2013-01-04 13:25:00.159018-08 by Dan Lyke 1 comments
How fast could you travel across the US in the 1800s?
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#Comment Re: made: 2013-01-04 14:38:13.229474-08 by: petronius
In Stephen Ambrose's book Nothing Like it in the World, about the building of the Trans-continental Railroad, he said that basically in the 184Os it took 6 months to get from New York to California, no matter how you went. That included conestoga across the West, fighting off savages and thirst; sailing around Tierra del Fuego and battling some of the worst weather in the world; or sailing to Panama, treking across the pestilential jungles to the Pacific, and then sailing the rest of the way. By the Civil War a railroad across Panama sped things up considerably, but it still had its problems. The man who surveyed the Trans-con caught yellow fever on one passage and died shortly after he got to New York.
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