Milwaukee & Chicago Races - 1905

This content was originally published in the June 7, 1905 edition of the  Horseless Age. The two PDF pages are a digest of various events, the most significant of which are race meets staged at the Milwaukee Mile and Chicago's Harlem horse track. Numerous sprint races were conducted at both. Barney Oldfield appeared at both and won the most significant contest on the Milwaukee race weekend, setting the mile speed record for the track in the process. Louis Chevrolet and Webb Jay battled for the biggest prize in Harlem, with Jay's White steamer ("Whistling Billy") literally losing steam in the third mile of the five mile race - but not before setting the new track record for steam cars at 55 seconds. I found this particularly interesting in that it is my understanding that steam cars were direct drive machines producing tons of torque which allowed them to acclerate insanely fast over short distances - but as boiler pressure dissapated their horsepower diminished in subsequent miles. I'm only guessing, but perhaps this happened in this instance.
 
There are other interesting items as well:
 

• In Buffalo, the work of a government appointed a special committee to draft auto traffic laws.
• A calendar of auto racing events for June 1905.
• Henry Ford issuing a challenge to steam car racer Louis Ross for the Thomas Dewar Trophy for a mile speed competition.
• A brief item on the "Climb to the Clouds" hillclimb sponsored by the White Mountains Roads Improvement Association, which, I believe, was based in Connecticut.
• I found this item especially interesting: an Oldsmobile transcontinental endurance run with a progress report from Wyoming. A good day's work was to travel 150 miles. Keep in mind in some instances people on these runs were literally trail blazing where there were no roads. Here is what I found particularly interesting - the drivers found sandy areas in Wyoming very challenging because the differences in track (the length of the axle from hub-to-hub was different in the Western United States than the manufacturer's standard). Apparently, this meant the drivers could not always rely on paths created by their predecessors. The standard manufacturer's track - the article says - was 56 inches and the western track was 60.