Motoring West

In the first years of the twentieth century, motoring across the vast expanses west of the Mississippi was at the very least an adventure and at most an audacious stunt. As more motorists ventured forth, such travel became a curiosity and, within a few decades, commonplace. For aspiring western travelers, automobiles formed an integral part of their search for new experiences and destinations - and like explorers and thrill seekers from earlier ages, these adventurers kept records of their experiences. The scores of articles, pamphlets, and books they published, collected for the first time in Motoring West, create a vibrant picture of the American West in the age of automotive ascendancy, as viewed from behind the wheel.

Documenting the very beginning of Americans' love affair with the automobile, the pieces in this volume - the first of a planned multivolume series - offer a panorama of motoring travelers' visions of the burgeoning West in the first decade of the twentieth century. Historian Peter J. Blodgett's sources range from forgotten archives to company brochures to magazines such as Harper's Monthly, Sunset, and Outing. Under headlines touting adventures in ""touring,"" ""land cruising,"" and ""camping out with an automobile,"" voices from motoring's early days instruct, inform, and entertain. They chart routes through ""wild landscapes,"" explain the finer points of driving coast to coast in a Franklin, and occasionally prescribe ""touring outfits."" Blodgett's engaging introductions to the volume and each piece couch the writers' commentaries within their time.

As reports of the region's challenges and pleasures stirred interest and spurred travel, the burgeoning flow of traffic would eventually and forever alter the western landscape and the westering motorist's experience. The dispatches in Motoring West illustrate not only how the automobile opened the American West before 1909 to more and more travelers, but also how the West began to change with their arrival.

Peter J. Blodgett is the H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western American Manuscripts at the Huntington Library and author of Land of Golden Dreams: California in the Gold Rush Decade, 1848-1858.

Illustrations	11 black & white illustrations, 1 map
Pages	360
Date Published	30 Aug 2016
Publisher	University of Oklahoma Press
Language	English
Dimensions	235 x 156 x 21

Peter Blodgett's Motoring West, covering the period 1900 to 1909, includes accounts of automotive travel in the trans-Mississippi West by such able and eloquent guides as Hamlin Garland and William Dix. But the most effective guide of all is Blodgett, whose superb introduction to the volume - and to each carefully made selection - is a valuable roadmap through the existing scholarship on American automotive tourism in the first half of the twentieth century. This book should find its place on the shelf of everyone interested in the cultural history of the modern West, and in the glove box of every contemporary automotive traveler who wonders what the journeying experience was like a century ago."" - David M. Wrobel, author of Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression

""Peter Blodgett's Motoring West is a TripTik through the enthusiasm, past the awe, over the excitement, and around the challenge experienced by the first automotive pioneers into the beckoning West. Thoughtfully assembled and skillfully introduced, this book re-illuminates the romance of the road that so seduced early-twentieth-century Americans."" - Terence Young, author of Building San Francisco's Parks, 1850 - 1930