July 11, 2026 • 49 mins
Back when cars were a brand new thing, before people even knew they'd stick around, two men and a dog drove from San Francisco to New York. This classic episode has their story.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey guys, it's me Josh, and for this week's select,
I've chosen our episode on the very First road Trip
across America from back in twenty twenty three. The episode
was from twenty twenty three. The first road Trip took
place way before that, and it's one of those wonderful
stories where nothing goes horribly wrong, the people don't turn
out to be horrible people. It's just a great story
(00:24):
about a couple of guys and a dog taking a
road trip across America at a time when it was
highly unlikely that they were gonna make it all the way.
I'm glad to present you with this one. Enjoy.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck in. It's just the two of us, but we're
gonna make it just fine. We're gonna make it if
you try. As a like to say, sometimes when it's
just the two of us and this stuff, you.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Should I'm excited about this episode because this is a really,
really great story that doesn't have like I kept waiting
for something either bad to happen or someone to be
exposed as awful and it's just a really fun, feel
good story.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
I would go so far as to call it a
hum dinger.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
It's a hum dinger.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
And we got to give a huge credit to Ed
who helped us with this, and also because he helped Ed,
who helped us ken Burns. Ken Burns has a great
documentary about this topic, which is the first cross country
automobile road trip. It's called Horatios Drive. It's wonderful story
(01:48):
and you can find it on PBS. Hopefully if you're
a streamer, you pay for and subscribe to the PBS
app because it's a very worthwhile and great channel to
subscribe to. Narrated by the great Keith David, one of
the great great voices.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Just amazing and such a great actor too, great everything
from They Live to Men at Work to There's Something
about Mary. Yeah, he was in Platoon too. He's like
just such a great actor.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Love that guy.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
And because our protagonist in this story, who will introduce
you to in a second, is such an affable, seemingly
really good guy, they got none other than Tom Hanks
to recreate his voice for his diary letters and stuff
like that.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
We should also give a hat tip to Dayton Duncan,
who's interviewed extensively in that documentary because he wrote a
book on the drive.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
I would argue the book, yeah, and.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Let's call it that the book on Horatio Nelson Jackson, Right.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Yeah, that's his name, great name.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
So we're going to talk a lot more about him later,
but we really kind of want to like lay the groundwork,
bring the con text, as flavor flav would put it,
and just kind of give you an idea of what
the times were like when Horatio Nelson Jackson decided to
become the first person to travel cross country in a car.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Right, So nineteen oh three, nine to one one was
a joke. I like that one.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
That's okay, all right, just a medium okay on that one.
I'll take it. Nineteen oh three is when this happened.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
But to put this in context, like you said, the
first trans continental railroad was built and completed or not
built but completed in eighteen sixty nine, and it was
eighteen seventy six when you got your first cross country
train trip that happened. So this was what like twenty
(03:50):
five is years roughly after that, and people were still
kind of only traveling by train because cars were pretty knew,
and they were only for richies because I believe in
the documentary they said, like the cheapest car you could
get would cost more than the average American made in
a year. So in the early nineteen hundreds, it was
(04:14):
rich people who wanted to buy a super expensive, unique
toy that and will hammer this home a lot, but
they didn't even know was.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Gonna end up being a real thing.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, it could have turned out like the segue totally right.
I mean this is kind of a kin to somebody
taking a treck across America on a segue back in
like nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah, they did not know car Like a lot of
people thought, these cars will never amount to anything. You're silly,
It'll always be trains and horses.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Right, So to kind of get across why people thought
it was just going to be nothing but trains and horses,
Like that's how the American infrastructure was built. Like, if
you went any any kind of lengthy distance, you took
a train. If you were moving around locally, you took
a horse, maybe a horse and a buggy or a
horse and carriage or something like that kind of drive.
(05:10):
I'm sure if you wanted to be super wild west
about it. But there were At the time, say around
nineteen hundred, the United States had two point three million
miles of roads, pretty impressive. One hundred and fifty miles
were paved, and all of those were within big cities. Right,
So the vast, vast, vast majority of roads in the
(05:35):
United States were rough, rutted, dusty, or muddy or somehow
both at the same time, roads that you would not
want to walk over really, let alone ride a car over.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Yeah, they were in bad shape.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Generally, about fourteen million horses in the United States to
about eight thousand cars.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
And like you said, people traveled low.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
I think the average was, like people generally didn't go
more than twelve miles from their house. And that even
feels like the high end. I don't think that's an average.
I think people probably didn't go within a few miles
of their house.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Yeah, I mean today, unless I'm traveling.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Right at the time, there were and you still take
trains for long distance travel sometimes I try to. At
the time, also, like you, you didn't really steer away
from home because it took you so long to go
anywhere on horse, right, I think at the time it
was still a two day journey basically from New York
to Philadelphia by horse. So this is like a this
(06:40):
is a this is a big deal for somebody to
be like, no, I'm going to try this. The other
thing was the roads themselves weren't mapped. Yeah, I mean
east of the Mississippi. There were maps and guide books
that you could get pretty good directions from.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
Right, and it's it's funny.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
In the documentary they kind of show what that part
directions were like, and one of those like turn right
at the old Stone horse Trough. Yeah, like those were
the kind of directions and because that's what a local
would tell you to do, so somebody had the bright
idea to print those and put them down in a
(07:16):
book form and transmit that information that way. And it's
still held up because there were no road names, there
were no route numbers, there was nothing like that, because
there was no reason for anything like that to exist.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Yeah, And funny enough, that's how I prefer directions now
because I'm very directionally challenged and famously so. And I
also never know the names of roads, so I always
ask people like, tell me, you know, go to that
diner that you know and take a left and then
go to that car wash and veer right.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Then. That's how I prefer to get directions.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
I I tend to zone out when people give me
directions me too, that I've asked for, and you can
just kind of see it on their faces. They can
tell I'm going to get lost because it's just not sinking.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
In well, all the fun of that it's gone now
because you just punch it into your app or whatever.
But totally, I'm basically talking about pre GPS stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
I remember, I remember, remember that. I am also smart
enough to really appreciate ways though too.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
You know, do you remember the fun of a road
trip of opening that Rand McNally atlas and saying like,
I think we can go this way to get to
this town, or it looks like this other road we
can go around. That was like and I'm not like, oh,
things were so much better when it was harder, but
it was a really had a fun, sort of magical
(08:35):
adventuresome quality to it.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
I think, Yeah, I spent five weeks in a van
driving around the Western United States doing that same thing.
It was very cool and like the amount of freedom
is really hard to get across of like, yeah, not
having anywhere you had to be at any particular time
and saying like, oh, that that landmark sounds pretty cool.
(08:58):
I'm going to go see that. It's pretty neat.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
You know what words you don't hear anymore is let's
go here instead. It's true, everything seems so locked down,
you know, it's like, I don't know, people don't say,
oh no, let's just let's decide to go to this
town instead of this town.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
I feel like we've entered the disgruntled aged old men
or stuff, because it seems like we do this almost
every episode.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Dude, Yeah, maybe we're gonna have to pay.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
More attention to that, or else we're gonna lose all
the youngsters and just attract all the old stirs and
who cares.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Well, Hey, youngster, I encourage you to set out on
a road trip with a map and and enjoy it.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Okay, wait to save it. I don't think I saved anything.
So I think we've.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Gotten across that it would be really hard to drive
a car, right, Yeah, across the United States at the time.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Yeah, hard to drive a car.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
But because cars were becoming a little more popular, they
were trying to get a more positive publicity going for
their cars and their companies, and so they said, hey,
what a great way to do this then, like kind
of sponsor a cross country car truck trip that'll get
a lot of press. And so they tried this with
John and Louise Davis from the how do you pronounce that?
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Cardia? It sounds like something you contract that you'd be
really unhappy.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
About, Okay, thedia.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
I couldn't quite tell, but yeah, it does sound like
a disease of some sort.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Do you r yea?
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Yeah, the Derea car company gave them a national or
I'm sorry, they weren't a car company.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
That was the car. The company was the National Motor
Carriage Company.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Yeah, known today as the NMCC.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Really, I'm just kidding that. I thought you were going
to say as Portia.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
No, I would like to think that, but no, I
don't think so.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
No, I don't think so either. So they sponsored this couple.
This was an eighteen ninety nine. It did not work out.
They very famously got beaten to They started from New
York and they got beaten to Syracuse by a one
armed bicyclist who gave them a ten day head start.
So press it went opposite of how they wanted to.
That was sort of they lost track or lost interest
(11:09):
very early on in this sort of doomed thing. And
I don't think they even know if they succeeded in
getting the San Francisco. Well, I think they know they didn't,
but they basically didn't really cover the story after that.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
No, they drop off the map after about Chicago.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
They dropped off the GPS apporry.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
So no, it's just could it just took me a
second to for it to sink in.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
I thought that was pretty good. I'm trying to get
our younger listeners back.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
So well, we should make a TikTok of all this then, okay,
know what people do?
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Sure for now US government? So it was wonderful, Yeah,
thank you.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
So it was established though, even though the Davises didn't
make it that like, this is actually a really good
way to to to promote a car brand is to
be the first to make it across the country. Then
everyone will know that's a good car, because it's just
so ridiculous to even think a car could do that.
So a couple of years after the Davises, I guess
nineteen oh one, a car maker named Alexander Winton who
(12:14):
had a Winton car company, handmade cars, beautiful cars. He
tried it himself, I believe, with this publicist. Very smartly.
He and his publicist hit the road. The acid hit
them around Barstow. I think, well, that showed up and
(12:35):
they ended up getting trapped in a dune in Nevada.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Yeah, but you bring up a thing that might be overlooked.
Is they very smartly started from west to east because
as we mentioned, the west was untamed land and bad,
bad bad roads if there weren't he at all. So
getting that hard part over first when the car was
brand spanking new was really really smart. But what they
didn't count on was an and we'll see what Jackson
(13:01):
learned was driving through the desert in an old car
like that is not good. Sand is not good for
getting stuck, or it's great for getting stuck, it's not
good for making good time. Sand is not good for
getting in carburetors and in oil and gas. And you know,
these engines weren't these big closed systems like they are today.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
So sand no good.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
But Winton got this press right like he It helped,
I think, still publicize his car company regardless, and again
the fact that no one had done this, but people
were starting to try it. It kept being a thing.
It was going to be a thing until somebody did it.
And so a couple of years after Wynton tried, a
guy named Horatio Nelson Jackson, who's the star of our story,
(13:46):
was hanging out at the University Club of San Francisco,
and apparently a couple of fellow club members were saying
that cars were basically useless and that they would never
really go anywhere, and there's no reason for anybody to
have Jackson, by this time had really developed a real
love of cars, had started collecting them even and I
(14:07):
guess to defend cars honor, he slapped down a fifty
dollars wager that he could make it across the United
States from San Francisco to New York in less than
ninety days. Ninety days or less, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
And that was.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
About fifteen hundred dollars that he threw down on the
table right then, and the people took it.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
They accepted as wager.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
And four days later he set out for New York
from San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
It is madness to think about that he did this
with that little planning.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
He didn't have a car to do it.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
I mean he had cars, but not one to go
across country at the time. Just quickly about Jackson. He
was a doctor who got tuberculosis and quit his practice
kind of at the same time that he married a
very wealthy woman named Bertha Richardson Wells, very wealthy New
England family from Vermont.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
She her family made their money in Celery compounds.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
I know, it was like a tonic yeah, basically, so
he as ed put did rich guy things, capital R,
capital G. And his wife was super supportive, like everyone
was on board. She was like, that's awesome. I'll take
a train to Burlington. I'll meet you over there. Honey,
you have my blessing. And it seems like they had
a really like judging from the letters that of course
(15:28):
it was voiced by Tom Hanks too, so you're endeared immediately.
But judging from the letters, it seems like they were
just a great couple, a very loving family. He called
her Swipes, and no one knows why that nickname was there,
but he you know, he signed it as Nelson and
you're yours forever Nelson and my dearest Swipes, and it
was really really sort of a beautiful story of this couple,
(15:52):
and he knew he had to get a guy to
go with him, and so he picked a great traveling partner.
He was a small engine mechanic and a factory named
Sewell Crocker, who was about ten years younger.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
He's twenty two years old. I think we was. Horatio
was like two.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Okay, So this guy could fix cars, he knew cars,
and apparently like they really liked each other and were
which was a big deal. You know, you've been on
road trips and regular cars. Yeah, and that's a key factor.
But especially back then with all the troubles they were
going to have, he had to have someone that you
could get along with.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
That's a big one for sure.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
So he asked Crocker, hey man, what car should we
get for this? And Crocker said, well, you have basically
limitless funds, get the best by yourself, a nineteen oh
three Winton touring car. And Ed points something out that
I think is very astute. The reason why, probably Sewell
Crocker said get a Winton was because Winton had already
(16:50):
shown that they were making really good cars enough so
that they were willing to try to make it across
country in one of them. So that's exactly what Jackson
did did. He's the kind of guy you call him
by his first name because it's got a great first name,
and he's Tom Hanks, like appable.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
Right.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Yeah, So so Horatio bought himself a Winton touring car
nineteen oh three. Apparently he paid essentially one hundred thousand
dollars for.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
It, and it was used.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, it was used, but it was the only one available.
So he just paid whatever the person wanted for it.
And so I think in nineteen oh three dollars he
paid three thousand dollars. But he named it the Vermont
because that's where he and his wife Bertha lived. But
a little bit about this car there was it was
an It was open in every sense of the word.
(17:40):
It was like if you took a tub and put
wheels on it and then had a steering wheel sticking
out of it.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
That was the car.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
There was no windshield, there was no roof, there was
no back windshield, there were no doors, there was no nothing.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
It was like a giant riding lawnmower with like wagon wheels.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Well it's funny that you bring up riding lawnmowers, Chuck,
because the two cylinder chain drive engine had twenty horse power,
and my friend a John Deere X three hundred series
riding mower has twenty two horse power.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
That's funny, that's really funny. This thing topped out at
thirty miles per hour. I don't think that John Deere
does that, but that's probably just because it's cutting grass
at the same time.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
But imagine imagine traveling the country on riding lawnmower.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Basically that's about what they were doing.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
But yes, you're right, thirty miles an hour is substantially more.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
That's what it could do. Max. Yeah, no way did
they average thirty miles.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
An hour, not even close. It was someone it was
red a really good looking car. You'll only see black
and whites. But someone on Reddit, that's the picture I
sent you did a very fun colorized picture of Horatio
and Crocker and a a third party to be named
later and colorized it and it just it looks awesome.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
And this car is so cool looking.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Yeah, I don't mean to detract from it.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
It was a cool looking car.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
As far as comfort goes, it was not at all comfortable. No,
I say, we take a break and then set out
on the road trip with these guys.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
Huh oh, let's do it.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
All right.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
So, as we will see, there were other car manufacturers
planning to do the same thing at the time, and
a couple of them ended up. You know, it ended
up sort of being a race against like a corporation
versus human even though he was driving. You know, it's
not like a car he built himself. It was a Winton,
(20:07):
but he was doing it himself with this other guy.
He wasn't for fun, he wasn't sponsored. It was about
the spirit of adventure. All these as we'll see, all
these other companies sent like supplies ahead and the like.
They had teams of mechanics. He didn't have anything to prove.
He put this together in four days, including buying the car,
(20:29):
And that's just I really want to get across. The
spirit of this whole thing was just this optimist who
was like, let me see if I can do this
crazy thing.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
So two months after Horatio and Sewell set out on
their trip, Packard sent a team out and like you said,
they were very well outfitted. They had a mechanic on board.
There was gasoline for them at every stop. Because gasoline
was there were no gas stations, and definitely there were
no gas stations out west. You would go to the
(21:02):
general store and be like, I'd like a can of
your most dangerous volatile liquid, please, and they would hand
you some gasoline in a can and you buy a
few of them to drive around with. It was incredibly dangerous,
but that's how you didn't run out of gas. Packard
had the advantage of like every town or every x
number of miles, there was gasoline waiting for them. So
(21:23):
they essentially had gas stations that were reserved exclusively for them.
Horatio and Sewell did not have anything remotely like that,
and so they got into all sorts of fun little adventures,
like the time that Sewel Crocker had to bike dozens
of miles on a borrowed bicycle to go to and
fro to fill up their gas can and bring it
(21:43):
back and then fill it up again and then bring
it back. And that might have been there right exactly,
And it's fun now in retrospect us talking about it
here in twenty twenty three in the studio. I'm sure
it was not a great day for Sewel Crocker.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
No, I don't think they were drawing straws, though, you
know what I mean. The rich thirty one year old
that had TV is definitely saying, all right, hit the
road on the bike.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Yeah, my friend, were equals in almost every way, but
hit the trail on the bike, right, all right.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
So Packard did so two months later, like you said,
and Oldsmobile did the same thing a month after that,
I believe, much the same operation, you know, fully sponsored
and like rigged up and everything. So they tore out
the back seat on this Winton. I don't think we
mentioned this thing could go two hundred and fifty miles
(22:34):
with their tank of fuel, which was way more than
I thought. Yeah, for sure, I was super impressed. So
they ripped out the back seat, which doesn't look like
it was much of one anyway, and packed you know,
a cooking kit, tons of rope. Something that would probably
be the most valuable thing in the whole car was
(22:55):
a pulley system, a block and tackle.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
They had a codec camera, They had sleeping bags, they
had a shovel and axe. They had a bunch of
guns and ammunition because they might be hunting for food
out in the middle of nowhere or just maybe want
to murder someone, yeah, or just.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Like shooting out of an untopped car is probably pretty
fun when no one's around.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
That is fun.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
So yeah, the problem is is like they weren't experts
at tying down their gear, and they would get to
like a stop probably basically every day and find that
something they needed had dropped.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Off and bounced out at some point.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Like back on their trail, and that they had gone
too far to go back to try to find it.
It's really they lost like cooking utensils. Horatio lost multiple
pairs of his eyeglasses. It's just crazy to me that
they weren't like put a tarp on it and wrap
the tarp up and then put rope on the tarp.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
You know who knows.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
But they did lose a lot of stuff, and luckily,
like you said, they didn't lose that block and tackle.
It would really come into play multiple times. But they
made a really good decision early on number one. They
followed I can't remember it for some mister won Alexander
Winton's example and started out west. So what they would
(24:14):
be doing is getting the hardest part of the trip
out of the way first. While the car had very
few miles on it, right.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Yeah, which was a nice little copy.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
But then they made a really really great decision, and
I think the decision that frankly made them a success
in the end. Did I just spoil it? I guess
we talked about what a great story was. It wouldn't
be great if they conked out in Michigan.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
True.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
True, But they decided to go at hundreds of miles
to their trip by not just taking a right and
going across the country, but going north up through Oregon
to avoid that Nevada desert, and that, my friend, even
though there was some treacherous mountains that they had to
go through, avoiding that desert I think is what ultimately
(25:03):
made them successful.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, I mean, hundreds of miles added to the trip,
But it was incredibly smart because again Winton had bottomed
out in that sand. That sand wasn't going anywhere at
the very least. There were wagon trails and stuff up
in Oregon, and they were able to kind of make
their way along these the railroad tracks that were there.
So there were railroad right of ways, which is the
(25:28):
land cleared on either side of a railroad track, and
they would drive on those or if they had to
drive on the railway themselves, and they would they would
ride on railroad bridges in a car that could go
thirty miles per hour max. Yeah, and hoped God that
there wasn't a train that was going to come. And
I was like, man, I'm so glad I watched stand
(25:50):
By Me a couple of days ago.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
Chris about to bring that up. You watched it.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
It's such a great part of that movie. And I
was telling you, like, that was a masterpiece. Is Rob
b Reiner's masterpiece, And he's made some pretty great movies,
but it is exponentially better than I even remembered as
a kid.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
I'll throw a spinal tap in there. But I know,
have you still not seen that?
Speaker 3 (26:11):
That's what I'm saying. No, it's great.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
That's a great movie. I think when Harry met Sally's
a great movie. Like there's tons of great movies Rob
Briiner's made, but I think stand By Me might be
the best.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Yeah, it's a great movie.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
I love that scene when they put their hands on
the rail, Yeah, and it just gets real quiet and
they're listening. They're like, do you feel any vibration at all?
And that's probably what these guys were doing.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
I'm sure, but they were doing it bumping along in
their open car. Yeah, also shout out. I don't know
Phil Wheaton still listens to us. I know he used to,
but man, all of those kids.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Did a great, great job.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
But he really did a magnificent job acting in that movie.
So way to go Wheaton, totally listening.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Great movie. I love it.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
I'm gonna watch it too now. Talking about it in Vegas,
it made me nostalgic for it for sure.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
All right.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
All right, so we are at leave time, which was
May twenty third, nineteen oh three.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
It was a Saturday.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Apparently it was a hot spring in California, and it
rained that afternoon and they took off from San Francisco
and very quickly blew a tire out.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
It was like Romeo Michelle.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Yeah, totally. And the chronicle in San Francisco wasn't even
covering it. Basically, the San Francisco Examiner had a very
short little piece about it, about a horseless carriage going
from sea to sea. But it would build, as you
will see, with the press as things went along. But
it wasn't well covered at first, and the tire thing,
(27:41):
it was an issue I mean the car tires at
the time would routinely blow out. They had a hard
time on the trip finding new tubes. They would stock
up on used tubes whenever they went to a town
it seemed like that had any kind of tubes, they
would just buy them, right and Yeah, and it was
a tires were an issue that woud seemed like one
(28:02):
of the main issues.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Yeah, because I mean you can imagine there's not people
selling car tires because there were so few cars, and
out west they kept encountering people who had never seen
a car.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
I saw mention of that Packard team that was riding.
I think Tom Fetch was the Packard guy who was
driving the car, and they pulled into one town that
where a murder had just been committed and so few
people had seen a car in that town that everybody
left the fresh murder scene, including the sheriff, to come
look at the car that had just rolled into town.
(28:37):
Like that was like what it was like out west
at the time. So of course you weren't gonna find
car tires easily. You had to improvise any way you could.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Sure, and a murdered body out there back then was
a dime, a dozen, dime a dozen. Ye's not going anywhere,
that's right, it's gonna check out that new car.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Yeah, it's not going anywhere.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
So they're going east. They're going through some treacherous terrain,
go to the Cascade Mountains. It's fun in the documentary
to hear the diary or letters home to his wife
where he was talking about, you know, the roads that
are basically big enough for one car because I can't
remember exactly I said it, but like because nature has
(29:16):
made it that way, basically like it's a cliff side
on the side of a mountain. So luckily, you know,
they're having to share the road with stage coaches and
horses and stuff like that, not really any other cars probably,
but they would it was what you would think. They
were constantly getting stuck, constantly blowing tires. They I think
the record was eighteen times in a day they had
(29:39):
to use that block and tackle to pull themselves out
of a ditch or a river or a mud hole.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
That must have been the suckiest day ever. Yeah, and
then the maps were an issue too, right.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Yeah, they would have to rely on locals for directions.
Some when they could find locals a lot of times
they just had to guess I saw again the Packard team.
Sorry to keep bringing them up. I know or not
what the story's about, but they learned to avoid the
nicest roads because out west that usually meant that it
just dead ended in some rich person's house, and when
(30:10):
you could find locals, they would sometimes just literally misguide you.
There was one that Horatio and Sewell ran across a
woman on horseback who told them to get to the
next time they should go down this road, and it
dead ended in her family's farm.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
It was her driveway.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Basically, they came back the way they went and ran
across her again. They're like, why did you do that?
And she's like, oh, my dad and mom and husband
would have wanted to see a car. They've never seen
a car before, so she purposefully sent them the wrong
way down a dead end, miles down a dead end
apparently too. And I did not hear that they had
gotten angry with her or cross even. I think they
(30:47):
probably just said like, good day to you, madam and
kept on.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
They should have said, you don't know this yet, but
one day giving directions will be very important, and this
will not be cool.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
This is not going to reflect good on your family. Manson,
you like.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
That, Tina. I just loved Tina. It was so not
a name back then, Tina Manson, I love it.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
Great choice.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
The breaks were kind of what you would imagine. They
weren't great, So it was quite thrilling when they would
get on these downhill runs and there wasn't a lot
you could do about it. The clutch went out a lot.
I mean, you know, we talked about our various van
journeys out west. We were in a Volkswagen Van for
mine and the mountains killed it. Like we had to
(31:35):
to get a rental jeep Cherokee in Nevada for the
whole second half of the trip because going through the
mountains literally killed his. And it wasn't like a brand
new VW van. It wasn't one of the old ones,
but it was like the Vanigan. But like it drove
us from Atlanta to the mountains just fine, and the
mountains killed it. So imagine what the mountains did to
(31:58):
the clutch system on this lawnmower.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Basically, yeah, I have to admit, until today I did
not know what a clutch did. I knew that the
clutch was the thing you push into shift gears. Never
understood why the reason why you push in is because
you actually want to stop the clutch from working temporarily.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
What the clutch does is it transmits the motor power
or the motor's torque to the transmission, which in turn
turns the axle to the tires the wheels. Right, that's
my understanding of it. And when you're pressing in the clutch,
what you're really doing is keeping that transfer from taking
place so that you can go into another gear and
(32:39):
then you let the clutch out and that transfer begins again. So, yes,
the clutch is an extremely important instrument. The car does
not go without it. And apparently Suel Crocker had to
fix that thing almost as many times as they used
the block and tackle to pull themselves out of mud.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Well he was worth his weight, oh boy, yeah he was.
He did have one modification they made on the way there,
as they added a headlamp and a ceedlean headlamp so
they could drive at night because they want to make
up time, you know, because there were times when they
had to go to a town and wait for I
think one of them was like three or four days
(33:18):
where they're waiting ironically for a stage coach to show
up with parts that they had ordered. There were times
when a stage coach or a guy on a horse
would pull them out ironically.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
Again.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Yeah, and I didn't get the impression that Horatio was
trying to prove that horses were obsolete.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
No, I don't think so at all.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
I think he still saw it as pretty ironic that
he still relied on horses in this horseless carriage.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
I don't think he threw shade even when blacksmiths would
make repairs. They pointed out in the documentary that I
think it was in one of his letters he said
it like the irony wasn't lost on him. But I
don't think he was like, you're not going to have
a job in a few years, sucker.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Right right, that's what segue makers said to people on foot.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
Didn't the adventure of this segue drive off a cliff
on a segway.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Oh that sounds like an urban legend, but maybe one
that's just crazy enough to be true.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
I'll have to look that up. Should we take a break, Yes, well,
we'll take a break and look that up. All right,
we'll be back here with the truth, right, after this.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Okay, we're back and chuck it's true bbc D He
really says it.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Wow, Jimmy Hezelden was sixty two when he rode off
a cliff on his company's segues.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
They killed him obviously, Yes, in West Yorkshire. That's sad.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
Yeah, making it My god, that's quite a legend.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
It is.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
It's like Fabio getting hit in the face with a
duck on a roller coaster.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
What no, you know that.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
No, Fabio on a roller coaster. A duck flew across
his path and hit him in the face.
Speaker 3 (35:20):
And killed him. No, no, no, oh okay.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
But it's uh, it's one of these pictures on the
Internet where you're like, oh, that's got to be fake,
and it's and it really happened, poor Fabio. I know,
I feel bad for the guy, but it was also like,
of all the people to get for this to happen
to it was just it was pretty rich.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Yeah, I can imagine, what way is he a jerk?
Speaker 3 (35:44):
No? No, no, is he?
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Okay, but he's Fabio And like you know, that kind
of stuff doesn't happen to Fabio.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
It's not happened to me for sure, and me too,
totally with you on that. Did you look up that picture?
Speaker 1 (35:55):
I'm watching the video right now. I can't not chuck.
We will have an episode someday where we just tell
each other internet memes and the other one will look
it up and then react on Mike, and that's how
we'll do it.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
All Ye, stuff you shouldn't couldn't care less about will
be the name of that new.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
Stuff you really probably shouldn't bother listening to. All right,
so let's pick up with the trip.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
It sounds like we're painting an ed I'm glad he
pointed this out. It sounds like we're painting a picture
of an awful time. Because of all of the delays
and all of the things that happened. They knew what
they were in for with this. They didn't think it
was going to be a pleasure cruise. It was also
a great fun adventure. Like these guys are having a
great time. They were seeing things that few people had
ever even seen in person before, even by horse at times.
(36:43):
And they had no schedule. I mean, they were trying
to beat this ninety day thing. But like I get
the feeling he really just wanted to finish the trip,
so you know he had money. They were staying in hotels,
they were staying with people along the way who opened
their homes to them.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
They were driving about two.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Hours at a time time, and it seemed like they
were having fun at the same time.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
I have that same impression too, for sure. And plus,
don't forget Sewell Crocker was making some pretty good money too.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
Yeah, I didn't find that. What was he getting paid.
I didn't see either.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
But we can go ahead and say at the end
they tallied up how much Horatio Jackson spent on the trip,
and this included Crocker's pay.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
It was about eight.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Grand back in nineteen oh three, which is a two
hundred and sixty seven grand today.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
So much funny. So if you think about it.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Hotels, food, supplies, gas, car parts, repairs, that still leaves
a pretty decent amount for Sewell Crocker, and I hope
he got a big chunk of that.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
I hope so too, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
I cannot, for the love of life find the stupid
picture of Fabio getting hit in the face. I found
some ABC report and it just shows him going into
the roller coaster station after the ride, just faces all
bloody and he looks really upset, but nothing about the
actual hit.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
You know, I wonder if what I saw was a
faked recreation of that, and there is only a before
and after.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
That would make sense that it looked photoshopped, then I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
I just had to had to circle back.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
On that because my disappointment was palpable.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Oh boy, So they're making their way out west or
i'm sorry, back east. And it's funny they say, back east,
out west, up north, down south.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
So they're back. They're heading back east.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Uh. And they come to Idaho. M When I mentioned
a third party in that photograph, we were holding out
for this big surprise and Caldwell, Idaho. They left without
Jackson's code, turned back to go get it, and this
guy said, here, I have this pit bull named Bud
and he wants to go with you and be your mascot.
(38:54):
And they said, hop a board, Bud, And all of
a sudden, they have this beautiful white pit bull in
between the two of them.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Yeah, he's routinely described as a bulldog, but he's pretty
clearly a pit bull.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
For he's a pity and he's beautiful, and like, if
this story couldn't get any better, now you have a
pit bull in between you.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
And they made him.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Doggles to protect his little eyes, and there's a wonderful
photo of it in the documentary.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Yeah, so they were, you know, like you said, they
were getting pressed as they went from town to town,
and they were like, oh my god, a car. There's
people actually trying to use it to cross the United
States in that car. When Bud joined it, people just
went berserk over this whole thing, in part because he
was wearing these goggles, but also he very quickly learned
(39:41):
how to ride in the car. He look ahead, he
loved it to look for ruts or bumps or whatever,
and would like brace himself like. He just took to
it very easily and became like this great mascot. So
everybody started to really find out about this when Bud joined.
And I don't get the impression that sewel or Horatio
with least bit jealous.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
No, he paid him fifteen dollars, which is five hundred
dollars today for this dog. And Crocker said, hey, adopt,
don't shop And Jackson said what does that mean, right,
and he said, no, don't worry about it. That comes later, right.
So they're getting all this press thanks to Bud. They
make their way through sort of that toughest stretch of terrain,
(40:24):
they're running out of food. They finally sort of cross
out of the mountains and they're like, all right, that
was sort of it, like we think this is not
literally but this is sort of downhill from here. And
he in his letters he was saying, I've never felt
more confident now that we're gonna make it to New York.
And this is when they were in like Wyoming.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yeah, and then once they got to Omaha, it really
got easier. And then after Omaha Chicago, and then after Chicago,
probably Cleveland or something like that, maybe an Indianapolis in between,
like the city after city just started to pop up,
and they were getting closer and closer, and there were
much better roads. The railroad rideaways were just beautiful. Sitting
(41:08):
there for the picking flat. They started to really yeah,
they started to really make some pretty good time.
Speaker 3 (41:13):
Yeah. I think.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
How many miles did they top out at the day.
I feel like it was like seventy something, which is
not too bad.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
I don't remember, actually, I think in.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
The documentary said seventy seventy something miles in a single day,
like when they were kind of cruising, which that's awesome,
that's good time for that car.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Yeah, that's not bad at all, especially considering it maxed
out at thirty miles an hour. Yeah, so that was
just like a two and a half hour day for them,
I guess, Yeah, sure so, but that really does go
to point out like just how slow they were going
because of things like breaking down and waiting for parts
and just the roads being terrible. And I mentioned Cleveland too.
(41:56):
They actually when they showed up in Cleveland, that's where
the Winting Motor Carriage Company was located. And we didn't
say I don't think that Wynton had by this time
heard about the whole trip and that they were actually
making pretty good headway.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Right, Yeah, so he got he sort of officially offered
to kind of sponsor them from that point on, and
Jackson turned him down. He was like, no, I've got
Packard and Oldsmobile behind me, and I don't want this
to become like a corporate sponsored thing. Like we made
it this far, we can make it the rest of
the way. And they did go by the factory and
(42:32):
they got some fanfare, and I think they helped him
out with fixing this car up and stuff. But they
got free beer koozies exactly refrigerator magnets, and they were
on their way.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
M Yeah, I'm sure they probably fixed the car up
a little bit. But Wynton was talking like, we'll have
gas like every hundred miles for you kind of thing.
We'll send a technician to ride along with you. I'm
sure the idea of adding a third stranger or a
stranger to this mix by this time, which is just unthinkable.
So yeah, they turned them down, but they made it
through Cleveland. They made it all the way to Buffalo.
(43:04):
It wasn't until Buffalo, New York that they had their
the worst wreck that they had, where all three of
them sewell, Horatio and Bud were ejected from the car
because they hit something. Bud Horatio only mentions it as
a hidden obstruction, so I'm not sure if he ever
knew what it was. But none of them were injured
and the car was okay, so they just kept on
(43:26):
keeping on.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
So take us home. When did they they pulled into Manhattan,
didn't they? Finally?
Speaker 1 (43:32):
On July twenty sixth, at four thirty am, sixty three days,
twelve hours and Thirty minutes after they set out from
San Francisco, they made it to Manhattan, New York, and
Horatio Nelson Jackson won his bet, which, by the way,
he never collected on.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
Oh, I was curious about that. He didn't. Nope, what
a stand up?
Speaker 1 (43:55):
Yeah, or he's like, I'm never going out west again.
It's too long of a ride.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
And there to greet him where it was a throngs
of press and journalists, people from the wint And car
company and swipes the old girl herself right there.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
Yeah, that's so cool.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
I love that they had like a great relationship, and
he had a great relationship with Sewell and everybody loved Bud.
And if you're wondering what happened to Bud, Bud lived
out the rest of his days on the Jackson farm
in Vermont.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
And that's not an euphemism for like, right, he really
got lost and died.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Right, No, he really did live out his days there.
Speaker 3 (44:31):
It's great.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Jackson went on to live a very interesting life after this,
even he had a number of businesses that he ran.
He joined the military in World War One in his
forties and apparently became a decorated veteran.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
Probably collected tobacco baseball cards.
Speaker 3 (44:51):
At the time. Probably so so Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
I think he ran for governor and lost governor of
Vermont at one time in loss. I don't know how
he lost. I don't know who in the world would
vote for someone else other than this guy. Right, and
donated that car the Vermont to the Smithsonian, which and
those doggles. Ed has seen this in person, I don't
think I have, even though I've been there, so or
maybe I didn't. I just didn't know the story at
(45:15):
the time.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Maybe it seems like you'd be able to recall a
car like that.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
I don't know. I've been to a lot of museums,
seen a lot of old cars. Right.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Sadly, Suell Crocker, he died young. He contracted an illness
and died in nineteen thirteen, so he was about forty, no,
thirty something, early.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
Thirties, and he's thirty one.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
He had been sent to Mexico, I think, to protect
some land during the revolution there, and he the stress
of it killed him, essentially, is how I saw it.
Speaker 3 (45:50):
Jesus, that's really sad. I know it is.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
So that's really the only big sad thing that happened
aside from Bud getting ejected from the car in Buffalo,
New York.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
A nice little cherry on top here that ed found.
Two was six years after this trip, a woman named
Alice Ramsey and three of her friends became the first
woman and women to accomplish this same thing. They were
sponsored by Maxwell Brisco, an automaker, and they did the
trip in fifty nine days in basically the same or
(46:21):
maybe just barely slightly better conditions than Jackson and Crocker
did it in. So they pulled it off, and they
kind of encountered the same issues, and they got a
lot of press at the time and obviously did a
lot to advance, you know, the shine a light on
what women were capable of doing, which was driving a
(46:44):
car through terrible circumstances for fifty nine days.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Right exactly.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Also despite being described as pretty in every single article
that was about them at the time.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
So one other thing, and that was a kind of
a note about this, is that thirty years after Horatio
and Sewell and Bud made their trip, the record was
set that stood for decades. Fifty four hours, so two
and a half days. Guy named Irwin Cannonball Baker, we
made a famous run from New York to LA and
(47:21):
I think about forty years after that, in the early seventies,
Car and Driver magazine editors said, this Cannonball Baker guy,
he deserves his own his own place in history. So
we're going to commemorate him with a recreation of his run.
We're gonna call it the Cannonball Run.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
That's right, And if you want to learn more about that,
we was that a two parter.
Speaker 3 (47:40):
It was just a one arter.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
I think it was probably one of our fifteen minute episodes.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
No, that was a good one.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
It was a good one. I'm just saying we used
to real shortback then. I can't believe I didn't talk
that much back then that we could actually record an
episode that was fifteen minutes long.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
I think we probably talked for fifteen minutes about Burt Reynolds.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Probably probably, but that was probably the episode two. Yeah,
you're right, you got anything else? No, I don't either,
which means it's time for listener male.
Speaker 2 (48:12):
I'm gonna call this short but sweet Amazon factoid. Hey, guys,
About a quarter the way and through the episode of
the moment, the episode reminded me of our trip of
the Amazon to.
Speaker 3 (48:24):
I don't know, is it Manaus or Manaus m A
n a u S. I think manaos an owse.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
And back on a Viking ocean cruise, he said, Surprisingly,
ocean cruise ships can go that far about a thousand miles.
Who knew on the cruise Our Amazon guide told us
that what I think is the greatest bit of trivia
I've ever heard. The volume of water leaving the mouth
of the Amazon is equal to the volume of water
going over Niagara Falls Victoria Falls. I'm going to do
(48:54):
my best with my pronunciation on this falls in South America.
Speaker 3 (48:58):
Iguazu.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
Perhaps very nice for South American listeners should write in
and let us know.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
Right so it is the volume of water leaving the
mouth of the Amazon is equal to those three giant balls.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
Wow times twelve. Wow.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
I was not expecting that extra little bit of math
right there.
Speaker 3 (49:14):
I think that's what makes it amazing. That's from Rich Pope.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
Thanks Rich Pope. Great name too, really gets it across.
Rich Pope.
Speaker 3 (49:20):
Yeah, good to meet you, you know, yeah, I agreed.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
Well, it's good to meet you to Rich Pope. And
if you want to be like Rich Pope, you can
email us as well. Send it off to stuff Podcasts
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey guys, it's me Josh, and for this week's select,
I've chosen our episode on the very First road Trip
across America from back in twenty twenty three. The episode
was from twenty twenty three. The first road Trip took
place way before that, and it's one of those wonderful
stories where nothing goes horribly wrong, the people don't turn
out to be horrible people. It's just a great story
(00:24):
about a couple of guys and a dog taking a
road trip across America at a time when it was
highly unlikely that they were gonna make it all the way.
I'm glad to present you with this one. Enjoy.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck in. It's just the two of us, but we're
gonna make it just fine. We're gonna make it if
you try. As a like to say, sometimes when it's
just the two of us and this stuff, you.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Should I'm excited about this episode because this is a really,
really great story that doesn't have like I kept waiting
for something either bad to happen or someone to be
exposed as awful and it's just a really fun, feel
good story.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
I would go so far as to call it a
hum dinger.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
It's a hum dinger.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
And we got to give a huge credit to Ed
who helped us with this, and also because he helped Ed,
who helped us ken Burns. Ken Burns has a great
documentary about this topic, which is the first cross country
automobile road trip. It's called Horatios Drive. It's wonderful story
(01:48):
and you can find it on PBS. Hopefully if you're
a streamer, you pay for and subscribe to the PBS
app because it's a very worthwhile and great channel to
subscribe to. Narrated by the great Keith David, one of
the great great voices.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Just amazing and such a great actor too, great everything
from They Live to Men at Work to There's Something
about Mary. Yeah, he was in Platoon too. He's like
just such a great actor.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Love that guy.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
And because our protagonist in this story, who will introduce
you to in a second, is such an affable, seemingly
really good guy, they got none other than Tom Hanks
to recreate his voice for his diary letters and stuff
like that.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
We should also give a hat tip to Dayton Duncan,
who's interviewed extensively in that documentary because he wrote a
book on the drive.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
I would argue the book, yeah, and.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Let's call it that the book on Horatio Nelson Jackson, Right.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Yeah, that's his name, great name.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
So we're going to talk a lot more about him later,
but we really kind of want to like lay the groundwork,
bring the con text, as flavor flav would put it,
and just kind of give you an idea of what
the times were like when Horatio Nelson Jackson decided to
become the first person to travel cross country in a car.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Right, So nineteen oh three, nine to one one was
a joke. I like that one.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
That's okay, all right, just a medium okay on that one.
I'll take it. Nineteen oh three is when this happened.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
But to put this in context, like you said, the
first trans continental railroad was built and completed or not
built but completed in eighteen sixty nine, and it was
eighteen seventy six when you got your first cross country
train trip that happened. So this was what like twenty
(03:50):
five is years roughly after that, and people were still
kind of only traveling by train because cars were pretty knew,
and they were only for richies because I believe in
the documentary they said, like the cheapest car you could
get would cost more than the average American made in
a year. So in the early nineteen hundreds, it was
(04:14):
rich people who wanted to buy a super expensive, unique
toy that and will hammer this home a lot, but
they didn't even know was.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Gonna end up being a real thing.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, it could have turned out like the segue totally right.
I mean this is kind of a kin to somebody
taking a treck across America on a segue back in
like nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah, they did not know car Like a lot of
people thought, these cars will never amount to anything. You're silly,
It'll always be trains and horses.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Right, So to kind of get across why people thought
it was just going to be nothing but trains and horses,
Like that's how the American infrastructure was built. Like, if
you went any any kind of lengthy distance, you took
a train. If you were moving around locally, you took
a horse, maybe a horse and a buggy or a
horse and carriage or something like that kind of drive.
(05:10):
I'm sure if you wanted to be super wild west
about it. But there were At the time, say around
nineteen hundred, the United States had two point three million
miles of roads, pretty impressive. One hundred and fifty miles
were paved, and all of those were within big cities. Right,
So the vast, vast, vast majority of roads in the
(05:35):
United States were rough, rutted, dusty, or muddy or somehow
both at the same time, roads that you would not
want to walk over really, let alone ride a car over.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Yeah, they were in bad shape.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Generally, about fourteen million horses in the United States to
about eight thousand cars.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
And like you said, people traveled low.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
I think the average was, like people generally didn't go
more than twelve miles from their house. And that even
feels like the high end. I don't think that's an average.
I think people probably didn't go within a few miles
of their house.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Yeah, I mean today, unless I'm traveling.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Right at the time, there were and you still take
trains for long distance travel sometimes I try to. At
the time, also, like you, you didn't really steer away
from home because it took you so long to go
anywhere on horse, right, I think at the time it
was still a two day journey basically from New York
to Philadelphia by horse. So this is like a this
(06:40):
is a this is a big deal for somebody to
be like, no, I'm going to try this. The other
thing was the roads themselves weren't mapped. Yeah, I mean
east of the Mississippi. There were maps and guide books
that you could get pretty good directions from.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
Right, and it's it's funny.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
In the documentary they kind of show what that part
directions were like, and one of those like turn right
at the old Stone horse Trough. Yeah, like those were
the kind of directions and because that's what a local
would tell you to do, so somebody had the bright
idea to print those and put them down in a
(07:16):
book form and transmit that information that way. And it's
still held up because there were no road names, there
were no route numbers, there was nothing like that, because
there was no reason for anything like that to exist.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Yeah, And funny enough, that's how I prefer directions now
because I'm very directionally challenged and famously so. And I
also never know the names of roads, so I always
ask people like, tell me, you know, go to that
diner that you know and take a left and then
go to that car wash and veer right.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Then. That's how I prefer to get directions.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
I I tend to zone out when people give me
directions me too, that I've asked for, and you can
just kind of see it on their faces. They can
tell I'm going to get lost because it's just not sinking.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
In well, all the fun of that it's gone now
because you just punch it into your app or whatever.
But totally, I'm basically talking about pre GPS stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
I remember, I remember, remember that. I am also smart
enough to really appreciate ways though too.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
You know, do you remember the fun of a road
trip of opening that Rand McNally atlas and saying like,
I think we can go this way to get to
this town, or it looks like this other road we
can go around. That was like and I'm not like, oh,
things were so much better when it was harder, but
it was a really had a fun, sort of magical
(08:35):
adventuresome quality to it.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
I think, Yeah, I spent five weeks in a van
driving around the Western United States doing that same thing.
It was very cool and like the amount of freedom
is really hard to get across of like, yeah, not
having anywhere you had to be at any particular time
and saying like, oh, that that landmark sounds pretty cool.
(08:58):
I'm going to go see that. It's pretty neat.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
You know what words you don't hear anymore is let's
go here instead. It's true, everything seems so locked down,
you know, it's like, I don't know, people don't say,
oh no, let's just let's decide to go to this
town instead of this town.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
I feel like we've entered the disgruntled aged old men
or stuff, because it seems like we do this almost
every episode.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Dude, Yeah, maybe we're gonna have to pay.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
More attention to that, or else we're gonna lose all
the youngsters and just attract all the old stirs and
who cares.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Well, Hey, youngster, I encourage you to set out on
a road trip with a map and and enjoy it.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Okay, wait to save it. I don't think I saved anything.
So I think we've.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Gotten across that it would be really hard to drive
a car, right, Yeah, across the United States at the time.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Yeah, hard to drive a car.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
But because cars were becoming a little more popular, they
were trying to get a more positive publicity going for
their cars and their companies, and so they said, hey,
what a great way to do this then, like kind
of sponsor a cross country car truck trip that'll get
a lot of press. And so they tried this with
John and Louise Davis from the how do you pronounce that?
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Cardia? It sounds like something you contract that you'd be
really unhappy.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
About, Okay, thedia.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
I couldn't quite tell, but yeah, it does sound like
a disease of some sort.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Do you r yea?
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Yeah, the Derea car company gave them a national or
I'm sorry, they weren't a car company.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
That was the car. The company was the National Motor
Carriage Company.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Yeah, known today as the NMCC.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Really, I'm just kidding that. I thought you were going
to say as Portia.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
No, I would like to think that, but no, I
don't think so.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
No, I don't think so either. So they sponsored this couple.
This was an eighteen ninety nine. It did not work out.
They very famously got beaten to They started from New
York and they got beaten to Syracuse by a one
armed bicyclist who gave them a ten day head start.
So press it went opposite of how they wanted to.
That was sort of they lost track or lost interest
(11:09):
very early on in this sort of doomed thing. And
I don't think they even know if they succeeded in
getting the San Francisco. Well, I think they know they didn't,
but they basically didn't really cover the story after that.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
No, they drop off the map after about Chicago.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
They dropped off the GPS apporry.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
So no, it's just could it just took me a
second to for it to sink in.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
I thought that was pretty good. I'm trying to get
our younger listeners back.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
So well, we should make a TikTok of all this then, okay,
know what people do?
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Sure for now US government? So it was wonderful, Yeah,
thank you.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
So it was established though, even though the Davises didn't
make it that like, this is actually a really good
way to to to promote a car brand is to
be the first to make it across the country. Then
everyone will know that's a good car, because it's just
so ridiculous to even think a car could do that.
So a couple of years after the Davises, I guess
nineteen oh one, a car maker named Alexander Winton who
(12:14):
had a Winton car company, handmade cars, beautiful cars. He
tried it himself, I believe, with this publicist. Very smartly.
He and his publicist hit the road. The acid hit
them around Barstow. I think, well, that showed up and
(12:35):
they ended up getting trapped in a dune in Nevada.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Yeah, but you bring up a thing that might be overlooked.
Is they very smartly started from west to east because
as we mentioned, the west was untamed land and bad,
bad bad roads if there weren't he at all. So
getting that hard part over first when the car was
brand spanking new was really really smart. But what they
didn't count on was an and we'll see what Jackson
(13:01):
learned was driving through the desert in an old car
like that is not good. Sand is not good for
getting stuck, or it's great for getting stuck, it's not
good for making good time. Sand is not good for
getting in carburetors and in oil and gas. And you know,
these engines weren't these big closed systems like they are today.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
So sand no good.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
But Winton got this press right like he It helped,
I think, still publicize his car company regardless, and again
the fact that no one had done this, but people
were starting to try it. It kept being a thing.
It was going to be a thing until somebody did it.
And so a couple of years after Wynton tried, a
guy named Horatio Nelson Jackson, who's the star of our story,
(13:46):
was hanging out at the University Club of San Francisco,
and apparently a couple of fellow club members were saying
that cars were basically useless and that they would never
really go anywhere, and there's no reason for anybody to
have Jackson, by this time had really developed a real
love of cars, had started collecting them even and I
(14:07):
guess to defend cars honor, he slapped down a fifty
dollars wager that he could make it across the United
States from San Francisco to New York in less than
ninety days. Ninety days or less, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
And that was.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
About fifteen hundred dollars that he threw down on the
table right then, and the people took it.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
They accepted as wager.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
And four days later he set out for New York
from San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
It is madness to think about that he did this
with that little planning.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
He didn't have a car to do it.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
I mean he had cars, but not one to go
across country at the time. Just quickly about Jackson. He
was a doctor who got tuberculosis and quit his practice
kind of at the same time that he married a
very wealthy woman named Bertha Richardson Wells, very wealthy New
England family from Vermont.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
She her family made their money in Celery compounds.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
I know, it was like a tonic yeah, basically, so
he as ed put did rich guy things, capital R,
capital G. And his wife was super supportive, like everyone
was on board. She was like, that's awesome. I'll take
a train to Burlington. I'll meet you over there. Honey,
you have my blessing. And it seems like they had
a really like judging from the letters that of course
(15:28):
it was voiced by Tom Hanks too, so you're endeared immediately.
But judging from the letters, it seems like they were
just a great couple, a very loving family. He called
her Swipes, and no one knows why that nickname was there,
but he you know, he signed it as Nelson and
you're yours forever Nelson and my dearest Swipes, and it
was really really sort of a beautiful story of this couple,
(15:52):
and he knew he had to get a guy to
go with him, and so he picked a great traveling partner.
He was a small engine mechanic and a factory named
Sewell Crocker, who was about ten years younger.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
He's twenty two years old. I think we was. Horatio
was like two.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Okay, So this guy could fix cars, he knew cars,
and apparently like they really liked each other and were
which was a big deal. You know, you've been on
road trips and regular cars. Yeah, and that's a key factor.
But especially back then with all the troubles they were
going to have, he had to have someone that you
could get along with.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
That's a big one for sure.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
So he asked Crocker, hey man, what car should we
get for this? And Crocker said, well, you have basically
limitless funds, get the best by yourself, a nineteen oh
three Winton touring car. And Ed points something out that
I think is very astute. The reason why, probably Sewell
Crocker said get a Winton was because Winton had already
(16:50):
shown that they were making really good cars enough so
that they were willing to try to make it across
country in one of them. So that's exactly what Jackson
did did. He's the kind of guy you call him
by his first name because it's got a great first name,
and he's Tom Hanks, like appable.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
Right.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Yeah, So so Horatio bought himself a Winton touring car
nineteen oh three. Apparently he paid essentially one hundred thousand
dollars for.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
It, and it was used.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, it was used, but it was the only one available.
So he just paid whatever the person wanted for it.
And so I think in nineteen oh three dollars he
paid three thousand dollars. But he named it the Vermont
because that's where he and his wife Bertha lived. But
a little bit about this car there was it was
an It was open in every sense of the word.
(17:40):
It was like if you took a tub and put
wheels on it and then had a steering wheel sticking
out of it.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
That was the car.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
There was no windshield, there was no roof, there was
no back windshield, there were no doors, there was no nothing.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
It was like a giant riding lawnmower with like wagon wheels.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Well it's funny that you bring up riding lawnmowers, Chuck,
because the two cylinder chain drive engine had twenty horse power,
and my friend a John Deere X three hundred series
riding mower has twenty two horse power.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
That's funny, that's really funny. This thing topped out at
thirty miles per hour. I don't think that John Deere
does that, but that's probably just because it's cutting grass
at the same time.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
But imagine imagine traveling the country on riding lawnmower.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Basically that's about what they were doing.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
But yes, you're right, thirty miles an hour is substantially more.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
That's what it could do. Max. Yeah, no way did
they average thirty miles.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
An hour, not even close. It was someone it was
red a really good looking car. You'll only see black
and whites. But someone on Reddit, that's the picture I
sent you did a very fun colorized picture of Horatio
and Crocker and a a third party to be named
later and colorized it and it just it looks awesome.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
And this car is so cool looking.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Yeah, I don't mean to detract from it.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
It was a cool looking car.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
As far as comfort goes, it was not at all comfortable. No,
I say, we take a break and then set out
on the road trip with these guys.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
Huh oh, let's do it.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
All right.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
So, as we will see, there were other car manufacturers
planning to do the same thing at the time, and
a couple of them ended up. You know, it ended
up sort of being a race against like a corporation
versus human even though he was driving. You know, it's
not like a car he built himself. It was a Winton,
(20:07):
but he was doing it himself with this other guy.
He wasn't for fun, he wasn't sponsored. It was about
the spirit of adventure. All these as we'll see, all
these other companies sent like supplies ahead and the like.
They had teams of mechanics. He didn't have anything to prove.
He put this together in four days, including buying the car,
(20:29):
And that's just I really want to get across. The
spirit of this whole thing was just this optimist who
was like, let me see if I can do this
crazy thing.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
So two months after Horatio and Sewell set out on
their trip, Packard sent a team out and like you said,
they were very well outfitted. They had a mechanic on board.
There was gasoline for them at every stop. Because gasoline
was there were no gas stations, and definitely there were
no gas stations out west. You would go to the
(21:02):
general store and be like, I'd like a can of
your most dangerous volatile liquid, please, and they would hand
you some gasoline in a can and you buy a
few of them to drive around with. It was incredibly dangerous,
but that's how you didn't run out of gas. Packard
had the advantage of like every town or every x
number of miles, there was gasoline waiting for them. So
(21:23):
they essentially had gas stations that were reserved exclusively for them.
Horatio and Sewell did not have anything remotely like that,
and so they got into all sorts of fun little adventures,
like the time that Sewel Crocker had to bike dozens
of miles on a borrowed bicycle to go to and
fro to fill up their gas can and bring it
(21:43):
back and then fill it up again and then bring
it back. And that might have been there right exactly,
And it's fun now in retrospect us talking about it
here in twenty twenty three in the studio. I'm sure
it was not a great day for Sewel Crocker.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
No, I don't think they were drawing straws, though, you
know what I mean. The rich thirty one year old
that had TV is definitely saying, all right, hit the
road on the bike.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Yeah, my friend, were equals in almost every way, but
hit the trail on the bike, right, all right.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
So Packard did so two months later, like you said,
and Oldsmobile did the same thing a month after that,
I believe, much the same operation, you know, fully sponsored
and like rigged up and everything. So they tore out
the back seat on this Winton. I don't think we
mentioned this thing could go two hundred and fifty miles
(22:34):
with their tank of fuel, which was way more than
I thought. Yeah, for sure, I was super impressed. So
they ripped out the back seat, which doesn't look like
it was much of one anyway, and packed you know,
a cooking kit, tons of rope. Something that would probably
be the most valuable thing in the whole car was
(22:55):
a pulley system, a block and tackle.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
They had a codec camera, They had sleeping bags, they
had a shovel and axe. They had a bunch of
guns and ammunition because they might be hunting for food
out in the middle of nowhere or just maybe want
to murder someone, yeah, or just.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Like shooting out of an untopped car is probably pretty
fun when no one's around.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
That is fun.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
So yeah, the problem is is like they weren't experts
at tying down their gear, and they would get to
like a stop probably basically every day and find that
something they needed had dropped.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Off and bounced out at some point.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Like back on their trail, and that they had gone
too far to go back to try to find it.
It's really they lost like cooking utensils. Horatio lost multiple
pairs of his eyeglasses. It's just crazy to me that
they weren't like put a tarp on it and wrap
the tarp up and then put rope on the tarp.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
You know who knows.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
But they did lose a lot of stuff, and luckily,
like you said, they didn't lose that block and tackle.
It would really come into play multiple times. But they
made a really good decision early on number one. They
followed I can't remember it for some mister won Alexander
Winton's example and started out west. So what they would
(24:14):
be doing is getting the hardest part of the trip
out of the way first. While the car had very
few miles on it, right.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Yeah, which was a nice little copy.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
But then they made a really really great decision, and
I think the decision that frankly made them a success
in the end. Did I just spoil it? I guess
we talked about what a great story was. It wouldn't
be great if they conked out in Michigan.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
True.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
True, But they decided to go at hundreds of miles
to their trip by not just taking a right and
going across the country, but going north up through Oregon
to avoid that Nevada desert, and that, my friend, even
though there was some treacherous mountains that they had to
go through, avoiding that desert I think is what ultimately
(25:03):
made them successful.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, I mean, hundreds of miles added to the trip,
But it was incredibly smart because again Winton had bottomed
out in that sand. That sand wasn't going anywhere at
the very least. There were wagon trails and stuff up
in Oregon, and they were able to kind of make
their way along these the railroad tracks that were there.
So there were railroad right of ways, which is the
(25:28):
land cleared on either side of a railroad track, and
they would drive on those or if they had to
drive on the railway themselves, and they would they would
ride on railroad bridges in a car that could go
thirty miles per hour max. Yeah, and hoped God that
there wasn't a train that was going to come. And
I was like, man, I'm so glad I watched stand
(25:50):
By Me a couple of days ago.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
Chris about to bring that up. You watched it.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
It's such a great part of that movie. And I
was telling you, like, that was a masterpiece. Is Rob
b Reiner's masterpiece, And he's made some pretty great movies,
but it is exponentially better than I even remembered as
a kid.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
I'll throw a spinal tap in there. But I know,
have you still not seen that?
Speaker 3 (26:11):
That's what I'm saying. No, it's great.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
That's a great movie. I think when Harry met Sally's
a great movie. Like there's tons of great movies Rob
Briiner's made, but I think stand By Me might be
the best.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Yeah, it's a great movie.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
I love that scene when they put their hands on
the rail, Yeah, and it just gets real quiet and
they're listening. They're like, do you feel any vibration at all?
And that's probably what these guys were doing.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
I'm sure, but they were doing it bumping along in
their open car. Yeah, also shout out. I don't know
Phil Wheaton still listens to us. I know he used to,
but man, all of those kids.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Did a great, great job.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
But he really did a magnificent job acting in that movie.
So way to go Wheaton, totally listening.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Great movie. I love it.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
I'm gonna watch it too now. Talking about it in Vegas,
it made me nostalgic for it for sure.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
All right.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
All right, so we are at leave time, which was
May twenty third, nineteen oh three.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
It was a Saturday.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Apparently it was a hot spring in California, and it
rained that afternoon and they took off from San Francisco
and very quickly blew a tire out.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
It was like Romeo Michelle.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Yeah, totally. And the chronicle in San Francisco wasn't even
covering it. Basically, the San Francisco Examiner had a very
short little piece about it, about a horseless carriage going
from sea to sea. But it would build, as you
will see, with the press as things went along. But
it wasn't well covered at first, and the tire thing,
(27:41):
it was an issue I mean the car tires at
the time would routinely blow out. They had a hard
time on the trip finding new tubes. They would stock
up on used tubes whenever they went to a town
it seemed like that had any kind of tubes, they
would just buy them, right and Yeah, and it was
a tires were an issue that woud seemed like one
(28:02):
of the main issues.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Yeah, because I mean you can imagine there's not people
selling car tires because there were so few cars, and
out west they kept encountering people who had never seen
a car.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
I saw mention of that Packard team that was riding.
I think Tom Fetch was the Packard guy who was
driving the car, and they pulled into one town that
where a murder had just been committed and so few
people had seen a car in that town that everybody
left the fresh murder scene, including the sheriff, to come
look at the car that had just rolled into town.
(28:37):
Like that was like what it was like out west
at the time. So of course you weren't gonna find
car tires easily. You had to improvise any way you could.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Sure, and a murdered body out there back then was
a dime, a dozen, dime a dozen. Ye's not going anywhere,
that's right, it's gonna check out that new car.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Yeah, it's not going anywhere.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
So they're going east. They're going through some treacherous terrain,
go to the Cascade Mountains. It's fun in the documentary
to hear the diary or letters home to his wife
where he was talking about, you know, the roads that
are basically big enough for one car because I can't
remember exactly I said it, but like because nature has
(29:16):
made it that way, basically like it's a cliff side
on the side of a mountain. So luckily, you know,
they're having to share the road with stage coaches and
horses and stuff like that, not really any other cars probably,
but they would it was what you would think. They
were constantly getting stuck, constantly blowing tires. They I think
the record was eighteen times in a day they had
(29:39):
to use that block and tackle to pull themselves out
of a ditch or a river or a mud hole.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
That must have been the suckiest day ever. Yeah, and
then the maps were an issue too, right.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Yeah, they would have to rely on locals for directions.
Some when they could find locals a lot of times
they just had to guess I saw again the Packard team.
Sorry to keep bringing them up. I know or not
what the story's about, but they learned to avoid the
nicest roads because out west that usually meant that it
just dead ended in some rich person's house, and when
(30:10):
you could find locals, they would sometimes just literally misguide you.
There was one that Horatio and Sewell ran across a
woman on horseback who told them to get to the
next time they should go down this road, and it
dead ended in her family's farm.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
It was her driveway.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Basically, they came back the way they went and ran
across her again. They're like, why did you do that?
And she's like, oh, my dad and mom and husband
would have wanted to see a car. They've never seen
a car before, so she purposefully sent them the wrong
way down a dead end, miles down a dead end
apparently too. And I did not hear that they had
gotten angry with her or cross even. I think they
(30:47):
probably just said like, good day to you, madam and
kept on.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
They should have said, you don't know this yet, but
one day giving directions will be very important, and this
will not be cool.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
This is not going to reflect good on your family. Manson,
you like.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
That, Tina. I just loved Tina. It was so not
a name back then, Tina Manson, I love it.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
Great choice.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
The breaks were kind of what you would imagine. They
weren't great, So it was quite thrilling when they would
get on these downhill runs and there wasn't a lot
you could do about it. The clutch went out a lot.
I mean, you know, we talked about our various van
journeys out west. We were in a Volkswagen Van for
mine and the mountains killed it. Like we had to
(31:35):
to get a rental jeep Cherokee in Nevada for the
whole second half of the trip because going through the
mountains literally killed his. And it wasn't like a brand
new VW van. It wasn't one of the old ones,
but it was like the Vanigan. But like it drove
us from Atlanta to the mountains just fine, and the
mountains killed it. So imagine what the mountains did to
(31:58):
the clutch system on this lawnmower.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Basically, yeah, I have to admit, until today I did
not know what a clutch did. I knew that the
clutch was the thing you push into shift gears. Never
understood why the reason why you push in is because
you actually want to stop the clutch from working temporarily.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
What the clutch does is it transmits the motor power
or the motor's torque to the transmission, which in turn
turns the axle to the tires the wheels. Right, that's
my understanding of it. And when you're pressing in the clutch,
what you're really doing is keeping that transfer from taking
place so that you can go into another gear and
(32:39):
then you let the clutch out and that transfer begins again. So, yes,
the clutch is an extremely important instrument. The car does
not go without it. And apparently Suel Crocker had to
fix that thing almost as many times as they used
the block and tackle to pull themselves out of mud.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Well he was worth his weight, oh boy, yeah he was.
He did have one modification they made on the way there,
as they added a headlamp and a ceedlean headlamp so
they could drive at night because they want to make
up time, you know, because there were times when they
had to go to a town and wait for I
think one of them was like three or four days
(33:18):
where they're waiting ironically for a stage coach to show
up with parts that they had ordered. There were times
when a stage coach or a guy on a horse
would pull them out ironically.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
Again.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Yeah, and I didn't get the impression that Horatio was
trying to prove that horses were obsolete.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
No, I don't think so at all.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
I think he still saw it as pretty ironic that
he still relied on horses in this horseless carriage.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
I don't think he threw shade even when blacksmiths would
make repairs. They pointed out in the documentary that I
think it was in one of his letters he said
it like the irony wasn't lost on him. But I
don't think he was like, you're not going to have
a job in a few years, sucker.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Right right, that's what segue makers said to people on foot.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
Didn't the adventure of this segue drive off a cliff
on a segway.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Oh that sounds like an urban legend, but maybe one
that's just crazy enough to be true.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
I'll have to look that up. Should we take a break, Yes, well,
we'll take a break and look that up. All right,
we'll be back here with the truth, right, after this.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Okay, we're back and chuck it's true bbc D He
really says it.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Wow, Jimmy Hezelden was sixty two when he rode off
a cliff on his company's segues.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
They killed him obviously, Yes, in West Yorkshire. That's sad.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
Yeah, making it My god, that's quite a legend.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
It is.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
It's like Fabio getting hit in the face with a
duck on a roller coaster.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
What no, you know that.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
No, Fabio on a roller coaster. A duck flew across
his path and hit him in the face.
Speaker 3 (35:20):
And killed him. No, no, no, oh okay.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
But it's uh, it's one of these pictures on the
Internet where you're like, oh, that's got to be fake,
and it's and it really happened, poor Fabio. I know,
I feel bad for the guy, but it was also like,
of all the people to get for this to happen
to it was just it was pretty rich.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Yeah, I can imagine, what way is he a jerk?
Speaker 3 (35:44):
No? No, no, is he?
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Okay, but he's Fabio And like you know, that kind
of stuff doesn't happen to Fabio.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
It's not happened to me for sure, and me too,
totally with you on that. Did you look up that picture?
Speaker 1 (35:55):
I'm watching the video right now. I can't not chuck.
We will have an episode someday where we just tell
each other internet memes and the other one will look
it up and then react on Mike, and that's how
we'll do it.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
All Ye, stuff you shouldn't couldn't care less about will
be the name of that new.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
Stuff you really probably shouldn't bother listening to. All right,
so let's pick up with the trip.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
It sounds like we're painting an ed I'm glad he
pointed this out. It sounds like we're painting a picture
of an awful time. Because of all of the delays
and all of the things that happened. They knew what
they were in for with this. They didn't think it
was going to be a pleasure cruise. It was also
a great fun adventure. Like these guys are having a
great time. They were seeing things that few people had
ever even seen in person before, even by horse at times.
(36:43):
And they had no schedule. I mean, they were trying
to beat this ninety day thing. But like I get
the feeling he really just wanted to finish the trip,
so you know he had money. They were staying in hotels,
they were staying with people along the way who opened
their homes to them.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
They were driving about two.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Hours at a time time, and it seemed like they
were having fun at the same time.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
I have that same impression too, for sure. And plus,
don't forget Sewell Crocker was making some pretty good money too.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
Yeah, I didn't find that. What was he getting paid.
I didn't see either.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
But we can go ahead and say at the end
they tallied up how much Horatio Jackson spent on the trip,
and this included Crocker's pay.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
It was about eight.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Grand back in nineteen oh three, which is a two
hundred and sixty seven grand today.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
So much funny. So if you think about it.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Hotels, food, supplies, gas, car parts, repairs, that still leaves
a pretty decent amount for Sewell Crocker, and I hope
he got a big chunk of that.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
I hope so too, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
I cannot, for the love of life find the stupid
picture of Fabio getting hit in the face. I found
some ABC report and it just shows him going into
the roller coaster station after the ride, just faces all
bloody and he looks really upset, but nothing about the
actual hit.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
You know, I wonder if what I saw was a
faked recreation of that, and there is only a before
and after.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
That would make sense that it looked photoshopped, then I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
I just had to had to circle back.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
On that because my disappointment was palpable.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Oh boy, So they're making their way out west or
i'm sorry, back east. And it's funny they say, back east,
out west, up north, down south.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
So they're back. They're heading back east.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Uh. And they come to Idaho. M When I mentioned
a third party in that photograph, we were holding out
for this big surprise and Caldwell, Idaho. They left without
Jackson's code, turned back to go get it, and this
guy said, here, I have this pit bull named Bud
and he wants to go with you and be your mascot.
(38:54):
And they said, hop a board, Bud, And all of
a sudden, they have this beautiful white pit bull in
between the two of them.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Yeah, he's routinely described as a bulldog, but he's pretty
clearly a pit bull.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
For he's a pity and he's beautiful, and like, if
this story couldn't get any better, now you have a
pit bull in between you.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
And they made him.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Doggles to protect his little eyes, and there's a wonderful
photo of it in the documentary.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Yeah, so they were, you know, like you said, they
were getting pressed as they went from town to town,
and they were like, oh my god, a car. There's
people actually trying to use it to cross the United
States in that car. When Bud joined it, people just
went berserk over this whole thing, in part because he
was wearing these goggles, but also he very quickly learned
(39:41):
how to ride in the car. He look ahead, he
loved it to look for ruts or bumps or whatever,
and would like brace himself like. He just took to
it very easily and became like this great mascot. So
everybody started to really find out about this when Bud joined.
And I don't get the impression that sewel or Horatio
with least bit jealous.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
No, he paid him fifteen dollars, which is five hundred
dollars today for this dog. And Crocker said, hey, adopt,
don't shop And Jackson said what does that mean, right,
and he said, no, don't worry about it. That comes later, right.
So they're getting all this press thanks to Bud. They
make their way through sort of that toughest stretch of terrain,
(40:24):
they're running out of food. They finally sort of cross
out of the mountains and they're like, all right, that
was sort of it, like we think this is not
literally but this is sort of downhill from here. And
he in his letters he was saying, I've never felt
more confident now that we're gonna make it to New York.
And this is when they were in like Wyoming.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yeah, and then once they got to Omaha, it really
got easier. And then after Omaha Chicago, and then after Chicago,
probably Cleveland or something like that, maybe an Indianapolis in between,
like the city after city just started to pop up,
and they were getting closer and closer, and there were
much better roads. The railroad rideaways were just beautiful. Sitting
(41:08):
there for the picking flat. They started to really yeah,
they started to really make some pretty good time.
Speaker 3 (41:13):
Yeah. I think.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
How many miles did they top out at the day.
I feel like it was like seventy something, which is
not too bad.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
I don't remember, actually, I think in.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
The documentary said seventy seventy something miles in a single day,
like when they were kind of cruising, which that's awesome,
that's good time for that car.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Yeah, that's not bad at all, especially considering it maxed
out at thirty miles an hour. Yeah, so that was
just like a two and a half hour day for them,
I guess, Yeah, sure so, but that really does go
to point out like just how slow they were going
because of things like breaking down and waiting for parts
and just the roads being terrible. And I mentioned Cleveland too.
(41:56):
They actually when they showed up in Cleveland, that's where
the Winting Motor Carriage Company was located. And we didn't
say I don't think that Wynton had by this time
heard about the whole trip and that they were actually
making pretty good headway.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Right, Yeah, so he got he sort of officially offered
to kind of sponsor them from that point on, and
Jackson turned him down. He was like, no, I've got
Packard and Oldsmobile behind me, and I don't want this
to become like a corporate sponsored thing. Like we made
it this far, we can make it the rest of
the way. And they did go by the factory and
(42:32):
they got some fanfare, and I think they helped him
out with fixing this car up and stuff. But they
got free beer koozies exactly refrigerator magnets, and they were
on their way.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
M Yeah, I'm sure they probably fixed the car up
a little bit. But Wynton was talking like, we'll have
gas like every hundred miles for you kind of thing.
We'll send a technician to ride along with you. I'm
sure the idea of adding a third stranger or a
stranger to this mix by this time, which is just unthinkable.
So yeah, they turned them down, but they made it
through Cleveland. They made it all the way to Buffalo.
(43:04):
It wasn't until Buffalo, New York that they had their
the worst wreck that they had, where all three of
them sewell, Horatio and Bud were ejected from the car
because they hit something. Bud Horatio only mentions it as
a hidden obstruction, so I'm not sure if he ever
knew what it was. But none of them were injured
and the car was okay, so they just kept on
(43:26):
keeping on.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
So take us home. When did they they pulled into Manhattan,
didn't they? Finally?
Speaker 1 (43:32):
On July twenty sixth, at four thirty am, sixty three days,
twelve hours and Thirty minutes after they set out from
San Francisco, they made it to Manhattan, New York, and
Horatio Nelson Jackson won his bet, which, by the way,
he never collected on.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
Oh, I was curious about that. He didn't. Nope, what
a stand up?
Speaker 1 (43:55):
Yeah, or he's like, I'm never going out west again.
It's too long of a ride.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
And there to greet him where it was a throngs
of press and journalists, people from the wint And car
company and swipes the old girl herself right there.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
Yeah, that's so cool.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
I love that they had like a great relationship, and
he had a great relationship with Sewell and everybody loved Bud.
And if you're wondering what happened to Bud, Bud lived
out the rest of his days on the Jackson farm
in Vermont.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
And that's not an euphemism for like, right, he really
got lost and died.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Right, No, he really did live out his days there.
Speaker 3 (44:31):
It's great.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Jackson went on to live a very interesting life after this,
even he had a number of businesses that he ran.
He joined the military in World War One in his
forties and apparently became a decorated veteran.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
Probably collected tobacco baseball cards.
Speaker 3 (44:51):
At the time. Probably so so Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
I think he ran for governor and lost governor of
Vermont at one time in loss. I don't know how
he lost. I don't know who in the world would
vote for someone else other than this guy. Right, and
donated that car the Vermont to the Smithsonian, which and
those doggles. Ed has seen this in person, I don't
think I have, even though I've been there, so or
maybe I didn't. I just didn't know the story at
(45:15):
the time.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Maybe it seems like you'd be able to recall a
car like that.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
I don't know. I've been to a lot of museums,
seen a lot of old cars. Right.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Sadly, Suell Crocker, he died young. He contracted an illness
and died in nineteen thirteen, so he was about forty, no,
thirty something, early.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
Thirties, and he's thirty one.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
He had been sent to Mexico, I think, to protect
some land during the revolution there, and he the stress
of it killed him, essentially, is how I saw it.
Speaker 3 (45:50):
Jesus, that's really sad. I know it is.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
So that's really the only big sad thing that happened
aside from Bud getting ejected from the car in Buffalo,
New York.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
A nice little cherry on top here that ed found.
Two was six years after this trip, a woman named
Alice Ramsey and three of her friends became the first
woman and women to accomplish this same thing. They were
sponsored by Maxwell Brisco, an automaker, and they did the
trip in fifty nine days in basically the same or
(46:21):
maybe just barely slightly better conditions than Jackson and Crocker
did it in. So they pulled it off, and they
kind of encountered the same issues, and they got a
lot of press at the time and obviously did a
lot to advance, you know, the shine a light on
what women were capable of doing, which was driving a
(46:44):
car through terrible circumstances for fifty nine days.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Right exactly.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Also despite being described as pretty in every single article
that was about them at the time.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
So one other thing, and that was a kind of
a note about this, is that thirty years after Horatio
and Sewell and Bud made their trip, the record was
set that stood for decades. Fifty four hours, so two
and a half days. Guy named Irwin Cannonball Baker, we
made a famous run from New York to LA and
(47:21):
I think about forty years after that, in the early seventies,
Car and Driver magazine editors said, this Cannonball Baker guy,
he deserves his own his own place in history. So
we're going to commemorate him with a recreation of his run.
We're gonna call it the Cannonball Run.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
That's right, And if you want to learn more about that,
we was that a two parter.
Speaker 3 (47:40):
It was just a one arter.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
I think it was probably one of our fifteen minute episodes.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
No, that was a good one.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
It was a good one. I'm just saying we used
to real shortback then. I can't believe I didn't talk
that much back then that we could actually record an
episode that was fifteen minutes long.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
I think we probably talked for fifteen minutes about Burt Reynolds.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Probably probably, but that was probably the episode two. Yeah,
you're right, you got anything else? No, I don't either,
which means it's time for listener male.
Speaker 2 (48:12):
I'm gonna call this short but sweet Amazon factoid. Hey, guys,
About a quarter the way and through the episode of
the moment, the episode reminded me of our trip of
the Amazon to.
Speaker 3 (48:24):
I don't know, is it Manaus or Manaus m A
n a u S. I think manaos an owse.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
And back on a Viking ocean cruise, he said, Surprisingly,
ocean cruise ships can go that far about a thousand miles.
Who knew on the cruise Our Amazon guide told us
that what I think is the greatest bit of trivia
I've ever heard. The volume of water leaving the mouth
of the Amazon is equal to the volume of water
going over Niagara Falls Victoria Falls. I'm going to do
(48:54):
my best with my pronunciation on this falls in South America.
Speaker 3 (48:58):
Iguazu.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
Perhaps very nice for South American listeners should write in
and let us know.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
Right so it is the volume of water leaving the
mouth of the Amazon is equal to those three giant balls.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
Wow times twelve. Wow.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
I was not expecting that extra little bit of math
right there.
Speaker 3 (49:14):
I think that's what makes it amazing. That's from Rich Pope.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
Thanks Rich Pope. Great name too, really gets it across.
Rich Pope.
Speaker 3 (49:20):
Yeah, good to meet you, you know, yeah, I agreed.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
Well, it's good to meet you to Rich Pope. And
if you want to be like Rich Pope, you can
email us as well. Send it off to stuff Podcasts
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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