Railroads
Did horsebox or horse trailer play role in West?
Did the horse trailer — often called a “horsebox” in Europe — play any role in the Old West? Were horses often transported rather than ridden, and if so, what was the most common way?
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Westward rush of railroads advanced ‘hell on wheels’
The westward rush of the railroads across the Plains and westward led to an onward march of an interesting social characteristic that gained a special name: “hell on wheels.” More than just a curse or profane expression, “hell on wheels” was a Westernism for a very specific advancement of a very unusual type of a sort of “portable town.”
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French mining engineer writes of Western travels in 1867
While kicking the dust off some boxes of old books, I ran onto a little volume I forgot I have. So I pulled it out of the box, blew some clouds of dust around the room, and took a close look at this little jewel. The title in English is “The Rocky Mountain West in 1867,” and in French it is titled “Le gand-ouest des Etats-Unis.” What I have is the English translation done by Wilson O. Clough. The original — and I do not speak or read any sort of French — was a collection of letters written by Louis L. Simonin, a French mining engineer and professor of geology. The letters were written to an unidentified friend in Paris.
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How did people in the Old West really know what time it was?
We have atomic clocks that can keep track of the “real” time in millionths of seconds — but how did someone living in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, etc., in, let’s say 1855, know what time it was?
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