covered wagon

n.
A large wagon covered with an arched canvas top, used especially by American pioneers for prairie travel.

Origin: 1745

The English defined it as a wagon with a tilt, tilt being "a canvas awning or cover." We Americans just covered our wagons and gave them the plain descriptive name covered wagon. In 1745, New Englanders who sailed north to Cape Breton Island and negotiated the surrender of the French Canadian fortress of Louisbourg mentioned covered wagons in their conditions: "That the commander in chief now in Garrison shall have liberty to send off covered waggons to be inspected only by one officer of ours."

In the nineteenth century, covered wagons earned renown as they carried pioneers across the Great Plains and the Rockies to settle in Oregon and California. They were also known as Conestoga wagons (1750) because they were first manufactured in the Pennsylvania town of Conestoga and prairie schooners (1841) because they looked like ships sailing through the tall grass.

And in the twentieth century, The Covered Wagon, an epic silent film of 1923 made from Emerson Hough's best-selling novel of the previous year, not only established the genre of the movie Western but also ensured that covered wagon would remain a familiar term to modern Americans. When the first aircraft carriers were constructed in that decade by putting tops on warships, they too were honored with the nickname covered wagon.

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Covered Wagon, the means of transcontinental transportation used for two centuries of American history. The covered wagon was fundamentally a wagon box with a framework of hoop-shaped slats over which a canvas tent was stretched to make a "covered" wagon. Each wagon was drawn by several teams of horses, mules, or oxen. Many were boat shaped with oarlocks so they might be floated over streams, the animals swimming across.

Although derived from the Conestoga wagons built in Lancaster, Pa., in the early eighteenth century, the covered wagon used by emigrants on the Oregon and California trails differed in size, design, and purpose. Conestoga wagons were primarily designed to haul heavy goods for trade along the eastern coast, while smaller covered wagons were the vehicle of choice for emigrant groups headed to western destinations.

Emigrants using covered wagons assembled at such points west of the Missouri River as Independence, Mo., and Council Grove, Kans., and organized into caravans—called Wagon Trains—for companionship and protection. Emigrants usually took between four and six months to make the two-thousand-mile trek that lay between the Missouri and the Pacific Ocean. Although the threat of Indian attack was small, emigrants would often draw their wagons into a circle to serve as a corral for their animals and post sentinels to guard against livestock raids. Covered wagons remain in museums, including the Conestoga Wagon original at Pittsburgh, Pa., and Ezra Meeker's Prairie Schooner at Tacoma, Wash.

Bibliography

Dunbar, Seymour. History of Travel in America. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1915.

Winther, Oscar Osborn. The Transportation Frontier: Trans-Mississippi West, 1865–1890. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.

—Keith Clark/F. B.

A typical conveyance for settlers moving west with their belongings. It was drawn by horses or oxen and equipped with a canvas cover, often supported by hoops, to keep off rain.

Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: a large wagon with broad wheels and an arched canvas top; used by the United States pioneers to cross the prairies in the 19th century
  Synonyms: Conestoga wagon, Conestoga, prairie wagon, prairie schooner

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