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The companion volume to the PBS documentary film about the first—as well as perhaps most astonishing—automobile trip over the United States.
In 1903 there have been only 150 miles of paved roads in the whole nation and most people had never seen a “horseless buggy”—but that did not stop Horatio Nelson Jackson, a thirty-one-year-old Vermont doctor, who impulsively gamble $ 50 that he could drive his 20-horsepower automobile from San Francisco to NEW YORK. Here—in Jackson’s own words and photographs—is a glorious account of that months-long, problem-beset, thrilling-to-the-rattled-bones trip with his mechanic, Sewall Crocker, and a bulldog named Bud. Jackson’s previously unpublished letters to his wife, filled with optimism against all odds, describe in vivid detail every detour, every flat tire, every adventure bad and the good. And his practically a hundred photographs show a country still settled mainly in small towns, where life moved no faster than the horse-drawn carriage and where in fact the arrival of Jackson’s open-air (roofless and windowless) Winton would cause delirious excitement.
Jackson was possessed of a deep thirst for adventure, and his remarkable story chronicles the beginning of the restless road trips that soon became a means of life in the us. Horatio’s Drive is the first chapter in our nation’s great romance with the road.
With 146 illustrations and 1 map
