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From Off the Road Database
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<p>Mr. Winton sent me to hunt a telegraph station. Walked east for about a mile until I could look up the mountain side and see the railroad snow sheds with some sort of a station in an opening. I climbed up through the snow, over fallen trees, broke passage through tangled bushes, and finally came upon a surprised operator, who asked what the trouble was. It was a little telegraph station for railroad service only, but the dispatcher took my messages and repeated them to the Gap, from which point they were sent, one to the Winton factory at Cleveland, asking for duplicate of part damaged, and another to L. S. Keeley, of Emigrant Gap, to come for us and our effects and take us back to the Gap, where we would wait for the repair parts. The machine was left alone in the mountain wilderness.
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<p>To those who are interested in knowing what was met and mastered during the days we were out from San Francisco; to those who wish to learn some facts about automobiling in a section of this country where all kinds of climate and every condition of road may be encountered in a single day, the experiences of the short trip will satisfy.
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<p>Instead of running the thirty-two miles, we clipped off forty-four between Oakland and Port Costa as a consequence of mistaking the road to San Pablo and going around by way of Martinez. Reached Port Costa too late for the No. 4 trip and had to wait until 11:17 A.M., when the transcontinental express (The Overland Limited) was ferried over.
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<p>Pull out block and tackle, wade around in the mud, get soaked to the skin and chilled from the effects of the deluge, make fastenings to the fence or telephone post and pull. Pull hard, dig your heels into the mud, and exert every effort at command. The machine moves, your feet slip and down in the mud you go full length. Repeat the dose and continue the operation until the machine is free from the ditch and again upon the road.
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<p>The storm that day caused us to speculate largely as to whether some of the many bolts of lightning hitting close around us would not strike the machine, demolish it completely, and incidentally put the operator and passenger out of business.
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<p>Tie ropes around the tires to prevent slipping. It may help some, but the measure is not entirely effective, for down in the bog you find yourself soon again and once more the block and tackle are brought into play. Slow work—not discouraging in the least, but a bit disagreeable, considering that it is the first day out and you are anxious to make a clever initial run.
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<p>Mill City was reached shortly before 5 o'clock. The Southern Pacific agent there said we could never get to Winnemucca (thirty miles to the east) that night because of the sand hills; the quicksand would bury us, he said. Another man who came up discussed the sand proposition with Mr. Winton and told him that there would be only one way in which "that there thing" could get through this thirty miles' stretch of quicksand. "How?" asked Mr. Winton. "Load her on a flat car and be pulled to Winnemucca."
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<p>Having been with Mr. Winton on this trip, I saw and experienced things the like of which automobile drivers in every civilized portion of the North American continent know not of, nor can an active imagination be brought to picture the terrible abuse the machine had to take, or the hardships its riders endured in forcing and fighting the way from San Francisco to that point in Nevada where the project was abandoned—where Mr. Winton had forced upon him the positive conviction that to put an automobile across the sand hills of the Nevada desert was an utter impossibility under existing conditions.
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<p>Our expedition left the government building in San Francisco and started across the bay for Oakland at 7:15 A.M., Monday, May 20. Left ferry foot of Broadway and got on road at 8 A.M. Turned off Broadway at San Pablo Avenue heading for Port Costa, distance thirty-two miles, hoping to reach there in time to catch the Sacramento River ferry to cross with Southern Pacific Express No. 4, which left Oakland at 8:01 with schedule to reach Port Costa at 9:15 A.M.
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<p>The motor never flinched, its power never lagged, it pulled us through those rocks and up the stiff grades. Emigrants westward bound in the early days would never trust horses or mules to convey their wagons safely to the bottom of one particularly stiff and rugged grade which Mr. Winton caused the motor to ascend. Those early day pathfinders would tie a rope to the rear axle of the wagon, take a turn around a tree and lower it gently.
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<p>On the following morning (May 24) at 7 o'clock, the repair had been completed. When darkness enveloped us that evening, the machine had covered seventeen miles. And such a day of battle. When it was over, we had reached and passed the summit of the high Sierras, the machine was hard and fast in a snow bank at the bottom of "Tunnel No. 6 hill," a treacherous descent, along which there was great peril every moment.
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<p>The officials of the Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company (the "company" owns the town and all there is in it) were particularly generous in bestowing upon us many courtesies and making the time we spent with them in Hobart Mills that of delightful remembrance.
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<p>Since the day in the snow banks, I have called it to Mr. Winton's mind. He says that the frightful experiences of that day, the abuse and hardship to which the machine was subjected, stay in his mind like the remembrance of an ugly nightmare. During the entire day, working up there among the clouds, we were cold and drenched. When it did not rain, it snowed or hailed.
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<p>That day we plunged through four unbridged streams, and in one place where a bad washout had occurred, it became necessary for us to build a bridge before the machine would “take the ditch.” We lugged railroad ties—many ties from a pile close to the railroad tracks some distance away. And they were heavier than five-pound boxes of chocolate, but we finally got enough and bumped the machine through and on its way.
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<p>Two miles of it were covered. Progress was slow, the sand became deeper and deeper as we progressed. At last the carriage stopped, the driving wheels sped on and cut deep into the bottomless sand. We used block and tackle, got the machine from its hole, and tried again. Same result. Tied more ropes around wheels with the hope that the corrugation would give them sufficient purchase in the sand. Result: wheels cut deeper in less time than before.
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<p>But a kind providence was with us during the storm, and the lightning kept off. Getting up the Wadsworth sand hill, we cut sage brush and kept piling it up in front of all four wheels to give them something to hold to and prevent slipping and burrowing in the soft sand until the machine was buried to the axles and it became necessary to use block, tackle, and shovels to pull up to the surface. Got to the top at last, but found no improvement in sand conditions. It was the hardest kind of work to make the slightest progress, but at 5:45 in the evening halted at Desert Station, a place inhabited by D. H. Gates, section boss, his wife, Train Dispatcher Howard (his office, cook house, etc., were all combined in a box car which had been set out on a short siding), and a dozen Japanese section hands.
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<p>There is nothing more to tell. We left Mill City that night and rode into Winnemucca on a freight train. The machine, aided by its own power, had been hauled from its bed by horses and returned to Mill City, where arrangements were made to load it for Cleveland. We left Winnemucca May 30, at 2:40 P.M. on a Southern Pacific passenger train, and arrived in Cleveland June 2, at 7:35 P.M.
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<p>We walked back to Summit Station and stayed at the hotel that night. Next morning, aided by some kindly disposed railroad men who could handle shovels most effectively, the machine was dislodged.
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<p>It was a condition never encountered by an automobilist in the history of the industry. We were in soft, shifting quicksand where power counted as nothing. We were face to face with a condition the like of which cannot be imagined—one must be in it, fight with it, be conquered by it, before a full and complete realization of what it actually is will dawn upon the mind.
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