In this excerpt from his new book Drive!, Lawrence Goldstone recounts one of the first coast-to-coast road trips. In 1903, Packard investor Henry Joy hired test driver E.T. "Tom" Fetch to drive a 4.5-horsepower Model F across the country to prove American-made cars could "negotiate the all but impassible mountain and desert roads and trails of the Far West." It took 63 days.
The Packard set out from San Francisco on June 20, 1903. The Model F that E.T. "Tom" Fetch drove had been modified only slightly---the fenders had been removed, and it had been fitted with extra gasoline tanks and an additional low gear for negotiating mountains. In addition to the canvas---to roll out and lay under the wheels to allow the car to traverse the most inhospitable tracts of soft sand---Fetch took along a pick and shovel and log chains to get the car through ruts.
The car weighed 2,200 pounds stripped and almost 3,000 when laden with equipment. Finally, Fetch thought his chariot should have a name, and since they would initially be following the Southern Pacific tracks, he chose Old Pacific.
Fetch detested the route, “straight through the Rocky Mountains and on to Denver,” which he believed was chosen by an advertising man Fetch later called a “dumb fool.” In fact, Packard’s general manager, Sidney Waldon, had chosen the route, but he didn’t disagree with Fetch’s assessment. “I didn’t understand the difficulties and consequently selected the wrong route from San Francisco to Emigrant Gap, Reno, Lovelock, Winnemucca, around the north end of Great Salt Lake, and from Salt Lake City told them to go right through the center of Colorado. Like a dumb fool, I was thinking from the standpoint of publicity, with pictures of the mountains and canyons, but what I sent them into was something terrific.” Clearly, Waldon was not using “terrific” in the positive sense.
It took the Packard a full month to arrive in Denver. But the route, as hoped, provided a plethora of opportunities for publicity. A series of regular press releases were issued, such as this one that appeared in Horseless Age: “The Packard Motor-car Company reports that E. T. Fetch and M. C. Krarup, who have undertaken to run a Packard automobile from San Francisco to New York City, have reached Wadsworth, Nev. in their progress eastward. This is the first time that an automobile has succeeded in crossing the Sierra Nevada Mountains.”
They would also cross the Rockies; at 11,000 feet, the Packard set a record for altitude. There were no bridges built to accommodate automobiles, so Fetch had to use more than a little creativity to nudge the Packard along the tracks on railroad bridges. He also learned that the appearance of good fortune could be deceiving.
More than once in the early weeks of the trip, Fetch found what appeared to be a well-groomed main road, only to learn after following it, sometimes for miles, that it led only to the entrance of a mine or some wealthy rancher’s spread. Asking directions was equally knotty, as few of those encountered on the trail had ever been more than a day or two’s horse ride from their homes.
The journey was immensely challenging. Extremes of temperature and altitude were exacerbated by bad food, no bathing facilities, fatigue, and a series of impediments that seemed to have been drawn from a Greek saga. Fetch and Krarup were called upon to use all the skills they had learned and some that they had not, like road construction.
When they finally reached Colorado Springs, Krarup wrote of the terrain they had just traversed. “Nevada is awful, but Utah is the worst I ever saw. We carry a pick and shovel along, and we found it necessary in more than one instance to use them when we had to build roads ourselves, cutting along the sides of hills.”
But a bit farther along, Krarup decided he wasn’t keen on Colorado either. “It rained and the water made the alkali roads like soap, making steering impossible. ... The strain going down into the gullies on the machine was awful and I was afraid something was going to break, but Old Pacific stood it all.” Almost all. At one point the car had to be pulled by a team of horses from a buffalo wallow, but other than that it ran the entire course under its own power.
The wisdom of allowing an editor of one of the minor journals to accompany the expedition became questionable, as reports in the more important publications could be less than enthusiastic. For example, *Horseless Age’*s deadpan report of *Old Pacific’*s arrival in Denver, not published until two weeks after the event, was hardly what Frederic Smith would have hoped for.
“The arrival of the Packard transcontinental car from Colorado Springs on the afternoon of July 20 stirred Denver to a more than ordinary interest in automobile affairs . . . a circuitous route was followed through the principal streets to the Packard agency, giving all the population an opportunity to realize that the most difficult and perilous portion of an unprecedented motor-car performance had been successfully finished.”
Fetch and Krarup remained in Denver for two days, talking with Packard representatives and taking a well-earned rest. Each had a bath. After Denver, they would not travel on a surfaced road until they reached Illinois.
Still, they covered the eastern two-thirds of the nation in the same amount of time as it had taken for the western third. When Old Pacific reached Tarrytown, New York, on August 21, it was greeted by two hundred automobilists who formed an escort to lead Fetch to the finish, “bending all the eight mile-per-hour speed limits,” Motor Age noted. A long article in the New-York Tribune marked the Packard’s arrival in New York City proper.
Motor Age added, “The entry into New York was a triumphal procession, with the brilliant lamps on the machines shining through the dark and all the occupants were singing.”
Although the mechanic who had been made available to Fetch and Krarup in the West had come in handy---he left the expedition in Denver---Old Pacific had completed the journey requiring no major repairs. When Packard’s hometown newspaper, the Warren Tribune, reported on the trip, it noted that the completion “demonstrates the superiority of the Packard machine over all other models, and this will be worth all the thousands of dollars it has cost the company.”
As for Fetch, his sentiments were a good deal more prosaic. When asked to address the hundreds who had come to celebrate his arrival, he merely said, “Thank God, it’s over.”
But all was for naught. A Vermont doctor, his mechanic, and their dog had arrived in New York after a 5,600-mile journey from San Francisco, just a few weeks earlier.
From Drive! Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age by Lawrence Goldstone. Copyright © 2016 by Lawrence Goldstone. Reprinted courtesy of Balltantine Books.
