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Reviewed by:
  • Motoring West, Volume 1: Automobile Pioneers, 1900–1909 ed. by Peter J. Blodgett
  • John A. Jakle
Motoring West, Volume 1: Automobile Pioneers, 1900–1909.
Edited by Peter J. Blodgett. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. 360pp. Illustrations, map, index. $34.95 cloth.

Published by the University of Oklahoma Press under its Arthur H. Clark imprint, historian Peter J. Blodgett offers the first of two intended edited works focused on early automobile travel in the western United States. Volume 1 contains excerpts from eighteen articles originally published between May 1901 and June 1909 in serials, including Country Life in America, Harper’s Weekly, Outing: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine of Recreation, Scientific American, Sunset, and World’s Work. Authors in the anthology include car owners, their hired drivers, and accompanying passengers, including journalists not just along for the ride but specifically to write about the adventure implicit. Blodgett first offers an introduction to the overall two-volume project. He tells the story of how motoring in the American West evolved from “audacious stunt to a curiosity to a commonplace occurrence over a few decades” (19).

There follows a short introduction to the current volume. It focuses on the earliest periods of “stunt” and “curiosity” in emphasizing early transcontinental endurance runs and speed contests: sporting events widely covered in newspapers and magazines that pitted drivers against their machines, topography, weather, and, ultimately, time. Reports emphasized not only the primitive motor cars used but also the very poor roads (and even the lack of roads) that generally characterized the West, especially in the mountainous areas of the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, and the Cascades. Each vignette is preceded by a short introduction, Blodgett providing a biographical sketch of each author (or authors) as well as contextual outline for the specific travel episodes reported.

One might argue over the items chosen for the anthology, and, as well, over the editor’s abridging (or choice of specific excerpts). The anthology does contain much redundancy with authors seemingly making the same sorts of observations over and over again. But is that a problem? Perhaps not. By including such repetition Blodgett accomplishes something important. Significant ideas are hammered home thus to clearly establish in the reader’s mind what was and what was not commonplace regarding motoring in the earliest decades of the twentieth century, especially in the West.

Importantly, insight into sense of place is offered. For example, the reader is challenged to consider the West not just as a geographical area but as a mythical locale of challenge and redemption. Interesting regional stereotypes underlie much of the reporting, themes that strongly echo today when Americans think about their nation west of the Mississippi River. In early motoring there was substantial concern for the passing scene. In western travel, mountainous courses stood out in the remembering—if only for the lack of passable roads and the resulting hard going. In contrast the Great Plains (especially the High Plains) provided less interest. Roads tended to be minimally improved (although they could turn to mud in wet weather) and services (for example, garages with gasoline, lubricating oil, and tires) were generally available relatively close at hand. But flat landscapes could become monotonous, drivers and their passengers, for example, seemingly facing ever-receding horizons, scenes dominated by grass [End Page 77] and sky. Wrote one author, having motored from San Francisco to the East Coast: “The hardest part of the trip was over when Denver was reached, though beyond that city barbed-wire cattle fences and irrigation ditches were often annoying. Through part of Nebraska and Iowa the muddy condition of the roads made the travel almost amphibious” (207). [End Page 78]

John A. Jakle
Department of Geography and Geographical Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
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