In 1903, a doctor from Vermont bet $50 that he could drive across America. It cost him $8,000 and 63 days' worth of gas.
This year marks 120 years since the first coast-to-coast road trip. Horatio Jackson and Sewall Crocker were the first people to drive a car from one end of the United States to the other. They did this in 1903.
At the time, cars were a new and exciting thing, and the number of them was growing quickly—from 8,000 in 1900 to 32,920 in 1903—but many people still thought the "horseless carriage" was just a fad. There were not many good roads, let alone a network of roads across the country. So theirs was a new kind of journey. Everything began with a $50 bet.
Jackson (at the wheel) and Crocker arriving in Omaha, Nebraska, about halfway on the very first drive across the country. (Credit: ISC Images & Archives via Getty Images)
The Automobile Association of America's Blue Book from 1907 has this map. It shows the tracks of the 11 cross-country car trips that had been taken up to that point, which is odd because they were all made by two people. The trip between Jackson and Crocker is marked in red.
Horatio Nelson Jackson was a doctor from Vermont who lived from 1872 to 1955. One of his brothers ran Burlington as mayor. (John Holmes Jackson won the election for mayor in 1917 by a majority of only 10 votes. Bernie Sanders set the same record in 1981). Another one was the state's vice governor.
No maps, no car, and very little driving experience
Dr. Jackson was one of the first people who liked cars. He and his wife took a train to get to San Francisco, where he took a bet that he could drive a car across the country. He took the bet even though he didn't have a car, didn't have much practice driving, and didn't have any good maps.
Jackson asked Sewall K. Crocker, a driver and mechanic, for help with these kinds of practical issues. He told Jackson to buy a 1903 Winton, which Jackson did. He called the traveling car with two cylinders and 20 horsepower "The Vermont." The two left San Francisco on May 23. Their car was full of sleeping bags and blankets, rubber suits and coats, an axe, a shovel, and other tools, a Kodak camera and a telescope, a rifle and a shotgun, spare parts, and as many cans of gas and oil as they could fit.
A map showing all cross-country trips by automobile that had been completed successfully by 1907. (Credit: AAA Blue Book 1907, v.1 — original from Harvard University and digitized by Google, accessed via Hathi Trust / Public domain)
The plan was to avoid the deserts of Nevada and Utah and the higher passes of the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies, so the group turned north and went backwards on the Oregon Trail. They had only gone 15 miles when the car's tire blew, and they had to use the only extra they had brought.
A woman sent them the wrong way for 108 miles north of Sacramento so her family could see their first car. On the rough road to Oregon, when more tires went flat, they wrapped rope around the wheels. Along the way, they sent a message to the Winton Company to send goods ahead. Still, they sometimes had to walk or ride their bikes for a long way to find gas, oil, or extra parts.
A bulldog named Bud
Jackson and Crocker got a bulldog named Bud in Idaho to travel with. They gave him goggles to keep the dust out of his eyes. Then the press got wind of it. Jackson, Crocker, and Bud all got to be well-known people. At every stop, reporters and groups that kept getting bigger were waiting for the three.
Even though they had more problems—they lost their money and their way on the way to Cheyenne, so they didn't eat for 36 hours—things got easier once they crossed the Mississippi, where there were more fixed roads.
When they got to New York City on July 26, 63 days after leaving San Francisco, it was the first time in American history that people had driven across the country. And it only cost them about $8,000 (about $260,000 in today's money) and 800 gallons (3,000 liters) of gas. Jackson paid for everything. They never got the $50 bet back.
Jackson and his wife moved to Vermont with Bud when he retired. Jackson went on to serve in World War I and get a lot of medals for it. He also became a famous businessman in Vermont. The only other important thing about his car is that he got a ticket for going over the 6-mph speed limit in Burlington. In 1944, he gave the Smithsonian Institution his car as a gift. It is on show all the time at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. Jackson and Bud's faces have been added to it. Crocker died when he was only 30, but that's not much of a reason to leave him out.
Jackson and Crocker's cross-country adventures make me think of other people who broke long-distance records, like Lewis and Clark or Phileas Fogg (though Fogg is made up). Their groundbreaking trip was the subject of a book (Horatio's Trip) and a Ken Burns documentary of the same name, in which Tom Hanks voiced Horatio Jackson.
No household names
Even with the book and the movie, they haven't become as well-known as flying pioneers like Charles Lindbergh or Amelia Earhart. Even fewer people remember the cross-country travelers who followed in their tire tracks, but they are on this map. This table, which is also from the 1907 Blue Book, reminds us for a moment of what they did. (Here is a video of the plan that shows all 11 trips in order.)
Credit: AAA Blue Book 1907, v.1 — original from Harvard University and digitized by Google, accessed via Hathi Trust / Public domain
Jackson and Crocker hadn't even gotten to New York yet when two more car trips left San Francisco for New York. E.T. ("Tom") Fetch and M.C. Krarup would get there in 61 days, which is two days faster than the originals. The time it took Lester Whitman and Eugene Hammond was 73 days, which was a record for being slow.
Whitman got his own back a year later. With his new partner Charles Carris, he drove from San Francisco to New York in just under 33 days, which was almost a month faster than the previous record. Whitman was the first person to drive from one coast to the other twice.
In 1905, there were no less than four coast-to-coast trips. In the opposite way, the first three left New York and went to Portland, Oregon. The first two, who both left on May 8 in eight-cylinder Oldsmobiles, were clearly trying to beat each other.
Three hurrays for Percy Megargel
Who won, though? The table says that Dwight Huss and Milford Wigle crossed the ocean in 44 days, while Percy Megargel and Barton Stanchfield took 51 days. However, it shows that both teams arrived on June 21, the same day. Megargel probably lost because he got there on June 28 instead of June 21 and tried again right away, this time with David Fassett. Their time was only 84 days, which was sad. The two people drove back to New York from San Francisco, but it took even longer than before: 201 days. Megargel was the first person to drive from one side to the other three times.
In 1906, there were three trips from one side to the other. William Gehr and W.E. Canfield were also the first to bring their wives with them. Whitman and Carris went across the country in just over 15 days, which was faster than what they had done before. Just two years ago, the fact that Richard Little and D. Haggerty got to San Francisco 24 days and 8 hours after leaving New York would have made news. But by that time, coast-to-coast car trips were no longer as fun or interesting as they used to be.
Last thing to say about Horatio Nelson's "first" trip:
As the way people get around on the road changes from fossil fuels to electricity, there are a lot of old car marks that should be broken again. Even Horatio Jackson's trip from coast to coast. In 2022, Jack Smith did that with two friends. In a 1964 VW Bus that had been turned into an electric car, they followed Horatio's path. It went so well that they went back right away: "Once we got to New York City, we turned around and took the version of the Lincoln Highway that was in place in 1913 back to San Francisco," Jack writes. Read all about that trip here.
The likenesses of Jackson and Bud next to the original Winton touring car, displayed at the National Museum of American History. Crocker has been airbrushed out of history. (Credit: Kevin Burkett via Wikimedia Common, CC BY-SA 2.0)
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