In 1918, a dream team of road travel was assembled for a journey through the southern Appalachian mountains and foothills. The principals were Henry Ford, the creator of the Model T and the American automobile industry; Thomas Edison, the practical genius who invented the light bulb, phonograph, and other hallmarks of the modern age; and John Burroughs, the dean of American naturalists. The three men had come to know one another during previous years, and had taken shorter road trips to test this new version of American vacationing. They liked the experience and determined to go longer and farther.
Journeys have provided structure for stories since Odysseus required 10 years and 12,000 Homeric lines to travel the several hundred miles from Troy to Ithaca. Wes Davis, author of a previous book about partisan fighting during World War II, makes the most of the journey genre. Before recounting the big trip through Appalachia—a region he knows from having grown up there—he traces the earlier expeditions: through Vermont's Green Mountains and New York's Adirondacks, besides an excursion by rail to San Francisco for an international exposition.
Like Homer, Davis has more in mind than itinerary. His protagonists don't have to deal with angry and jealous gods, but they do contend with large themes of history, including the abiding struggle between past and future that the present always finds itself caught up in. Burroughs was the eldest of the three, having been born in 1837 and raised in the Catskills. With his long beard he looked and sometimes acted like his fictional neighbor Rip Van Winkle. Burroughs cut his intellectual teeth on Ralph Waldo Emerson and the New England transcendentalists.
Edison was a decade younger and, significantly, from Ohio. That breeding ground for Civil War generals and postwar presidents had America's future in its soil and in the bones of its residents. Edison first embraced the future in the telegraph industry, which he stormed during his teens, and then in electricity, of which he became the acknowledged master.
Ford was the youngster of the trio. He was born in Michigan amid the Civil War and came of age as America's industrial and capitalist revolutions were kicking into high gear. He fiddled with his father's farm equipment and caught the motoring spirit as horseless carriages were becoming the next big thing. Better than Edison, who was no slouch at monetizing good ideas, and infinitely better than Burroughs, who couldn't be bothered about money, Ford epitomized the marriage of inventiveness and acquisitiveness that has characterized the cutting edge of the American economy from the 19th century to the present.