In 1913, an unlikely friendship blossomed between Henry Ford and famed naturalist John Burroughs. Their mutual interest in Ralph Waldo Emerson led them to set out in one of Ford's Model Ts to explore the Transcendentalist's New England, in the first of several road trips that would take Ford and Burroughs, together with an enthusiastic Thomas Edison, across America: to the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, the Adirondacks of New York, the Green Mountains of Vermont, and on a 1918 expedition through southern Appalachia.

Their travels influenced the way Ford, Edison, and Burroughs viewed the world, nudging their work in new directions through the onset of war in Europe and the outbreak of the 1918 influenza pandemic. InAmerican Journey, Wes Davis re-creates these landmark adventures, through which one of the great naturalists of the nineteenth century helped the men who invented the modern age reconnect with the natural world-and reimagine the world they were creating.