Regular maintenance on the original style wheel bearings gave them long life, but too many people failed to grease them like they were suppose to do. I think the FSM called for the bearings to be greased every 3,000 miles. you had to pull both front wheels off, line up the zerks with the holes, pump in 2 -3 pumps of grease and put the wheels back on. My boss at the gas station had well over 100K miles on his original bearings on each of his 3 Dodge plow trucks.
Greased every 3000-4000 miles and standard offset tires and wheels.

Most guy's that had problems were the ones with the wide offset wheels with monster tires, that never saw a grease gun. They couldn't figure out why the wheel bearings were shot in 50K miles or less. Then after the bearings were shot, they kept driving until the ends of the brake rotors were shot (the bearing inner races ran on the rotor hub). Being the cheap butts they were, most didn't want to but the rotors, so they would throw the new wheel bearings on the wore off rotors and soon the new bearings were shot again. Of course it wasn't their fault, it was all because of Dodges bad bearings. Gene