Читать книгу RVs & Campers For Dummies - Christopher Hodapp - Страница 25

In 1903, Horatio Nelson Jackson and his co-driver, Sewell Crocker, were the first people to drive an automobile across the United States. It took just over two months. Jackson did it on a bet to prove cars were more than a passing fad, and it made headlines. Their feat made it all too clear that American roads were just plain lousy. They didn’t have it much better than a Conestoga wagon on the Oregon Trail.

In the two decades that followed, cars became an ordinary part of American life, but anyone driving one farther than church on Sunday was considered an “intrepid autoist.” The few highways built were privately funded by consortiums of businessmen, and they were called auto trails. The quality was miserable by our standards, often macadam (a gravel surface) or just plain dirt. A few small, expensive sections were brick.

Those early highways covered some ambitious stretches: the Atlantic Highway, down the eastern seaboard from Maine to Miami; the Lee Highway, from Washington, D.C., to San Diego; and the National Old Trails Road, from Baltimore to San Francisco. The most famous one was the Lincoln Highway, from New York’s Times Square to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. The promoters who financed them loved romantic or memorable names, like the Dixie Highway, the Yellowstone Trail, and El Camino Real. And those names stuck to those routes, even to the present. But taking a trip on one, particularly the whole way, was a little like climbing Mount Everest.

The big change came in 1919, in the wake of one embarrassing, high-profile trip. The U.S. Army sent out a highly-publicized expedition on the Lincoln Highway to see how long it would take for a convoy of military vehicles to cross the country by road, if the time ever came to defend the West Coast. The answer was a dismal 62 days, just one day shorter than Jackson and Crocker had taken 16 years before. By the end of the journey, none of the men on the convoy had been killed, but there were an almost unimaginable 230 road accidents and many injuries.