Great God Pan

By 1920 automobiles were becoming commonplace. Nearly every family owned one. In 1898 there were 2,500 cars produced worldwide, by 1920 there were 2.4 million— a jump of nearly 1000 percent —the majority in the United States. As the automobile became more accessible, its purpose changed as well. No longer was it a solely utilitarian invention. It was becoming a status symbol—sleek and sexy—and more importantly for this discussion, a recreational tool. The number of cars mushroomed during this period, especially in the rapidly-growing coastal regions where the mild climate proved immensely compatible with automotive touring. In California especially, the car “was welcomed by a well-to-do, restless, pleasure-seeking population.”

If the 1920s and ‘30s were the era of the initial boom of automobile tourism, it was the ‘40s and ‘50s that saw this phenomenon exaggerated to heretofore unimaginable levels. Hundreds of thousands of hopeful job-seekers had flocked to the temperate Western states during W.W.II to snatch up relatively lucrative positions in the munitions plants, aerospace industry, and shipyards of California. When the war ended, few chose to return to their humdrum existence back at home. Similarly, servicemen returning from overseas recalled the beauty of the region when they had been stationed at West Coast training camps. They too chose to remain.

The result was a near doubling of California’s population between 1940 and 1950. This massive influx of new residents, fresh to the area and possessed of a disposable income, was curious to delve into this mysterious new land where rustic adobe walls dozed under shady pepper trees and sunburnt skeletons of Gold Rush boomtowns splintered in the sand. There was much to explore.

In the introduction to his 1976 leisure study, The Tourist, Dean MacCannell made the point that the uninformed tourist is looked down upon by more “experienced” travelers. All tourists, MacCannell insisted, desire a “deeper involvement with society and culture” than their fellow sightseers. They want to see things the way they “ought” to be seen. But where would our postwar travelers get their information?

Magazines and newspaper columnists catered to this demand. Book publishers were ready with books to provide information on the region, and radio hosts discussed the topic on syndicated shows. From 1966 to 1975 the Ward Ritchie Press of Pasadena, California published no less than thirty-three titles on exploring the West by automobile. Desert magazine, published from 1937 until its popularity fizzled in the 1980s, detailed lost mines, hauntingly beautiful canyons, and tales of ghost towns of days past. Civic-sponsored publications like the AAA’s Westways and the Arizona Highway Department’s Arizona Highways thrilled readers with their electrifying photographs and informative travel tips. From a radio station in Glendale, California, British expatriate Commander A.W. Scott described romantic settings waiting to be encountered just off the major highways.

But if reading and listening to yarns about the West before actually venturing out into it educated travelers and gave them a “one up” on their fellow sojourners, it also served another purpose. In the postwar period, the backroads of the West were still relatively remote and unpoliced. Areas of scenic beauty could and quickly did turn from wilderness retreats into overused tourist areas. In the desert ghost towns were dismantled, picked apart by souvenir-hunters. Nearly every vacation home within fifty miles of Bodie in Mono County has a display of purple bottles and broken china liberated from the ruins. Broken glass and plastic shotgun shells covered parking areas and vista points in the mountains. Pottery shards, petrified wood, and semi-precious gems and geodes disappeared from sites to find new homes displayed on fluorescent-lit bookshelves in suburban homes.


On the one hand this guidebook literature helped to give the land an importance, an incitement not to desecrate it. “During my early days of exploring the desert,” wrote former Desert magazine editor Choral Pepper, “I found that the public can be induced to respect. . . backcountry areas—not by rules and regimentation, but by education. And the education begins by making its history exciting and adventurous.” This technique is evident in the articles of Desert, which included historical anecdotes and wildlife and plant descriptions alongside off-road trail descriptions. Rallying against MacCannell’s uninformed tourist, Pepper continued, “When someone goes looking for a lost treasure. . . they are forced to thoroughly research the area. They aren’t just spinning wheels over meaningless, empty land.” Reading her books brought knowledge, and with this knowledge, Pepper argued, came a certain “respect” for the land.

But did informed travel create enough awareness to compensate for its environmental impact? It has been said that “the huge and aggressive business known collectively as travel is a more dangerous adversary than all the oil lumber, cattle, and mining interests combined.” The sheer number of tourists undoubtedly affected the sites they visited, whether or not they heeded Pepper’s advice. But their impact was dwarfed by those who saw profit in their mobility. The pavers of roads and the developers of housing communities, mega-resorts and shopping centers that began to line the highways gained the most from auto tourism. And though they may have been only catering to demand, it is arguably they who have done the most damage.

The frantic rate at which California grew gave little time for an appreciation of the land to develop in as it had in the Eastern states. In less than fifty years rural areas went from dusty wagon roads to two, three, and four-lane highways. “The rough Indian trail,” one writer complained, “has become. . . a cement-lined fjord” violently scooped out of the earth. The burgeoning population followed these asphalt arteries, settling along the way in “close together” subdivisions with fenced yards of green grass or “colored rock.” To service these new communities, developers erected shopping centers “squatting by the acre on land that a year before had supported an apricot orchard, a lemon grove, a field of winter lettuce, or a vineyard.” “The auto had created a spread-out, low-density population,” a population that relied on expansion.

While they may be guilty of buying in to these new developments, the reality is that the majority of postwar guidebook readers never visited the places they read about. Indeed it would be difficult for nature to compete with the Technicolor images of Indians in Arizona Highways and Desert’s imaginative legends of the prospectors and Spanish dons. “No reality can hope to compete with their purple eruptions,” wrote J.B. Priestly after examining tourist brochures in the 1930s. The real landscapes would only prove a disappointment. A far cry from these vivid photos and florid passages, “the outdoor West that some tourists found was little more than open spaces between gasoline stations.“

If the readers of the magazines and guidebooks did not always leave their living rooms to visit the places they read about, they certainly adopted the “lifestyle” advertised in their pages. They were influenced by this romantic vision of times past, enjoying “outdoor living” by participating in hearty outdoor barbecues clad in “Western-cut denim jeans.” Advertisements in the back of Desert magazine hawked western necessities like metal detectors, moccasins, and dune buggy kits, things the in-the-know Westerner couldn’t live without.
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Perhaps the best way to explore the effects of the guidebooks on the Western psyche is a closer examination of some of the prime movers in their development and of the motives behind their outpourings. Choral Pepper is a native of the West. Before embarking on her travel-writing career, she wrote two cookbooks and contributed a weekly celebrity column for an entertainment newspaper. By 1963 she had married the publisher of the Palm Desert-based Desert—the “magazine of the Southwest.” Desert had a fifty year stint on the newsstands, through the years alternating between roles as a poetic booster of the Western deserts and a forum for those who wish to explore them in vehicles. Desert’s inclusion of noted naturalist Edmund C. Jaeger as a regular contributor was a perfect example of the magazine’s continual flirtation with respectability.

From 1963 to 1968 Pepper both edited and contributed to Desert, as well as producing several books on her own. Adorned with titles like “Bewitched by Baja” and The Mysterious West, her books and articles were laden with interesting tidbits of “Western lore”—not to be confused with Western history —that were sure to garner the attention of armchair treasure hunters and adventure seekers. Her prose teetered between being hyper-descriptive and overly poetic. The “tranquil beauty” of the Colorado Desert is said to “provide spiritual surcease from worldly clutter” and present “a soliloquy of enchantment” to its visitors. Who could resist such an invitation?

Pepper’s devotion to the Western deserts and particularly Baja California was influenced by her introduction to Perry Mason-creator and outdoor bon-vivant Erle Stanley Gardner in the early 1960s. The prolific pulp fictionist was himself a continual traveler and self-described desert buff. In 1947 he had conducted a Jeep and blimp expedition into the then relatively unexplored Baja peninsula. The trip resulted in The Land of Shorter Shadows, the first of five books he would pen on the region. In 1963 he returned to Baja, inviting Pepper along as his guest. The group discovered painted caves from helicopters, drove jeeps to lost missions (the local Mexicans pointed them out), and “opened” new roads with their four-wheel drive vehicles.

In an open letter to a Baja travel website, Pepper claimed that though she has traveled the world, she finds Baja California—with its solitude and primitiveness—to be one of her favorite destinations. “There is a spiritual quality about Baja that seeps into the very soul of those who respond to it.”

But the Baja of 1963 or even 1983 is not the Baja one can experience today. The roads that Pepper and Gardner “opened” are now paved and heavily-used. Today there are massive American movie studios on the bluffs in between Rosarito Beach and Ensenada. Fourteen-story condominiums tower above the beach and man-made harbors are gouged out of the wetlands at La Salina. The highway is paved all the way to the tip. These modifications are for American tourists and the hotels and campgrounds are often full. The “improvements” are rapidly spreading south into remoter regions. The “worldly clutter” that Pepper had hoped to escape has followed her to the very destinations she sought out to escape it. Is this the legacy of the guidebooks? Or is it a result of the blossoming population of California? Do the stories attract the mobs? Or do the writers succeed because their audience is ever-expanding?

In 1941 a strange, rugged-looking vehicle was debuted by the U.S. Army. They called it the “Jeep.” Manufactured by the Willys-Overland company as a light transport for military personnel, the Jeep was nimble yet powerful. With the close of W.W.II, widespread manufacture of Jeeps slowed, but the public’s fascination with the vehicle did not. Sensing a hot market, Willys-Overland began production of the Civilian Jeep, or “CJ.” The CJ, along with cheap surplus military Jeeps, proved to be immensely popular among the sporting set and outdoor enthusiasts. In 1974 there were nearly two million licensed off-road vehicles registered in California alone. No longer did the end of the pavement signal the end of one’s vacation. Blacktop byways gave way to dirt roads and sandy tracks. The desert was at anyone’s doorstep.

As the Automobile Association of America formed on the highways to protect and advise motorists, groups of four-wheel-drive and dune buggy owners began banding together in clubs to swap travel tips and more importantly, set a code of ethics for off-road travel. “We feel most people who use the back country and sand dunes are good honest people and if they were told why they should not start trash dumps they would understand,” related Bill Bryan in his “Four Wheel Chatter” column in Desert magazine in 1968. Off-roaders were further admonished to refrain from “throwing cans out of vehicles and destroying old buildings.”

No-one was more worried about this type of activity than Russ Leadabrand. The recently-deceased journalist single-handedly wrote more about Southern California automobile travel than any other travel writer. As a staff editor for the AAA’s Westways magazine, he authored the column “Let’s Explore a Byway” in which he detailed little-known auto routes where one could take in the rich scenery and living history the region had to offer. These columns were collected and expanded into a series of Exploring California Byways guidebooks published by the Ward Ritchie Press in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A graduate of Columbia University and USC, Leadabrand’s prose was earnest and informed. His stories appeared in Sunset, Desert, and Arizona Highways magazines. Like most travel writers, he truly enjoyed his work. “He was never so happy. . . as when alone poking through the duff of California’s past at the end of some backcountry trail,” remembered a colleague at Westways.

But if Leadabrand was a promoter of getting out there and seeing things from the comfort of your own car or Jeep, he also firmly believed in taking one’s time and appreciating the scenic wonders to which he had directed you. He worried about the rush that people were in. Speedy automobile tourism was “of questionable value.” John Muir, Leadabrand pointed out, walked into the country, looked, stayed, communed with the big trees in a kind of reverent fascination: measuring, pacing, testing.” Shouldn’t modern travelers do the same? Leadabrand urged his readers to take their time as it was “an elixir for serenity.”

More than time issues, Leadabrand was concerned about the future of the land. In a five-part series for Westways in the mid-1970s, he pondered the future of recreation in California. “Many of the things that attracted the people here are being systematically destroyed,” he complained, noting the immense amount of development occurring in the outlying areas. The war and subsequent real estate boom had brought innumerable subdivisions of tract homes and shopping centers, obliterating areas of natural beauty and historical importance. So dire was the forecast in 1959 when Leadabrand’s column first appeared, that his editor figured it would only last a year before Leadabrand’s entire inventory of byways would be “replaced by a freeway or a major highway.” But did Leadabrand feel responsible for hastening such a process? It is doubtful. He seemed intent on urging his fellow travelers to explore these paths before they disappeared, and to hopefully influence them to protect what remained. He was, some claim, “the original tree-hugger, rock-kisser, [and] relic-seeker.”

“To really see and enjoy the country you should travel the highways by either automobile or motor coach,” declared Commander Alfred Willis Scott in 1946. A more dashing figure than Commander Scott would be difficult to invent. Royal Navy pilot, world traveler, and famed lecturer, Scott’s nationally syndicated “Romance of the Highways” radio show was broadcasted from his Pasadena, California studio every Sunday morning from 1935 to 1950.

In 1945 Scott published Romance of the Highways of California, a playful literary tour of California by automobile. Scott’s travels uncovered “many interesting stories. . . unusual places and Unreal Realities.” Like Pepper’s tales, however, many of Scott’s dialogues can be described as “lore’ rather than factual historic retellings. He describes restaurants where “bear steak” has not yet been removed from the menu, and how a central California peak was named Mt. St. Helena “three times, by three different people from three different nations at widely different times. . . for an entirely different reason.”

Scott suggested “visiting not only the well-known places, but making side-trips into the back country, where so much of the romance of the Golden State is to be found.” To experience the “real thing,” he believed, the traveler must extend himself outward from the resorts and main streets—the dwells of “the softy.” Like Leadabrand, Scott insisted on taking one’s time while exploring. “When you hear about something of interest off the beaten path, go and see it. Play your hunches and they will pay off in real dividends of pleasure and romance.” Maybe in 1945 one could play their hunch, but by the 1960s overcrowded campgrounds and traffic problems could seriously limit one’s flexibility.
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An article in a 1963 issue of Desert magazine detailed the problems already facing Los Angeles’ outlying areas. While Commander Scott had recommended the quiet towns at the base of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains as romantic destinations themselves—”all delightful, quaint, and very friendly”—twenty years later the hordes of sightseers were filing right through the city, intent on more exciting destinations in the deserts further east. Just before Thanksgiving, 1963, the final segment of U.S. Highway 99 linking metropolitan Los Angeles with the Low Desert region was completed, eliminating the paralyzing crush of travel trailers and cars through downtown Redlands. The $16 million, six-lane addition, Desert editors pointed out, “brings the desert resort areas around Palm Springs and Twentynine Palms 10 minutes closer to downtown.” The editors also reported that at the close of that weekend, traffic was at a virtual standstill.” This sort of underestimation was not uncommon. One freeway, built in 1949, had already exceeded its 1970 predicted usage by 1954. Highways and freeway extensions were “burdened to capacity almost as soon as they are opened.” Rural byways were and still are constantly being widened to cope with the multitudes of drivers. If it can be said that “transportation was indispensable to the growth of tourism” then the reverse can be true as well.

There is no doubt that the guidebooks, magazines, and radio programs played a part in burying the rural West, shoveling dirt into a rapidly-filling hole. “No one can ever calculate with exactness the tens of thousands of permanent residents who were ‘lured’ to Los Angeles by the praise of the region.” By 1910 Los Angeles recorded a “floating population” of over 20,000; with these numbers undoubtedly growing in proportion to the region’s expanding permanent population. But it would be irresponsible to place the blame of roadside blight, overused tourist destinations and crowded subdivisions on the guidebook writers. There are too many other factors involved. It was the automobile that has truly altered the landscape; the automobile that “opened up adjacent communities to residence, commuting, and visiting” and eventually over-development; the automobile that “brought [us] into the wilderness [and] brought [us] out again in a hurry.”

What can be argued is the integral role the guidebooks played in informing travelers of what lay beyond the boundaries of their neighborhoods; of the little roads that “appeal to those of us who are interested in local history, in the trees and flowers that grow beside the road, and in the natural scene, the California that existed before the white man laid his heavy hand upon this fair land.” The postwar guidebooks introduced all this and more to the new Westerners. All from the comfort of their own cars.

“May Your Tank Never Run Dry” was presented at the American Society of Environmental Historians (ASEH) conference in Denver, 2002.