Recently I rewatched a wonderful PBS documentary called "Horatio's Drive" about the first two people to drive across the United States from San Francisco to New York in 1903.
It was a helluva adventure; with constant breakdowns necessitating repairs as well as replacement parts shipped in via railroad when they reached towns that had a railroad depot. Basically they followed wagon trails and other ruddy, broken paths.
But what struck me was that gasoline was clearly NOT a worry (for the most part) of the two men. In their travels through northern California, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming... they went from tiny, remote town to tiny remote town. None had ever seen an automobile; but invariably they had some form of gasoline available (though occasionally at greatly inflated prices). Apparently the entire trip took 800 gallons of gasoline.
My question is: why was gasoline so readily available? Most general resources I read seem to indicate that gasoline was mostly treated as a by-product of oil refining, that was of little use until the automobile industry took off (and often simply burned off). But there were essentially no automobiles at all in the various towns visited by Horatio on his drive. So why was gasoline so ubiquitous? What were the other uses of it at the time that ensured it would be so readily available in so many tiny, remote towns, to the point that Horatio could assume it we be available on the entire trip?
(and in the documentary at least, there's no real indication that the towns had other machinery that might need gasoline).
In 1903, Standard Oil company held a nationwide monopoly on petroleum products. They did so by controlling the distribution system for kerosene, which was used primarily for lighting/lamps. Standard's distribution system for kerosene was based initially on control of railways, but came to also include contracts with retail outlets, general stores, hardware stores, drug stores, etc. Demand for kerosene lighting extended even to very small towns, so Standard Oil effectively controlled an organization which could reach into small towns nationwide especially if they were near a railroad.
One of Standard's standard customary business practices was aggressively marketing kerosene byproducts. Lubrication oil, petroleum based fertilizer and gasoline oil chief among these. In the same way that Coca-Cola and Pepsi make modern convenience stores give shelf space to new beverages if they want to carry colas, Standard Oil insisted that their distribution network for kerosene make available byproducts as well.
Standard Oil made it a company policy that gasoline powered tractors in farming communities, gasoline powered water pumps for mines, and gasoline powered factories in general had access to this fuel. Every community needed Standard Oil kerosene, so they could make this policy stick. They had an aggressive salesforce that sought out companies using competing products to petroleum byproducts and underbid them. Sponsoring motor car events like races and general automotive boosterism was also fairly common practice.
If an entrepreneur, inventor, or similar individual wanted a certain amount of Standard Oil products to be available in a place connected to a railway or retail outlet of Standard Oil they could contact a Standard Oil salesperson. This is how the Wright brothers got their lubricant oil and gasoline out to the remote outer banks town of Kitty Hawk, NC. They contacted (or had a salesperson walk into their bike shop) a Standard Oil salesman in Dayton Ohio and had the petroleum delivered to the remote outer banks of North Carolina, an area with few or no motor cars.
I'm not familiar with the documentary you mention so I can't comment on any of the specifics of how they fueled their motor car. However, the presence of a large distribution network based on railways with a policy of marketing gasoline would have made arrangements much easier than you might suspect.
Source:
Chernow, Ron ”Titan: The life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr”