♪♪ -In partnership with the friends of the UNH library.

♪♪ This is the New Hampshire Authors’ Series from the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire.

♪♪ -Dayton Duncan, award winning author, film producer and dedicated traveler, was born in Iowa but has called New Hampshire home for more than three decades.

He's written ten books, including, most recently, Our National Parks: America's Best Idea, coauthored with Ken Burns and companion to the PBS series, It's a Beauty His other books reflect his wide ranging interests political, historical, geographic, and social.

He tackles big subjects like the journey of Lewis and Clark, America as it was then and is now, or the contemporary American frontier.

Those places in our country where hardly anybody lives who does live there, and why do they live there?

He asks hard questions that take miles of travel and years of research, including extensive interviews with folks in their own home places.

Now it's our turn to interview him.

Welcome, Dayton Duncan.

- Thank you.

Thank you very much.

[applause] -Well it's hard to know where to begin, [Dayton chuckles] but I thought we could start with this book, Horatio's Drive.

Because it's a book and a film that you really fought for, and everyone knows that you've worked for many years with America's best film maker, Ken Burns and this is a story that was dear to your heart and it took a while for you and Ken to find a way to make it into a movie, into a movie and into a book.

So would you talk a little bit about Horatio?

-Sure.

I had, moved, my family out to Kansas for three years while I was working on my third book, Miles From Nowhere, about the most sparsely settled counties in the United States, none of which were very close to Walpole, New Hampshire and in order to stay married, I didn't think it'd be a good idea to do my research by leaving for these trips from Walpole, New Hampshire, in which I would spend three days just getting to Kansas, which was not even close to the places I was going to so we’re living out there and while I was working on that book, I read a, a picture book, actually, with a little bit of narrative about the Lincoln Highway, the first highway across America.

And in that was a small, paragraph, that said that the first automobile trip across the United States was undertaken by a Vermont doctor by the name of Horatio Nelson Jackson in 1903, on a $50 bet that he made in San Francisco then he adopted a bulldog along the way, and then he made it across the United States in about 63, three days, and hired a mechanic to go with him and that was about it and, I'm a sucker for road trips.

Most of... a lot of my life, my life is a road trip but, a lot of the things I've done, have involved road trips, for fun and for, for business.

1903 if you're also Lewis and Clark, if you suffer from Lewis and Clark-itis as I do, you recognize that that's exactly a century after Meriwether Lewis left Washington, DC to become the first American citizen to physically cross the continent so exactly 100 years later, a guy going west to east, drove this horseless carriage, launching the 20th century and sort of a harbinger of what, would define the 20th century to a certain extent, the automobile.

At the same time, I wrote to Ken back here in New Hampshire and I said, this would be a great film if there's, you know, if there's enough information there, what we call critical mass of material to flesh it out more and he sort of condescendingly nodded his head, knowing that, you know, maybe I’d just forget about it, over time.

He, he now knows me better than that, and, over the course of the next ten years, as we worked on, film on The West, as we worked on, our film on Lewis and Clark as we worked on, a film about Mark Twain, I kept coming back to this idea, and I'd been doing my own research on the side, trying to find out more information, and found up in Vermont at the University of Vermont and their special collections, newspaper clippings, trove of photographs that he took at the Smithsonian with some more information that he donated to the Smithsonian that Jackson did, and kept pestering Ken and pestering him, and finally, either because I, had persuaded him or he just didn't want me bugging him anymore about it he said, okay, we'll do the we'll do this, this film on Horatio's Drive.

-And you discovered the letters?

-Yeah, I didn't discover that my, my, I'm married to one of the best political reporter I ever met.

I ended up marrying Diane Kearns, now Diane Kearns Duncan, and I was convinced that this guy is an educated person, taking this trip that he knew was historic.

It was on a whim, a $50 bet but it was nonetheless, he knew he would be the first person crossing the continent.

I knew that he had to have more written material than what I could find.

And finally, in one newspaper account, when he was in New York City, it mentioned that his wife had come down from Vermont to meet him and kept referring to the letters that he wrote.

So I thought, well, it's either going to be journal or letters or both, and instituted a search for his descendants and got pulled away from that to work on our film on Mark Twain and Diane took it up and through cold calls, internet searches, genealogy, dot com, all sorts of things, she finally placed a call to, a family in Ohio and said that she was looking for the descendants of Horatio Nelson Jackson, and the guy on the other line said, well, yes, you know, my wife is his granddaughter.

She said, well, I'm calling on behalf of my husband, who is searching for hoping that he might be able to find the letters that he wrote and goes, oh, no, we don't have those, and says her sister has them.

[laughter] And so we got the letters, which I'd never been published before, and for our film, Tom Hanks agreed to read the voice of, of Horatio Nelson Jackson.

And it, made it all possible.

I, I, before I read that, I just want to say that when it came time to do the, our most recent film on the national parks, it took me 45 seconds to convince Kent of it so, I don't know, I guess that makes, means it means I'm averaging every, I can takes me five years to do it -Everybody wants to know how you come up with ideas and so the national parks was your idea?

-Yes it was, yeah I mean the... - You're welcome Ken.

- Yeah, right.

[laughter] We did make that the subtitle National Parks Dayton Duncan’s best idea... [laughter] But, a film on the national parks, colon, Dayton Duncan’s best idea would, would be appropriate.

You know, I've got the best job in America.

Working with my best friend who is the best filmmaker in America.

And, I am involved, you know, in certain respects on all the films that Florentine Films makes most often as a consultant not because I know the topic but because of my interest in storytelling, American history and now filmmaking as well and so I get dragged into the, screenings to say, this is working, this isn't working, that's boring, that's not.

-Well, this is an example of one of the letters or a couple of the letters that I think, I like it because it's funny and because I think it gives a sense of a very special relationship between, Horatio and his wife.

- Jackson hired a guy who was, a mechanic to go with him, bought a 1903 Winton Touring Car and set out from San Francisco, trying to work his way across the United States and most of the roads, obviously, I forget now the, the the statistic it's in the book and in the film, a couple thousand miles total were paved all within city limits of the United States, everything else was a dusty, dirty road with no road signs most of the time.

So here's a couple of days after he left.

He's writing to his wife, who he called Swipes and that we could never find out why that was her nickname but, there you have it.

My darling Swipes, we leave in the morning for Oroville.

The last railway point we have, we will have until we strike Ontario, Oregon.

When we get there, the worst will be over.

I can run the car as well as Crocker now, the guy he hired and have rather surprised him.

We take two hours on and two off at the wheel.

He is a mighty good man.

I am fine and the only trouble is, I miss you so.

Nelson.

Please keep my letters as I want them for reference, and then the narration continues on May 25th, they started for Oroville, traveling through miles and miles of fruit orchards on dusty roads Jackson described as, quote, a compound of ruts, bumps and thank you ma’ams.

We never noticed, he added, as our cooking utensils jolted off one by one.

When we discovered our loss, we could not afford to turn back to seek them.

Then they discovered something else.

They were lost.

Their fortunes seemed to brighten, Jackson later remembered, when they came upon a ra... red haired young woman riding a white horse.

Which way to Marysville?

I asked her.

Right down that road, she said, and pointed.

We took that road for about 50 miles, and then it came to a dead end at an isolated farmhouse.

The family all turned out to stare at us and told us we'd have to go back.

We went back and met the red haired young woman again.

Why did you send us way down there?

I asked her.

I wanted Paw and Ma and my husband, to see you, she said they've never seen an automobile.

[laughter] I date that historically as the moment when men driving cars in the United States stopped asking directions.

[laughter] Lewis, Lewis and Clark always stopped to ask directions of the Indian tribes and it was that moment, I think that is, - They just gave it up.

- Embedded, in the rest of our half of the species that, -It’s our genetic memory.

-We decided we’ll remember that deep, deep down that we shouldn't stop and ask somebody for, directions.

It's a, you know, it was this was, this was probably the most fun book and film project I ever worked on.

-In, this book, Miles from Nowhere: Tales from America's Contemporary Frontier, you traveled great distances to places where hardly anybody lives.

Places that most of us will never see.

And I love the quote from Gertrude Stein.

In the United States, there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.

That is what makes America what it is.

Well, in New England, we don't have much of a sense of that.

I think.

-No, the concept behind Miles from Nowhere was, that I did my research on this in 1990 this is why I moved my family to Kansas, to be closer to the research that I need to do.

Every ten years, the Census Bureau, in the past, would draw a frontier line that say, the we are marching westward and here's where the frontier line is, and here's where it hasn't been settled yet and their criterion for that was, if it was under two people per square mile, it was not yet settled.

And so that was what the frontier line was.

I decided that I would go to all the counties in the United States that, were they still drawing a frontier line, would qualify as not yet settled under two people per square mile.

In 1990, there was 132 of them.

Two people per square mile.

It's hard for us to imagine in New Hampshire, it would be about 8000 people inhabiting the state of New Hampshire.

That's the kind of population density that we're tying to.

The purpose of my, of, of that book was to go to those places, meet the people who lived there, write about what it's like to live there but also because of my sort of late blooming and blooming, interest in history to connect it to the earlier frontier.

What are the things that are similar and what are the things that are different?

It also in terms of great theories, as someone pointed out to me, is that if you want to write a book that a lot of people are going to read, why would you picked it to be about the places where the fewest people live?

[laughter] And that pretty much turned out to be a true prediction.

[laughter] But, it was a it was a fun, you know, it was a fun book to, to write, it got me, traveling lots of backroads and seeing lots of, parts of the United States, all of which were west of the 98th Meridian, but... -And wonderful people, in all your books, you managed to, just find these characters who, who, you know, some are very sad, some are desperate, some are angry, a lot of them are very funny, I think you might be attracted to those kinds of people.

And as I read about these characters who are very different from me, I begin to get a picture of the big picture of America.

To me, that's what your, your writing is all about is the big picture of America.

-Well, before talking about the big picture, the, the small picture of, of, interviewing these people, the characters are in my book, you know, dates back to my, you know, start as a reporter, at the Keene Sentinel, and, interviewing people and, a profound belief, that I have is that, every person has an interesting life.

Every person has at least one good story to tell.

-Absolutely.

-And, the, the role of a good reporter is not to trick them into telling that story, but by being, legitimately interested.

In who they are, what they've done, what their life is like, those stories will come out regardless of whether they're living in a town of, you know, 200 people on the sand hills of Nebraska or anything else that, I am the, the polar opposite of celebrity journalism.

-Congratulations.

[chuckling] -That's my big picture.

-That's your big picture?

Well, one of the one of the characters and I could have picked any number of them, is a woman named Margaret, and Margaret had, she was 84 when you interviewed her, Margaret Stafford, and she had staked out a homestead in 1925, in Montana, because her brother had a homestead and if she got one next door, then he could eventually take over hers and have more land now, homestead out there was, I don't know, 600 acres or something like that?

- 640.

-640 acres.

It's hard to even imagine that kind of space, but she is a character.

She is a character.

She said she never liked it there.

She said, I didn't want to stay in this country, but here I still am.

At age 84, her brother left.

That's all right, she stayed and she says she goes in about three times a year to, the nearest town of Jordan in Montana, 43 miles away.

- Jordan, Montana.

- 43 miles away.

She hates it there.

She says, don't ask me to stay in that rotten little burg.

Everybody knows everybody else's business.

That's why I stay out here.

And what I loved is just, you know, who are these people?

I go to the north country of New Hampshire and I can stay, or should I say this out loud?

About two weeks is my limit.

[laughter] Because it seems so far from everything as beautiful as it is, it's a special kind of person that lives in the North country of New Hampshire, and a special kind of person who lives and really sticks it out in these remote places.

-Yeah, I think so I, you know, I think to a certain extent they are of their place, one of the things that struck me, while I was working on this book, Diane and I had moved, to Kansas, to the outskirts of Kansas City.

Our daughter Emny had already been born here in New Hampshire, and our son, Will, was born while we were there in Kansas I was home enough for that to happen, and, I would come back with the stories that, that I was collecting and the thing that that really struck me profoundly was the intense sense of place that these folks had.

You know, some people might approach it and say, why would anybody stay here?

And for them, the heartbreak was that be... for economic reasons and others, that it's mostly ranching country or sometimes some wheat farming, desert country.

They're what I and I call in my book, the irreducible minimum, there's, there's no room for expansion anymore the frontier at one time was the land of opportunity and, fresh promise, and now these same places were economic backwaters.

And so that was one of the differences of 100 years brought.

It was, it was a fascinating, topic for me to pursue historically and, and journalistically and, and again, a great excuse to, to drive long distances across this great land.

-Well, your first book, Out West, Lewis and Clark book a journey through Lewis and Clark's America, was the first time you really got on the road you took to the road, in order to to trace their, trace their trail across America.

The opposite, as you said of Horatio's Drive.

Why did you feel like you had to hit the road for that?

-I really needed to get out of New Hampshire in 1983.

[laughter] - New Hampshire in 1983.

- Right.

-Because?

-Well, the governor that I had worked for as the chief of staff had lost an election and then died.

- Hugh Gallen.

- It was Hugh Gallen.

He was like, A mentor and, father and good friend of mine, and, I couldn't bear to see all of the things that he did, dismantled, and for my own, psychic health and perhaps for the physical health of those people who were dismantling it, his... [laughter] -You don’t strike me as a violent man.

[laughter] -I thought it better for, for me to, to hit the road as my tonic.

Great gulps of, of, big skies and rolling plains, is good for me, as a native Iowan, and, so I concocted this, notion that I knew, convinced an editor of the Boston Globe Sunday magazine that I knew more about Lewis and Clark than I, in fact, did, and convinced him that it would be an interesting article to retrace their route and write about what they would find if they took the same route again and that, became, my, a magazine article that I then turned into the book, Out West, and became really a, you know, a, if I look back on my, my life, my professional life, if professional life is something that can be ascribed to any part of my life.

That was a real turning point because it, it got me back into writing.

It got me back into investigating who we are as a people, doing Lewis and Clark and following them, awakened in me, an interest in the, in the that historical moment, but also in what we made of those historic... -Right, right.

What's, what's great in that book is the then and now, it's the then and now you get the original journals and what they were seeing, you know, the American landscape in those times, and then you go and get a great piece of pie right in Montana.

-Right I, you know, Out West operates on sort of three narrative levels, there is I retell the story of Lewis and Clark in 1803 and 1806, I, and what they saw, what they did, I then tell what I do and people I meet, and I'm the butt of my own jokes throughout, throughout it and, but then there's the, the third track is you have to explain to find that place where they, had to stop their canoes because there were so many buffalo crossing the river, and there are no longer any buffalo well, you have to explain what the heck happened to the buffalo, what happened to the West that they saw?

How is it the same, and how is it different, and, and, and, how do we explain that?

And, you know, the Lewis and Clark journals a lot of what, comprised of journals was what they would have to eat, and, they ate a lot of bison and, they ate 9 pounds of meat per man per day and when they were in the buffalo plains and, but they also ate dogs, and they also ate a lot of things that we wouldn't want to eat now and so I talk about what, what I ate, and the bars I went to, it was before Diane and I got married, when her dad read it, he said, I think with a raised eyebrows, he seems to go to a lot of bars.

[laughter] Which I, say in my book is a good place to, to, you know, to, to, to meet, you know, people, and churches are the two they have similar functions in certain respects... -Saturday night, Sunday morning.

-But I'm also, a pyromaniac, so, romantic rather, I love pie, and my book is... [laughter] my book is filled with, great pie.

-And the greatest pie you ever ate we need to know.

-The best pie place that I know of is, Glen's Cafe in Florence, Montana, which is south of just south of Missoula, about 20 miles.

And it's just a little out of the way place but if you go there of a morning, they'll have about 20 newly built, as they call them, pies and, all sorts of varieties and, I made it, fortunately, it was at a place where Lewis and Clark went on the way out and on the way back and north and south.

So my research required me to go through Florence quite a, quite a few times.

- You are such a dedicated man.

- Right, yeah, and, sometimes I would take a whole pie with me, My... - And your favorite is?

Oh, no.

At Glen's, it would be the, sour cream and raisin but I I prefer a fruit pie but you have to be careful you know, fruit pies are very easily ruined by too much sugar.

- Absolutely.

- And too much gunk it just should be the, the fruit... - It’s all in the balance.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

-And so sometimes I, you know, I was, I borrowed my sister's Volkswagen camper when I was doing the book, and it had a little refrigerator in it.

- Take the whole pie.

- You could take the whole pie.

-I just want to say how much I appreciate your passion.

Your passion in every book.

And your passion about your craft.

It's wonderful to talk with you and to really experience that.

-Thank you.

-Thank you so much for being with us today and for connecting with us and telling us a little bit about how you connect with your subjects in your work, I really appreciate it.

-Thank you so much, thank you.

[applause] -Thank you.

♪♪