For want of roads, traveling by coach was slow and laborious, in all the north-western states. In 1840, the writer was treated to a five cents per mile ride across the State of Michigan, from Detroit to New Buffalo, now Benton Harbor, on Lake Michigan, a distance of two hundred miles. It was mid-winter, but not frozen hard, and required nearly three days and two nights of joltings and fatiguing monotony. The joys felt on arriving in sight of steamboat navigation are still fresh in the recollections of the past. Stage coaches had their centers for distribution in Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati, and were used in the principal mail lines over the state. Here too, the African skin became a perplexing question. The dictum of slavery had to be respected. If a colored person desired to be carried to a given point, he could prepay to such--his money was never refused on any account but for his color there was no time-table of departure or arrival. If no objections were raised by a passenger, he would at once be started on his way as an outside incumbrance. But if at any time while on the route, at a station or “change,” a passenger should be added who objected to riding in the same coach with a “_free nigger_,” as was no unusual thing, the colored passenger would be obliged to stop off and wait for a coach containing more liberal sentiments, or take the road on foot. This treatment on all the coach lines was witnessed so frequently that it ceased to call forth marks of disapproval. The principle in a milder form appears to have been transferred from the old stage-coach to the great railroad Cincinnati built South, by ignoring the constitution of the state, and as some thought at the time, subsidizing the Supreme Court. On this road the American born citizen with African blood, however remote the descent, or great the admixture, is refused admittance to coaches accorded to all other nationalities. Why? it is not necessary to state. The wagons for freight were large and strong, and, having a cover of white canvas, gave them the name of “Prairie Schooners.” They were usually drawn by six horses, and on long routes traveled in companies; and trains could be seen moving slowly along in line, all laden with merchandise of the East, or on their way East, carrying the products of Ohio industry to an eastern market. The style of the “schooner” and the wagons themselves have “been out of print” so long, not one appeared on exhibition at the Centennial World’s Fair. They were all of the same pattern, and as “near alike as peas;” differing in every respect from the emigrant wagon of later date. [Illustration: Prairie Schooner.]