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AuthorTopic: Northern Winter Travel? (Read 145 times)
Just Plain Annie
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Northern Winter Travel?
« Thread Started on Oct 17, 2008, 9:09am »
I imagine most winter travel in the 18th Century was done on foot and was only attempted when very necessary. Without the waterways available in the north, is there any documentation for any kind of sleds being used in American that early or were all goods packed in and out?
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Re: Northern Winter Travel?
« Reply #1 on Oct 19, 2008, 9:12pm »
There is quite a bit of mention of sleds being used on the frozen lakes in NY and NE during the F&I. Even some crossing Lake Ontario with them if I remember right.
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Harrod
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Re: Northern Winter Travel?
« Reply #2 on Oct 21, 2008, 7:01am »
Annie when I was a kid my uncle had a thing that I'll call a sled. It was just a low, wooden platform with a runner on each side. It was pulled by a horse. He used this thing year round IIRC. I know he used it in the summer without snow or ice. With a low center of gravity it would be perfect for traveling short distances on the narrow, hilly, crooked roads of the 18th Century frontier. I haven't tried to document this but it's very basic and could have been used to some extent back then. FWIW.
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Henry
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Re: Northern Winter Travel?
« Reply #3 on Oct 23, 2008, 9:59pm »
Harrod wrote:
It was just a low, wooden platform with a runner on each side. It was pulled by a horse. He used this thing year round IIRC. I know he used it in the summer without snow or ice.


Harrod, When I was young, my grandfather had a sled like that; sometimes pulled by a horse and sometimes by his oxen. I knew of a few others that had them too.
We were in SW Virginia where things get pretty steep. There was an old sled road from the creek in the holler where my grandparents then lived, that went up the side of the mountain to the old homeplace.
If you wanted to take anything up or down that mountain that you or a horse couldn't carry, you had to use that sled - there was no wheeled vehicle getting up there. :)

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Re: Northern Winter Travel?
« Reply #4 on Dec 29, 2008, 11:14pm »
Winter travel by road, was much better than summer travel.
Especially in the Northern regions.
Once the roads froze, the snow was graded and then rolled to pack it and you had a basic paved road. (Samething on the Alaska Highway) You had to shoe your horses and oxen with caulks, but other than that, everything was normal.

There were lots of sleds, sledges and sleighs. Animals didn't have to work nearly as hard to pull heavy items on runners when they were sliding on ice and snow.

When I was a kid in E. Texas, we still used a sledge to haul stuff to the fields and back. We were plowing with mules.

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Just Plain Annie
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Re: Northern Winter Travel?
« Reply #5 on Jan 4, 2009, 11:24am »
Ah, but what about the areas where there were no graded roads? I'm talking about the areas out away from the forts that saw heavy snow falls. Was snow shoeing the only way to get around our could sleds still be used to haul firewood, fresh meat, etc?
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akaandreduval
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Re: Northern Winter Travel?
« Reply #6 on Aug 22, 2009, 5:16am »
Just saw this old posting, snowshoeing and the toboggan were the prefered method of transporting gear over the deep snows of the northwoods. The Canadians learned this from our Native brothers
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