Selects: The First Road Trip

Summary

Podcast Summary: Stuff You Should Know – "Selects: The First Road Trip"

Release Date: July 11, 2026
Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant
Episode Theme: The story of the first cross-country automobile road trip in the United States, accomplished by Horatio Nelson Jackson, Sewall Crocker, and their dog Bud in 1903.

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Overview

In this feel-good, adventure-filled episode, Josh and Chuck revisit the remarkable tale of Horatio Nelson Jackson and the first-ever automobile journey across the United States. The duo unpacks the historical context, colorful characters, challenges, and triumphs of an event that captured America's imagination—highlighting the optimism and ingenuity that typified this early automotive milestone.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Stage: America in 1903

• Automobiles were Novel and Rare:

  • Cars were considered toys for the wealthy; the cheapest model cost more than an average American made in a year.
  • About 8,000 cars vs. 14 million horses in the country (07:23).
  • People generally didn’t travel far: "People generally didn't go more than 12 miles from their house." – Josh Clark (07:23)

• No Road Infrastructure:

  • Only 150 of the 2.3 million miles of U.S. roads were paved, all in cities. The rest were “rough, rutted, dusty or muddy…” – Chuck Bryant (07:02)
  • Navigation relied on local landmarks: “Turn right at the old stone horse trough.” (08:41)
  • No gas stations; gasoline was bought at general stores.

Predecessors & Failed Attempts

• Various attempts at cross-country drives before Jackson:
  • John and Louise Davis sponsored by Duryea (1899) – beaten by a one-armed bicyclist despite a ten-day head start (12:21).
  • Alexander Winton attempted west-to-east but failed in the Nevada desert (13:53).

The Genesis of the First Successful Road Trip

• Horatio Nelson Jackson: Vermont doctor, wealthy by marriage, loved cars, dubbed them “super expensive unique toys” (04:59, 16:07).
• The Bet: On a whim in the University Club of San Francisco, Jackson wagered $50 ($1,500 today) he could drive SF to NYC in under 90 days (15:54).
• Team Assembled: Jackson recruited Sewall Crocker (mechanic, 10 years younger) and bought a used 1903 Winton Touring Car for what would now be $100,000 (18:42).

The Automobile: “The Vermont”

• Specs: No windshield, roof, or doors; only 20 horsepower—like “a giant riding lawnmower with wagon wheels” (19:32).
• Max speed: 30 mph; typical daily average much lower.

Trip Preparations

• Hastily organized—in just four days! (16:07)
• Supplies: Cooking kit, rope, block & tackle, camera, sleeping bags, guns, and basic tools. Items frequently lost along the way (27:43).
• Ripped out backseat for storage; could carry enough fuel for about 250 miles (27:11).

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The Journey Unfolds

Early Challenges

• Started May 23, 1903, from San Francisco:
  • Blew a tire almost instantly (31:49).
  • Tires were a major recurring issue: “Give me all your tubes." – Josh Clark (32:28)
  • Roads and maps often unreliable or unmarked; locals sometimes gave intentionally wrong directions (34:59).

Noted Tactics and Dangers

• Avoiding Disaster:
  • They detoured hundreds of miles north through Oregon to avoid Nevada desert sands—a wise move that likely contributed to their success (29:13).
  • Commonly had to use a block and tackle: “The record was 18 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.” – Josh Clark (34:16)
• Sharing Roads with Trains and Stagecoaches:
  • Occasionally had to drive on railroad right-of-ways and bridges, braving the risk of oncoming trains (30:17).

Spirit and Camaraderie

• The Tone of the Trip:
  • Despite hardships, the adventure was positive: “They were having a great time … seeing things few people had ever seen.” – Josh Clark (41:48)
  • Stayed in hotels and with friendly locals; welcomed at many stops.
• Public Interest:
  • Interest from townspeople was intense—they sometimes left “fresh murder scenes” to see the car (32:35).

The Arrival of Bud the Dog

• Caldwell, Idaho:
  • After turning back to retrieve a coat, Jackson and Crocker were given a pit bull, Bud, who quickly adapted to road life (43:33).
  • “He just took to it very easily and became this great mascot. So everybody started to really find out about this when Bud joined.” – Chuck Bryant (44:33)
  • Famous for his goggles (“doggles”) and his enthusiasm for the ride.

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The Home Stretch: Triumphs & Trials

• Crossing into the Midwest and East (45:19): Once in Omaha, trip became much easier—better roads, more towns.
• Best Day’s Mileage: Roughly 70+ miles in one day when hitting better roads (45:54).
• Factory Visit: When they passed through Cleveland, home of Winton’s plant, they declined sponsorship to preserve the trip’s non-commercial, adventurous spirit (46:44).
• Worst Accident: Near Buffalo, NY; all ejected from the car, but no serious injuries (48:00).

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The Finish Line

• Arrival in Manhattan: July 26, 1903, 4:30 AM, after 63 days, 12 hours, 30 minutes—well under the 90-day limit (48:04).
• “Horatio Nelson Jackson won his bet—which he never collected on.” – Chuck Bryant (48:22)
• Reunion: Met by crowds and Jackson’s wife (“Swipes”), and of course, Bud (48:33).

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Aftermath & Legacy

What Happened Next?

• Bud the Dog: Lived out his days happily on the Jackson farm in Vermont (48:56).
• The Car: “The Vermont” was donated to the Smithsonian—along with Bud’s iconic goggles (49:34).
• Jackson: Led a varied life as a businessman, WWI veteran, and would-be Vermont governor (49:03).
• Crocker: Sadly died young, at 31, after falling ill during service in Mexico (50:09).

Notable Follow-ups

• First Woman to Drive Cross-Country: Alice Ramsey and friends made the drive in 1909 in just 59 days, under comparably tough conditions (51:01).
• The Cannonball Run: Reference to how, decades later, cross-country speed records became a cultural phenomenon—eventually inspiring the famous “Cannonball Run” (52:08).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It's a really fun, feel-good story.” – Josh Clark (02:40)
• “Imagine traveling the country on a riding lawnmower. Basically, that's about what they were doing.” – Chuck Bryant (20:00)
• “Everything seems so locked down, you know? … You don't hear 'Let's go here instead’ anymore.” – Josh Clark (10:39)
• “He slapped down a $50 wager … and four days later, he set out for New York from San Francisco.” – Chuck Bryant (15:54)
• “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. … I think is what ultimately made them successful.” – Josh Clark (29:13)
• “They made him doggles to protect his little eyes. And there's a wonderful photo of it.” – Josh Clark (43:38)
• “... the adventure was positive: 'They were having a great time... seeing things few people had ever seen.'” – Josh Clark (41:48)
• “63 days, 12 hours, and 30 minutes after they set out … they made it to Manhattan, New York, and Horatio Nelson Jackson won his bet—which, by the way, he never collected on.” – Chuck Bryant (48:04)

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Important Timestamps

• Context & Introduction: 02:26 – 04:52
• State of America & Cars in 1903: 04:52 – 07:23
• Early Road Trip Attempts: 11:23 – 13:53
• Jackson’s Bet & Preparations: 15:54 – 21:11
• Trip Logistics & Early Obstacles: 22:08 – 29:13
• Challenges & Daily Life on the Road: 34:16 – 41:48
• Bud Joins the Adventure: 43:33
• Final Leg & Arrival: 45:19 – 48:43
• Post-trip Legacy: 49:03 – 52:08

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Tone & Style

The hosts keep things light-hearted, conversational, and humorous, interspersing detailed historical facts with relatable personal anecdotes, playful banter, and gentle nostalgia. The spirit of optimism, curiosity, and the sheer gumption of early automotive adventurers shines through the whole episode.

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Further Listening & Resources

• Ken Burns’ Documentary: Horatio’s Drive, narrated by Keith David, with Tom Hanks voicing Jackson (03:01).
• Dayton Duncan’s Book: The definitive account on Horatio’s cross-country drive.
• Earlier SYSK Episode: On The Cannonball Run, for more on cross-country car records (52:08).

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Summary Prepared For: Listeners wanting an in-depth review and key highlights of the first U.S. cross-country automobile road trip as covered by Stuff You Should Know.

Transcript

[Announcer]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

Thirty years ago, an island off Manhattan almost brought down New York City.

[Josh Clark]

Who will you trust? Your friends and neighbors? Who will you trust? The people five miles overseas.

[Chuck Bryant]

This is a story about neighbors turning on each other and what happens when a forgotten place decides it's had enough.

[Josh Clark]

But we're not stopping, are we?

[Chuck Bryant]

Listen to revisionist history, the Staten island problem on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Josh Clark]

This is Michael Rapaport and my podcast, the I Am Rappaport Stereo podcast, is unlike anyone you've ever heard. If you're looking for strong opinions about sports, entertainment, politics, pop culture, and whatever else catches my attention, then subscribe now. This kid, Jafar Jackson, should absolutely, positively get nominated for his portrayal as Michael Jackson. Listen to I Am rappaport on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or where you get your podcast.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. The 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 a 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.

[Josh Clark]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartradio.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck, and it's just the two of us, but we're gonna make it just fine. We're gonna make it if we try. As I like to say, sometimes when it's just the two of us and this is something we should not do.

[Josh Clark]

I'm excited about this episode because this is a really, really great story that doesn't have like 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

I would go so far as to call it a humdinger.

[Josh Clark]

It's a humdinger. And we gotta give huge credit to Ed who helped 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 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Just amazing. And such a great actor too. And everything from they Live to Men at Work to There's Something About Mary. Yeah, he was in Platoon too. He's like just such a great actor.

[Josh Clark]

Love that guy. And because our protagonist in this story, who we'll 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 believe.

[Josh Clark]

I would argue the book.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, let's just call it that. The book on Horatio Nelson Jackson. Right.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's his name.

[Chuck Bryant]

Great name. So we're going to talk a lot more about him later. But we really kind of want to like, lay the groundwork, bring the context, as Flavor Flav 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.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So 1903, 911 was a joke. I like that one.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's okay. All right.

[Josh Clark]

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 this was what, like 25ish years roughly after that. And people were still kind of only traveling by train because cars were pretty new and they were only for Richie's. Because I believe in the documentary they said like the cheapest car you could get would Cost more than the average American made in a year. So in the early 1900s, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. It could have turned out like the Segway totally.

[Announcer]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, this is kind of akin to somebody taking a toy, a trek across America on a Segway back in like 1995.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 at home. Sure. If you wanted to be super wild west about it.

[Announcer]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

But there were at the time, say around 1900, the United States had 2.3 million miles of roads.

[Josh Clark]

Sounds great.

[Chuck Bryant]

Pretty impressive.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

150 miles were paved.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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 need today, unless I'm traveling.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. At the time there were. And you still take trains for long distance travel Sometimes I try to. 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 a. This is a. It's 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 directions were like, so cool. One of them's like, turn right at the old stone horse trough.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 still held up. But 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.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

I tend to zone out when people give me directions that I've asked for and you can just kind of see it on their faces. They can tell I'm gonna get lost because it's just not sinking in.

[Josh Clark]

Well, all the fun of that is gone now. Cause you just punch it into your app or whatever. But I'm basically talking about pre GPS stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

I remember, I remember. I'm old enough to remember that. I am also smart enough to really appreciate Waze though too, you know, do

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I spent five weeks in a van driving around the western United States doing that same here. 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 going to go see that. It's pretty neat.

[Josh Clark]

You know what words you don't hear anymore is, let's go here instead.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's true.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

I feel like we've entered the disgruntled, aged Old men era of stuff. You should know 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?

[Josh Clark]

Well, hey youngster, I encourage you to set out on a road trip with a map and. And enjoy it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay? There you go. Way to save it.

[Josh Clark]

I don't think I saved anything.

[Chuck Bryant]

So I think we've gotten across that it would be really hard to drive a car, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Across the United States at the time.

[Josh Clark]

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 than like kind of sponsor a cross country car 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 car?

[Chuck Bryant]

Duria. It sounds like something you contract that you'd be really unhappy about.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. The duria, I couldn't quite tell, but yeah, it does sound like a disease of some sort.

[Chuck Bryant]

D U R Y E A. Yeah,

[Josh Clark]

The Durya 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Known today as the nmcc.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, really?

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm just kidding.

[Josh Clark]

I thought you were gonna say as Porsche.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I would like to think that, but no, I don't think so.

[Josh Clark]

No, I don't think so either. So they sponsored this couple. This was in 1899. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

No. They drop off the map after about Chicago.

[Josh Clark]

They dropped off the GPS app.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sorry. So. No, it's good. It just took me a second for it to sink in. I thought that was pretty good.

[Josh Clark]

I'm trying to get our younger listeners back.

[Chuck Bryant]

So we should make a TikTok of all this then.

[Announcer]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Isn't that what people do? Sure. For now. The US Government ban. That was wonderful. You just saved me.

[Josh Clark]

Thank you.

[Chuck Bryant]

So it was established though, even though the Davises didn't make it, that, like, this is actually a really good way 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 years after the Davis', I guess, 1901, a car maker named Alexander Winton, who had a Winton car company. Handmade cars, beautiful cars.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah,

[Chuck Bryant]

he tried it himself, I believe, with his publicist. Very smartly, he and his publicist hit the road. The acid hit them around Barstow. I think bats showed up, and they ended up getting trapped in a dune in Nevada.

[Josh Clark]

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, 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. Sure. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

But Winton got this press, right. Like. Like he. It 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 years after Winton 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 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 $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.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Her family made their money in celery compounds. I know.

[Josh Clark]

It was like a tonic, 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. 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. No one knows why that nickname was there, but he signed it as Nelson. And 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 guy to go with him, and so he picked a great traveling partner. He was a small engine mechanic in a factory named Sewell Crocker, who was about 10 years younger. He's 22 years old, I think. What was her ratio? It was like 31, 32.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

So this guy could fix cars. He knew cars. And apparently they really liked each other, which was a big deal. 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, you had to have someone that you could get along with.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 Ed points something out that I think is very astute. The reason why, probably Sewell 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 he's got a great first name and he's Tom Hanks, like affable, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So. So Horatio bought himself a Winton Touring Car 1903. Apparently he paid essentially $100,000 for it.

[Josh Clark]

And it was used.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 $1903, he paid $3000, 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. 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 was the car. There was no windshield. There was no roof. There was no back windshield. There were no doors. There was no nothing.

[Josh Clark]

It looked kind of like a giant riding lawnmower with, like wagon wheels.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, it's funny that you bring up riding lawnmowers, chuck, because the two cylinder chain drive engine had 20 horsepower. And. And my friend, a John Deere X300 series riding mower has 22 horsepower.

[Josh Clark]

That's funny. That's really funny. This. This thing topped out at 30 miles per hour. I don't think the John Deere does that, but that's probably just because it's cutting grass at the same time.

[Chuck Bryant]

But imagine. Imagine traveling the country on a riding lawnmower. Basically, 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. In no way did they average 30 miles an hour.

[Josh Clark]

Not even close. It was someone. It was red. A really good looking car. You'll only see black and whites, but someone on Reddit. 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 and colorized it. And it just. It looks awesome. And this car is so cool looking.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I don't mean to detract from it. It was a cool looking car, but very cool as far as comfort goes. It was not at all comfortable.

[Josh Clark]

No.

[Chuck Bryant]

I say we take a break and then set out on the road trip with these guys, huh?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, let's do it. Awkward time to ask this, but.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, did you download the trail map?

[Announcer]

Yeah. No, I don't need to.

[Chuck Bryant]

I. I don't understand.

[Josh Clark]

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They have the best network. And if we end up in bumtots nowhere.

[Announcer]

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[Josh Clark]

Whoa, I don't trust my carrier that much.

[Announcer]

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[Chuck Bryant]

All?

[Announcer]

It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women Women's Sports. Because, let's be real, women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline, and the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week, every week we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. We'll give you our takes, our debates, and probably a few disagreements. We'll talk to athletes, celebrate big moments, and get into what's happening on and off the field, court, track, and beyond. Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. So if you're already a fan or you're just getting into the game, there's a seat for you right here. Listen to everyone watches women's sports from the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Josh Clark]

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 not like a car he built himself. It was a winton, right? But he was doing it himself with this other guy. He wasn't for fun. He wasn't sponsored. It was about the spirit of adventure. He all these, as you will see, all these other companies sent, like, supplies ahead and they had teams of mechanics. He didn't have anything to prove. He 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.

[Announcer]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 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, there was gasoline waiting for them. So they essentially had gas stations that were reserved exclusively for them. Horatio and Sewell did not have anything remotely like that. And so they got into all sorts of fun little adventures, like the time that Sewell Crocker had to bike dozens of miles on a borrowed bicycle to go to 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's why he was there, Right, Exactly. And 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 Sewell Crocker.

[Josh Clark]

No, I don't think they were drawing straws, though. You know what I mean? Like, right. The rich 31 year old that had TB is definitely saying, all right, hit the road on the bike, my friend.

[Chuck Bryant]

We're equals in almost every way.

[Josh Clark]

But hit the trail on the bike.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

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 and everything. So they tore out the back seat on this Winton. I don't think we mentioned this thing could go 250 miles with their tank of fuel, which was way more than I thought.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

I was super impressed. So they ripped out the back seat, which doesn't look like it was much of one anyway, and packed a 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

They had a Kodak camera, they had sleeping bags. They had a shovel and ax. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, or just like shooting out of an untopped car is probably pretty fun when no one's around, but that is fun. So, yeah, the problem is they weren't experts at tying down their gear. And they would get to a stop probably basically every day and find that something they needed had dropped off at some point, at some point back on their trail and that they had gone too far to go back to try to find it. So they lost 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 play multiple times. But they made a really good decision early on. Number one, they followed. I can't remember his first name, but Mr. 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Which was 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

True, true.

[Josh Clark]

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 was some treacherous mountains that they had to go through, avoiding that desert, I think is what ultimately made them successful.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 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 30 miles per hour, max.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 days ago.

[Josh Clark]

I was just about to bring that up. I know you watched it.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's such a great part of that movie. And I was telling you, like, that was a masterpiece. Like, that is Rob Reiner's masterpiece, and he's made some pretty great movies, but it is exponentially better than I even remembered as a kid.

[Josh Clark]

I'll throw Spinal Tap in there, but I know. Have you still not seen that?

[Chuck Bryant]

That's what I'm saying. No, it's great. That's a great movie. When Harry Met Sally is a great movie. There's tons of great movies Rob Reiner's made, but I think Stand By Me might be the best.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it's a great movie. I love that scene when he. They put their hands on the rail and it just gets real quiet. And they're listening. They're like, do you feel any vibration at all? And that's probably what these guys were doing, I'm sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

But they were doing it bumping along in their open car.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Also, shout out. I don't know. If Wil Wheaton still listens to us. I know he used to, but, man, all of those kids did a great job. But he really did a magnificent job acting in that movie. So way to go, Wheaton. Totally listening.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right.

[Josh Clark]

All right. So we are at leave time, which was May 23, 1903. That 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

It was like Romeo and Michel.

[Josh Clark]

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, the 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. Give me all your tubes.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And tires were an issue. That seemed like one of the main issues.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. 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 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 at the time. So, of course, you weren't going to find car tires easily. You had to improvise any way you could.

[Josh Clark]

Sure. And a murdered body out there back then was a dime a dozen.

[Chuck Bryant]

Dime a dozen. Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

It's not going anywhere.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

Let's go check out that new car.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. He's not going anywhere.

[Josh Clark]

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 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 stagecoaches 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 to pull themselves out of a ditch or a river or a mud hole.

[Chuck Bryant]

That must have been the suckiest day ever.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And then the maps were an issue too, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

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. Sorry to keep bringing them up. I know they're not what the story's 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.

[Josh Clark]

It was her driveway, basically.

[Chuck Bryant]

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'd 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 or cross even. I think they probably just said like, good day to you, madam. And kept on.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

This is not going to reflect good on your family. Tina Manson. Do you like that? Tina? I just love.

[Josh Clark]

Tina was so not a name back then.

[Chuck Bryant]

Tina Manson.

[Josh Clark]

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 and there wasn't 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 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 Vanagon, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 in to shift gears. Never understood why. The reason why you push in is because you actually want to stop the clutch from working temporarily.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. 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 tackle to pull themselves out of mud.

[Josh Clark]

Well, he was worth his weight, wasn't he?

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, boy. Yeah, he was.

[Josh Clark]

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 they wanted to make up time, you know, because there were times when they had to go to a town and I think one of them was like three or four days where they're waiting, ironically, for a stagecoach to show up with parts that they had ordered. There were times when a stagecoach or a guy on a horse would pull them out, ironically again.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I didn't get the impression that Horatio was trying to prove that horses were obsolete.

[Josh Clark]

No, I don't think so at all.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think he still saw it as pretty ironic that he still relied on horses in this horseless carriage.

[Josh Clark]

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 in a few years, sucker.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right, right. That's what Segway makers said to people on foot.

[Josh Clark]

Didn't the inventor of the Segway drive off a cliff on A Segway.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, that sounds like an urban legend. But maybe one that's just crazy enough to be true.

[Josh Clark]

I have to look that up. Should we take a break?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes, we'll take a break and look that up.

[Josh Clark]

All right. We'll be back here with the truth right after this.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, we're back. And Chuck, it's true. BBC News says it. Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Wow.

[Chuck Bryant]

Jimmy Heselden was 62 when he rode off a cliff on his company's Segways.

[Josh Clark]

They killed him, obviously.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes, In West Yorkshire.

[Josh Clark]

That's sad.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. But, my God, that's quite a legend.

[Josh Clark]

It is. It's like Fabio getting hit in the face with a duck on a roller coaster.

[Chuck Bryant]

What?

[Josh Clark]

No. You know that.

[Chuck Bryant]

No.

[Josh Clark]

Fabio on a rollercoaster. 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 gotta be fake. And it really happened.

[Chuck Bryant]

Poor Fabio.

[Josh Clark]

I know. I feel bad for the guy, but it was also, like, of all the people to get. For this to happen to. It was just. It was pretty rich.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I can imagine. Is he a jerk? No, no, no. Is he?

[Josh Clark]

Okay, but he's Fabio. And, like, you know, that kind of stuff doesn't happen to Fabio.

[Chuck Bryant]

That stuff happens to me for sure. And me, too. Totally with you on that.

[Josh Clark]

Did you look up that picture?

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Stuff you couldn't care less about will be the name of that new show.

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff you really probably shouldn't bother listening to.

[Josh Clark]

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 gonna 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 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 having fun at the same time.

[Chuck Bryant]

I have that same impression too, for sure. And plus, don't forget, Sewell Crocker was making some pretty good money, too.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I didn't find that. What was he getting paid?

[Chuck Bryant]

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 8 grand back in 1903, which is 267 grand today.

[Josh Clark]

That's so much money.

[Chuck Bryant]

So if you think about it, hotels, food supplies, gas repairs, car parts repairs, that still leaves a pretty decent amount for Sewell Crocker. And I hope he got a big chunk of that.

[Josh Clark]

I hope so too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Chuck. I cannot, for the love of life, find this 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. And his face is all bloody and he looks really upset, but nothing about the actual hit.

[Josh Clark]

You know, I wonder if I. What I saw was a faked recreation of that. And there is only a before and an after.

[Chuck Bryant]

That would make sense that it looked photoshopped then. I'm sorry, I just had to circle back on that because my disappointment was palpable.

[Josh Clark]

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 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 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, he's routinely described as a bulldog, but he's pretty clearly a pit bull for sure.

[Josh Clark]

He's a pity. And he's beautiful. And 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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, 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 would look ahead. He loved it to look for ruts or bumps or whatever and would, like, brace himself. He just took to it very easily and became this great mascot. So everybody started to really find out about this when Bud joined. And I don't get the impression that Sewell or Horatio were the least bit jealous.

[Josh Clark]

No. He paid him $15, which is $500 today for this dog. And Crocker said, hey, adopt, don't shop. And Jackson said, what does that mean?

[Chuck Bryant]

Right?

[Josh Clark]

And he said, no, don't worry about it. That comes later.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

So they're getting all this 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 in his letters, he was saying, I've never felt more confident now that we're gonna make it to New York. And this is when they were in, like, Wyoming.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 right of ways were just beautiful. Sitting there for the picking. And they started to really. Yeah, they started to really make some pretty good time.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't remember, actually.

[Josh Clark]

I think in 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 a good time for that car.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's not bad at all. Especially considering it maxed out at 30 miles an hour.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So that was just like a two and a half hour day for them, I guess.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. 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.

[Josh Clark]

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 them out with fixing this car up and stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

But they got free beer koozies.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. Refrigerator magnets and they were on their way.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I'm sure they probably fixed the car up a little bit. But Wynton was talking like we'll have gas like every hundred miles for you kind of thing will 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 their 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 he ever knew what it was. But none of them were injured and the car was okay. So they just kept on keeping on.

[Josh Clark]

So take us home. When did they. They pulled into Manhattan, didn't they?

[Chuck Bryant]

Finally on July 26 at 4:30am 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 collected on.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I was curious about that. He didn't.

[Chuck Bryant]

Nope.

[Josh Clark]

What a stand up guy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Or he's like I'm never going out west again. It's too long of a ride.

[Josh Clark]

And there to greet him was throngs of press and journalists, people from the Wynton car Company and swipes the old girl herself right there.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's so cool. I love that they had like a great relationship and he had a great relationship with Sewell 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 in Burlington.

[Josh Clark]

And that's not a euphemism for like.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

He really got lost and died.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. No, he really did live out his days there.

[Josh Clark]

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 I in his 40s and apparently became a decorated veteran.

[Chuck Bryant]

Probably collected tobacco, baseball cards at the time.

[Josh Clark]

Probably so. So I think he ran for governor and lost. Governor of Vermont at one time and lost. I don't know how he lost. I don't know who in the world would vote for someone else other than this guy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Maybe it seems like you'd be able to recall a car like that.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know. I've been to a lot of museums, seen a lot of old cars.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. Sadly, Sewell Crocker, he died young. He contracted an illness and died in 1913. So he was about 40. No, 30 something, early 30s, I think.

[Josh Clark]

He's 31.

[Chuck Bryant]

He had been sent to 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.

[Josh Clark]

Jeez, that's really sad.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

A nice little cherry on top here that Ed found too, 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 59 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 the shine a light on what women were capable of doing, which was driving a car through terrible circumstances for 59 days.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right, exactly. Also, despite being described as pretty in every single article that was written about them at the time.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So one other thing that was a kind of a note about this is that 30 years after Horatio and Sewell and Bud made their trip, the record was set that stood for decades, 54 hours. So two and a half days. Guy named Irwin Cannonball Baker made a famous Run from New York to LA, and I think about 40 years after that. In the early 70s, car and driver magazine editor 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 going to call it the Cannonball Run.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. And if you want to learn more about that, we. Was that a two parter or was just a one parter?

[Chuck Bryant]

I think it was probably one of our 15 minute episodes.

[Josh Clark]

No, that was a good one.

[Chuck Bryant]

It was a good one. I'm just saying we used to do them 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.

[Josh Clark]

I think we probably talked for 15 minutes about Burt Reynolds.

[Chuck Bryant]

Probably. Probably. But that was probably the episode too.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you're right.

[Chuck Bryant]

You got anything else? No, I don't either. Which means it's time for listener mail.

[Josh Clark]

I'm going to call this short but sweet Amazon factoid.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

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 it Manaeus or Manaus? M A N A U S. I think Manaus. Manaus and back on a Viking ocean cruise, he said. Surprisingly, ocean cruise ships can go that far. About 1,000 miles. Who knew? On the cruise though, 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. Iguazu, perhaps.

[Chuck Bryant]

Very nice for South American listeners should write in a let us know.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So it is. The volume of water leaving the mouth of the Amazon is equal to those three giant balls.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow.

[Josh Clark]

Times 12.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

I think that's what makes it amazing. That's from Rich Pope.

[Chuck Bryant]

Thanks. Rich Pope, great name too. Really gets it across. Rich Pope.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Good to meet you, you know.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, agreed.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, it's good to meet you too, Rich Pope. And if you want to be like Rich Pope, you can email us a. Well, send it off to stuffpodcastheartradio.com

[Josh Clark]

Stuff

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[Josh Clark]

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[Josh Clark]

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