Old Blue’s Road: A Historian’s Motorcycle Journeys in the American West by James Whiteside (review)

It is unusual to be able to peer into an historian’s mind just as he or she is about to initiate a major research project. I do not mean the long preface outlining vital archival work done prior to writing the first page of the manuscript that will reflect months or often years of preparation. In Old Blue’s Road, author James Whiteside clearly sets the stage for this book in the first sentence.

“This is nuts.”

“Sitting on my motorcycle just after sunrise on a cool, misty August morning …” (1). So begins this odyssey of a now retired historian seeking to add vigor to a world he has lectured about and written of for decades. The mechanism he has selected for such vitalization is a series of trips around the American West on a new 700-pound Harley-Davidson motorcycle that the Milwaukee manufacturer calls the Heritage Softail. Whiteside refers to it as “Old Blue.”

And lest you think that Whiteside was nuts to undertake this mission, consider a paragraph at the end of the book. “It was a privilege to see all of these Wests and to think about their history on Old Blue’s road. The road connected me to history in a very personal way. Out there I saw the past, touched it, and sometimes even felt it emotionally. Out there I sensed more clearly than I ever had in books and archives how the past and the present rub up against one another” (265).

Early in the book, Whiteside gives one further glimpse into his mindset. “Many years ago I penned something called the Immutable Second Law of History, revised edition: … ‘For any historical question having two or more plausible explanations, the correct interpretation is ‘yes’” (7). He supports this multiplicity of potential answers to historical questions because he is focused not on the America West, but rather on the American Wests.

There are the plains West, the arid Southwest, and the rainy Pacific Northwest. … And there are the human, cultural, and idealized Wests. There are polyglot Wests, filled with conflict, nostalgia, and contradiction. … Historian Clyde Milner II has written, “the American West is an idea that became a place.” … I think the reverse is equally true, that the West is a place that became an idea, or a collection of ideals and values—individualism, freedom and democracy, opportunity—all deeply imbedded in American notions of who they are.

(262–63)

Old Blue’s Road is given over much more to historical chronicle—developed primarily around issues of Indian–white conflicts, resource extraction, and the transformation of these Wests through quest for water and its control—than it is to Whiteside’s biking narrative. However, the buzz that comes from his conversations and observations along the way—“We got 60 kinds of beer here” which later turned out to mean “20 Coors, 20 Budweisers, and 20 Miller Lites” (93), or “Silverton makes its living these days by mining the pockets of skiers, mountain bicyclists, and other tourists” (150), or “Jackson Hole dude ranchers, who made their living by herding summer tourists rather than cattle, were among the first proponents of conservation” (185)—bring a refreshing energy to the prose.

One facet of the book that is of enormous value to a reader who is more at home with archives than biker customs is the notes that follow each chapter. Annotation is provided by superscript in the text corresponding to chapter-ending notes that include detailed classic archival sources, as well as Internet sites and sources, films, government documents, and even song lyrics. One of the frustrations of the book is the black and white photography. Resolution is especially poor in the broad landscape vistas, but on the other hand, a thirteen-page index adds a significant additional dimension to the historical discussions that are the major substance of...