The Look of the Old West: A Fully Illustrated Guide by William Foster-Harris

Author:William Foster-Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-09-05T07:08:00+00:00

Conestoga wagon

Typically, three teams (that is, six horses) were used with these wagons. The front team was called the lead team, the middle one the swing team, and the rear one the wheel team.

A hundred years ago, the horses would have been Conestoga horses. The breed is now extinct, or virtually so, but it had a proud lineage. It traced back to the Flemish stallions that once had carried armored knights. According to some accounts, William Penn himself sent the first stallions to Pennsylvania to be bred to Virginia mares and so produce this New World horse. The big horses weighed 18oo pounds or more, averaged i6 hands high, and could lug that behemoth of a wagon iz to i8 miles a day. Which is lots of horse and lots of horsepower.

They worked in a heavy but very simple freighting harness, a stout leather collar with iron hames (these are two curved pieces which fit over the leather collar and carry the tugs, or loops to which the traces are attached) ; a girth around the body just behind the front legs; a back strap, running from the collar along the top of the back to the crupper (the piece that went back to encircle the tail) ; plus some more straps called breeching, which came down over the haunches to support the traces. These traces were the tow straps, or usually chains in the Conestoga harness, coming horizontally from the tugs on the hames around the collar through loops on the bellyband or girth and through more supporting loops in the breeching to attach to the ends of a singletree, which, in turn, attached at its middle to the end of a doubletree. Thus the power of two horses, each pulling at the end of the stout doubletree, was combined and applied at a single point to the wagon. The idea of all this was to equalize the pulling power of the teamed horses.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.