In the summer of 1904 Eben W. Chaffee II traveled with his father, Herbert F.Chaffee, and "Governor" John Miller to Jamestown, North Dakota, to take delivery of the first automobile to be owned by a resident of Cass County. It was a Cadillac, an open car that you cranked on the side rather than in front. It had nice leather seats, stuffed with horsehair. It also featured a chain drive, primitive brakes, flimsy tires made of rubber-coated canvas, and a water-cooled one-cylinder engine that was alleged to develop eight horsepower. Herbert had no doubt negotiated a discount, but the list price of a Cadillac that year was $800, about four years’ wages for a farm laborer.

The car was being sold by a farm implement dealer, and it was the only one he had in stock. Eben, 15 years old, was assigned to learn to operate it. The dealer showed him how to start the engine, identified the controls, and then confessed that he knew nothing more about the machine, and had never driven it. Herbert, Eben and John Miller spent three days in a Jamestown hotel while Eben ran the vehicle around town, frightening horses and pedestrians as he learned to drive in the same way, and at about the same time, that the Wright brothers were learning to fly an airplane (Eben said that one news account in 1903 claimed the Wrights had not achieved true flight because the wings of their craft did not flap).

On the fourth day the Chaffee party started for Amenia in the car. They made slow progress, partly due to the dirt and gravel roads and partly because the older men required fairly frequent roadside rest stops. The Governor asserted that the vibration of the automobile increased the production of urine. "Shakes it down into the spile," he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the clattering machine as he stood at the edge of the ditch. About five in the afternoon Herbert and the Governor declared it was time to stop and check into a hotel. Eben was indignant. They were forty miles from Amenia, it was a fairly good gravel road, and the car's top speed, as Eben had demonstrated over the protests of his elders, was nearly forty miles an hour.

The horse-and-buggy view prevailed on that occasion, but several years later Herbert Chaffee showed that he had adapted to a mechanized world. He and Eben were returning from a trip to Fargo, with Eben driving the same one-cylinder Cadillac. Suddenly another automobile passed them with a roar and disappeared ahead in a cloud of dust. "What was that?" Herbert asked. "A four-cylinder car," said Eben, and named the make. "Turn around," Herbert said, "go back to Fargo." They did, and bought a four-cylinder car.

Submitted by John Van Schenck Chaffee, 2013