Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip.(Book Review)

Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip. Dayton Duncan. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2003.

This account of the first transcontinental car trip was the basis for director Ken Burns's PBS documentary (2003) of the same title. Although Burns's films seldom break new scholarly ground (as he admits in his introduction to this book), this particular film and book owe a great deal to the determination of Dayton Duncan. He and his wife found unpublished materials and attempt to settle discrepancies in earlier accounts of Horatio Nelson Jackson's intrepid 1903 journey from California to New York.

Based on Duncan's script for the film, this book is long on narrative and wonderfully well illustrated with period images--photographs, advertisements, and newspaper headlines. However, analysis receives less attention. Duncan uses primary sources well, if not too critically, but a glance at his brief bibliography shows that he relied more on the road trip literature than on broader cultural history and scholarly sources.

Horatio Jackson (1872-1955) was a thirty-one-year-old doctor from Vermont who no longer practiced medicine because he had a wealthy wife. While pursuing investments in gold and silver mines in Mexico and Alaska, he became interested in new technology, including the automobile. Dining at the University Club in San Francisco in May 1903, he bet fifty dollars that he could drive to New ...