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Pikes and Paths
Land travel in the 1840s, especially on the frontier, was hard work. Generally speaking, people traveled from necessity, not for pleasure. Travel was physically draining, dangerous, and dirty, and there were many discomforts and delays. The heavy rains and spring thaws transformed the dirty roads of Illinois into deep mud, broken here and there by ponds of standing water hiding holes that travelers could only guess the depth of. When Brigham Young and the other apostles returned to Nauvoo by stage in 1844 after the death of Joseph Smith, they had to walk around the mud holes and in places had to pry out the embedded wheels of their stagecoach. In that same year another traveler, riding in a coach from St. Louis across Illinois to Chicago, described his trip:
"Never before saw such a road. We were tossed about like tennis-balls in the coach; and obliged to get out I know not how often, to avoid the danger of being overturned. We then went literally through thick and thin, in the road and out of the road, through standing or trodden-down grass; till sprinkled and spattered with all kinds of soil, exhausted and dripping with perspiration, we took our places again in the thumping, jolting, rickety vehicle. No one would risk traveling at night under such circumstances; we lodged therefore in Juliett."
One frontier tale tells of a half-mile stretch on a "highway" that was in such unexpectedly good condition that a delighted traveler drove his buggy back and forth all day "to get the good out of it."
At times Nauvoo was nearly isolated. During a rainy spell in the summer of 1844, Bathsheba Smith wrote to her husband, George, who was away on a mission, "The roads have been so bad, the bridges are most all washed away that it is all most impossable to go to or come from Messedonia [Macedonia] here."
[In Old Nauvoo
River Road Bridge
The Nauvoo period was an era of improving transportation. By the end of the 1830s, distance was starting to be measured in hours rather than in miles. For example, according to Buley, in 1839 the distance from New York to Cleveland was eighty-four hours and from Cleveland to Chicago, ninety-six hours. Such travel time, however, was most likely under ideal conditions with travelers using what railroads were available. All too often the conditions were not ideal and railroads were not available, especially in frontier Illinois. The best road through Nauvoo was the River Road, connecting Quincy to the south with Rock Island to the north. There were two other well-traveled roads into Nauvoo: one directly west from LaHarpe, twenty miles away, and another, northwest from Carthage eighteen miles away. A company of Latter-day Saints, including diarist Warren Foote, traveled along this road in September 1841 to attend conference in Nauvoo: "I started today in company with E. Allen and wife for Nauvoo to attend the Semi Annual Conference. We went by the way of Carthage. . . . About sunrise it began to rain as we were passing through Carthage. This place is 18 miles from Nauvoo. . . . It rained all day, and we did not get to Nauvoo until 10 o'clock at night."