A Route 66 Companion

By David King Dunaway and Michael Wallis

A literary history of America’s most storied highway, featuring work from Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, John Steinback, Sylvia Plath, and more.

Even before there was a road, there was a route. Buffalo trails, Indian paths, the old Santa Fe trace—all led across the Great Plains and the western mountains to the golden oasis of California. America’s insatiable westering urge culminated in Route 66, the highway that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. Opened in 1926, Route 66 became the quintessential American road. It offered the chance for freedom and a better life, whether you were down-and-out Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl in the 1930s or cool guys cruising in a Corvette in the 1960s. Even though the interstates long ago turned Route 66 into a by lane, it still draws travelers from around the world who long to experience the freedom of the open road.

A Route 66 Companion gathers fiction, poetry, memoir, and oral history to present a literary historical portrait of America’s most storied highway. From accounts of pioneering trips across the western plains to a sci-fi fantasy of traveling Route 66 in a rocket, here are stories that explore the mystique of the open road, told by master storytellers ranging from Washington Irving to Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Leslie Marmon Silko, and John Steinbeck. Interspersed among them are reminiscences that, for the first time, honor the varied cultures—Native American, Mexican American, and African American, as well as Anglo—whose experiences run through the Route 66 story like the stripe down the highway. So put the top down, set the cruise control, and “make that California trip” with A Route 66 Companion.

“Route 66 has a long and interesting history, and Dunaway . . . has done a fantastic job selecting works of literature about ‘America’s Main Street’ to tell its dynamic story, supplemented by the editor’s own invaluable commentary. . . . [An]all-around remarkable anthology.” —Publishers Weekly

“A Route 66 Companion is a great read and should find its way to the hands of any armchair traveler or lover of the history of the American West.” —Oral History Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9780292742673

Michael Wallis

Michael Wallis is an award-winning historian of the Old West and author of Route 66: The Mother Road and several other books, and the co-author of Mankiller: A Chief and Her People. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Sante Fe, New Mexico.

Book preview

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RAILROADS AND THE PREHISTORY OF ROUTE 66

Three ways of transit along a corridor that would be Route 66.

BUFFALO HUNTING ON ROUTE 66

DAVE EDMUNDS

– 1840s –

Long before Route 66 was a pretty song or a television series or a way to sell toothpick holders, it was a series of paths, created first by animal crossings and then by the native settlers who followed them. Perhaps the oldest settlement in the Midwest that influenced Route 66 was Cahokia in East St. Louis, near the Mississippi River. Trails radiated out from Cahokia, the largest pre-Columbian settlement in the Midwest, to Ft. Smith and its wagon road, and an early east-west transit emerged.

In a continent bounded by north-south roads, the Canadian River runs east-west, its forks and dry riverbeds snaking their way across the plains. In the nineteenth century, tribes crossed the breaks and fords from the plains of eastern Oklahoma and Missouri to the West, foraging in the creekbeds for water, game, and shelter from the wind. It is here that the story of Route 66 begins, long before railroads drew a hard metal line across the landscape. Dave Edmunds, a Cherokee, is a historian whose compass points towards the public. Professor Edmunds teaches history at the University of Texas at Dallas and has served as the president of the American Society for Ethnohistory and the Western History Association; he is the author of ten volumes of history and more than a hundred articles. He appears as a commentator in television and radio documentaries; his words sit on a plaque at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, characterizing the statue The End of the Trail. For him, Route 66 is a classic transportation corridor best understood by following its origins.

As a route westward across the U.S., 66 will come down out of Chicago and then make this loop through Oklahoma City and then take off through the West. In the nineteenth century, living in Oklahoma, about where 66 runs now, would depend on geography. West of modern Oklahoma is an open rolling area, and so the native people living there would hunt primarily buffalo, and they were plains-oriented.

By the middle part of the nineteenth century, a lot of the game is gone from the eastern parts of Oklahoma. Moving out onto the Plains, you leave an area where your vistas are relatively enclosed by forest or hills. West of Oklahoma City all of a sudden the land begins to open up and roll, and you have cedars in the draws. The climate begins to change; it gets drier, vegetation is grass.

As you go out there, you get these great vistas. Off in the distance, you would see herds of buffalo several miles away with draws and ravines in between. You’re anticipating this great hunt.

I’m always taken in that movie Dances with Wolves when they finally come up over that rise, and there’s the buffalo herd and everybody goes for them. I always thought if a movie viewer’s adrenaline isn’t flowing at that time, it’s just never flowing. That’s what it must have been like, only more so, in reality: This is it. Here ARE the bison.

To be Kiowa or Cheyenne or Comanche in the 1840s or 1850s in Western Oklahoma was to be at the height of one’s power, and life was good. It won’t last long. Tragically, the whole way of life will be overwhelmed within a quarter of a century—the coming of the railroads and the Oklahoma land rush.

The buffalo hunters would be a group of thirty to forty people out hunting, sleeping in the evening and camped down along the river bottoms for protection from the wind. When one gets into the Panhandle, into western Oklahoma, wind blows in some direction most of the time. Wood is concentrated along the rivers, and the further west you go, the drier it gets, so having access to water and wood when you camp is where you’d stay.

The people would rise very early and have a meal early and then would be out hunting. You would split up as you traveled out looking for the buffalo herds. Once located, the scouts would come back and say, We’ve found them.

The hunters would gather and have an evening meal, and then people would smoke and they would tell stories from the past, talk about the events of the day. Stories are very, very important.

Trappers who’d once traded with Native American people for furs were by the 1850s and ’60s trading for buffalo hides. There was a great demand for buffalo hides as carriage blankets and sleigh blankets. In the East, and even in Europe, it became very fashionable. If one wanted to show one’s affluence in Central Park in the 1870s on a drive on a cold December day, one snuggled up under a buffalo hide blanket as one went tootling around the park.

Way later, Route 66 injects an awful lot more people into the area who are non-Indians. It will make the travel across the area so much quicker. There’s a greater sense of hurry. Once there was a whole rhythm, and a ritual, and the camaraderie of the hunt and the parties going out. These are negated by railroads going west. It’s much different—the trek west, the going west—for people who are not Indian. For them, this is an area that has to be crossed and as soon as possible to get someplace where they really want to go. Whereas the crossing of the area itself was for Indian people very much part of the process.

In Oklahoma, tribal people who lived in the region at the time were very much against the railroads going through their land, because they knew that the railroads would transform the nations markedly—because they became avenues of penetration for non-Indian people coming through. So, the railroads become areas where intruders will settle. They’ll become the death knell of the Indian nations in the period after the Civil War, as they are forced then to open up corridors across their lands for these railroads, and they opposed them very much.

The Five Civilized Tribes wrote petitions to Congress. It was a very legalistic sort of opposition because they realized that armed opposition wasn’t going to work. So they argued that this would be an infringement upon their sovereignty.

Later, Indians, like other Oklahomans in the Dust Bowl, took off west along Route 66, toward that golden mecca of economic opportunity that was California. And that’s why a lot of Indian people then ended up in the central valley of California, because they, like other Okies, were agricultural workers.

A TOUR ON THE PRAIRIES

WASHINGTON IRVING

– 1832 –

Route 66 is more than just a span of years and concrete, says Michael Wallis, prominent author of books on the West. "It’s what happened there before we connected the dots and put this road together in 1926. That’s very, very important—to know it’s such an old path, before it was Route