Stagecoaches, Canal Boats and Steamers, Oh My! Southworth's Travel to St. Louis

Train travel in the nineteenth century

Soon after Emma D.E.N. Southworth married her husband Frederick, the two set out for a wild adventure into the yet unsettled West in 1840, an age before the automobile and even in an age in which railroad travel was in its infancy. Interestingly, Charles Dickens recorded a published account of a similar trip he had taken two years after Frederick and Emma had made the journey.

Interestingly, Dickens – who by 1842 had achieved literary success with the serial publication of the Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), Oliver Twist (1837-1838), and Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839) – would later be touted as the “greatest novelist of the Victorian age.” At this time, Emma Southworth was a young newlywed without fame or fortune, but later she would become the “leading contributor to the Ledger” and was considered solely responsible for increased circulation of the paper even though the newspaper had published works by many other famous authors which included Charles Dickens himself.

            As Dickens acknowledged in his account of his American adventure into the West, travel in those days was long and arduous, requiring various combinations and modes of transportation from stagecoach to railroad to canal to river passages. Both the Southworths and Dickens traveled aboard the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Railroad travel was still in its infancy in the United States, and the B&O Washington Line with its steam locomotives had only been opened since 1835. A Washington D.C. newspaper in the Native American advertised two trips per day, one that departed at 6 a.m. and another at 3 p.m. – destination: Baltimore, Maryland. The advice to passengers was to purchase tickets in advance since “under no circumstances whatever can the train be delayed beyond the hour fixed for starting.”

Whether the Southworths took the morning or afternoon train is unknown, but when Charles Dickens made the journey, he took the afternoon train, arriving in time for him to procure a hotel room at Barnum’s, which he described as the “more comfortable of all the hotels” and Baltimore as having “many agreeable streets and public buildings.”

Conversely, he portrayed Washington DC as having “spacious avenues that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile long, that only want houses, road, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament.” Even though Emma may have previously traveled both during her childhood trips to St. Mary’s and her early teaching jobs in Virginia and Ohio, she had spent most of her life in Washington DC, which had the reputation as a dismal and dirty city. Surely, this first stop in Baltimore seemed not only a refreshing change from the drudgery of the nation’s capital but a sign of a prosperous life with her new husband.

However, this was just the first stop in what would be at least a ten-day journey to St. Louis, and the next day’s journey required a half-day travel by railroad to York, Pennsylvania, followed by a half-day stagecoach to Harrisburg. Although crude and tedious by today’s standards, travel in 1840 was rapidly improving and was considered a matter of national pride. “In connexion [sic] with the Baltimore and York Railroad just completed, it renders our intercourse more rapid, more intimate, and quite as convenient, as if no State Line intervened between us,” Attorney General of Pennsylvania Ovid F. Johnson observed, “We are now more than ever one people. Every line of internal communication that crosses the boundary dividing different States, is one more tie, to bind together and cement the Union.”

Similarly, Dickens recorded no trouble traveling from Baltimore to York; however, the stagecoach from York to Harrisburg was quite a different story for the English traveler. “This stage-coach was like nothing so much as the body of one of the swings you see at a fair set upon four wheels and roofed and covered at the sides with painted canvas. There were twelve inside! I, thank my stars, was on the box. The luggage was on the roof; among it, a good-sized dining table, and a big rocking-chair,” Dickens wrote of the twenty-five-mile ride, “We also took up an intoxicated gentleman, who sat for ten miles between me and the coachman; and another intoxicated gentleman who got up behind, but in the course of a mile or two fell off without hurting himself, and was seen in the distant perspective reeling back to the grog-shop where we had found him.” Even though riding a stagecoach may not have been a new experience for Emma as it was for Dickens, this part of the journey certainly would have made for a long and tiresome day.

The next part of the Southworths’ journey to St. Louis was aboard the recently completed Pennsylvania Canal. Beginning in the first part of the nineteenth century, canal travel enhanced the way that goods could be transported between the east and west coasts. In 1834, the Pennsylvania state legislator approved funding to begin a canal system between Philadelphia and Pittsburg which consisted of a series of locks, dams, canals, and railways.  By 1840, this system eventually led to the completion of the Main Line which was broken into four parts called divisions. When Frederick and Emma made the journey, advertisements for passenger tickets were found in all the major newspapers like Philadelphia’s National Gazette, which in February 1840 boasted that boats and cars on the Pennsylvania Canal were “fitted up in the most comfortable manner” in which passengers could “cook their own provisions, stoves being provided in the boat for the purpose.” Another similar 1840 advertisement added that passengers could “take all their baggage through on the same cars and boats with themselves” and that the stoves were provided “at no extra charge.” Both advertisements promised passage to Pittsburg in four to six days.

            Even though the Main Line began in Philadelphia, both Dickens and the Southworths entered their canal journey in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. After the stagecoach from York, the couple needed a hotel for the night much like Dickens who traveled the same journey. “We emerged upon the streets of Harrisburg, whose feeble lights, reflected dismally from the wet ground, did not shine out upon a very cheerful city,” Dickens recalled, “We were soon established in a snug hotel, which though smaller and far less splendid than many we put up at, it raised above them all in my remembrance, by having for its landlord [Henry Buehler] the most obliging, considerate, and gentlemanly person I ever had to deal with.” After a bumpy stagecoach from York to Harrisburg and a night’s stay in a soggy Harrisburg, Emma was probably glad to be snugly boarded on the canal boat for the next part of her journey.

Travelers crossed the first two of the four divisions on the Main Line with relative ease; the most challenging part of this canal passage was crossing the Susquehanna River where boats had to be pulled across it from the Eastern Division to the Juniata Division.  By the time passengers reached Hollidaysburg, they had gone through more than 86 locks and traveled approximately 140 miles before arriving at the foot of the Allegheny Mountains. At the time, the Allegheny Portage Railroad was an engineering marvel that extended 36 miles up and over the mountains. There were ten inclined planes, five going up and five going down, that raised and lowered boats via horses and steam-powered engines.

“Occasionally the rails are laid upon the extreme verge of a giddy precipice; and looking from the carriage window, the traveler gazes sheer down, without a stone or scrap of fence between into the mountain depths below,” Dickens described, “The journey is very carefully made, however; only two carriages travelling together; and while proper precautions are taken, is not to be dreaded for its dangers.” The final part of the canal trip was made on the Western Division from Johnstown to Pittsburg. Despite the difficult and dangerous nature of the voyage, the canal cut travel time from several weeks to several days, which increased the numbers of emigrants traveling to the West.

Once in Pittsburg, passengers like Dickens and the Southworths bought passage aboard a steamboat that carried them down the Ohio River to the Mississippi River and into St. Louis. However, this part of their journey was not without hazards. Major rivers such as the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Mississippi needed to be dredged in order to make steamboat passage safer and faster. In 1824, a survey estimated that the Ohio and Mississippi rivers contained 50,000 snags that often either sunk or delayed passage, so Congress approved a $60,000 contract with John Bruce to remove them, and by 1832 these obstacles, while not eliminated, were significantly reduced. When Frederick and Emma made the trip in 1840, the biggest threats to steamboat travel were fires, explosions and collisions. Additionally, weather played a significant part in when it was safe to travel as indicated in the Pittsburg Gazette in February 1840 that “the running ice still presents some obstruction to the passage of steamboats” but “the weather is now very mild with a slight drizzling rain, so that we may shortly expect another rise.”

            Despite the dangers, steamboats still provided the most dependable mode of transportation than other forms of travel. Steamboats travelled easily both up and downstream, carried produce and staple goods, and offered comfortable and inexpensive accommodations for passengers. Until the last half of the nineteenth century when railroads expanded across the US, steamboat travel continued to increase from 230 steamboats in 1834 to an astonishing 1,000 by 1849. Steamboats also expedited the time it took to travel; for example, prior to steamboat travel, a trip from Louisville, Kentucky to New Orleans took up to four months. By 1820, the time was reduced to 20 days, and by 1838, it could be made in just six days. 

Likewise, the trip that Charles Dickens recorded from Pittsburg to St. Louis occurred in about a week and a half. While on his steamboat trip to St. Louis, Dickens also observed newlyweds who were passengers aboard his ship – passengers who were much like Frederick and Emma. “The beautiful girl […] married the young man with the dark whiskers, who sits beyond HER, only last month,” Dickens wrote, “They are going to settle in the very Far West, where he has lived four years, but where she has never been.”

            Perhaps the best evidence of how Frederick and Emma felt on the journey can be found in clues Emma left in the novels she would later write. Her novel Mark Sutherland; or Power and Principle resonates with similarities between Emma and Frederick and her fictional characters Mark Sutherland and his new bride Rosalie who were traveling on a steamboat to the West.

In chapter 19, Emma described the lovers as they travel: They were standing upon the hurricane deck of the steamer Indian Queen, which was puffing and blowing its rapid course down the Ohio river. She was leaning on the arm of her husband; their heads were bare, the better to enjoy the freshness of the morning air; her eyes were sparkling, and her cheeks glowing with animation, and her sunny ringlets, blown back, floated on the breeze.

In real life, Emma and Frederick also rode aboard the Indian Queen on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. On March 5, 1840, the Indian Queen arrived from Pittsburg and departed that same day bound for Galena, Illinois – the departure point for Frederick and Emma as they left St. Louis for the Northwest Territory. For more about E.D.E.N. Southworth’s time in the Northwest Territory, read E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand: The Untold Story of America’s Famous Forgotten Nineteenth-Century Author.