Selects: The First Road Trip

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Listen to Sweet 305 with Lille Ponds on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's me Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our episode on the very first road trip across America from back in 2023.

That episode was from 2023. The first road trip took place way before that.

And it's one of those wonderful stories where nothing goes horribly wrong. The people don't turn out to be horrible people. It's just a great story about a couple of guys and a dog taking a road trip across America at a time when it was highly unlikely that they were going to make it all the way. I'm glad to present you with this one. Enjoy.

“Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I-Hart Radio.”

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck, and it's just the two of us, but we're going to make it just fine. We're going to make it if you try, as I like to say, sometimes when it's just the two of us, and that's the stuff you should do. I'm excited about this 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. How would go so far as to call it a home dinner?

It's a home dinner, and we're going to give huge credit to Ed, who helped us with this, and also because he helped Ed, who helped us, can burns.

Yeah, can burns has a great documentary about this topic, which is the first cross country automobile road trip.

It's called Horatios 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. And that's a great story, and it's a great story, and it's a great story. It's such a great act to love that guy, and because our protagonist in this story, who will introduce you to in a second, is such an affable seemingly really good guy, they got none other than Tom Hanks to recreate his voice for his diary letters and stuff like that.

We should also give a hat tip to Dayton Duncan, who's interviewed extensively in that documentary, because he wrote a book on the drive, 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 going to talk a lot more about him later, but we really kind of want to lay the ground, we're bringing the context as Flavoflave 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 1903 911 was a joke. I like that one. Is it okay? All right, just a medium okay on that one. I'll take it. 1903 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 1869 and it was 1876 when you got your first cross country train trip that happened.

So in the early 1900s, it was rich people who wanted to buy a super expensive unique toy and what hammered the song a lot, but they didn't even know was going to end up being a real thing. Yeah, it could have turned out like the segue. Totally right. I mean, this is kind of a kid to somebody taking a trek across America on a segue back in 1995.

Yeah, they did not know like a lot of people thought these cars will never amount to anything. You're silly. It will 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 locally, you took a horse, maybe a horse and a buggy or a horse and carriage or something like that. You kind of drive a home sure if you wanted to be super well-west about it. Yeah, but there were at the time, say around 1900, the United States had 2.3 million miles of roads. Pretty impressive. 150 miles were paved and all of those were within big cities, right? So the vast vast majority of roads in the United States were rough, rusted, 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 14 million horses in the United States to about 8,000 cars.

And like you said, people traveled locally. I think the average was like, people generally didn't go more than 12 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, at the day. Unless I'm traveling. Right. At the time, there were, and you still take trains for a long distance travel sometimes. That's right, too. At the time also, like, 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, 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, the roads themselves weren't mapped. Yeah, I mean, east of the Mississippi. There were maps and guidebooks that you could get pretty good directions from, right? And it's, it's funny in the documentary. They kind of show what that part of the directions were like in the school. One of those, like, turned right at the old stone horse trough.

“Yeah, like those were the kind of directions. And because that's what a local would tell you to do.”

So somebody had the bright idea to print those and put them down in a book form and transmit that information that way. And it still held up because there were no road names, so we're 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 washing beer right, and that's how I prefer to get directions. I, I tend to zone out when people give me directions. Me too, but I've asked for and you can just kind of see it on their faces. I can tell I'm going to get lost because it's just not sinking in. Well, I'll, all the fun of that is 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 ran McNally Atlas and say, and 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. Um, adventure some quality to it, I think. Yeah, I, um, spent five weeks in van driving around the Western United States doing that.

Same thing. It was very cool.

yeah, not having anywhere you had to be at any particular time and saying, like, oh, that, that landmark sounds pretty cool.

I'm going to go see that. It's pretty neat. You know what words you don't hear anymore? As 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 disgruntled, aged old man here.

No, no, no, no. Because I, it seems like we do this almost every episode, dude. Yeah, maybe. We're going to have to pay more attention of that, or else we're going to 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 enjoy it.

Okay, yeah, we need to save it. No, I don't think I saved anything.

“So I think we've got to cross the, 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 a cross country car trip, a trip that will get a lot of press.

Mm-hmm. And so they tried this with John and Louise Davis from the, how do you pronounce that? Car. Um, duria. It sounds like something you contract that you'd be really unhappy about.

Okay, the duria couldn't quite tell, but yeah, it does sound like a disease of some sort. Do you, R. Y. E. A. Yeah, the duria 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? I'm just kidding. I thought you're going to say, as Porsche. No, I would like to think that, but no, I don't think so. No, don't think so either.

Um, so they sponsored this couple. This is in 1899. It did not work out. Uh, they very famously got beaten to, uh, they started from New York. And they got beaten to Syracuse by a one arm bicyclist who gave them a 10 day head start. So press, it went opposite of how they wanted to.

That was sort of, they lost track, uh, or lost interest very early on in the sort of doomed thing. And I don't think they even know if they succeeded in getting the same.

“It's, 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, to, for it to sink in.

I thought that was pretty good. I'm trying to get our younger listeners back. So, um, we should make a tic-tac of all this then. Okay. And then what people do?

Sure. For now. Take it out of the US government. Can it? That was wonderful.

You just saved me. Thank you. Thank you. So, it was established though, even though the Davis didn't make it that, like, this is actually really good way to, to promote a car brand. Yeah.

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 even think a car could do that. So, a couple years after the Davis is, I guess 1901, a car maker named Alexander Winton, who had a Winton car company. Handmade cars, beautiful cars. Yeah. He, uh, he tried it himself.

“I believe with his publicist very smartly.”

He and his publicist hit the road. The acid hit them around bars, though, I think. Well, that's showed up. And they ended up getting trapped in a dune in Nevada. Yeah, but you bring up a thing that might be overlooked is they very smartly started from West to East.

Because as we mentioned, the West was untamed land and bad, bad, bad roads if there were any 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, uh, and we'll see what Jackson learned was driving through the desert and an old car like that is not good. Sand is not good for, I'm getting stuck. It's, oh, 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 when got this press, right? Like, like, it helps, I think, still publicizes 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 years after Wynton tried, a guy named Horatio Nelson Jackson, who's the star of our story, was hanging out at the University Club of San Francisco.

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.”

And I guess to defend cars on her, he slapped down a $50 wager that he could make it across the United States from San Francisco to New York in less than 90 days, 90 days or less, I'm sorry. And that was about $1,500 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 new wealthy New England family from Vermont. She, her family, made their money in celery compound. I think it was like a tonic. Yeah, basically. So he as Ed put did rich guy things, capital R, capital G.

And his wife was super supportive. Like everyone was on board. She was like, that's awesome. I'll take a train to Burlington. I'll meet you over there, honey.

You have my blessing. And it seems like they had a really like judging from the letters that, of course, it was voiced by Tom Hanks too. So you're in deer to 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 your yours 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 guide to go with him. And so he picked a great traveling partner. He was a small engine mechanic and a factory named Soil Crocker.

He was about 10 years younger. He's 22 years old, I think. Well, sorry. I was like 31 or 32. So this guy could fix cars.

He knew cars. And apparently like they really liked each other. And which was a big deal. You know, you've been on road trips and regular cars. Yeah.

And that's a key factor. But especially back then, with all the troubles they were going to have. He had to have someone that you could get along with. 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 funds.

Get the best. Buy yourself a 1903 Winton touring car. And at point something out that I think is very astute. The reason why probably Soil Crocker said get a Winton was because Winton had already. Showed that they were making really good cars.

And 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 he got a great first name. And he's Tom Hanks like affable, right?

Yeah. So Horatio bought himself a Winton touring car. 1903 apparently he paid essentially $100,000 for it. And it was used. Yeah, it was used.

But it was the only one available. Yeah. So he just paid whatever the person wanted for it.

“And so I think in 1903 dollars he paid $3,000.”

But he named it the Vermont because that's where he and his wife birthal lived. But a little bit about this car. There was it was it was open in every sense of the word. It was like if you took a tub and put wheels on it. And then had a steering wheel 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 20 horsepower. And my friend, a John D. or X300 series riding mower has 22 horsepower. That's funny.

That's really funny. This thing topped out at 30 miles per hour. I don't think the John D. or 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.

Yeah. That's about what they were doing. But yes, you're right. 30 miles an hour is substantially more. That's what it could do max.

Yeah. No way did they average 30 miles an hour. Not even close. Someone, it was, it was red. Really good looking car.

That's the picture I sent you.

Did a very fun colorized picture of her ratio in Crocker in a third party to be named later.

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. 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?”

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Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kattby on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, 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 erased against, like a corporation versus a human. Even though he was driving, you know, it's an alcoholic car. He built himself.

It was a wintern. 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 you will see, all these other companies sent supplies ahead. And they had teams of mechanics. He didn't have anything to prove. He took 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 in two months after, Horatio and Suil set out on their trip, Packard sent a team out. And like you said,

they were very well outfitted at a mechanic onboard. 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 liquid, please. And they would hand you some gasoline in a can. And you buy a few of them to drive around with. It was incredibly dangerous.

“But that's how you didn't run out of gas.”

Packard had the advantage of like every town or every X number of miles.

So they essentially had gas stations that were reserved exclusively for them.

Horatio and in Suil did not have anything remotely like that. And so they got into all sorts of fun little adventures. Like the time that Suil crocker had to bike dozens of miles on a baro bicycle to go to to and fro to fill up their gas can and bring it back and fill it up again and then bring it back. That's why he was there.

Exactly. And then it's fun now in retrospect us talking about it here in 2023 in the studio. I'm sure it was not a great day for for Suil crocker. No, I don't think they were drawn straws though. You know what I mean?

Like the rich 31 year old with the head TB is definitely saying. All right. Hit the road on the bike. Yeah, my friend. Yeah, we're equals and almost everything. But hit the trail on the bike.

Right. All right. So Packard did so two months later. Like he said, an old mobile did the same thing a month after that. I believe much the same operation. You know, fully sponsored and like rigged up and everything.

So they throughout the back seat on this went in. I don't think we mentioned this thing. It could go 250 miles with their tank of fuel, which was way more than I thought. Yeah, for sure. I was super impressed.

So they ripped out the back seat, which doesn't look like it was much of one anyway. And packed, you know, cooking kits, tons of rope, something that would probably be the most valuable thing in the whole car was a pulley system, a block in tackle. Yeah, for sure. They had a code at camera, they had sleeping bags, they had a shovel and axe. They had a bunch of guns and ammunition because they might be hunting for food out in the middle of nowhere.

Or just maybe want to murder someone. Yeah, or just like shooting out of a untapped car is probably pretty fun when no one's around. But that is fun.

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. It bounced out. Some point like back on their trail and that they had gone too far to go back to try to find it. It's really 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?”

Yeah. But they did lose a lot of stuff. And luckily like you said they didn't lose that block and tackle. It would really come into play multiple times. But they made a really good decision early on.

Number one, they followed. I can't remember his first name. Mr. Witton's Alexander Witton'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.

Mm-hmm. Did I destroy it? I guess we talked about what a great story was. It wouldn't be great if they kicked out in Michigan. True.

True. But they decided to go at hundreds of miles to their trip by not just taking a right and going across the country. But going north up through Oregon to avoid that Nevada desert. And that, my friend, even though there was some treacherous mountains that they had to go through.

“Avoiding that desert, I think is what ultimately made them successful.”

Yeah. I mean, hundreds of miles added to the trip. But it was incredibly smart because again, Witton 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 railroad tracks that were there. So there were railroad right of ways, which is the laying and 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 the car, they could go 30 miles per hour max.

Yeah. And hope to 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. I was just about to bring that up and he watched it. It's such a great part of that movie.

Yeah. I was telling you, like, that was a masterpiece. Like that is Rob Riner'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 spinal tap in there, but yeah, he's still not seeing that. That's, and 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 Riner's made.”

But I think Stand By Me might be the best.

Yeah. And it just gets real quiet.

“And there's something there, 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, full wheat and still listens to us.

But man, all of those kids did a great job. Yeah. But he really did a magnificent job acting in that movie. So way to go, Wheaton. So listening.

Great movie. I love it. I'm going to watch it too now. You talking about it in Vegas. It made me nostalgic for it for sure.

All right. All right. So we are at, uh, leave time, which was May 23, 1903. Mm-hmm. I 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 and Michelle. Yeah.

And the, 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, it would build as you will see with the press as things went along.

But it wasn't well covered at first. And this, the tire thing, it was an issue. I mean, the car tires at the time would routinely blow out. Uh, they had a hard time on the trip finding new tubes. Mm-hmm.

They would stock up on use tubes whenever they went to a town. They seemed like that had any kind of tubes. They would just buy them. Right. Any other tubes?

Yeah. And it was, it was a, tires were an issue. That was seem like one of the main issues. Yeah. Um, yeah.

Because I mean, you could imagine there's not people selling car tires because there were so few cars in out west.

They kept encountering people who had never seen a car.

Yeah. I saw a 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 it's 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 car tires easily.

You had to improvise anyway you could. Sure. And a murdered body out there back then was the dime a dozen. Diamond dozen. Yeah.

It's not going anywhere. That's right. It's going to check out that new car. Yeah. I don't go anywhere.

So they're going east. They're going through some treacherous terrain. They're going to the Cascade Mountains. Uh-huh. It's it's fun in the documentary to hear the 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 cliffside 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 18 times in a day.”

They had to use that block and tackle the pull themselves out of a ditch or a river or a mud hole. They must have been the suckest day ever. Yeah. And then the maps were an issue too, right? Yeah.

They would have to rely on locals for directions. When they could find locals a lot of times they just had to guess. I saw, again, that Packard team started to keep bringing them up. I know they're not with the stories about, but they learned to avoid the nicest roads, because out west they usually meant that it just dead ended in some rich person's house.

Mm-hmm. And when you could find locals, they would sometimes just literally misguide you. There was one that Horatio and Sue 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.

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 never seen a car before.

So she purposefully sent them the wrong way down a dead end. Miles down a dead end apparently too. And I did not hear that they had gotten angry with her across even. I think they probably just said, like, good day to you, madam, 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. Tina.

I just love Tina. It was so not a name back then. Tina Manson. I love it. Great choice.

The brakes were kind of what you would imagine. They weren't great. So it was quite thrilling when they would get on these downhill runs.

The clutch went out a lot. I mean, you know, we talked about our various van journeys out west. We were in a Volkswagen van for mine. And the mountains killed it. Like we had to get a rental Jeep Cherokee in Nevada.

For the whole second half of the trip because going through the mountains,

literally killed his. And it wasn't like a brand new VW van. It wasn't one of the old ones, but it was like the van again. Mm-hmm. 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 clutch was the thing you push into shift gears. I never understood why.

The reason why you push in is because you actually want to stop the clutch from working temporarily. What the clutch does is it transmits the motor power or the motor's torque to the transmission,

“which in turn turns the axle to the tires, the wheels, right?”

That's my understanding of it.

And when you're pressing in the clutch, what you're really doing is keeping that transfer from taking place

so that you can go into another gear and then you let the clutch out and that transfer begins again. So yes, the clutch is an extremely important instrument. The car does not go without it. And apparently, Sewell Crocker had to fix that thing almost as many times as they used the block and tack all the pull themselves out of mud.

Well, he was worth his weight. No, boy. Yeah, he was. They did have one modification they made. Like on on the way there is they added a headlamp and a seedling headlamp so they could drive

at night because I 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 that her issue was trying to prove that horses were obsolete.

No, I don't think so. I think he still saw it as pretty ironic that he's still relied on horses in this horseless 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 going to have a job

and a few years sucker. Right.

“That's what Segway Maker said to people on foot.”

Didn't that invent through the Segway drive off a cliff on a Segway? Oh, that sounds like an urban legend, but maybe one that's just crazy enough to be true. I have to look that up. Should we take a break? Yes, we'll take a break and look that up.

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Okay, we're back. And Chuck, it's true. BBC did he really? Did he really? Wow.

Jimmy Hezelden was 62 when he wrote off a cliff on his company's segways. They killed him, obviously? Yes, in West Yorkshire. That's sad. Yeah, it is sad.

I'm making sure.

But my god, that's quite a legend.

It is 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 one of these pictures on the internet where you're like, oh, that's got to be fake. And it really happened.

Poor Fabio. I know. I feel bad for the guy. But it was also like of all the people. For this to happen to, it was just, it was pretty rich.

Yeah, I can imagine. What was he a jerk? No, no, no, it's okay. But he's Fabio and like, you know, that kind of stuff that happened to Fabio? No, it's just happened to me.

For sure. And 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 up and then react.

“And on Mike, and that's how we'll do it.”

Yeah. Yeah. And 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 an Ed. I'm glad he pointed this out. It sounds like we're painting a picture of an awful time because of all of the delays and all of the things that happened. They knew what they were in for with this.

They didn't think it was going to be a pleasure cruise. It was also a great fun adventure. Like these guys are having a great time. They were seeing things that few people had ever even seen in person before, even by horse at times.

And they had no schedule. I mean, they were trying to beat this 90 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. Well, Crocker was making some pretty good money too. Yeah, 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 Horisho Jackson spent on the trip. And this included Crocker's pay. It was about eight grand back in 1903,

which is a 267 grand today. Oh, so much money. So if you think about it, hotels, food, supplies, gas, car parts, repairs, that still leaves a pretty decent amount for a civil 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. His face is all bloody and he looks really upset. But nothing about the actual hit. You know, I wonder if I what I saw was a fake to recreation of that.

And there is only a before and an after. That would make sense that it looked Photoshop then. I'm sorry. I just had to had 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 either heading back east. And they come to Idaho.

When I mentioned a third party in that photograph.

We were holding out for this big surprise in Colville, 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 beer mascot.

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 bull dog.”

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 the United States in that car. When Bud joined, people just went berserk over this whole thing. And part because he was wearing these goggles.

But also he very quickly learned how to ride in the car. He looked ahead. He loved it. To look for ruts or bumps or whatever. And with like brace himself.

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

Suele or Horatio were the least bit jealous. No. He paid them $15, which is $500 today for this dog. And Crocker said, hey, adopt don't shop.

And Jackson said, what does that mean? All right. And he said, no, don't worry about it. That comes later. All right.

So they're getting off his 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 and his letters.

He was saying I've never felt more confident now.

They're going to make it to New York. And this is when they're 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 Indianapolis in between. Like city after city just started to pop up. And they were getting closer and closer. And there were much better roads.

The railroad rideaways were just beautiful. Sitting there for the pick and it's flat. 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 70 something, which is not too bad. I don't remember actually. I think of the documentary said 70, 70 something miles in a single day. Like when they were kind of cruising, which that's that's awesome. That's good time for that car.

Yeah. It's not bad at all, especially considering maxed out at 30 miles an hour. Yeah. So that was just like a two and a half hour day for them. Yeah, sure.

So but that really does go to point out like just how slow they were going because of things like breaking down and waiting for parts and just the roads being terrible. And I mentioned Cleveland too. They actually when they showed up in Cleveland, that's where the Witten Motor Carriage Company was located.

And we didn't say I don't think that Witten 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 and Oldsmobile behind me. And I don't want this to become like a corporate sponsored thing. Like we made it this far. We can make it the rest of the way. And they did go by the factory and they got some fanfare.

“And I think they helped him out with fixing this car up and stuff.”

But they got free beer coosies. Exactly for refrigerator magnets and they were on their way. Yeah, I'm sure they probably fixed the car up a little bit. But Witten 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 an stranger to this mix by the time would is just unthinkable. Yeah, they turned him down. But they made it through Cleveland. They made it all the way to Buffalo.

In New York that they had their worst wreck that they had. We're all three of them. Soel Horatio and Bud were ejected from the car because they hit something. But 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 and the car was okay. So they just kept on keeping on. So take us home. When did they pulled into Manhattan? Finally, on July 26th at 430 a.m.

63 days, 12 hours and 30 minutes after they set out from San Francisco. They made it to Manhattan, New York and Horatio Nelson Jackson won his bet.

Which by the way, he never collects it on.

Oh, I was curious about that. He didn't. Nope. What a standup.

It's too long of a ride.

And there to greet him, where it was a throngs of press and journalists.

People from the Witten 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 a soul.

And everybody loved Bud. And if you're wondering what happened to Bud, Bud lived out the rest of his days on the Jackson farm in Vermont. Amazing. Amazing. And that's not it.

You've been missing for like a night. You really got lost and died. Right. No, he really did live out his days there. It'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 I in his 40s. And apparently became a decorated veteran. Probably collected tobacco baseball cards at the time. Probably so. So I think he ran for governor in lost.

Governor of Vermont at one time in loss. 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 this Smithsonian, which and those doggles editing this in person.

I don't think I have even though I've been there. 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. So you don't see a lot of old cars. Right. Sadly, Sue O'Crocker, he died young. He contracted an illness.

And died in 1913. So he was about 40. No, 30 something, early 30s. And he was 31.

“He had been sent to Mexico, I think, to protect some land during the revolution there.”

And he, the stress of it killed them essentially is how I saw it. Jesus. That's really sad. I know it is. So that's really the only big sad thing that happened.

But getting ejected from the car and buffalo in 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 in women to accomplish this same thing.

They were sponsored by Maxwell Briscoe, an automaker. And they did the trip in 59 days. And basically the same or maybe just barely slightly better conditions. Then 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 59 days. Right, exactly.

And 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 30 years after Horaceo and Suele and Bud made their trip. The record was set that stood for decades.

54 hours. So two and a half days. Guy name Irwin Cannonball Baker made a famous run from New York to LA. And I think about 40 years after that. And the early 70s, car and driver magazine editor said, this cannonball Baker guy, he deserves his own place in history.

So we're going to commemorate him with a recreation of his run. We're going to call it the Cannonball run. That's right.

“And if you want to learn more about that, we was at two parter.”

It was just a water. I think it was probably one of our 15 minutes. No. That was a good one. It wasn't good one.

I'm just saying we should show him real short back then. I can't believe I didn't talk that much back then that we could actually record an episode. That was 15 minutes long. I think we probably talked for 15 minutes about Bert Reynolds. Probably.

Probably. But that was probably the episode. Yeah, you're right. You got anything else? No.

I don't either, which means it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this short with sweet Amazon factoid. Okay. Hey guys, about a quarter of the way into the episode of the moment. The episode reminded me of our trip up the Amazon to, I don't know, is it menace or menace,

M-A-N-A-U-S? I think menace. And back on a Viking ocean cruise. He said surprisingly ocean cruise ships can go that far about a thousand miles. Who knew?

“I'll increase our Amazon guy told us that what I think is the greatest bit of trivia I've ever heard.”

The volume of water, leaving the mouth of the Amazon, is equal to the volume of water, going over Niagara Falls, Victoria Falls. I'm going to do my best with my pronunciation on this falls in South America.

Perhaps? Very nice.

“We're South American listeners should write in them.”

Right. So it is the volume of water, leaving the mouth of the Amazon, is equal to those three giant balls. Wow. Times 12. Wow.

I was not expecting that extra little bit of math right there.

That's what makes it amazing.

That's from RichPope. Thanks RichPope. Great name too. Really gets it across. RichPope.

Yeah. Good to meet you. You know? Yeah. Agreed.

Well, it's good to meet you to RichPope.

“And if you want to be like RichPope, you can email us as well.”

Send it off to [email protected].

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's up, fam? It's sports journalist Ari Chambers.

Hey, what's up, y'all? Is she girl Sam J? And we're the hosts of everyone watches women sports. A new podcast from together. We're breaking down the biggest headlines.

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