Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  The fast run across a rickety bridge would seem dramatic enough in itself, but over time, in Nellie Bly’s retelling, it became even more so. In her version of the story the bridge not only threatened to fall; in this version it actually fell. “I’ve had many narrow escapes and no closer call than on my lightning trip across the continent when the railroad bridge fell down the instant we crossed,” she related to a reporter two months after her return. It was a story that she told again and again. In her book about the trip, Bly wrote that “my train had run safely across a bridge which was held in place only by jack-screws, and which fell the moment we were across.” No one seemed to notice or care that the scene had been lifted directly from Around the World in Eighty Days, when Phileas Fogg’s train races across a ruined bridge in Wyoming. “But hardly had the train passed the river,” Jules Verne wrote, “when the bridge, now completely demolished, crashed noisily down into the rapids of Medicine Bow.”

  At every station stop Nellie Bly stood on the back platform of the train and shook hands and signed autographs. People held up cards, notebooks, sheets of foolscap, even pine boards, most of the time accompanied by a pencil or a pen freshly dipped in ink, and she always signed until the last request had been satisfied. When the train pulled out of the station the crowds would run after it, grabbing for her hands as long as they could. Bly’s arms were sore for several days afterward—“but I did not mind the ache,” she would say later, “if by such little acts I could give pleasure to my own people, whom I was so glad to be among once more.” As it sped east, the San Lorenzo filled with wreaths and bouquets sent by well-wishers; congratulatory telegrams poured in from all over the country, many of them addressed only to Nellie Bly, Nellie Bly’s Special Train. “It is pardonable in us as Americans to say that your indomitable will and pluck are but characteristic of model young America,” read one such telegram. “Get there, Nellie Bly, and God bless you.” Later, Bly would remember that trip across the country as “one maze of happy greetings, happy wishes, congratulating telegrams, fruit, flowers, loud cheers, wild hurrahs, rapid hand-shaking and a beautiful car filled with fragrant flowers attached to a swift engine that was tearing like mad through flower-dotted valley and over snow-tipped mountain, on-on-on!”

  Everywhere she was received with the sort of fanfare usually reserved for a conquering hero; her race around the world was already being turned from a personal into a national triumph. The World, in the days before her return, called it “a tribute to American pluck, American womanhood and American perseverance.” This, of course, despite the fact that Bly’s success had been made possible by German and British steamships, British coaling stations, a British-owned canal designed by a Frenchman, and a transcontinental railroad largely built by Chinese workers not permitted American citizenship. Bly herself wrote, “They say no man or woman in America ever received ovations like those given me during my flying trip across the continent. The Americans turned out to do honor to an American girl who had been the first to make a record of a flying trip around the world, and I rejoiced with them that it was an American girl who had done it.”

  A drawing of “the rival tourists” that appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in January 1890. Note that only Elizabeth Bisland is referred to as “Miss.” (Illustration Credit 15.1)

  JANUARY 23–24, 1890

  Kansas to Chicago

  The railroad trip through Kansas was, in Bly’s own description, “a triumphal march.” At one of the train stations a man shouted jubilantly to her, “Come out here and we’ll elect you governor.” Seeing the crowds that waited at every stop, standing in the January cold just to get a glimpse of her, she could well believe him. In Topeka more than a thousand people were on hand to greet her; they pressed forward so vigorously that the police had to intervene. In Larned she was received by a cheering crowd of several hundred; in Dodge City, where it seemed that nearly every resident was at the train depot, the mayor presented her with a resolution that read:

  Vim, enterprise, phenomenal activity and high courage unite in the person of Miss Nellie Bly, the swift messenger of the New York World, now passing through our city on her wonderful journey around the world. She proves that woman leads and man follows; that the earth is none too large for woman’s conquest; that whether the earth moves or not, civilization advances, mankind progresses and Nellie Bly is a synonym for success and happy achievements. The people of Dodge City join the procession, toss up their hats and cry God speed.

  In Hutchinson, Kansas, the members of the Ringgold Silver Cornet Band, who had been practicing a special number in Nellie Bly’s honor, were so awed by the sight of her that they forgot to play and simply joined in cheering with the rest of the crowd.

  “The traveller appeared to be in excellent spirits,” John Jennings reported from Kansas to the readers of The World, “and somewhat surprised at the enthusiasm she had provoked.”

  Through whirling snow the train roared through a succession of little towns, Halstead at 2:48 and Newton at 2:50 and Florence at 3:42 and Emporia at 4:37. Engines were changed on the fly; long before the train was due into a town, all switches were spiked into position to prevent collisions with slower-moving trains. Upon entering Kansas, Bly’s train had been given permission to exceed the state speed limit of 50 miles per hour, and at various times the train was running as fast as 65. The 134 miles between Dodge City and Hutchinson were covered in exactly 134 minutes; east of Ellinwood, seven miles were made in six minutes. “It is doubtful whether such marvelous speed has ever before been made on the Santa Fe line,” noted the Topeka Daily Capital. Nellie Bly thoroughly enjoyed it. “This is the way I like to travel,” she called happily to one of the reporters. The reporter from the Capital did a quick calculation and determined that if Bly had been able to maintain her speed across Kansas for the length of her entire trip, she would have circled the globe in less than twenty-four days.

  The Topeka Daily Capital reporter rode in the railroad car with Nellie Bly from Larned back to Topeka, and indeed throughout her cross-country train trip Bly was accompanied by a large and ever-changing group of newspaper reporters. The reporters from the smaller papers stayed on for only a few train stops, while those from the larger papers stayed for much longer stretches. Each one, though, wanted to hear the story of her journey around the world, and tirelessly Nellie Bly repeated it anew. Bly, who had been anxious and unhappy for much of the Pacific Ocean crossing, now seemed enlivened by the attention of her fellow journalists. Despite the rigors of her long trip, the Daily Capital reporter noted, she was “in the very best of spirits and apparently not fatigued in the least,” while to the representative of the Chicago Daily Herald she was “cordial, frank and sprightly” and, to the Pittsburg Press, “very entertaining.” From the very beginning of her career Bly had placed herself at the center of her reportage: her exposé of the Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum, for instance, had focused in large part on how she managed to get inside the asylum—the women inmates did not even appear until midway through the story. Still, this was something else entirely. As her train barreled east, Bly could not have helped but recognize just how unusual it was for a journalist, much less a female journalist, to be the subject of so many interviews. She was no longer reporting the story; she was the story.

  NELLIE BLY’S TRAIN arrived in Chicago at 7:05 A.M. on Friday, January 24; the trip from Oakland had been made in only sixty-nine hours, the fastest time ever recorded for that run. Bly had stayed up until four o’clock in the morning talking with a young newspaperwoman from Nebraska—her name, amusingly, was Miss Muffett—who had traveled six hundred miles to interview her, and afterward dictating an account of her trip for The World, a process that was immeasurably slowed by the stenographer being made seasick by the motion of the train. Despite the lack of sleep she was up by six-thirty, when the porter called to her that the train would soon be in Chicago. She got herself dressed, “drank the last drop of coffee there was left on our train,” and was
surprised, upon opening the door of her stateroom, to see the car filled with good-looking men. They were members of the Chicago Press Club who had boarded the train at Joliet to escort her through their city, and Bly was delighted to sit with them and answer their questions and joke about her sunburned nose and the cleverness of her monkey and the merits of her one dress. By the time the train rolled into the Polk Street Depot she was wishing she could spend all day in the city.

  Carriages were waiting for them at the station; Bly rode in a small coupe with the leader of the press delegation, who would write later that he was so charmed by Nellie Bly that he was tempted to steal her. They sat side by side in the carriage’s single seat watching through the windows as the city roused itself for the day, the already crowded grip cars lurching past, the newsboys and bootblacks staking out their corners, the men and women in elegant dark clothing hurrying off to work. The tall, ornately carved stone buildings that lined the streets were more reminiscent of New York than any other place she had ever been, and must have impressed on her the idea, pleasing though almost impossible fully to grasp, that by the end of the following day she would be back home with her mother. In the beautifully appointed rooms of the Press Club the president offered Bly congratulations on behalf of all the newspaper men and women of Chicago. All of the men in attendance seem to have been utterly charmed by Nellie Bly; wrote one, “All preconceived notions that she was a sort of man in female attire, that she was something of a tomboy, that she was too adventurous for refined womanhood, that she was a mere ‘globe-trotter,’ vanished before her winning smile and soft, lightly musical voice. She was feminine in the best sense. She was natural. A free, independent, but gentle product of distinctively American social condition—that was all and everything.”

  After what she termed a “delightfully informal reception,” Bly was driven to Kinsley’s, Chicago’s most fashionable restaurant, where the club had arranged for her breakfast. Kinsley’s had been built in the style of a Moorish castle, though the medieval effect was vitiated somewhat by the red-and-white striped awnings that hung above every window; inside, diners could choose among a French café, a German café, a Gentleman’s Restaurant, a Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Restaurant, and several banquet rooms of various sizes, one of which is presumably where Bly met the group of Chicago journalists who were waiting for her. Bly, one reported the next day, chatted “charmingly” and “unreservedly” about her trip, and “told of small, pointed incidents which only a woman would remember.” She related amusing stories about the Englishmen she had met on her travels, including one especially caddish fellow who flirted with her unconscionably (Bly described how she “dropped him a brief note, telling that if I even so much as caught him looking at me again I would report him to the crew of the first man-of-war we met floating the Stars and Stripes and induce the laddies in blue to resent an insult to the womanhood of their country by boarding our vessel and leading him off in chains”). She joked about her black-and-white checked overcoat, which she claimed was loud enough to have left a continuous echo behind her as she traveled. She recounted how she had seen the American flag only once, flying over the consulate in Canton. When the meal was over the journalists in attendance grandly voted Nellie Bly “one of the boys.” This was, in fact, the only way that she might be able to join the Chicago Press Club, as women were allowed as members solely on an honorary basis.

  After breakfast the party drove to the Chicago Board of Trade, where Bly was shown to an upstairs viewing gallery. The hall boasted the marble pillars and gilded arches, the enormous plate-glass windows and high tessellated ceilings of a great European gambling house. Downstairs, the trading floor—the “wheat pit,” as it was known—was the usual pandemonium, jammed tight with wildly excited men waving their arms, shouting, jostling, apparently engaged in a never-ending struggle to gain one another’s attention. Somehow those gestures converted money into more money, an alchemical process utterly mystifying to the uninitiated. “From this gallery,” explained an 1891 guidebook, “a perfect view may be had of the operations on the floor, operations which it would be impossible to describe, and impossible for the average visitor to understand.” One of the men in the wheat pit, already raising his arm to offer something to someone, happened first to glance up and saw, standing at the railing, a dark-haired young woman in a checked coat and fore-and-aft cap. “There’s Nellie Bly!” he shouted.

  Instantly all trading stopped. The men crowded into the middle of the floor, where they could better see the gallery, and after a moment of stunned silence, burst into wild cheering. “People can say what they please about Chicago,” Bly wrote later, “but I do not believe that anywhere else in the United States can a woman get a greeting which will equal that given by the Chicago Board of Trade.” Above the din came cries of “Speech, speech,” but Bly just bowed and waved her cap and playfully shook her head, and as she turned to leave the men gave her their best three cheers and a tiger, the final whoop louder than anything heard on the floor on even the busiest trading day.

  The scene at the Board of Trade was so tumultuous that Bly had to be escorted to the street through a private hallway; afterward the members of the Press Club drove Bly to the Union Station, where she would switch to a Pennsylvania Railroad train for the last leg of her journey. The news of her presence had by now made its way around the city, and outside the station still another throng had gathered to see her, a seemingly endless stream of brokers and typewriters and clerks pouring out of the surrounding office buildings onto the broad sidewalks wanting to see the young woman who had gone around the world faster than anyone ever had before, surrounding her as she stepped down from her carriage and calling her name and jostling for a better look, and not satisfied until she had shaken all the hands they stretched out to her. Finally Bly managed to make her way inside the station. At the platform she reluctantly said goodbye to the men of the Press Club; thanking them “for the royal manner in which they had treated a little sun-burnt stranger,” she boarded her train.

  The Pennsylvania Railroad train to New York, known as the Atlantic Express No. 20, departed at ten-thirty in the morning. Nellie Bly had been given exclusive use of the rear parlor car, the Ilion; it was, in the words of one reporter aboard the train, “a perfect bower of beauty and comfort.” The walls were painted a peacock blue, set off by curtains and lambrequins of fawn gray. The stateroom was already full of flowers sent by well-wishers—so full, in fact, that many more had to be left behind. In one corner of the room sat the red and gold temple chair from Hong Kong; on the wall hung a Japanese mandolin that Bly was saying had been a gift from a prince in Yokohama. Just before the train started east, a telegram intended to have been delivered in San Francisco was handed to her. It read: “Mr. Verne wishes the following message to be handed to Nellie Bly the moment she touches American soil: Monsieur and Madame Jules Verne address their sincere felicitations to Miss Nellie Bly at the moment when that intrepid young lady sets foot on the soil of America.”

  “Oh, I am so glad to get that,” Bly exclaimed.

  With the snowstorms behind her and New York only a day away—and Elizabeth Bisland apparently delayed by storms on the Atlantic—there seemed nothing left that could deny her victory. Happily Bly lounged in the Ilion’s drawing room, chatting with the reporters on board. Back in Kansas, Nellie Bly had given the first hint of possible ill will toward Elizabeth Bisland when to a reporter’s question she answered tartly, “I know nothing of her plans and I care very little about it,” and further asserted, “The idea of taking this trip was entirely my own. I suppose the editor of The Cosmopolitan thought he could get some good advertising by taking advantage of The World’s enterprise, but I don’t think they will be able to steal all the thunder.” Now she grew more expansive on the subject in a long interview with a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, who at one point inquired about “Miss Bisland.”

  “Miss Bisland?” Bly repeated, with what the reporter described as a “twinkle in h
er eye.” She explained that she had left New York nine hours before Elizabeth Bisland, that Bisland’s trip was “suddenly conceived,” and that she herself had not even heard about Bisland until she reached Yokohama. (This was a bit of misremembering on either Bly’s or the reporter’s part, as she had actually learned about Bisland in Hong Kong.) Warming to her story, Bly went on, “Miss Bisland had reached Yokohama two days before me and had then left. I soon found that she had not spent those days idly. She had tried to bribe the officers of the Occidental and Oriental steamship Oceanic to make a slow trip with me to San Francisco. I really think she succeeded in fixing the Captain. I do not tell this against Miss Bisland. I merely state it as a fact I discovered. Perhaps anything is fair in a race of this kind, as well as in war, since money counts as much as cleverness.

  “But, having discovered it, I went frankly to the officers of the Oceanic and told them of it. I said to them that it was their duty to make as fast a trip across the Pacific as they could. I said I would not give them one cent beyond my regular fare to induce them to perform their duty, but I also told them that if they didn’t do their duty I would ‘roast’ them with my pen to the whole world. If they could afford to stand that, and their employers beside, all right. Perhaps that was as much bribery as Miss Bisland had done. At least it was as effective. The steamship reached San Francisco one day late, but it was because of a stormy headwind, and not on account of any dereliction on the officers’ part.”

  This was an astonishing—and entirely unsubstantiated—accusation, made against not only Elizabeth Bisland but also the officers of the Oceanic, who had by Bly’s own account done everything possible to deliver her to San Francisco as quickly as possible and whom she elsewhere characterized as “perfect, from the captain down.” In that regard, it might also be noted that in fact the Oceanic arrived in San Francisco one day early, not one day late; the steamship was late only in relation to Chief Engineer William Allen’s prediction that Nellie Bly would be brought across the Pacific in record-breaking time—a prediction that he believed so strongly that he had it painted on the ship’s engines.