Spin

by Peter Zheutlin

  Just ten days earlier the Chinese had surrendered the Port of Weihaiwei to the Japanese. The brief and bloody war between them over control of Corea was all but over, but I was witness (wink, wink) to the most horrible atrocities while traveling to the war front, though it would have taken a more powerful set of binoculars than ever existed for me to see the battlefield from the Sydney, which left Shanghai on February 26, arrived in Nagasaki on the 27th, Kobe on March 3, and Yokohama on March 4 with yours truly aboard at each port of call.

  My stories of the war front, spun from whole cloth, were honed on the two-week voyage from Yokohama to San Francisco aboard the Belgic, a lumbering ship over four hundred feet long and equipped to sail or steam. The raw material for those war stories I “borrowed” from a handsome war correspondent I chanced to meet on the quay while waiting to board the ship the morning she sailed, March 9, 1895.

  The Belgic.

  I was standing with my Sterling, my American flag wrapped tight and tied to my bike frame, in what was now my standard riding attire, a short jacket worn over a plain white shirt and men’s trousers acquired in Paris. Newspapermen are curious by nature, and since I cut an unusual figure in my male riding costume and holding on to my cream-colored wheel with the Stars and Stripes, a man, very striking-looking, made his way through the crowd to introduce himself.

  “You are, I assume, Miss Londonderry of Boston,” he said. “I read about you in the Weekly Mail.” The Weekly Mail was an English-language newspaper published in Tokyo and read throughout Japan.

  “Indeed, I am,” I replied. “And to whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

  “My name is Johnson,” he answered, extending a large, strong hand. “Mark Johnson. I’m a war correspondent for the Call of San Francisco. Heading home after two months at the front.”

  I have to tell you, dear Mary, that Mark Johnson was probably the most beautiful representative of the male sex I had ever seen. He had dark hair, a sly but friendly grin, a thin moustache, bright blue eyes, and stood several inches over six feet tall. He was about my age, maybe a couple of years older. His manners were impeccable. Decades later, when Errol Flynn became a big movie star, I could have sworn he was the son of Mark Johnson. The resemblance was uncanny.

  “Well, Mr. Johnson,” I said, “we will have two weeks to spend as prisoners of this ship. Hopefully, you will share with me stories of the war, of the horrors you have seen. I would be most interested to hear them.” But I was really interested, as I said, in borrowing them.

  “Likewise, Miss Londonderry,” he replied. “It seems you have been on quite an adventure of your own. I should be interested to hear details of your journey, too. You see, I am an avid wheelman myself when I am not making my way through a war zone.”

  As Humphrey Bogart says at the end of Casablanca, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship and quickly became something more. I hope I do not shock you with these confessions, dear, but you are a grown woman now, wise, I hope, to the ways of the world, and I want someone to know my story, blemishes and all. I am an old woman now, but back then I had an abundance of git up and go, and there is nothing wrong with exploring the sensual side of life. You are just sixteen now but will be thirty if you open this when I intend. Perhaps you will be married and have children of your own. Or perhaps a career. Wherever life has taken you, I do so fervently hope you have had your share of adventure and romance, and romantic adventures. Most men have. Why should we women be deprived?

  Only in hindsight do I understand how, still so in love with Susie despite our ill-fated meeting aboard the Sydney, I was able to fall so easily under the romantic spell of Mark Johnson. It was, after all, not Annie Kopchovsky who fell for him but Annie Londonderry, an emancipated woman meeting a man on her own terms. We were both adventurers in a far-off corner of the world and we met as equals. I sensed it and he sensed it, and he engaged me as such in every way. He was, for a man, well ahead of his time, just as I suppose I was ahead of mine for a woman. Here was someone who could well understand my thirst for adventure and not be at all threatened by it.

  For the next two weeks, Mark Johnson and I took nearly every meal together, spent countless hours walking the deck swapping stories of our adventures, and, to be plain, falling in love. The relationship turned romantic about halfway across the Pacific, and by the time we reached San Francisco I had all the raw material I would need to make considerable hay of my “experience” at the war front as I made my way lecturing from California to Chicago, and for the first-person account of my travels I expected to write for the New York World upon my return.

  Thanks to Mark and the telegraph operator aboard the Belgic, all the San Francisco newspapers were primed for my arrival back in the United States. And, as I would learn from reading the stories they published about me, I had become a symbol for an entire generation of women and a symbol of the struggle for women’s equality. The press across the country had been reporting frequently on my whereabouts during the four months I was away from American soil, and the inconsistencies in my story, and my rather fleet passage from France to the western Pacific, were mostly drowned out by coverage more favorable to me, the grand scope of the adventure overwhelming the smaller details.

  To anyone paying close attention, making it from the southern coast of France to San Francisco in two months’ time on a bicycle was an impossibility, and some were paying attention. But for most, the sheer novelty of my enterprise, indeed just a woman traveling alone, was enough to wash away doubts. I sowed considerable confusion about my own travels by telling wildly inconsistent stories about them, sometimes, as I said, to different reporters on the very same day, as I did when I arrived in San Francisco.

  I told the reporter for the Examiner a version closer to the truth, that I had mostly been at sea since leaving Marseille, making short tours on my bike at the various ports of call. The wager, I told him, required only that I procure the signatures of American consuls in Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nagasaki, Kobe, and Yokohama, that “it did not matter how I reached those places, so long as I made the circuit with my wheel in tow.”

  Later the next day I met with a reporter for the Chronicle and dished up another story altogether. In that version I had ridden across India and endured a long and dangerous slog across China to the Pacific coast.

  But the most effusive account of my travels appeared, not surprisingly, in the Call. Not only was I flattered with a description of my physical beauty (unlike the Chronicle, which called me “short and stout” and said I had “sacrificed personal appearances for comfort” during my journey), but I was brave, beautiful, and brilliant, and had overcome obstacles few women could have surmounted. Perhaps it is needless to say, but who knew more about me and my journey than Mark Johnson, war correspondent for the Call, who had just spent two weeks listening to my story, sometimes in the comfort of my bed! And who better to write a story for the Call than he? You might say he had an exclusive!

  People were always wanting to know the answer to two other questions: how many miles had I ridden and how much money had I earned thus far, because it was widely reported that I was required to travel ten thousand miles by wheel and earn five thousand dollars in order to win the wager. My answers to those questions, like my descriptions of where I had been and how I had gotten there, were also all over the map, so to speak!

  But so great had my fame become, and so effusive the accolades for what I was doing, that few were looking closely enough to notice that my answers weren’t always consistent, in fact far from it. Not that it was of any concern to me anyway. Freedom and fame were what I was after, and I had achieved both and, in the process, was now seen as a champion of the female sex, of the “New Woman,” and of women’s equality. My story was so well known in America, thanks to the interest of the newspapers eager for a great story, that when I arrived back on American soil many of the headlines simply read, ANNIE IS BACK! I had become the shining star of my very own one-woman show.
/>   Twelve

  San Francisco. Mary, dear, if you haven’t already, I do hope you will someday travel to San Francisco. There isn’t a lovelier, more beautifully situated city anywhere in the world, and I would know. Sometimes called the “Paris of the West,” the city was expanding over the entire peninsula by the 1890s. It was a vibrant place of 300,000 people, many coming and going from points in Asia, and it had all the virtues (and vices) of a port city, a crossroads where people of all stripes mingled.

  Golden Gate Park, a park to rival Central Park in New York, had been established several years before my arrival. The city’s famed cable cars were newly in operation, the clanging of their bells part of the city’s infinite charm. There were many Chinese laborers in the city and a bustling Chinatown that felt like a miniature Shanghai. Throughout the city bicyclists jockeyed for position on the streets along with the wagons and streetcars, for the bicycle craze was in full flower in this city sandwiched between ocean and bay.

  The weather had already turned to spring when I arrived and would remain sunny and beautiful most of the days during my stay. Mark and I took in the views of the great bay from Nob Hill, walked the beaches of the Golden Gate, though there was no bridge across it then, and admired the Seal Rocks from the newly constructed Cliff House on the city’s northwest corner.

  That the newspapers in the city made much of my arrival turned out to be good fortune in more ways than one, for my celebrity there would soon open the most unexpected doors.

  * * *

  I settled into quarters at the Palace Hotel on Montgomery Street, the city’s first luxury hotel, and what a fine hotel it was. Never had I stayed in such a sumptuous place, nor since, covering the cost of my lodging in return for a short series of lectures about my travels for the guests. I would stay in San Francisco, at the Palace, for a little more than two weeks. Shortly after my arrival I learned that three other people of considerable fame were expected in the city within days and, as improbable as it may seem, my path would soon cross each of theirs, much to my benefit.

  A national women’s convention was to open two days hence, and I was thrilled to read that the keynote address was to be given by the great Susan B. Anthony. Though in her mid-seventies, she was still traveling the country rallying women to the causes of suffrage and social equality. Never married, she had been a major figure in the movement for more than forty years, a bold and outspoken force of nature, and widely revered by women across the country. I was determined to have an audience with her, if even briefly, and was sure that my story would have great appeal to her.

  And just a week after the convention, the greatest show on earth was scheduled to open at the fairgrounds just south of the city center and along the bay. No, not the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus; a show far more original than that, a show that traveled the world for three decades and made its namesake founder the most famous American in the world, even more famous than the American president, a show called “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” That was the full name, but mostly people just called it Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. It was an enormous spectacle that included reenactments on a grand scale of scenes from the American West. In addition to several circus-sized tents, at one end of the open field where part of the show was staged was a huge canvas, more than four hundred feet wide and forty feet tall, on which was painted a finely detailed western landscape. And within that canvas were cutouts, barely visible from a distance, through which dozens of men on horseback, whether portraying a cavalry or an Indian war party, could gallop, with the painted canvas providing a realistic backdrop in a reenactment of, say, Custer’s Last Stand or some other historic battle. It was absolutely thrilling according to all those who saw it.

  One of the stars of Cody’s show was the sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Remember when I was shown the advertising card in Chicago of Oakley on a Sterling? Well, we now had something in common. My image was being used to promote the Sterling wheel, as was Miss Oakley’s. She was such a skilled marksman she could, in rapid succession and with nary a miss, hit a dozen airborne targets in just a few seconds.

  I made up my mind to try to meet Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, too, and to try to talk myself into a cameo role in the show while it was in San Francisco. I had learned a few bicycle-riding tricks and now had some celebrity to trade as well. And I thought Bill Cody would understand me, for he and I had something in common, too. Though many of his daring exploits were real, Bill Cody, with the help of the dime-store novelists, was a masterful creator of his own myth. Everyone read those books, including me, and as a young girl in my late teens, enamored of Bill Cody and the American West, I read as much about him as I could.

  At the age of fourteen he had become a Pony Express rider and later a scout for the Union Army during the Civil War. He earned his nickname hunting buffalo for crews working the Kansas Pacific Railroad, where he became an expert shot and earned the name Buffalo Bill. He won a Congressional Medal of Honor for his valor in the Indian Wars. Just three weeks after the fall of Custer, Cody’s regiment encountered a group of Cheyenne, and Cody killed and scalped a Cheyenne named Yellow Hair to avenge Custer’s death. Over the years his legend grew, and he became a favored subject of pulp-fiction magazines that glorified and exaggerated the exploits of those who roamed the plains, both the good guys and the bad guys, and this eventually led him to portray himself in a stage production that featured a reenactment of his scalping of Yellow Hair. That’s where the notion of a Wild West Show on a grand scale took root in Cody’s imagination, as did greatly exaggerated versions of his encounter with Yellow Hair. He claimed his small group of cavalry confronted more than eight hundred Cheyenne, but no reports of the battle mentioned more than thirty. He described his confrontation with Yellow Hair as a duel where the two horsemen charged at each other as in a medieval joust, but the Cheyenne never fought like that. He claimed he and Yellow Hair knew each other, but it was not true, and he described Yellow Hair speaking to him, challenging him, and claimed to have understood, though he spoke not a word of Cheyenne. But Cody did understand, as did I, that the stuff of legend sometimes has to be sewn from whole cloth. Where Bill Cody the man ended and Bill Cody the legend began no one really knew.

  But it wasn’t just our mutual interest in mythmaking that drew me to Cody. He was, improbably, an early champion of the rights of women. In 1868 he had declared, “If a woman can do the same work that a man can do and do it just as well, she should have the same pay.” And he practiced what he preached: the women performers in his Wild West Show were paid the same as men who did similar work, whether they were trick sidesaddle riders, experts with a rope, sharpshooters, or actors.

  And so I determined that I would, while in San Francisco, make myself known to Buffalo Bill Cody if I could, a task made all the easier by the copious amount of press I started receiving in the city within hours of my arrival. To a man like Cody, the story of a woman adventurer making her away around the world alone on a bicycle should have irresistible appeal, I thought. The only issue was how to make contact with him.

  Coincidentally, Miss Anthony checked into the Palace Hotel the day after I arrived. I was in the lobby when she came striding in, accompanied by several assistants, young women about my age. It was impossible not to be impressed and, rare for me, in awe of this iconic and powerful woman. Fifty years my senior, she was controversial, outspoken, and a force to be reckoned with. She was as famous a woman as lived at the time. She had a regal bearing and, even at seventy-five, a spring in her step. She had a prominent chin, high cheekbones, a large, angular face, a masculine nose, narrow, wide-framed glasses behind which her flinty blue eyes sparkled, and straight gray hair parted in the middle, pulled back, and held in place with a small bow. A white shirt with a frill collar and a velvet, ankle-length black skirt gave her the appearance of an ancient British royal or one of the Founding Fathers, had one of them been a woman! I expected her to be taller, perhaps because of
the magnitude of her celebrity, but she was just two or three inches taller than me, though heavier. For a woman so far ahead of her time she appeared as if from an earlier, more austere age.

  I did not approach her as she crossed the lobby that day; I was, in truth, intimidated by her serious and imperious bearing, but I lingered close enough to learn that she was staying in a suite on the second floor. That night I pondered how best to make my attempt to gain an audience with Miss Anthony. Mark devised the scheme that evening, one of many we spent together in my room at the Palace.

  “It is quite simple, Annie, but I am surprised that you of all people are intimidated by anyone, let alone an elderly woman,” Mark said to me. “I will write her a note on the letterhead of the Call, enclose a copy of my story about you, and offer to make the introduction. You are the embodiment of the New Woman. Why wouldn’t she welcome the chance to meet you? I’d wager she already knows who you are—so many do—but just in case, my story will make it clear. We can leave it for her at the front desk. I will ask that by return note she let me know if an audience would be possible.”

  It seemed as good a plan as any, and I agreed. The next morning Mark left the envelope at the front desk as we left the hotel to ride our bicycles along the bayfront, where we would meet up with friends of his, members of the Olympic Club, an athletic club of which Mark was a prominent member. Cycling was a popular pastime among the men of the club, and it was from his colleagues that I learned Mark was, perhaps, the best-known and most accomplished wheelman in San Francisco, capable of riding more than one hundred miles in a day, which he had done many times. He was too modest to tell me so himself. Members of the club had arranged for a luncheon on the beach where the bay meets the ocean. It was a splendid spring day and I was the object of much interest to the dozen or so wheelmen who had joined us.