In 1919 a young Englishman bought a second-hand Henderson in New York and rode it to the Pacific, across an America that had almost no roads worth the name.
Charles Kenilworth Shepherd came out of the Royal Flying Corps looking for something to do with himself. He named the machine Lizzie, pointed it west, and spent the summer crossing the continent by way of the Alleghenies, the Dixie Highway, the Santa Fe Trail, the Royal Gorge, New Mexico, the Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon, and the Mojave Desert. Across America by Motor-Cycle is the account he published in 1922.
Shepherd is dry, self-deprecating, and very funny about punctures, mud, speed traps, and hotel keepers, and beneath the comedy the book is a clear-eyed snapshot of a country at the moment the motor age arrived and the highways had not yet caught up. It has been a favourite among motor cycle travellers ever since, and it stands up as a fine piece of early adventure writing in its own right.
This edition features:
- The complete text of Shepherd's transcontinental ride from New York to San Francisco
- Twenty-one chapters following the route by way of the Dixie Highway and the Santa Fe Trail
- First-hand descriptions of the Royal Gorge, the Grand Canyon, and the crossing of the Mojave Desert
- A candid portrait of American roads, towns, and hospitality in the years after the First World War
- Essential reading for motor cycle travellers and enthusiasts of early road adventure