Ruts, Guts, & a Model T Truck: Cruising the West at 15 Miles Per Hour

In a trip to a dusty family attic, physicist R. Kent Crawford found buried in a photo album, a story of a Kansas family’s extraordinary trip through the American West. After harvest in 1922, Roy and Albina Crawford embarked on an adventure in which they designed and helped build an early-century Model T Ford truck recreation vehicle, sewed sturdy travelling clothing and took their children, Pauline and Clarence, out of school for what turned into a nearly yearlong trek. Their travels took them from their farm in Russell County Kansas, across the Rocky Mountains, through Wyoming, to Oregon and California and back through Arizona and New Mexico. On the trip, they took hundreds of photographs of national parks, farming operations, tourist attractions, and examples of the heightened industrial growth of the nation in a stunning portrait of western America in the 1920s.There were no expressways, no superhighways, no fast food franchises. They camped, fished, and sometimes made their own roads across an undeveloped expanse of western America. They carted art from the Native Americans on the Southwest reservations and petrified wood from Arizona across the desert to complete a remarkable year that could never be duplicated today. This is their story, amplified by over 200 photographs, as remembered by Pauline and Clarence and researched by Clarence’s son.