Around the World on Two Wheels

by Peter Zheutlin

  “Her route lay through Broadway to Fifty-ninth Street, where a large crowd congregated and cheered the rider,” reported the New York Times. “Old cyclists are of the opinion that Mlle. Londonderry will never finish the trip. Yonkers will be the first resting place.” Luckily for Annie, she only had to cover eleven miles that day, for riding a heavy bicycle in long skirts through the oppressive heat was miserable. Washington had been dropped from her agenda as quickly as she had added it.

  From Fifty-ninth Street and Broadway (Columbus Circle) Annie rode through Central Park, dense with summer green. The park was an oasis, a respite from the relentless thrum of the streets of New York. It was the place New Yorkers—at least those who couldn’t get to the shore—fled to escape the oppressive summer heat and, hopefully, to catch a breeze.

  Next Annie crossed the Harlem River on the Washington Bridge, a graceful two-arched span that afforded a broad view of the city looking south across Manhattan and the Bronx and headed north through Yonkers and over the Hudson Highlands opposite West Point. These were the largest hills of her trip thus far, and no doubt a formidable challenge with the heavy Columbia bicycle beneath her. But if she had a tough time on the uphills, Annie surely had a whale of a good time on the downs, though it may have taken her a while to learn how to control her unwieldy bicycle on steep downhill grades.

  The Columbia was equipped with a “spoon brake” activated, like the brake on a modern bike, by a lever on the handlebar. The lever was attached to a plunger that forced a curved metal shoe into contact with the front wheel to slow it. But unlike modern bicycles, Annie’s had no freewheeling mechanism, a device that allows wheels to spin while the pedals remain stationary. Rather, the pedals turned in direct relationship with the rear wheel. When the speed became too great she had to place her feet on coaster brackets mounted to the lower part of the forks, lest her skirts get caught up in the spinning pedals and cause a sure fall.

  Once through the Hudson Highlands, Annie passed through Poughkeepsie, crossed the Hudson River at South Bridge, and rode into Albany.

  It was early to mid-August and well over a month since Annie left Boston, yet she was a mere 150 miles west of where she had started, a distance an experienced cyclist could have covered in two days, even in the 1890s. The wager clock was ticking and she had barely made a dent.

  Outside of Albany the roads deteriorated, and Annie found herself facing hilly roads of sand and clay for ten miles to Schenectady. Following side paths, roads, and the Erie Canal towpath, she traveled until the steeples and electric light towers of Utica came into view. While the Erie Canal towpath generally offered smooth, flat riding, teamsters driving mules and horses that pulled barges up and down the canal often didn’t take kindly to cyclists, whose presence frequently startled the mules, and the teamsters often hurled epithets as the cyclists sped by. But the sight of a lone woman on wheels was a rarity and might well have been cause more for astonishment than anger. Annie crossed the Erie Canal, turned on to Genesee Street, and pedaled into the heart of Utica. Past Utica, the roads were excellent all the way to Syracuse.

  BY MID-TO LATE August, Annie found herself between Syracuse and Rochester. She must already have begun growing weary of life on the road.

  When she was unable to find a hotel or rooming house to put her up for the night, she sometimes slept outdoors, under bridges, or in barns—any place that offered some protection from the elements and tramps. Though the roads were good in central New York, the lack of ordinary household conveniences and the labor of going mile after mile, day after day on her forty-two-pound bike was tiresome. As washing her clothes was a rare treat, in the August heat they became quite unpleasant to wear. Even when she did find lodging where she could wash her clothes, there often wasn’t time for them to dry completely before starting off again.

  When drenched by downpours, Annie continued to ride in clothes that were soaking wet and therefore heavier; at day’s end, she would be caked with mud. In dry weather, she ended the day covered with dust and dirt. She tried, she said, “to eat three square meals a day,” but when she couldn’t she ate apples. Annie also had to become accustomed to relieving herself in creative ways and not always in pleasant places. A proper toilet was one of the luxuries she most appreciated. All in all, the reality of the road may have been quite at odds with the glamorous life she had imagined when she left Boston. She had, it seemed, traded one form of drudgery for another.

  THE ROUTE TO Rochester was a convoluted one involving countless crossings over the Erie Canal, under railroad tracks, over the tracks, and over the canal again. From Rochester, Annie followed the telegraph line through Coldwater, North Chili, and Churchville, where she picked up a cinder path between the railroad tracks to Bergen, a harrowing experience if one were caught between an east-bound and a west-bound train. Nonetheless, cyclists of the time often rode the path between double tracks because those paths dried before other roadways. In 1895, George T. Loher, a butcher from Oakland, California, rode a Stearns Yellow Fellow bicycle from his California home to New York City. In his journal Loher described such riding as “a dangerous undertaking, owing to the high speed of the trains as they fly along over the well-ballasted tracks.”

  By the time Annie reached Buffalo, she had ridden about 460 miles since leaving New York City and had been traveling for two months, yet was not even halfway to Chicago. She must have started to wonder whether she had underestimated the undertaking and overestimated herself.

  The route out of Buffalo offered Annie beautiful views of Lake Erie, especially at Woodlawn Beach. The roads were poor along the telegraph line that cut across the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation, but once Annie crossed over Cattaraugus Creek to Irving the roads improved on the way to Fredonia.

  On August 30, Annie passed through the small towns of Brocton and Westfield. “She seems to be possessed with abundant muscle and an equal desire for notoriety,” reported The Brocton Grape Belt, and The Westfield Republican identified her as a Harvard student, an affectation she would soon begin to repeat with some frequency. She also told the Republican her month in New York would “not count” against the fifteen-month time limit.

  Annie was now some thirty miles from the Pennsylvania line. The anticipation of crossing the state line was surely a psychological lift—once into Pennsylvania she had only to cut across the state’s narrow northwest corner before reaching Ohio and the Midwest.

  The roads between Fredonia and Erie were good, and the countryside between Erie and Conneaut, Ohio, as lovely as any Annie had seen so far. With excellent roads and side paths along the flat Lake Erie shore, the wheeling through this stretch of Ohio was as pleasant as she could have hoped for. Near Ashtabula, large farms stretched out along both sides of the road; the towns were prosperous with beautiful homes and tree-lined streets.

  In early September, Annie reached Cleveland and knew she had to hurry to Chicago. The appearance of early fall weather brought days of more comfortable riding than those of August, but now she faced the daunting prospect of trying to cross better than two-thirds of the country before the frigid winter swept in. Annie crossed into Indiana near Butler and continued on to Kendallville and Goshen, following good roads and side paths all the way. Annie pedaled from Goshen to South Bend, and crossed the lllinois state line soon thereafter.

  In June, she had been a working mother whose horizons went no further than the Charles River in Boston. By September, she was within reach of the great city of Chicago. Annie was now, no doubt, filled with mixed emotions. On the one hand, she had nearly made it to the first major destination of her trip. On the other hand, she was mentally and physically spent from days of rigorous riding and exposure to the elements.

  ON SEPTEMBER 24, exactly one week after her husband had been sworn as a United States citizen in the federal circuit court in Boston, Annie pedaled into Chicago in cool, clear weather. Temperatures were in the mid-fifties, the breeze light from the northwest.

  “Miss Annie Londonderry�
��is in the city,” reported the Daily Inter Ocean. “After two weeks in the city she will tour through the South leisurely, and then go on to San Francisco where she will embark for the Orient.” Though the Inter Ocean described Annie as “in prime condition for continuing her travels,” it underestimated the toll the ride had taken on her.

  Cycling to Chicago had been no easy task for her. She began the trip with no physical conditioning and no cycling experience. Plus, she only discovered while pedaling it that the Columbia was too heavy and cumbersome for long-distance travel. Moreover, Annie’s riding attire—the “short” skirt over bloomers she devised in New York—might have been suitable for a spin through the Boston Common or New York’s Central Park, but it was worse than useless on the road; it was an impediment, unnecessarily heavy and bulky, especially for riding in hot weather.

  So arduous was the journey west, Annie had lost twenty pounds “kicking her heavy cycle over the country.”

  Not only had the trip to Chicago been challenging, the prospect of losing the wager loomed before her. She was three months out. If she continued west, she would have no time to waste in Chicago, for the season was growing late, almost surely too late to attempt a ride across the vast prairies and mountains that lay between Chicago and California. If she tried the southern route, as the Inter Ocean reported she would, it would add a thousand miles to her journey. If she reversed course, all the cycling she had done thus far would amount to naught. Trying to win the wager now looked like a fool’s errand, and Annie would have to choose from among these options, or a fourth: to abandon the effort altogether. But giving up would have dealt a blow to the hopes and aspirations of legions of women now campaigning to be seen as the equal of men. And, given Annie’s bold spirit, she may have bristled at the idea of the smug men who wagered against her in Boston toasting her failure. Would her pride and determination outweigh her mental and physical exhaustion? Or would she be forced to return prematurely to the constrained life she had managed, at least for a short while, to leave behind?

  Chapter Two

  Female Paul Jones on a Wheel

  In olden times the women rode

  As fitted one of subject mind:

  Her lord and master sat before,

  She on a pillion sat behind.

  But now upon her flying wheel

  She holds her independent way,

  And when she rides a race with man,

  ’Tis even chance she wins the day.

  —A. L. Anderson

  As Annie pondered her options in Chicago, the wager clock continued to tick. The journey there had consumed three of the fifteen months she had been given to circle the globe, and she was a mere thousand miles from where she had started. It was beginning to appear that the “sugar king” who wagered against her had made a good bet. But who were the men who conceived this novel enterprise and started her on the road to Chicago? How was Annie chosen to settle the matter? Was there, in fact, a wager at all? Or was some other scheme afoot?

  The inspiration for Annie’s journey likely came from an eccentric former Harvard student named E. C. Pfeiffer. In mid-February 1894, four months before Annie left Boston on her Columbia bicycle, Pfeiffer, using the pseudonym Paul Jones, set out from Boston on foot with nothing, not even a change of clothing, ostensibly on a wager of $5,000, to go around the world in a year, earning his way as he went. But on February 25, 1894, just two weeks after his departure, Pfeiffer had acknowledged his plan was a “fake.” “He said that there was never a cent of wager placed on the trip around the world, that he simply originated the plan to make money and gain notoriety,” said the Boston Daily Globe.

  On the very same day the Globe reported Jones was a “fake,” a small headline in the New York Times declared, “A Woman to Rival Paul Jones.” Though Annie was not identified by name, she was clearly the subject of the story: “A Boston newspaper woman about twenty-seven years old, the wife of a Boston business man, will undertake to travel around the world, and at the end of fifteen months return to Boston with $5,000, after having paid all her expenses, The trip will be the result of a wager…and a part of the plan is to travel through cities on a bicycle and in bicycle costume.”

  On the day Annie left the Massachusetts State House, some newspapers likened her to the discredited Pfeiffer: “Emulating ‘Paul Jones,’” said one headline; “Female Paul Jones on a Wheel,” said another. The unmistakable implication was that Annie, too, might be a schemer.

  If indeed a wager was the catalyst for Annie’s trip, who was behind it? If it was all a publicity scheme, as some suggested, who, if anyone, was behind that? Or, had Annie, like Pfeiffer, simply devised the entire plan herself, using a bogus wager to add drama and intrigue to her undertaking?

  ON JUNE 26, 1894, the Boston Post reported that, “Mrs. Kapchowsky [sic] says that she is backed by rich merchants, and refers to Dr. Albert Reeder.” The name John Dowe appears in two newspaper accounts much later—once just before the end of Annie’s trip and one shortly after its completion—as one of the bettors. Other than these few references, the men involved in the wager are never identified by name, but only as “two wealthy clubmen of Boston,” “two rich men of Boston,” “Stock Exchange men of Boston,” or as “two rich sugar-men of the Hub.”

  No John Dowe is listed in any Boston City Directory of the mid-1890s. Was this merely a variant of John Doe, designed to point to no one in particular? Dr. Reeder, mentioned in several reports, is almost always described as an intermediary who held the wager stakes and who identified Annie as the woman to undertake the journey.

  Albert Reeder’s medical office was in Boston’s Park Square and his medical specialty, as listed in the Boston City Directory for 1894, was the curiously named “curative movement.” Today, curative movement often refers to the use of motor activities to stimulate parts of the brain to help develop body awareness. It is sometimes used therapeutically with patients with autism, Asperger’s syndrome, and learning disabilities, though it has other applications as well.

  Just what Dr. Reeder meant by the term is unclear, but there was in the 1890s a lively debate about whether cycling was beneficial or detrimental to a woman’s health, and many physicians took sides. Some, mostly men, argued that the exertion involved in cycling was too much for the frail female physiology. Others took the affirmative side, often with the financial “encouragement” of bicycle manufacturers. Whether “curative movement” suggests Reeder was a player in this debate is uncertain, and there is no other evidence to suggest this is where his interest in a woman’s around-the-world bicycle trip lay. Nor is there any evidence that hints at the reason for his involvement in Annie’s journey or how the two knew each other.

  The Boston Post suggested right at the start of Annie’s journey that her claim to be on a wager was suspect: “There are those who say that Mrs. Kapchowsky [sic] is not doing this thing for a wager at all, but that remains to be seen.” And the Boston Journal reported, “The crowd [at the State House] were incredulous about her receiving any such sum as $10,000 upon her return. Many expressed the opinion that it was simply an advertising scheme from start to finish.” If Annie’s gambit was indeed a publicity stunt or advertising scheme, only one person stood to benefit more from the trip than she did, and that person was Colonel Albert Pope.

  Colonel Pope was a leading industrialist of his age and one of Boston’s most prominent citizens. The Pope Manufacturing Company of Boston and Hartford manufactured, among other things, Columbia bicycles. There is one obvious sign of Pope’s involvement: Pope supplied Annie’s Columbia bicycle and his representative, Captain Peck, personally delivered it to the State House on the day of her departure. But whether Pope’s involvement went beyond using Annie’s trip to promote the Columbia brand is unknown.

  Alonzo D. Peck was one of Pope’s longest-tenured employees, working in 1894 as the senior salesman in Columbia’s flagship store in downtown Boston. It was not unusual for Pope Manufacturing to give away bicycles for promotiona
l purposes, but none of the hundred or more bicycles it gave away in 1894 was to be used for a purpose as audacious as Annie’s. And Peck was not simply a Pope employee. He was also the captain of the Massachusetts chapter of the League of American Wheelmen, an organization started by Pope in 1880 to promote cycling and lobby for the interests of cyclists, especially the improvement of roads, an effort that came to be known as the “good roads” movement. Incidentally, Pope had another motive here besides making roads more accommodating for cyclists. The Pope Manufacturing Company would soon be producing automobiles.

  How Annie and Peck knew each other is unknown but, as an advertising solicitor for several Boston newspapers, Annie may well have known many people in the Pope organization, which devoted considerable resources to advertising the Columbia brand.

  It was clearly in Pope’s interest to see Annie on a Columbia. The mid-1890s was the peak of the American bicycle boom and consumers were buying bicycles in large numbers. In 1897 alone, more than 2 million bicycles were sold in the United States, about one for every thirty people. A quality bicycle could be had for under $100. “Wheels,” as they were commonly called, were everywhere in the gay ’90s, as were “wheelmen’s clubs,” well-organized associations with newsletters, receptions, weekly outings, uniforms, and special meeting rooms. Bicycle paths were clogged with traffic on weekends, and newspapers were filled with cycling news and special columns for “wheelmen.” Hundreds of manufacturers were successfully profiting from the sale of the must-have vehicle. In all, some three thousand American businesses were involved, in one way or another, in the bicycle trade, including a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, owned by two brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, who were using bike technology to tinker with another invention they were working on.