Gathering the Bones, XXVI: Philadelphia and Conestoga.

 Conestoga wagon at the National Museum of American History
By Daderot - Own work, CC0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26706952

 The Susquehannock were an Iroquoian-speaking people living in the lower Susquehanna valley. Successful in the early stages of the Beaver Wars, in which they fought, amongst others, the nascent colony of Maryland. From the 1680s the population collapsed, not least because a large number, designating themselves as the Conestoga, moved into a town settlement somewhat misleading known as their reservation, in Lancaster County, on the Conestoga River immediately above its junction with the Susquehanna that creates the ferry to York, Pennsylvania. The timing and extent of the Conestoga's population decline is not a matter of careful attention from the historians of colonial Pennsylvania, but must have been late and extreme for there to have been a flourishing town in the 1820s and  only twenty-odd victims of two massacres during the Paxtang Boys rebellion of 1764. 

The Conestoga is a characteristic but folk design associated with western American roads. 

By Ware Bros. Co., photographer - Library of CongressCatalog:
 https://lccn.loc.gov/2012645747Image download
: https://cdn.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3a10000/3a15000/3a15600/3a15645
r.jpgOriginal url: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2012645747/,
 Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67936737

Wiki goes on to note the first reference to American wagons, in the business records of James Logan, here misleadingly described as a "trader" rather than as the head of the junto that governed Pennsylvania during the Walpole era, as wagons belonginto to John Miller, and already being used in haulage between Philadelphia (at the juncture of the Schuykill and Delaware) and Conestoga. And no wonder, considering that this is the original American long-distance goods road, joining the Delaware and Susquehanna river valleys, and the route of the first American turnpike, the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike, a corduroy-paved controlled access private tollroad that opened in 1794. Two other "individuals from the Conestoga valley named James Hendrick and Joseph Cloud" had wagons operating on the road the next year. Of this it need only be said that New Testament names are somewhat uncommon in the Eighteenth Century anglosphere, and all but ubiquitous in the Francophonie, and that Hendrick was a common Haudenosaunee name, and at the end of 1717, Logan bought a "Conestoga wagon" from Hendricks. "Dutch wagons" was a common synonym, and I have shared my theory about the Pennsylvania Dutch being mixed-race German speakers from the Haudensaunee controlled territories along the future Erie Canal route in upstate New York. 

The obvious ancestral form to the Conestoga is a canoe. Boat-wagons are ubiquitous around the world, but the European model is flat-bottomed. The canoe form is scarcely unique to the Americas, of course, and I'm sure the form was common in Europe before it became cheaper and easier to build boats and wagons from sawn planks. Wikipedia cites two experts discounting the traditional theory that Conestoga wagons were used as boats in ferries on the grounds that the bodies weren't water tight, which kind of ignores the canvas cover that could have been stretched over the hull.It is also worth pointing out here that a six-horse wagon is a very big wagon. Two-horse conveyances seem more like a frontier thing, and, in fact, have a North American type, the Red River Cart. Although a Conestoga wagon was an artisanal product, it was definitely big business, costing up to $250 in 1820 on top of the six horse team and harness. A strange conveyance for impoverished family farmers making their way west to  homestead, I must say!

No, I didn't take this picture.
https://bernadeanjgates.blogspot.com/2017/07/they-cherished-freedom-that-cost-them.html

The artisanal process for making Conestoga wagons may have a prehistory in canoemaking, but they also required substantial iron pieces for the brakes and tires at least. The Studebaker family acquired a curiosity about their family history in the early 20th Century, and the surviving records have been used in several corporate/family histories. The most recent being Bonesell's 2000 monograph from Stanford UP. The historians describe the Studebaker practice of settling sons on substantial farm estates with access to water power for milling and presumably operating a forge by focussing on Peter Studebaker's 100 acre farm, "Baker's Lookout," at Conococheague Creek, a tributary of the Potomac near Williamsport, Maryland, whose location I will now proceed to look up so that you don't have to: It's way up on the Maryland panhandle that juts into the Appalachians. The old inland colonial north south  road runs down the Creek on its way from Philadelphia to Baltimore, and although Peter did not practice factory-level assembly, he made enough money to move up to a 1500 acre patent with a still-standing colonial mansion. Note that the blog where I found this picture has a completely different early family history from that of Wikipedia, and that we do  not have secure dates for Peter Studebaker, who "died in the mid-1750s."

Cycling back to Braddock's defeat, Wiki reproduces the document TOE of Braddock's train that I might or might not have somewhere around. Benjamin Franklin organised a 150 wagon train with 1500 horses "from the locals." This is just 119 years after the founding of New Sweden! Archaeology establishes that Braddock's wagons were not Conestogas, lacking brakes and carrying smaller loads. Another antiquarian believes that th ere were 10,000 "Conestoga" wagons operating in Pennsylvania in 1750--75. Surviving jacks indicate that the wagons reached proper "Conestoga" size and presumably configuration in the 1840s, and were favoured on the Santa Fe Trail. As still an artisanal product, the Conestogas of the Santa Fe points us to the likelihood that the quotidian wagonwrighting of North America does not derive, or does not completely derive, from Europe, and, like so many other figures of his era, Peter Studebaker was not likely to have been an immigrant from Germany, and, if I had to guess, I would say that he came to wagonwrighting from the maritime world. Whether he was from beside the rolling Shenandoah before he sailed the world, I cannot say. 

It also bears noting that there is probably a relationship between the vagueness and implausibility of Eighteenth Century American family histories, and any reweighting of the demographic sources of colonial American population history to bring it closer in line with what we know happened. Just a thought as I watch Tennessee Ernie Ford sing Shenandoah. Looks uncannily like Ronald Reagan, doesn't he?