The story of the curved dash Olds, the first mass-produced automobile ever, is one we’ve never taken on here, as the interest in really early automotive history seems to be a bit weak among our readers. So I’m just going to give the 90 second version, but this shot of “Old Scout” fording a river in Wyoming is pretty impressive. It looks like a boat at first glance. Is that why the curved dash is there?
The single cylinder Olds Model R arrived in 1901, very much at the dawn of the production automobile era. The 95 CID (1560cc) single cylinder engine produced 5 hp. The semi-automatic epicyclic (planetary) transmission had two speeds forward and one reverse, like the Ford Model T that arrived some seven years later. It was priced at $580 (about $19k in 2020 dollars), and over 19,000 were built over several years. Seems modest by Model T standards, but it was a remarkable sales success at the time.
And in 1905, two of them (“Old Scout” and “Old Steady”) participated in the first transcontinental auto race, and won, thanks to its simple and rugged design and light weight, which meant it could easily be pulled out of ditches and rivers.
The route was from New York to Portland. After crossing the Missouri River at Council Bluffs, Iowa, “civilization” was left behind. The route followed the Oregon Trail, moving on to Nebraska, Wyoming, then Idaho and ultimately Oregon. Old Scout’s driver Dwight Huss wrote of one day driving in Wyoming, “we drove 18 hours, forded five streams and made a total of 11 miles.”
Conditions were much like those half a century before. The racers had no road maps except for guidebooks written for the pioneers crossing the Oregon and California trails during the mid-1800s.
The trip was expected to take only 30 days but instead took 44 long and grueling days and nights.
Somewhere west of Laramie.
Old Scout got to Portland just in time for the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland on June 21. Old Steady rode in eight days later.
Here’s a much more detailed account of this remarkable achievement.
That must have been quite an adventure. The difficulty of long-distance automobiling back then must have seemed to many a pretty good justification to stick with horses.
The linked article ends with a quote from one of the drivers, looking back some years later: ‘The truth is, we’d all be better off if we never had any danged automobiles at all … ‘
It seems that the dashboard on that car serves only as a footrest. Because it is between the front tires it doesn’t fulfill its original purpose of blocking stones and dirt from the horse’s hooves. Nor does it serve one of its modern functions of protecting against engine heat. It does seem to do a good job pushing water out of the way.
Your first sentence made me think of a book or books I read about the advent of bicycles and automobiles and references to “horse sense”. I had heard the phrase over the years, but I didn’t realize it referred to riders being able to rely on a horse’s sense of direction – something absent in human-only operators. 😉
I remember my mother saying Grandpa used to talk to his car like he used to talk to the horse, to urge it up a hill and so on. “Gee up there…..”. Couldn’t shake the reins though.
Wonder if that’s why people used to give their car a name, a holdover from the horsey days?
That’s a great connection.
The emphasis for the past 40 years had been on building out the railroad, not the roads between and outside cities; those in the east had deteriorated and those out west had largely never been built. In either case the emphasis on roadbuilding had been on getting to and from the nearest railroad stop.
“You can go as far as you like with me in my merry Oldsmobile”
It’s like an early Olds Bravada, they almost sit higher than the horses in surrounding traffic! It’s probably possible to still drive a lot of the western half of that general route without being on pavement.
Imagine if GM had tried to do a retro one of these!
Thanks for a great piece of American history! I add:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFruHQJeaRg
Seems like they would have chosen solid tires for a trip like that. Solid tires were easily available and used on trucks, and there certainly wasn’t any need for smooth velvety comfort when driving through plowed fields and ruts.
This was a time of real adventure. Nowadays our biggest challenge is the search for an open, clean restroom! It was a decade later, after WW One, when the U.S. Army sent a large expedition to chart a route from New York City to San Francisco to lay out the path of the Lincoln Highway. A young Lieutenant named Dwight Eisenhower went along for the trip. There is a great, entertaining account written about of the mission entitled,
The American Road by Pete Davies.
Upvote for that book recommendation. Wonderful detail and gripping stuff.
In one of those “road not taken” scenarios, Oldsmobile could have become a mass manufacturer of low-priced cars, like Ford. Instead, they went upmarket — way upmarket for a few years — and sort of just bumbled along making largely undistinguished midpriced as a minor part of General Motors.
Oddly, the Thirties were relatively kind to them. Their sales more than doubled between 1929 and 1936, as many Twenties success stories like Hudson and Willys struggled.
To my knowledge, Ransom E. Olds intended his car to be a low price car. When GM bought it, Billy Durant wanted to move Oldsmobile upmarket. This caused an argument between Olds and Durant. Durant won out, Olds got P.O.’d and left the company to form the REO car company.
It was Olds investors who wanted to go upscale. When Olds fought them, they forced him out. Olds then moved upscale and went bankrupt. Durant then bought them and brought them
Pretty gutsy taking a five horsepower car through grizzly country. I bet they packed a firearm but it still takes some serious ball bearings to do that.
An Olds can Ford, but a Ford can’t Olds!
Jokes aside, you never hear of fording streams in the course of everyday driving nowadays. When I was a kid there was a ford near my school, with a pedestrian bridge. it wasn’t a main road, just a residential street. I guess the developer figured the water was usually shallow there so those newfangled machines could just get their wheels wet. There wasn’t usually much water, but enough that you couldn’t step across. So we’d walk over the bridge (if it was too wide to jump) and hear the splash as cars drove through. Or we’d hear the splash when someone misjudged the jump (because we were kids!), fell in, and just knew they’d be copping it from their parents that night!
Of course, being Australia, you just knew us kids would change the sign to read “Holden”. That seemed to happen several times a year.
Amazing how many people would try and drive through when the creek was up, and got stranded in the middle.
It’s bridged now.
I like the idea of a ford in the road, though it’s not very good for the stream. And people made it across without lifted suspensions, giant tires, snorkels and winches.
It kinda depends on how you define “first”, but Packard’s “Old Pacific” raced a Winton in 1903, from San Francisco to New York City. The Winton started first and got into New York City first, but the journey took longer.
https://www.recordcourier.com/news/2003/jul/11/old-rivalry-remembered-on-centennial-of-first-auto/
Did anybody else besides the two Oldsmobiles join in the race to Oregon, I cannot this out from the linked articles.
Interestingly, there are at least two “open fords” as the warning signs say in my home county, Albemarle in Virginia (surrounding Charlottesville). These cross streams and you allowed to do it, but I won’t in our Toyota hybrids or even my Nissan Frontier 2wd. As you might expect, these are on gravel country roads not used by many people.
I’ve been lucky enough to get a couple of short rides in curved dash Olds and it is a very odd feeling. I think the best comparison would be a golf cart, but with a 2nd bench seat mounted up on top of the existing one.
I call BS. clearly tintype chopped. Everyone knows you need 4wd to go to the mall much less a dirt road!
How did they carry enough gasoline to get from Iowa to Oregon?
Even modern cars under modern conditions would need several auxiliary tanks.
It wasn’t Durant who forced Olds out. He left well before Durant formed GM. It was in 1904 when his investors who had a controlling interest voted to go upmarket. They did and soon became bankrupt.
Olds left with no intention of forming another auto company but local investors persuaded him too form REO.
Gasoline was available at drug and mercantile stores as it was used for other purposes and in the hit & miss engines in use at the time. However, it wasn’t plentiful and they had to scramble to find it.