The First Road Trip

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 is their story. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
I'm welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck
and it's just the two of us. But we're gonna
make it just fine. We're gonna make it if you try.
As I like to say, sometimes when it's just the
two of us and it's sufficient. I'm excited about this

(00:25):
episode because this is a really, really great story that
doesn't have Like I was, 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. I
would go so far as to call it a hum dinger.
It's a hum dinger. And we gotta give a huge

(00:47):
credit to Ed who helps us with this, and also
because he helped Ed, who helped us ken Burns, Yeah,
ken Burns has a great documentary about this topic, which
is the first cross country automobile road trip. It's called
Horatio's Drive. It's a wonderful story and you can find

(01:07):
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,
just amazing and such a great actor too, and everything
from They Live Too Minute work there's something about Mary. Yeah,

(01:31):
he was in Platoon too. He's like just such a
great actor. I love that guy. And because our protagonists
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. We should also

(01:52):
give a hat tip to Dayton Duncan, who's interviewed extensively
in that that documentary, because he wrote a book on
on the Drive. I would argue the book, Yeah, let's
just call it that, the book on Horatio Nelson Jackson. Right, Yeah,
that's his name. Great name. So we're gonna talk a

(02:14):
lot more about him later, but we really kind of
want to like lay the groundwork, bring the context, as
Flavor Flavor 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. Right, so, nineteen oh three,

(02:38):
nine one one was a joke. I like that one. Yes, okay,
all right, just a medium okay on that one, I'll
take it. Nineteen o three is when this happened. But
to put this in context, like you said, the first
transcontinental railroad was built and completed or not built but
completed in eighteen sixty nine, and it was eighteen seventy

(03:01):
six when you got your first cross country train trip
that happened. So this was what like twenty five ish
years roughly after that, and people were still kind of
only traveling by train because cars were pretty new, and
they were only for richies, because I believe in the

(03:23):
documentary they said, like the cheapest car you could get
will cost more than the average American made in a year.
So in the early nineteen hundreds, it was rich people
who wanted to buy a super expensive, unique toy that
and we'll hammer this home a lot. But they didn't
even know was gonna end up being a real thing. Yeah,

(03:45):
it could have turned out like the se totally right.
I mean this is kind of a kin to somebody
taking a trek across America on a segue back in
like nineteen ninety five. 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, right,

(04:08):
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 luckily, you took
a horse, maybe a horse and a buggy or a
horse and carriage or something like that. You kind of drive,

(04:29):
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. Sounds pretty impressive. One hundred and fifty
miles were paved, right, and all of those were within
big cities, right, So the vast, vast, vast majority of

(04:53):
roads in the 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. Yeah, they were in bad shape. Generally,
about fourteen million horses in the United States to about

(05:14):
eight thousand cars. And like you said, people traveled locally,
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. Yeah, I mean today, unless I'm traveling. Right.

(05:36):
At the time, there were and you still take trains
for a 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

(05:58):
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. Right, And
it's it's funny in the documentary they kind of show
what the directions were, like one of those like turn

(06:22):
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
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

(06:42):
there was no reason for anything like that to exist. 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

(07:03):
to that car wash and veer right. And that's how
I prefer to get directions. I tend to zone out
when people give me directions too, but I've asked for
and uh, you can just kind of see it on
their face. Can tell I'm gonna get lost because it's
just not sinking 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

(07:27):
GPS stuff. I remember, I remember, I remember that. I
am also smart enough to really appreciate ways though, too.
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,

(07:48):
things were so much better when it was harder, but
it was a really had a fun, sort of magical
adventuresome quality to it. I think, yeah, I um 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

(08:11):
be at any particular time and saying like, oh, that
that landmark sounds pretty cool. I'm gonna go see that.
It's pretty neat. 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

(08:31):
go to this town instead of this town. I feel
like we've entered the disgrunt old aged old man because
it seems like we do this almost every episode. Dude, Yeah,
maybe we're gonna have to pay more attention to that
or else we're gonna lose all the youngsters and just
attract all the oldsters and who cares. Well, Hey, youngster,
I encourage you to set out on a road trip

(08:53):
with a map and and enjoy it. Okay, there you go,
I'm way to save it. I don't think I saved anything.
So I think we've gotten across that it would be
really hard to drive a car, right, yeah, across the
United States at the time. Yeah, hard to drive a car.
But because cars were becoming a little more popular, they
were trying to get a more positive publicity going for

(09:15):
their cars and their companies, and so they said, hey,
what a great way to do this then, like kind
of sponsor across country Carr 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? Deria?
It sounds like something you contract that you'd be really

(09:38):
unhappy about. Okay, the Daria I couldn't quite tell, but yeah,
it does sound like a disease of some sort. Do
you are yea, yeah, the Daria car company gave them
a national or I'm sorry they weren't a car company.
That was the car The company was the National Motor
Carriage Company, Yeah, known today as the NMCC. Really kidding out,

(10:00):
I thought you're gonna say as Portia. No, I would
like to think that, but no, I don't think so. 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.

(10:21):
So press it went opposite of how they wanted to.
That was sort of they lost track or lost interest
very early on in this sort of doomed thing. And
I don't think they even know if they succeeded in
getting to San Francisco. Well, I think they know they didn't,
but they basically didn't really cover the story after that. No,
they dropped off the map after about Chicago. They dropped

(10:44):
off the GPS app. Sorry, so no, it's good. It
just took me a second to for it to sink in.
I thought that was pretty good. I'm trying to get
our younger listeners back, so well, we should make a
TikTok of all this. Then, Okay, didn't know what people do,
sure for now, so it was wonderful you just saved me. Um.

(11:09):
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. I mean,
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 davis Is, I
guess nineteen o one, a carmaker named Alexander Winton M

(11:33):
who had a Winton Car Company, handmade cars, beautiful cars. Yeah. Uh,
he tried it himself, I believe, with this publicist. Very smartly,
he and his publicist hit the road. Um, the acid
hit them around Barstow. I think, well that showed up

(11:53):
and they ended up getting trapped in a dune in Nevada. Yeah.
But you 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 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

(12:16):
count on was and we'll see what Jackson 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

(12:37):
engines weren't these big closed systems like they are today.
So sand no good. But Winton got this press right,
like like he 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

(12:58):
years after Winton try, a guy named Horatio Nelson Jackson,
who's the star of our story, 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 one. Jackson, by

(13:20):
this time had really developed a real love of cars,
had started collecting them even yeah, and I guess to
defend cars honor, he slapped down a fifty 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. And that was about fifteen

(13:41):
hundred dollars that he threw down on the table right then,
and the people took it. They accepted his wager, and
four days later he set out for New York from
San Francisco. It is madness to think about that he
did this with that little planning. He didn't have a
car to do it. I mean he had cars, but

(14:01):
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. Her family made

(14:22):
their money in salary compounds. I it was like a
tonic yeah, basically, so he as Ed Putt, did rich
guy things, capital R, capital G. And his wife was
super supportive, like everyone was on board. He 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

(14:43):
seems like they had a really like judging from the
letters that of course 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 the year years forever Nelson

(15:05):
and my dearest Swipes. And it was really really sort
of a beautiful story of this couple. 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. He's twenty two years old.
I think, um, what was Horatio? Was like, okay, so

(15:30):
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
in regular cars 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.
That's a big one for sure. So he asked Crocker, hey, man,

(15:51):
what car should we get for this? And Crocker said, well,
you have basically limitless fun, get the best, buy yourself.
In nineteen oh three went in touring car and end
points something out that I think is very astute. The
reason why, probably Suel Crocker said get a Winton was
because Winton had already shown that they were making really
good cars enough so that they were willing to try

(16:13):
to make it across country in one of them. So
that's exactly what Jackson did. Horatio 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 affable. Right. Yeah, So Horatio bought himself a Winton
touring car nineteen o three. Apparently he paid essentially one
hundred thousand dollars for it, and it was used, Yeah,

(16:36):
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.

(16:59):
It's like if you took a tub and put wheels
on it and then had a steering will sticking out
of it. That that was the car. There was no windshield,
there was no roof, there was no back windshield, there
were no doors, there was no nothing. It was like
a giant riding lawnmower with like wagon wheels. Well, it's

(17:22):
funny that you bring up riding lawnmowers, Chuck, because the
two cylinder chain drive engine had twenty horsepower, and my
friend a John Deere X three hundred series riding mower
has twenty two horsepower. That's funny. That's really funny. This
this thing topped out at thirty miles per hour. I
don't think that John Deer does that, but that's probably

(17:43):
just because it's cutting grass at the same time. But
imagine imagine traveling the country on a riding lawnmower. Basically
that's about what they were doing. But yes, you're right,
thirty miles an hour is substantially more. That's what it
could do. Max Ye, no way did they average thirty
miles an hour? Not even close. It was someone, uh

(18:05):
it was it was red, a really good looking car.
You'll only see black and whites. But someone on redditum,
that's the picture I sent you did a very fun
colorized picture of Horatio and Crocker and a third party
to be named later, um and colorized it and it
just it looks awesome. And this car is so cool looking. Yeah,

(18:27):
I don't mean to detract from it. It was a
cool looking car, very cool 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. Huh oh, let's do it all right. So,

(19:06):
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
a human. Even though he was driving. You know, it's
like a car he built himself. It was a Winton,

(19:26):
but he was doing it himself with this other guy.
He wasn't fun, he wasn't sponsored. It was about the
spirit of adventure. He 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'd put this together in four days, including buying

(19:46):
the car, 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. Yeah. 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.

(20:09):
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 general store and be like,
I'd like a can of your most dangerous volatile liquids please,
and they would hand you some gasoline and a can,
and you'd buy a few of them to drive around with.

(20:30):
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 they essentially had gas stations that
were reserved exclusively for them. Horatio and Sewel did not
have anything remotely like that, and so they got into

(20:51):
all sorts of fun little adventures, like the time that
Sewel Crucker had to bike dozens of miles on a
borrowed bicycle to go to and fro to fill up
their gas can and bring it back and then fill
it up again and then bring it back. And that
must have been there all right, exactly, And it's fun
now in retrospect us talking about it here in twenty

(21:11):
twenty three in the studio. I'm sure it was not
a great day for Suel Crocker. No, I don't think
they were drawing straws. Ooh you know what I mean.
Like right, the rich thirty one year old with the
head TB is definitely saying, all right, hit the road
on the bike, my friend, were equals in almost every way,
but hit the trail on the bike, right, all right.

(21:31):
So Packard did so two months later, like he said,
an Oldsmobile did the same thing a month after that.
I believe much the same operation, you know, fully sponsored
and like rigged up in everything. So they threw out
the back seat on this Winton. I don't think we
mentioned this thing could go two hundred and fifty miles

(21:53):
with their tank of fuel, which that was way more
than I thought. Yeah, for sure, I was super impressed.
So they ripped out the backseat, which doesn't look like
it was much of one anyway, and packed you know,
cooking kit, tons of rope. Something that would probably be
the most valuable thing in the whole car was a

(22:14):
pulley system, a block and tackle. Yeah, for sure. They
had a code at camera, they had sleeping bags, they
had a shoveling 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 you want
to murder someone, yeah, or just like shooting out of
an untopped car is probably pretty fun when no one's around,

(22:36):
But that is one. So Yeah, the problem is is
like they weren't experts at tying down their gear. Yeah,
And they would get to like a stop probably basically
every day, and find that something they needed had dropped
off and bounced out at some point like back on
their trail, and that they had gone too far to
go back to try to find it. They lost like

(22:58):
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. You know, who knows. 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 into play multiple times. But they

(23:21):
made a really good decision early on number one. They
followed I can't remember his first, mister Winton's Alexander Winton's example,
and started out west. So what they would 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, yeah, which was you know, a nice

(23:44):
little copy. 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 it was. It
wouldn't be great if they conked out in Michigan. True, true,
But they decided to go add hundreds of miles to
their trip by not just taking a right and going

(24:07):
across the country, but going north up through Oregon to
avoid that Nevada desert, and that, my friend, even though
there were some treacherous mountains that they had to go through,
avoiding that desert I think is what ultimately made them successful. Yeah,
I mean hundreds of miles added to the trip. But

(24:28):
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 a railroad right of ways, which is the land

(24:48):
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 by

(25:09):
Me a couple of days ago, just about to bring
that up, and he watched it. It's such a great
part of that movie. And then I was telling you,
like that was a masterpiece, Like that is Rob Briner's masterpiece.
And he's made some pretty great movies, but it is
exponentially better than I even remembered as a kid. I'll
throw a spinal tap in there, but I a yeah,
have you still not seen that? That's what I'm saying. No,

(25:31):
it's great. That's a great movie. I think When Harry
Met Sally's a great movie. Like there's tons of great
movies Rob Brianer's made, but I think stand By Me
might be the best. Yeah, it's a great movie. I
loved that scene when he they put their hands on
the rail, Yeah, and it just gets real quiet and
they're listening. They were like, do you feel any vibration
at all? And that's probably what these guys were doing,

(25:51):
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 did a great, great job.
But he really did a magnificent job acting in that movie.
So way to go Wheaton. Totally listening. Great movie. I
love it. I'm gonna watch it too now. Talking about

(26:13):
it in Vegas, it made me nostalgic for it for sure.
All right, all right, So we are at leave time,
which was May twenty third, nineteen oh three. It was
a Saturday. 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. It

(26:36):
was like Romeo Michelle, 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.

(26:57):
And the tire thing, it was an issue. I mean
that 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 you
know your tubes. Yeah, And it was it was tires

(27:19):
were an issue thatould seemed like one of the main issues. Yeah,
for sure. 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. Yeah, I saw mention of that Packard
team that was riding. I think Tom Fetch was the

(27:40):
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. Like that was like what it was like
out west of the time. So of course you weren't
going to find our tires easily. You had to improvise

(28:01):
any way. You could sure an a murdered body out there.
Back then was the Diamond dozen. Diamond dozen, it's not
going anywhere. That's right, Let's go check out that new car.
It's not going anywhere. So they're going east, they're going
through some treacherous terrain. They're going through the Cascade Mountains.
It's fun in the documentary to hear the diary or

(28:24):
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 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

(28:45):
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 to use that block and
tackle to pull themselves out of a ditch or a
river or a mud hole. That must have been the
suckiest day ever. Yeah. And then the maps were an

(29:07):
issue too, right, 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 started to keep bringing them up.
I know they're not what the stories 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 you could find locals, they would

(29:31):
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 town they should go
down this road and it dead ended in her family's farm.
It was her driveway. 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.

(29:54):
They've never seen a car before, so she purposefully sent
them the wrong way down to dead end, miles down
dead apparently too. And I did not hear that they
had gotten angry with her or cross even. I think
they probably just said like, good day to you, madam,
right and kept on. 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. This is

(30:16):
not going to reflect good on your family. Tina Manson
like Tina, I just loved. Tina was so not a
name back then. Tina Manson, I love it. Great choice.
The breaks were kind of what you would imagine. They
weren't great, so it was quite thrilling when they would

(30:38):
get on these downhill runs and they're what a lot
you could do about it? The clutch went out a lot.
I mean, you know, we talked about our our various
van journeys out west We were in a Volkswagen Van
for mine and the mountains killed it. Like we had
to get a rental jeep Cherokee and Nevada for the

(30:58):
whole second half of the trip because going through the
mountains literally killed his. And it wasn't like a brand
new vwvan. It wasn't one of the old ones, but
it was like the Vanagan. But like it drove us
from Atlanta to the mountains just fine, and the mountains
killed it. So imagine what the mountains did to the
clutch system on this, you know, lawnmower. Basically. Yeah, I

(31:22):
have to admit, until today I did not know what
a clutch did. I knew that the clutches 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. Yeah. What the clutches.
It transmits the motor power or the motor's torque to

(31:42):
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 then you let the
clutch out in that transfer begins again. So, yes, the

(32:02):
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. Well
he was worth his weight, wasn't, Oh boy, Yeah he was.
They did have one modification they made, like on the

(32:22):
way there, as they added a head lamp and a
seed lean head lamp so they could drive at night,
because he wanted 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 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

(32:45):
a guy on a horse would pull them out ironically. Again. Yeah,
And I didn't get the impression that Horatio was trying
to prove that horses were obsolete. No, I don't think
so at all. I think he still saw it as
pretty ironic that he still relied on horses in this
horse carriage. Yeah, I don't think he threw shade even
when blacksmiths would make repairs. They pointed out in the

(33:06):
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 gonna
have a job in a few years, sucker, right right,
that's what segue maker said to people on foot, didn't
the adventure the segue drive off a cliff on a segue.
Oh that sounds like an urban legend, but is maybe

(33:28):
one that's just crazy enough to be true. I have
to look that up. Should we take a break, Yes,
we look, we'll take a break and look that up.
All right, we'll be back here with the truth right
after this star. Okay, we're back and Chuck it's true,

(34:06):
BBC says it. Yeah. Wow. Jimmy Hezeldin was sixty two
when he rode off a cliff on his company's segues.
It killed him, obviously, Yes, in West Yorkshire. That's sad. Yeah,
but my god, that's quite a legend. It is. It's
like Fabio getting hit in the face with a duck

(34:27):
on a roller coaster. What no, you know that? No,
Fabio on a roller coaster, a duck flew across his
path and hit him in the face and killed him. No, no, no, okay,
but it's uh, it's one of these pictures on the
Internet where you're like, oh, that's got to be fake,

(34:47):
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 too,
it was just it was pretty rich. Yeah, I can imagine,
what is he a jerk? No? No, no no, he okay,
but he's Fabio and like, you know, that kind of
stuff didn't happened to Fabio Dan, me too, totally with

(35:12):
you on that. Did you look up that picture? I'm
watching the video right now. I can't not chuck. Maybe
we'll 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. Okay, stuff stuff you shouldn't I couldn't care
less about. We'll be the name of that stuff you

(35:32):
really probably shouldn't bother listening to. All right, So let's
pick up with the trip. It sounds like we're painting
and 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

(35:54):
were having a great time. They were seeing things that
few people had ever even seen in person before, even
by horse at times. 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

(36:14):
the way who opened their homes to them. They were
driving about two hours at a time, and it seemed
like they were they were having fun at the same time.
I have that same impression too, for sure. And plus,
don't forget Seuel Crocker was making some pretty good money too. Yeah,
well I didn't find that. What was he getting paid.
I didn't see either, But we can go ahead and

(36:35):
say at the end they tallied up how much Horatio
Jackson spent on the trip, and this included Crocker's pay.
It was about eight grant back in nineteen o three,
which is a two hundred and sixty seven grand today money.
So if you think about it, hotels, food supplies, gas,
car parts, repairs, that still leaves a pretty decent amount

(36:59):
for Suel Crocker, and I hope you got a big
chunk of that. I hope so too, Chuck. 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.

(37:21):
You know. I wonder if I what I saw was
a faked recreation of that, and there is only a
before and and after that would make sense that it
looked photoshop, then I'm sorry. I just had to head
to circle back on that because my disappointment was palpable.
Oh boy. So they're making their way out west or
I'm sorry, back east, and it's funny they say, back east,

(37:44):
out west, up north, down south. So they're back. They're
heading back east and they come to Idaho. When I
mentioned a third party in that photograph. We were holding
out for this surprise and Caldwell, Idaho. They left without
Jackson's coat, turned back to go get it, and this

(38:05):
guy said, here, I have this pit bull named Bud
and he wants to go with you and be your mascot.
And they said, hop aboard Bud, and all of a sudden,
they have this beautiful white pit bull in between the
two of them. Yeah, he's routinely described as a bulldog,
but he's pretty clearly a pit bull. He's a pity

(38:25):
and he's beautiful. And like, if this story couldn't get
any better, now you have a pit bull in between you.
And they made him doggles to protect his little eyes,
and there's a wonderful photo of it in the documentary. 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

(38:46):
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 how
to ride in the car, he went look ahead. He
loved it to look for rots or bumps or whatever,
and would like brace himself like he just took to

(39:08):
it very easily and became like this great mascot. So
everybody started to really find out about this when when
Bud joined and I don't get the impression that Sewel
or Horatio were the least bit jealous. No, he paid
him fifteen dollars, which is five hundred dollars today for
this dog. And Crocker said, hey, adopt, don't shop, And

(39:28):
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 us press thanks to Bud. They make their
way through sort of that toughest stretch of terrain, they're
running out of food. They finally sort of cross out
of the mountains and they're like, all right, that was

(39:51):
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 going to make it to New York.
And this is when they were in like Wyoming. Yeah,
and then once they got to Omaha, it really got easier.
And then after Omaha, Chicago, and then after Chicago, probably

(40:12):
Cleveland or something like that, maybe in 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 ride of ways were just beautiful.
Sitting there for the picking. They started to really yeah,
they started to really make some pretty good time. Yeah.
I think how many miles did they top out at

(40:36):
the day. I feel like it was like seventy something,
which is not too bad. I don't remember actually, I
think 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. Yeah, that's
not bad at all, especially considering it maxed out at
thirty miles an hour. Yeah, so that was just like

(40:58):
a two and a half hour day for them. Yeah,
sure so, but that 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. They
actually when they showed up in Cleveland, that's where the
Winton Motor Carriage Company was located, and we didn't say

(41:23):
I don't think that Winton had by this time heard
about the whole trip and that they were actually making
pretty good headway, 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 an Oldsmobile behind me, and I don't

(41:44):
want this to become like a corporate sponsored thing. Like
we've made it this far, we can make it the
rest of the way. And they did go by the
factory and they got some fanfare and I think they
helped him out with fixing this car up and stuff.
But they got free beer cousies exactly, refrigerator magots, and
they were on their way. Yeah, I'm sure they probably
fixed the car up a little bit. But Winton was

(42:04):
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 would is just unthinkable. So yeah, they turned them down,
but they made it through Cleveland. They made it all
the way to Buffalo. It wasn't until Buffalo, New York

(42:25):
that they had the worst wreck that they had, where
all three of them sewell, Horatio and Bud were ejected
from the car because they hit something. Horatio only mentions
it as a hidden obstruction, so I'm not sure if
you ever knew what it was. But none of them
were injured in the car was okay, So they just
kept on keeping on. So take us home. When did

(42:48):
they pulled into Manhattan? Didn't They? Finally on July twenty six,
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 her ratio Nelson
Jackson won his bet, which, by the way, he never
collected on. Oh, I was curious about that he didn't. Nope,

(43:12):
what a stand up guy. Yeah, or he's like, I'm
never going out west against too long. Have a ride,
uh and there to greet him where it was a
throngs of press and journalist people from the Winton Car
Company and swipes the old girl herself right there. Yeah,
that's so cool. I love that they had like a

(43:33):
great relationship and he had a great relationship with Seoul,
and everybody loved Budd. If you're wondering what happened to Bud,
Bud lived out the rest of his days on the
Jackson farm in Vermont. Like, right, he really got lost
and died, right, No, he really did live out his
days there. That's great. Jackson went on to live a

(43:54):
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. Probably collected tobacco baseball cards at the time,
probably so so. Yeah. I think he ran for governor

(44:14):
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 the time. Maybe it seems like

(44:37):
you'd be able to recall a car like that. I
don't know. I've been to a lot of museums, seen
a lot of old cars, right. Sadly, Suel Crocker. He
died young. He contracted an illness and died in nineteen thirteen,
so he was about forty, no thirties something, early thirties.
I think he's thirty one. He had been sent to

(44:58):
um 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. Geez. That's really sad, I
know it is. So that's really the only big sad
thing that happened, aside from Bud getting ejected from the
car in Buffalo, New York. A nice little cherry on

(45:19):
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 Briscoe, an automaker,
and they did the trip in fifty nine days in
basically the same or maybe just barely slightly better conditions

(45:43):
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 car through terrible circumstances for fifty

(46:06):
nine days, right exactly, Also despite being described as pretty
in every single article that was for sure about them
at the time. Yeah. So one other thing that was
a kind of a note about this is that thirty
years after her Ratio and Sewell and Bud made their trip,
the record was set that stood for decades. Fifty four hours,

(46:31):
so two and a half days. Guy named Irwin Cannonball Baker,
we had a famous run from New York to LA
and 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

(46:52):
his run. We're gonna call it the Cannonball Run. That's right.
And if you want to learn more about that, we
was that a two parter, was just a one quarter
I think it was probably one of our fifteen minute episodes. No,
that was a good one. It was a good one.
I'm just saying we're real short back then. I can't
believe I just didn't talk that much back then that
we could actually record an episode that was fifteen minutes long.

(47:14):
I think we probably talked for fifteen minutes about Burt Reynolds.
Probably probably, but that was probably the episode two. Yeah,
you're right, you got anything else? Uh No, I don't either,
which means it's time for a listener Mayo. I'm gonna
call this shortwood sweet Amazon factoid. Okay, hey, guys, About

(47:36):
a quarter of the way in through the episode, at
the moment, the episode reminded me of our trip up
the Amazon to I don't know, is that Manaus or
Manou's m A n A u s. I think Manaus
manous 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 guy told us

(47:58):
that what I think is a 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
my best with my pronunciation on this falls in South America.
Iguazu perhaps very nice for South American listeners should write

(48:21):
in and let us know. Right so, it is the
volume of water leaving the mouth of the Amazon is
equal to those three giant falls times twelve. Wow. I
was not expecting that extra little bit of math right there.
I think that's what makes it amazing. That's from Rich Pope.
Thanks Rich Pope. Great name too, really gets it across,
Rich Pope. Yeah, good to meet you, you know. Yeah,

(48:42):
I agree. 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. 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

(49:03):
to your favorite shows.