The first truck ever powered by internal combustion was designed and built in 1896 by Gottlieb Daimler of Germany. It looked like a rear-engine hay wagon. The first American pickup trucks were homemade and came on the scene at almost the same moment as the car. Farmers built cargo boxes onto the rear end of their automobiles, especially after Henry Ford’s Model T arrived in 1908. A few planks of oak or hickory and some angle irons from the local blacksmith was all it took.
By the end of World War I, demand for light trucks was soaring. Ransom E. Olds was building his REO Speedwagon, and Ford had launched a line of factory-made Model TT trucks. In 1918, Chevrolet started building factory pickups, and suddenly the light truck sales race was on. A federal report issued six years later showed a sharp decline in the number of farm horses, and their individual cash value. Horse power now officially came from Detroit.
For decades, a pickup was as simple as a shoe. Four wheels, an engine and a frame with a place to sit and a box to carry things. As humble as the folks who drove it. In John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the Joads rode west out of the Dust Bowl looking for work in a homemade pickup truck, a cut-down 1926 Hudson Super Six sedan. “The house was dead, and the fields were dead; but this truck was the active thing, the living principle,” Steinbeck wrote. “The ancient Hudson, with bent and scarred radiator screen, with grease in dusty globules at the worn edges of every moving part, with hub caps gone and caps of red dust in their places—this was the new hearth, the living center of the family; half passenger car and half truck, high-sided and clumsy.”
After World War II, with the arrival of prosperity and television and television advertising, the pickup became a vehicle for self-expression, an act of imagination owing as much to John Ford as to Henry Ford. The mythology of the West became the defining signifier of network TV schedules, from “Wagon Train” to “Gunsmoke” to “Bonanza,” and truck advertising was cowboys and big hats and big payloads, leather seating surfaces and rawboned ranch hands, Monument Valley and available power windows.
Then the idea of the truck overtook the truck itself. Tow the camper, the boat, the trailer; carry the sheetrock and the prize bull; the turnips and the fly rods and the paneling and the lumber and the plumbing, sure, but the truck was really a mirror in which we saw ourselves. Look out for that one-ton load of cinderblocks! Truck commercials reached a postmodern perfection of self-reference when a Ford carried a Chevy up a mountain.