US Rates of Travel

There are two famous graphs to show the rapid change in the rates of transportation in the US during the 1800s to 1840s. They are taken from the 1932 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States.

 

and were discussed in this blog post in December 2012. It would be more helpful of course to know how they constructed that information, so that similar maps could be built for Mormon missionary travel, or communication between Kirtland, OH and Far West, MS, to name but a few.

Routes of English Mormons in 1841

In the context of his discussion of Mormonism, Clark in his Gleanings reports a letter by John Hall, Rector of St Peter, in Ashtubla, Ohio, on the origin of Mormonism around Kirtland, Ohio, that gives an indication of the travel routes of newly arrived Mormon converts from England (pp.317-318).

John Hall in his letter dated June 5th, 1841, notes

It is indeed astonishing that so low an imposture should ever have been countenanced at all; much more so that hundreds of English converts should recently have come over to it, and that four hundred more should now be daily expected to take shipping at Buffalo, in order to pass up our Lakes to join the Western Mormons ! (p.318)

Literature

• Rev. John A. Clark, D.D., Gleanings by the Way, Philadelphia (Simon) -- New York (Carter), 1842.

1837 Travel literature for the Mississippi

In 1837, William Gilmann Lyford wrote a book entitled The western address directory, a travel guide to the main docking places and the merchants residing there, for those perusing the steam boats on the Mississippi river.

Seymour Dunbar's History of Travel in America

Dunbar's monumental, multi-volume History of Travel in America is only available in snippet view on Google books (e.g. here is volume #3).

But the Internet Archive has these volumes as well

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4

with downloadable PDFs. Now these volumes are from the University Library of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne; but why then does the internet archive also have Google scanned versions of these volumes (apparently from Harvard and Stanford Library), but not on Google books?

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4

And dont even look at the URL names for the Google book contributed versions ....

Maximillian von Wied as fellow traveller

Thanks to the Google book search features, I was able to procure a travel description of the interior US of A for the important years of 1832-1834, when Prinz Maximilian von Wied-Neuwied crossed through the continent and wrote a 500+ page travel description description. This should help flesh out some of the travel descriptions that I have gathered so far form the primary documents.

I was actually looking for Kennedy's "Early Days of Mormonism" (1888) and Linn's "The Story of the Mormons" (1902), both available at the Salomon Spalding info website, but neither of these are scanned in Google books.