Darkness had already fallen; J. W. Deuel led the way holding a lantern, the others following in single file. Each man wore a buttoned-up overcoat, leather gloves, and a hat with flaps that covered his ears, and carried his skis on one shoulder and a snow pole on the other; each had on several pairs of socks and wore long rubber boots, keeping his shoes in his coat pockets. Earlier that day a rotary plow had dug out the railroad track from Emigrant Gap almost to Blue Canyon, five miles away, and the men walked in the cuts that the plow had made. The cuts ranged from eight to sixteen feet deep, making high walls of snow as smooth and solid as plaster; it was like walking down a narrow windowless corridor with no end. The great danger, of course, was that a train would come through and the men would be trapped on the track with no way to escape. This was a form of death not unheard of in the mountains. Each man, as he walked, listened for a distant whistle. The only light came from the orange glow of the lantern, which reflected eerily off the walls of snow. The amount of snowfall was almost unimaginable: only the very tops of the pine trees peeked above the snow lines, and the telegraph poles were buried up to their top arms. Once they passed an abandoned two-story house, covered in snow to the chimney. Above them the sky was blue-black; the snow crunched loudly underfoot. Just past midnight they arrived at Shady Run, two miles west of Blue Canyon. There the trail became indistinct: they would have to ski the remaining five miles to Alta.
The skis were made of white ash; they were seven feet long and four inches wide, and turned up at the front ends. Deuel was the only one in the party who had ever skied before, and the going was very slow. Ice formed so quickly under the skis that every hundred yards Jennings needed to stop and scrape it off with his pole. The skis had to be kept parallel at all times or else they would tangle and the skier would fall into a snowbank. This happened to Jennings perhaps twenty times; each time the inside of his coat sleeves filled with snow and his gloves were again encased in ice. Once one of the men, tired of struggling with his skis, took them off and tried walking on top of the snow; almost immediately he fell through and sank out of sight and had to be pulled out by the others. As they moved, drifting snow formed small icicles on their faces; two of the men said that their hats were frozen to their heads. With his every muscle aching and his extremities having passed from painful to numb, facing the prospect of several more hours trekking in the bitter cold, Jennings began to understand why men often decide to lie down in the snow and go to sleep. The only sound was the constant gentle shushing of the skis, like a mother quieting her children at bedtime. Thirty feet below them the railroad track lay like a subterranean river.
It was past four o’clock in the morning when the group, exhausted and chilled to the core, finally reached Alta. J. W. Deuel had suffered frostbite on his left hand, but other than that the men were all right. A train was waiting at the station to take Jennings to Sacramento.
“Thus it was by eight hours’ snowshoeing,” John Jennings would later report, “the blockade on the Central Pacific was raised and The World’s instructions carried out.”
JANUARY 21–22, 1890
Oakland to Mojave Desert
At eight o’clock on the morning of January 21 the tugboat Millen Griffith pulled up alongside the steamship Oceanic lying in San Francisco Bay, and several distinguished-looking men came aboard. They included the deputy collector of the Port of San Francisco, the inspector of customs, the superintendent of the Occidental and Oriental steamship line, and the port’s quarantine officer, who had to examine all of the ship’s passengers for smallpox before they would be allowed to come ashore. The lone reporter in the group was Charles Low of the San Francisco Examiner, who had been asked by The World to accompany Nellie Bly to New York in the event that John Jennings did not arrive in time.
Low found Nellie Bly in the Oceanic’s saloon, quietly eating her breakfast. Though he was a seasoned reporter, he still could not help but feel slightly starstruck in the presence of the young woman who had lately occupied so much of the nation’s attention. She was slender and pretty, smaller of stature than he had imagined, with large gray eyes and an upturned nose, her dark hair braided and tied in two loops at the nape of her neck. Her hands, Low observed, were white and nervous, and on the thumb of her left hand she wore a simple gold band. She was wearing the same blue broadcloth dress in which she had left New York, and was only sixty-eight days older than when she departed, but she looked now like a seasoned traveler, her face deeply browned by the sun—all but her nose, which was burned a bright red.
Low said, “The World men are snowbound in the Sierras, Miss Bly, and The World is going to let the Examiner take care of you.”
Bly looked up and smiled. “Is it another rescue expedition?” she asked, gathering up her belongings. “Well, I’m ready to be rescued. My things are packed and I’ve only got to slip on my ulster.” Though her movements were quick and businesslike he thought he could sense a shyness, a hint of self-deprecation in her manner; it occurred to him that she was the sort of girl of whom men say, “God bless her little heart.” With Low following behind, Bly hurried down the gangplank to the tugboat (“quick-footed as a schoolboy,” he noted admiringly), and then turned to wave to the ship’s crew. “They’ve all been so nice! Oh, the captain—there’s the doctor—but my monkey,” she cried. “Where’s my monkey?”
The monkey in his cage was passed down to a deckhand, and Bly’s baggage was tossed in after. The tug started for shore, but before it could get more than a few yards the quarantine officer shouted down to Bly that he had not yet examined her tongue, and that she was not permitted to land until he did so. By this time, though, there would be no delaying the arrival of the famous world traveler. Playfully Bly stuck out her tongue at the doctor, and with a broad smile he called back, “All right!” Everyone on the tug laughed, and Bly waved farewell to the passengers she was leaving behind.
The tugboat set out across San Francisco Bay for the brief trip to the Oakland Mole, where her train awaited. Bly stood by the capstan with her face to the salty breeze, taking in the sights: Goat Island, Angel Island, Alcatraz with its lighthouse and ring of cannons shining in the morning sun. She had seen none of this before, but after so long traveling in the East it all seemed reassuringly familiar. Slowly the dark mass at the end of the long pier differentiated into a crowd of people; as the tugboat drew closer she could see the excited, expectant faces. The tug pulled up and a gangway was thrown across, and shortly before nine o’clock, to the cheers of the onlookers, Nellie Bly set foot again on America. She waved and flashed that dazzling smile; she thought she had never felt a more exquisite happiness.
On the pier Bly was met by Division Superintendent Alvin D. Wilder of the Southern Pacific Railroad, who ushered her quickly to the waiting train with R. A. Donaldson of the railroad’s Passenger Department walking ahead, imperiously brushing the crowd aside to let her pass.
At exactly 9:02 A.M. the train set off to more cheers from the crowd. It comprised simply an engine and a vestibuled baggage and sleeper car. The San Lorenzo, one of the newest cars in the Pullman fleet, contained a buffet, drawing room, and observation parlor; the wood finishing was of mahogany and bird’s-eye maple, the upholstery was purple velvet. Settling in for the ride, Bly arranged the monkey cage with the bars facing outward so that McGinty could watch the country as it passed. Wilder and Donaldson would be escorting her as far as Port Costa, along with William A. Bissell, general freight and passenger agent of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. As the train set off, Bissell asked Nellie Bly when she would like to arrive in New York. Bly inquired about Elizabeth Bisland, and looked relieved to hear that Bisland was then struggling with storms over the Atlantic. She considered Bissell’s question, her eyes seeming to darken as she furrowed her brows in calculation. “Not later than Saturday evening,” she replied after a moment, although privately she doubted they could get her there that quickly.
Bissell nodded. “Very well,” he said quietly. “We will put you t
here on time.”
Also on board was a stenographer and a telegraph operator, and as the train set off, Bly dictated a message to be sent back to The World in New York; it would be published in the paper the following day:
The saddest sounds that came to me were the farewells called from the Hoboken pier when I started on my trip. The sweetest sounds were the words of welcome and applause which greeted my arrival in San Francisco. Most of my journey has been by water and most of that has been very rough. I have travelled nearly sixteen thousand miles on the seas and am a pretty good sailor by this time.… Just think of it! I haven’t been seasick once, and am delighted to be able to say in this connection that I have enjoyed good health ever since I left New York.
Of course Bly had been seasick, on more than one occasion, while aboard the Augusta Victoria. She herself had noted this in her first letter to The World back in November; in January, though, more confident and so close to setting the around-the-world speed record, this uncomfortable fact did not comport with the desired image of the intrepid young woman traveler—healthy, lively, unaffected, modest, patriotic: the very embodiment, in the phrase just then coming into vogue, of the New American Girl—and so she preferred to change it.
At ten minutes past eleven the train stopped for lunch in the little town of Lathrop, where the train would begin its journey south through central California. In Lathrop the train was held over in the station for four minutes, an unanticipated development but one that Bly understood when she looked up and saw, coming through the vestibule into the car, The World’s own John J. Jennings, just off the train from Sacramento and ready to take his place as Nellie Bly’s Escort Corps. As the train sped south, Jennings related to the others the story of his remarkable overnight trek across the mountains. Not surprisingly, he still seemed shaken by the events of the previous days. “I have seen snow and blizzards in New York,” he said wonderingly, “but the people back there don’t know what snow is.” Jennings was by nature self-effacing, but his reputation had been made: in the news stories the reporters sent back east he was already being referred to as “Snowshoe” Jennings.
The next station stop would not be for another two hours. Those in the San Lorenzo with Nellie Bly spent the time reading, or counting telegraph poles to gauge the speed of the train, or admiring the San Joaquin Valley from the car’s observation parlor. The track here was very smooth and straight as a sunbeam, and even at full speed the carriage rocked from side to side as gently as a cradle. Bly herself felt little inclination to do anything other than sit quietly and rest. There was, she knew, nothing left for her to do. She could change nothing, she could hurry nothing; all she could do now was wait for the train to deliver her to the end of her long journey.
Just before one o’clock the train stopped in Merced. A large crowd, all dressed in their best clothes, had gathered around the station. Bly assumed that the people were having a picnic, and was amazed to hear that they were waiting for her. In answer to the crowd’s calls she stepped out to the train’s back platform, prompting a cheer so loud that, as she recalled later, it “almost frightened me to death.” Immediately the town band struck up a chorus of “My Nellie’s Blue Eyes,” the popular song that in the coming days she would hear more times than she could count. Afterward, a delegation of fifty townswomen visited Bly in her car to wish her Godspeed. Someone passed her a large tray of fruit and nuts and candy, the tribute of a local newsboy; Bly remarked that she was more grateful than if it had been the gift of a king.
At two minutes after two the train arrived in Fresno, where again a large crowd awaited her at the depot. At this stop men and women alike came into the San Lorenzo to meet Nellie Bly. The men asked about the delays she experienced, about the number of miles she had traveled; the women wanted to examine the dress in which she had traveled around the world and to see what she was carrying in her famous gripsack. Four staff members of the Fresno Evening Expositor brought aboard a large basket of fruits and wines, all products of Fresno County, to present to Bly. Soon the bell rang and the crowd filed slowly out of the vestibule. As the train pulled away from the depot, Nellie Bly stepped back onto the platform of her car and waved her cap to the crowd standing below; in response the men waved their hats, the women raised their handkerchiefs, and everyone gave a parting cheer.
So it went for the rest of the day as the train made its way south toward Mojave. With each station stop, each crowd waiting to receive her, each brass band playing “My Nellie’s Blue Eyes” and “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” Bly became more used to the idea of her own fame. Until now she had achieved her journalistic success precisely by being unrecognized, and at first she did not like being looked at by large groups of strangers, but by the end of the first day she felt as comfortable with it as if they were simply looking at the train in which she rode. At Tehachapi a delegation of farmers and lumbermen were waiting at the station for Bly and were deeply disappointed to learn that she had retired for the evening. These were people who sixty-nine days earlier had never heard of Nellie Bly. Her life, she was beginning to understand, had changed forever.
JANUARY 22–23, 1890
Mojave Desert to New Mexico
The special train rolled on through the night. At Mojave it switched engines and tracks and began the long journey eastward into the desert. There was no moon, and the stands of yucca that interrupted the horizon glowed faintly in the dim light of the stars. Here the absolute silence of the world was broken only by the rumble of the train and the occasional howl of a coyote. Here the train stations were not depots but simple station houses. One of them, deep in the desert, was called Bagdad; another, at what was presumably the hottest place on the line, was called Siberia. Just past dawn the train crossed the border into Arizona, at a town with the unlikely name of Needles.
As the sun rose, the train began to climb into the mountains; by ten o’clock, at Williams, Arizona, the elevation was more than eight thousand feet. After the station stop at Williams, the engineer surprised Nellie Bly by inviting her to ride in the cab, and even to operate the throttle, for much of the thirty-one miles to Flagstaff. Bly was thrilled by the unexpected opportunity and took it for all it was worth, pushing the throttle as far as the engineer would allow; sometimes, when he wasn’t looking, she nudged it just a bit further, and on the straight stretches of road she pushed it open as far as it would go, until she was sure that nothing had ever run so fast over the Atlantic and Pacific line. For The World Nellie Bly had learned to ride a bicycle, which she called “the most delightfully perfect amusement ever invented or imagined,” because it came closer than anything else to satisfying her lifelong desire to fly; but riding a bicycle was nothing compared to this. The air roared in her ears—she had to shout at the engineer, right next to her, just to be heard—and the telegraph poles flashed by like lightning. One man standing near the track, she was delighted to see, had to hold his hat on his head as the train went whizzing past. Ahead of her the snowy crown of Flagstaff Mountain rose in the distance; as the track curved, the mountain would appear first on one side of the engine and then the other, and Bly watched it loom closer and closer all the way to the end of her run. For a woman to operate a locomotive was highly unusual, and it was an achievement of which she was very proud. The next day she told a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer, “For a new engineer the master mechanic said I was a rushing success.”
This was a region of rock and cactus and sagebrush, of sandstone buttes carved into fantastic shapes by eons of wind; in the bright sun the mountains looked brown and scorched, as if a fire had just swept over them. It was a forbidding landscape and sparsely settled: most of the people waiting at a train station to see Nellie Bly had traveled a long distance to get there. The women wore calico dresses; the men wore rawhide cowboy hats and carried pistols in their belts. Bly herself was continually surprised that the residents of these “almost desert places” had even heard of her, but everywhere the train stopped, she reported back to New
York, “a crowd is gathered who call for me, and will not be satisfied until I appear on the rear platform to receive their greetings.”
At four o’clock in the afternoon the train crossed the state line into New Mexico. The Navajo reservation was about twenty miles south of the railroad tracks, near the town of Gallup, and Bly saw many Indians on horseback riding nearby. The Rand McNally guide to the area advised travelers that the Navajos “display their only interest in civilization by looking at the trains. There is no telling what they think of the innovation.” Just east of Gallup, railroad men were repairing a bridge that spanned a deep ravine. While the repairs were in progress the bridge was held up only by jackscrews, without the girders that normally helped to support it. Hearing Bly’s unscheduled train coming, the workmen frantically tried to flag it down before it reached the bridge, but they were too late and they watched helplessly as it thundered past at fifty miles an hour, over the weakened bridge and safely across to the other side. “The escape is a miraculous one,” The World marveled the next day, “and section men who witnessed the train flash past on the frail structure regard the escape as one of the most miraculous in railway history.”
Eighty Days Page 36