The Great Canadian Road Trip That Wasn’t Driven by Canadians

There is a wonderful irony at the heart of Canada’s first great transcontinental automobile adventure.

In 1912, Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney set out from Halifax in a REO touring car with the ambition of reaching the Pacific and proving that Canada needed a highway connecting the country from coast to coast. The journey would become one of the foundational stories in Canadian motoring history. Yet neither of the two men in the car was Canadian.

Thomas Wilby was an English journalist living in New York. Jack Haney, the young mechanic supplied by REO who did the actual driving and kept the car running, was an American from Indiana. Wilby did not drive the car himself. He preferred to travel as an observer and writer while Haney handled the difficult work behind the wheel.

That makes the story even more striking when compared with what had happened in the United States only nine years earlier.

In 1903, Horatio Nelson Jackson and mechanic Sewall Crocker became the first people to cross the United States from coast to coast by automobile, driving a Winton from San Francisco to New York in 64 days. Jackson, remarkably, had been born in Canada.

So the historical reversal is almost perfect. America’s pioneering transcontinental automobile journey was led by a Canadian-born driver. Canada’s pioneering transcontinental automobile journey was undertaken by an Englishman and driven by an American.

But that does not make the 1912 journey any less Canadian. In many ways, it makes the story more interesting.

As Wilby and Haney moved west, they depended on local motorists, mayors, automobile clubs, Boards of Trade, government officials, mechanics, guides and ordinary residents.

Local pilots repeatedly helped them find routes through places where maps were unreliable, or roads simply disappeared. Communities welcomed them, decorated the REO with pennants and sent messages westward with the travelers.

Wilby later acknowledged that the assistance he received across Canada was one of the main reasons he ultimately reached Victoria.

Wilby and Haney may not have been Canadian, but the expedition quickly became a national undertaking. Two outsiders were attempting to cross a country whose own citizens could not yet drive from one side to the other on a continuous highway. 

That may be one of the most fascinating ways to understand the 1912 expedition. It was not simply two men driving across Canada. It was Canada discovering, almost mile by mile, what automobile travel across the country might eventually become.

Wilby himself understood the larger significance. In "A Motor Tour Through Canada," he argues that the country desperately needed a Trans-Canadian Highway and believed such a road could transform Canada by linking its regions and encouraging better roads everywhere.