They would travel west or to a safe place.
Conestoga wagons
It is not wagon trains. Groups of covered wagons are called prairie schooners. But we can also call it wagon trains, I guess.
Covered wagons. See the link below.Better said wagon train
Usually it was two horses that pulled the covered wagon. ----- There were different kinds of covered wagons. The small ones might have been pulled by two horses, but the large ones needed more than that. The Conestoga wagons were big enough to carry six tons of cargo, and were pulled by teams of as many as eight horses, or a dozen oxen. There are links below.
I'm trying to find the best answer to the same question, but I can give you a partial answer. When my great-grandmother, who died in 1997, was young, her family moved from West Virginia to Oklahoma to take part in a government-sponsored homesteading project. There were no moving vans back then, so they travelled by covered wagon (or maybe wagons, I'm not sure). Sometimes she used to say "Conestoga Wagon", which is a slightly different thing, but the idea is still the same. Three years after they moved out there, the farm failed. They moved back east in the same wagons. That was in 1906, when there were cars, but very few roads and no highway system as we know it now. So there's your partial answer. The earliest, last date of covered wagons was 1906. But it was probably later than that, as sometimes people had to move across states where no highways existed into the 1920s and maybe even later. There are probably still people out there for whom travelling in covered wagons is a living memory. Not many, but a few. As an aside, as the eldest child of a big brood of siblings, my great-grandmother didn't actually ride in the wagons. She had to walk on the side of the wagon with the adults. At the age of ten, and then again at thirteen, she walked from West Virginia to Oklahoma, and then from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania. Gives you a good indication of how slow the wagons were, and on how tough our ancestors were, huh?
The Covered Wagons were made so the pioneers would not have to walk, and carry their belonging on their back. Some types of wagons are the Farm Imigrant Wagons, and the Conestoga Wagons. Also to get west.
Because the tops of the wagons reminded people of ships at sea.
conestoga wagons
Conestoga wagons
Conestoga wagons
conestoga wagons
They were called Covered Wagons.
Covered wagons were also known as "Prairie Schooners".
Covered wagons were the first SUV's. They moved both people and things. They made Americans mobile. The concept of Manifest destiny and the great migration to the west coast were possible because of these wagons.
The first groups of Latter-Day Saint (Mormon) Pioneers traveled west by covered wagons, mostly pulled by oxen. Later on, those who could not afford the expenses of wagons and oxen (mostly European immigrants) made handcarts, which are small, two-wheeled wagons pulled by men. You can see an image of a handcart here: http://www.clegghistory.org/imagesmag1.jpg
Another name for covered wagons is a prairie schooner.
Wagon train