Build Your Wagon

Season 4 Episode 7 | 24m 16sVideo has Closed Captions

We discuss the classic American wagon and how it compares to modern vehicles.

We discuss the various styles and types of carriages, carts and wagons and how they compare to modern vehicles, and we visit with a current day craftsman who restores and constructs these classic conveyances.

Aired 04/28/2024

Cottonwood Connection

Build Your Wagon

Season 4 Episode 7 | 24m 16sVideo has Closed Captions

Aired 04/28/2024

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Culture

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Build Your Wagon
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Karl Benz applied for his patent for the first gas-powered automobile in 1886. Henry Ford dreamed of making the automobile accessible to all when he introduced the Model T in 1908. These events radically changed personal transportation. Before this, the family car, the pickup, the farm truck... Well, they were all wagons. [music] Up until the early 20th century, as far as up until about the 1920s, a lot of people still had wagons and used them on the farm because they had horses and mules as draft animals. Some, even in the 1890s in western Kansas, were using oxen. Now, the wagons at Cottonwood Ranch now are the "rolling stock" as it is usually called, belong to the Friends of the Cottonwood Ranch. And so we have a few of the various representative types, but not all of them. There are a lot of different styles around, some of them very light, and we can kind of compare those today to what we might have or see on the streets. We might have, we might see a sports car. So we have a buggy that represents that. Pulled by one horse, not a lot of horsepower was needed for this, but a small seat. So it could seat three, but generally two. So this is what you might take Saturday night to a date. It traveled fast, it was quiet, and it was light. I'll give you a demonstration of how light it is. These are the shafts that doesn't have a tongue, so once one horse would fit in here where I am, and you can see that I can pull it without too much strain. But there are a lot of buggy wrecks because you can turn these wheels, and if you turn too short with the horse or the horse gets away, it makes it top-heavy and they tip very easily. And so you had to be careful. Hopefully you had a fairly well-trained horse that didn't shy a lot. But that's why too, when you see the movies and stuff with the horses, they have these shields behind their eyes. They're called blinders because some horses, although you use them a lot, you didn't want them to see what was going on behind them. So this might be the sports car. On a date, people were very conscientious about what you wanted to impress your date. And so you might have it all cleaned up, the buggy all cleaned up. You might even take some snacks because there's a little trunk behind here because you spent a lot of time in a buggy going to dances and stuff or church socials or box suppers at the schools. You'd have it all cleaned up like somebody would detail in a car. You'd have it all spiffy so her dress wouldn't get dirty or anything. You'd probably have the wheels all cleaned off and polished, and you'd even curry your horses and brush them down so they looked the best they could. And even sometimes do the mane of the horse and the tail. You'd have it all brushed out. But you might use something like fish oil or some would use kerosene but fish oil is more popular and better for the horse. It's to work that into the mane and the tail hairs so it would be all shiny and hang really nice. And so you wanted the horses to have a good hairstyle and you want your horse looking good. They were fairly soft riding because they had springs, not only a soft seat, but you can see the springs where they would bounce. So they're more comfortable than a lot of things. And even on the range, a lot of cattlemen who were taking care of herds or were the owners of the ranch or something, they called them buggy bosses because rather than riding horseback, they had a buggy because they could get it about anywhere with the horse. It was a lot easier on them. And these could travel a lot. It wouldn't be unusual for a very good horse that was bred to do it and in good condition to travel 50 miles a day pulling a buggy. They couldn't do that every day, but they could a while because they'd run out of gas and you'd have to rest them up. A lot of these were trotting horses so you could trot a long ways. The trot is the fastest, most ground eating, consistent way to travel other than a walk is slower and a gallop is too stressful. The horses can't do that for very long. But a trot, they can go. You're talking about steel and wood on these, no internal combustion. So you had to get them fairly precise because we can turn this and see that the buggy wheels, the spokes of them are very light. Now they're heavier than a bicycle, but they're fairly durable. And these may have been out of oak or hickory or even if they could get it, maybe mahogany. And so they were very tough and the tires on them, the outside steel rim is very narrow. So that adds to the easy of pulling them if the ground is dry because going through deep mud or deep snow, these would sink in a lot more. So this is what would be called a buckboard in most cases. This is a two horse deal and this would be the double tree. And these double trees are attached on. And so the tugs or sometimes called the traces of the horse would attach to this. But they were usually light leather and going. But this is also a very light rig. Also, this one has a brake. The buggy did not have a brake, but this one does. And this is a foot brake. And so the driver sitting on the right could press down on her brake and it puts resistance against the back wheels on both sides. So if you want to take the family to town because you could convert these and take out the back seat and make a utility vehicle out of it. If you had a light load of posts or something like that and went to town to get groceries, they'd haul six at least in the seats and put stuff underneath. It's kind of a little cute flatbed pickup sort of thing. So there's the pickup. And then to get bigger, you had what we could consider. This is a chuck wagon. And it was the type that would be in western Kansas for trail drives or roundups. It isn't the most elaborate because the early chuck wagons were made by Studebaker Company. And they were big wagons and they sold a lot of them. They had some of them had iron axles in them, had big wide tires on them. This one only has small tires on it. But so the big chuck wagons and big freight wagons had wide tires so it wouldn't sink in. So we have a chuck wagon and these wagons are modified out in western Kansas for roundups and trail drives of only, you know, maybe 30 or 40 miles. You had your farm wagon, so you converted it into a food wagon. So you compare these to food wagons that you had in some of the towns now or see in the summertime around beaches and stuff like that. So they modified this because the chuck box in the back could be removed. The cover could be taken off this. And so the rest of the time you could haul, say, posts in it or wheat or something like this. But these are at least two horse wagons because the tongues, they're all about the same length on these tongues. But you would add another tongue on and chain it to the front part. For instance, if we went with four horses and mules, we could attach another short tongue that just kind of hung, was supported by the harness and stuff, onto this and or even change it going through. It depends on what your preference was. And so the front two horses might be pulling by chain or a tongue, but all the change or the tongues would be attached to this. So when you see that and you see such things as pictures of the 20 mule teams, those were long tongues and then it was chained. And the mules would learn to step over the chains as you turn the corner. And so here I talked about 20 mule team. OK, the team consisted of 20 mules. Most people think that a team is two horses. It is. But it can be.

So you have the single horse, the two horse team and two horses are called a span. And then the 20 mule team are 20 mules that act as one team or 10 spans of mules out there. So a four horse team, that's four horses that pull together. A two horse team is a span, is two pulled together where you could put them all out. And even with the farm machinery, you had to have a lot of horses because the horses, in a sense, would run out of gas. They'd get tired.

They can't go all day in most cases and pull a heavy load. The buggies were pretty light. And so one horse could go in. If you had a horse in good condition, most horses could pull a buggy easier than it was for a horse to carry a single rider and trot. And you could wear out the back of the horse and stuff and the buggy didn't. And so you had good legs and horses bred or selected to pull the buggies. And then we have what is a bigger standard of wagon. And this would be your basic farm wagon.

You can see that the chuck wagon and the big wagon are about the same size because you can add side boards on to this farther up. And the seat is on the inside. This would have a seat on it too because you have the seats on these. And they're a spring seat, but they aren't very comfortable. They don't spring a whole lot. It isn't like riding a bucket seat.

And so you'd want those fairly well padded to be able to be comfortable, especially for a while. We have the company of International Harvest still in existence that makes a lot of farm equipment and stuff. Well, a wagon was farm equipment.

So this is a big wagon. It could all, not a lot of wheat, but you didn't cut as much as we do now. They varied, but I think maybe a hundred bushels. The end gates on them had them if you had grain that you could open this up. But some of them you had and probably this one did at one time too. You put a machine on here and fill it full of wheat, the broadcast wheat or oats. And it would be joined to the wagon wheel.

So as a wagon is turned, you had a propeller just like on your push, fertilizer spreaders or seeders. That would broadcast the grain. The wagons were driven usually with the driver on the right side of the wagon so he could control the brake. And slow the wagon down on a slope or even stop the wagon. Throughout there were companies that built wagons that had kind of a mass production thing going. And so that's where we get International Harvester wagons. We have the other wagons by a lot of famous names, Studebaker and others. But every blacksmith could work on a wagon.

Usually every blacksmith could make wheels and put new tires on them and do small repairs. But for the rest of the woodwork, they didn't. Everybody could kind of work on them.

You could do a lot of this work at home if you were a skilled blacksmith and almost every farm had a blacksmith shop on it. But now we have people reproducing these wagons and doing it extremely well. In fact, northwest of the Cottonwood Ranch, about 100 miles at Bird City, we have a group up there making all sorts of wagons and restoring wagons and wheels and all sorts of things. Well, I'm Mike McGilvray. We've been building and restoring wagons and wagon wheels for over 30 years. This is one of our little pride and joys right here.

This is in Bird City in the Old Threshers building. It's a roof seat brake.

It was built off of a Brewster plans. Brewster was a company in New York that made these. And we got an original set of plans for him and built everything on it.

Did the upholstery work, everything. And my son was a blacksmith and he did all the blacksmiths work on this. And this was all round steel. And he run this through a forge and he made a swedge and he turned it into oval steel so it looked like the original steel was all oval steel. So he made this.

This went from round to oval. Bend all of that out.

We cast these.

These are aluminum. The only thing we bought for it was the springs and the axles. The rest of it we made. This we started on the body first and my son started building the undercarriage. Really I don't think we went out of our way to start a business.

It just kind of happened. Well we bought a team of Belgian mares.

And then we started showing Clydesdales and we wanted a hitch wagon. And so I thought I could make one.

So we made one and I just started getting jobs to do. People saw what we did and it just, we started rebuilding wheels for people. When we moved down here we bought all the equipment so we could build all the wheel parts here. Most of the parts used to come from the Amish back east and I thought I could make all the parts as easy as they could. I went back and had an Amish friend in Shipshawana.

He took me through the shop and told me what to buy. And we just bought those tools and the bender that we have out in the shop. We bought that from an Amish wheel ride in Kentucky and drove clear to Kentucky and drug it up here. We have a steamer there which amounts to a 12 foot piece of aluminum irrigation pipe with a 55 gallon drum sitting on top of a turkey cooker. And we put enough steam into that.

We have it plugged on one end and then we use a real fancy plug on the other end. It's an old pillow to keep the heat in and you need to pick wood that's straight grained. Anything that the grain runs out of you're usually going to make firewood out of it. You steam it for an hour an inch so usually it's under steam like all the two inch stuff we've been in the steamer for at least two hours, sometimes longer. And then you put compression on the, that bender has two hydraulic cylinders to put compression on the wood. Because when you're bending wood you want it to compress into itself. It doesn't stretch, it has to compress. And we put it in a strap and try and cut the wood the same size as the strap, put in pressure on it, then there's down pressure from that form and then it just bends up around that form. The way it works to get something to bend, if you look underneath there, it's got this, this is a spring steel that lays on top of these. And these two pieces bend out and the spring steel goes up against your wood and your form. And this is your form, you put your wood in to bend it around but you end up getting a half circle. And it'll bend four of those at a time and that's enough for two back wheels. It'll bend a piece of two inch wood like there's nothing to it. It'll also, if it's not steamed enough, it'll turn it into splinters. We've broke a little wood. I'd say that when you're bending a lot of fellies you're going to have about a 10% failure. And then we have a spoke, well it's pattern lathe but it does all our spokes. We have your hub, which is the hub just like a hub on a car or anything else. And then you have your spokes. The wood rim is called a fellow and then you have the steel band on there. When we're putting the steel on we usually make it, you'll measure it and then you make the steel a quarter inch smaller round. We heat it in a fire, put it on there, cool it and then when it shrinks down it's tight. Well we built a stagecoach that is Fort Wallace. It was a nice project but it's off of an original set of plans too. There's nothing straight on it, everything is, we bent all the wood that went in it. The floor is curved this way, the sides are bowed out. There's a lot of hours.

I figured there's a thousand hours in it. The one at Fort Wallace is off of Abbot Downing plans. I don't know where we bought them but we got the plans.

I think they maybe came from the Smithsonian, someplace like that. Abbot and Downing made all the stagecoaches that, well they made Butterfield but they also made all the for Wells Fargo. And Wells Fargo got a train load of those things into Cheyenne. When they're bringing the railroad through, that's where the end of the line was, was Cheyenne at the time and they got a train load of them and then they went out all over the west from there. There's so many hours in one and so much detail. Just the sides are mirror images of each other. So the left side will go on the right side but you build that and then you build the rest of the cabinet. We built a mud wagon for Fort Larned, which is a version stagecoach. It's covered with canvas rather than being all covered with wood and having windows. You just have canvas flaps.

But it sits down there at Fort Larnard right now. Well we don't just build but we also restore wagons and we've restored sheep camps and old wagons. We did an army ambulance, a restoration on an army ambulance a few years ago. And the detail on that, there were places in it to hang stretchers up above. So you could either set six people on a side or else you could put four people on stretchers. Two down below and two up above. We did a restoration on an army escort wagon for Fort Riley for the Mounted Color Guard. And they brought us the original one that had been stored outside in I think South Carolina for the last 25 or 30 years. And they brought it up and we redid it. And you have to build with the army, you have to build the specs. So it had to have, the undercarriage had to be white oak and the box all had to be red oak. So there's a lot more work in restoring one than there is building a new one. This is a restoration of a sheep wagon for a guy in Wyoming. We're using the old one here as a pattern so that everything will be pretty much the same as the original sheep wagon. Yeah, you get like spots like right here where the woods all rotted out. It's just, it's too far gone by the time you tear it apart, all apart, you might as well build it brand new. This one we found some markings on it, looks like it was made in what, 1918. And so it's set out in a lot of weather. There's a lot of detail that people don't realize when you're building an old wagon to build it right. You use all square bolts and you use rivets and getting the dimensions right. An old original wagon is worth a lot of money. I like to marry the steel to the wood. When you put a wheel together and it's kind of loose and sloppy looking and you put the tire on it and everything comes together and it's tight and you can bounce it off of a concrete floor. It's like a quarter, it's enjoyable. And you learn something I don't think I've ever built a set of wheels that I haven't learned something on. They're all different. I don't know, it's enjoyable. It's an art form. They do excellent work. They do it quite well and are very authentic on what they do as far as the outcome. It's nice to see the finished project and have it turn out looking like this. It takes a lot of hours to make something that looks this nice. They have the look and the feel of what the wagons were 150 years ago. [MUSIC] [BLANK-_AUDIO]