_JPG.jpg)
THE ROUTES
A sampling of historic routes that may appear as episodes on
History on the Road's first season.
Mark Twain's Mississippi
"Twain’s works that emerge from the Mississippi like Huck Finn, 'Life on the Mississippi' and 'Tom Sawyer' draw upon a river valley culture that had only recently been hewn from its frontier past. Remarking on that past shortly before his death in 1910, Twain said that for the interest it sparks, past and present should 'constantly be brought face to face.' We couldn’t agree more. In fact – that’s what this series is all about. So, with that in mind – and considering how much it likes him, we feel pretty sure that Mark Twain would’ve liked History on the Road." -- From the episode's introduction
the Alamo at the request of John Wayne.
In 1957, a Brackettville, Texas, rancher began replicating ng
John Wayne. Wayne went on to make "The Alamo," a minor 1959
events, but redeemed itself with the Potemkin Alamo's authenticity. Any true replica
homage, and, indeed the Alamo's Texas re-creation conveys a better sense of its 1836 forebear than does the original mission, which, surrounded by far more than the Mexican army, stands in downtown San Antonio. There, the Alamo that Davy Crockett knew undergoes assault by contending political forces. By contrast, the now-abandoned Alamo that John Wayne knew sits quietly, buffeted by nothing more than the Santa Anna winds of time. Tattered and forlorn, the Brackettville Alamo provides a setting for the line in the film's theme song that claims "Sometimes between the setting and the rising of the sun / You will hear a ghostly bugle." Whether or not that bugle is sounding taps relies on rumors that the Bracketville Alamo's resurrection is at hand. Regardless, should these Alamos be the original, a relic or restoration, all will serve as stations of the cross on History on the Road's time-travelling Alamo trail.
classic that played it fast and loose with
incorporates a sense of
The Alamo Trail
Road to Antietam
"Driving the same Ford that Mitchum bent to his will in 'Thunder Road,' I began to feel less like a duck-tailed outlaw than a seriously spooked kid. With my hands tight on the its wheel, I was stiff with fear that any one of these blind curves might launch the Ford down a mountainside like a Marmon in an old gangster film. With the fear upon me, I again sought out Mitchum in my mind and began gunning toward Harpers Ferry as if trying to keep a curve or two ahead of the law. All this took place in the spring of 1962, nearly a century to the day after A.P. Hill charged at full gallop to save Lee's bacon at Antietam Creek. Now riding with both Mitchum and Hill, I furiously ran the length of smoky hollers, their pines and poplars silhouetted against a galleon moon."
-- From Alan Wellikoff's car blog Hoovering the Horizon, in which, as a runaway teen, he drove through the night "from the Bronx to the Battle of Antietam."
“I’ve got to get back to the land and set my soul free … “
In one of the most iconic episodes of the hippie era, Ken Kesey and his band
of Merry Pranksters traveled the country in a psychedelically-painted school bus, its rooftop sign proclaiming its destination as Furthur -- a place set beyond geography and consciousness, but well within the “krewe’s” Aquarian ethos. Faced with the need to document a Prankster journey on a more concrete level than those taking place during one of the group's "Acid Tests" (parties enlisting Kool-Aid-laced LSD in the cause of taking a communal acid trip), History on the Road will follow Kesey's furthur-wandering flower
-children from Chico, California, to Max Yasgur's Woodstock,
Merry Prankster Road Trip
New York, farm. This journey will occur a re-creation of the bus (the original's in the Smithsonian); while surviving writers, Hell's Angels, members of the Dead and others whom the Prankster krewe encountered will
serve as shotgun riders.
.jpg)
Sherman's March: With Atlanta in smoke and cinders, on September 2nd, 1864, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman turned his army toward Savannah, then Georgia’s largest city. Sherman’s legendary March to the Sea not only "made Georgia howl," but it ripped the soul out of the Confederacy, undermining the fledgling country's morale while reducing its materiel -- thereby hurting its desire to wage war right along with its ability to do so. Sherman’s march not only destroyed railroads to deny the Confederates food and other badly needed supplies, it so traumatized the South’s citizenry that, despite the passage of more than 150 years, a significant remnant of ill-will remains. Calling at seminal points along his army's route, History on the Road will explore this and other aspects of Sherman’s march as reflected by its related historic sites and present-day Americana.
Highway 61 Resurrected: The wellspring of much American music is southern -- and deeply so. Drawing sustenance from the Mississippi and rooted in the chants of sharecroppers and slaves -- blues, jazz, gospel, rasping folk ballads and even early rock branched out from a road that runs the length of the big river to New Orleans. You can drive it if you’ve a mind to -- in fact you have to drive it to convince yourself that despite calls from the sirens of its haunting past -- Highway 61 is no fable. What it is, rather, is a road, a stretch of secondary blacktop that twists through a thousand miles of country just as it has through generations of lore that 's come along since the Civil War. Steeped in a raucous folk culture, it's an unfettered, raw
Highway 61 Road Trip
and evolving museum in which the most exultant -- and arduous -- lives have been lived. On the highway south of Nashville, passing roadhouses where deals with the devil were struck on sultry nights, or coursing past cotton fields where the ghosts of slaves still seem to appear in gossamer wisps, History On The Road will square the lofty with the low and find magic in the mundane to show Highway 61 as it has not otherwise been seen.
Bonnie & Clyde Route. As our Host sits behind the wheel of the History on the Road classic convertible, scenes of the Midwest as it appeared during the 1930s unfold beyond the windshield. The sepia countryside is rich with the fruits of farm labor, and thrives amid the inventiveness, plain-spokeness, and gentle humor of the Yankee descendants who work it. In time, a full- color tableland of unadorned beauty appears. Here are roads that are marked by farm-stands and Kendall Gas-o-Lene stations by day -- and at night by farmhouses glowing like lanterns in the honeyed air. But another Midwest lies just around the bend, a land that ran through the sweep of time from Indian frontier to Depression-era Dustbowl. As such it well knew plunder, for as our Host explains,
barely more than a generation had passed between the time when the James and Dalton gangs where emptying the region’s banks to when, wielding Browning automatics in place of hogleg Colts, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow tore along its rural roads during the public-enemy era of the Thirties-- From History on the Road's original pitch.
Lee's Route to Gettysburg. Filming in my mind's eye, historian Soren Akerstrom and I spoke with a corncob-toking graybeard who looked like he’d fought at Chickamauga and a pretty hash-house cashier who added to the historic import of her Abe Lincoln Diner tee with a pair of earrings bearing Frida Kahlo’s severe visage. We also met a guide to one of the ghost tours who looked pretty cadaverous himself; hung out with a Hispanic youth dressed in black (nearly every Gettysburger seems a Civil War vet, a farmer or an arch-Goth) who was hoping for the new casino to come in — a huge controversy there ... Gettysburg and Walden are perhaps America's most sacred places, something that hit home in the early afternoon as we stopped amid the knolls where Custer’s cavalry surprised Stuart’s to ensure that the Confederates mounting Pickett's charge would have no reinforcements. Had this not happened, some of us might be humming along to "Dixie" when the local TV station signs off at night. Lee's failure at Gettysburg is something unsurpassed in pathos — and you
feel that keenly. The old man inaugurated the Lost Cause when he turned to the remnant of his army to say their failure there was all his fault ... We somberly walked the avenue lining that side of the battleground when a farmhouse, privately owned and dating to the battle, presented itself. Waving to people there at their barbeque, we received an invitation to join them, were handed a couple of Yuenglings, and regaled with handed-down tales of the battle, none of which are generally known. Later, after passing below the church steeple that both Lee and Meade alternatively used as a look-out, we wound up drinking again at the brewery abutting what is — in effect — Lee's-Headquarters-and-Colonial-Motel while, on the juke box, Elvis mournfully sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic. -- From History on the Road's original pitch.
The Trail of Tears. All but forced to leave their lands by fraudulent treaties, the Cherokee set out on their doleful trek to a place “west of Arkansas” in the years 1838 and 1839. Our Host and fellow travelers will take the History on the Road classic convertible along a path the tribe followed to their nuna hi duna hili hi, or "place where the people cried." The Trail of Tears was actually a web of four main routes. Of these, History On The Road will likely combine the established "Trail of Tears Commemorative Auto Route" with the largely unmarked trail to its south taken by the Cherokee’s Benge band. It was the Benge that departed Ft. Payne, Alabama on a trek that took them through Tennessee and Kentucky before they crossed the Mississippi into Missouri. There, they followed "The Old Southwest Trail" from St. Louis to Texas, taking the road still known as the Jacksonport Road that President Jackson had created "to remove Indians to the west.” -- From History on the Road's original pitch.
The Riders
The Praise
The Principals
© Alan Wellikoff All Rights Reserved
History on the Road has been described as a history-themed Route 66, only with the likes of P.J. O'Rourke and Ken Burns as its road-going Buzz and Tod. While that’s not bad, it goes only so far. That's because rather than park their Stingray in some dusty cow-town to put in time at the feedlot, it'll be the job of History on the Road's peripatetic pair to find the American past as it exists – glori-ously, crassly, movingly and often unseen – in the American present.
How we do this is something reserved for those in-terested in becoming the show's fortunate under-writers. For now, suffice to say that beyond our series' battlefields, classic cars, diners, dives, drive-ins, festivals, fun parks, museums and motels; past its historians, celebrities, eyewitnesses, reenactors, cowboy poets, Indian activists, neo-Confederates, gold miners, blues musicians and descendants of soldiers, slaves and historic figures -- lies a greater goal: the viewer's realization that the past isn't irredeemably lost beyond the veil of time, but lives on, surprisingly near, in the here-and-now.