Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  When she awoke, the train would at last be traveling west.

  BY THE NEXT MORNING, New York’s newspaper readers had learned that not just one young reporter was racing around the world, but two. In fact, many New Yorkers now believed that there were three, thanks to a story in the New York Tribune. “An epidemic of globe-galloping broke out in these parts yesterday,” reported the Tribune, “and already has three victims trying hard to get home the longest way round in the shortest time.” According to the Tribune, “it had been whispered in Park Row” that the Herald had dispatched its own reporter—a man—around the world on only two hours’ notice, with the orders to beat Bly back to New York “by a day, an hour, a minute, anything.” The competitor from the Herald was said to have “actually taken passage on the Augusta Victoria and to have steamed down the bay with his unsuspecting rival.”

  Fortunately, this particular piece of misinformation was not long lived, as there was never any evidence adduced for it other than the “whispers” supposedly heard by the Tribune. The Herald itself never claimed to have sent any world traveler, and indeed the paper took no notice of Nellie Bly’s trip in its pages, other than a brief satirical piece a few days later, supposedly written by a male reporter named “Very Fly” who had been “summoned to the office yesterday and told to immediately pack my gripsack and start on a trip around Manhattan Island, with the design of breaking the record by accomplishing this wonderful feat in seventy-five minutes.” Tossing a second shirt collar into his handbag, he set out on his journey via elevated railroad. Predictably enough, he managed to complete the trip in precisely 74 minutes 59 seconds.

  Following the Herald’s lead, the Tribune ran a whimsical editorial suggesting that a race around the world was old hat (“Everybody has either made the journey himself, or has a friend who has made it”) and that a real achievement would instead be a trip to the moon. Even the staid New York Times, not willing to ignore the story entirely, ran a paragraph headlined “Flying Trips of Two Young Women” at the bottom of its sports page, just below an item about the second annual Fall Games of the Plainfield, New Jersey, bicycle club.

  Those early news reports were rife with mistakes, as Park Row, caught unawares by the story, tried to pin down just who these young female reporters were. According to the Tribune, Bisland was twenty-two years old, understating her actual age by six years, while in the Press she was twenty-three and Nellie Bly was “in the neighborhood of thirty”—a rather expansive neighborhood, as she was in fact twenty-five. Perhaps the most flagrant error came from the editor of the Press, Joseph Howard. The information must have begun to circulate around Park Row that Elizabeth Bisland had written book reviews for The World, and, as in the children’s game Chinese whispers (later, given technological developments, it became known as “telephone”), the original idea turned out quite different in the retelling. “Miss Nellie Bly and Miss Elizabeth Bisland are the best-known women reporters on the New York World staff,” Howard informed the readers of the Press. “They have both started around the world, and it makes no difference to anybody outside of the World office which of the two comes out ahead.”

  It made a great difference, for one, to John Brisben Walker (who must have been quite taken aback to see his reporter identified as a member of the World staff), and on the afternoon following the departures, Walker made good on his original idea and grandly appeared at the World offices on Park Row to announce that he would bet $1,000 against The World’s $500 on the outcome of the race; to further sweeten the offer he suggested that the winning amount be donated to charity. Walker well understood that a sporting wager between the two publications would be excellent publicity for all concerned, but The World, with the vast resources at its disposal, was perfectly capable of generating its own publicity without having to involve The Cosmopolitan in the bargain. About Walker’s offer The World would say simply, “That proposition was declined.”

  On the day of Bly’s departure a reporter from The World sought out the mayor of New York, Hugh J. Grant, who gave a statement to the paper complimenting Miss Bly on her “plucky undertaking” and noting that “When you come to think of it, travelling at the rate of 400 miles every twenty-four hours for a period of seventy-five days is enough to take one’s breath away. It would be an uncommon task for a man to accomplish, and the mere fact that a young woman attempts the feat is amazing.” Mayor Grant, however, was unwilling to take a position on whether Bly would accomplish her goal, stating only, “I shall watch her progress from place to place with considerable interest.” Other elected officials were more definitive, among them Congressman Amos J. Cummings, who asked rhetorically, “Do I think Nellie Bly will go round the earth in seventy-five days?” and then answered, “Of course I do, if she keeps her health and strength, and from what I know of Miss Bly, I am satisfied that she will pull through all right.” He added, “As an American I am proud that one of our women is brave enough to undertake such a wonderful journey, and as a man I glory in her spunk.”

  Students at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore were said to be studying a map of the world in order to calculate the probabilities of success. The travel writer Thomas Knox (who had earlier provided female travelers nine pages of advice for packing their bags) declared that he believed it was theoretically possible to circumnavigate the globe in seventy-five days, though of course “what its practical aspect is remains to be seen”; Knox himself had circled the world twice, and each time the trip took a year and a half. The baseball impresario Albert G. Spalding, who had recently returned from a barnstorming tour of the world with a team of all-star ballplayers, remarked wonderingly, “It took me nearly six months to go around the earth, while she is trying it in one-third of the time. I never met Miss Bly, but I have no doubt she will reach the home-plate on time.” Not content with only a single baseball metaphor, Spalding went on to say, “Talk about home-runs around the diamond, why, she is making one round the earth. I hope she will make the full score and win the game.”

  So the public was presented the views of the race held by politicians, world travelers, and sportsmen. Though little of it ever found its way into the newspapers, it is not unreasonable to imagine a different sentiment prevailing among the women who worked for the papers, who had been sharply limited in what they were permitted to write about, who worked for less pay and less prestige than their male colleagues, and who understood how little career advancement would likely ever be available to them, no matter how capably they performed their jobs; it must have been gratifying to see the names of two female reporters appearing daily on the front pages of newspapers, on the editorial pages, even on the sports pages—anywhere but on the style pages. Alone among its contemporaries, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a signed editorial about the race by a female reporter, Dorothy Maddox.

  The World, in sending its bright little correspondent upon such a novel, yet hazardous mission, has with one unique stroke accomplished more for my sex than could have been achieved in any other way in a decade. This odd but clever departure from every rule that has heretofore governed the newspaper kingdom is a stirring editorial upon woman’s pluck and woman’s energy and swings wide open the door that leads to success in every branch of the world of letters. It also goes a long way toward proving that the gentler sex, released from depreciating influences and given a sound body to co-operate with the divine inspiration of the mind, may compete most successfully with the brightest men of the day.

  NOVEMBER 15–16, 1889

  New York to Chicago

  Speeding toward Chicago on the Fast Western Express, Elizabeth Bisland would not have been pleased to know that her name, as she had feared, was now appearing in the columns of daily newspapers, nor that word of her race was moving across the United States even more rapidly than she was. From Buffalo, in upstate New York, her train headed west on the Lake Shore Railroad line along the southern shore of Lake Erie, passing through Erie, Ashtabula, Cleveland, and Toledo, the smoky gray industrial
cities of Pennsylvania and Ohio eventually giving way to the prairies of Indiana and Illinois, the countryside in mid-November already withered and brown, like a landscape in one of those sepia-toned photographs that had become so popular in recent years, stretching all the way to the horizon and relieved only occasionally by a distant farmhouse or forlorn-looking tree. The bleak, unvarying scenery did nothing to assuage the loneliness she felt, a young woman on a train surrounded by strangers (it was generally considered improper for a single woman to initiate conversation with a man on a train, and risky for her too willingly to accept it), and as the sky began to darken she could not have helped but cast her mind back to the city from which she had been so unexpectedly uprooted and think about the many friends who would otherwise have been arriving just then for Friday afternoon tea.

  It was late when the lights of Chicago first came into view as a pale glow on the horizon. Outside the window yellow flickers appeared and disappeared in the darkness like stationary fireflies; they were flames spat out from the tops of high smokestacks. The Union Depot at Van Buren Street was an impressively large limestone building topped by several smaller mansard roofs, much like the Grand Central Depot that Elizabeth Bisland had left behind the day before in New York. The Fast Western Express rolled into the immense shed behind the station and with a last, sighing expulsion of steam came to a halt. Helped by waiting porters, the passengers stepped down from the train and filed slowly into the train hall.

  It had been arranged that The Cosmopolitan would send someone to meet Bisland at the station; as she entered the hall she looked around expectantly, but no one came forward for her. The other passengers met family with hugs and kisses, friends and associates with handshakes and pats on the back, or simply strode toward the baggage room; they handed over their claim checks to the baggage master, gathered up their belongings, and made their way out to the street. Little by little the group dispersed. With polite thanks she declined offers of assistance from the few remaining porters: she was expecting someone. Silently she waited; the minutes passed, but still no one came to meet her.

  Finally, having given up hope that The Cosmopolitan’s emissary would ever arrive, Bisland began to wander around the vast, gloomy station, not knowing which direction to go, angry at the unexpected complication, resentful at Walker for having sent her on this ridiculous wild-goose chase, and at herself as well for ever having consented to participate in it. She felt, all at once, terribly homesick, so far from the cozy apartment where her sister had by now lit the gas jets and prepared a quiet dinner for herself; she remembered that she hadn’t eaten on the train and realized that she was very hungry. She passed shuttered newsstands and lunch counters, a waiting room with a few sleepy-looking passengers in it; she could hear her own footsteps echoing in the cavernous hall. On a wing adjoining the main hall a telegraph office was still open: but at this hour, a wire back to The Cosmopolitan would do no good. A friendly conductor took pity on her and helped her locate the departure gates for the Rock Island Road, where she would transfer to the train for Omaha, before bidding her, in Bisland’s description, “a commiserating adieu.” Near the waiting area she found a lunch hall that was open late, and she sat on a high stool at the counter and ate a solitary dinner of ham with a cup of tea. Even this seemingly ordinary act was daring in its way: in New York there was only a single restaurant at which it was considered appropriate for respectable women to sit on stools and eat at a counter on which no cloth was spread. That restaurant was located on Broadway near Twenty-first Street, and Elizabeth Bisland, who worked only a few blocks away, surely knew of it, and had likely eaten there on her way to or from the Cosmopolitan offices. Memories of New York would have only exacerbated her sense of loneliness. She was in a nearly deserted train station in a strange city late at night having dinner, unaccountably, by herself. It could not bode well for her trip, she must have pondered, that the magazine had made this mistake at the very first opportunity to do so. As she ate, her every mouthful was regarded with wan interest by the man who oversaw the lunch hall. She finished her meal and hurried out to the train.

  The train to Omaha, as it turned out, ran more slowly than the Fast Western Express had, and on far straighter track, so the rocking of the car was gentler, soothing and peaceful and free of sudden sidelong bumps, and Bisland fell asleep right away. After only a few hours she awoke in her berth feeling surprisingly rested and—really for the first time since she had left the Cosmopolitan offices two days earlier—in her right mind, no longer afflicted by what she called that “stupefaction of amazement.” Pulling up the window curtain, she saw that dawn was just beginning to break. A frost had formed during the night, and the harvested fields glistened with silver and pearl. With delight she watched the silently waking world go by her window, noting the subtle tints of rose and milky blue that spread across the land as the sun made its way above the horizon; she felt herself traveling “for some brief space in a world of intolerable splendor, where innumerable billions of frost crystals flashed back to the sun the reflection of his shining face.” In the distance she could make out silver streams running like veins through the countryside, occasionally flanked by willow trees draped in their primeval-looking fringes, shining in the morning light. Here and there the train passed a neatly demarcated square of jet-black loam amid the amber fields, where the ground had been broken by a farmer for winter sowing. Above it the sky was a pale turquoise. It all seemed to her absolutely exquisite. That afternoon she inscribed in her notebook the words “A perfect day.”

  NOVEMBER 16–17, 1889

  Omaha, Nebraska, to Ogden, Utah

  By early evening the train had arrived in Omaha. The station there was a hub for several railroad lines, and at this hour it was a hive of activity, passengers rushing from one train to the next, vendors hawking their newspapers and basket snacks, porters lugging Gladstones and hatboxes and rolled-up steamer rugs and, for the Western sportsmen, rifle cases and fishing rods and telescopes, the general hubbub punctuated by shrill train whistles and bells announcing another departure; but somehow, amid that clamor (she herself only ever said that it happened “by chance”), Bisland managed to talk her way aboard a new fast mail train that was about to depart for San Francisco on the Union Pacific line.

  The U.S. government’s Railway Mail Service hoped to cut the time of the New York to San Francisco trip from 118 hours down to 108; though the difference was only ten hours, by arriving in San Francisco in the morning rather than the evening, the post office would effectively save a full day in the delivery of the mail. The government had offered the Union Pacific and associated railroads a contract worth $750,000 if the trip could be accomplished in that time. The very first run of the transcontinental fast mail train had left New York’s Grand Central Depot on the evening of November 14—just three hours after Elizabeth Bisland’s Fast Western Express—to determine whether it might be done. The train was carrying a mail car, a baggage car, two sleeper cars, a dining car, and a private car belonging to Edward Dickinson, general manager of the Union Pacific Railroad; the passengers included several railway and postal officials, as well as newspaper reporters from some of the cities along the cross-country route, who were looking to provide their readers with firsthand accounts of the historic trip. Elizabeth Bisland was the only woman aboard the train.

  Leaving Omaha the mail train was an hour and a quarter behind schedule; it steamed west across Nebraska, heading toward Cheyenne. The train made a distinctive sight, as all of its cars were painted a stark white and bore the words The Fast Mail. Near the front of the train, the mail car was brightly lit by a row of overhead globe lamps. Inside, a dozen clerks wearing green eye shades sorted letters into long pigeonholes, the pile of letters on the distribution tables in front of them constantly replenished by assistants. A clerk would glance briefly at an address on the front of an envelope, then toss the letter into the correct slot with the flick of a wrist. When a pigeonhole was filled the letters inside it were plac
ed in labeled sacks, to be delivered to a connecting train at the appropriate station. The train thus served as a kind of traveling post office; it had left New York loaded with thirty-eight tons of mail, with twenty-five more tons brought on in Chicago and thirteen in Omaha. All of that mail was sorted and bagged in transit. “The letters were dealt out into their proper places almost as rapidly as an expert card player would deal at whist,” marveled one reporter, “and this in spite of the physical and mental strain arising from the peculiar conditions under which the operation was performed.”

  In the other cars the activity was far less organized. To pass the time, some of the men played whist in the general manager’s private car. One of the passengers brought a Winchester rifle out to the platform of the rear car and took shots at coyotes and grouse. It was possible to stand on the platform and see all the way to the horizon in any direction. The air shone with a luminous clarity that Elizabeth Bisland did not recognize from the coastal cities, south and north, in which she had lived. Here was the frontier she had read about in childhood stories of pioneer families; it was a windswept, empty place. They rode through vast plains the color of ash. The only water was in feebly trickling streams around which no greenery grew; spavined horses took what little sustenance they could from the barren upland meadows. From time to time the train passed an isolated settlement, usually little more than a few rickety cabins made of rough, unpainted boards, the cabins always tightly shut up and to all indications empty, as though the occupants had fled in advance of an invading army. Only once did she ever see any sign of human habitation around those silent, lonely homes, and that was a tiny pair of light brown wool trousers—butternut trousers, as they were then called—fluttering on a clothesline. As the train continued west the land grew, if possible, even drearier; to Bisland, it began to resemble a kind of prehistoric Sodom sown with salt. There was, she thought, something brutal and hideous in the doom laid upon this unhappy country, “as of a Prometheus chained to his mountain-tops, its blood dried to dust in its veins, and lifting a scarred face of gray despair to the rainless sky.”