The Black Car of Idaho's snowmobile pioneer

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If it wasn’t for a man named Rick Just we wouldn’t know much about this picture. Has the driver just jumped out from his place behind the wheel to capture this serene shot of his wife and children plus mother-in-law? It seems so. We even knew the name of that driver—Mr. Joseph Sherwood of Idaho—but that still wouldn’t have helped us much as the identity of this vehicle is not something we can place. Fortunately, along came Mr. Just to the rescue. On his website about all things connected with Idaho in times gone by, he shares some trivial information about Sherwood and his car.

The man was a real inventor who ran his own cleverly-designed sawmill at Henrys Lake in Idaho, and that was not the only thing he’d made there. “He was a mechanically minded man,” writes Just, and the vehicle shown here is said to have been all his own work, too. It was named “The Black Car” and supposedly utilised a 1½ hp engine under the back seat.

However, Sherwood’s Black Car seemed to be only a stepping stone to something even more imaginative. Winters can be harsh in rural Idaho and according to Just, Mr. Sherwood is likely to have been the first man to devise a snowmobile as early as in 1907! We quote: “He received a patent, number 844,963 for his ‘auto snow-car’ in 1907. He patterned it after a four runner, horse-drawn sled. A 1½ horsepower gasoline engine was connected to the gearbox and flywheel by chain-drive. Another set of chains wrapped around sprockets on a large wooden drum in the rear. That was the equivalent to the track on a modern snowmobile. To steer the contraption you moved the front runners from side to side by means of a lever. The snow machine weighed something under 1,000 pounds. It wouldn’t win any races with a top speed of 12 miles per hour.”

That’s really interesting and must have been a major diversion from the vehicle as it is seen here.

Words: Jeroen Booij; photograph: Yellowstone Photo Collection
 

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