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Rivalry Remembered on Centennial of First Auto Trip Across Nevada One hundred years ago the Nevada desert and a feud between two great automobile industry pioneers played key roles in the first two automobile crossings of Nevada and the continent. This summer a vestige of the old rivalry lived on with two cross-country automobile tours. It started in 1898 when James Ward Packard purchased a horseless carriage from Alexander Winton, then the largest U.S. producer of automobiles. The sixty five mile journey from Winton’s factory in Cleveland to Packard’s home in Warren, Ohio took eleven hours and ended by being towed ignominiously behind a horse team. Packard continued to have problems, and suggested numerous improvements to Winton, who was apparently not well disposed to outsider’s opinions. In 1899 the cantankerous Winton told Packard: “well if you are so smart, maybe you can build a better machine yourself!” Packard took up the challenge and built his first car in 1899. The transcontinental rivalry began in May of 1901. Alexander Winton and Charles Shank started out from San Francisco in an attempt to be the first to drive across the continent. It took a week to cross the Sierra’s after mishaps with snowdrifts, a broken front spring, bent front axle and even a broken engine crankshaft. The first automobilists in Reno stopped at the Riverside for breakfast on May 27th before chugging on to Wadsworth in their topless car in a downpour accompanied by gale force winds, thunder and lightening. The next two days were exhausting, spent constantly winching through deep sand and mudholes with block and tackle. Finally near Mill City, the driving wheels churned away on a modest sandhill, cutting deep ruts from which they did not have the strength to winch out. Winton and Shanks surrendered and caught the train to Winnemucca. It was a tough bit of crow for the proud Winton to chew on. The trip had been widely publicized as a demonstration of the capabilities of his company’s automobiles. Sitting in the offices of Winnemucca’s Silver State newspaper, he lamented “It is absolutely impossible for an automobile to cross the stretches of sand on the deserts of Nevada”, but also claimed he would make a machine that would conquer the desert. His personality often generated antagonism, and after apparently claiming to have invented the automobile, the Silver State reporter got a dig in at the end: “The automobile is one of Winton’s semi-racing machines. It weighs 1700 pounds and is driven (when it goes) by a 15 horse-power gasoline engine.” By 1903 the upstart Packard company was enjoying good success due to its reputation for reliability, production growing from 5 cars in 1899 to 213 by 1903 (compared to 850 for Winton). No one had yet driven an auto across the continent and Packard made plans. They would send Tom Fetch to San Francisco with a 12 horsepower, single cylinder Packard His charter was not to merely cross the continent, but to go out of his way to travel the highest mountain passes and cross the Nevada desert that rival Winton had tried and declared “impossible”. Marius Krarup (kra-roop), the editor of The Automobile magazine, would take photographs and wire reports while they traveled. Two weeks before Fetch and Krarup arrived in San Francisco, however, fate played a wild card. Vermont doctor Horatio Nelson Jackson was visiting San Francisco’s University Club and got into a liquor lubricated argument about whether automobiles were suitable for anything but city streets. The local gents remembered Winton’s failure on the Nevada sand two years earlier, but Jackson declared an auto could cross the continent. Legend has it that a wager of $50 was made, Jackson bought a four month old Winton and hired a mechanic named Crocker Sewell to accompany him. On May 23, 1903, only four days after making the bet, they set off from San Francisco with two worn rear tires and the only spare Jackson could find before leaving. Jackson had no intention of repeating Winton’s debacle, so he detoured north to cross the Sierra over the less lofty passes of northern California and into Oregon, avoiding Nevada’s sand entirely. Given the rivalry, Packard apparently smelled a rat in the Jackson effort. The idea that a crazy Vermont doctor lit out on a transcontinental attempt in a Winton on his own only a few weeks before Packard’s attempt, and without any tie to the Winton company, appeared ludicrous. Never the less, Packard proceeded with their plans. A guide was hired to guide Fetch over the unmapped tracks of the west. He either failed to show up in San Francisco, or was dismissed ,and Krarup took the opportunity to ride with him and experience the story rather than simply report from railroad stations along the way. Sixty year old Krarup likely would not have been Fetch’s first choice in a companion. Through the West their trip would be to me more akin to pioneers in wagons than automobile travel. Their car was truly a horseless carriage – two seats mounted atop a wood body sans roof, doors, or windshield. To put it in modern perspective, imagine taking off across Nevada in the summer off-road on a lawn tractor. There were no road maps and routes were taken based on the advice of locals asked along the way. Gasoline had to be shipped ahead as there were no gas stations. On June 20th, Fetch and Krarup drove up to Cliff House, took a look at the Pacific Ocean and headed east. Their start was nearly a month behind Dr. Horatio Nelson, who had just spent three days lost and approaching starvation in the Wyoming wilderness They nicknamed their tireless Packard “Old Pacific” soon shortened to “Pac”. The problem of reliable directions manifested itself immediately, a young man engaged to accompany them to find Port Costa instead led them three miles off track to Martinez. On the way to Sacramento they were forced to take detours to reach Davis due to a recent flood sweeping away the bridges and culverts. In Placerville the owner of several stagecoaches advised Fetch that they must stop and wait at Riverton to allow a stage full of women and children returning from Tallac at Lake Tahoe to pass. The previous year a number of people had been killed on the route when horses pulling a stage were frightened by a steam automobile. They spent a night at Kyburz and after a 5:00 AM start had breakfast at Martins hotel in Strawberry (near present day Strawberry Lodge). Old Pacific made the arduous climb to the 7300 ft elevation of Echo Summit up grades measured by Krarup’s clinometer to vary between 13 to 17%. It earned the appellation bestowed on it a day later by the Carson City Morning Appeal: “A hill climber from away back”. After dropping down to Lakeside (Stateline) Krarup states “Since crossing the summit we were on ground untrodden by automobiles and the car was the subject of much curiosity. Most of the summer boarders, however, were familiar with the sight and generally took the attitude that familiarity breeds contempt.” (Note quotes are from Krarup’s articles in The Automobile June-August 1903 except as noted), That afternoon (June 24) they continued on and reached the summit at Kingsbury after an even harder drive up steeper sandy slopes. “The difference was undoubtedly mostly due to the fact that the road, now in Nevada, was no longer under state supervision, but left to the none to tender mercy of Douglas County, NV.” Modern weekend warriors, over confident in the rarely used off-road capability of their air conditioned steel encased SUV’s with cell phones at the ready, might well consider the spirit of Fetch and Krarup as they viewed the spectacle of Kingsbury grade. They sat atop a single cylinder 12 horsepower open carriage with two wheel brakes about to plunge thousands of feet down a narrow single lane wagon trail. “We had no conception whatever that the descent over Kingsbury Grade, through Daggett’s pass, meant a drop of 2,400 feet over a mountain side whose natural angle was 45 degrees or more had been so doctored by the roadbuilders of the (eighteen) fifties and sixties, that the traveler could get down without breaking his neck. This ignorance added spice to the descent which caused us both unbounded surprise, for the Californians, jealous perhaps of its scenic attraction, had represented it as commonplace. In our opinion, it was by far the most superb unfolding of weird vistas, changing at every turn, that the day had given us. The road started down at about 12 or 15% slope, turning and twisting around from side to side of one conical peak to that of another a little lower, and every moment we expected to bring up on more level ground, but there was no letup. We slid down a mile or two in this fashion and began to smell hot brakes, but whenever the direction was such that we could see the Carson Valley conveniently it seemed just as far below as ever….it was the cause of much regret that the last photographic film had been exposed just before the descent began… We made a brief stop to cool the trusty brakes. The consolation came to the writer that surely Carson City photographers would have views for sale of all these grand vistas (they didn’t)... The uncertainty about the whole thing magnified time and distance. The brakes were hot again. The gradometer now showed 15 to 17 per cent gradient, occasionally 20 (note: modern U.S. highways are usually restricted to no more than 6%). …Here we were, as we found out the same evening, in a historical spot, the main national thoroughfare to California in ante-railroad days, ….but the population of Carson Valley generally seem to be unaware that Kingsbury Grade presents a succession of views unsurpassed for grandeur in any country and of a most pronounced local color.” What seemed like two hours to Krarup had actually only taken 37 minutes, including three stops to cool the brakes. They had descended 2400 feet in a scant 6 miles. They continued on through Genoa and Jacks Valley arriving in Carson City at 6:10 PM. Pac was the first automobile seen in Carson City. Within minutes of their arrival the Chinese head cook of the Arlington Hotel was murdered during a scuffle ended by a butcher knife. Krarup stated, “Of the two events, our arrival seemed to excite by far the greater amount of comment.” After President Theodore Roosevelt’s stop a few weeks before on a tour of the west, Carson City must have sunk into the doldrums that summer. The first line of the Carson Morning Appeal article the next day reads “For the first time in a number of years Carson is credited with a murder.” Spending the night at Carson
they motored up to Reno the next morning after a two hour 35 minute drive,
including 7 miles of potholed macadam road, the only pavement outside
a town they would find in the West. They left for Wadsworth that afternoon. Fresh supplies of gasoline and photographic film were supposed to be waiting for them there, but on arrival found they were still a day away. The postmaster’s assistant promised to stay after-hours Friday night to deliver their mail, but forgot when she found out about an impromptu town dance. They were obliged to stay all Friday and left Wadsworth Saturday morning. The sand hill east of town was formidible and the town turned out to watch, fully expecting them to get stuck. An entrepreneur was waiting at the top of the hill with a team of horses to pull them out, but Tom Fetch pulled out a secret weapon undoubtedly invented with the fore knowledge of Winton’s unhappy experience two years before. Two 20’ long strips of canvas were placed ahead of the wheels, and Old Pacific chugged up the infamous hill under its own power. The citizens of Wadsworth cheered them loudly as they continued east through more sand. It took them 3 hours and forty minutes to make twelve miles. It was 94 degrees in the shade and 125 degrees in the sand. The sand required so much power to drive through that at one point they were using low gear to force their way down a 14% grade. Surprisingly, they did not have a flat tire until they were nearing Lovelock and took a nail from a small board left in some construction litter next to the railroad track. They entered “the wonderful little valley of which Lovelocks is the center…” and over-nighted. The next day they found themselves traversing ravines (“arroyas”) which required following their course along the bottom until a gentle enough slope (23%) could be found to drive up the bank and reach the next one. Despite these they were able to make good time reaching Rye Patch by 8:33 am and a supply of gasoline was taken on. The Reno paper had pretensions of being cosmopolitan, giving the arrival of Old Pacific second billing to the main headline trumpeting the results of the Yale-“Havard” rowing competition, but across the rest of Northern Nevada the trip was followed with interest. The Humboldt Standard of Winnemucca reported the arrival in Lovelock and paraphrased an interview. “Mr Fetch, in speaking of Winton’s experience, stated that the Packard car was a much superior automobile and had no apprehension of serious difficulty after passing Wadsworth Hill…”. Fetch had intended to travel to Battle Mountain by way of Stillwater and Austin, bypassing Winnemucca and Mill City. Fetch changed his mind, however and Winnemuccans saw the “novel sight” of Old Pacific driving in on June 28. Krarup explained that they had learned following the railroad tracks would save them fifty miles, but the Winton rivalry apparently played a role as well, Krarup stating “…if they could reach Winnemucca they would have accomplished something where others had failed.” They did however, avoid the sand that had stopped Winton and instead braved the rocky pass at Dun Glenn. On the way into Winnemucca they found the sandy portions of the last stretch covered with cut sagebrush by a squad of “enterprising citizens”, what the locals called a “brush road”. June 29th, it rained and delayed their departure to avoid wet alkali and mud. They took off after dinner (mid day) and made Golconda at 2:40. As in Winnemucca, it was the first car ever seen. They continued on through the mountains to Battle Mountain with little trouble save attacks by “hawklike mosquitos” at Stone House. They would be pestered by the vicious critters from then on through the rest of Nevada and Utah. The road was traversed with numerous ridges that often reached the bottom of the differential case and requiring “much caution and a sharp lookout”. At Battle Mountain the Central Nevadan noted “Many of our people who had the pleasure of seeing an automobile took advantage of taking a good look at this machine Tuesday evening”. June 30th they hit the trail for Elko, reaching Rock Creek at 11:00 am. “It did not look very bad. True, the descent was at an angle of about 45 degrees, but in the middle there was a little bank of shale and stone”. Old Pacific got stuck in the creek bottom and it took the efforts of all three pushing, backing, and steering to get it across. The next six miles to White House ended up being twenty due to Krarup getting lost. Arriving at Dunphy ranch at 1:25 pm they enjoyed dinner noting that due to the “national traditions” of the Chinese cooks, eating hours were strictly observed. They reached Carlin “a pretty little railroad town – all towns in Nevada are on the railroad” at 7:30, continuing the 28 miles to Elko as night fell. Traversing the canyon they approached Elko with their kerosene headlight illuminating the narrow road next to the railroad tracks. The head brakeman of a westbound freight mistook their headlight for another train, and started to jump. The engineer and fireman managed to physically restrain him from jumping convincing him that the light was from a lime kiln. At times the ruts had been so bad that they took to driving over “virgin trackless ground” and soon the gear shift, brake, and clutch mechanisms were choked with sagebrush pulp. The muffler became polished and the handle of their shovel strapped underneath was eventually torn to shreds. The tires were “still in good condition though beginning to show the canvas on the inner sides where the rubber was gradually being ground off.” After passing through Deeth they reached Wells at 5:00 pm on July 1st where Marius Krarup commented “…the horses take more kindly to the automobile than those of the eastern states…” Near Fenelon they encountered a hill with a 40% grade. This was too steep for “Pac” to chug up normally, so Fetch would “dump” the clutch to make it jump a couple feet forward while Allyn wedged rocks behind the rear wheel to prevent it rolling back and kept repeating this until they crested the grade. They had to resort to this hopping technique several more times in Utah. They reached Ogden and then Salt Lake on the 4th of July. There the local constables seized Old Pacific due to legal actions for breach of contract issued by the guide who had failed to show up in San Francisco. They continued after the Packard factory posted bond. Utah proved to be a harder go. Fetch later said, “The worst roads were encountered through Utah between Carleton and Grande Junction. The Nevada desert was not as bad as told to us, but Utah was seven times worse.” Meanwhile, Jackson’s Winton had broken down in Rawlins, Wyoming and then again in Archer, both from broken engine connecting rods. Learning of Fetch’s start more than 1,000 miles behind him, he assumed the Packard was in a race to beat him to be first. Two days later, on July 6th, Lester Whitman and Eugene Hammond set out from San Francisco in a diminutive 5 horsepower curved dash Oldsmobile as yet a third contender in the unofficial transcontinental race. The “merry” little Oldsmobile was the first affordable mass produced car and the most popular of the day due to its relatively low price. Being far behind, they continued to Boston and then Maine in order to establish a different transcontinental “first”. They followed the path of the Packard across Nevada, arriving into Reno on July 11th, 1903. Traversing Nevada they commented that they could see Fetch’s tracks through the sage. Breakdowns slowed them down but they managed the second Nevada crossing, sometimes resorting to cotton stuffed canvas wrapped around their tires in an improvement over Fetch’s canvas strips. Although Jackson assumed Packard
was trying to beat him to be first, but his one month head start meant
that the only realistic chance of that was for Jackson to give up, or
the Winton to break down irreparably. Fetch kept to the original plan
of going the hardest way, and when Jackson had already reached Illinois,
Fetch took a 200 mile detour to crest three Colorado mountain passes over
9,000 feet. They then spent 5 days recovering from the ordeal in Denver. Fetch and Krarup reached New York on August 21st. Packard satisfied itself with the much better mechanical reliability of Old Pacific and beating the Winton’s elapsed time of 63 days by two days. The Oldsmobile reached Boston on September 21st, after a 75 day journey. Unproven accusations were thrown about that the Winton had not driven the journey entirely under its own power and had resorted to railroad shipment at times. Winton and Dr. Nelson vociferously denied the allegations and offered $10,000 and $15,000 respectively to anyone who could prove the rumors. The bounties went unclaimed. Both Packard and Winton heralded their accomplishments while taking oblique digs at each other in full page ads. Winton taking pride in pointing out that Nelson was “in no way connected to the automobile business” and was not accompanied by a “factory mechanic.” Packard replied “there has not been the slightest assistance by man or beast since our car left San Francisco. It has never been towed by horses, carried by trains…” It is generally accepted that Jackson was the first to cross the continent, but changing and conflicting accounts by Jackson of many details of his trip over the subsequent years, including the $50 bet, still keep the debate fueled. Winton continued in the automobile business until the mid 1920’s, but the high point of his contribution was at the turn of the century. Oldsmobile went on to become one of the pillars of the General Motors conglomerate, but sadly with the 100th anniversary of Whitman and Hammond’s epic journey it is scheduled to pass from the roster of production automobiles. Packard’s reputation quickly overtook Winton. By the 1920’s and 1930’s Packard was the premier manufacturer of luxury automobiles in the United. In the Great Depression, Packard manufactured lower priced cars, trading their vaunted image for survival, and after World War II lost the mantra of being the most sought after luxury car to the often bizarre styling pizazz of General Motor’s Cadillac. The last Packard rolled off the assembly lines in the late 1950’s after a questionable purchase of the ailing Studebaker company. In 1983 Terry Martin and Tom Fetch, grand nephew of Old Pacific’s 1903 driver, retraced the journey driving a restored 1903 Packard nicknamed “Old Pacific II”. This summer on the 100th anniversary of the first transcontinental trips, a 72 year old retired dentist named Peter Kesling retraced Dr. Nelson’s route in a restored 1903 Winton. With Old Pacific II in tow, Fetch and Martin led a centennial tour of Packard enthusiasts retracing the route again this summer. In order to allow a caravan of later Packards to tour at highway speeds, Old Pacific II was carried in a trailer. Driving is now dangerous in a different way than in 1903. The tour nearly ended at the start when the trailer carrying Old Pacific II was hit on a freeway off ramp at Vallejo by a semi truck too busy gawking at the accompanying caravan of later model Packards. ### —
Jim Chase is a member of Silver Circle Packards, the Northern Nevada region
of Packard Automobile Classics.
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