Origins Of The Jeep: Birthing A 75-Year Legend

Origins Of The Jeep: Birthing A 75-Year Legend

Blog Mirror: Lansing State Journal: Uncovering the history of Army Jeep #1

Lansing State Journal:  Seventy-five years after it wowed the U.S. Army, the oldest known Jeep is getting its due as a symbol of the Greatest Generation’s fight and Detroit’s role in what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “the Arsenal of Democracy” — the manufacturing might that helped the Allies win World War II.

Return of the Willys MB

U.S. Army convoy in Iran during World War Two, with Jeep lead vehicle in convoy.  The Jeep is either a Willys MB or a Ford GPW, the two trucks being identical.  Now, the Iranians are making essentially the same vehicle.

We've discussed Jeeps here a fair amount.  As noted, I've owned three, the first being a 1946 CJ2A.

The CJ2A was a Willys post war variant of the MB, the most mass produced Jeep of the Second World War.  Willys was one of the original competitors for the 1/4 ton truck contract, and its the one that basically won it.  That Jeep, the World War Two Jeep, established the brand, basically. 

I won't go into the Jeep history, as I've already done that.  But what I will note is that the next military model was the M38.  The M38 was an improved MB.  It basically takes a Jeep fan to be able to tell the difference, although their are real differences.  They looked virtually identical.

The M38 gave way to the M38A1, which wasn't identical. That Jeep is the originator of the CJ5 style Jeep.  I've owned a M38A1 as well.  

My M38A1, back when I owned it.

The M38A1 yielded to the M151, a really good, but very dangerous Jeep, with independent wheel suspension.  After that, the Army phased the 1/4 ton truck out.

But not every Army did.  There's probably a few 1/4 US Jeeps still in use by some Army. And many European Armies use a truck of about that size.

Well, now Iran is making one, the Safir.

And not only are they making one, it's apparently pretty much a copy of the M38.  It's body style isn't identical, but it's pretty close, and otherwise it's pretty much a copy of the M38.

And they're getting quite a bit of use in the war in Iraq, in the hands if Shia militias.

All sorts of rocket launchers and recoiless rifles are mounted on them, probably taxing their capabilities, as these vehicles are small.

Now,  note, I'm noting this as I like Jeeps in general, but I'm amazed that the little tiny MB is back.  They were really very small, and various Jeep developments since then have made for much better Jeeps.  But back they are, and like the M38 and M38A1, they're packing some pretty stout weapons.  Engine wise, they use a modern Nissan engine, and they appear to have torsion bars for their front suspension. But they retain a solid front axle, as of course current American civilian Jeeps do.

Interesting that the old type would be back, and in this peculiar fashion.

Lex Anteinternet: Toyota Landcruiser: The Prime Mover of the Third ...

Lex Anteinternet: Toyota Landcruiser: The Prime Mover of the Third ...:  Moroccan troops with some sort of Toyota, United States Marine Corps photograph. Americans may have invented the  Jeep , but based o...

And now, it appears, there's a little competition in this category.

At least, anyone, in Iraq.  The Iranian built Safir Jeep sized vehicle, a real throw back that's the size of the original Willys MB (if that big) and which retains a solid front axle (but which appears to have torsion bars rather than springs) is seeing use in the ongoing war in Iraq.  The Safir is typically decked out with a rocket launcher or a recoiless rifle, something we stopped doing way back when we were still using the M38A1.

But, in the conditions in which they're fighting, it's probably pretty darned effective.

The Best Posts of the Week of September 20, 2015

Jeep

Jeep

I've owned Jeeps twice.

 

My first car, a 1958 M38A1 Army Jeep.  In the words of Iris Dement, "it turned over once, but never went far."*

My very first vehicle was a Jeep.  I bought it for $500 with money I had earned from a summer job.  I was 15 at the time, and not old enough to actually drive, but I still had it when I turned 16.  

The engine was a mess, in need of rebuilding or replacement, and as you can see, the prior owner had hit a tree with it.  As the engine was so worn out, it burned nearly as much oil as gasoline, and I sold it when I was 16 and bought a Ford F100 to replace it.

My second Jeep was a 1946 CJ2A, the very first model of civilian Jeep.  I kept it for awhile, but ultimately when my son was small, I sold it too.  The CJ2A, particularly ones made in the first couple of years of production, was nearly unchanged from the World War Two Army 1/4 ton truck that gave rise to the species, and indeed, the model I had, had some parts commonality otherwise unique to the Army Jeeps of the Second World War.

Depiction of Jeep in use on Guadalcanal, bringing in a KIA.

Jeeps got their start in that role, as a military vehicle, a 1/4 ton truck, entering service just prior to World War Two.  Bantam, a now extinct motor vehicle manufacturer, gets a lot of credit for the basic design, and indeed the Bantam Jeep did enter U.S. and British service.

Bantam Jeep being serviced by Army mechanic. The Bantam was actually lighter than the Willys Jeep.

But it was Willys, with larger manufacturing capacity, that really gets credit for the design.  It was their design that became the Jeep, although Ford made a huge number of Jeeps during the Second World War as well.

Coast Guard patrol with Jeep.  The Coast Guard also had mounted patrols during the Second World War, acquiring horses and tack from the Army.

American and Australian troops with Jeep serving as a field ambulance.

Jeeps became synonymous with U.S. troops during World War Two.  Indeed, there's a story, probably just a fable, of a French sentry shooting a party of Germans who tried to pass themselves off as Americans, simply because the sentry knew that a walking party of men could not be Americans, they "came in Jeeps."  A story, probably, but one that reflected how common Jeeps were and how much they were admired by U.S. forces at the time.  It's commonly claimed by some that Jeeps replaced the horse in the U.S. Army, but that's only slightly true, and only in a very limited sense.  It might be more accurate to say that the Jeep replaced the mule and the horse in a limited role, but it was really the American 6x6 truck that did the heavy lifting of the war, and which was truly a revolutionary weapon.  

None the less, the fame of the Jeep was won, and after the war Jeeps went right into civilian production.  For a time, Willys was confused over what the market would be for the little (uncomfortable) car, and marketed to farmers and rural workers, who never really saw the utility of the vehicle over other options.  Indeed, for farmers and ranchers who needed a 4x4, it was really the Dodge Power Wagon that took off.  The market for Jeeps was with civilian outdoorsmen, who rapidly adopted it in spite of the fact that it's very small, quite uncomfortable, and actually, in its original form, a very dangerous vehicle prone to rolling.  Still, the light truck's 4x4 utility allowed sportsmen to go places all year around that earlier civilian cars and trucks simply did not. The back country, and certain seasons of the year, were suddenly opened up to them.  For that reason, Jeeps were an integral part of the Revolution In Rural Transportation we've otherwise written about.  You can't really keep a horse and a pack mule in your backyard in town, but you can keep a Jeep out on the driveway.

Not surprisingly, Willys (and its successor in the line, Kaiser) soon had a lot of competition in the field.  The British entered it nearly immediately with the Land Rover, a light 4x4 designed for the British army originally that's gone on to have a cult following, in spite of being expensive and, at least early on, prone to the faults of British vehicles.  Nissan entered the field with the Nissan Patrol, a vehicle featuring the British boxiness but already demonstrating the fine traits that Japanese vehicles would come to be known for. Toyota entered the field with its legendary Land Cruiser, the stretched version of which I once owned one of, and which was an absolutely great 4x4.  Indeed, their smaller Jeep sized vehicle, in my opinion, was the best in this vehicle class.   Ford even entered the field with the original Bronco.  Over time, even Suzuki would introduce its diminutive Samurai.

So, what's happened here to this class of vehicles anyway?

Recently, for reason that are hard to discern, I decided to start looking once again for a vehicle in this class.  I know their defects.  They are unstable compared to trucks, and they don't carry much either.  But there is something about them.  Last time I looked around there were a lot of options, and costs were reasonable for a used one. Well, not anymore.

I don't know if its the urbanized SUV that's taken over everything.  But whereas once a fellow looking for a Jeep like vehicle could look for Jeeps, Land Cruisers, Land Rovers, Samurais, Broncos and International Scouts, now you are down to Jeeps, the Toyota FJ Cruiser or the soon to be extinct Land Rover Defender.  The Defender is insanely expensive, but the Jeep and Cruiser sure aren't cheap.  Even used vehicles in this class now command a crazy price.  I'm actually amazed I see so many around, given that most people don't use them for what they are designed for, and they're so darned expensive.

________________________________________________________________________________

*From "Our Town".

Postscript.

I recently ran across a net article that posed the same question, "what's happened here to this class of vehicles", which came to the conclusion that the the Jeep occupies such a niche market, and it's the only game in town for Jeep, so nobody else bothers with it.

Well, maybe.

But I'm not completely buying that.  There were a lot of vehicles in this class at one time.  Now, there's just one in North America.  The Land Rover hasn't been imported for years, and Toyota is discontinuing the FJ Cruiser.  Indeed, the Land Rover Defender is in its last year of production.

Oddly enough, overseas there is some competition. There's the Defender, this year.  Mercedes makes a vehicle in this class, as I believe Steyr also does.  Toyota also might, for overseas sales. Even Ford does, in Brazil.

The fact that Ford offers something like its old Bronco, albeit in a product line it just bought, might help explain it.  Maybe there just aren't as many places requiring a rough and ready vehicle in a lot of places anymore, but Brazil probably has plenty.  On the other hand, a lot of heavy duty 4x4 trucks seem to be around.

It's a good thing, anyhow, for people who need something like a Jeep that at least its still offered.

I did find one, by the way, after I posted this item.  I've been using it for about a year now, adding those items to it I find handy as I've gone along.

Recalling the WC-56/57

Dodge Weapons Carrier at the Wyoming Machinegun Shoot.

The World War Two vintage Dodge WC 56/57 series of vehicles are among my all time favorites.

I've certainly never owned one, and I haven't even seen one for sale. And outside of World War Two, they weren't around long.  They're just neat.  Based on the WC truck frame, they were bigger than the Jeep, but not too big. Almost the ideal size.

Which is what make this Jeep concept car so neat.

It's obviously a shout out to the WC 56.

I know that they're not going to make it. But I wish they would.

Sigh.

Beauty: Function or Form?

Heavily rusted mid 1970s Chevrolet pickup truck, with Colorado classic vehicle plate and rough trailer, but lifted and with good tires, on Homer Spit, Alaska.

But is it a Power Wagon?

The Legacy Power Wagon was written up in Auto Week.

But is it a real Power Wagon?

I have my doubts.  Indeed, as much as I hate to say it, as it looks so nice, I don't think it is.  Indeed, I think this defines it:

And power? Oh man. On most conversions, the original engine is swapped out for a 585-hp, 550-lb-ft supercharged 6.2-liter Chevy LSA V8 retuned for mid-range torque.
“From 2,000 to 4,500 rpm, it pulls like an animal,” said Bent.  

There are other engines available, too. For instance, there are those who claim putting a Chevy engine in a Dodge Power Wagon is sacrilege.

“So for them we offer a stroked small-block Chrysler. It’s available, but not one customer of the 60 we’ve delivered has asked for the Chrysler.”

You can also order a 6.2-liter, 430-hp, 420-lb-ft Chevrolet LS3; a 7.0-liter, 430-hp, 500-lb-ft Chrysler 426; or a 170-hp, 480-lb-ft 3.9-liter Cummins turbo-diesel. The Chevies get a four-speed automatic, while the Chrysler and Cummins get five-speed manuals. But most people get the LSA Chevy V8.

“The LSA engine, transmission and computers come straight from Chevy Performance,” Bent said. “They’re simple, they have a ‘connect-and-cruise’ package that makes them easy and simple to install and they come with a two-year, 50,000-mile warranty that they actually stand behind.”

If the engine and transmission come from Chevy Performance, well, isn't it a Chevrolet?  It would seem to be just a Power Wagon body and set of axles.  Same with the other conversions, it seems to go to far.

Perhaps that's because I like the original trucks. They were slow, with flathead 6 cylinder engines as a rule, but they were low geared and had piles of torque. They weren't fast as they didn't need to be.

I feel like these miss the point.

The Rise and Decline of the "SUV".

 Some time ago, on this transportation obsessed blog, I published this item:

Lex Anteinternet: SUVs before SUVs: 

A 1962 Dodge Power Giant Carryall.  Not mine, I saw it for sale the other day while driving through town.  It appears in nice shape, and still features bias ply tires.  This is a D100 Carryall, which means its rated at 1/2 ton, although it has a two speed rear axle.  Of course, I don't know anything about it or what is, or isn't original.  It looks pretty original, however.

Anyhow, it's interesting how SUVs are supposed to be a modern concept, with the Chevrolet Suburban supposedly sort of ushering them in. But Suburban's themselves go way back, and before them were vehicles like this Dodge Carryall.  Carryalls, in fact, go all the way back to World War Two.

Of course, these aren't easy to drive.  It has a manual transmission and armstrong steering.  And, of course, conventional hydraulic brakes.  Not something a soccer mom, or dad, would probably drive.  Still, it's interesting to note how far back the concept of a full sized 4x4, built on a truck frame, goes.  About as far back as 4x4 trucks themselves.

Since that time, I posted a comment on trucks or SUVs on the M K Wright blog, and Jenny, who has a couple of excellent blogs herself, including the 1870-1918 blog, noted that she'd be interested on how SUVS became the sort of bloated light duty vehicles that they've become. To a fan of 4x4s, which I obviously am, that question struck a chord and so I'm back on the topic.

I guess to start off on this, we'd have to define what an SUV actually is. The term isn't really that old in comparison to the vehicles that arguable fit the definition.  SUV, as we know, stands for Sport Utility  Vehicle.  But what's that?

It's a bit hard to say. When the term first was used, it seemed to fit any 4x4 that was a light carryall, but over time it expanded to include all the traditional carryalls and perhaps even things like Jeeps. So, here we'll take a look at that class of vehicle, that being the 4x4 that isn't a pickup, but is designed to carry multiple passengers.

 

M151A1 Jeep in the foreground, with self propelled artillery in the background, South Korea, 1987.  The M151 was the last of the US military Jeeps.  Today, the Jeep is basically almost back to a single manufacturer after having had as wider run at one time.

If we look at it that way, I suppose the Jeep, which we've discussed here before several times.  Probably the last time I looked at them at length was in this post:

Jeep

I've owned Jeeps twice.

 

My first car, a 1958 M38A1 Army Jeep.  In the words of Iris Dement, "it turned over once, but never went far."*

My very first vehicle was a Jeep.  I bought it for $500 with money I had earned from a summer job.  I was 15 at the time, and not old enough to actually drive, but I still had it when I turned 16.  

The engine was a mess, in need of rebuilding or replacement, and as you can see, the prior owner had hit a tree with it.  As the engine was so worn out, it burned nearly as much oil as gasoline, and I sold it when I was 16 and bought a Ford F100 to replace it.

My second Jeep was a 1946 CJ2A, the very first model of civilian Jeep.  I kept it for awhile, but ultimately when my son was small, I sold it too.  The CJ2A, particularly ones made in the first couple of years of production, was nearly unchanged from the World War Two Army 1/4 ton truck that gave rise to the species, and indeed, the model I had, had some parts commonality otherwise unique to the Army Jeeps of the Second World War.

Depiction of Jeep in use on Guadalcanal, bringing in a KIA.

Jeeps got their start in that role, as a military vehicle, a 1/4 ton truck, entering service just prior to World War Two.  Bantam, a now extinct motor vehicle manufacturer, gets a lot of credit for the basic design, and indeed the Bantam Jeep did enter U.S. and British service.

Bantam Jeep being serviced by Army mechanic. The Bantam was actually lighter than the Willys Jeep.

But it was Willys, with larger manufacturing capacity, that really gets credit for the design.  It was their design that became the Jeep, although Ford made a huge number of Jeeps during the Second World War as well.

Coast Guard patrol with Jeep.  The Coast Guard also had mounted patrols during the Second World War, acquiring horses and tack from the Army.

American and Australian troops with Jeep serving as a field ambulance.

Jeeps became synonymous with U.S. troops during World War Two.  Indeed, there's a story, probably just a fable, of a French sentry shooting a party of Germans who tried to pass themselves off as Americans, simply because the sentry knew that a walking party of men could not be Americans, they "came in Jeeps."  A story, probably, but one that reflected how common Jeeps were and how much they were admired by U.S. forces at the time.  It's commonly claimed by some that Jeeps replaced the horse in the U.S. Army, but that's only slightly true, and only in a very limited sense.  It might be more accurate to say that the Jeep replaced the mule and the horse in a limited role, but it was really the American 6x6 truck that did the heavy lifting of the war, and which was truly a revolutionary weapon.  

None the less, the fame of the Jeep was won, and after the war Jeeps went right into civilian production.  For a time, Willys was confused over what the market would be for the little (uncomfortable) car, and marketed to farmers and rural workers, who never really saw the utility of the vehicle over other options.  Indeed, for farmers and ranchers who needed a 4x4, it was really the Dodge Power Wagon that took off.  The market for Jeeps was with civilian outdoorsmen, who rapidly adopted it in spite of the fact that it's very small, quite uncomfortable, and actually, in its original form, a very dangerous vehicle prone to rolling.  Still, the light truck's 4x4 utility allowed sportsmen to go places all year around that earlier civilian cars and trucks simply did not. The back country, and certain seasons of the year, were suddenly opened up to them.  For that reason, Jeeps were an integral part of the Revolution In Rural Transportation we've otherwise written about.  You can't really keep a horse and a pack mule in your backyard in town, but you can keep a Jeep out on the driveway.

Not surprisingly, Willys (and its successor in the line, Kaiser) soon had a lot of competition in the field.  The British entered it nearly immediately with the Land Rover, a light 4x4 designed for the British army originally that's gone on to have a cult following, in spite of being expensive and, at least early on, prone to the faults of British vehicles.  Nissan entered the field with the Nissan Patrol, a vehicle featuring the British boxiness but already demonstrating the fine traits that Japanese vehicles would come to be known for. Toyota entered the field with its legendary Land Cruiser, the stretched version of which I once owned one of, and which was an absolutely great 4x4.  Indeed, their smaller Jeep sized vehicle, in my opinion, was the best in this vehicle class.   Ford even entered the field with the original Bronco.  Over time, even Suzuki would introduce its diminutive Samurai.

So, what's happened here to this class of vehicles anyway?

Recently, for reason that are hard to discern, I decided to start looking once again for a vehicle in this class.  I know their defects.  They are unstable compared to trucks, and they don't carry much either.  But there is something about them.  Last time I looked around there were a lot of options, and costs were reasonable for a used one. Well, not anymore.

I don't know if its the urbanized SUV that's taken over everything.  But whereas once a fellow looking for a Jeep like vehicle could look for Jeeps, Land Cruisers, Land Rovers, Samurais, Broncos and International Scouts, now you are down to Jeeps, the Toyota FJ Cruiser or the soon to be extinct Land Rover Defender.  The Defender is insanely expensive, but the Jeep and Cruiser sure aren't cheap.  Even used vehicles in this class now command a crazy price.  I'm actually amazed I see so many around, given that most people don't use them for what they are designed for, and they're so darned expensive.

The Jeep  was the first of the SUVs, although only barely so.  The Jeep came about just prior to World War Two, as the U.S. Army, which had quite a bit of experience all read with front and rear axle drive vehicles, sought to have a really light car, or truck developed for military use. Being light weight was a requirement for the vehicle, as was it being four wheel drive, a revolutionary requirement at the time.  Jeeps were the result, with there being two Jeeps to see U.S. service during the war, the Bantam Jeep and the Willys type Jeep, which was also made by Ford.  The Willys type Jeep was made in much larger numbers.  By the wars end, the Soviet Union was making its own version of the Jeep, based on the Willys and Bantam examples they'd acquired via Lend Lease.  The Germans, who loved all things mechanical, had also experimented with light weight 4x4s after being exposed to the Jeep, and came up with 4x4s based on the Kubelwagen. The Germans, however, never made the full switch to 4x4s so their examples are much less common that their 2x4 vehicles.

Civilian Jeep fans would tend to identify this as a CJ5, but it's actually a M38A1, in service with the South Korean Army in 1987.

I've addressed at length before, but Jeeps have had a long run as a popular civilian 4x4, and have actually outlasted their use by Americans in the civilian role, the Army no longer using Jeeps at all.  Those armies that do use a Jeep like vehicle today, use Toyota, Land, Steyr or Mercedes trucks, not American ones.  But the Jeep lives on as an American 4x4, but only made by Jeep.  A small close cousin, but much lighter, does exists in the form of the Suzuiki Samauri and the General Motors equivalent of it, but that vehicle seems to be an example of what generally seems to have occurred here.  Starting out a sub Bantam type Jeep, but made for the outdoors, it's evolved into a little 4x4 car.  As we'll see, that seems to have been the general trend.

The Jeep wasn't the only 4x4 passenger vehilce (ie., I'm omitting trucks) introduced by the military during World War Two.  Just as the Army sought to introduce 4x4 trucks and the Jeep, it also introduced, during the war, a class of vehicles we'd later know as Travelalls or Carryalls, and which like the Jeep, we find that there was explosion of types, but that we're now down to a singular example.

I've posted an example of a Dodge Carryall above, so we know what the type is, but we can probably define it as a 4x4 panel truck with seating.  Indeed, the first vehicles to carry that name were in fact 4x2 panel trucks.  Just before the Second World War, however, the Army decided to introduce a Dodge variant of the panel truck for passengers, just as Dodge was also producing a 4x4 heavy duty pickup truck for the Army. And, in addition to that, Dodge also introduced a vehicle called a "command car" that went under a variety of WC designations.

We'll take a quick look at two of these vehicles, before going on to the third, as it's interesting how Detroit sort of missed the boat on these early on, although that's true of nearly all of the early 4x4 vehicles.  Truth be known, they just didn't see much of a post war use for any of them.

 

One of the WC Command Cars

Command cars were a Dodge product based on at first the 1/2 ton Dodge military pickup chassis, and later the 3/4 ton chassis. They were a great vehicle, and were very popular with the service at the time.  Sometimes called a "weapons carrier", they were basically the first true SUV.  Senior officers with access to them, such as George Patton, frequently used them rather than the Jeep, as they were just big enough to be a bit more useful, and small enough to remain really maneuverable.  When we see the later SUVs of the 80s and 90s, we're really seeing something that's pretty darned close to these, conceptually.  Oddly, however, not only did the automobile manufacturers basically fail to appreciate that there's be a post war market for them, the Army phased them out after the war in favor of the Jeep, which isn't quite as useful.

Dodge 4x4 military ambulance, essentially a panel truck.

Also based on the Dodge truck frame was the Dodge military ambulance. This vehicle was hugely successful and a nearly identical model was put into production after the war when the Army adopted the M35, an updated version of the World War Two 3/4 ton Dodge military truck.  Again, however, this didn't seem to inspire the manufacturers to produce a civilian model, and perhaps that's understandable as these were, after all, military ambulances. They did find some favor with civilian users, however, post war as a surplus rugged panel truck.  Here two, however, we can see something that would come back into favor later in another form.

Dodge military carreyalls.

Dodge also produced true carryalls for the Army during the war, and it's hear that we really see the beginnings of something that would find widespread post war use.  The least significant of Dodge's wartime vehicles, it's almost hard t find a picture of them actually being used overseas.  But they set a pattern, along with the Dodge 4x4 truck, that would soon find expression in post war vehicles.

Wartime manufacture.

After the Second World War, Dodge kept its military truck in production, in a civilian variant, as the Power Wagon, vending the heavy 4x4 to commercial and agricultural customers as being "job rated".  Willys kept the Jeep in production as well, struggling to vend it to a market it didn't quite understand.  Soon, sportsmen proved to be the market for Jeeps, while Power Wagons were bought by the anticipated market.  Nobody kept a 4x4 panel truck in manufacture except for Willys, which alone made one in this class, based on its small frame 4x4 pickup truck.  This vehicle, termed by Willys a "station wagon", also very much anticipated the later size of common SUVs, although the car, nicknamed the "rumble wagon", was very much a truck.

In 1954, however that suddenly changed.  Dodge came back out with the vehicle depicted above, the Town Wagon.  But they were late by a year. The prior year, International Harvester, the heavy truck and implement company, came in with the Travelall, a vehicle built on the same concept.  Chevrolet was already making its panel truck, the Suburban, but in 1957 it entered the 4x4 market with the panel truck as well.  As odd as it may be to think of the "family truckster" starting off as a fairly heavy 4x4, they all were.

So, by the late 1950s three American manufacturers were making heavy 4x4 panel trucks for passenger use.  The Carryall, the Travelall and the Suburban all vied for the same, fairly off road, passenger market. A fourth, the Jeep, was a smaller vehicle nearly alone in its class. None of these vehicles was  the plush type vehicle that the Suburban is today, but they are all recognizable as being in that class.  

That class took a new turn in 1963 when Jeep took a huge leap and abandoned its station wagon in favor of a luxury carryall, that vehicle being the Jeep Wagoneer.  There was nothing really like it.  Dumping all pretensions of commercial use, the Wagoneer was the luxury vehicle in the suburban or carryall class, and it did really well. While Jeep vehicles, save for the Jeep itself, have been somewhat forgotten as being pioneering, this one clearly was. 

Just a few years thereafter Chevrolet ramped up the competition by taking it in another direction, when it introduced the Blazer.  Based on a half ton, short box, pickup truck frame, the Blazer took the carryall one notch down in size, marketing its vehicle to the smaller family size now emerging in the US and the weekend sportsman. The Blazer was a huge success.

1972 Chevrolet Blazer.  This type of Blazer (without the lifted suspension and large wheels) was the first model of the popular 1/2 ton SUV.

The Blazer was such a successful vehicle that soon there were others in its class.  Ford, which had a contender in the Jeep market which was very much loved, the Bronco, dumped it in favor of a larger Blazer sized vehicle, still called the Bronco. Dodge, which of course had a military vehicle in this class as long ago as 1940, came back out with one based on its 1/2 ton short box pickup frame, calling it the Ram Charger.  By the early 1980s, Ford, Chevrolet and Chrysler were all competing in this class, and International and Chevrolet were still competing in the carryall class, Dodge having dropped out.

In the meantime, other manufacturers had not been idle.  Toyota had come out with a stretched Land Cruiser, and entered the field, by the 1960s.  Land Cruiser had as well, but it's temperamental expensive 4x4 was never really popular in the US, so that variant was rarely seen.  International Harvester, which had competed in the Jeep class with its Scout, came out with a new larger variant of the Scout which also competed in this smaller, but not Jeep sized, class.  Jeep itself would attempt to enter it from time to time, but was never successful in really figuring it out.

 
 Chevrolet Blazer in use by the U.S. Army, in this case the 3d Bn, 49th FA, Wyoming Army National Guard, in South Korea.  It's odd to think that this class of vehicle, which basically started off as a military vehicle, had a return, albeit a not too successful one, to military service.

By the late 1980s, this latter class, the smaller, but not 1/4 ton, 4x4 market really took off.  Nissan entered the class with its rugged Pathfinder.  Toyota, already in the class, came out with an additional vehicle in it called the Four Runner.  Mazda entered it as well.  Seeing what was going on, Chevrolet abandoned its trailblazing full size Blazer in favor of a smaller model in this class, also called the Blazer.

And then, something happened.

Somehow these vehicles quite being what they were, which was offroad vehicles, and simply became panel trucks, with 4x4, once again.

How it happened isn't clear, but whole class of rugged personal 4x4s began to evaporate.  The Bronco disappeared.  International quit making personal vehicles.  And the small SUVs increasingly became large 4x4 cars, but not really trucks.  

Some of these vehicles are still around in one form or another, but only some.  The Jeep class is principally occupied by Jeep, unless a person is so well off they can afford a Mercedes or Land Rover.  The mid sized SUV still sees a rugged Toyota class vehicles, and Jeep has finally figured it out, virtually dominating the field now with its four door Jeep.  General Motors still makes a Suburban class vehicle and a Blazer sized vehicle, but both vehicles now are nearly luxury vehicles, not the field vehicles they once were, although they can still do the back country and come with off road options.

People will buy, of course, what they want.So the manufacturers can't be blamed for producing what they do. But the evolution is an interesting one.

Toyota Landcruiser: The Prime Mover of the Third World Military.

 Moroccan troops with some sort of Toyota, United States Marine Corps photograph.

Americans may have invented the  Jeep, but based on what you see in the news, the Japanese surely perfected the type.  The Toyota Land Cruiser of the FJ type is surely the prime mover of the third world and irregular military.   This past week, I saw news footage of a fairly  new pattern of Toyota Landcruiser (or whatever they're calling them now) that had been fitted out with a rocket launcher, being used in Iraq, by the Iraqi army.

Whatever that pattern is, they don't import it here.  Universal (i.e., light small 4x4 trucks of the Jeep type) have gone from being a product offered solely by Willy, to being one, as I've noted before, that was offered by many manufacturers, to include Toyota, Rover, Nissan, and Ford, amongst others.  Now the numbers have dwindled back down so that the only common one is the Jeep once again, now a Chrysler product, unless you include Toyota's somewhat larger option.  Mercedes does make a Jeep type vehicle that's imported into the US, but you rarely see one.  And I know at least Steyr makes one overseas.  Jaguar, the current owner of the Rover brand, might as well.

No matter, it's Toyota that has the light military vehicle role all sewn up all over the glove.  Every third world army everywhere, and every mobilized irregular guerrilla outfit, uses them too.  They must be a fantastic light truck.  While I know it'd be very politically incorrect, were I in the Toyota advertising department, I'd propose the slogan "Toyota Landcruiser:  The prime mover of the third world army".

Automotive Transportation I: Trucks and Lorries

Truck Train, May 1920.

We have, in this continuing series on transportation, looked at trains, planes, ships, and shoe leather.  We're going to start looking at the type of transportation now that's just part of the regular background of our lives, for most of us.  Automobiles.

In doing this, I've broken the topic up into two, and perhaps oddly, I've started with trucks and lorries.  That probably seems backwards, but for what we're doing it really isn't. Transportation by truck has been a major change in the basic distribution system for the nation.

First of all, we probably better get some basic definitions down.  I've used, in the caption to this entry, terms that are somewhat unique to differently localities.  A "truck" is to Americans and Canadians what a "lorry" is to the English.  I don't know why, but they are.  And that's sort of illustrative of what we're trying to address here, which is the commercial vehicle.  A unique hauling vehicle designed to move objects and operated by people, rather than an automobile designed to haul principally people.  We'll get to cars, or sedans, later.

Trucks are as old as the internal combustion engine, which itself dates to basically the second half of the 19th Century. The history of the internal combustion engine is surprisingly convoluted and long, and there are different early engines that could compete for the claim of being the very first such engine. Suffice it to say, for our purposes, the introduction of the internal combustion engine had its way paved by a different type of engine, really, that being the steam engine. And in fact, the steam engine, along with electric motors, competed with early internal combustion engines for the role of individual vehicle power plant for quite some time.  As early as the 1870s, at any rate, such familiar names as Benz and Daimler were introducing internal combustion engines that would be recognizable as ancestors to the current ones.  Rudolph Diesel had designed the early variants of the engine that bears his name by 1893.  Even such theoretically advanced engine features such as the supercharger were 19th Century inventions.

So the early engines were around in the late 19th Century, but what it took to really get the vehicles up and rolling, so to speak as viable alternatives to horse and locomotive was cheap fuel, which oddly enough is rapidly reaching the pinnacle of its cheapness in our very own era.  And that took petroleum exploration.  As this isn't a history of petroleum exploration, we'll forgo looking into that in this thread.  Perhaps we'll look at it at some time in the future.  What it also took, however, was an affordable set of vehicles.

Trucks came in, therefore, quite early, but as practical machines they really began to make their appearance felt just prior to World War One.  By that time, there were some really stout industrial trucks chugging around, and that's basically what they were doing, around American cities.  They were the competitor to draft horses pulling wagons and carts.

They did not all operate exactly the same way that modern trucks do. Some did, with engine and transmission, but others were chain driven, like motorcycles were (and some still are).  But as heavy as they were, they tended to be pretty prone to maintenance problems and they were, in some ways, more comparable to industrial machines than to the modern trucks we have today.

They also didn't stray much into the sticks. They didn't have the range for it, and they were too expensive for many rural users.  Nonetheless, they began to come into military use just prior to World War One.  The U.S. First Aero Squadron was the first fully motorized unit of the U.S. Army and saw deployment in the Punitive Expedition, where its trucks proved as great of value, if not greater, than its aircraft.

U.S. Army Truck Company 28.  Punitive Expedition.

Trucks went on to see widespread use by every army during the Great War and while they did not displace the horse in any role, they were basically proven by the end of the war.  This was so much the case that the United States Army, as part of a grand experiment, ordered a convoy of various types of trucks and vehicles then its possession to cross the United States in 1919, just one year after the conclusion of the war.

 British brewery truck, an early example of a truck directly replacing a role generally filled by horses, in use here to haul cannon parts.

 Light trucks in use by the U.S. Army, World War One.

That convoy proved to be an epic ordeal, which served as much as anything to demonstrate that American roads were really all local, and in some cases nearly impassable, affairs.  But the fact that the trucks did make it proved a point, and it wasn't all that long thereafter when a true interstate  highway system was put into the works.  Indeed, the it already was as Congress had first entered the picture legislatively in 1916, with the Federal Road Aid Act of 1916.  In 1921 Congress passed a new act, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 which provided matching funds for highway construction and acted to have the Army target highways that were vital to national defense.  Therefore, contrary to the general supposition that this first occurred under the Eisenhower Administration, in fact the Army became involved in highway construction, in a fashion, in 1921.  In 1922 the Army had identified 20,000 miles of road that it considered vital.

Road construction boomed in the 1920s, and by the 1930s thousands of miles of paved, or concrete, roads had been put in and the road age had really arrived.  Many of the old dirt public roads, which could really only serve local purposes, and which took hours of travel in order to go even modest distances, were replaced with paved roads that greatly increased the speed of travel.  Small stores and gas stations, in turn, popped up everywhere, as vehicles of the era really only  held a modest amount of gasoline.  With the increase in roads everywhere, an increase in truck traffic came in as well.
 

Fairly typical commercial trucks, 1940.

At first, and for a very long time, most truck traffic really remained only local.  However, even by the 1930s tractor trailers had become relatively common, having made their appearance some time before. So the beginning of longer hauls were there.  These trucks were somewhat modest in size compared to the ones we see now, but they were there and they were used, although more often for intrastate hauls or relatively short hauls, by modern standards.

 

Tractor trailer combinations, 1930.

 Trucks delivering tucks, 1931.

At the same time, the pickup truck very much made its appearance.  At first most pickups were converted cars, with conversions of Model Ts being quite common. But as the type proved so utilitarian soon major automobile manufacturers began to offer them, and they became a staple for small businesses, farms and ranches.  All were two wheel drive at this point.

 Very early example of a truck that would come to be thought of as the pickup truck.

 Pickup truck in farm use, 1930s.

Truck and trailer, late 1930s.

None of which is to say or suggest that trucks supplanted horse and mule drawn wagons by this point. They were starting too, quite clearly, but horse and mules remained very much in evidence the entire time.

Also contrary to widely held belief, the post Great War period, followed by the Twenties and the Great Depression did not see the  Army supplant horses entirely by any means, but it did see the artillery branch, specifically the field artillery, take a huge interest in trucks.

Various nations artillery branches has started to use trucks as "artillery tractors" during World War One, with every major army using some. The heavier the piece, the more likely that an army was using an artillery tractor to tow it.  Following World War One, the U.S. Army in particular had an enormous interest in trucks.  Indeed, the artillery was arguably more interested in trucks than any other branch of the Army.

What the artillery branch found was that there really weren't any artillery tractors of the type that it wanted, and that it new could be built.  Available trucks, for the most part, were two axle, two wheel drive, low geared trucks.  All wheel drive trucks did start coming in during this period, but they were very heavy indeed, and mostly used for very rugged rural enterprises, such as logging. The artillery wanted a truck that was all wheel drive, but still capable of effective road use. As there wasn't such a vehicle, it set out inventing one.

And it was successful, which oddly put the Federal government, for awhile, in the truck manufacturing business.  While these 6x6 artillery tractors proved to be immediately successful, they also proved to be very expensive, and in a nation with such a massive automobile industry, it soon came to be the case that nobody could see a really good reason why the Federal government should be operating a truck company, so this line of truck, during the 1930s, was contracted out as a type to various civilian manufacturers.

 

Marines riding in heavy 4x4 truck early in World War Two. This type would soon be supplanted by 6x6 trucks.

Right about the same time, the Army, having seen the utility of 6x6 trucks, began to desire 4x4 trucks as well, and these were also contracted for.   Just prior to the United States entering World War Two the Army had adopted and was purchasing, therefore, a wide range of all wheel drive trucks, ranging from the newly adopted and very small 1/4 ton truck, the Jeep, to 4x4s and 6x6s.  Other armies were likewise experimenting with fall wheel drive vehicles but no other nation did to the same extent as the U.S, which by the wars end was at any rate supplying at least some trucks to every Allied army.

 

World War Two era Dodge 4x4 truck.  With very little in the way of change, this model would go into civilian production immediately after World War Two.

Four wheel drive trucks brought about a revolution in transportation in rural quarters that has already been addressed by this blog, so we won't go back into it, other than that to say after World War Two every major U.S. automobile manufacturer, and there were more major ones at that time, had experience in building 4x4s.  And as they were offered to civilians, they slowly came to be a major automobile type were today, they are very common.  In my region of the country it's so rare as to see a 2x4 pickup truck that its actually a bit surprising now when a newer one is encountered.  They aren't something you see much, and most automobile lots have only 4x4s for sale here, as a rule.  This hasn't always been the case, but it certainly is the case now.

Following the Second World War the U.S. saw a rising expansion of over the road trucking.  By the late 1950s the US was, additionally, overhauling its Interstate highway system via the Defense Department's budget with new "defense" highways, which were much improved compared to the old Interstate highway system.  With the greatly improved roads, by the 1960s, interstate long haul trucking was in an advance state of supplanting the railroads for a lot of American freighting.  At the same time, the diesel engine supplanted the gasoline engine for semi tractors.  A very uncommon engine for motor vehicles in the United States prior to the 1950s, diesels started coming in somewhere in that period and by the 1960s they'd completely replaced gasoline engines for over the road semi tractors.  Now, of course, diesels have become fairly common for heavy pickups as well, and are even starting to appear in the U.S. in light pickup trucks in spite of the higher cost of diesel fuel.

 

 Mack tractor, 1942.

The change was dramatic, although few people can probably fully appreciate that now, as we are so acclimated to trucking.  Thousands of trucks supplanted thousands of rail cars, and entire industries that were once served only by rail came to be served by truck.  The shipping of livestock, for example, which was nearly exclusively a railroad enterprise up into the 1950s is now done entirely by truck, a change which had remarkable impacts as rail shipping required driving the livestock to the railhead, whereas with the trucks they are simply scheduled to arrive at a ranch at a particular time.  Likewise, businesses that at one time located themselves near rail lines, so that they could receive their heavy products by rail, no longer do, as they receive those items by trucks.  For example, pipeyards, once always near a railhead, are not always today.

Not that the railroads have disappeared.  Indeed, in recent years they've once again been expanding, as they're very cost efficient and even more "green" than trucking, as they point out.  But trucks have, in the past 60 years, gone from something that was really for short hauls, for the most part, to something that is now common for long hauls, and indeed the bulk of American shipping is now done by truck.  Trucks have an advantage in being able to go more selectively and directly from "port to port", and the surface on which they travel is of course, put in by the public, making it a partially subsidized industry.  So they aren't going away soon, in spite of a revitalized rail industry.

And trucks have became part of the American vehicular fleet in a way that would have been hardly imaginable even 50 years ago.  As they've become more comfortable to drive, and easier to drive, they've been a common family vehicle, which is not what they once were.  Pickup trucks used to be pretty much only owned by people who had some need of them, even if that need was recreational.  Now, they're common everywhere.  Indeed, the Ford F150, Ford's 1/2 ton pickup truck, has been the best selling vehicle, that's vehicle, not truck, for the past 32 years.  So, so common have trucks become in the United States that one model of 1/2 tone truck is the number one single high selling model of vehicle.  Pretty amazing for a vehicle that started off as utilitarian and industrial.

1957 Dodge Power Wagon W100 $9,500 [ID]

1957 Dodge Power Wagon W100 $9,500 [ID]

Shoot, I didn't know that the three speed column shifts came with the V8 engine.

1947 Dodge WDX Power Wagon | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

1947 Dodge WDX Power Wagon | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

SUVs before SUVs

A 1962 Dodge Power Giant Carryall.  Not mine, I saw it for sale the other day while driving through town.  It appears in nice shape, and still features bias ply tires.  This is a D100 Carryall, which means its rated at 1/2 ton, although it has a two speed rear axle.  Of course, I don't know anything about it or what is, or isn't original.  It looks pretty original, however.

Anyhow, it's interesting how SUVs are supposed to be a modern concept, with the Chevrolet Suburban supposedly sort of ushering them in. But Suburban's themselves go way back, and before them were vehicles like this Dodge Carryall.  Carryalls, in fact, go all the way back to World War Two.

Of course, these aren't easy to drive.  It has a manual transmission and armstrong steering.  And, of course, conventional hydraulic brakes.  Not something a soccer mom, or dad, would probably drive.  Still, it's interesting to note how far back the concept of a full sized 4x4, built on a truck frame, goes.  About as far back as 4x4 trucks themselves.

A Revolution In Rural Transportation

 

When I seemingly had more free time, I used to occasionally publish articles in various journals.  This posts has its origins in one such article, which came about, as a concept. right about the time that I became to busy to really keep at that endeavor, so I never wrote it.  Perhaps, if worthwhile, I'll develop this blog entry into an article later.  I'd also note that this is a topic which I've actually posted on here before.  And its a topic I consider every year during hunting season.  The topic of back country travel, and indeed travel in rural areas in general.

 

Now, in 2012, we can hardly conceive of how recent the revolution in rural travel has been, or even how little rural travel occurred not all that long ago.  While I've never accommodated myself to them (I'm sticking with the 4x4 for road and the horse or shoe leather for everything else) the ATV, or "four wheeler", is seemingly everywhere.  Or at least its more places than it arguably should be.  But not all that long ago, even the automobile didn't go most places.

And, indeed, people didn't go most places, truth be known.

On one of my other blogs I attempt to catalog Wyoming's history on a daily basis.  On occasion, that notes people going here and there early in the state's history, for one reason or another.  To give a bad example today, October 31 (the day I started, but not finished) this entry is the anniversary of the 1903 Battle of Lightening Creek, a freakish event related as follows:

1903  The Battle of Lightning Creek occurred in Weston County Wyoming when Sheriff William Miller and a party of men under his leadership, having already arrested twelve Sioux in the area for hunting violations, engaged in a firefight with Sioux under Chief Charley Smith.  Miller, Deputy Louis Falkenberg and Chief Smith died in the battle.  Nine Sioux men alleged to have participated, and twelve women, were later arrested by Crook County Sheriff Deputy Lee Miller, but they were released for lack of evidence.

Now, nothing in this entry says anything about how Sheriff Miller and his party, nor how Chief Charley Smith and his party, arrived at Lightning Creek.  But the answer is pretty evident to most, they rode horses there. But this somewhat obscures what the reality was of that era, while illuminating at the same time.  And what that illuminates is that rural travel was by horse.

 

Now, that would hardly seem to be an illumination. But, in this modern era, few people really know what that meant.  It's common to assume, "well, of course, everyone traveled by horse"  But, in fact, most people did not travel by horse during the horse era.  And not only in the 19th Century horse era in North America, but during the horse era in almost all (but not quite all) societies everywhere. That his, during the eras in which the fastest mode of travel across the land was the horse, most people walked.

This is as true of Wyoming as anywhere else, as surprising as it may seem, and what that meant to average life is difficult for most of us to now really grasp.  Perhaps, however, before looking at that, it would be helpful to look at why that was true.

As folks with horses know, you really can't keep a horse anywhere.  For that reason, only rural people or aboriginals can keep an individual mount relatively easy, although certainly not without cost.  Some people like to imagine that in the pre automobile era they would have somehow kept a horse in town and rode where they drive today, or perhaps they'd have kept a buggy in town and have driven a team or single draught animal to pull it.  This is a really common depiction in films.  Some fellow lives in town doing this or that, needs to go somewhere, and hitches up his wagon.

 

Forest Service pack string.

But in reality few people could or did keep horses in town, which does not mean that there were not horses in town.  Average people, however, didn't do that.  If a person kept a horse in town, and worked in town, there was a specific reason for that.  Why was this true.

Well, those who own and keep horses probably instantly know.  Horses are expensive, and they have to be fed.  Additionally, they die.

Feeding a horse, in and of itself, would have been a very difficult endeavor any average person, even in a small Wyoming town of the late 19th or early 20th Centuries.  A person's yard, and yards were much smaller (as a quick glance around at most older neighborhoods in Wyoming demonstrate) certainly doesn't provide adequate forage for a horse, even during the summer growing season.  So any in town horse has to be fed.

Today horse owners feed their horses in the winter, at least, depending upon the forage they have available in their pasture.  Buying hay is certainly an option, but an expensive one.  It would have been more problematic in the late 19th Century, however, than now, as hay was not really a significant Wyoming crop until after the disastrous winter of 1888.  Indeed, at that time ranchers began to cut hay for cattle, not for horses, but the pattern of working horse usage also began to change, due in large part to barbed wire.  From early in the state's history up until around 1900 most ranchers simply turned the remuda out for the winter, where it fended for itself, grew semi wild again, and then was rounded back up in the Spring.  Only a few saddle horses were kept in.  After the range started to be fenced, and after cattle started to be fed, it no longer was as practical to simply turn horses out, as they were both needed to do winter work that hadn't previously existed, and it wasn't as possible for them to range where they might need to go.

 

Winter stock working.

In town terms, of course, what that meant is that anyone keeping horses in town, and of course there were some who did, had to find a source of hay to feed them all year long.  Not a cheap thing to do.

People who did keep horses in town essentially had two options.  They could stable them at home, or in a livery.  The few people who did stable a horse at home were well off.  There is, in Casper, at least one very old, early 20th Century, home that has a carriage house.  That would indicate that at least the original owner of that house in fact did keep a horse or horses, in town, for a carriage.  Unfortunately, I no longer know the history of the house's ownership, as I once did, so I can't recall why that person was likely to do that, if I ever knew.

 Grand Central livery in Casper, from Wyoming Tales and Trails.

Livery stabling was more likely, but that was also not inexpensive.  A livery boarded horses and every town had one or more.  Casper's Livery was the Grand Central, located downtown on what is now Yellowstone Avenue.  Liveries also served the purpose of allowing the rural employed to board a horse for a day, if they needed to come into town, as well as allowing town people to keep a horse if they needed to.  Photographs of Western liveries generally show that they were not all that large, which demonstrates that at any one time they were not housing vast numbers of horses.

So, if people didn't keep horses, what did they do?  Largely, they walked.  Henry Fairlie, in his famous essay The Cow's Revenge, gives some of the fascinating details on that.  In larger and industrial cities, the number of miles a person walked on a daily basis was staggering by modern standards.  "Mechanics", those individuals employed as skilled machinists and the like, often walked as far as seven miles one way just to get to work, and walked the same distance back to get home, after days that were endless by current standards.  This is not to laud 19th Century industrial conditions, but as Fairlie noted in his essay the necessary expenditure of calories at the time makes our current modern effort to artificially replicate that seem fairly pathetic in comparison. Of course, for a town the size that Casper, or Cheyenne, or Laramie then were, walking to work, whatever that work was, would not have been much of a burden, or wouldn't have seemed like one.  For many years at that, I walked to and from work, which was a distance of about 1.5 miles, and I used to (and sometimes still do) ride a bicycle to work.  In the late 19th and early 20th Century that would have simply been routine and unremarkable for anyone living in a smaller town or city.

Also, of course, quite a few people lived above their places of employment.  This is starting to become common once again, but was very common, even in smaller towns, at that time. Several of the older buildings in Casper, for example, have a second story apartment.  And by apartment, I mean sufficient living quarters for an entire family.  This was quite common for shopkeepers, but it wasn't uncommon for some other professions.  Doctors often operated out of their houses early on, and the term "office hours" meant that they kept "office hours" for an office in their house.  At least one lawyer I knew as a kid worked out of his home, and this was as late as the 1970s.  Houses were simply more public than they now are, in the pre automobile era.

Many more people than, as opposed to now, worked in rural occupations everywhere, however, and it's really rural travel that we started out writing about.  Even after World War One statistically half of all Americans lived in "rural" areas, although that statistic is deceptive as rural doesn't equate with working on a farm or ranch.  People who live today, for example, in Shoshoni or Meeteetsee live in a "rural area", statistically, even if they have nothing to do with farming or ranching.  Be that as it may, certainly working on a farm or ranch, or being part of a farm or ranch family, meant having access to horses.  And, for that matter, residence in a very small town, and there were many very small towns, probably meant that there was a greater need to own a horse no matter what you were doing.

So what was rural travel like for those folks?  In watching movies, a person gets the impression that if you wanted to go from here to there, or hunting or fishing, or just go somewhere, you went out the front door, jumped on your highly compliant already saddled horse, and off you went.  But that's not correct either.  Much more work was often involved in a trip of that type than that.

To illustrate what I mean, perhaps there it's best to cite a couple of written examples.  A few  years ago Wyoming Wildlife, the journal of the Wyoming Game & Fish Department, ran an article about a notable  figure who went on an extended hunting/camping trip with his family around the year 1900.  I've now forgotten who the figure was, but he was a Wyoming figure.  Photographs were included.  What was remarkable was that the family of about four had been requiired to take several saddle animals and a wagon, in order to get out, ot the out back.  It was a remarkable effort that took weeks to undertake.

Likewise, Theodore Roosevelt, who was admittedly rather wealthy and therefore probably not the best example, wrote a Colliers article about going hunting in Wyoming while he was a rancher in Medora South Dakota.  The trip likewise involved a wagon and several hands, and took weeks.  Indeed, in order to supply themselves the hunting party had to hunt all along the way, even though their plan was to go into the Big Horns to hunt elk.  A trip of that type turned into a rolling hunting trip just to make it.

Yet another example is provided in the book by B. B. Brooks on his life up until about 1920.  Brooks, who started off as a well educated prospective rancher and trapper and who became Governor took a hunting/fishing trip from his home in Natrona County to Fremont County.  I've forgotten the year, but it would be in approximatley 1900.  This trip with his family involved several horses and a wagon, and ultimately ended up discovering an unnamed lake in the high country of Fremont County.,  Again, it took weeks.

Rather obviously not everyone had weeks to devote to such endeavors and it would be completely untrue to suggest by this that only those with lots of time, and perahps lots of cash, engaged in outdoor activities.  Many average people did as well. But what that does mean is that for people who lived in towns such endeavors were almost certainly normally quite close to town.

Pioneer Wyoming rancher, Dick Latham, with antelope.

Another thing that this should make plain is that inter state travel was not what we might imagine.  Today it's a well known aspect of life in the rural West that traveling enormous distances in any one day are routine, far more so than elsewhere.  I've driving, for work, from Casper Wyoming to Lewistown Montana, and back, in a single day and I don't regard that as particularly abnormal. Generally, if a trip is 300 miles or less, I regard it as a one day deal.  If a trip is only 100 to 150 miles one way, I regard it as a short trip.

This would not have been the case, however, in the pre automobile era.  150 miles on a horse is a three day trip, normally, if a person is really pushing it.  Four days, or five, would be more likely.  There are examples of riders riding 100 miles or more in a day, but they're noted examples simply because they are extreme.  The Army standards was "forty miles a day on beans and hay", a rhyme which is not only notable because it is a rhyme, but because 40 miles is a long ways to riding on a horse.  It'ts particularly a long ways to ride if you have to do it day after day, as it becomes very hard on the horse.  Cowboys, then and now, generally never rely on one horse.  The 19th Century standard was seven horses to a man.

Travel long distance was normally by train, if a rail line existed, and quite frequently it did.  Wyoming had a few 19th and early 20th Century rial lines that carried passengers which are now completely absent, and the nationwide existance of rails to trails programs provides ample proof of that.  Most business or commmon people, if they needed to travel, took a train, if they could.

A nice example of how this worked is provided in Davis' book Goodbye Judge Lynch, about law in Big Horn County Wyoming.  Prior to the railroad coming in a practical trip in and out of the basin took weeks, not days.  And as a result, there was really no law in the basin, particularly as the distant sheriff of Johnson County, who had to travel by horse over the Big Horns to get there, could not really be there for any practical policing.  The railroad changed all that however and a person could then get there from many Wyoming localities in a day, or no more than two. This certainly made a huge differeance to lawyers, who could then actually defend cases in Big Horn County even if they lived in Natrona County, or Fremont County, or Laramie County.  It also made a big difference to the court too, as the judge didn't have to engage in an expedition to get there, even if he still had to travel a circuit from his home.  Indeed, harkening back to a much earlier era, it's interesting to note that East Coast circuit judges of colonial and early US history were in a mounted occupation, as the judge, and the lawyers, rode together from town to town in a circuit to adjudicate their casees.

All that must have come to a crashing halt on September 27, 1908, when the first Model T left the plant at Detroit Michigan, correct?  Well, no.

This is not to say that the Model T's introduction wasn't a big deal.  It was.  Automobiles, and motorcycles had of course been in manufacture for some time prior to the Model T (the first Harley Davidson came out in 1903), but they were extremely expensive and beyond the means of most people.  Model Ts were much more affordable, and indeed had been designed to be.  Ford's hope was that Most Americans could buy one, and he came darned near close to realizing that goal.  The car, and very rapidly modified examples that became early pickup trucks, were a huge success.  And no wonder. For the first time, people living in towns could buy a vehicle that didn't require storing a horse to move it, and which simply sat idle, ready for use, when not in use.

The extent to which cars spread very rapidly after the Model T, and because of the Model T, is almost impossible for us to imagine today.  Starting in 1908, by World War One the simple, and frankly rather primitive, car was everywhere.  The impact it had on town and city travel was enormous.  Fairly quickly after its introduction, and indeed even before it, the phenomenon of driving into the country, or "touring" became quite popular  So popular in fact that more expensive models of automobiles, and there were a tremendous number of automobiles, offered "touring cars".  Americans rapidly became car crazy, although the evolution was not entirely welcome everywhere by everyone.  In farm regions cars were at first not particularly welcome, as they were conceived as a threat to livestock.  Once farmers realized, however, that owning a car. . . or truck, allowed them to get to town and back quickly, that soon changed.

 

Model A Coupe.

In an area like Wyoming, this change was impressive.  For the first time ever it became easy for people living in a town like Casper or Laramie to travel some distance outside the town for a day.  And early cars were very high centered, almost like 4x4 trucks today, and very low geared.  Indeed, although they were 2x4 vehicles, they were quite well suited to rural travel.

 Ranch Truck, Big Horn County Montana, 1939.

This didn't, however, necessarily make long trips really easy.  Early newspaper articles from Wyoming are full of tales about locals driving long distances, such as between Cheyenne and Casper, and note that the trip took one or two days.  It now takes under three hours.  Of course, the trip was being made over roads that were really wagon roads.  It took some time before improved paved highways, at first very narrow, came in.  Indeed, interstate highways were non existant until after World War One, when an Army experiment gave them a boost by demonstrating that cross country automobile travel was possible, if extremely difficult.  After that an interstate highway system, the remote predacessor to today's Interstate Highways, started to come in, with the early highways named.  The highway across southerin Wyoming was the legendary Lincoln Highway. 

 Ranch truck, 1939.

Ford built the Model T up until 1927, an impressive twenty year long production run. By that time, more modern cars with some improvements had entered the scene. As the 1920s and 1930s arrived, cars became more recognizable to us today in terms of their features.  The Great Depression killed off the vast number of car companies that existed up until that time, and fewer more productive companies remained, such as Chrysler, Chevrolet, Ford, Studebaker, Willys, Kaiser and Hudson.  By modern terms, the cars remained surprisingly suitable for dirt road travel, although they were much less the "truck" that the Model T had been.  An even later car, a 1954 Chevrolet, I once had was quite easy to drive on dirt roads as a rule, and I often took it fishing while I owned it, something I'd never do with any later car I owned.  Given its relatively low gears, heavy weight, and low horsepower high compression engine, it was also pretty good in snow.  It's no wonder, therefore, that you see photos of hunters with deer strapped over the hoods of their cars.  The cars could get a fairly far out, as long as the driver wasn't crazy about it.

 

1954 Chevrolet Four Dour Deluxe Sedan.

 1954 Chevrolet Deluxe in wintertime conditions.  While I'd hesitate to drive it in conditions like this, the car exhibited pretty good winter characteristics, save for the lousy vacuum wipers and the iffy personnel heater.

None of which meant that wintertime and really outback travel was easy.

As a rule, up until sometime after World War Two, families that owned a car; owned a car.  That is, they owned one car.  Most of those cars, even in the rural West, were cars, not pickup trucks, although pickups were always more popular in this region than in others.  Prior to World War Two, however, even those trucks were two wheel drive, not 4x4.

That fact is really significant in terms of the ease of travel.

Prior to the 4x4 vehicle, much of Wyoming was either periodically, or completely, closed during the winter.  We travel from town to town now when nobody, or only the foolhardy, would have attempted it prior to seemingly everyone owning 4x4 vehicles.  And if they did try it, tire chains were in order.  We still see tire chains, of course, but not like we once did.  Even as a kind in the 1960s and early 1970s I can recall tire chains being fairly common on cars.  Now I usually only see them on 4x4 trucks, and only when conditions are really awful out back.

And people just didn't drive to the back country after the weather started getting bad.  It just wasn't really possible. 

The impact of this was vast.  Ranches, for example, had started using trucks almost as soon as they were available, but the trucks were 2x4, not 4x4 trucks, up until after the war.  This meant that they couldn't go where 4x4s can.  Wintertime feeding operations, therefore, retained a lot of hay wagons.  Horses continued to haul sheepwagons up to summer pastures, and sheep tenders were horse drawn as well.  In the winter, ranches that had distant pastures, and sometimes even mountain pastures, kept a cowhand there all winter long.  He couldn't be driven in or out, he just stayed and came down in the spring.  The less motorized operation meant that more cowboys needed to be employed than current are.

 Heavy truck in Army use, 1917.

For outdoorsmen, this meant that seasons shut down, except those close to town, once the heavy snows came.  Nobody was fourwheeling in and out of a high country elk camp after the snows.  It couldn't be done.  Even prarie travel could be difficult.  People gauged the weather and stayed in accordingly. 

Most long distance travel continued to be by train, which are much less plagued by snows.  If, for example, a person wanted to go from Casper Wyoming to Lincoln Nebraska, they were likely to take the train, not drive.  Now, of course, you can't take the train, although you can probably take a couple of airplane commuter hops. 

Even summertime trips weren't as easy.  It's routine now to find people who will drive a 4x4 far into the backcountry to fish, for example.  But they can due that due to the 4x4 and would be much less limited, or at least have to take alternative travel, if they lacked one.  Many now will take ATVs even further, and it's not uncommon to see somebody haul an ATV up into the hills with a 4x4 truck.

The 4x4 truck, and for that matter the all wheel drive car, is a byproduct of World War Two.  It wasn't until the war that they were anything more than a specialty item.  The U.S. Army began to develop the 6x6 truck in earnest in the 1920s when no suitable commercial artillery "tractor" (i.e., truck) was available  The developed truck was what the artillerymen wanted, but it was very expensive to produce.  Fortunately for the Army, by the 1930s commercial manufacturers were ready to pick up what the Army had started.  

 

 6x6 2 1/2 ton Trucks on the Alaska Highway during World War Two.

The 6x6 truck was  the workhorse of World War Two, and it arguably was the single most significant item produced by the United States during the war.  People like to imagine that tanks, or guns, or aircraft won the war, and of course a good case can be made for any of them, but as the old saying goes, professionals study logistics, amateurs tactics.  The 6x6 truck gave the US such a  logistical advantage over its opponents that it would be difficult to exaggerate.  That advantage extended to all the Allies, as the 6x6 was supplied by the Army to all of them.  Indeed, for years after the war the Soviet Unions 6x6 truck bore a striking resemblance to the Studebaker variant of the 6x6 supplied to them by the US during the war.

The Army didn't limit itself to 6x6 trucks of course, it also put out specifications for 4x4 trucks.  While Chevrolet, and International are part of the WWII 4x4 truck story, it was principally Dodge that filled that need with trucks and a car that are the parents of almost all larger 4x4s today.

The father of every 4x4 pickup on the road today. . . a Dodge 1/2 ton Army 4x4 truck.

Dodge started in the late 1930s by making a 1/2 ton 4x4 truck for the Army. That truck soon gave way to a 3/4 ton truck.  It also made "command cars" for the Army, which predicted the large SUV of later eras.

The original SUV, a Dodge 4x4 command car.  Note the tire chains on all four wheels.

Dodge 3/4 ton Weapons Carriers, a 3/4 ton pickup truck.

 

Nice preserved 3/4 ton command car.

Most vehicle fans, in terms of World War Two U.S. Army vehicles, will immediately recall the 1/4 ton Jeep, which of course was also a very significant 4x4 car of the war.  It's really misunderstood in some ways thought, as it was an extremely light weight vehicle, and arguably not as important as the vehicles mentioned above.  None the less, it can't be ignored.

Franklin Roosevelt in a Jeep at Casablanca

A striking feature of the 6x6 and 4x4 trucks of World War Two is that they all used existing engines.  Therefore, to some extent, putting them into post war manufacture was fairly easy.  This did not occur as the 6x6s, as there was only limited civilian application for them, but Dodge and Willys both understood that there was a market for what they were making post war.  Willys, one of two manufacturers of Jeeps, basically kept its World War Two production line up and running and introduced the wartime Jeep as the CJ2A, which varied only slightly from the military Jeep (including the addition of a tailgate).  Dodge, for its part, restored the enclosed cab to the 4x4 3/4 ton truck it was making for the Army, which had been omitted in favor of a soft top in the military edition, simplified the box, and introduced the truck as the Power Wagon, a name it was already using during the war.

Both vehicles were phenomenally successful, although the Jeep never really lived fully up to its promise.  Marketed as a vehicle that could be used for anything, including being used as a farm tractor, it really could not be.  Nonetheless, it was a popular vehicle with sportsmen, and it continues to be to this day.  The vehicle probably more closely resembles a vehicle of the World War Two than any other vehicle made today.

1958 Willys M38A1 Army Jeep, in civilian use and repainted.  This version was introduced to the public as the CJ5.

4x4 trucks took off a little more slowly than Jeeps.  The Dodge Power Wagon, introduced in a 3/4 ton and 1 ton variant, were heavy duty vehicles that were a little more truck than most civilians wanted.  The original Jeep wasn't a very good "daily driver", but the heavy Dodges were definatelty not.  None the less, the original Dodge Power Wagon, resembling the Army product very strongly, was made all the way up into the 1970s.  In the 1950s a second, equally beefy, version came out with a V8 engine, which bore the name "Power Wagon" as well, but which were marketed as Power Giants, reflecting the fact that they were actually larger than the Power Wagon.  While finding only a limited market with sportsmen, the truck was a huge success with commercial and agricultural users.  I recall seeing Power Wagons still in use as late as the 1990s on some ranches.  In the meantime, Dodge began making lighter 4x4 trucks in the 50s, reflecting a less industrial market.

Dodge Power Giant.

While the Power Wagon was really too stout for use by most non business or non agricultural users, the utility of 4x4 truck wasn't lost on outdoors men and all the American automobile manufacturers soon started offering a lighter truck, often with running gear actually made by Chrysler or Marmot Harrington for that market.  In 1959 Ford finally introduced its own, all Ford, 4x4 truck, a good decade plus after Dodge.  Chevrolet followed suit in 1960, although it had been selling Chevrolet and GMC trucks with NAPCO parts since 1956. 

As this might reflect, while there was a market, the manufacturers were unsure of it at first, and frankly all the early 4x4 trucks were very heavy duty.  For that reason, in Wyoming, a lot of 2x4 trucks were around well into the 1970s, and they were the rule for town truck owners up through the 1960s.  4x4s were bought by sportsmen, but they tended to shy away from them as they were very heavy duty, rough riding, and there was a common well founded belief that they more expensive to maintain.  Even some ranchers and farmers were reluctant to really heavily use 4x4s, tending to keep a Power Wagon just for when a 4x4 was really needed.

 

1956 Chevrolet 2x4 pickup truck.

This means that the change 4x4s brought was slow in coming, but it did come.  The first big impact they had in Wyoming was on ranching.  The Dodge Power Wagon, in both its civilian and military surplus variant, ended the career of many cowboys just at the same time when many of them were returning from World War Two and looking for other employment in any event.  Equipped with the Power Wagon, there was no longer any need to keep a cowboy in the high country all winter long, as the rancher could drive there if he needed to.  And the Power Wagon replaced the hay wagon on many outfits.  

The 4x4 also meant, that for the first time, many really dedicated sportsmen could get into the back country much later in the year. The post snow fall elk camp became a possibility for hte first time, with the hunters equipping themselves with pickup trucks or Travelalls (early full sized SUVs) and heading to the high country.  Quite a few Jeeps also were employed by them in that capacity, and the Jeep as a backcountry summer time vehicle came on rapidly.

 

Modern Dodge diesel 1 ton truck with stock trailer in heavy snow.

The WWII Dodge 4x4s were the predecessors of every 4x4 truck and SUV out there today, unless they're smaller, in which case the Jeep is.  That's opened up the country for us year around, an evolution which occurred extremely rapidly.  In 1944 ranchers and outdoorsmen still couldn't reach the high country, or go out in heavy snow far from their home bases.  By 1949 they could.  Not everyone switched right away, particularly in town, but by the 1970s a high percentage of pickup trucks in  Wyoming were 4x4s. By the 1980s, they majority of them were.  Now, a 2x4 truck is a freakish oddity.

Dodge D150 1/2 ton truck, a direct descendant of the WWII Dodge military 4x4.  Indeed, with this body style, the Army would employ the same truck in a 1.5 ton version as the D880.

4x4s are now everywhere in the American West, and indeed, they're everywhere in general.  But that hasn't been the end of backcountry vehicle evolution.  Motorcycles made an early appearance on rural roads and then the "dirt bike" became a big, but temporary, hit in the 1970s. Following them was the 3 wheeler, a popular if dangerous light motorized trike.  Both the dirt bike and the trike came and went, but a newer vehicle, the ATV, appears to be a permanent addition to the scene, and not one that's an unqualified good thing.  Light, somewhat dangerous, but capable of going many places that even a Jeep could not, the hills are crawling with them.  Contrary to the expectations of some, they have not replaced the horse by any means in ranching, and like the dirt bike they've appeared and then started to disappear in that application, but many outdoorsmen now seem almost permanently glued to them.

 

The ATV for those too cheap to buy an ATV.

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