Some of us have four weekends to burn in the US thanks to the 4th weekend of July, and plenty of Americans — 43.2 million, according to AAA projections — are planning to hit the road. and travel more than 50 miles from your home. But did it all begin?
Firstly cross country journey It will take a little longer than a long weekend to complete, but it only takes a moment and a $50 bet to spark the idea.
Horatio Nelson Jackson was hanging out at a private social club in San Francisco as a guest on May 19, 1903, when some club members began arguing about cars. Almost no one thinks that personal transport of four (sometimes three) wheels will catch up. Cars are both unreliable and unsafe, especially on rough, unpaved American roads.
Jackson, a native of Vermont, was already an explorer. After contracting tuberculosis forced him to leave his medical profession, Jackson went looking for gold in Alaska and Mexico.
It’s fair to say he’s both an avid traveller and a car enthusiast – although not a mechanic. He was so angry at the anti-car talk he made a $50 bet that he could drive from San Francisco to New York in less than 90 days. After all, he needed to get to the East Coast anyway.
Now that seems like a generous amount of time – Transcontinental RailwayFor example, it only took three and a half days to ferry Americans across the country — but Jackson and everyone present knew it would be a difficult journey. Sometimes he drives through deserts, mountains and forests without any roads. There is no road map, because there are often no sugar.
But Jackson wants that $50. So he hired Sewall K. Crocker to come along as his mechanic. The couple bought one two cylinder, 20 hp 1903 Winton. When they set off on that beautiful May 23rd, just four days after the initial bet, things immediately started to go awry:
The plan was to avoid the deserts of Nevada and Utah and the higher passes of the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies, so the expedition headed north to follow the Oregon Trail in reverse. They had only traveled 15 miles when the car blew a tire, and they had to use the only spare car they had with them.
Just north of Sacramento, a woman distracted them a total of 108 miles so her family could see their first car. When many tires blew up on the rocky road toward Oregon, they wound wires around the wheels. Along the way, they telegraphed the Winton Company to send supplies. However, sometimes they have to walk or cycle a long distance to find gas, oil or spare parts.
It doesn’t help that two other teams are trying to do it at the same time as Jackson and Crocker — and those teams have the financial backing of automakers interested in being the first to perform the stunt. dangerous. When the two picked up a bulldog named Bud in Idaho, the press began to take notice. Winton would offer the couple a sponsorship deal, but by that time they were far east of Mississippi and the trip to New York would have been smoother.
In the end, the first trip across America would take 63 days, cost 600 gallons of gas, and cost the independently wealthy Jackson $8,000. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator didn’t go that far, but ten years later, in 1913, $8,000 was the equivalent of a quarter of a million dollars.
AlternateHistoryHub has a really interesting and historically accurate trip narration with great detail:
Although Jackson never received his $50 payment, he became the proud owner of the bulldog Bud and earned himself a lifetime bragging rights. It’s really about the friends he’s made along the way (and influenced).
