Conestoga Wagons in Braddock's Campaign, 1755

More than 200 years have passed since the Pennsylvania farm wagon, the ancestral form of the Conestoga wagon, first won attention through military service in the French and Indian War. These early wagons, while not generally so well known, were the forerunners of the more popular Conestoga freighter of the post Revolutionary period and also of the swaying, jolting prairie schooners that more recently carried hopeful immigrants to the western territories.