* * *
On the morning of the eighteenth of April, the fever gone and my bruises almost entirely healed, we left Stockton for San Jose, joined by a group of San Jose wheelmen Mark had invited along.
An interview I gave to the Daily Mercury there was the first opportunity I would have to embellish my account of the accident in Niles Canyon. Like the fisherman telling the tale of the one that got away, in each subsequent telling of the Niles Canyon accident, the ball of yarn would grow bigger and bigger. In San Jose I reported that the spill had knocked me unconscious and that I lay in a coma for two days in the hospital. When I awoke, I coughed up a good deal of blood and was told by the doctor that I would never make a complete recovery.
“But here I am!” I told the astonished reporter. “And what’s more, I intend to complete the journey.”
After leaving San Jose, Mark and I spent several days riding purely for pleasure in and around the hills west of the city before making our way across the flat terrain to the southeast, past Morgan Hill and Gilroy to Salinas. There we chanced to meet another long-distance rider, a meeting I would come to regret.
His name was Thomas Winder, a newspaper editor from Warsaw, Indiana. Winder was in the midst of what the Salinas Weekly called “the longest ride ever undertaken on a bicycle.” Winder’s game was to win a one-thousand-dollar prize by riding the entire border of the United States, some twenty-one thousand miles in all, Winder told the paper. This was preposterous. The circumference of the United States is, depending on how you figure it, somewhere between eight thousand and eleven thousand miles. Not that Winder’s making more of himself than he deserved would have bothered me; I was doing the same. But when he called me “a hustler” in a story published the day after we met, accused me of making my journey entirely by steamship, described my lecture tour (which at this point had consisted of just the one lecture in Stockton) as “a dismal failure,” and warned the public that I intended to write a book that would be fiction, I was riled. Our encounter had been pleasant enough. Why he chose to disparage me this way I can only surmise—he saw me as a competitor for the attention and affections of the public. Negative publicity rarely bothered me. It only added to my growing fame. But I resented that Mr. Winder saw fit to be the source of such mischief. However, I took to heart that I would likely find myself the subject of increasing skepticism as I closed in on my goal of reaching Chicago by mid-September, and that the prize money I hoped to claim might be put beyond reach if Mr. Winder’s view of my endeavor became the dominant one. And, it seemed, the trend was in that direction. The articles that began to find their way to me from various newspapers and magazines were now filled with words such as “allegedly” and “supposedly.”
Cycling Life, a magazine that had been following my journey and had run advertisements for the Sterling wheel with my image, wrote snidely, “Smart girl, Annie Londonderry, but much too fresh to be touring the world as a representative of American womanhood in any shape or form. To read of the hair-breadth escapes of this young woman, to say nothing of the hair-breadth escapes of the people who make her acquaintance, makes our eyes bulge with astonishment.”
The Sandusky Register in Ohio wrote, “as she left Marseille, France, sometime in January, her trip across Eastern Europe and Asia must be considered a record-breaker from a cycling standpoint. What are you giving us, gentle Annie?”
“According to original plans, Miss Londonderry should be in the wilds of some savage country instead of delivering lectures on the West Coast,” reported the Chicago Tribune.
The fact is, I wasn’t making much of an effort to conceal anything. Yes, I told stories about places I had never been, contradictory accounts of how I had reached Japan from Marseille, and it should have been obvious, as it was to some, that no one on a bicycle could have covered such a great distance in so little time. But the lesson I learned was this, Mary: never underestimate the power of the mind to see what it wants to see and to believe what it wants to believe. Yes, the chorus of skeptics was growing, but for the most part people wanted to believe, and so they did. Perception has a way of becoming reality.
* * *
My idyll with Mark Johnson continued down to Paso Robles, San Luis Obispo, Los Olivos, and Santa Barbara, where we arrived on the thirteenth of May, almost a month after leaving San Jose. I gave a few lectures along the way and was quite the draw wherever I appeared. Mark and I knew that our time together was growing shorter with each passing day, which explains why our daily progress was so modest. The spring air, the ubiquitous wildflowers, the beauty of the mountains and the sea were thoroughly intoxicating, and our affection for each other, already strong, grew by the mile. Yet, as close as we had grown, Mark still did not know my real identity, or that I was married and had three babies at home waiting for their mother to come home. If he had somehow learned that I was not who I appeared to be (by reading some of the earliest accounts of my travels, perhaps), he never mentioned it, and that he would have been silent had he known seemed wildly improbable to me. And if anyone was expert in the improbable it was me.
I do hope, Mary dear, that at some point in your life you have known passion like this, that you have had that one impossible love affair, preordained by circumstance to come to a close (after all, Grandpa and the children awaited), but, which, while it lasted, carried you away on its wings.
* * *
Since recovering from my injuries in Stockton, the riding was without misfortune, but our luck changed for the worse some twenty-four miles from Los Angeles. The Sterling suffered a tire puncture, and the repair kit we had, when opened, was missing the glue we needed to affix the patch. We had no choice but to walk our bicycles all the way to the city. It was dusk, but the moon rose full, and for the next ten hours we walked in the silver light and watched the sun rise from the hills just north of the city.
You would not recognize the Los Angeles into which we walked that May morning. As I write, the population of Los Angeles is approaching two million people, and by the time you read this it will surely have multiplied by leaps and bounds. Hollywood was the name of a place, not an industry. The Los Angeles of the mid-1890s was home to a mere forty thousand souls. Still, it was large enough for a cable car and had paved sidewalks and many paved streets.
Mark and I took a room at the Hollenbeck Hotel. Exhausted from our long trek into the city, we slept like logs from late afternoon until the following morning. Mark inquired at the front desk of the whereabouts of a bicycle shop that could repair my broken tire. There was one just two miles away, and we walked our bicycles there after breakfast. With the wheel repaired I set out for the newspaper offices to introduce myself, and Mark made his way to the Los Angeles Athletic Club and arranged for me to lecture there later in the week.
At the Hollenbeck I received a telegram from Alonzo Peck. He knew me to be a cunning woman and understood immediately the reason for my sending him a copy of Mark’s story recounting my meeting with Miss Anthony. He wrote:
My dear Mrs. K. Am, as you know, your biggest cheerleader. But Col. increasingly perturbed. Unhappy you switched wheels in Chicago, but acknowledges oversight that Columbia wheel not specified for entire journey. Now skeptical of your swift passage France to California. Believes it impossible you will cover required 10,000 miles. Prize money in doubt as he expects to lose wager. Will do my best but be prepared. Yours, “Capt.” A.D. Peck
I was not at all surprised or even deterred by this message. It’s what I would have expected. And it’s precisely why I was laying the groundwork to make it more costly for Colonel Pope to refuse me the money than to pay it. It would all come down to whether I could outmaneuver the naysayers, especially in the press, who were now nipping at my heels.
* * *
The ten days we lingered in Los Angeles were bittersweet, as you can imagine. Mark wanted me to return to California when the journey had ended, and I could not honestly explain why that would be impossible. My evasiveness on the subject bewildered h
im. Given the intense passion we had shared for six weeks he was confused by my inability to promise him straight out that I would return. And then, the night before we had agreed that I must restart my journey east, he asked me to take his hand in marriage. I was speechless. I couldn’t possibly say yes, of course, but saying no would have been a devastating blow, and an ending utterly out of drawing for what had been a beautiful six-week dream.
I told Mark I was very flattered, of course, that our feelings were mutual, and that I would use the time remaining in my journey to consider his proposal. My family, I told him, without being specific, was all back in Boston, and a move to California would be hard on my aging parents, who were, in reality, long dead. Disappointment was written all across his face, but he said he understood, that it was a large commitment, and that he would await word after I had returned home.
And so, on the morning of the twenty-eighth of May, we embraced one last time, and I watched as he pointed his two wheels north.
My heart was heavy as I pedaled on toward San Bernardino, some fifty flat miles east, across a largely uninhabited landscape on a roadway that skirted the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Because I had lingered so long in San Francisco and with Mark on the ride south, I now had less than four months to make it back to Chicago to meet the deadline that had been so widely reported. I was confident it was possible, but I also knew I was beginning what would surely be the most difficult, dangerous, and challenging stretch of the journey, for El Paso was about eight hundred miles distant, and I would be crossing hot, dry, sparsely populated desert with far more rattlesnakes and scorpions than people. I would soon learn roads were little more than lightly worn paths that often petered out in the middle of nowhere, and the emptiness was so vast it was possible to ride thirty or forty miles and feel that one had not moved at all.
Adding to my woes, the newspaper notices were, with increasing frequency, growing more and more dour. The Daily Sun in San Bernardino said I was not “good looking” and “not much to admire in a white sweater, a light brown skirt, and a boy’s hat and cap to match,” yet another outfit for riding I had acquired in Los Angeles. “Yes, she is interesting,” the story read, “evidently well-educated, charming in conversation, and makes a good story out of any one of a hundred incidents in her journey.” And the Los Angeles Times wasn’t impressed either: “Annie Londonderry, who is supposed, from her own story, to be going around the world on a bicycle, arrived in San Bernardino yesterday, and is working the town for what she can earn for her exchequer. She may realize enough to pay her fare on the Southern Pacific to Yuma, and thus avoid the dangers and dust of wheeling through desert sand.”
Two days later I made the short ride to Riverside, where the local notices were more favorable and lifted my spirits. “Smart as a whip and an excellent conversationalist,” said the Daily Press.
I also found a new and novel way to earn money. A large bicycle meet was underway at the athletic park, and between races I was invited to display my skills on the wheel. Though some races featured many racers competing head-to-head around the track, some were simply timed sprints, some from a standing start and some from what was called “a flying start” where the racer was allowed to build up speed as he approached the starting line. I was, by this time, very fit, and covered an eighth of a mile in fifteen and a half seconds, a quarter mile in just over thirty-three seconds, and with a fellow I met at the track, a tandem mile in two minutes and twenty-eight seconds, collecting ten dollars in all for finishing in the top tier.
I had shipped my steamer trunk from Los Angeles, and I selected the clothes I would wear for my desert crossing to Yuma: a light, white blouse with billowy sleeves, bloomers, stockings, and, to keep the sun off my head, a cap with an ample brim. I availed myself of the hospitality of the local wheelmen’s club for two more days, and on the morning of June 2, with several male and female club members as an escort for several miles, pedaled south and east for my next destination, Yuma, in Arizona Territory (Arizona was not yet a state then), one hundred and sixty-five miles away. When my escorts bid me farewell and headed back to Riverside, I was, for the first time in months, truly alone, and I confess to you, more apprehensive than at any other time in my entire journey.
Thirteen
“Follow the railway tracks!”
That was the advice of the Riverside wheelmen. It was the only way not to get lost in the vast, hostile environment of the Southern California desert, they said. By day at that time of year temperatures were almost always close to one hundred degrees, the sun unrelenting, and water scarce. Without the advice of the Riverside wheelmen I’d have been a dead duck in the desert. They marked on a hand-drawn map the locations of freshwater springs and told me to avail myself of the shelter of the “section houses” immediately along the railway route, rudimentary but sturdy enclosures the size of a large tool shed where canned goods, water, and other provisions were stocked for the train crews. Whether in the searing heat of midday or the chill of the desert night, these section houses afforded nourishment and escape from the elements. They were, I was told, spaced about thirty miles apart and were always unlocked, for no one, save the crews or a daft cyclist trying to cross the desert, would have any use for them. That wasn’t quite true, for I quickly learned they were a refuge for rattlesnakes also seeking relief from the sun and, in one case, a weathered and taciturn Indian man who told me he was walking all the way from Winslow in Arizona to Los Angeles to visit his sister.
The logic of following the railway tracks was unassailable. Every mile across this vast landscape looked like every other mile in every direction. Getting lost in this punishing environment could quickly turn fatal. Following the tracks was not only the way to avoid getting lost, but, in the event of illness or mechanical failure, one could at least count on a passing train for help, though one never knew if the wait would be four hours or four days. But, like most advice, this proved easier given than followed for the simple reason that the ground alongside the slightly elevated tracks was often littered with sage, rock, cactus, and other obstacles that made riding virtually impossible for long stretches at a time. I had learned back in New York State, when we had to take to riding between the elevated rails and over the ties to avoid the thick mud that accumulated alongside the tracks, that as impractical and improbable as it seems, it was often the only way to ride when the railway beds were the only alternative, and in the desert, roads were nonexistent. Bumping over endless railroad ties was bruising and exhausting, not to mention hard on the bicycle, especially the tires, but it was, across the desert, sometimes the best of bad choices.
About sixty miles from Yuma, on my fourth day out of Riverside, my tires had had enough, and the front one simply wore out. The Sterling was no longer rideable. Of course, I told the newspaper reporters in Yuma that I had pushed the broken machine across sixty desert miles, but the Los Angeles Times didn’t get it wrong when they wrote, “if certain railroad men were asked how she crossed the desert, they would wink their other eye.”
With fewer than two thousand souls, Yuma was, nevertheless, one of the largest towns in the Arizona Territory. Tucson, the territory’s capital, was a city of five thousand, and Phoenix had a population of barely three thousand. You can imagine how sparsely settled this vast area was in those days. Yet, the railway links were expanding, connecting these towns to each other and to other parts of the West. But still, these were remote outposts in the middle of the desert, relatively isolated, which made the arrival of a woman from Boston making her way around the world on a bicycle a novelty like no other and one I was well prepared and eager to exploit.
Once my tires were replaced in Yuma, a man named Art Bennett, the editor of the local newspaper there, the Yuma Times, proposed to ride with me all the way to Phoenix, eager for an exclusive about having ridden nearly two hundred miles with the first woman going around the earth on a bicycle. Bennett was a mild-mannered man of middle age who had been in Yuma since he was a child
. His horizons didn’t extend very far beyond Arizona, and so he was particularly charmed by my stories of exotic places such as the jungles of India and the rugged countryside of China. Though I would soon become accustomed to various newspapermen making their advances, Bennett was too modest to be inappropriate in any way. He was an experienced wheelman, had made the trip to Phoenix by wheel several times, and was therefore familiar with the rigors of desert riding. He knew the locations of several freshwater springs along the way, how to get water from a cactus, and was accustomed to spending nights in the section houses along the Southern Pacific Railroad. At night, to keep ourselves safely above the poisonous critters that often, as we did, used the section houses for shelter, we had to clear the heavy wooden shelves that held canned goods and water jugs and miscellaneous equipment, and sleep on them or, if there was a table inside, on that. And each morning, or in the middle of the night if we had to relieve ourselves outside, we had to carefully scan the floor to be sure it was safe to put our feet to the ground. More than once I was terrorized by the rattle of a snake’s tail, and I was lucky to escape the desert unbitten.
It was hot and dry during the daylight hours, but we were able to cover about fifty miles each day, mostly riding alongside the tracks, sometimes on the ties as I have explained. The sunsets were breathtaking, and I found the isolation and utterly still quiet of the desert very agreeable. It was possible to believe, watching the fiery sunsets turn the hills, the cacti, and the sagebrush into a surreal, dreamlike landscape, that there wasn’t another person anywhere on earth.
When we reached Phoenix, Mr. Bennett escorted me to the hotel and then headed directly to the train station for the return trip to Yuma. I never heard from him again, and whether he ever wrote up a story I do not know. I assume so!
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