called "thorough braces." At either end of the body was the driver's boot and the baggage boot. The first "Troy" coach put on the road came in 1829. It was a great novelty, but some hundreds of them were soon throwing the dust of Maryland and Pennsylvania into the air. Their cost then was between four and six hundred dollars. The harness used on the road was of giant proportions. The backbands were often fifteen inches wide, and the hip bands, ten. The traces were chains with short thick links and very heavy.
But the passenger traffic of the Cumberland Road bore the same relation to the freight traffic as passenger traffic does to freight on the modern railway—a small item, financially considered. It was for the great wagons and their wagoners to haul over the mountains and distribute throughout the west the products of mill and factory and the rich harvests of the fields. And this great freight traffic created a race of men of its own, strong and daring, as they well had need to be. The fact that teamsters of these "mountain ships" had taverns or "wagon houses" of their own,
