The First Road Trip

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 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

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, 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 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 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,

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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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. 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 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. 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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. 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. 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 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

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. 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 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 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,

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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.

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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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, 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 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 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

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

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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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

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