Prices at the Dawn of the Gasoline Age, Dusk of the Equine

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selewis
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Some other examples of this sort:

The major streets in Salt Lake City are sufficiently wide to make a u-turn with a freight wagon.

Numerous fountains were originally for the relief of horses and mules.

Speaking of autos and tractors, something inchoate that has been jangling around in the back of my mind for years but that I never quite put my finger on until the other day as I was cursing, er, working on my Deere and facing the possible prospect of having the cylinders re-bored, is that despite the outward appearances that the two share- they both move and have engines and so, in a way, are both motor vehicles- there is a fundamental difference in their history and development. The car grew out of the carriage industry. There is a clear evolution from horse drawn to horseless in purpose, design, and even nomenclature. Not so the tractor, except for the engine it is not an offshoot or even a cousin of the automobile. It is an engine with wheels, as opposed to wheels with an engine; a moving factory, the machine aspect being the principal component. A subtle distinction perhaps, especially when one views a modern tractor, but basic and completely separate.

Sandy

PS: Neat, Tom.
Pat Holscher
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selewis wrote:Some other examples of this sort:

The major streets in Salt Lake City are sufficiently wide to make a u-turn with a freight wagon.
They are wide over there, but I had no idea why.
Pat Holscher
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Joseph Sullivan wrote:Pat:

Horses worked the streets of Chicago right through the 1940s. My father, who grew up near there, remembers them well. In fact, one of his grandfathers had a dairy outside the city and would use a horse-drawn delivery wagon to run his routes in the small towns there. I recall one or two horse-drawn vendors there in early 1960 when I lived there with my parents for two years in 1st and 2nd grade.

In the 1930s and 1940s my grandmother used a pony trap to go to town for groceries in the town of Barrington, outside Chicago. They had one automobile, and the trap. Her husband would have the car during the day. She enjoyed driving the trap, anyway. The pony was of a competitive nature and liked to race the fast Chicago Northwestern passenger trains. Everybody including the trainmen, grandma, and the pony thought this was great sport until grandpa found out. As grandma was a semi-invalid anyway, he was quite worried about the risks of racing locomotives and talked her out of it. Not being Tenbrooks or Longjohn, the pony did not BEAT the train, but he did give it a go.

My father-in-law inherited a 1,000 acres cotton farm in the Arkansas delta. He completed the conversion to tractors in the early 1950s. At one point he burned harnesses for 40 mules -- which had been the working complement, more or less, to keep that much land under cultivation.
Things like this make me wonder how much equine related employment there was in the first half of the 20th Century. Breeding horses and mules, feeding horses and mules, selling horse and mules, shoeing horses and mules. It seems like it would have been fairly extensive.
tmarsh
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I was fortunate to find a tractor that my grandfather had and it was a tractor that I drove as a kid. It was all in pieces when i recieved it and also recieved an original brochure that went with it. The model is a 1939 John Deere H that was a smaller tractor designed to be very econimical. The brochure states that it could pull anything 3 horses could and because of higher working speeds and steady untiring power gives you the daily output of 4-6 horses. No wasted cost when keeping animals that are not working and no extra hours require to care or feed the horses. Allso said that horse drawn equipment could be used easily. This was in 1939. I found it very intersting. Tractor has about 14 hp and a top speed of 7 mph and hand start. Tom
Pat Holscher
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I heard a radio interview that was surprisingly related to this topic (or at least I was surprised), in that it was of political satirist P. J. O'Rourke. O'Rourke frankly admits of a love of cars, but advanced the theory that the American love of cars is the transferred love of houses. He even started off his interview with a quote from Kipling, that being "Four things greater than all things are; Women and power and horses and war."

O'Rourke touched upon a couple of things that we've touched on here, but our focus is so unique, it was surprising to hear them elsewhere. One was that "all early cars were really off road vehicles", which is basically correct, and he touched on the expense entailed with early cars in relation to the expense of horses.

Another example, I guess, of "you heard it first on The Society of the Military Horse".
Pat Holscher
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Perhaps another example of how things once were in the early automobile, late horse, era:
Slow ambulance -- "Broke Her Arm.

"Mrs. Frank Jameson of Ervay was kicked on the left arm by a horse Sunday and sustained a fractured bone, and she passed through this city Monday on her way to the Douglas hospital, where she will have the fracture reduced. She was accompanied by her son Lawrence."
From the Casper Star Tribunes history column. The date was September 1909.
Pat Holscher
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Not really direction on point here, but sort of vaguely, given as this thread touches a lot on "how things were" and "how things are".

Some time over the weekend, our server here at work bit the dust. I don't really understand how servers work, but fortunately for us, our system was redundant, so we didn't loose anything.

What it did mean, however, is that we couldn't access our files, and we had no internet.

It'd be tempting to say that it reversed things to 1989, when I first walked in the door here for a summer job. At that time, we didn't have computers at all. We got them the following year, 1990, and there was one waiting for me when I started my first day of full time work here, but that wouldn't be true. In 1990, my brand new 286 wasn't connected to anything. If I wanted to save some work, I saved it to the C drive or saved it to a disk. If I needed it printed or worked on, I walked it to a secretary, who would work on it on her 286. In short, our computers at that time were fancy typewriters and file cabinets. I used a Dictaphone for most of the product I generated. I don't have a Dictaphone anymore, and my secretary doesn't have the equipment to transcribe a tape taken from one. In short, we were rendered almost inoperable. By the end of the day, most of the lawyers went home to work on their own machines, myself included.

Anyhow, it amazes me how seamlessly we have worked computers into our office here over the past 20 years. I suppose that's how it worked with automobiles too. You don't really notice it happening at the time, but by the time it is fully done, it's nearly impossible to operate without them, for good or ill.
Pat Holscher
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On a somewhat related topic to the above, in looking at these posts and related matters, I can't help but note how different the past was occupationally from the present.

This would be true in the US in all sorts of ways, of course, and even the relatively recent 1970s are considerably different from the present, occupationally. There aren't nearly the same number of stable manufacturing jobs there once were, for example, in the US. And of course everything involving computers is really pretty new, post 1980 or so I'd say.

What strikes me about the era we're talking about, however, say pre 1930 or so, is how many more occupations involved animals, and more specifically horses, in some ways.

What also strikes me about the earlier era, say pre 1940 in this instance, is how a person who might have had a strong interest in horses would have been able to work their way around to an occupation involving them. As Joe pointed out earlier somebody he was familiar with had become an Army artillerymen because he wanted a career involving horses. WWII general Terry Allen so identified with horses that he retired immediately after WWII as he didn't want to be in an Army that lacked them. Quite a change over a century really.
Pat Holscher
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I was listening to a Pod Cast on traffic bill reauthorization in which the speaker made an interesting claim related to this topic. This was that the introduction of the horse retired some huge amount of acreage from being horse pasturage (I forget the acreage, but it was vast). "Horse sprawl", he claimed, took up more acreage than Urban Sprawl.

I'm not too certain that I wouldn't prefer horse sprawl, but that was his claim.
Pat Holscher
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I just changed my Wyoming History Calendar on to the new page for December this morning and noted that this month's photograph is of a huge mule team, 20 mules or more, moving a heavy engine to the oilfield, from Casper here, in 1920. Really impressive photograph, made a little more impressive as I suspect that the team wsa the one that belonged to my wife's g-grandfather.

Anyhow, no real point here, other than to observe that at the dawn of the gasoline age, heavy hauling was still a horse deal. And that, once again, it's pretty evident that a much higher percentage of the population worked with animals than now do, which is of course obvious.
Pat Holscher
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Pat Holscher wrote:I just changed my Wyoming History Calendar on to the new page for December this morning and noted that this month's photograph is of a huge mule team, 20 mules or more, moving a heavy engine to the oilfield, from Casper here, in 1920. Really impressive photograph, made a little more impressive as I suspect that the team wsa the one that belonged to my wife's g-grandfather.

Anyhow, no real point here, other than to observe that at the dawn of the gasoline age, heavy hauling was still a horse deal. And that, once again, it's pretty evident that a much higher percentage of the population worked with animals than now do, which is of course obvious.
More and more, with examples like this, I'm impressed by how many people had careers involving animals in earlier eras.

Of course, some folks probably wished they didnt' have to deal with animals. Still, today, there's a great deal fewer. In some ways, I can't help but feel that something's been list in that regards.
Pat Holscher
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Pondering on changes again, the improvement in some things even over the past couple of decades is notable, transportation wise.

Wednesday I drove to Vernal Utah in my diesel pickup truck. The distance is 360 miles. We're having a cold snap, and the temperature during the trip rose up to about 11F, and sank occasionally to about -4F.

Thursday night I drove back. The temperature rose up to about 5F, and sank down to about -11F.

Not only would this not have been possible in the horse era, it really wouldn't have been until after WWII. I'm sure you could have driving from Casper to Vernal in 1935, but about 100 miles of it would have been on dirt roads, and you wouldn't have done it in winter (it's winter here). I suppose a person would have done this by train, taking the train here and there until you got there.

Driving back at night was really foolish on my part even now, and I won't try that again in winter, but it strikes me that even in my last diesel truck, a 96, I would have been concerned about the temperatures. Diesel's used to jell up. They must not do that much anymore.
selewis
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A good sleeping bag (I like down): never leave home without it. Even today, with cell phones and GPS, frequent patrols etc., it is naive to travel in the west, even in the summer months, without the means of survival.

Sandy
Pat Holscher
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selewis wrote:A good sleeping bag (I like down): never leave home without it. Even today, with cell phones and GPS, frequent patrols etc., it is naive to travel in the west, even in the summer months, without the means of survival.

Sandy
Very true. I'm actually packing Sorels around now, and a Canadian Army parka. You never know, and you never travel here in the winter far without seeing some car that's broken down by the side of the road.
Couvi
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It snowed in my home town in Louisiana yesterday! Where is this Global Warming we keep hearing about?
Pat Holscher
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Couvi wrote:It snowed in my home town in Louisiana yesterday! Where is this Global Warming we keep hearing about?
That is weird.
Pat Holscher
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Noted in the local newspapers history column as something happening this week, in 1909. This gives a bit of the flavor of early 20th Century transportation:
Natrona County Tribune, 1909

Digging out -- "Snowed In.

"W. L. Hobbs and Dr. J. W. Padgett left Lander over seven weeks ago on a three weeks' elk hunt, and the first of last week one of their horses returned, and their friends feared that they had perished in the deep snow in the mountains, and relief parties were organized to search for them. On Sunday night Dr. Padgett was brought into Lander by a trapper, and the doctor said that Mr. Hobbs was badly snowed in near Fremont Peak, there being three to five feet of snow all over the mountains. He said that Mr. Hobbs would not leave his horses, that he had plenty to eat and was clearing small patches of ground so his horses could feed, that there was no immediate danger of either the horses or Mr. Hobbs perishing."
wkambic
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Couvi wrote:It snowed in my home town in Louisiana yesterday! Where is this Global Warming we keep hearing about?
Have faith in Prince Albert. Would a Nobel Laureat lie to you????? :?:
Couvi
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wkambic wrote:
Couvi wrote:It snowed in my home town in Louisiana yesterday! Where is this Global Warming we keep hearing about?
Have faith in Prince Albert. Would a Nobel Laureat lie to you????? :?:
Bill,

To which Nobel Laureate do you refer, the fat white one or the skinny black one? :shock:
wkambic
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Couvi wrote:
wkambic wrote:
Couvi wrote:It snowed in my home town in Louisiana yesterday! Where is this Global Warming we keep hearing about?
Have faith in Prince Albert. Would a Nobel Laureat lie to you????? :?:
Bill,

To which Nobel Laureate do you refer, the fat white one or the skinny black one? :shock:
Sounds like "dealers choice" to me. :wink:
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