Route 66 turns a hundred in 2026, and the country will come to Arizona to drive it — because Arizona kept more of the original road than anyone, some three hundred eighty miles, including the longest unbroken stretch of the old alignment left anywhere. The road is sold as the most American thing there is: the Mother Road, the Main Street of America, the open highway of a young and restless country heading west to reinvent itself. Most of that story is true. What it leaves out is whose country the road was crossing.
Begin with the road's own age, because it is younger than it pretends. Route 66 got its number in 1926 and its signs the year after, but the line it followed was already old. Much of the western route traced the wagon road Lieutenant Edward Beale surveyed along the 35th parallel in 1857 — famously, at the head of a string of imported camels — and Beale in turn followed the water and the passes that Native people had traveled for centuries, because there was only ever one sensible way through this country. The railroad came in the 1880s and took the same line. Route 66 was the fourth or fifth name on a road geography had drawn long before, and the interstate that replaced it in 1985 is only the latest. The Mother Road did not open the West. It paved a path that was already ancient.
Nowhere is that plainer than at Peach Springs. Every Route 66 map marks it as a stop on the free-running old road between Grand Canyon Caverns and the Hackberry General Store; almost none of them mention that it is the capital of a sovereign nation. The Hualapai — the People of the Tall Pines — have lived along this rim of the Grand Canyon for more than a thousand years, and Peach Springs is their seat of government, with a constitution written in 1938 and a Supreme Court victory in 1941 affirming title to their own land, a rare win in a century that mostly ran the other way. The animated film Cars is often said to have modeled its Radiator Springs on Peach Springs, which is exactly the misreading the road encourages: it turns the working capital of a living people into a piece of roadside whimsy. You drive through as a guest of a nation, not a stop on a byway.
The forgetting can be more literal. At Grand Canyon Caverns, the strangest overnight on the whole route, an early attraction was a "caveman" that tourists paid a quarter to see — a set of human remains in the cave. They were not a curiosity. They were two Hualapai brothers who died in the influenza winter of 1917 and were buried in what the cave's early owners took for a shallow pit. The natural entrance was sealed in 1962 at the Hualapai's request, because the cave is a burial place and sacred to them; the site is Havasupai-run today. For decades the nostalgia trade had quite literally sold a grave as a gimmick, and it took the people whose grave it was to stop it. That correction is part of the road's real history now, and it belongs in the telling.
Even the road's most photographed ghost town carries a name that should be spoken with care. Oatman — the gold camp west of Kingman, gone over to wild burros and staged gunfights in the street — takes its name from Olive Oatman, a girl of about fourteen whose family, Mormon emigrants bound for California, was attacked in 1851, most of them killed, by a party most likely of Tolkepaya, the Western Yavapai. Olive and her younger sister were taken and then traded to the Mohave, who adopted them and tattooed Olive's chin with the mark of the tribe; her sister died in a famine, and Olive was ransomed back in 1856. The captivity narrative published afterward made her a national sensation and taught a generation to fear her captors — a girl absorbed by one people after another had destroyed her family, made into a warning against the very tribe that had taken her in. The town wears the name as a brand. The history under it is heavier than the brand can hold.
None of this is an argument against the road, or against loving it. The revival that saved this stretch is one of the genuinely good stories in American preservation: when the interstate bypassed Seligman in 1978 and left it for dead, a barber named Angel Delgadillo organized the stranded towns and got Arizona to sign the old road as Historic Route 66, and the families who perform the nostalgia today — the deadpan gags at the Snow Cap, the license-plate ceiling at Hackberry, the neon in Williams, the last town in America to lose its road to the interstate, in 1984 — are the same families who lived the history. The slow road is real, and it is worth driving slowly. The point was never to get anywhere fast.
But a road remembers what it is taught to remember. Historic Route 66 remembers the diners and the neon and the burros, and it is very good at it. It is less practiced at remembering that its most scenic miles cross a Hualapai homeland, that one of its novelty caves is a grave, that one of its prettiest towns is named for a stolen child. The centennial is a fine reason to drive the Mother Road — to take Sitgreaves Pass slow, to buy a milkshake in Seligman, to let the burros lean on the car in Oatman. It is also a good moment to drive it with both eyes open, and to read the country the way the people who were here first still read it. The road gets the postcards. The country was here long before the road had a name, and it still is.