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When the U. S. was very young,* wooden bowls were turned where "dish timber" grew and "minifers" (pins) came whence brass could be drawn into wire. New England resourcefulness produced "Yankee notions" which found a ready market with the agrarian Dutch, the simple Quakers, the luxury-loving Southerners. Bright young Yankees left home with a packful of Neighbor Brown's nutmegs, Neighbor Smith's pie tins and Uncle Timothy's rawhide "whangs" (shoe-laces). Bronson Alcott hit the road with tinware and almanacs instead of going to Yale. Worcester Polytechnic Institute was founded by John Boynton, onetime pack-peddler. The original soap Babbitt peddled razor strops. Benedict Arnold took woolens into Canada. Cherry rum, gingerbread and candy were the stock in trade of Phineas T. Barnum before, aged 25, he bought "161-year-old" Joyce Heth, "George Washington's nurse," and turned showman. Purloining a sheaf of his father's sermons, the notorious Stephen Burroughs tramped to one empty pulpit after another.
At the ports, one's profits on butter-stamps, axes, ballads, candles, sermons, maple sugar, hats, horse liniment and soft soap, could be put into indigo, poplin, clocks, Bibles, Jews-harps, carriages, beads. One swapped for a horse and, if one's reputation permitted, peddled home again to dazzle the village with a city wardrobe and watch-chain.
Westward of Philadelphia the distances were too long for peddlers, so freight creaked through the mountains to Pittsburgh at $3 per ton, on blue and red Conestoga wagons, the drivers rolling "stogies" between mudholes.
German-Jews outpeddled the Yankees, who turned storekeepers —Woolworths, Wanamakers. The canal, steamboat and railroad superseded wagoning. Religion grew organized, shutting out all but the most gorgeous spellbinders—Sundays and Sankeys, Moodies and McPhersons. Book peddlers had to learn the mass technique that flowered in Elbert Hubbard, Nelson Doubleday, E. Haldeman-Julius. All that remain of itinerant America are the scurrying hired droves who still "drum" everything from coal dust to white space; the glib "representatives" whose backslaps, hotel snoring and smoking-car anecdotes constitute an unmelodioua ground-buzz in the U. S. chorus.
Peddlers used to be called "Bible Leaf Joe," "Dew Drop," "Johnny Cup o' Tea," "Leather Breeches," "Dutch Molly," "Shoestring Pratt." Now they are plain "our-Mr.-Zerkle," "our-Mr.-Bragg." Along the road they used to meet, instead of small-time vaudeville folk, really queer dicks like David Wilbur, Rhode Island's gentle, weatherwise, forest wildman, whose passion was scratching signs on pumpkins; Dan Pratt, the sawbuck philosopher, whiskered butt of a score of colleges; Ann Lee and her twelve disciples who rumor said were self-made eunuchs; and Johnny Appleseed, wilderness pilgrim, with his body in a coffee sack, his head in a tin pot, who took Swedenborgian Bibles to the Indians and in 46 years of roaming planted fruitful apple pips over 100,000 square miles of Middle America.