Riding Shotgun

One thing that all the kids I knew did was to call shotgun every time we went anywhere.

This referred to the best seat in the car, of course: the front passenger seat, right next to the driver. As a young kid, I had always ridden in the back seat, but as I got older, I found myself in the coveted spot more and more.

At some point, I was promoted to sitting in the front seat and helping my dad get places. This didn’t mean my mom sat in the back seat while I rode shotgun, but I did go on drives with them (to the dentist, to summer camp, to the library) where I was in the front seat, and I learned to support the driver.

Sure, there were those responsibilities, but they were well worth the upgrade in status for a teenage kid who didn’t want to get isolated in the back seat while his friends had a blast up front.

Naturally, calling shotgun was the remedy to this.

“Calling shotgun.” What a phrase!

This hearkens back to the days of stagecoaches in the US. Stagecoaches would travel across the country with money or other valuable goods. There was a need to defend property while traveling, so an armed guard (usually with a shotgun) would sit next to the driver.

Incidentally, drivers would sit on the right-hand side of the coach while driving on the right side of the road. The passenger holding the shotgun would sit to the driver’s left, so they could defend against any bandits approaching from the open side of the coach in the road.

By the early 1900s, journalists were describing this practical approach to a harrowing experience, and the terminology stuck in the public mind. Riding shotgun first appeared in the novel The Sunset Trail by Alfred Henry Lewis:

Wyatt and Morgan Earp were in the service of the Express Company. They went often as guards — “riding shotgun,” it was called — when the stage bore unusual treasure.

Cars and trains gradually replaced stagecoaches, but the shotgun terminology stuck around.

By the time I was getting excited about being able to drive soon, I began hearing this phrase for the first time: I call shotgun. A friend would insist on riding in the front passenger seat for the duration of this trip, and the etiquette insisted that whoever called it first, simply got it.

For most things in life, you have to do more than simply declare that something is yours. Not so with riding shotgun. You could even abbreviate the phrase to just one word and holler out, shotgun!