The Road Before Us
The motorcycles, riders, roads, films, and remarkable stories that shaped the culture of the open road.
Before the Ride, There Was the Road
Every time you thumb the starter, you are borrowing from people you will never meet. Someone built the machine. Someone else rode it farther than anyone thought sensible. Someone was told she couldn't, and went anyway. Someone stood on a salt flat at sixty-eight years old with a motorcycle older than most of the people watching.
This is where the archive begins. Not with a dry timeline, but with true stories of the riders, machines, roads, films, and places that turned a noisy invention into a culture. Read it in order, or jump to whatever calls to you. Either way, take the long way.
The Road, in Dates
The Machines
Where it all started, and how unlikely it was.
The Machine Nobody Meant to Build
The first motorcycle was never supposed to be a motorcycle.
In 1885, in a workshop behind a house in Cannstatt, near Stuttgart, Gottlieb Daimler and his engineer Wilhelm Maybach mounted a compact petrol engine in a wooden frame and added two small outrigger wheels to keep it from tipping over. They called it the Reitwagen, the "riding car." It made about half a horsepower and could barely outrun a determined cyclist.
Here is the twist. Daimler did not want a motorcycle. He was chasing a motor car, and the two-wheeler was a test bed for an engine that was not yet strong enough for anything bigger. By most accounts he never rode it himself. His teenage son Paul took it out on the road.
Steam-powered two-wheelers had appeared earlier, but they were a dead end. The Reitwagen earns its place as the first motorcycle because it did something genuinely new: it put an internal-combustion petrol engine into a single-track machine. Every bike you have ever admired, from a café racer to a Gold Wing, descends from an experiment that was really about something else.
Two Bicycle Racers and a Backyard Shed
Two American names. One rivalry that would last for generations.
In 1901, in Springfield, Massachusetts, two bicycle racers named George Hendee and Oscar Hedstrom began building a motorized bicycle. Their first prototype had a practical job: pacing bicycle races. It grew into the Indian, the oldest American motorcycle brand.
In Milwaukee, William S. Harley, who at twenty-one had drawn up plans for a small engine meant for a bicycle frame, was working alongside his boyhood friend Arthur Davidson, with Arthur's brother Walter joining in. Their first machine was underpowered. By all accounts it could not climb Milwaukee's modest hills without pedal help.
So they started over, with a bigger engine and a loop frame, and assembled the new prototype in a ten-by-fifteen-foot shed in the Davidson family backyard. By September 1904 it was racing at Milwaukee's State Fair Park. Harley-Davidson counts 1903 as its founding year.
Indian's original company ended in 1953, and the name has since been revived. Harley-Davidson has carried on from Milwaukee ever since. Two companies founded by people who loved speed and machinery, both born in the years when a motorcycle was still mostly a bicycle with ambition.
The Motorcycle Goes to War
Mud, sidecar machine guns, and messages that had to get through.
When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, motorcycles went with it. The U.S. Army used about twenty thousand of them, and both Indian and Harley-Davidson turned a large share of their production over to the war effort. Fitted with sidecars, they carried machine guns. Converted, they became ambulances with stretchers. Most often, they carried dispatches to places no telephone line could reach.
One of those dispatch riders, Corporal Roy Holtz, is credited as the first American to enter Germany after the Armistice, riding a Harley-Davidson. The story is told with small variations, but the common version has him getting lost, being held briefly by a German patrol, and then riding on once the fighting stopped.
The pattern repeated in the Second World War. By one count, U.S. forces used around ninety thousand motorcycles, nearly all of them Harley-Davidsons, while Canadian, Australian, and other Commonwealth forces relied on Indians. Motorcycles proved themselves tough, quick, and independent of rails and roads. Those are the same qualities that riders would later prize for very different reasons.
Across America
Before interstates and fuel stops at every exit, there were people who simply decided to cross the country.
The Man Who Crossed a Country With No Roads
George Wyman, and the ride that history almost forgot.
On May 16, 1903, a 26-year-old champion bicycle racer named George Wyman rolled out of San Francisco on a motorized bicycle rated at about one and a quarter horsepower. He had already pedaled around Australia. Now he intended to become the first person to cross the continent on a motor vehicle. He wore a three-piece wool suit, a tie, and a cap.
There was hardly any road to follow, so he followed the railroad. He rode the ties across the Nevada desert, threaded through dark wooden snow sheds in the Sierra Nevada, and lost days to sand, mud, and snow. Sometimes he pedaled to help the little engine over a grade. In Wyoming, a rancher hitched a team of horses to pull him out of thick mud.
By the end his machine was so worn out that he pedaled the final stretch, about 150 miles, into New York City. He arrived on July 6, 1903, roughly 3,800 miles and 50 days after leaving California, the first person to cross the United States on a motor vehicle.
Twenty days later, Horatio Nelson Jackson completed a crossing by automobile that had taken him 63 days, and the car took the headlines. Wyman was largely forgotten for decades. His hands were still bandaged when he attended the Brooklyn meeting that founded the Federation of American Motorcyclists. In 2015, a group of historians and riders formed the George A. Wyman Memorial Project to mark his route and put his name back on the map.
Cannon Ball
Erwin Baker offered manufacturers a simple deal: if he didn't break the record, he didn't get paid.
Eleven years after Wyman, an Indiana racer named Erwin G. Baker left San Diego on an Indian and pointed it at New York. The Federation of American Motorcyclists sanctioned the run. Baker sent nightly reports on his progress, and newspapers along the route tracked him. He later described the desert leg to Phoenix as one of the worst stretches of the trip.
On May 14, 1914, he rolled into New York after roughly 3,400 miles, in about eleven and a half days. By most accounts only a handful of those miles were paved, and dozens were ridden along railroad tracks. He beat the previous record, twenty days and nine hours, set in 1911, by nearly nine days, and he beat the automobile record too.
A New York reporter compared his unstoppable pace to the Cannonball Express train, and the nickname stuck for life. Baker went on to set well over a hundred driving records across the following decades. In 1971, fifty-seven years after his ride, a Car and Driver editor set out to honor him with a coast-to-coast dash by car, a run that grew into the legendary Cannonball Run.
The Sisters the Army Wouldn't Take
They rode to prove a point. Then they proved it.
Augusta and Adeline Van Buren, sisters from New York and descendants of President Martin Van Buren, believed America was headed into the First World War and that women could serve as military dispatch riders. So on July 4, 1916, they rode out of Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn on two Indian Powerplus motorcycles, bound for California.
The machines were heavy and had no front brake, and the roads were worse than the machines. They fought rainstorms, floods, and two weeks of mud. Miners rescued them after they got stuck at a remote Colorado mining camp. They were arrested several times, not for speeding but for wearing men's clothing. In Colorado they made it to the top of Pikes Peak, the first women to reach the summit on a motor vehicle. In the desert west of Salt Lake City their water ran low, and a passing prospector saved them.
They reached Los Angeles on September 8, 1916, and rode on to Tijuana for good measure. The year before, Effie Hotchkiss had crossed the country with her mother riding in a sidecar. The Van Burens were the first women to make the crossing on their own machines.
The Army turned down their applications. The leading motorcycling magazine of the day praised the bikes and called the journey a vacation. Today it is remembered as a landmark, four years before American women won the right to vote.
The Motorcycle Queen of Miami
Toss a penny on a map. Ride to wherever it lands.
Bessie Stringfield got her first motorcycle, an Indian Scout, as a teenager, and by nineteen she was riding alone across America. Her method for choosing a destination became famous: she would toss a penny onto a map and ride to wherever it landed. She called them her penny rides.
She rode through Jim Crow America, when many motels refused to rent her a room. She stayed with Black families when she could find them and slept on her motorcycle at filling stations when she couldn't. She paid her way by performing stunts at carnivals, where one favorite trick was riding while standing on the saddle. At least once, a driver in a pickup truck ran her off the road. She got back on and kept riding.
During the Second World War she served as a civilian motorcycle dispatch rider for the U.S. Army, riding her own blue Harley-Davidson and carrying documents between bases. She was the only woman in her unit. In the 1930s and 1940s she made eight solo trips across the United States, and over her lifetime she owned twenty-seven Harley-Davidsons.
After settling in Miami she worked as a nurse, founded the Iron Horse Motorcycle Club, and entered races without revealing she was a woman, winning, then removing her helmet, and sometimes being denied the prize money for it. She rode into her seventies and died in 1993. She has since been honored by the American Motorcyclist Association and the Motorcycle Hall of Fame.
Rebels & The Silver Screen
How Hollywood found the motorcycle, and how the motorcycle found its myth.
The Weekend That Built the Outlaw
A rally, a magazine photograph, and a movie that outgrew both.
On the Fourth of July weekend in 1947, thousands of riders converged on Hollister, California, for a motorcycle rally sanctioned by the American Motorcyclist Association. There was drinking, street racing, and some arrests. That was the reality.
The legend was bigger. On July 21, 1947, Life magazine ran a photograph of a man on a motorcycle surrounded by beer bottles, a picture widely believed to have been staged. It caused a sensation and helped brand motorcyclists in the public mind as lawless rebels. In 1951, Harper's Magazine published a short story inspired by the coverage, Frank Rooney's "The Cyclists' Raid."
In 1953, Hollywood turned it into The Wild One. Marlon Brando played the leather-jacketed gang leader Johnny, with Lee Marvin as his rival. Brando required in his contract that he ride his own Triumph in the film, and the bike on screen was a Triumph Thunderbird 6T. The picture unsettled authorities so much that British film censors kept it off screens there for years. It also made the black leather jacket the uniform of a generation, and Brando's Triumph reportedly boosted sales of that model.
Harley-Davidson's own archivist has said the company might not be here today without Hollister, Life's coverage, and Hollywood's embrace. It is a strange inheritance: the outlaw image was shaped as much by a magazine and a movie as by anything that happened in the street, and riders have been living with it ever since.
Captain America
The most famous motorcycle in movie history was built by two Los Angeles builders.
In Easy Rider, two riders named Wyatt and Billy, played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, who also directed, set out from Los Angeles for New Orleans in search of freedom. Fonda's Wyatt, nicknamed Captain America, rode a stars-and-stripes Harley-Davidson Panhead chopper.
That chopper was designed and built by Cliff Vaughs and Ben Hardy, two African-American builders from Watts, in Los Angeles, with design input from Fonda. Two identical Captain America bikes were made so that filming would not stop if one broke down. After production, one of them, along with Hopper's bikes, was stolen from a stuntman's home. The survivor, the bike used in the film's crash finale, was restored, and in 2014 it sold at auction for $1.35 million.
The film grossed about $60 million, was nominated for two Academy Awards, won a prize at Cannes for best first work, and has been preserved in the U.S. National Film Registry. Where The Wild One had made the rider look like a threat, Easy Rider made the open road look like a search.
Café Culture
How a roadside stop became the birthplace of a look, a sound, and a way of riding.
A Jukebox, a Coin, and the North Circular
The Ace Cafe, London.
The Ace Cafe opened in 1938 as a 24-hour roadside stop on London's brand-new North Circular Road, closer in spirit to an American truck stop than a shrine. German bombing destroyed the original building in 1940, and it was rebuilt in 1949.
In the early 1950s, post-war rationing had ended, young people had jobs and, for the first time, credit, and the British motorcycle industry was at its peak. Teenagers who wanted rock 'n' roll, music the BBC was not playing, found it on the Ace's jukebox. They became known as the Ton-Up Boys, after the goal of riding at a hundred miles an hour, and in the 1960s, the Rockers.
Out of that scene came a legend called record racing: drop a coin in the jukebox, race to a set point and back before the song ends. How often it truly happened is debated. One longtime regular later called the tales of crowds cheering along the roadside overblown. Whatever the truth, the story helped define an attitude.
It also helped define a machine. The café racer, stripped-down, low-barred, and lightweight, was built for speed and for showing off outside places like the Ace. By 1969, traffic had moved to the motorways and the British motorcycle industry had shrunk, and the Ace closed. A revival began in the 1990s. A reunion in 1994 drew as many as twelve thousand people, and the Ace reopened in 1997.
Road Legends
Riders whose journeys became folklore.
The World's Fastest Indian
He was sixty-eight. The motorcycle was forty-seven.
Burt Munro was a New Zealander from Invercargill who bought a 1920 Indian Scout in 1920 and spent roughly the next twenty years modifying it in his workshop. He made many parts himself, casting pistons and other components, and enlarged the engine well past its original size.
He set his first New Zealand speed record in 1938, and more followed, some on Invercargill's Oreti Beach. But the dream was Bonneville, the Utah salt flats. He made his first trip in 1962, and over ten visits he set three speed records recognized by the American Motorcyclist Association.
In August 1967, at age sixty-eight, on a machine that was forty-seven years old, he set an under-1,000 cc record at just over 183 miles per hour. In 2014, decades after his death, a calculation error was corrected and the official figure was revised to 184 mph. The record has never been beaten.
His story reached the world in 2005 with the film The World's Fastest Indian, starring Anthony Hopkins. But the lesson needs no film: one stubborn person, one old machine, and a great deal of patience can go faster than anyone expects.
Four Years Around the World
Ted Simon, and the book that sent a generation down the road.
On October 6, 1973, in pouring rain, a 42-year-old British journalist named Ted Simon left London on a 500 cc Triumph Tiger 100, bound for the world. Six months earlier, he had owned no motorcycle and did not even hold a license. His sponsor, The Sunday Times, felt that an Englishman's journey should be made on a British bike.
Over four years he rode more than sixty thousand miles through forty-five countries. Along the way came breakdowns, revolutions, a war, and a spell in prison. He was treated as a spy, a curiosity, and a welcome stranger, sometimes all in the same week.
The book he wrote about it, Jupiter's Travels, became a cult classic and one of the most influential motorcycle travel books ever written. Decades later, Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman set out from London to New York on their 2004 Long Way Round journey, and arranged to meet Simon in Mongolia along the way. In 2001, at around seventy, Simon set off again on a modified BMW R80GS, roughly retracing his original route, and finished three years later.
What's Next on The Road Before Us
This is the first chapter of a growing collection. Here is what's coming.
From the Archive
Historical motorcycles, manufacturers, riders, advertisements, photographs, and events.
Coming SoonAcross America
More extraordinary early cross-country journeys and the people who attempted them.
Coming SoonOn the Silver Screen
How Hollywood portrayed, and sometimes distorted, the motorcycle and the motorcycle rider.
Coming SoonRoad Legends
Famous routes, legendary riders, remarkable journeys, and stories that became motorcycle folklore.
Coming SoonMachines That Mattered
Motorcycles that changed the industry or influenced generations of riders.
Coming SoonThe Renegade Years
Specific periods in motorcycle history, from the 1910s and 1920s to postwar America, the 1960s, and the 1970s.
Coming SoonBuilt for the Road
Manufacturers, builders, customizers, mechanics, and the evolution of motorcycle engineering.
Coming SoonThe Road Continues
The Road Before Us is designed to grow one story at a time. Every rider you have just met started with a machine, a road, and a reason to go. None of them knew they were making history. They were just riding.
Know a story that belongs here? Send it along through the Contact page.
A Note on the History
These stories were compiled from published sources, including the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame, the Indiana Historical Bureau, Smithsonian Magazine, HistoryNet, Atlas Obscura, the National Women's History Museum, the Ace Cafe's own history, Cycle World, and reference histories of Daimler, Harley-Davidson, Indian, and the Reitwagen. Where accounts differ, we have said so or stayed general. Wyman's ride is counted as 50 or 51 days depending on the source. Distances for the Van Buren sisters' and Ted Simon's journeys vary by account. Bessie Stringfield's early biography is told in different versions. Burt Munro's record is listed both as about 183.6 mph and, after a later correction, as 184 mph. The details of Roy Holtz's crossing into Germany differ slightly from telling to telling.
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