In the summer of 1919, a 28-year-old army officer sat on the dirt in the Nevada desert, eating cold beans from a can in the dark. The truck carrying the field kitchen had broken down hours earlier, as trucks kept breaking down on this journey, and the men had been rationed to one cup of water each for dinner. Above him stretched more stars than most people alive today have ever seen. Ahead of him stretched a country he was slowly realizing was nearly impossible to cross.
His name was Dwight Eisenhower, and he was two months into what was supposed to be a simple car trip from Washington, D. C. , to San Francisco. Two months to drive across his own country.
Not because he was lazy, and not because he stopped to see the sights, but because in 1919 the United States, already one of the richest and most industrialized nations on earth, did not have roads in any meaningful sense. The roads were a patchwork of dirt tracks, farm lanes, mud holes, and unfinished gravel, connecting cities in a manner that was, so to speak, optional. Remember that image of Eisenhower eating cold beans in the dark, because by the end of this story you will understand exactly how a miserable, humiliating road trip planted a seed in that young man’s mind. A seed that took him nearly forty years to act on, and that would reshape the entire landscape of the United States.
First, the question: if there were no interstate highways until 1956, and not a single mile of the network you drive on today existed before then, how did Americans travel across their vast country for the first century and a half of its existence? The short answer is that for long distances, they took the train. And if they were foolish, adventurous, or wealthy enough to own one of those newfangled automobiles, they took a deep breath, packed their shovels, spare tires, and canned food, and set out on a road network that barely deserved the name. Crossing America by car before the interstate highways was not a road trip.
It was an expedition. Before cars took over, America was already connected, not by asphalt but by steel. By the start of the twentieth century, the United States had built the most extensive railroad network on earth. The famous moment everyone half-remembers from school came in May 1869, when the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines were joined at Promontory Summit in the Utah desert, and a ceremonial golden spike was driven into the ground.
That single event shrank the transcontinental crossing from roughly six months to about one week. Before the railroad, if you wanted to travel from New York to California, your options were brutal. You could go overland by wagon across the plains and mountains, risking your life against weather, disease, river crossings, and exhaustion for six months. Or you could sail around the tip of South America, a journey of thousands of extra miles taking months.
Or you could sail to Panama, hack your way on foot through the jungle, buy a mule, and catch another ship up the Pacific coast, hoping you did not die of yellow fever along the way. That was cross-country travel in pre-railroad America, measured in months and in lives. When the transcontinental railroad opened, it was not a convenience. It was a revolution in the very concept of distance.
For the next fifty years, the train ruled. Whether you were a businessman, an immigrant heading west, a soldier, a tourist, a mail-order bride, or a family relocating for work, you traveled by train. The great railroad companies built massive ornate stations in the hearts of American cities, cathedrals of travel with marble floors and vaulted ceilings, because train travel was the center of American life. A first-class passenger could board a Pullman sleeper, eat a fine dinner served by a porter on white linen, sleep in a real bed while the landscape rolled past the window, and wake up several states away.
The wealthy crossed the continent in a moving hotel. Even ordinary passengers in the cheaper cars reached their destination in days, not months, safe from mud and weather. In long-distance travel, Americans in 1900 had vastly better service than they would twenty years later when cars took over. That is because early cars did not appear in a world of good roads.
They appeared in a world where roads were considered a secondary concern. Which brings us to the machine that changed everything, and the man bold enough to be the first to own one. In the spring of 1903, a Vermont doctor named Horatio Nelson Jackson sat in a gentlemen’s club in San Francisco, discussing the future of travel. The automobile was then just a toy for the wealthy, a noisy, unreliable, temperamental machine that constantly broke down and spooked horses.
Most sensible people considered it a passing fad. Roads, after all, were built for horses and carriages, not engines. Jackson disagreed. He believed the car was the future.
Over drinks, an argument turned into a bet, a wager of fifty dollars that he could not drive one of these automobiles across the country to New York. Here is what makes the story remarkable. Horatio Nelson Jackson did not own a car. He barely knew how to drive.
No one in history had ever successfully driven a car across the United States. Many men had tried. All had failed, usually stuck somewhere in the western deserts. None of that deterred him.
Jackson bought a used 20-horsepower Winton touring car, which he named Vermont after his home state. He hired a young mechanic named Sewall Crocker, because he would need someone to fix the thing when it inevitably broke down. They removed the back seat and filled the space with camping equipment, tools, spare parts, food, a shovel, a rifle, and a pulley-and-rope system for the anticipated moments when they would have to drag the car out of the mud by hand. Somewhere in Idaho, a third crew member joined them, a bulldog named Bud, purchased for fifteen dollars, who rode with them wearing little goggles to protect his eyes from dust.
Three thousand miles of dirt, mud, sand, and mountains in a car with no roof, no seatbelts, barely any windshield, and a bulldog in goggles riding shotgun. They left San Francisco in late May 1903. The trip was an ordeal. There were no gas stations, so they bought fuel from general stores and hardware shops, and had it shipped ahead by rail.
There were no useful road maps, so they constantly got lost. On one occasion, a woman deliberately sent them fifty miles in the wrong direction just so her family could get a look at the car. When parts broke, which was often, they had to telegraph the factory back east and wait, sometimes for days, for the replacement to arrive by train. They had the same wheel failures, the same tire blowouts, the same mud extractions, over and over.
It took them 63 days. When they finally reached New York City in late July 1903, they made history, the first people to cross the United States by automobile. Jackson spent roughly eight thousand dollars to win a fifty-dollar bet, a fortune at the time. He never bothered to collect the fifty.
The dog Bud retired comfortably in Vermont. The reason it took two men and a dog 63 days to do what can now be done in about forty hours was not the slowness of the car. It was the absence of ground suitable for it to run on. The car preceded the paved road by a full generation.
In the early automobile era, most American roads were dirt. On dry days they were so potholed and dusty they rattled the car apart. When it rained, they turned into what drivers of the era called gumbo, thick sticky mud that swallowed a wheel up to the axle and stranded a machine weighing a ton. Getting stuck was not a mishap.
It was an expected part of every trip. Experienced drivers did not wonder whether they would get stuck. They asked how many times they would have to abandon their car in the mud, and whether the local farmer with a team of horses would charge them a fair price to pull them out. Many farmers discovered they could make excellent money by deliberately keeping part of the road muddy, then rescuing the tourists who sank into it.
There were no highway numbers. There was no green sign telling you that you were on Route 40 heading west. The very idea of a numbered, marked national road system did not exist. Instead, America had what were called named trails.
Starting around 1910, private groups, boosters, businessmen, and local chambers of commerce began linking existing local roads into long routes with grand romantic names, the Lincoln Highway, the Dixie Highway, the National Old Trails Road, the Yellowstone Trail, which promoted itself with the slogan a good road from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound. But these were not roads as we understand them. They were suggestions. Routes marked by colored stripes painted on telephone poles, fence posts, and rocks.
If you wanted to drive the Lincoln Highway, you did not follow signs. You followed a pattern of red, white, and blue stripes painted on whatever stood beside the road. And you prayed the paint had not faded, or that a rival trail association had not painted its own stripes right over yours to hijack your route toward its own towns and hotels. The trail names were often just a way to make money.
There was profit in tourism, and a town on a popular trail got travelers’ money, fuel, food, and lodging. Trail associations competed fiercely, sometimes routing their highways in absurd, winding detours specifically to pass through the towns of members who paid dues. A trip that should have been a straight line could bend for hundreds of extra miles due to what were essentially advertising deals. The Lincoln Highway, opened in 1913, was the most famous, the first American attempt at a coast-to-coast automobile road, from Times Square in New York to San Francisco.
But even the celebrated Lincoln Highway was mostly unpaved in its early years. Long stretches were nothing but dirt and gravel. In the western deserts, some sections were just two faint ruts in the sand, marked by a few posts. This was the best road in the country.
How did people navigate all this? Not with maps, which were unreliable. They used what were called tour books, which read more like a story told by a friend than instructions. A typical guide might say, leave town heading east, cross the yellow bridge, turn right at the big red barn, keep going until you reach the schoolhouse, then turn left at the fork by the oak tree.
If the barn got painted or the tree fell down, you simply got lost. Before gas stations and phones, getting lost in the desert was not an inconvenience. It was mortal danger. The push for better roads did not begin with car owners.
It began with bicyclists. In the 1880s and 1890s, long before cars, bicycles spread across the country, and riders were fed up with road conditions. They organized into a powerful league, the League of American Wheelmen, and launched what became known as the Good Roads Movement, demanding that governments invest in pavement suitable for riding. When farmers realized good roads would help them get crops to market and children to school, they joined.
When cars arrived and spread widely, their owners inherited a road-reform movement that had been fighting for a generation. The government began to respond. In 1916, the federal government passed its first real law appropriating money to help states build roads. It was expanded in 1921.
Then in 1926 came the change that finally put order into the chaos. The United States introduced the numbered highway system. America already had a national highway system before the interstates, but it was not the interstates. In 1926, all those overlapping, confusing trails were formally replaced with a logical network of numbered federal highways.
US Route 1 ran along the East Coast. US Route 40 cut through the middle of the country. And one number would become the most famous road in the world, US Route 66. Route 66 stretched from Chicago to Los Angeles, nearly 2,400 miles, and it became a legend.
It was the road that carried people west toward the promise of California, toward work, toward sunshine, toward a new beginning. A novelist later gave it the name that stuck forever, the Mother Road. But even these numbered highways, for all their improvements, were nothing like modern highways. A US highway in the 1930s and 1940s passed directly through the heart of every town.
There were no bypasses. If Route 66 ran through your town, it was your main street, with all its traffic lights, pedestrians, parked cars, and a 15-mile-per-hour speed limit downtown. Crossing the country meant driving through hundreds of towns, one after another, stopping at every red light in every one of them. This created an entire world along the roadside, a world that has almost completely disappeared.
In the early days, drivers simply camped. They pulled over in a field, and towns began setting up free auto camps to attract these traveling tourists and their money, simple plots of land where you could park your car and pitch your tent. Then someone realized travelers would pay for more comfort, and the auto camps evolved into rows of small individual cabins you could rent for the night, what became known as tourist courts. In 1925, a hotel in California combined the words car and hotel to create a new word that had never existed before: motel.
The motel was born on the roadside, with its small rooms in a row, parking right outside your door, and its glowing neon sign announcing vacant rooms in the dark. There were roadside restaurants, tourist traps, the giant fiberglass dinosaur, the largest ball of string in the world, the reptile farm, the trading posts promising live rattlesnakes. And then there were the signs. One shaving cream company discovered a captive audience moving slowly along these two-lane roads.
Starting in 1925, they planted small sequential signs along the roadside, spaced so you would read them one after another as you drove. Each sign was one line of a rhyming jingle building to a punchline, then the product name. For decades, reading Burma-Shave signs was a beloved part of the American road trip, a small poem delivered at 35 miles per hour. The highway would destroy them completely.
You cannot read a poem on billboards at 70 miles per hour. For those who could not afford a car, and in the 1920s and 1930s that was still a great many Americans, there was another way across the country, the bus. A company that began in 1914 hauling miners around Minnesota expanded into a national network, painting its buses silver and putting a running dog on the side. Greyhound.
For the price of a ticket, workers, students, soldiers, and families who had never owned a car could reach almost anywhere in America, traveling overnight, watching the same small towns and neon motel signs pass by the window. The bus made long-distance travel accessible to everyone. In the 1930s, two catastrophes collided in the heart of America. The first was the Great Depression, which threw millions out of work.
The second was an environmental disaster known as the Dust Bowl. Years of drought, combined with decades of over-plowing, had stripped the Great Plains of the deep-rooted grasses that held the soil. When the winds came, they pulled the topsoil off the land and carried it in vast black clouds, dust storms capable of turning day into night and burying farms, fences, and houses. Hundreds of thousands of families in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and Arkansas lost everything.
Their land was destroyed, their farms foreclosed, and they had nowhere to go. So they packed everything they could carry into old, broken-down cars and trucks. They tied mattresses to the roofs, piled children among the luggage, and headed west toward California, following rumors of fruit-picking work in the fields. The road they took was Route 66.
This was the other face of the Mother Road, the face the postcards left out. For these families, the highway was not a symbol of freedom. It was mobile despair. They limped westward in overloaded cars that constantly broke down, camped by the roadside because they could not afford a room, rationed their food, and buried their loved ones along the way.
The two-lane highway that a wealthy tourist considered a charming adventure was, for a Dust Bowl family, a brutal corridor of hunger, breakdowns, and uncertainty. When they finally reached California, many were met not with embraces but with hostility and exploitation. The same paved road could be a vacation for one family and a trail of tears for another. Now back to that young army officer eating cold beans in the desert.
In 1919, the army decided to run an experiment. World War I had just ended, and the military had learned a hard lesson about the importance of moving trucks and equipment overland. So they organized a massive convoy of about eighty vehicles and three hundred men, and sent them on a mission: drive from Washington, D. C.
, to San Francisco along the Lincoln Highway, to find out how hard it would be to move an army across the United States by road. The answer was: very hard. The convoy left Washington in early July and did not reach San Francisco until early September. It took 62 days to cross the country, an average of about six miles per hour, barely faster than walking.
Along the way, trucks broke through wooden bridges that could not support their weight, forcing the men to stop and rebuild the bridges themselves. Trucks sank into desert sand and prairie mud. They crawled up mountain grades and repaired their vehicles by the roadside day after day. The grueling journey was a national embarrassment disguised as a spectacle, proof that the greatest industrial power on earth could not move itself across its own territory efficiently.
Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower accompanied them as an observer, taking careful notes and watching everything fall apart. He never forgot it. Decades later, he wrote that it was that old convoy that had started him thinking about the need for good roads across the country. But it took another experience to convince him fully.
During World War II, as Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe, Eisenhower watched the German autobahn network, wide, smooth, accessible superhighways with no intersections, no traffic lights, no crawling through towns, allowing rapid, efficient movement across the entire country. In his own words, the 1919 convoy made him think about good two-lane roads. Seeing Germany made him see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land. When Eisenhower became president of the United States, two images were burned into his memory: the humiliation of that slow, 62-day crossing of America, and the excellence of the German autobahns.
He decided to do something about it on a scale never attempted before. The result was the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, signed into law by Eisenhower in late June of that year. It is almost impossible to exaggerate its scale. The law authorized a national network of interstate and defense highways stretching roughly 41,000 miles, limited-access superhighways built to a uniform standard from coast to coast.
The federal government would pay 90 percent of the cost, states the remaining 10 percent, and the entire project would be funded by a dedicated trust fund financed by gasoline taxes. It was the largest public works project in American history to that point, and arguably the largest construction project in human history up to that time. Notice the word defense in the official name. This project was not sold to the public as a mere convenience for family vacations.
It was presented as a matter of national survival. This was the height of the Cold War, and the fear of nuclear attack was real. Planners argued that wide, straight highways were necessary for evacuating cities in an emergency and for moving military equipment rapidly across the country, solving on a national scale the very problem that had defeated Eisenhower’s 1919 convoy. The ghost of those broken-down trucks in the desert is written into the law.
Once construction began, the country changed with astonishing speed. The interstates did what the old roads could never do. They went around cities instead of through them. No traffic lights, no main streets, no crawling at 15 miles per hour, just smooth, divided, limited-access pavement where you could drive at 70 miles per hour for hours without stopping.
The crossing that took Horatio Jackson and his dog 63 days could, by the 1970s, be done in about three days of effortless driving. But every revolution has a price. The price of the interstates fell directly on everything celebrated in the old roadside world. The highway pulled traffic away from the towns.
And traffic was their lifeblood. All those main-street businesses that had flourished for decades on the constant flow of travelers through their restaurants, hotels, gas stations, and souvenir shops suddenly found themselves on a road to nowhere. Cars now hummed by on the interstate a few miles away, stopping only at anonymous exits lined with chains. One by one, towns along old Route 66 and the other historic highways withered.
Some became ghost towns. The rhyming Burma-Shave signs, useless at highway speed, vanished. The motels, the tourist cabins, the intimate texture of crossing America town by town, disappeared, not all at once, but bypassed to death. Route 66 itself, the Mother Road, the most famous highway in the world, was gradually replaced segment by segment by the new interstates until it was officially decommissioned in 1985.
The road that carried Dust Bowl families to California, the road that became a symbol for the whole country, was removed from the map and officially ceased to exist. So here is the honest answer to the question of how Americans crossed the country before 1956. They crossed it slowly, and because of that, they experienced their country in a way that is now almost impossible. They crossed it by train, moving between hotels of marble and linen.
They crossed it by car, fighting mud and dust town by town, sleeping in tourist cabins, reading poems by the roadside, eating in family restaurants in towns whose names they would never remember. They crossed it by silver bus if they were poor, and in overloaded jalopies if they were desperate. It was slow, hard, sometimes dangerous travel. But it forced them to actually see the country they were passing through.
The interstates gave us something like a miracle: speed, safety, and the freedom to go anywhere quickly. They united the nation and supported decades of economic growth. But they also flattened the journey. They turned crossing America from an intimate, chaotic human adventure into a soft gray blur of identical exits, where you can drive from coast to coast without ever feeling like you have passed through anything at all.
We traded the barn and the oak tree and the rhyming signs for an exit number and a logo on a pole. We gained the destination, and in a strange way, we lost the country in between. That road you drive on erased their road. But it was built out of their struggles, their patience, and their refusal to accept that a country this size could not be crossed.
They crossed it with immense difficulty so that we could cross it with ease. That is worth thinking about the next time all the exits look the same.
