Frontier travel demanded constant vigilance against animal and terrain hazards.

Evidence

It was a bad road, one shelving sheet of ice, and awfully lonely, and between the peril of the mare breaking her leg on the ice and that of being crushed by windfalls of timber, I had to look out all day. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 199

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: the unglamorous labor of 19th-century overland travel — a day spent scanning for ice and falling timber rather than scenery.