One of the more striking modern-day conveniences we take for granted is the ease of long distance travel. Before commercial airlines, concrete highways and railroads, there were stagecoach lines. | From Our Past page

And what now takes hours would take days as stages, pulled by teams of four and sometimes six horses, bumped to and fro down impossibly rutted "roads," waded through chest-high mud, crossed low-lying prairies transformed into shallow lakes, and crossed rolling, swollen streams.

To put it another way, traveling down Interstate 55 to a St. Louis Cardinals game in a minivan with six screaming kids and the air conditioner on the fritz would be an idyllic romp of unparalleled comfort and pleasure compared to travel back then.

The latter 1840s marked the "palmy days" of the stage in Illinois, noted local historian Dwight E. Frink in a 1910 essay. But with the emergence of "Titan power" in the early 1850s, flesh-and-blood horsepower gave way to the railroad steam engine.

Throughout the settlement period, most pioneers traveled by wagon or horseback. Stagecoaches, though, filled a transportation niche for businessmen, visitors from the East, elected officials and others. In addition, stage lines became the primary carrier of U.S. mail.

In Bloomington, the main stage line ran east-west, from Danville to Peoria and/or Pekin. Stage and steamer lines were linked, and the Pekin wharf gave access to not only the navigable stretches of the Illinois River, but the Mississippi and Ohio as well. There was also stage traffic running north-south, connecting Bloomington with either Decatur or Springfield, through irregular service. The Chicago to St. Louis stage line usually ran through Peoria.

The dominant Midwestern stage line was Chicago-based Frink & Walker (later Frink & Co., sans Walker), which served Bloomington in the 1840s and early 1850s. One early settler remembered Bloomington Judge John E. McClun wresting away the Danville-to-Peoria mail contract from a stage line (presumably Frink). There were also local freight haulers, like Bloomington's William G. Boyce, who served as over-the-road truckers.

Many stages that crisscrossed Illinois were nine-passenger, four-horse "post coaches" manufactured by Abbot and Downing of Concord, N.H. According to historian Frink, the first "real coaches" in Bloomington ("swung by four massive straps above a sturdy gear") appeared in the late 1840s.

Travel conditions were unpleasant at best and appalling at worst, and the trials and tribulations of stage passengers is a lively sub-genre of frontier literature. A July 16, 1836, letter (written in Latin but later translated into English) by Jesuit Pierre Verhaegen to his superior in Rome detailed a stage trip from St. Louis to Springfield.

The six-seat coach, crammed with nine passengers, was no match for a prairiescape dotted with stagnant water. Passengers, already tormented by gnats, had to disembark and "proceed on foot through horrid places if they would not see the coach sink in the mud." At a crude wayside, eight men, including Father Verhaegen, had to share four beds in a 20-by 20-foot-square room.

J.S. Buckingham, in his multi-volume travelogue published in 1842, recounted a stage stop twelve miles out of Chicago. "While this change of coaches was making," he recounted, "we had to wait in the bar-room of one of the most filthy and wretched houses we had yet seen, in which the smell of rum and tobacco, mingled with other powerfully disagreeable odours, was most offensive; the hideous-looking bar-keeper appeared like a man who never washed or combed, and none of whose garments had ever been changed since he had first put them on; - altogether nothing could be more revolting."

William H. Milburn, a blind Methodist preacher, recalled an 1846 journey from Chicago through Peru, Peoria, Bloomington and beyond. Eleven miles east of "Peory," with Milburn and his wife the sole passengers, the stage company swapped out its four-horse coach for a two-horse wagon.

Once in Bloomington, Milburn inquired as to hotel accommodations. The driver "assured us that we should get nothing fit to eat," he recalled, "and that if we attempted to sleep, the bed-bugs would eat us up." Milburn wisely directed the driver to continue "to the door of the Methodist that lived in the largest and most comfortable house."

At 2 a.m. the stage driver roused the Milburns with shouts and blasts from his horn, and the couple continued their journey through the "pitchy dark" in the midst of a chilly downpour. Their only protection from the elements was a coarse blanket "through which the water dripped in showers."