Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip
by Dayton Duncan, Ken Burns

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Book Reviews of Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip

Book Review: A Little Epic
Summary: 5 Stars

Jackson was a thirty-one-year-old doctor from Burlington, Vermont, and an automobile enthusiast. On 19 May 1903, he was with a bunch of well-to-do men at the University Club in San Francisco. A wager was made; fifty bucks said that no one could drive from San Francisco to New York in less than three months. Jackson accepted immediately; he was on the road four days later. He hired a mechanic, and acquired a mascot, a bulldog named Bud who got his own automobilist goggles. His owner said that Bud was "...the one member of [our] trio who used no profanity on the entire trip." Jackson bought a used Winton for $3,000. It had a two-cylinder, 20 horsepower engine, a chain drive, and top speed of thirty miles an hour. It had no windshield and no roof. Jackson named it the _Vermont_. They bounced along the road, losing important items sometimes, and often they were mired in thick mud. The solution was generally to get a farmer to hitch his horse to the _Vermont_, and then pay the farmer by giving him a ride in the car. Stagecoaches had to bring spare parts. Blacksmiths had to weld parts together. Whenever the car came into a rural town, it caused a sensation. People liked to have their pictures taken as they sat at _Vermont_'s right-sided wheel. It took 63 days, but Jackson made it to New York, and was a sensation.

Jackson went on to become the owner of Burlington's first radio station and a bank president. He got ex-president Teddy Roosevelt to get him into the Army for World War One, even though he was too old to enlist. But he loved telling his story about his great drive as the proudest of his accomplishments. In 1944, he donated the _Vermont_ to the Smithsonian, where it will be forever on display, gleaming without a speck of the dust and mud that it picked up in its historic 6,000 mile journey. Bud's goggles were donated, too. For better or worse, we can drive all over our nation now, with little of the trouble Jackson went through, and with little of the adventure or need for his sort of pluck. _Horatio's Drive_ in pictures and words brings back a time when automobiles were novelties enthusiastically boosted by eccentrics, and a forgotten little epic of American adventure.

Summary of Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip

20th Century Books

• Books > Subjects > History > Americas > United States
• Professional & Technical > Automotive > History
• Travel > United States > Regions