The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  Once the cash spigots were opened, work began in many widely separated places, and in a matter of only weeks the new highways began to appear, growing outward toward one another like Penicillium mycelia in a petri dish. The race was to the swift, and though there are at least three separate claimants to being the first finished (two of them in Missouri), the generally accepted fleetest of all were the team at a ribbon-cutting in Topeka, Kansas, on November 14, not five months since Ike signed the bill. The men had widened, straightened, and paved, according to Washington’s Yellow Book specification, eight miles of the old US Route 40 and had transmuted it into the beginnings of Interstate 70, which runs now between Baltimore and Utah.

  Month by month, new sections of high-speed, limited-access national highways opened. Three states lay claim to be first, among them Kansas in 1956, with the I-70, with four fully paved miles outside Topeka. This ceremony near Waukesha, Wisconsin, held two years later on the I-94, was typical of the times, but such occasions swiftly became too routine to merit celebration.

  The project was supposed to take thirteen years to complete, but instead it took thirty-five. The first phase was finished in 1992, with its total cost estimated at $430 billion in modern money. Curiously, the completion was achieved with a section of the very same I-70 that had been the first road started, which passes through a particularly rugged valley of the Colorado River known as Glenwood Canyon. This valley long provided the route for the Union Pacific Railroad, and later it was touted as the most scenic portion of the California Zephyr route. A memorial to the dome cars that made the Zephyr so beloved had to be moved to make way for the highway.

  Thomas MacDonald had meanwhile left government and had gone off to Texas to teach engineering. He never lost touch with “the greatest public responsibility” of building highways. He was well aware of the moment, seventy-six years after his birth, when the ribbon-cutting ceremony was held for the beginnings of I-70 in Topeka. But he would know precious little more of the story. The man who essentially started it all, midwife to the greatest highway system in the world, died in a Texas restaurant in April 1957, as his forty-thousand-mile memorial was just beginning to coil its way around the nation.

  Montezuma, Iowa, the town where he had grown up, once had a railway station; it was his father’s difficulty in getting his goods to this tiny depot over the mud and ruts of the early-twentieth-century roadways that led Thomas MacDonald to his obsessive interest in building good roads. There is now an Interstate highway, I-80, twenty miles north of Montezuma. There is no longer a railroad connection of any kind: the tracks have long been torn up, and the depot is no more.

  One final reminder of the many legacies of Thomas MacDonald came to me recently when I was driving through the Yukon, in far northwestern Canada, and was stopped for speeding. I was heading north on the Alaska Highway—a 1,700-mile international, mostly paved, but still extreme road between Dawson’s Creek, British Columbia; and Delta Junction, Alaska. I was tooling along, minding my own business. I had Lake Teslin to my left, spruce forests to my right, and what seemed an empty hundred lonely miles of gravel road ahead of me—when suddenly, out of nowhere, the scene was filled with more flashing blue lights and sirens than the New Jersey Turnpike. A police cruiser was pulling me over. I was busted. In the Yukon.

  It turned out to be a patrolman from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a Mountie. He strode over, adjusted his big Mountie hat, and struck an imposing attitude. He was all smiles. He glanced at the backseat, checked my New York license plate. “Don’t see many Land Rovers in these parts,” he observed by way of introduction, and then: “Welcome to Yukon Road Safety Week! You were doing one hundred twenty-five in a ninety zone. You were speeding. Radar said so.”

  He was talking in the metric system, of course. I had been doing eighty miles per hour in a fifty-five zone. “But even so,” I said, “there’s nothing to hit.” No people, no cars, no towns, no houses, nothing.

  “A moose,” returned the Mountie. “If you hit a moose at a hundred twenty-five, you’d be in pretty poor shape.” He then explained that a Yukon Road Safety Week ticket—the only one he had given so far—was for much less than the price of a modest lunch; it wouldn’t go on my record back home, the insurance company would never know, and here was an 800 number to call once I got to Whitehorse, a day’s more driving ahead. So far as tickets go, it could scarcely have been a more pleasant experience.

  And when I called the number, the lady who answered sounded as if she was quite well on in years and was doing her knitting. “Have you been a naughty boy?” she asked, and when I allowed that I sort of had, she asked me for the ticket number, the credit card number, and then announced that I was free to go. Except, she asked—who had given me the ticket? I squinted at the handwriting. Sergeant R. Smith, I read out to her. “Oh how wonderful!” she exclaimed. “Rolly Smith himself? Knew him when he was a little boy. Isn’t he an absolute sweetheart?”

  The Alaska Highway was built in 1942. It took two teams of US Army soldiers just six months, one team working up from mile zero in the Canadian south, the other moving down from across the US border in Alaska in the north. They met at a place now called Contact Creek, six hundred miles from anywhere. They began work in May, the road was open in October, the public got to use it in 1948, and it has never closed since. An American road passing through a foreign country—much like the Manchurian Railway, built by the Japanese but passing through China.

  And the father of the Alaska Highway, the man who back in the 1920s dreamed of one day creating something tangible that would link Alaska to the forty-eight states, was Thomas Harris MacDonald. So far as the corps d’elite of men who united the states is concerned, MacDonald can fairly be said to be one of the very few who lured number forty-nine into a physical connection with the rest of the Union. That makes it even more remarkable that he has been so widely forgotten, overlooked, and dismissed in just about all the places he managed to bring together.

  AND THEN WE LOOKED UP

  It was the second Tuesday in September 2001, and I was climbing up the Sierra Nevada, heading for New York, breasting the Donner Pass. It was the most beautiful of days—at more than a mile above sea level, the few deciduous trees that stood beside the Interstate were already starting to display the purples, golds, and reds of their autumn exultation. The weather was perfect, cool and crisp, the air like champagne. The sun was low behind me, and the sky ahead was the palest of blues and perfectly, perfectly clear.

  Clear and quite empty. Some birds were wheeling and soaring above the trees, but apart from them, nothing. I think I would have noticed, even if I hadn’t known the reason. Normally there were at least a few contrails lacing the sky—a delicate tracery of die-straight white lines, usually in pairs, showing where a high plane had gone past, most likely preparing for its landing in San Francisco, a couple of hundred miles behind me.

  The smaller, more local aircraft, those running between places like Reno and Sacramento, say, would not be flying high enough to leave a trace, though the planes themselves would be seen glinting in the sun. But the big transcontinental jets would still be climbing, heading east as I was, or else going west, their captains spooling back their engines, starting their deliberate loss of altitude, heading for the comforting arms of the glide paths into Oakland or San Francisco. They were the ones that would usually leave behind these strange cloud signatures, either because of the water in their engine exhausts or because their wings would alter the physics of the thin air six miles high and turn its suspended water vapor into ice crystals.

  But there were no glints in the sky this Tuesday afternoon, no contrails visible whatsoever. There had not been any seen over California or Nevada or Utah, or indeed over anywhere in the entire United States or in the skies over Canada (in Mexico matters remained unaltered) for at least the previous ten hours. It was a noticeable lack, a visible emptiness, a strange hollowness in a usually differentiated sky. And it had happened because a man named Ben S
liney, an experienced air traffic controller who by chance happened to be on his first day in the chair of national operation manager in the country’s air traffic control center in the Virginia suburbs, had issued a nearly unprecedented order.

  The banks of monitors before him had told an awful story. The nation was under attack and in chaos. The president was on the run. The vice president was hidden underground. The Cabinet was in emergency session.

  Such of the world as was awake was stalled in horror; in much of the world that was asleep, millions were being shaken into horrified consciousness. Because of what had already occurred in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania, every one of the aircraft crossing America’s skies at that moment was to be regarded as a potential flying bomb, a weapon of vast power that could be unleashed at any of a score of targets. The Golden Gate Bridge. Fort Knox. An atomic power station—or all sixty-five of them. A crowded high school. Harvard. A biological weapons lab. The United States Capitol. The White House.

  At 9:45 a.m. East Coast time, Mr. Sliney had issued, in direct response to the gathering threat, an order of formidable implications. He had already forbidden any aircraft to take off from any airport anywhere under his vast national jurisdiction. He had already closed the Atlantic and Pacific approaches to the United States, and planes were already turning around high over the oceans, returning to where they started, or diverting to some safe haven nearby.

  But now at 9:45, Ben Sliney instructed that word of a strange and seldom heard procedure—SCATANA—be broadcast to every one of almost five thousand commercial aircraft that were in the air. “This is not a drill!” was then broadcast immediately afterward, many times, for emphasis. The announcement was a formal, legally and militarily enforceable order for which all aircraft officers were in theory well prepared. It was an order made under the terms of the regulation for which it was the acronym—the plan for the Security Control of Air Traffic and Air Navigation Aids—and it required all aircraft then in flight to land immediately at the airport closest to where they happened to be.

  It was obeyed, masterfully. Every pilot appeared to cooperate; none of significance appeared to balk. And as one could then see from the monitor screens showing the aircraft images bleeding away, second by second, the icons of their presence seeming to evaporate like spray on a hot plate, it was effective, in double-quick time. By 11:20, an hour and thirty-five minutes later, every plane was safely down, somewhere, on North American ground. Airport aprons were crowded. Passengers bound for Oregon fetched up in Oklahoma; others, wanting to reach New York, found themselves in the cornfields of Nebraska. Most famously of all, thousands were marooned in Gander in Newfoundland and were made more welcome and at their heart’s ease than they could have ever imagined. Millions were inconvenienced.

  But the intent had been achieved. The American skies were empty. A few fighter jets patrolled. A small number of prisoners and deportees were flown in planes that had been given brief waivers. Some organs due for transplant were allowed to be flown, as well as vitally needed medicines. But otherwise America’s skies were quiet. And my portion of the deep blue sky, the wheeling and soaring birds aside, was as empty as anywhere between the sand dunes of California and the cliffs of Maine.

  The tragedy of that September day briefly united the hearts and minds and souls of most Americans, and yet it did so at a moment when, oddly, the threads of cross-country jet routes that had for so long bound the nation together physically had been so abruptly sundered. It remains a supreme moment of double irony that the machine that had done so much to bond the nation into one had been employed by an enemy to try to do the opposite.

  The jets started flying again three days later, as the country did its best to resume its life, now so utterly changed. The jets that are taken so much for granted these days—often cursed, indeed, so routinely unpleasant has the business of long-haul flying become—are the legatees of one lonely journey that was taken in the winter of 1911. It was a journey made by air from New York to California just eight short years after the aircraft had been invented on an American beach and ninety years before this magical invention was first used as a weapon on American soil.

  An American had tried to cross his country by air, for a $50,000 wager. He lost the wager but succeeded in crossing the country; then, shortly afterward, he managed to get himself killed. He made history, and like so many of those who helped to knit the nation together, he has almost wholly passed from the scene.

  His name was Calbraith Perry Rodgers. Although throughout his brief life he was a flamboyant, cigar-chomping showman and in no sense the sort of fellow who would ever wish to become an American civil servant, in one respect he was very much like the sobersided traffic controller in Virginia, Ben Sliney: both were men entirely new to their tasks.

  The day that Ben Sliney made his decision to close American airspace in September 2001 was his first day on the job. When Cal Rodgers took off on the adventure that essentially first opened up that same American airspace in September 1911, he had only just learned to fly. He had taken his first and only lesson in June, a ninety-minute session given to him by no less than Orville Wright himself. He had been given a flying license, the forty-ninth ever issued; his brother flew for the US Navy and had an earlier one. Cal had taken part in an aviation meet in Chicago and had won third prize for staying aloft for the longest time. But despite that small victory, he had flown for a total of less than sixty hours. He was a beginner. Both men, in more ways than one, were pioneers.

  THE TWELVE-WEEK CROSSING

  Philip Danforth Armour, the nineteenth-century butcher-baron who famously remarked that he did not love money so much as the acquisition of it, spent a lifetime trying to prize everything it was possible to sell out of every kind of customarily edible animal in America. He was a meat packer, founder of Armour & Company, which for a while was the nation’s biggest food and food products maker. He was as rich as Croesus, thanks in part to his early hunch that Chicago (because of its growing nexus of railway lines) would in time beat out Cincinnati as the world center for butchering, preparing, and preserving meat and rendering fat.

  He loved to peddle meat, but he was also a great early believer in diversification. Armour & Company did not simply pack beef, pork, mutton, lamb, and veal and send it onward in Armour-invented refrigerated railcars to the grocery stores of the nation. The firm also traded in glue, fertilizer, margarine, lard, soap, gelatin, isinglass, buttons of horn, hairbrushes of bone and hog bristle, and various chemical by-products that went into the making of pharmaceuticals. Philip Armour is said to have liked poking around in the sewers close to his South Side packing plants, eager to see if there were any animal parts being washed away that might have a potential commercial value.

  Philip Armour died in 1901, two of his sons continuing to run the business. In their eagerness as ingenues, they may have gone too far. In 1910 the company, diversifying rather further than normal from hoof and horn, began selling a soft drink. It was a lurid pink syrup, supposedly made out of grape juice, carbonated water, and a slew of secret ingredients. Because it was a sort of aerated nonalcoholic wine, it was called Vin Fiz. It was best drunk cold or, in the opinion of many, not at all. It was wildly unpopular. It was said by some consumers to have a decidedly laxative effect, and others, presumably competitors, said it tasted “like a combination of river sludge and horse slop.” But J. Ogden Armour, the older son and company president, was no slouch and was eager to sell whatever his firm made as widely as possible, so in the best American tradition, he looked for inventive ways to market this otherwise unmarketable product. It was then that he heard of Cal Rodgers and his plan to try to fly across the entire United States, and the company promptly hatched a plan to bring the name Vin Fiz to the tongues of the nation.

  The Armour people decided that Vin Fiz would sponsor Rodgers, in every imaginable way. They would name his plane. They would festoon it with advertising signs. The plane would carry an oversize bottle of the stuff
between the wheels. They would christen the craft with a bottle that would be broken (carefully, by a pretty girl) over the fuselage. They would provide Rodgers with a railway train, also festooned with advertising slogans, to trundle beneath his flight path carrying every spare part he might ever need. The firm would also pay him. A rate was set: $5 for every cross-country mile he managed to fly east of the Mississippi, where Vin Fiz sales were more brisk than elsewhere, and four dollars a mile over the unpopulated west, where the drink had yet to catch on (and, in fact, never would).

  William Randolph Hearst, in the name of his morning daily newspaper the New York American, had offered a prize* of $50,000 to the first flier to cross the United States, between New York and Pasadena, going either way, within thirty days. Many accepted the challenge; three men eventually set out. The first was a race-car driver, heading west; the second a jockey, heading east from the California coast. Neither of them made it; their engines were too wanting in power, their aircraft were too fragile, their navigation was too poor, their energy too easily sapped.

  And then came Calbraith Rodgers in the Vin Fiz, the third and only other birdman, as fliers were often called back then, to enter the contest. His plan was to leave Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, near Coney Island, at dawn on September 17, 1911, and head west for some three thousand unnavigated miles. Because Hearst’s offer was due to expire exactly one year after he first made it, on October 31, Rodgers had just forty-three days to complete the entire trip. If he managed to reach Pasadena by Halloween, he would not only pocket a much needed $50,000 but would also earn an extra $20,000 from the Armour Company.

  In the end, he failed. He made it to Pasadena nineteen days too late to claim the money. He pressed on, however, and dipped his wheels in the water at Long Beach, thereby becoming the first person ever to fly from one coast of America to the other, taking a total of twelve weeks to do so. But contest failure or not, his first-ever journey turned out to be so rich with colorful misfortune and gay amusement, and he himself so jolly and good-tempered through it all, that he accreted a folk-hero reputation that grew steadily as he went. By the time he was halfway across the country, he was known to everyone—as was Vin Fiz, just as the Armour brothers had wanted. At the end of 1911, Cal Rodgers—tall, half deaf, impeccably dressed, ebullient, broadly smiling, and interminably brave—had become the best-known, most celebrated man in America.