Before we left Yuma, Mr. Bennett had sent a telegraph message to the Valley Cycle Club in Phoenix, and they made a nice fuss about me for the two days I passed there. I spent part of the first day walking about the town in my bloomers with a local reporter from the Arizona Gazette, and though bloomers were by then a common sight in, say, Chicago or New York or San Francisco, they were a novelty in a remote town like Phoenix, and I turned quite a few heads. The reporter captured one encounter with a woman who was startled to see me in such an outfit, though he embellished a bit, and why not?
Upon seeing me in bloomers, he wrote, this woman “threw up her arms in horror and bemoaned the depravity and boldness of the nineteenth-century girl. ‘Wal if that ain’t queer doin’s now-a-days. I jest seen a woman wearin’ men’s pants!’ ” The reporter, so the story went, explained that they were bloomers. “ ‘Balloons, did you say! Wal if ever ketch my darter wearin’ balloons, I’ll jest, I’ll jest…’ ”
I was, in my outfit, challenging every preconception folks in those parts had about masculinity and femininity and rather enjoying it!
I also called on the local Sterling agents, whom I had telegraphed from Yuma, and they used me and my bicycle as an attraction, taking out a large advert in the Gazette:
ANNIE LONDONDERRY, THE LADY WHO IS RIDING AROUND THE WORLD ON HER STERLING, IS IN TOWN—HER WHEEL WILL BE ON EXHIBITION AT PINNEY & ROBINSON’S
As in France, the local wheelmen’s clubs delighted in serving as escorts and helping me make contact with other clubs down the road. And so, with an escort of about half a dozen wheelmen from Phoenix, I spent two days getting to Red Rock, where an escort of Tucson riders met me for the ride into that city.
* * *
The Tucson club had seen to it that my arrival in the city would be well noticed, and as we reached the outskirts of town another twenty riders or so joined the procession, including a famous trick rider from Los Angeles, Claude Leslie, who made his living traveling the West giving demonstrations of his unique skills. He could ride for distance balanced on his back wheel, ride backward while standing on his saddle, and had all manner of entertaining but otherwise useless cycling skills. He was a funny fellow, though, with a large personality, a booming voice, and a stable of silly jokes he used during his routine. I took a shine to him right away; not in a romantic way, as he wasn’t a terribly attractive man, though he was a physical specimen. He just seemed to take delight in everything.
The people of Tucson were giddy with anticipation about my arrival. One group positioned itself in a bell tower with binoculars hoping to catch a glimpse of me and my posse as we came over the horizon.
“All the Tucson riders unite in testifying to Miss Londonderry’s ability as a rider,” reported the Daily Star, though they noted I was a bit wobbly as I rode into town. Riding in the company of two dozen men, and with no trees or other obstructions in the empty desert, I had no chance to relieve myself for several hours, which accounted for my “wobble.”
We had just enough time to check into the Orndorff Hotel, have a quick dinner, and make our way to the opera house, where arrangements had been made for me to lecture about my trip and for Leslie to demonstrate some of his skills on the wheel, though the small stage severely limited his repertoire.
To understand why my lectures were so popular in these small, remote cities, you have to understand the isolation of life there in the 1890s. Yes, they were connected by train to other cities, but most people lived almost their entire lives within a few square miles. Rarely did I meet anyone in these remote towns who had traveled overseas, or even to Boston, Chicago, or Los Angeles, so it was easy to fill their imaginations with stories of hunting for tigers in the jungles of India, exotic geishas in Japan, and bloody battlefronts in China. The characters who inhabited my stories would, figuratively speaking, have been at home in a circus sideshow or a Jules Verne novel: Japanese laborers with bodies completely covered in tattoos, Bedouins, opium merchants, and royalty. I’m not sure if half my stories were believed by even half my audiences, but they paid, usually twenty-five or fifty cents, for an evening’s entertainment, and that’s what I gave them—my best one-woman show. The lantern slides I had collected with images of exotic people, distant countrysides, and bloody battles gave life to these stories and left people quite satisfied that they had gotten their money’s worth.
* * *
My sights were now set on El Paso, the largest city I would see between Los Angeles and Denver. Back then, El Paso was a lively town of more than ten thousand and, I figured, one of my last chances to make a big splash. I started sending telegrams and telegraph messages to the bicycle clubs and the newspapers there ten days before I expected to arrive, and my efforts paid handsomely, for my impending arrival was well reported as early as a week before I reached the city.
On the morning of June 21, Bert Orndorff, the owner of the hotel in Tucson and a passionate wheelman himself, organized an escort to accompany me east toward Willcox where a telegram from a man named Jim Williams of the El Paso wheelman’s club reached me, detailing the rousing reception that was being planned for me there.
“Expect delegation of El Paso cyclists to meet you in Strauss,” he wrote, referring to a town in New Mexico about fifteen miles north of El Paso. “Have arranged for lecture at McGinty Club, meetings with most important newspapermen of city, and special appearance at bicycle races on Fourth of July. Pray we can induce you to remain in El Paso until then.”
I was excited that such a reception was planned and determined to make as much hay as I could in El Paso, known then as “sin city” because it was a magnet for outcasts, outlaws, desperados, women of ill repute, and all kinds of unsavory characters. It did not disappoint.
Sometimes traveling by wheel, sometimes by rail, I arrived in Lordsburg, New Mexico, on June 23, where I received a telegram from the El Paso Daily Herald containing a series of questions, which I answered by return telegram. Some of my answers were true (the toughest roads I had ridden were indeed across the desert and the most hospitable people in France), some were not (I was not shot by the Chinese and I was not refused a drink of water in Yuma after pushing my broken-down bike sixty miles across the desert), but no matter. Then, on the afternoon of June 25, exactly one year since my formal departure from Boston, I stepped off the train in Strauss, and the stationmaster sent a telegraph message to the Daily Herald stating that I was there and awaiting my escort into the city.
About three hours later they arrived: Jim Williams, Joe Mollinary, Randolph Terry, Herbert Bishop, and a Herald reporter named Patrick O’Leary, who attached himself to me like glue during my stay in El Paso, a persistent and often cloying presence who was, to tell the truth, lovesick.
After introductions were made, a light dinner was spread out on tables in the railway station, and I regaled those assembled with stories of my travels, a preview of the lecture I would soon give in El Paso. It was too late to ride into the city, so the men slept on the station floor while I was afforded a small private room with a cot normally reserved for the stationmaster. I was, after all, the only woman present.
By the time we set out the next morning, more riders, having learned of my arrival in Strauss, joined those who had cycled out the night before, and with every mile the escort got larger and larger until we were close to a hundred strong pedaling through the streets of El Paso. Arrangements had been made for my lodging at the Vendome Hotel where several hundred spectators had gathered to welcome me. Not since Marseille had I seen a reception so large and enthusiastic. Since so much (ten thousand dollars’ worth) was dependent on my creating a counter narrative to combat the skeptics and the naysayers, this greatly cheered me.
* * *
Mary, dear, the days in El Paso almost defy description, but I will try. In several conversations with the reporter, O’Leary, both in Strauss and the day after my arrival in the city, I filled his head with a grand and sensational account of my journey thus far. He was so utterly credul
ous that he eagerly shared my account almost verbatim in a big story in his newspaper the next day. So smitten was O’Leary that when he inquired about the terms of my wager, I felt obliged to add one—that I not contract matrimony during my trip—heading him off at the pass, as they say, to deflect his amorous intentions.
“The necessity of this condition,” he wrote, “is patent, from the fact that she has received nearly 200 offers of marriage and written refusals to 147 of them.” (Perhaps I exaggerated just a bit!) He then added: “Any horrid man who says she is not good looking ought to be taken out back of a cow shed and knocked in the head with an axe.”
Having my physical appearance commented upon, for better or for worse, was generally tiresome, but a constant of the newspaper coverage wherever I went, as if it was somehow relevant to the story of my journey. At least in America it was mostly flattering, unlike in France, where I had, for all practical purposes, morphed into a man!
O’Leary gave a breathtaking account of my hunting the Bengal tiger in India, of being attacked by “Asiatics” who wanted to stick knives in my tires, voracious insects that nearly ate me alive in Hindustan, and my rattling the tar out of some Chinese soldiers with my pistol. Not only had I nearly made it around the world on a wheel, but I was a certified war hero to boot! It was all my way of teasing the public to come to the lecture I was to deliver at the McGinty Club a few days hence.
My lecture was a huge success, every seat sold, and my repertoire of stories took on a life of their own. I cast quite a spell that night in West Texas with the carnival absurdity of some of my stories!
Our bicyclist visitor gave her lecture last Saturday night on the McGinty Club grounds before an audience of about 100 people and was well-received. The fair lecturer detailed some of her experiences. On reaching Chicago she had but three cents. She made the windy city, 1,235 miles, in six weeks. En route mademoiselle had to sleep in a barn, and fell through from the loft onto a horse’s back. But in eighteen days she traveled 1,030 miles to New York and earned $835 in carrying advertisements.
When in France she was not allowed to talk French, according to the terms of her contract, which made it embarrassing for her, and landed in Paris with only seven cents in American money so she earned $1,500 by carrying advertisements about town and working in stores. Miss Londonderry was six days in riding to Marseille, during which time occurred the hold-up racket already detailed in the Herald. Ludicrous mistakes were made in trying to make people understand her necessities. Miss Londonderry tried by signs to ask for meat to eat, and a beefsteak was given her in a shoe. She wanted mushrooms and was given an umbrella. Then the cyclist tried to make a woman understand that she wanted a place to sleep by lying down on the floor, whereupon the woman thinking it was a case of fainting threw a pitcher of water in her face. In Marseille Miss Londonderry was treated royally so that in four days she earned $1,000. Thence she went to Egypt, Bombay, and Calcutta. The Hindoos seemed afraid of the bicycle, thought it an evil spirit, so that the rider had to pay priests to pray for her in the temple, and a knowledge of this kept the natives at a more respectful distance. While in India, she visited a museum of freaks. She saw one man with a foot like a chicken, another with a leg shaped like that of an elephant, while there was one woman with a wen on her neck like a Saratoga trunk. Miss Londonderry was afraid that if she remained there much longer she would see some such sight as a man with an extra pair of legs dangling lightly from the sides of his neck, or some of the lovely creatures treated of in Gulliver’s Travels. So she beat a precipitous retreat.
Miss Londonderry went to the battlefields of Wei Hai Wei where even little children were killed. She was favored with a guard by the French consul, but had the sleeve of her coat carried away by a bullet and was captured by the Chinese with two war correspondents and a doctor of divinity who were locked up in jail where neither food nor water was furnished. But for the snow water they would have died from thirst. The French consul finally sent forty gendarmes to release them. The lecturer said that the dead were unburied from the battlefields. The clergyman finally died from wounds he received and exhaustion from crossing a frozen river and breaking through the ice where the party came near drowning. The best they could do in the way of burial was to lay the poor man in a trench and cover him up with dead Chinese. In one shack where the party crawled in to sleep they had to brush aside the dead bodies to make a place to lie down.
The lecture concluded with the stereopticon exhibition with views taken by Miss Londonderry herself in Asia and elsewhere en route. The audience went away very much pleased.
(El Paso Daily Herald, July 2, 1895)
The audience laughed and guffawed and when it was over gave me a standing ovation. All that mattered was that they were entertained, and were they ever! But it was after the lecture, at a reception, that one of the most chilling episodes of my fifteen months on the road unfolded.
All who attended lined up to shake my hand and exchange a few pleasantries or have an autograph signed. Standing with me was a woman of my age who had come to call on me at the Vendome the day after I arrived, a woman who became a fast friend: Euphreisa Sweeney. She knew many of those in attendance and was able to make many introductions.
Near the end of the line stood a sturdy middle-aged man with a female companion, and when my eyes first caught his I felt a shiver go down my spine. He was serious but cordial and complimentary of my lecture, but never had I seen eyes as dead as his. It is said that the eyes are the window into the soul, but I swear that no soul lay behind those eyes. You know the phrase “if looks could kill.” His gaze was stone cold.
Euphreisa Sweeney.
“Hardin is my name, Miss Londonderry.” His hand was clammy and lifeless. It was like shaking hands with a cadaver. “And this,” he said, gesturing toward his companion, “is Miss Helen.” I didn’t know if Hardin was his first name or last, and he gave no last name for his companion.
“How do you do, Miss Londonderry?” Helen chimed in. “We greatly enjoyed your lecture and are happy to have you in El Paso.”
“The pleasure is mine, Miss…”
“Mrose, Miss Londonderry. Helen Beulah Mrose.”
“Miss Mrose, then,” I answered. “Thank you for coming tonight, and I am delighted to be in El Paso. It’s a long way from Boston to be sure.”
The Hardin fellow seemed very distracted. He said a few more perfunctory words, and then he and Miss Mrose bid me good night and nodded in the direction of Euphreisa.
After they’d gone I turned to her.
“Well, he seems an odd fellow,” I said. “You don’t know him?”
“I do not, Miss Annie,” she replied, “but there isn’t a soul in El Paso who doesn’t know of him, and a fair share are afraid of him, and with good reason.”
“Afraid? Why afraid?”
“His name is John Wesley Hardin. Have you ever heard of him, Miss Annie?”
“I have not,” I replied. “Whatever he may be known for, word surely hasn’t traveled as far as Boston.”
“Well, Miss Annie, in his younger days he left a trail of dead men in his wake. He’s a legend throughout these parts, and one of the deadliest shots west of the Mississippi. Folks say that even Annie Oakley wouldn’t have stood a chance against Mr. Hardin.”
“Is that right?” I answered. I knew firsthand, of course, of Miss Oakley’s skills with a firearm.
“Killed at least two dozen men between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, but brags it was many more,” she continued. “Finally, the Texas Rangers caught up to him, and he was sent away to prison for twenty-five years, where he learned the law. When he was released last year he came here and opened a law practice. Fancy that. An outlaw turned lawyer. But he has little business. Spends most of the time gambling and drinking in the saloons.”
I was nonplussed to say the least. That explained the odd demeanor and the stone-cold stare.
“Well, he gave me the chills,” I said to Euphreisa. “Who was the woman
accompanying him? It was not his wife, I assume, for they don’t share a last name.”
“Of late, Mrs. Mrose, not Miss, has often been seen on the arm of Mr. Hardin,” she replied. “They are not hiding their relationship even though Mrs. Mrose’s husband, Martin, is very much alive and presently in Juarez, just across the river. He’s never amounted to much. A horse thief with a fondness for drink. Word is he’s in Juarez avoiding the authorities.”
“Come, walk me back to my hotel,” I said. Together we strolled through the moonlit streets and said not another word about Hardin or Helen or Martin Mrose. But it turns out Martin Mrose was not in Juarez, as Euphreisa thought, but in El Paso, and he was not very much alive. He was very much dead, though his body was still warm. This I would learn only when I returned home to Boston in late September, where a letter from Euphreisa was waiting for me. Please save it, for it is a piece of history.
August 22, 1895
My dearest Miss Annie,
I trust this letter will find you safe and sound in Boston, and that you made a success of the final part of your journey. I do miss having you here to talk to.
You will scarcely believe what I am about to tell you. It has been the talk of the town for weeks. The same day you left our city, some workers at the town dump, just a mile or so from the McGinty Club, found a body, and from the looks of it, it had been there for a few days. The undertaker was dispatched to bring the body into town where Chief Milton identified it as that of Martin Mrose, the husband of the woman who accompanied Mr. John Wesley Hardin to your lecture in El Paso. I have no doubt you remember them. He’d been shot at least half a dozen times, twice in the neck and four times in the chest.
Well, it didn’t take long for suspicions to attach to Mr. Hardin, since he’d been seen around town often in the company of Mrs. Mrose, and when the newspapermen gathered up the courage to ask Mr. Hardin what he might know about Mrose’s murder, he proclaimed to know nothing about it. Witnesses who encountered Mrose heading to the dump right around the time of your lecture said he told them he was to meet a man there who had a business proposition involving some ranch land right nearby. That fixed the date of the murder. Pressed further, Hardin stated that he could not have killed Mrose that night for he was attending your lecture, and because of his notoriety, there were about one hundred witnesses who could attest to the truth of that assertion, including me.
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