The Southwestern Indian detours : the story of the Fred Harvey/Santa Fe Railway experiment in detourism

By the early twentieth century, a number of national parks and monuments had been established in the southwest, particularly Arizona and New Mexico, joining quite a few other attractions - Indian pueblos, Spanish missions, geological formations and curiosities - all of them prime tourist allurements. Most of these, however, were spread over a large area, and it was a time still when tourists traveled by train. How to get the people to the sites became a big concern, out of which came the idea for the Indian Detours: the trains (primarily the Santa Fe) would bring the people to the larger railway termini (Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Santa Fe) where they would be met by Fred Harvey's fleet of specially built automobiles which would transport them to the wonders of the SW in planned excursions lasting a number of days. "It is the purpose of the Indian Detour to take you through the very heart of [this region], to make you feel the lure of the Southwest that lies beyond the pinched horizons of your train window," announced one early Harvey brochure. Schedules were precise and listed sites to be seen, places to eat and stay, and how much time was to be spent at each place. Thus in the days of limited individual auto travel people were able to explore up close many important sites, from the Grand Canyon to Taos Pueblo, from Mesa Verde to Acoma. Diane Thomas's account of this enterprise is delightful and very thorough: she cites often the publicity material put out by the company, reproduces scores of old photographs, and shows many maps of the areas the detours traversed. Fred Harvey's tourist business was lucrative and useful to the tourists who came from great distances away; of course, as more people began driving their own cars on better roads over longer distances, the Indian Detours began to decline, though they remained in business into the 1960s. It's a fascinating book and reveals as much about the attractions of the SW as it does the Indian Detours themselves.