In the 1920s and 1930s, the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway ran a promotional campaign called the Indian Detour — a series of side trips from the main rail line into the New Mexico and Arizona high desert to visit Pueblo communities and the landscape of the Colorado Plateau. The brochures were gorgeous: red rock formations, adobe buildings, Pueblo women in traditional dress.
The Indian Detour was the moment the American Southwest became a tourist destination, and Route 66 inherited everything it had created. The highway gave individual travelers access to the same landscapes the train tours had packaged, without the intermediary of Harvey Company guides. You could stop in Gallup or Winslow or Holbrook and buy turquoise jewelry from a trading post and feel like you’d touched something ancient and authentic.
Whether the experience was actually authentic is a complicated question. The trading posts were mostly owned by white businessmen. The prices paid to Native artists were often exploitative. The towns that Route 66 travelers found picturesque had experienced dispossession, poverty, and forced assimilation within living memory.
But the landscape itself was real, and enormous, and unlike anything on the eastern half of the country. The red rock of New Mexico and Arizona, the painted desert, the Petrified Forest — these things could be seen from the highway window in a way that made them feel like a different planet.
Route 66 created the Southwest as an idea in the American imagination. Whether the idea did justice to the reality is a question the road leaves open, the way it leaves most large questions open — visible from the highway, never quite resolved.
We are offering licences for ROUTE 66® Beer in specific territories. An invitation to others to become part of this story. To carry a piece of the road with them and to contribute to the story. We will share a percentage of royalties with Route 66 associations to keep the story alive.
The journey continues. This story is brought to you by ROUTE 66® BEER. Find us at ROUTE66BEER.COM
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