Slow Road to Brownsville

A lifelong Londoner travels the little-known Route 83 that leads from a remote town in northern Manitoba to the Mexican border at Brownsville, Texas.  As he travels more than two thousand miles through the vast, flat expanse of the prairies along a highway that some say divides east from west, he seeks to uncover the reality behind some of the myths that define North America. What really happened in the Wild West?  What connected cowboys and Indians, and the likes of Kit Carson and Geronimo?  What is the truth behind those stories that excited him as a young boy? 

Then what about the myth of the American road – a concept that spawned books, movies and television that enthralled the author as he grew up in England What is its history?  What is its significance?  What is it now?  And Reynolds is also intrigued by the American dream. What did it mean?  How easy was it to turn into reality? Is it still a useful idea?

To answer these questions the author travels along an often empty highway through numerous small towns, finding echoes and memories of many people from the history of the West: pioneers, frontiersmen, homesteaders, cowboys and Indians; and legendary figures, from Sitting Bull to Davy Crockett, from Lewis and Clark to Truman Capote.

And he meets people of many backgrounds: farmers, ranchers, bartenders, musicians, historians, students, shopkeepers, truck-drivers, cowboys, Indians, Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives. From them he learns about the past and about their lives now. And he enjoys himself and laughs a lot, is often surprised and occasionally shocked – and he draws the reader along with him all the way from Manitoba to the very south of Texas.