Racing Cars from New York, Due West, to Paris
How an improbable 1908 auto race captured the imaginations of New York Times readers.
In 1907, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, newly famous for traversing the Northwest Passage, sent a letter to the New York Times about an unusual debate unfolding in its pages. “An automobile race from New York to Paris by way of the Bering Straits is feasible,” he declared, “in spite of the tremendous difficulties that would be encountered.” He added that driving on sea ice “will probably be the most difficult stretch.”
Even now, the notion of driving from New York to Paris sounds fantastical. Back then, few cars had crossed the continental United States. California didn’t yet have a gas station. Nevertheless, many in 1907 felt that an unassisted auto crossing of North America, Asia, and Europe, by way of Alaska, Siberia, and the sea ice between them, was doable, if difficult. And the Times published more items siding with the optimists than against.
The whole of 1907 was a heady year for auto-enthusiasts. “What needs to be proved today is that as long as a man has a car, he can do anything and go anywhere,” a Parisian newspaper, Le Matin, wrote that January. “Is there anyone who will undertake to travel this summer from Paris to Peking by automobile?" At first, the public was skeptical. Then drivers defied expectations, leaving Peking in June and arriving in Paris in August.
Their success made another contest inevitable. How to raise the stakes? “The proposition for a tour by automobile from New York to Paris without use of a boat already has stirred a number of enthusiasts,” the New York Times reported on November 26. “The Arctic portion of the trip would have to be carried out in midwinter, when the straits are frozen and frozen rivers might be expected to furnish the best highways.” The difficulties of such a tour were “fully recognized,” the newspaper claimed.
Organizers apparently agreed: rather than dedicate a year or more to planning, as might be expected, they announced that such a race would commence within weeks. And on February 12, 1908, six cars did in fact line up in Times Square, start their engines, and commence a westward journey, bound for Paris. Accounts of the race have appeared in magazines, books, and TV programs –– it’s a spectacular story, even if none of the racers ultimately drove across the Bering Strait. But this is not the story of the race itself, or its concessions to reality, or the American team that won it, reaching Paris 169 days later, or their car, the 4-cylinder, 60 horsepower Thomas Flyer. This is the lesser known, but more amusing story of New York Times coverage published in the months between when the race was conceived and when it actually began.
Having signed on as a cosponsor, the Times gave the race all the column inches any booster could hope for, coverage that began with charmingly naive optimism, as seen above, before turning schizophrenic, with some coverage reveling in the outlandish difficulty of driving across Alaska and Siberia, to say nothing of the ocean between them, even as other coverage presumed that some courageous soul would surely manage it.
Old newspaper writing is longwinded, so the excerpts that follow have been edited for length and clarity. Unabridged originals can be found in the newspaper’s online archive.
* * *
The idea of a world automobile race from New York to Paris, via Alaska and Siberia is almost the sole topic of conversation among French automobilists. The more the subject is studied, the more it is regarded as feasible. Henry Savage Landor, the well- known explorer, who is perfectly familiar with conditions in the little known North… told THE TIMES' correspondent today that he not only regarded the tour as possible, but easy.
"With the development of the modern automobile," he said, "such a tour should present no unsurmountable difficulties. The only element of uncertainty is the passage of Bering Strait.”
So began a cable from Paris that the Times published on November 26. It also quoted Carlton R. Mabley, “who has had considerable experience with foreign cars.” He’d have judged the race “too foolish” to discuss, he stated, as “the cars will have to climb mountains and drop down on passes well-nigh impassable even to sure-footed beasts. The drivers will have to go through rivers which will cover the wheels and flooring.” But the Peking to Paris race changed his mind. Many, “without doubt,” will make it, he predicted.
On November 30, the newspaper introduced readers to “Alfred H. Brooks, geologist in charge of the Alaska division of the U.S. Geological Survey,” who agreed that “it would be possible for brave and resourceful automobilists to make their way through the wilds of Alaska to Bering Strait,” because “in the extremely cold season, no trail is needed.” A John C. Klein, identified as a man “who spent some time in Alaska several years ago,” was quoted, too, telling the newspaper: “Thousands of men travel in Alaska in the Winter by dog teams or on foot who could not make such trips in the Spring or in Summer. They suffer but little hardship, comparatively speaking... Whether machines could successfully make such an arduous journey can only be proved after the experiment is attempted. While the cold is intense and snowstorms numerous in Winter, yet many thousand persons live there in that season and enjoy life.”
On December 1, alongside a headline stating that the proposed race “exceeds anything of the kind ever before attempted,” the newspaper published a grand spread with a tentative route:
The tone of coverage is captured by this passage:
From the earliest recollection, the efforts of certain members of the human race have tended toward overcoming such obstacles as have presented themselves. Difficulties that at first sight would appear to be unconquerable seem to lend a special interest to this class of man, and no stone is left unturned in the carrying out of a determination born of a desire to outstrip their fellow-man, no matter what the cost.
And now a test that but a few years ago would have been called the wild dream of a Jules Verne… There will be a large stretch of the country through which there are roads easily traversed; when it comes to the snows and ice of Alaska and Siberia, that is another question, but it is predicted that the ingenuity of the men will overcome all difficulties and one or more machines will roll triumphantly into the French capital.
Yet the same day’s paper quotes a Mister Whitman, one of the few people to have crossed the continent in an auto. The details hinted that, in fact, much south of Alaska would prove challenging, too. “You hear a lot about gentle Mother Earth and her kindness,” he said, “but when you've traveled a few thousand miles through floods, mud, sand, alkali, and gumbo you come to think this maternal benevolence is altogether too strenuous and sticky and that a good man-made road beats nature all to pieces.”
* * *
Times readers wouldn’t gain an appreciation for how difficult crossing Siberia would be until they were introduced to Barry de Windt, my favorite source in all the newspaper’s coverage. As a young engineer, he’d been hired by Russia to investigate the possibility of “an all-rail route from Paris to New York.” He had, in other words, traversed the terrain the racers confronted in the opposite direction. While relaying his “almost indescribable difficulties,” the Times noted that they offered them not “as a deterrent,” but rather, “as an incentive” to the brave “to establish a new record of grit, will, determination, and endurance.” But could any reader possibly emerge undeterred?
In de Windt’s telling:
At Irkutsk we left civilization.
In Winter the 2,000 miles to Yakutsk is made by horse sleighs on the frozen Lena. This road is a luxury compared to the tracks we came to further north, for here the posthouses were only about thirty miles apart. At first we kept revolvers handy, for escaped convicts infest this part of the road. Just before we passed a mail man was murdered, and we saw him lying dead. We traveled night and day, but the cold was not so severe at first, only 15 to 25 degrees below zero. There was generally clear sunshine, but occasionally it would darken and snow, and we would flounder about for hours lost in the drifts. The scenery never changed for 2,000 miles along this mighty river.
That was perhaps the journey’s most appealing stretch. He continued:
After traveling incessantly for twenty-three days we reached Yakutsk, a town of about 7,000 inhabitants. Winter begins here in September, and by the first week in October the country is ice bound and in semi-darkness. The temperature gets to 60 and 70 degrees below zero. During the brief Summer stifling heat, dust, and crowds of mosquitos render the place unbearable. But it is a paradise compared with the Arctic settlements.
Verkoyansk, 600 miles away, was our next stage. From here we wore arctic dress, two layers of thick flannel underwear, five pairs of worsted stockings, and sealskin moccasins, a suit of stout felt, and over it deer skin breeches and a heavy fur coat, three thick woolen caps, worn one over the other, a deerskin cap with flaps for the ears and a huge bearskin over all. On our hands two pairs of woolen gloves and one of bearskin mitts. But even under the mountain of material we seldom felt really warm.
Leaving Yakutsk, the road became a mere track, indicated by blazed trees through dense forests. The so-called post houses were now mud huts, 150 to 200 miles apart. We often slept in the snow, and though the cold was intense it was sometimes preferable to a rest house, for the foulness and stench of these dens is indescribable. All were alike, one low, dark room, with a mud floor and blocks of ice for windows…
At the last line of this next section I couldn’t help but laugh:
Between Yakutsk and the sea there was nothing fit to eat, and we lived on the provisions intended for the arctic and afterward nearly starved in consequence. Once during a blizzard we lay to in the open for twenty-four hours, and for the first time got badly frozen, while two of our deer perished. On the third day we passed over the Verkoyansk Mountains. We had to wear horseshoes on our feet. Going down the deer were hitched behind the sleds while we held back, but we soon lost our hold, and men and deer and sleds went whirling down the steep mountain-side into a snow drift at the bottom. On the twelfth day we reached Verkoyansk, a few miserable log huts containing mostly political exiles. It seemed as though here we had reached the acme of desolateness. But I had not then seen the hell upon earth further north.
Poor Mr. De Windt! And he persisted:
Verkoyansk is the coldest place in the world. There is an average temperature of 51 degrees below zero for the three Winter months. During our visit it fell to 78 degrees below zero, a cold so intense that our breath fell in powder to the ground. The Chief of Police here urged me to abandon my journey, which he said could only end in disaster. I won't go into details of that cold, weary journey of 1,200 miles to the Arctic Ocean. Three weeks of privation and hunger across a boundless ocean of snow describes this section. Throughout that wilderness of ice not a sign of human or animal life was seen outside the rest houses, and at times the unearthly stillness was almost unbearable. Nearing the Arctic, blizzards would bury us in the snow. We reached Sredni-Kolymsk in twenty-three days from Verkoyansk. It was a glorious morning, but the sight of that dismal settlement seemed to darken the face of nature like a coffin carried by mistake into a brilliant ballroom.
An evocative simile! Though surpassed, I think, by the one that concludes this next paragraph:
At Sredni-Kolymsk I nearly gave up the voyage in despair, for a famine was raging, our own food was practically exhausted and a journey of two months through a desert of ice lay before us. Dogs were scarce and, lastly, the Tchuktchis, on whom I had relied for food, lodging, and guidance, had retreated eastward along the coast until their nearest settlement was now 600 miles distant––600 miles of arctic desolation, without food or shelter of any kind. But after endless difficulty we got five sleds, three drivers, and sixty-three dogs, and we set out for Bering Strait about as suitably equipped as a man who is in the country and goes shooting for ducks at Christmas in silk pajamas.
De Windt pressed on across more of the terrain that ostensibly awaited the drivers:
On land we got along fairly well, but steep cliffs often compelled us to travel by sea, where the sleds had to be pushed and hauled over berg and crevice… Our greatest trouble was from blizzards, during which you can't see a yard ahead… An arctic blizzard gives no warning, and though the weather just before was clear and still, in five minutes we were at the mercy of such a tempest that we had to crouch under the sleds.
Our first reception by the Tchuktchis, whose settlement we finally reached, was not encouraging. Two or three woe-be-gone beings in ragged deer skins crawled out of a hut and surveyed us with surly, suspicious faces when we begged for food and shelter. They said there was neither. They also indicated several objects in the snow, which were found to be corpses.
Happy travels, racers!
In De Windt’s telling, traveling onward through Alaska was easy compared to Siberia. But when Professor Herschel C. Parker of Columbia University, a well-known explorer of Alaska, described its terrain in a December 3 article, it sounded rather trying, too:
"How the machines would get over the passes into Dawson I do not know,” he said. “Many hundreds of persons lost their lives trying to enter Alaska by this route during the Klondike gold fever. The greater part would be through mountain wilds, heavily wooded. Streams flowing down from the mountains make channels very deep and icy cold. The pack horses swim across, and often in the swamps it is necessary to unpack the load on the horses to pull them out of the mire. It is the roughest sort of country, with no supplies. There is no imaginable way of motor vehicles making the trip by land, or even partially by land. Those attempting the trip would simply have to cut their own roads and build bridges over the swift streams.
During Winter everything is frozen solid, and, provided the machines could be kept going, I presume they could get along if not for the difficulty of the almost impenetrable mountain passes. But after reaching St. Michaels, which is about 200 miles from the Bering Strait, enough troubles would confront the daring motorists to make them practically forget everything they might have passed through before. It is absurd to talk of crossing the Bering Strait on the ice, because the ice in the middle of the straits is jammed up in Winter in huge icebergs. The current is very swift. And even in the coldest weather the thirty to forty mile stretch is not always solidly frozen over.
Another warning was published on December 6:
To the Editor of The New York Times: No auto will reach Bering Strait on an overland route through British Columbia and Alaska for years to come. Such a road would require an army of laborers and many years. Trails are made by dog teams and seldom exceed two feet in width.
Fancy an auto on this trail!
There are many ice packs, slides, gulches, ravines, fallen trees, and other obstacles that a dog team must surmount. Could an auto succeed in overcoming these difficulties? There is still the intense cold of 65 degrees below zero. Would the auto stand it if the driver could? Where is his fuel to come from? He may provide for his own body, but how about the auto?
With these accounts and others one might have expected the optimists to concede the debate. Yet by December 8, the Times seemed to revert to the assumption that the racers just might make it. Said Winthrop E. Scarritt, an ex-President of the Automobile Club of America:
“The contest may be described in the way that James Russell Lowell described a German sentence: It starts like an Admiral going to sea with sealed orders. Nobody knows where the end will be.
The automobile has conquered the tropics. It is how the motor will behave amid ice and snow that adds such great interest to the race. A small reserve of high-grade gasoline will have to be carried, to start the motors in the cold. By injecting by hand small quantities into the cylinder, I have been able to start the machine practically in an instant. As it will be impossible for contestants to carry enough tires, each car should be equipped with a small vulcanizing plant with which to mend punctures.
He agreed that “one of the most important problems of all is how to keep warm.” But he wasn’t worried. “I can solve this problem now,” he wrote. “Let the exhaust pipe from the engine be arranged so that it will heat the bottom of the car and keep the feet warm with a current of soft, warm air. I also suggest that a portion of the exhaust be brought up through the steering wheel so as to allow the warm air to pass through its hollow rim.” He reasoned, “when a man's hands feel warm he can manage to keep warm all over.”
In contrast, on December 8, the Times published a letter from someone identified only as “an old klondiker” who “walked in over the Chilkoot Pass on the snow and ice during the great rush of 1897.”
One must have experience to understand what it means traveling day after day in a temperature from 40 to 65 degrees and sometimes 70 degrees below zero. It is a great risk to expose any portion of the body to the air for a moment. There is not much wind during the Winter, but when it does blow, everyone has to stay in almost air-tight shacks or risk their lives by appearing in the open. To go against a wind would be impossible.
That month in New York City, anyone with a connection to Alaska seemed able to draw a crowd. Dr. Willis Eugene Everette, a mining engineer who spent 25 years there, told a gathering at the Astor House that “it was perfectly feasible to take an automobile through Alaska clear to the Bering Strait under its own power.” In 1884, when he went to Alaska, “it would have been possible to cross the strait on the ice,” he claimed. “Of course, the autos have got to take their chances... I have gone out some Winters twenty miles from shore. Eskimos would be sent ahead to test the ice as solid. It would be easy to get to the Diomede Islands, about half way across, but then the conditions of the ice would have to be carefully watched to traverse the remaining distance.”
Dr. Everette said he was “positive” he could take an auto “from New York to Cape Prince of Wales, on the Behring Strait.” His ambitions were more grand: “I have been studying for several years,” he said, “the possibilities of automobile use for reaching the North Pole.”
Meanwhile, Samuel D. Williams of Oregon managed to convene an audience at the Waldorf-Astoria, where he pronounced the trip “perfectly feasible,” if racers followed his advice as to attire:
The value of reindeer-skin clothing has not always been known or as fully appreciated as it should be. The Eskimos use hardly anything else. Men's Winter clothing consists of close-fitting trousers, with the hair next to the skin for cold and the reverse for ordinary weather; deerskin socks with the hair next to the feet; boots with the hair out, with heavy sealskin soles for hard wear; two shirts, one with the hair next to the body and the other with the hair out, and both with close-fitting hoods fringed with wolfskin to break the wind from the face and nose, and a pair of mittens.
The whole outfit will not weigh more than ten or twelve pounds.
Williams concluded by noting that “the hospitality of the natives is not excelled anywhere. It is never grudging; it is thrust upon you. The best they have and the best place in the house is at the disposal of the traveler. Often it is embarrassing, for the natives are so insistent and generous that it is hard to refuse. What this means to a tired, cold, hungry traveler cannot be fully realized save by those who have experienced it."
* * *
On December 15, the Times reprinted a Canadian view of the contest, originally published in The Toronto Mail and Empire:
Interested officials at Ottawa and Washington are busy mapping out the route for the adventurous automobilists... Chicago will be passed, and then the racers will continue northwest to a point in Saskatchewan. Thence to Dawson will be a long, hard pull of more than 2,000 miles. Eight hundred miles further is the cape, and the strait whose easterly shore is America and whose westerly shore is Asia. The gap is fifty miles, and the adventurers hope to be able to cross on the ice. Indeed, they are sure they can wheel from one continent to another, and to make the trip really historic no boats must be used. The automobiles are guaranteed to travel the whole distance on their own power.
A few days later, another reprint, this time from The Savannah Morning News, was more skeptical:
Promoters are talking with apparent seriousness of an automobile race from Broadway in the City of New York to the Champs Elysées... It is simple enough to take a map and mark a route across the American Continent into Northwest Alaska, thence across the Bering Sea ice into Siberia, and across that desolate country into Russia... But there is a vast difference between marking a course on a map and actually negotiating it with a vehicle, as many automobilists know to their sorrow.
We do not mean to say that an automobile trip from New York to Paris is impossible. We don't know whether it is or not. But such a trip would be extremely hazardous, with ninety-nine chances for failure to one for success. The scheme contemplates crossing Bering Strait on the ice. Persons familiar say the passage is never frozen from side to side: there is always clear water at some point. And when there is firm ice over a part of the distance it rises in great ridges that an automobile could not possibly get over without the aid of a derrick.
The article nonetheless granted that “the project is fascinating. There is much more in it than searching for the north pole. Its success might be taken as forecasting the construction of a rail line from New York to Paris, which has long been an engineers' dream.”
The Times itself ended 1907 on an optimistic note, publishing a December 29 interview with W. H. Maupin, “for eight years a resident of Alaska.” His assessment:
I see that some gentlemen who have lived in Alaska declare that automobiles will be able to get through only with the utmost difficulty... Why, when I left Valdez in June of last year the road had been widened so that any automobile in the country could pass over it. Four-horse teams pass over that road as far as Fairbanks, a number of times each week. These wagons haul heavy loads, both of freight and passengers. If they can get through, and in six days, if the weather is not bad, why not automobiles?
In Alaska it is very much the same as in other parts of the world. If a man thinks he cannot do a thing, and sets out with that belief, the chances are that he will fail. It is not claimed that it will not take work to get through over the Valdez Road, but it is absurd to say that autos cannot pass over it. Conditions change, and a road that may be very bad this year may be in excellent condition next.
As New York City rang in 1908, I imagine (for how could it have been otherwise) many a champagne-fueled debate about whether the racers would or wouldn’t make it to Alaska, or the Bering Strait, or across Siberia, or all the way to Paris. Only later that January, when the official route was fixed, did romantic can-do optimism finally give way to reality: racers would cross from North America to Asia by ship, organizers decided.
What transpired in the race itself is a story for another day. Our story ends when readers were still imagining what might be—readers like Mrs. M.C. Shaffer, who wondered in a letter to the editor “what precautions, if any,” the racers had taken against “a dreadful peril” that she knew about by way of having kin from Russia and Poland:
After nightfall wolves come forth and seek their prey. Their scent is keen, and only large fires, and sometimes not then, will keep them at bay. They do not fear the sound of a rifle shot. They will follow for miles from twilight to dawn, and sometimes as many will be met coming toward you as are those that are following. How could a burst tire be repaired with hundreds of hungry wolves crowding about? I feel sure that all other obstacles will be surmounted, but the wolves may bring disaster and defeat. They will be very hungry, and they are strong, untiring, and agile.
No racer would be eaten by wolves; but none knew at the time that they’d escape that fate, or any of the other possible deaths pondered in newspaper coverage and public debates. For an account of what did happen, this Smithsonian article is as good a place as any to start. But to ponder the mindset of the drivers setting off due west from New York, there is no substitute for revisiting what the paper of record reported prior to the race. Having read it, knowing no more than they did, would you have struck out for Paris?