This article deals with stagecoaches from an American and European perspective, and a later article will consider other parts of the world, for the stagecoach was not a purely European or American development.
Stagecoaches, drawn by horses or mules (primarily), were the most important means of long-distance, commercial, cross-country transportation in the 18th and 19th centuries - at least before the arrival of the railways. They had existed, in a limited way, in the 17th century, and they did not completely vanish until the early 20th century. The heyday of travel by coach, however, was the period 1780-1880, when "express" companies developed stage lines to win lucrative government mail contracts. This era began with the development of Europe's first good road systems, and ended with the intensification of railway lines in the late 19th century.
Even if you owned your own private coach, chances are you probably would not take it across an entire continent any more than you would go off-roading in Baja with a Porsche. Private coaches were for sedate, in-town and local travel, and were simply not rugged enough to stand up to the rigors of long, tightly-scheduled journeys that required maintaining maximum speeds over roads that often left much to be desired. Furthermore, to travel a long distance by coach, you really needed to change teams frequently. Horses, after all, are living beings with feelings: if they are driven hard, all day, harnessed to a heavy vehicle, their performance collapses, and they can even die from the stress and strain, which breaks their health.
A stage line required numerous teams of horses that would be stationed at intervals along a particular route, with paddocks, barns, fodder, and hostlers ready to switch teams whenever a coach came in. The horn blown by the "messenger," or "guard," who sat with the driver, was used to give the crew at the way-station a "heads-up," so that they could have the new team ready. When John "Doc" Holliday's Overland Mail and later Wells Fargo & Co. Express operated the Central Overland staging route across the United States in the 1860s, they had way-stations, called "swing-stations," all along the route at roughly 10-16 mile intervals. Each station maintained at least 2-3 replacement teams, usually of 6 horses each, handling 1-2 stagecoaches traveling in each direction daily, including Sundays. It took 3-4 minutes to switch teams, but the telegraph was used, in this case, to let hostlers at the next station know a coach was on its way. In 1867, between Virginia City, Nevada, and North Platte, Nebraska, there were some 120 stations serving the Overland expresses, but as soon as a printed list was published, old stations were burned or moved, and new ones built. The route was constantly being shifted and improved to shorten the mileage or maximize business.
In Europe, way-stations were usually "coaching inns," located along the main roads, which often served multiple lines from crossroads. England had its Royal Mail coach lines, which developed from the late 1780s on, while Europe had a similar system of "diligences." When railways began to be built in Europe, the staging companies were reorganized to provide local and regional transport from train stations, or connections between the two ends of an incomplete railway line. Thus, a European journey of 100 or more miles in the 19th century might begin with a 3-4 hour ride aboard a train, and end with a 2 hour diligence ride covering only 16 miles.
So, how quickly could a stagecoach travel? That is the question many people ask. Well, I investigated this problem, as part of a research project I'm working on, and I discovered that most of the advice posted online is either wrong or very misleading.
One clue as to the "speed" along a particular staging route is the distance between stations. One can find lists of stations in 18th and 19th century guidebooks, but usually only the first vehicle of the day was scheduled, with actual arrival times at intervening stops varying. However, there was an expectation on the Central Overland route that stagecoaches could cover 112 miles a day, at a minimum, with 125-130 miles per day being the reality. "Home-stations," where travelers could find a meal and a place to eat, were situated at roughly 50-mile intervals. In general, coachmen started out at dawn, usually at 6 a.m., driving until sundown, with 30-minute halts for meals. Passengers' orders were telegraphed ahead so that the food would be ready to eat within 10 minutes of arrival. If they were running late, however, coaches would press on round-the-clock if necessary. In general, though, if we assume a daily distance of about 125 miles over the course of about 11 hours (subtracting time for meals and team-changing), we get an average speed of 11.3 mph.
If you get in your car and drive at a speed of 11 mph, you will see just how slow that feels to a modern person accustomed to much higher speeds. However, if you have ever driven on a washed-out road that is mainly jumbled rocks, you will realize quickly enough that even 5-6 mph, under those conditions, seems recklessly fast. The vehicle lurches from one tipping rock to another, reeling from side to side. Add to this the fact that the driver of a stagecoach is perched 6-7 feet off the ground, managing the lines of a team of six horses, who are living creatures and not an instantly-responsive engine, and you begin to realize that 11 mph is actually quite respectable. It was also the average.
Many online sources will tell you that the average speed of a stagecoach was 3-5 mph, but this was actually the very slowest a coach might travel, up an extremely steep grade on a rough road. A fully-loaded Concord coach of the 1860s weighed 2-3 tons, while the collective weight of a 6-horse team was a little over 3 tons. A six-horse team generates incredible pulling-power, hitched to a wheeled vehicle, on grades of up to 4 percent, but the same team will suffer significant performance losses, in terms of speed, haulage, and endurance, on steeper grades. In general, however, horses cannot draw a vehicle up a grade of more than 10 percent, and most roads used by stagecoaches were built so that grades steeper than 4 percent were all but eliminated. In fact, since there was such a significant loss of speed on hills, it was more efficient to wind the road around hills and mountains. To ease the burden on their teams, furthermore, most staging lines used lighter vehicles, called "mudwagons" in the U.S., on rugged or mountainous stretches. On very steep hills, passengers were usually told to get out and walk, since this could take half a ton of stress or more off the horses.
In the winter of 1867, one of the worst of the entire 19th century, an English immigrant to America named Edward H. Hall traveled from San Francisco to New York between March 20 and April 6 via the Central Overland route. Thus, even with 6-7 feet of snow on the Nebraska prairies, Hall made his stagecoach journey between the Sierra Nevada and North Platte, the railhead of the Union Pacific, in about 10 days, achieving an average speed of 10 mph. (The remaining days were spent traveling by rail or steamboat). Nor was Hall traveling constantly during that time, for he found time to give a lecture on the future of the West while passing through Salt Lake City. Fortunately, Hall was a well-known writer of immigrants' guidebooks and a public speaker, and his progress can be tracked by newspaper articles. How did Hall accomplish this in the dead of winter, with 15-20 foot snow drifts in the Sierra Nevada? Well, most stagecoaches were converted into sleighs during the winter, substituting runners for wheels.
Hall was eager to return to New York quickly, for reasons I have not yet been able to determine. We know this because he opted to travel overland after missing a steamship connection. Apparently, he could not wait even five days for the next steamship that would have allowed him to reach New York, via Nicaragua. If you are writing a Western, you may want to be aware that the cross-country stagecoach was fast, but not cheap. It was incredibly uncomfortable and much more expensive than traveling by sea. In fact, prior to the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, the majority of people traveling between the East Coast and the Pacific traveled by steamer, via Panama, which was cheaper and more comfortable, although slower and not always safer. Furthermore, because stagecoach travel was rough - intended mainly for short-distance travelers - tickets were good for a month, giving those who "wanted to see the West" plenty of opportunities to break their journey in places like Denver, Salt Lake City, Austin, or Virginia City.
As far as I can tell, based on my research, most stagecoaches - even in the worst season of the year - traveled 10-15 mph, but this depended on the nature of the terrain, the condition and grade of the road, and the weather. It should be noted, however, that achieving these speeds had a high cost: stage line horses were literally driven to death. A 10-12 mile run would leave well-groomed animals looking haggard, and few of the animals could stand more than two or three years of such punishment before they were either worn out or dying.
I would stress that the speed of stagecoaches probably increased between the 1780s and the 1880s due to improvements in coach design and in roads. By the 1850s, stagecoach designers - especially in the U.S. - were beginning to appreciate the importance of aerodynamic shape, building rounded coaches rather than boxy ones. They also understood the importance of precise wheel balance, alignment, and angling, and the use of lightweight materials. Then there were the roads. Even in the wild West, roads were kept in fairly good repair. If a section of road was washed out or damaged, a crew would be sent out to make repairs, even if they were only crude ones. Period photographs, in fact, reveal that many well-traveled wilderness roads were often in remarkably good shape. In more populated areas, where macadamization was the norm, the roads were 19th century state-of-the-art. The secret of a macadamized road is that it levels and compacts with use, the small pebbles making up the surface redistributing themselves beneath each new vehicle. In general, by the 1860s, if a road was a crucial line of communication, it was upgraded as much as possible and kept in good condition, often by a private company that was allowed to charge a toll.
We have a natural tendency, I think, to over-correct when imagining the speed of transportation in the past - we slow things down too much. However, it is important to note that people in the past had a different relationship with time and speed than we do. In Victorian cities, the "speed limit" for cabs and coaches was 3-5 mph, which is sensible when you have to try to stop a team of horses. However, we can be quite sure this 19th century speed limit was broken all the time, or the newspapers of the period would not be filled, as they are, with blurbs announcing that so-and-so was struck down and run over by a wagon or coach. If 3-5 mph was considered a safe in-town speed, 10 mph was the norm on the "highway," outside cities, and we can assume that this speed was exceeded, as well.
People of the mid-19th century generally did not comment on the slowness of stagecoaches except when comparing them with steam trains, which usually traveled at speeds of between 25 and 40 mph in the 1860s. Indeed, it was much more common for Victorian writers to go on, often at length, about the "reckless speed" and "dangerous driving" of coachmen, especially on a down-hill run. Other travelers' narratives speak of the pleasure of getting out to walk, over rough ground, because it offered an opportunity to see the land in detail. Thus, from the perspective of many Victorian travelers, the landscape seemed to be "rushing" past - fast enough, apparently, to be an indistinct blur. This seems to suggest that stagecoaches often achieved speeds close to 15 mph on good roads.
