Selects: The First Road Trip

**Josh** (0:01)
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. 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.

**Chuck** (0:42)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh** (0:52)
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 Stuff You Should Know.

**Chuck** (1:05)
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, right?

**Josh** (1:23)
I would go so far as to call it a humdinger.

**Chuck** (1:26)
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.

**Josh** (1:36)
Yeah.

**Chuck** (1:37)
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 a wonderful story, and you can find it on PBS. Hopefully, if you're a streamer, you pay for it 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.

**Josh** (2:04)
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 just such a great actor.

**Chuck** (2:16)
I 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.

**Josh** (2:33)
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.

**Chuck** (2:42)
I would argue the book.

**Josh** (2:45)
Yeah, let's just call it that, the book on Horatio Nelson Jackson, right?

**Chuck** (2:51)
Yeah, that's his name.

**Josh** (2:53)
Great name. So we're going to talk a lot more about him later, but we really want to lay the groundwork.
Bring the context, as Flavor Flav would put it, and just 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.

**Chuck** (3:17)
Right. So 1903, 911 was a joke. You like that one?

**Josh** (3:23)
It's okay.

**Chuck** (3:23)
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 trans-continental railroad was built and completed in 1869
And it was 1876 when you got your first cross-country train trip that happened. So, this was, what, like 25-ish years, roughly, after that.
And people were still kind of only traveling by train because cars were pretty new. And they were only for richies because, I believe, in the documentary, they said 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, and will hammer this home a lot. But they didn't even know was going to end up being a real thing.

**Josh** (4:25)
Yeah, it could have turned out like the Segway.

**Chuck** (4:29)
Totally right.

**Josh** (4:30)
I mean, this is kind of akin to somebody taking a trek across America on a Segway back in like 1995

**Chuck** (4:39)
Yeah, they did not know cars. Like, a lot of people thought these cars will never amount to anything. You're silly, it'll always be trains and horses.

**Josh** (4:48)
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 kind of lengthy distance, you took a train.