Stagecoach Facts

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A stagecoach is a four-wheeled public transport coach used to carry paying passengers and light packages on journeys long enough to need a change of horses. It is strongly sprung and generally drawn by four horses, although some versions are drawn by six horses.

Commonly used before steam-powered rail transport was available, a stagecoach made long scheduled trips using stage stations, or posts where the stagecoach's horses would be replaced by fresh horses. The business of running stagecoaches or the act of journeying in them was known as staging.

Some familiar images of the stagecoach are that of a Royal Mail coach passing through a turnpike gate, a Dickensian passenger coach covered in snow pulling up at a coaching inn, a highwayman demanding a coach to "stand and deliver," and a Wells Fargo stagecoach arriving at or leaving a Wild West town. The yard of ale drinking glass is associated by legend with stagecoach drivers, though it was mainly used for drinking feats and special toasts.

The stagecoach was a closed four-wheeled vehicle drawn by horses or hard-going mules. It was regularly used as a public conveyance on an established route usually to a regular schedule. Spent horses were replaced with fresh horses at stage stations, posts, or relays.

In addition to the stage driver or coachman who guided the vehicle, a shotgun messenger armed with a coach gun might travel as a guard beside him. From here comes the origin of the phrase "riding shotgun".

 A simplified and lightened vehicle known as a stage wagon, mud-coach, or mud-wagon, was used in the United States under difficult conditions. A canvas-topped wagon had a lower center of gravity, and it could not be loaded on the roof with heavy freight or passengers as an enclosed coach so often was. 

The novelty of this method of transport excited much controversy at the time. One pamphleteer denounced the stagecoach as a "great evil [...] mischievous to trade and destructive to the public health". Another writer, however, argued that:

"Besides the excellent arrangement of conveying men and letters on horseback, there is of late such an admirable commodiousness, both for men and women, to travel from London to the principal towns in the country, that the like hath not been known in the world, and that is by stage-coaches, wherein any one may be transported to any place, sheltered from foul weather and foul ways; free from endamaging of one's health and one's body by the hard jogging or over-violent motion; and this not only at a low price (about a shilling for every five miles [8 km]) but with such velocity and speed in one hour, as that the posts in some foreign countries make in a day."

— Angliæ Notitia: Or the Present State of England, Edward Chamberlayne, 1649

Source: Wikipedia