Who Knows the Way?

In 1909 roads across the United States from New York to Seattle were impassable or unknown. In response, the organizers of the Ocean-to-Ocean Automobile Contest hired a special car to find the way. Called the Pathfinder, the vehicle selected for the run was the very same Thomas Flyer that won the famous New York to Paris race of 1908, and L.W. Redington, the person in charge of the car, had actually taken part in it.

The 1965 movie The Great Race spoofed the 1908 event even pretending that the vehicles crossed the Bering Sea on cakes of floating ice. Weird as that may seem, the race’s organizers really planned to drive cars to Alaska (the first real road was built by the U.S. Army during World War II) and across the frozen Bering Sea in winter. When those plans were scrapped, the race detoured to San Francisco where ships carried the cars up the Inland Waterway to Valdez and then back to Seattle where they were reshipped to Japan on their way to Paris.

Enormous hoopla surrounded that race wherever it went, and everyone in Seattle would have been aware of the cars’ arrival from Alaska and their departure to Japan. It is likely then that the organizers of the A-Y-P and the Seattle Automobile Club were inspired by the 1908 event to arrange their own cross-country contest to publicize the A-Y-P.

The Pathfinder’s trip was not easy. The Thomas left New York on March 20, 1909 and took two months to get to Seattle. The arduous endeavor must have certainly discouraged entries in the contest that began only a few weeks later.

The Pathfinder's penultimate leg on the cross country trip was actually completed on a train. Snow blocked the roads at Snoqualmie Pass, so the car crossed the pass from Easton to Ravendale on the Northern Pacific railroad. It rode from Ravendale into Kent under its own power where it was met by a delegation of vehicles from the Seattle Automobile Club that accompanied it into town.

The Seattle Daily Times reported on May 18 that, “The difficulty in getting over Snoqualmie Pass is only one of many the pathfinder has encountered on its 4,000-mile transcontinental route never before traversed. The car is in charge of L. W. Redington, who represents a magazine and The New York Herald. George Miller is the driver, J. S. Ely the photographer and Clarence Eaton the mechanic.”

The next day on May 19th  A-Y-P leaders and the members of the Seattle Automobile Club hosted the car’s crew at a luncheon at the Washington Hotel.   One of the many new hostels constructed in anticipation of the exposition, the building still stands in all its white brick glory at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and Virginia Street. 

Little did anyone think that there would still be snow at Snoqualmie a month later and well after the June 1 opening of the A-Y-P.