Time in the Old West

[Masada]

How long did it take to do stuff in the Old West?

If I sent a letter from Dodge City to New York, how long did it take to arrive?

If I sent a letter to London from Dodge City, how long did it take?

How long did it take to walk across Kansas?

How long to ride across Kansas?

If I ordered a new Colt Thunderer, how long did it take to ship?

Have folks experience more "downtime" in their old west games?

 

[Stormborn]

Can't answer your specifics, but you might want to look at
GURPS Old West - don't have this one, but if it is on par with other GURPS books it will have tons of real world info on running a game in the setting.
http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/OldWest/

 

[Bobitron]

The gang at DHR would be best suited to answer these sort of questions, I think. Make a thread over there. The Shaman here on EN World might have some good insight as well.

 

[Nuclear Platypus]

Well I found this (http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/pxpress.html) about the Pony Express. According to it, Wells Fargo took 20 days to get from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento while the Pony Express could do it in 10 days.

Check up on railroads but I think this was well before Union Pacific and Central Pacific met up (1869?) so however long it took to get from London to somewhere on the East Coast (a couple of weeks for steam ships?) then maybe a day for the train to deliver from New York (probably) to St Joseph. So, maybe 30 days for a letter to get from London to Sacramento?

Unfortunately that has nothing to do with your questions.

Dodge City to New York, a couple of days if the railroad connected the two by then. I have no idea how fast the trains travelled (probably around 60 mph), the exact distance and how long. Ditto for New York to Dodge City I guess. The American No. 1, a 4-4-0, debuted in 1832 so its certainly possible (http://www.sdrm.org/history/timeline/).

London to Dodge City might be what I suggested earlier. A couple of weeks to cross the ocean, maybe less, then another day or two to get there.

According to this site (http://www.e-referencedesk.com/resources/almanac/kansas.html), Kansas is 400 miles wide so figure your walking or riding speeds. So quoting from the Pony Express site above:

"A rider would pick it from his predecessor and ride forth sixty miles at top speed to the point where his "relief" awaited him, to pick up the mochilla and start off in turn upon his sixty mile stretch. Six hour were given each of these riders for his sixty mile stint, and in this time he rode six different ponies."

That comes out to around 40 hours to cross Kansas, top speed on horseback, unless I did my math wrong but that seems kinda slow.

 

[JEL]

The Pony Express only existed for a couple of years. Sending a telegraph message would have been the most common means of sending messages. An actual letter would be taken to the nearest railhead and sent by train. As for actual time frames for how long this would take, I don't know off hand, but if I had to guess, I'd say probably 3 to 5 days. I don't know enough about sailing to say how long a clipper took to get from NY to London.

 

[jezter6]

Quoting d20 Past:

A light horse goes about 48 miles per day.
A galley ship about 96 miles per day
A train...somewhere between 15-30 mph depending on how much caro is being carried.
Travel in hills are at 3/4 speed, mountains at 1/2 speed.

 

[Faraer]

I can't answer reliably either, not being American.

But I think the best Old West RPG/sourcebook, bar none, is Mark Arsenault's Gunslingers.

 

[Chaldfont]

I'd say that everything moves at the "speed of plot", but that's just my DM style.

Speaking of travel by rail--here's something fun to mess with/educate your players: The current time zone system in the US was not made standard until 1918. American and Canadian rail roads implemented their own in 1883.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zones

Before then, noon was the local time when the sun reached its peak. Imagine the confusion as someone travelled via rail across the US. It's bad enough here in Indiana where we don't have DST (yet). I can't imagine what it must have been like in the 19th century. Not to mention the inaccuracy of period clocks.

Plenty of excuses to explain characters missing important meetings.

 

[JamesDJarvis]

How long did it take to walk across Kansas?
How long to ride across Kansas?
Have folks experience more "downtime" in their old west games?

Get a map and measure the distances along the routes you figure folks will take. I'd figure about 3 weeks to walk across Kansas.

Downtime doesn't have to take much longer then a few seconds of table time. There could easily be a whole lot of nothing going on worth RPing in an authentic western setting. In a film there'd be a couple of montage shots and then bango- next important thing happens.

 

[Masada]

I was trying to avoid having to do actual work...

Lessee... Kansas is about 400 miles wide. On a paved surface a healthy person can walk about 4 mph, but you probably only get 8 hours of actual travel a day. So about 13 days if everything is perfect. Standard movement rates in d20 double with adverse terrain so figure 26 days walking assuming you walked everyday--probably an even 30 days to account for rest.

A horse goes 48 miles a day so, at best, about 8 days only its not a road so probably 14-16 days on horse back. The train of course can do it in about 24 hours, but accounting for stops, probably 2 days.

Dodge City to New York is about 1500 miles... so roughly 4x time. At a guess 3-4 months walking, 2 months by horse and several days by train (7 ish).

I'm still looking up boats.