because of delays (traffic jams, airport clearance/delay times, etc). Extrapolating based on the technology would be quite misleading.
For lines greater than the 1-day journey, we’ve made huge leaps, of course.
I doubt the accuracy of this. It’s hard to believe that it really took a week to travel less than 100 miles over the prairie in Minnesota and the Dakotas. That’s about 1 mile per hour. (I’m assuming that the trail has been scouted, so there’s no issue of having to backtrack when blocked by a river or whatever, and that there are no political delays, such as time to negotiate passage with Indian tribes, and that we’re not talking about travel with a huge amount of baggage.)
No, that part is plausible. If we’re talking about a horse-drawn carriage traveling cross-country (no roads) and you can’t change horses, 20 miles/day would be more than reasonable, maybe even optimistic. Even for a single person traveling on horseback on an ordinary horse, 20-25 miles/day is said to be as fast as you can go for extended periods of time.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony_Express. This was a mail service between Missouri and California in 1860-61. Its riders averaged 75 miles/day; however, this took extreme measures like hand-selecting the best horses, switching horses every 10 miles, and even limiting the weight of the riders to no more than 125 lbs.
On the Oregon Trail 18-20 miles a day was considered good. http://www.oregontrailcenter.org/HistoricalTrails/ADayOnTheTrail.htm
Note that the article that I got this from has other maps too; check out the one from 1800!
More recent maps of this type:
http://www.mysociety.org/2006/travel-time-maps/
http://www.mysociety.org/2007/more-travel-maps/
Myself, I prefer anecdote (grin), which allows me to use personal experience. And, while I remember the 1950s, the 1850s are a bit beyond my frame of reference.
The first “long” trip I remember my family taking was in about 1957, from Indianapolis to Marchall, Michigan, a distance of 207 miles. According to Google Maps, you can do that now in about 3 hours, 10 minutes. In 1957, it took nearly 7 hours…no interstate highways, all two-lane roads, and passing through, rather than around, Noblesville, Anderson, Marion, Huntington, Fort Wayne, Angola, and towns too small to remember (or find on a map).
East side of Indianapolis (where we lived) to Terre Haute (where my grandmother lived; 83 miles) took between 2 & 3 hours, depending on traffic on US 40 through Indy.
Good times in the car.
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In 1919, it took Dwight Eisenhower and other soldiers 62 days to drive from Washington D.C. to Oakland, CA.
ORBIS lets you calculate travel times (and travel costs) between points in the Roman Empire, as a function of time of year. Some of this data has been turned into isoline maps (see this figure).
If you like this, check out some cool interactive railroad maps put together by Richard White and his colleagues at Stanford’s Spatial History Lab. These designs can be useful not just for travel time, but also for the study of travel cost.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/viz.php?id=121&project_id=
People interested in this topic should have a look at Gatrell (1983), which has a couple of nice chapters that discuss the value of isoline maps.
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