Bisland settled herself down in the plush of the seat and removed her veil and gloves, readying herself for the journey. Only now, alone in the train, with six hours of traveling ahead of her, could she really take stock of what had happened, the chain of misfortunes that had led her here: the Prussian had broken a screw in Hong Kong harbor; La Champagne, it seemed, had refused to wait; the Ems had been taken off the line; the Etruria had been replaced by the Bothnia. At this point, she understood, there was little chance of her arriving in New York on time. The inside of the carriage was lit, and in the window she could see herself hanging in the air, as pale and mournful as a ghost. She could have stayed overnight in London enjoying the hospitality of Lady Broome, with whom she had made a fast friendship in Ceylon, could have slept on silk sheets in a large, warm bed. Despite that, she knew she would not have slept comfortably. The idea of racing against Nellie Bly had never appealed to her; she had not even wanted to start on this trip in the first place. But now she had. She had watched the sun come up over the Mediterranean; she had eaten broiled eels, and curry, and mangoes with insides like orange custard; she had seen Mount Fuji at sunrise and the Aden Tanks in the moonlight. Back in New York there were people anxiously awaiting her arrival, and to them was due her best effort. The Bothnia was a slow boat, but aboard it she still had a chance. She would push on.
Somewhere along the road to Holyhead she fell asleep, though only for a short while; she was assailed by horrible dreams and awoke with a cry. The train was riding through a wild storm, wind howling and rain drumming against the windows. Indeterminate shapes rose against the sky, darkness etched on greater darkness. Out there stood towns with noble names—Rugby, Stafford, Chester—places she had always imagined, with their medieval cathedrals, castles, libraries, but now sliding by unseen, mile after mile. Deep in the night the train arrived at Holyhead station. Through the window the illuminated faces of the clock tower looked blurry, out of focus. The temperature had dropped and the rain was now mixed with sleet. Gathering up her belongings, Bisland ran down to the pier, the icy drops pelting her cheeks. At the dock the paddle-wheel steamer bobbed madly on the surf, straining against its ties like a wild animal on a leash.
Even in daylight, in the best of weather, the trip across the Irish Sea lasted four hours; and even then the voyage was rough enough that a guidebook of the time could refer to tourists in northern Ireland being “haunted by the dread of the terrible 4 hours between Holyhead and Kingstown.” Thirty-seven years earlier another woman journalist, Grace Greenwood, had crossed from Holyhead to Kingstown during a tour of Europe. “Throughout that trip,” she wrote, “I felt that I would sooner cross the Styx to the Plutonian shores than attempt it again.” Not two months before, the British steamship Florence had foundered in a gale on the Irish Sea, and nine lives were lost. It was best, of course, not to speak of such things, and the passengers on the steamer huddled silently together beneath blankets in the cabin. Now and again an especially fierce wave would send the ship into a queasying plunge, and another passenger would rush up to deck to be sick over the side. The engines throbbed steadily beneath them, hour after hour. The sky was already lightening to gray when land was sighted. Coming ashore to the Kingstown jetty, the passengers were immediately hurried onto the waiting train bound for Queenstown.
Bisland felt wretched and grimy—she had not changed her clothes in nearly three days—and so worn down that the remarkable beauty of the passing landscape was scarcely able to revive her spirits. Filmy mists swept across the land like phantoms, the countryside a lush green even in January. It was Sunday now, she realized, watching the peasants tramp the muddy roads to church. These were faces, broad and ruddy, that she recognized from back home. She gazed at the sturdy young men, wondering idly how soon they would be mayors in New York or aldermen in Chicago, at the girls in their bunchy provincial dresses, whose daughters might someday be Washington society ladies wearing gowns made by Worth. The train kept up its incessant rattle. She tried reading one of her books, but the words danced on the page. Her hunger was making it difficult to concentrate. She had not eaten since the previous morning in Calais, nearly twenty-four hours before. She still had the spice cake, but it was very dry and she had nothing to wash it down with except a bit of brandy in a flask; after a few bites she choked on the cake and set it aside. Due to the late arrival of the Holyhead boat the train was running late and stopped only for the shortest possible time at each station, not long enough for her to get anything to eat. The train passed the beautiful city of Cork, with its fine old mansions and crumbling castles covered with ivy; half an hour later, at noon, it arrived at the railway station, dockside in Queenstown. The Bothnia, thankfully, had not yet arrived, the bad weather having delayed it as well, but the steamship was expected in just a few minutes. From the train Bisland’s luggage was sent down to the tender, and she went off quickly in search of food. The large and stately Queen’s Hotel was not far from the landing, but the bad luck that had followed her for the better part of two days required that the hotel kitchen should be undergoing repairs, and only by “frantic protest” did she manage to obtain from a kitchen worker a cup of cold, bitter tea and a bit of bread as limp and dingy as a scrub rag. Back at the terminal, one of the porters warned her that she should be ready at a moment’s notice to be summoned to the tender, for when the steamship was signaled offshore there would be no time to waste. Bisland found the ladies’ room and made her toilet as best she could—her toiletries case was in her Gladstone bag, aboard the tender—and then took a seat on a bench in the damp, chilly waiting room.
Hour after hour passed with no summons to the tender. The rain drummed on the roof; the wind whistled through the thin glass of the windows. In her exhaustion, the walls themselves seemed slightly to tremble. In the previous two days she had been in Italy, France, England, Wales, and now Ireland. This was not traveling, as Jules Verne had once observed about Phileas Fogg; it was only describing a circumference. All afternoon Bisland sat in the waiting room, as she later recalled it, “hopeless, helpless, overwhelmed with hunger, lack of sleep, and fatigue.” She closed her eyes and tried to summon her strength. Her wool overcoat hung heavily on her shoulders, soaked from the rain and the spray. She felt chilled to the bone; it would take time, she knew, to recover from her night on the Irish Sea, and now she was about to cross the Atlantic Ocean. In those two days she had been on a train, a boat, another train, another boat, and still another train. It was best not to think about those meals on the India mail train, the warming soup, the fresh bread and butter, especially the strong hot coffee. From the window a line of hills rose an irresolute gray, seeming to blend into the sky churning with low clouds. The gray and beamless atmosphere, Shelley had written of days like this one. Outside the station she could hear the cries of beggars imploring newly arrived travelers for pennies; here was the poverty of Ireland that had brought so many to New York. There had been beggars at the train stations of the American West, beggars in the harbors of Singapore and Aden, beggars outside the temples in Colombo. On this trip, as Scripture said, the poor had always been with her. Slowly the room darkened. Finally, near six o’clock, when her patience was at an end and she was demanding food from one of the station clerks, the long-awaited notice came: the Bothnia had been signaled, and the tender must be off.
The tender put out from shore, but almost immediately the wind drove it back, whirling the little boat around in the water like an eggshell. The steamship lay miles offshore. From the far cliffs a lighthouse flashed and darkened in maddening regularity, seeming never to get any closer. The tender rolled and pitched on the waves, its engines roaring and then subsiding, again and again, for fully two and a half hours, until at last it pulled alongside the Bothnia. From somewhere on the steamship instructions were sent down through a speaking trumpet; a gangplank was tossed aboard and made fast with hawsers. Wearily the passengers lined up to board the ship. By this time Elizabeth Bisland was dizzy from cold and hunger and exhau
stion, and in the darkness she groped her way unsteadily up the narrow, slippery gangplank. No sooner had she set foot on the Bothnia’s rain-soaked deck than a shove from an impatient passenger behind her sent her tumbling into the ship’s scuppers, raising welts that would remain for the rest of the voyage. A compassionate stewardess showed Bisland to her cabin, where she crawled blindly into bed, bruised, speechless, and on the verge of tears.
That night the Bothnia set out into the worst weather that had been seen on the North Atlantic in many years.
JANUARY 21, 1890
San Francisco Bay
DESPITE THE FOUR-DAY STORM ON THE PACIFIC, THE OCEANIC HAD STILL managed to make the crossing in good time, sailing into San Francisco Bay in the early hours of January 21—a day later than Chief Allen’s confident prediction, but still a day ahead of schedule. In the morning the revenue officers came aboard to inspect the ship; they brought with them the latest newspapers, all of them heralding Nellie Bly’s impending arrival. The other big news story of the day was far less pleasant: a massive blizzard had led to the shutdown of railroad traffic through much of the American West for the better part of a week. “I read of the impassable snow blockade,” Bly recalled later, “and my despair knew no bounds.”
It was the largest snow blockade in the history of the United States. Seven feet had fallen on the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, more than had ever been recorded, with drifts reaching twenty feet. On the other side of the mountains, in Nevada, the situation was even worse. Local train men reported that in canyons there the drifting snow was anywhere from thirty to sixty feet deep. Stockmen were estimating that by the time the storm was over, four-fifths of the cattle and sheep in Nevada would be dead. The train blockade extended as far north as Washington State, where ten lives had been lost in the blizzard. Fifteen feet of snow had fallen in eastern Oregon, and the conditions were scarcely better in Montana and Colorado. The New York Herald declared, “No such storm has been known since the first white man penetrated the Rocky Mountains.”
By this time Nellie Bly had traveled more than eighteen thousand miles without a single missed connection or major delay. Now, having returned to her own country, she was facing the most serious threat to her race against time. “Guessers who felt quite sure that all elements of uncertainty would be practically eliminated after Miss Bly reached San Francisco,” The World advised its readers, “will see that there is more uncertainty now than at any time during the journey.” The original plan had been for Bly to take the Central Pacific Railroad’s overland route via Ogden and Omaha to Chicago. That route, however, was now totally impassable: no eastbound trains would be able to get through for several days at least, and perhaps for as much as a week. The only alternative was to head south in an attempt to skirt the blockade.
The World cabled General Passenger Agent T. H. Goodman of the Southern Pacific Railroad, asking him to charter a special train to carry Nellie Bly from Oakland to Chicago by a southern route. According to one report, “The New York journal sent instructions to spare no expense in attaining the object desired.” Goodman immediately began consultations with officials of the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe Railroads, and at noon on Monday, January 20, the Queen, one of the Southern Pacific’s fastest locomotives, with the Pullman sleeper car San Lorenzo attached to it, was moved to the depot at the Oakland Mole, to be ready as soon as Bly’s steamship arrived. It would function as a regular train on the Southern Pacific system down through central California to Mojave, and then proceed east as a special train on the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad’s “New Mexico Southern” road east to Albuquerque; there it would switch to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe road, heading briefly northeast to La Junta, Colorado, before resuming a more direct eastward path to Kansas City and then on to Chicago. The Southern Pacific sent telegrams up and down the route instructing local companies to have the fastest engines and best men available as needed; extra engines were placed on side tracks, ready to be called into service in case of an emergency. Bly’s train was given a “regardless order,” which meant that it would have the right of way over everything else on the road. To make those accommodations from Mojave to Chicago, the Santa Fe railroad charged The World a dollar a mile, for a total of $2,190; Nellie Bly’s train ride across America thus cost more than all the other parts of her trip put together.
Ever since the very first announcement of Nellie Bly’s race, The World had been proclaiming that their competitor would not resort to chartered ships or trains; only in this way could The World fulfill its self-declared mandate of public service, which was to determine how quickly and easily a typical traveler could circle the globe using “the ordinary lines of commerce.” But when presented with the likelihood that Nellie Bly, like thousands of other typical travelers, would be snowbound for days on end in California—when The World was faced with a conflict between its stated intention to use only ordinary transportation and its desire to break the around-the-world record (and beat The Cosmopolitan in the bargain)—the outcome was never in doubt: a special train was chartered, and no expense spared to make all possible speed. “This was permissible,” was all The World would say, opaquely, on the matter, “inasmuch as the snow blockade on the Central Pacific made passage by that route impossible and the wide detour and loss of time that the change of programme necessitated justified the deviation.” The only public demurral came from a small newspaper in a state through which Nellie Bly’s train would not pass. “As we understood it,” asked the Register of Wheeling, West Virginia, “she was to use only the regular modes of travel, making the regular connections. How is this?”
AMONG THE PASSENGERS trapped on the snowbound trains was a World editor by the name of John J. Jennings. Jennings, who had recently joined the Evening World after two years as managing editor of Joseph Pulitzer’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had been ordered to San Francisco to serve as one of the “Nellie Bly Escort Corps,” to meet Bly when her steamship landed and accompany her back to New York. He set out at once on a fast mail train heading west. The train made excellent time as far as Utah, where the snows began; by the morning of January 16, it was ten hours behind time and the road had become almost impassable. The engineer had no choice but to stop at a train shed in Emigrant Gap, California, a narrow pass in the Sierra Nevada 160 miles from San Francisco. The passengers reconciled themselves to being stuck there for several days at least, and perhaps a good deal longer.
Time passed very slowly. Each day John Jennings and a couple of the others walked back down the railroad tracks to look for the rotary plow. Sometimes they shoveled snow from the tracks, or picked ice from the rails. There was nothing else to do. The men, and three of the ten women on board, did daily exercises in the train shed. Two Dominican nuns sat in the same place day after day, cheerfully reading their prayer books. One passenger set to work with paper and pencil writing a newspaper that he called The Daily Snow, providing the latest news of the train; each issue was produced in a single copy that was eagerly read and circulated among the passengers. With each passing day the situation grew increasingly precarious. The train had two Pullman buffet cars with a limited supply of canned food. The shed was damp and dark, and cold all the time, leaving the passengers pale and shivering. By the third day half a dozen had fallen ill, among them the only doctor in the group, the police surgeon of San Francisco, who came down one night with congestion of the lungs that, it was feared, would develop into pneumonia; he was ministered to with quinine from his own supply, and with the little brandy that still remained. Before long the train’s oil tanks had also been depleted; at night the cars were plunged into blackness, and all the passengers could do was wait in the cold and dark for morning. They were twenty-six miles from Donner Lake—as the site was now called—the spot in the Sierra Nevada where the snowbound Donner party had met their terrible end.
At five o’clock in the afternoon of the fifth day, January 20, John Jennings received a telegram with instructions from The World: Nellie
Bly’s steamship was about to arrive in Oakland, and he should get there by the following morning and spare no expense in doing so. No train, he knew, would be able to reach them for two days at least; the only way out now was on skis (or, as they were called in the mountains of the American West, “snowshoes,” the term “ski” not yet being in wide circulation). The nearest station that a train could reach was in the town of Alta, fifteen miles away. Jennings himself had no experience in the mountains—he had grown up in St. Louis and was a drama critic by trade—but a local miner named J. W. Deuel, who had lived in the Sierra for twenty-five years, agreed to guide him to Alta for a price of twenty-five dollars. At the Western Union office by the train station, Jennings sent a telegram to the division superintendent of the railroad asking that an engine be made available for a trip to Colfax or farther; almost immediately the superintendent cabled back granting the request. The telegraph operators warned Jennings that he was facing a desperate trek across the mountains at night. The summit had received twenty to thirty feet of snow, they reminded him, and there was a risk of snowslide at any time. A telegraph lineman had started out the night before from the nearby town of Summit and was thought to be lost in the snow; a Chinese laborer had perished in Towles, near Alta, within fifty feet of the train station. John Jennings was forty-six years old and had never been on skis in his life, but he would not be dissuaded; Deuel had said that he could get to Alta by two A.M., and Jennings had confidence in his guide and in himself. He returned to the train to get ready, where two other passengers volunteered to join the expedition. At six-fifteen, seventy-five minutes after receiving the telegram from New York, Jennings and the three others set out for Alta to the cheers of the passengers who remained behind.
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