prairie schoonern.

1837 Western Messenger Oct. 107 We met many large wagons, which well deserve their name of ‘prairie schooners’ as their white covers show like sails at a distance.

1845 Amer. Whig Rev. Aug. 195/2 We remember to have seen in the place, thirty-five of those immense wagons, called in that country ‘prairie schooners’, drawn by two hundred oxen, from the mineral region of Wisconsin.

1858 N.Y. Tribune 7 June 5/6 In our streets [in Lawrence, Kansas] may be seen large covered wagons, alias ‘prairie schooners’... These wagons are generally drawn by oxen, otherwise by mules.

1882 Harper's Mag. Dec. 5/1 The prairie schooner, or large lumbering freight wagon,..looms up in the distance.

1911 C. E. W. Bean ‘Dreadnought’ of Darling vii. 67 An old white-bearded patriarch of a fellow that had once appeared in one of the up-river towns with a ‘prairie schooner’—one of those big white-hooded sort of ambulance waggons which the travelling hawkers drive from homestead to homestead over the plains in the West.

1923 National Geographic Mag. Apr. 424/2 As a child, I saw, on this same old trail, an endless stream of ‘mover wagons’, canvas-topped prairie schooners, laden with household goods, women and children, trekking west to the new, cheap lands.

1955 W. Foster-Harris Look of Old West vi. 159 The prairie schooners, developed from the Conestoga were smaller but still too heavy and clumsy for mountain work or badly broken country.

1993 Wind River Country Summer 25/1 The ‘prairie schooner’ was often little more than a farm wagon converted into a wagon with a canvas tarp for shade.