Yeah it was bench seating so one guy had the reins and the other had a shotgun. Hence the name.

The apocryphal story is actually kind of interesting.

Roads and right of way established during the pre-firearm era were that you'd ride on the left, with people going the opposite way on your right. This was so you could use your dominant hand (usually your right) to use a sword to defend yourself.

Roads after firearms were available often established right of way with riding on the right, with oncoming traffic on the left. This is because when you shoulder a firearm on your right shoulder it's easier to aim left.

Stagecoach drivers would sit in the left seat, with the extra person sitting on the right, holding a shotgun, hence the colloquial term for the front passenger seat.

I have no idea how true this is, but it makes for an interesting story.

I'd been told it was a gangster thing: passenger seat shoots out the window for a drive-by.

While this is probably some bullshit from the horse drawn carriage era, what I'd like to say is that statistically speaking riding shotgun is the most dangerous seat in car crashes, so the saying still works

Because they didn't have a shotgun.

La place du mort, c'est pas le siège du milieu a l'arrière ?

hi northernlion i love your videos

It means "quick marriage because the bride is pregnant" and that is 100% the origin of the phrase.

Particularly in poorer, rural parts of the USA having a child out of wedlock was incredibly shameful, and the financial burden of a single motherhood was intolerable. So the bride's family would ensure the man responsible married their daughter ... regardless of how he felt about it. Sometimes that meant having a shotgun at the wedding to ensure he didn't run off.

No, but many needed to protect those passengers from bandits and other assorted outlaws.

I'm the times coaches like that became common it wasn't really safe to travel in most parts of the world.

There was once a theory that the reason for the difference in which side a vehicle is driving on the road today, stems from whether a country had many stretches of untamed wilderness with lots of bandits. So if there was a high likelihood that whoever you met on the road was a danger, the horsecart driver preferred passing them on the side of their sword arm (right hand as default), while if you did not have to take that into account, you would pass them on the left hand side.

The theory has now largely been abandonded as spurious, but it does remain a fact that there were dangerous stretches of roads in older times in Europe as well.

This obe didn't either. Staying home was usually an option.

That's not what it was for. They fired a shotgun before turning onto a road. If two wagons came head to head on a crappy old western road it could cause hours of delay because the horses would have to be hitched to the back of one of the wagons a pull it all the way back to the crossroad.

You're basically americans with going outside instead of corn.