I’ve been anticipating this book for a few years now. Henry was probably well into his research for the book when he gave a presentation at the 2017 Lincoln Highway Association conference on trekkers who had incorporated all or part of the highway in their travels. The Lincoln Highway and other trails aimed at automobiles appeared in the latter half of the golden age of trekking, which Trekking Across America focuses on. Henry identifies this as roughly 1890 to 1930. Merriam-Webster defines a trek as “an arduous journey” and during that period just about any long-distance journey that did not involve the railroad was unquestionably arduous. I ordered the book as soon as I became aware of its publication but my own non-arduous travels and the winter holidays kept me from reading and reviewing it until now.

There are a couple of motorcycle-powered treks among those that Henry documents as well as a few powered by beasts of burden that include a bull, some goats, and a team of sled dogs from Alaska. But the vast majority were powered by the trekkers themselves and typically by just walking. “Pedestrian mania” was an actual thing in the latter part of the nineteenth century with all sorts of walking competitions and exhibitions taking place and being reported on by newspapers and magazines.

A fellow named Edward Weston is credited with getting the walking craze started by walking from Boston to Washington to satisfy a bet made on the wrong guy (Stephen Douglas) in the 1860 presidential election. Apparently, Weston decided that he really liked walking and was quite good at it. He proceeded to set records and win awards into his seventies. In some circles, the rampant pedestrianism of the time was referred to as Westonianism.

Henry is a longtime postcard collector and tells how he first discovered trekking through a misfiled postcard of two boys attempting to skate from New York to San Francisco in 1910. Trekking and postcard collecting make a very good match for each other. Weston financed some of his travels by selling photos of himself, and most of those who came after did something similar. Some postcards are just about the only evidence of treks that did not get very far. Others are the entry to sources such as newspaper reports that flesh out the trek.

Postcards are also a rather natural way to provide a visual connection with a trek’s story. Henry divides these stories into five chapters based — not all that rigidly — on the reason for the trek. Following a chapter’s introduction are several segments featuring one or two specific treks with at least one related image. Postcards often provide those images. These two or three page standalone segments allow “Trekking Across America” to be read in small doses if desired.

Individual males were hardly the only ones undertaking these long arduous journeys. Buddies, siblings, newlyweds, whole families, and even a few lone women appear on these pages. Incidentally, little evidence is presented here that a trekking honeymoon will lead to marital bliss. The rules for some of the contests and challenges were also interesting. Virtually every trek involved some sort of time limit but rules about clothing, starting with little or no money, and working en route were also common. After the turn of the century, gimmicks such as the aforementioned skating or rolling a hoop might be involved. One fellow fiddled every step of the way as he walked from New York to Los Angeles and on to San Francisco.

Trekkers were certainly a diverse lot and even included some handicapped individuals such as a man with one leg, a man with one arm, and another with no arms. All three remind us of unpleasant facts about the past. The leg was lost by a four-year-old playing in a train yard. That possibly could happen today but it’s not very likely. The three arms were all lost in factory accidents. The worker who lost his left arm was nine. Both arms were lost by a worker just four years older, thirteen. The Child Labor provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act might have prevented both of those but it did not come along until 1938.

When I first opened Trekking Across America and scanned the table of contents, I noticed that the epilogue carried the title “When Highways Were Stages”. Although it seems really silly now, I connected that with the divisions or stages of a route followed by stagecoaches. On reaching the epilogue, it instantly became apparent that Henry was referring to Shakespearean stages and not Wells Fargo stages and it added a layer of insight for some aspects of the stories I had just read. The earliest trekkers, such as Edward Weston, were respected and celebrated. That changed when baseball overtook walking as the nation’s number-one spectator sport and suffered even more as the twentieth century overtook the nineteenth. Whereas most, if not all, of the prizes pursued by the first generation of professional pedestrians were legitimate, this became less and less the case. Evidence of this is in the frequent changes in prize amounts, completion deadlines, and other rules claimed by trekkers as they traveled.

But even as confidence in cover stories fell and the trekkers became sometimes viewed as freeloaders, they were still welcomed to towns along their routes, their postcards. were purchased, and their lectures attended. Because, Henry believes, they were a break from the routine and they were entertaining. In Trekking Across America, they still are.

Trekking Across America: An Up-Close Look at a Once-Popular Pastime, Lyell D. Henry Jr., University Of Iowa Press (October 30, 2024), 6 x 9 inches, 278 pages, ISBN 978-1609389796
Available through Amazon.