When were covered wagons last used?

Answer 1

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?

Answer 2

People still use them in many parts of the world without modern roadways or where people are too-poor to use cars.

The West (USA, Europe,) stopped using them when trucks became cheap enough that they were affordable for farmers. In most parts of the United States this would be around the 1930's-40's.