American Road Magazine Summer 2020 Back Issue

This issue of American Road can be enjoyed at home or on a mountaintop. In it we look at roads and destinations likely to afford you some latitude. We start with "King of the Wild Frontier," a feature that recounts the life of David Crockett. The famous Tennessean may not have "kilt him a b'ar when he was only three," but he nevertheless grew into an American legend: Tall tales suggest he once rode his pet alligator down Niagara Falls and caught the tail of Halley's Comet. We pursue the man beyond the myth as we move from his birthplace in Limestone to his final hour at the Alamo, where proper social distancing surely would have left him standing a little bit longer.

Daniel Boone is the man most associated with coonskin caps, although he himself preferred wide-brimmed beaver hats of the Quaker variety. Whatever he kept on his head, he was likely wearing it the day he led settlers over the Cumberland Gap back in 1775—an accomplishment we recall in "Through the Gap with Daniel Boone." Boone went on to carve out a Wilderness Road to points north in Kentucky before settling into Boonesborough to retire. I can envision him there, feet swathed in bunny slippers, old VHS tape of F Troop popped into his VCR, hunkered down gamely until flu season passed.

Kit Carson was another scout whose paths we consider. Once upon a western expansion, his name was everywhere, and we look at some of the places he went—and many he didn't—in our postcard review "It’s Kit!" We next strike out toward more points lonely, finding Meriwether Lewis at Fort Clatsop, William Clark at Pompey's Pillar, and Isabella Bird in the Rocky Mountains. Bird, of course, took herself just about as far away from everyone as she could go the day she became the first woman to scale Longs Peak. We salute her achievement, and tip our old Daniel Boone cap, if we can find it.