Duck into the Old West Museum in Cheyenne, Wyoming and you’ll see so many chuck wagons, sleek phaetons, and sturdy stagecoaches you’ll think you stumbled onto a Clint Eastwood film set. The museum, part of the broader Frontier Days rodeo complex, is home to the largest collection of pre-automobile vehicles West of the Mississippi. It’s also, somewhat unintentionally, a prologue to the sprawling RV/MH Hall of Fame in Ekhart, Indiana – the midwest manufacturing town that’s turned out most of the motorhomes, travel trailers, toy haulers, and recreational vehicles you’ll see on highways not only in the US but around the world.
That’s because long before Winnebago was a household name, and even before companies like Ford made the automobile king of the road, the buggies, coaches, and wagons you’ll see on exhibit in Cheyenne or the Plains Museum in Laramie were the original RVs that helped Americans get outside not for work, but for the sheer fun of it.
Now a century later, RVs are having something of a renaissance. Not only have sales gone up in recent years, but RV users are increasingly diverse. Many in the industry are predicting that the COVID-19 pandemic is about to create a major boom for motorhomes as many adopt RVing as a way to travel while practicing social distancing. However, how did these rolling homes on wheels get their start? To answer that, you’ll have to travel back to the wild west, and the rugged landscape of Wyoming.
The History of the First RVs
One of the jewels of the Old West Museum is an original Yellowstone stagecoach in the signature bright yellow hue that’s still standard for the park’s current fleet of buses and snow coaches. The Tally-Ho Touring Coaches, as they were known, were manufactured by Abbot-Downing Company of Concord, New Hampshire specially for the Yellowstone Park Transportation Company. The century-old paint job is flaking off the museum’s example, but it’s still easy to get a sense of what it would be like to tour the United States’ original national park behind a team of horses after making the long journey from cities back east via the Northern Pacific Railroad.
Long before major thoroughfares like the Lincoln Highway or Route 66 linked states from coast to coast, visitors arrived in train cars and stayed in grand hotels built by the railroad companies themselves, often with an architectural style that blended western rustic with Old World alpine motifs – a genre that came to be known as “parksitecture.” Back then, a multi-day tour through the park cost about $50 a passenger (over a $1,000 today if you account for inflation), and took you from the North Pacific Railroad’s station in Cinnabar, Montana, to the hotel at Mammoth Hot Springs, which you can still visit today.
RVs in the Age of the Automobile
It didn’t take long for other carriage makers to roll out their own versions of the Pierce-Arrow – or for the burgeoning auto industry to get in on the small but exciting RV trend. Some of the innovative wealthy converted Packard trucks into the first ever Class C motorhomes (the mid-size RV models built on truck chassis, often with a bed in a pop-out over the cab). In 1910, a Michigan company called Auto Kamp started rolling out the first pop-up campers much like the ones you know today, with space for sleeping, cooking, and dining.
What set the Auto Kamp apart was that it was designed not to be pulled by horses like the Touring Landau, but by the brand new Model T’s that rolled off Ford’s Detroit factory lines just two years before. The age of the automobile had arrived, giving a broader swath of Americans access not only to Yellowstone but the six other national parks that had been established in the decades following the United States’ first national park, including Sequoia, Yosemite, Mt. Rainier, Crater Lake, Wind Cave, and Mesa Verde.
How RVs Became Part of American Culture
Though the Great Depression slowed the sale of RVs along with everything else in America, the Civilian Conservation Corps was hard at work on numerous projects in national and state parks around the country, constructing campgrounds and other outdoor recreation facilities still in use today. By the time World War II was over, the economy was roaring again and Americans were eager to explore. The age of nuclear family road trips and summer vacations had arrived, and so had a new generation of RVs that were bigger and more luxurious than ever, packed with new technology and ready to run on plenty of cheap gasoline.
RVs had started to make their way into pop culture through films like 1943’s What’s Buzzin’ Cousin? and 1953’s Long Long Trailer. A decade later, a VW microbus appeared on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, just a year after Donna Reed took her fictional TV family on a western vacation in a Dodge Travco RV. Also in 1962, an aging John Steinbeck hit the road in a camper named for Don Quixote’s horse, in search of the American essence and whatever the country was becoming.
Motorhomes from the Midcentury to Today
Many of the carriage manufacturers who started the RV travel trend had been put out of business by big auto decades earlier, but a new generation of RV-builders were about to become household names. Small buses and conversion vans like the VW Type 2, Westfalia Vanagon, and conversions of Dodge and Ram commercial vehicles came to the fore in the 1950s and 60s and have stayed popular to this day.
In recent years, new demographics have been getting involved with RVs. As the outdoor industry diversifies, so have rentals and purchases of the recreational vehicles people use to access their favorite destinations. The popularity of vanlife and a proliferation of RV influencers on YouTube and social media have contributed to RVs shedding their retirees-only image. Meanwhile, Volkswagen is putting the finishing touches on an all-electric version of its classic surfer van, ushering in a new, more sustainable era of RVing.
The first century of RVing has been a long, strange trip. Fortunately, if you’re still curious to learn more about how your contemporary adventure rig evolved, you can gas up your current model and head to the Old West Museum, Plains Museum, the RV/MH Hall of Fame, and beyond to see the original recreational vehicles for yourself.
