“[I]f the wheel is used as it should be the exercise can never be injurious to women,” Annie continued. “As a rule women ride on a drop seat and will keep their corsets on when taking a spin. They could not do anything that would hurt them more. The corset should be discarded, and nothing but a thick sweater used. This fits tightly about the form, keeps the body in shape and absorbs the perspiration that must come through taking such exercise. The fact that women will wear corsets when riding is the reason so many suffer from the exercise. It is against all reason to box one’s self up when making any such exertion as is required in riding. Tell the women to discard their corsets, and they will get some pleasure and health out of cycling.” Though feeling quite ill, Annie had much more to say that night on the subject of women and the wheel.
“There is another thing I would like to point out to my fellow riders of the weaker sex. They should not ride on a drop seat, but on a diamond wheel, such as is ridden by men. The position of the rider on the other seat is not a correct one nor conducive to health. On the wheel ridden by men the position is correct, and exercising on it cannot hurt anybody. The doctor who says it will harm the ordinarily healthy woman doesn’t know what he is talking about. I have studied medicine some, and I know what I am saying is true.
“Not only should women ride the wheel, but they should not wear heavy, baggy bloomers that make the work a torture and do not look nice. They do not have to go to the other extreme, either, and look unwomanly. There is just as correct a costume for bicycling as there is for the ladies’ habit in riding horseback, and to wear what is not the correct thing looks just as much out of place on a bicycle as on a horse. A heavy sweater, a neat pair of bloomers, leggings and a natty cap constitute proper costume. It looks simply ridiculous to see a woman peddling [sic] on a wheel wearing a heavy dress and a sailor hat.
“If women will exercise properly on a wheel they will have nicely rounded figures, bright eyes and healthy cheeks, and will feel well the year ’round,” Annie concluded. “My work on the bicycle since I started on this trip has developed me wonderfully.”
This monologue is revealing of Annie’s towering self-assurance and of the degree to which she now saw herself as someone who had lessons to impart to millions of women. In Stockton, from her sickbed, she was expressing the sense of well-being and strength the bicycle had delivered to her personally and her view that one could be both feminine and physically active at the same time. She was not only advocating for cycling, and the benefits it could deliver to women, but for something more—the liberation of women from their corsets, both literally and figuratively. She was practically imploring women, in her direct, opinionated way, to take up arms, so to speak, through the bicycle. Not bad for a woman struggling to speak through pain and a fever.
ANNIE RECUPERATED for a few days in Stockton, climbed back on her bicycle, and, with Johnson and an escort of San Jose cyclists, reached San Jose on the evening of April 18. “Miss Annie Londonderry…has traversed [her] stipulated course with nearly two months overtime to her credit, and almost three-quarters of the journey done,” reported the San Jose Daily Mercury.
Asked about her accident, Annie revved up the myth-making machine. “Outside of Stockton a few days ago, I met with a horrible accident,” she said. “As I was riding along a driver of a buggy ran me down and ran over me. I was picked up unconscious and carried into Stockton, where I lay in the hospital two days. I coughed up a good deal of blood and the doctor said that I could never recover, but here I am, and what is more, I intend to complete the journey.”
On Saturday, April 20, San Jose hosted a large bicycle meet. Annie announced the winners and handed out the prizes, a sign of her growing celebrity, especially in cycling circles. Asked about her route back to Boston, she said she would ride south to Los Angeles, across the south to New Orleans, and then on to Boston.
ON APRIL 25, a few days after leaving San Jose, Annie and the ubiquitous Johnson arrived in Salinas from the north. By coincidence, Tom Winder, a newspaper editor from Warsaw, Indiana, reached Salinas by bicycle the very same day from the south. Winder was on what the Salinas Weekly Index called “the longest ride ever undertaken on a bicycle,” a 21,000-mile journey along the entire coast and border of the United States that Winder was hoping to complete in three hundred consecutive days of riding. Winder, too, had a spouse and children at home and, like Annie, ostensibly, he was chasing prize money: $1,000 put up by the manufacturer of his bicycle. By the time Annie and Winder met in Salinas, she was in the middle of her six-week, 400-mile, San Francisco to Los Angeles jaunt, while he, in just six weeks, had covered an astounding 3,000 miles.
Winder’s opinion of Annie was less than complimentary:
Here I met the famous Anna Londonderry…Miss Londonderry’s trip has been a remarkable one from the fact that she went entirely around the world on steamboats, according to her own story, excepting a ride from Havre to Marseilles, France on her wheel. Miss Anna is a hustler for sure. She is some 50 days ahead of time, and has been in California for two or three weeks, and only has to get $3,400 more when she will have the $5,000. She tried lecturing out here, but the venture proved a dismal failure and Londonderry was quite gloomy and discouraged at the time I saw her. She intends to write a book, so I thus early put the public on its guard. (emphasis added)
This would not be the last time Annie would be described in such unflattering terms.
As elsewhere, in Salinas the description of Annie’s ’round the world route had some fanciful entries. The Index reported she had ridden through England and Spain, though she had been in neither, and also reported incorrectly that Annie was thirty years old, the speaker of several languages, and of French descent.
TOM WINDER and the Singapore Straits Times weren’t the only skeptics to think Annie was a traveling sideshow making her way around the world more on a whim than a wheel, and gulling a lot of people along the way. As she and Johnson made their way south, touring several of California’s Spanish missions, public doubts about Annie’s claim that she was riding around the world by bicycle began to proliferate and some of her press coverage turned sharply negative. Words such as “allegedly” and “supposedly” were beginning to appear with some frequency in connection with her claims to have been cycling around the world.
In April, Cycling Life, which had begun to write sarcastically of Annie’s unabashed interest in notoriety, wrote, “Smart girl, Annie Londonderry, but much too fresh to be touring the world as a representative of American womanhood in any shape or form. It is told of her that before she would taste of a patent milk preparation of a Yokohama man, or even signed a testimonial as to its efficacy, she insisted upon receiving 200 yen.”
Cycling Life made clear that it placed little stock in Annie or her stories. “Folks will pity Annie Londonderry upon learning that she was once compelled to sleep in a graveyard without other protections than her anatomical advertisements. To read of the hair-breadth escapes of this young woman, to say nothing of the hair-breadth escapes of the people who make her acquaintance, makes our eyes bulge with astonishment. She says she came within an ace of fighting and bleeding at Port Arthur.” Others in the cycling community complained that Annie wasn’t good for the sport or for women: “She is not elevating either cycling or her sex,” wrote the editor of one British cycling magazine.
Others joined this critical chorus: In late April, the Sandusky Register, whose reporter had met Annie when she rode through Norwalk, Ohio, on the first leg of her trip, reported Annie had reached San Francisco from Japan, “and as she left Marseilles, France sometime in January her trip across Eastern Europe and Asia must be considered a record breaker from a cycling standpoint. What are you giving us, gentle Annie?” The Chicago Tribune also observed that Annie was making remarkably good time: “According to original plans, [Miss Londonderry] should be in the wilds of some savage country instead of delivering lectures on the west coast.”
And there was more. On May 3, the Olean
(New York) Democrat reported that Dr. and Mrs. H. D. McIlrath of Chicago had set out “to girdle the globe on bicycles.” “Men globe girdlers are by no means a novelty, for Thomas Stevens, Thomas G. Allen and William L. Sachtleben have demonstrated that a plucky rider may pedal a bicycle entirely around the earth,” said the story. “The woman globe girdler has not thus far proved her right to the title by riding the necessary 25,000 miles. Miss Annie Londonderry is now completing an alleged bicycle ride around the world, but has made such astounding time through Europe and Asia that her riding must have been done on steamers and railroads.”
To be fair, even the undisputed holder of the title “first human to circle the world by bicycle,” Thomas Stevens, didn’t cover anywhere near 25,000 miles by wheel—he rode 13,500 miles—and only by figuring out a way to ride on water could a cyclist hope to cross the oceans in a single, direct circumnavigation of the earth. But, it is surprising that more observers hadn’t already drawn the same conclusions about Annie’s “astounding time through Europe and Asia on land.” Her “secret” was hiding, if it was being hidden at all, in plain sight. After all, she told the San Francisco Examiner that she had sailed to Singapore on the same steamer that took her to Suez from Marseilles and that she was permitted to make much of the trip by water. Furthermore, in early May, The Bearings and The Referee, two cycling magazines, carried an advertisement featuring Annie accompanied by a map of her route, a narrative of her adventures, and her testimonials to the virtues of the Sterling wheel. The map, unlike the cyclist’s own varying descriptions of her itinerary, was an entirely accurate, if crude rendering of the route she actually traveled, though the map shows her starting from Chicago where the Sterling Cycle Works was located. It would have been clear to anyone looking at the map in the Sterling advertisement, how Annie had made such fast work of Europe and Asia. However, most readers and reporters alike ignored such details.
By dint of her ability to engage the imaginations of others with spellbinding tales filled with adventure and drama, Annie was able, when desired, to elide the fact that she had not traveled from France to Asia by land. Like any good illusionist, she worked through misdirection. People wanted to believe in her, and for the most part did.
BY THE VERY END of April, Annie and Johnson had reached Paso Robles, north of San Luis Obispo, about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Paso Robles Record reported Annie expected soon to be in Mexico. According to the Los Angeles Times, however, she had been laid up with “the grip,” or flu, in San Luis Obispo for a week in early May, the result of a soaking while crossing several streams in the area. But the same story also reported that Annie had made daily runs of one hundred miles on three consecutive days from Watsonville, just north of Salinas, and well north of San Luis Obispo, on her way south to Santa Barbara. Unless Annie and Johnson were simply riding these grueling “centuries” through the California hills for fun, or riding in circles, the report is implausible, for it is only a little more than two hundred miles from Watsonville to Santa Barbara. Had the cyclists ridden three hundred miles south in three days from Watsonville, they’d have been well south of Santa Barbara by May 12, not thirty miles north, as they were in Los Olivos. And how Annie managed both to have the flu for a week and do three centuries between May 1 and May 10 makes one or the other story implausible. Indeed, neither report may have been accurate.
Annie and Johnson arrived in Santa Barbara on the night of May 13, two days before a major bicycle racing event, one the Santa Barbara Daily Independent predicted would bring “the biggest day in wheelmen’s circles that Santa Barbara ever saw.” On May 15, Annie, sporting a dark tan, was on hand for the races. At the invitation of the organizers she rode her Sterling several times past the grandstand, but did not race a timed mile, disappointing some who had come to see her. The Independent took a generous view of her decision not to race, declaring “nothing less than the earth” suited Annie for a course. She delivered a short lecture about her journey and made a good impression on her Sterling. “She is a good rider,” said the Independent, and “a plucky woman. [I]f she does not succeed in her undertaking it will not be on account of any fault of hers.”
THE TWO CYCLISTS finally reached Los Angeles in the early morning hours of Saturday, May 18, walking the final twenty-four-mile stretch when Annie’s Sterling suffered a tire puncture. She was “nearly exhausted” when she checked into the Hollenbeck Hotel. She had covered 114 miles in the previous twenty-four hours.
The Los Angeles Annie visited in 1895 would be virtually unrecognizable today. Nearly ten million people live now in Los Angeles County but, in 1895, Los Angeles was a sedate desert oasis of some forty thousand souls and Hollywood was merely the name of a place, not an industry. Indeed, it wasn’t until late 1895 that the first motion picture camera—le cinématographe—was invented, in France, by Louis Lumiere, who saw no commercial promise whatsoever in the medium. Cable cars, paved sidewalks, and palm trees were features of the L.A. cityscape, but it was still only a small town when compared with Boston, New York, or Chicago. Annie remained in Los Angeles for ten days with “plenty of time at her disposal,” during which she lectured at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, using her slides to illustrate her talk. She also contemplated the course of the next leg of the trip, considering direct routes to Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, or El Paso, and the fact that “the worst part of her journey lies before her, across the Colorado Desert [in Southern California, west of the Colorado River].”
At some point during her stay in Los Angeles, Annie said good-bye to Mark Johnson, though there is no record of their parting. If there was any subsequent correspondence between the two, she didn’t save it.
ANNIE EVENTUALLY decided to head for El Paso, almost due east. She left for San Bernardino on May 28 or 29, escorted by several Los Angeles cyclists. Today, this fifty-mile stretch is a continuous stream of urban sprawl, but in 1895 it offered Annie a ride through sparsely settled hills and valleys. When she arrived in San Bernardino, where she stayed at the Stewart Hotel, Annie had, according to the San Bernardino Daily Sun, earned just $1,625 of the $5,000 above expenses she was to accumulate as part of the wager. This amount is consistent with the $1,500 she reported having earned to date in San Francisco, but again considerably less than she had supposedly earned by the time she reached Buffalo the previous November.
Though the men of Stockton found it hard to take their eyes off Annie during her lecture there several weeks before, she didn’t catch the fancy of a reporter who met her in San Bernardino. “Good looking? Not very. Bright, expressive eyes, which are keenly observant are the distinguishing feature,” he proclaimed in the Daily Sun. “A young lady who is in the saddle most of the time, cannot be expected to pay much attention to style and there is not much to admire in a white sweater, a light brown skirt and a boy’s coat and cap to match. Yes, she is interesting; evidently well educated, charming in conversation, and makes a good story out of any one of a hundred incidents in her journey, which has thus far carried her three-fourths of the way around the globe.”
At this time, another sour note about her trip found its way into print, this time in the Los Angeles Times. “Annie Londonderry, who is supposed, from her own story, to be going around the globe on a bicycle…arrived [in San Bernardino] yesterday, and is working the town for what she can earn to add to her exchequer,” said the Times. “Just at present all the loose change is flowing into the Fourth of July fund, and there is not much on hand to assist in advertising globe-girdlers, though she may realize enough to pay her fare on the Southern Pacific to Yuma, and thus avoid the dangers and dust of wheeling through the desert sand.”
JUST BEFORE NOON on Friday, May 31, Annie reached nearby Riverside, where she stayed as a guest of the local wheelmen.
While in Riverside, either Annie or a reporter taking great literary license concocted a truly odd and patently false story about how she’d acquired her first bicycle: She purchased her bike frame for three cents from one manufa
cturer, the other components from various other manufacturers, then after assembling the bicycle herself, started out from Boston in a twelve-cent suit “made of cheese-cloth and paper.”
However it came about, this tale of assembling the bicycle by parts is an appropriate metaphor for her entire journey, which had been undertaken with little or no advanced planning and put together with equal parts guts, gumption, and guile. Annie was winging it in many ways. And just as she arrived in various towns covered in advertising ribbons, banners, and baubles, she adorned her stories with colorful but not always genuine accessories.
Annie made a favorable impression in Riverside. “She says she has sawed wood and done other work of a similar nature since starting her trip,” said the Daily Press, “and from her make-up she looks as if she might make a pretty good hand at almost any manual labor…Smart as a whip and an excellent conversationalist.” She also proved her cycling prowess at the race track. On Saturday, June 1, she gave a riding demonstration before a large crowd at Riverside’s Athletic Park and raced the clock several times. She rode one-eighth of a mile on a March brand bicycle in 0:14¾; a tandem mile in 2:28; a quarter-mile in 0:33¼, and on the Sterling, an eighth in 0:15½. These times suggest what was called a “flying start”—cycling records were kept for both flying and standing starts—but they are impressive nevertheless, all requiring speeds of close to thirty miles an hour, albeit over short distances. Whatever the doubts about her around-the-world claim, Annie had become a powerful and skilled cyclist in the months since leaving Boston as a complete novice.
But a woman racing a bicycle, as she did at Riverside, was still considered by many a disgraceful spectacle. Even The Bearings, one of the premier cycling magazines of the day, found it objectionable. “The Bearings has always been opposed to anything of this kind and it has not been the only paper which felt this way,” stated a July 25, 1895, editorial. “We do not see how any self-respecting woman can so far forget herself as to appear before an audience to race. The spectacle of…females straining every muscle, perspiring at every pore, and bent over their handle-bars in a weak imitation of their brothers is enough to disgust the most enthusiastic of wheelmen.” Can there be any doubt Annie would have had a few choice words for the editors of The Bearings?
Around the World on Two Wheels Page 12