“She says the native princes prefer to hunt in the night time, which may be better understood when we consider the often fatal heat of the sun by day,” reported the Herald. “In fact, she had to travel by night herself to escape the fierce solar rays. The hunting is on elephant back, while the natives ‘shoo’ up the tiger in his lair. Mister Tiger can make a break in but one direction, and as his cerulian optics are like balls of fire they make a daisy target from Winchesters from elephant back. Once in a while Mister Tiger is only wounded. Then he is just too mad for anything. He jumps right up on the elephant’s prehensile ear, and starts to chewing leather in great shape. His remarks at the time are altogether too suggestive; so there is a grand rush to shoot and spear the amiable beast immediately if not sooner. The man who gets in the first effective shot ‘captures the roast,’ that is the tiger’s lovely skin.” Annie also told the Herald that Asia was filled with overly inquisitive natives who she had to fend off. “The plucky Bay state maiden had hard work keeping the gentle Asiatics from sticking their knives into her tires. They seemed just bent on doing this sort of thing; and she was just as bent on them not doing anything of the kind. So she wore her bike around her neck like an opera scarf when not riding it, and kept her hand close by her gun.”
Annie regaled the newspaper with tales of bravery, primarily her own, at the Chinese front: “At Pen Yeng, Miss Londonderry on being released from capture started out in company with two war correspondents to get out of the country. They met several Chinese soldiers with spears who proposed to run in the whole outfit. The valiant war correspondents crawfished and weakened leaving it for Miss Londonderry to pull her gun and rattle the tar out of those Chinese soldiers.” Such copy surely helped sell a lot of papers during her stay in the city, and as a result, it’s no wonder Annie’s lecture on the twenty-ninth was much anticipated; not only had she been around the world on a bicycle, she was practically a certified war hero.
During her stay in El Paso, however, the whispers that Annie was doing something less than riding around the world on a bicycle again caught up with her. A number of skeptics in town were expressing their doubts, too. Accusations flew that she was an outright fraud. The El Paso Daily Times rode to Annie’s defense.
* * *
MISS LONDONDERRY GENUINE—DOUBTING THOMASES CAN READ—CONFIRMATION COMES FROM BOSTON
The people of El Paso have been “taken in” so frequently that they have become skeptical of their own existence. A few weeks ago the New York Herald regaled them with a column write-up about the doings of “That Strange Young Man” who left El Paso fifteen months ago driving a burro and a white horse to make a tour of the world for a wager of $10,000. The people of El Paso knew that “The Strange Young Man” was a fake and as soon as many of them heard that a Miss Londonderry who started out from Boston a year ago to make a trip around the world on a bicycle for a wager of $30,000 was heading for El Paso on her return trip, quite a number of people in this city declined to believe she was genuine. When the plucky young lady arrived here, those who met and talked with her were satisfied she was no fake, but was a very bright, clever little woman. There were plenty, however, to look on her with suspicion and many of them wanted to know why the Times did not investigate her. And yesterday, when the Lordsburg Liberal arrived containing the following the Thomases won a number of converts:
“Miss Londonderry, the young lady from Boston, who claims to be making a trip around the world on a bicycle, arrived in town on a freight train from Wilcox Sunday night and left the next morning on the passenger train for Deming. The young lady may be going around the world on a wheel all right enough but most of her traveling in Arizona and New Mexico appears to be done on a car wheel instead of one of the pneumatic variety. Her bicycle was broken when she arrived here but she expected to get it repaired in Deming. She dropped her Los Angeles escort [Claude Leslie] somewhere in Arizona.”
In order to let the people know positively whether Miss Londonderry was a genuine article or a fake, the Times sent the following to the Boston Herald:
“Miss Annie Londonderry is here. Claims she left Boston June 25th, 1894 to go around the world on a bicycle. Is she genuine?”
At 12:45 this morning the Times received the following reply:
“Annie Londonderry left Boston on such a trip. Cannot verify date.” The Herald.
Miss Londonderry is the genuine article and there is no further occasion for doubting Thomases.
—El Paso Daily Times, June 29, 1895
* * *
Of course, the mere confirmation that Annie left Boston on such a trip didn’t address the real question of how much of her trip she was making by bicycle. The Herald also discounted rumors that she was making the trip as a publicity scheme to promote the Sterling, but it was overly generous: “The impression is prevalent that Miss Londonderry is riding around the world as an advertisement for a certain bicycle. Such however is not the fact. The bicycle she rides she purchased with her own money and [she] is not advertising any special wheel.” In any event, whatever doubts were floating around El Paso didn’t put a damper on the festivities as the Fourth of July weekend approached, and Annie was at the center of it all. In one memorable instance, Will Rand, the star pitcher for the El Paso Browns baseball team, went about the town on his bicycle, dressed in bloomers, wearing “such a sweet and saint like smile that he was more than once taken for Miss Londonderry.” One presumes this was meant as a compliment.
On Saturday evening, June 29, Annie gave her much-anticipated lecture at the McGinty Gardens, a building on a hilltop beyond the Southern Pacific train depot. It was here that she again lit up her lecture with the slides she had collected, and gave what might have been the best performance of her life, an act that was positively vaudevillian.
* * *
MISS LONDONDERRY’S LECTURE
Our bicyclist visitor gave her lecture last Saturday night on the McGinty club grounds before an audience of about 100 people and was well received…The fair lecturer detailed some of her experiences…on reaching Chicago [she] had but three cents. She made the windy city, 1,235 miles, in six weeks [in fact, it took Annie about twice as long]…En route mademoiselle had to sleep in a barn, and fell through from the loft onto a horse’s back. But in eighteen days [supposedly on the return from Chicago to New York] she traveled 1,030 miles and earned $835 in carrying advertisements.
When in France she was not allowed to talk French, according to the terms of her contract, which made it embarrassing for her, and landed in Paris with only seven cents in American money…so she earned $1,500 by carrying advertisements about town and by working in stores. Miss Londonderry was six days in riding to Marseilles [it was more like two weeks], during which time occurred the hold-up racket already detailed in the HERALD [a reference to the alleged hold-up north of Marseilles]. Ludicrous mistakes were made in trying to make people understand her necessities. Miss Londonderry tried by signs to ask for meat to eat, and a beefsteak was given her in a shoe. She wanted mushrooms and was given an umbrella. Then the cyclist tried to make a woman to understand that she wanted a place to sleep by lying down on the floor, whereupon the woman thinking it was a case of fainting threw a pitcher of water in her face. In Marseilles Miss Londonderry was treated royally so that in four days she earned $1,000. Thence she went to Egypt and Palestine, and thence to Singapore, Bombay and Calcutta. The Hindoos seemed afraid of the bicycle, thought it an evil spirit, so that the rider had to pay priests to pray for her in the temple, and a knowledge of this kept the natives at a more respectful distance. While in India, she visited a museum of freaks. She saw one man with a foot like a chicken, another with a leg shaped like that of an elephant, while there was one woman with a wen [a type of benign skin tumor] on her neck like a Saratoga trunk. Miss Londonderry was afraid that if she remained there longer she would see some such a sight as a man with an extra pair of legs dangling lightly from the sides of his neck, or some of the lovely creatures treated of in Gulliver�
��s travels. So she beat a precipitous retreat.
Miss Londonderry went…to the battlefields of Wei Hai Wei where even little children were killed. She was favored with a guard by the French consul, but had the sleeve of her coat carried away by a bullet and was captured by the Chinese with two war correspondents and a doctor of divinity who were locked up in jail where neither food nor water was furnished. But for the snow water they would have died from thirst. The French consul finally sent forty gendarmes to release them…The lecturer said that the dead were unburied on the battle fields. The clergyman finally died from wounds he received and exhaustion from crossing a frozen river and breaking through the ice where the party came near drowning. The best they could do in the way of burial was to lay the poor man in a trench and cover him up with dead Chinese. In one shack where the party crawled in to sleep they had to brush aside the dead bodies to make a place to lie down on….
[The lecture] concluded with the stereopticon exhibition with views taken by Miss Londonderry herself in Asia and elsewhere en route. The audience went away very much pleased.
—El Paso Daily Herald, July 2, 1895
* * *
The audience went away pleased, but did they believe half of what she said? It may not have mattered; a good evening’s entertainment was had by all.
After more than a year on the road, she had reinvented herself so completely that she inhabited the character she had created with ease and comfort. One wonders whether she could even distinguish hetween Annie Londonderry and Annie Kopchovsky any more, or whether, indeed, she had by now shed her former identity completely.
Ironically, as Annie entertained the crowd at McGinty Gardens, another life-and-death drama—one indicative of the still wild nature of the West—was unfolding nearby at the El Paso city dump. John Wesley Hardin, one of the most infamous outlaws of the Old West, was one of El Paso’s most prominent, and most feared, citizens. His outlaw days mostly behind him, Hardin was practicing law in El Paso when he fell in love with a woman by the name of Helen Buelah Mrose. As Annie lectured at the McGinty Gardens, four men—a local constable, John Selman, and three U.S. deputy marshals—all hired by Hardin, murdered Helen’s husband, the desperado Martin Mrose. All the time, Hardin, with Helen at his side, sat in McGinty Gardens listening attentively to Annie’s lecture.
Hardin was never arrested for the murder of Mrose, one of dozens in which he had been involved over the years, but he, too, came to a bad end just a few months later when Constable Selman killed him on August 19, 1895, in the Acme Saloon, perhaps over disparaging remarks Hardin made about Selman’s son or because Hardin had failed to pay him for the murder of Mrose. In any event, while she was in El Paso for several days following her lecture, Annie likely heard about Mrose’s murder, which was duly reported in the press. Whether she knew the infamous John Wesley Hardin was among her audience that night, is unknown.
Bizarrely, Annie’s lecture apparently prompted Hardin to opine on the subject of the bicycle craze. The outlaw was almost always asked by the local newspapers for his comments on major civic events, but he was usually referred to only by such euphemisms as “a prominent citizen of El Paso” in the local newspapers, which treated him with kid gloves. “I am opposed to the bicycle, but I recognize the fact that opposition to the craze is very unpopular,” a “well known citizen of El Paso” was reported to have told the El Paso Daily Times the day after Annie’s lecture. “[T]he money that has been spent for and on bicycles during the last few months would pay for the schooling of every child in El Paso for three years.” Hardin was, apparently, a killer with a social conscience.
WHILE IN EL PASO, Annie also hosted groups of women at the Vendome for a series of lectures on physical development. “All those who have ridden with Miss Londonderry know of her strength and endurance and know that she is fully capable of giving ladies good advice on the subject,” said the Herald. In fact, some of those who rode with her found the experience unforgettable. The day after her lecture, Annie was at the bicycle track where four young men took turns riding on the tandem behind her, but each vowed never do so again because, “the pace was too much for them.”
Duly impressed, the local Cycle Track Association invited Annie to “make the pace” at one of the races to be held on the Fourth of July and announced that volunteers to “take the back seat” of the tandem pace bike were needed. “Those boys who are in the races will have to keep up good motion, if they want to keep tacked up to the hind end of that tandem,” declared the Herald. One volunteer, Bart Allen, stepped forward but probably regretted it later. “The way Miss Londonderry pulled Bart Allen around the track on that tandem greatly amused the crowd,” said the Herald the next day. “She pulled him along so fast that it was all he could do to keep his feet on the pedals.”
Annie took advantage of her fame in El Paso by soliciting advertising to carry through the streets. The Cycle Track Association was one of her advertisers, and by the Fourth of July she had enough advertisements “to cover herself and her bike completely up.” She cleared $52 in El Paso, $50 of which she sent back to Boston to be credited towards her earnings.
The Herald predicted a “tremendous welcome” when Annie returned to Boston. “Then Miss Londonderry can look over her freight train load of correspondence and select the fortunate man upon who she will see fit to bestow her fair hand. Then it will be oats, peas, beans and barley grows; and no more Colorado desert racket.”
Annie left the embrace of El Paso on July 7 with $2 in her pocket and an escort of cyclists who were to accompany her “as far as their nerves will stand to ride.” Her escorts took her as far as the Southern Pacific smelter—the same smelter at which she’d met her welcoming party some ten days earlier. From there, she headed north along the Santa Fe Railroad tracks alone.
Chapter Eight
A Whirl ’Round the World
MISS LONDONDERRY OF BOSTON HERE ON HER WAY HOME VIA WHEEL—SHE WEARS BLOOMERS AND LIKES THEM—WAS ON WEI-HEI-WEI BATTLEFIELD—WILL LECTURE TODAY
Good health to all, good pleasure, good speed,
A favoring breeze—but not too high
For the homeward spin! Who rides may read
The open secret of earth and sky.
—Anonymous, Scribner’s Magazine, June 1895
On September 25, 1895, the bell on Annie’s wager clock would toll. She left El Paso with just two and a half months to reach Chicago and claim success. The route ahead was still roughly 1,800 miles, some of it formidable country, but she was now homeward bound.
Just across the New Mexico line in the town of Anthony, Annie suffered another tire puncture. A repair kit was conveyed to her from El Paso the next morning and she “went on her way rejoicing.” But the thirty-mile trip to Las Cruces was awful. She was caught in a “blinding rain” and spent the entire night exposed to the elements without shelter. Because washouts made many of the roads around Las Cruces impassable, Annie was compelled to remain in the city for several days longer than planned. She sold photographs of herself and gave a bicycle-riding exhibition to earn a little money, while also managing before heading north to ignite a controversy that raged for more than a month.
While in Las Cruces, the cyclist got into a highly publicized spat with a local newspaper editor, Allen Kelly, of the Las Cruces Independent Democrat, who denounced her as a fraud. When she reached Santa Fe and the town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, a couple of weeks later, Annie contended that Kelly “was on a whiz,” or intoxicated, when she met him and that his real beef was “her refusal to go out buggy riding with him.” Her grievance, she said, “was one that would properly come under the caption ‘purely personal.’” As Annie made her way north through New Mexico and Colorado, four newspapers became caught up in a rhetorical melee about the whole affair.
“With the usual disregard for veracity, and the usual eagerness to fill up blank space, the Independent Democrat devotes nearly four columns to Miss Annie Londonderry, the lady cyclist who recently passed throug
h Las Cruces,” said the Rio Grande Republican, Kelly’s crosstown rival. “While purporting to roast Miss Londonderry, the writer succeeds only in making a clown of himself. Such buffoonery is probably a relic of bear-training days, and it was thought those antics would please the readers of the Democrat… The people of our town, however, have become very tired of this kind of thing. When it is fiction they want, they know where to find something readable and less nauseating…While, not hoping for a reform in this line from our contemporary [Editor Kelly], we cannot but help but think how refreshing it would be to see at least an attempt made at something near the truth once in awhile.”
A month after her departure, when she was already in Denver, Kelly was still feuding with Annie and trying to defend his reputation. “The alleged female person in nondescript apparel who went through here on a wheel some weeks ago claiming to have ridden around the world, did not succeed in fooling the editor of the Las Cruces Independent Democrat as easily as she did some others, and he exposed some of her extravagant pretensions,” he wrote. “The libel is the assertion that we wanted the jade to go driving with us, but that is mitigated by the allegation that we were drunk at the time. Nobody in his sober senses would have sought the intimate society of the woman, and she appears to have realized that in order to give the appearance of probability to the one assertion it was necessary to prefix the other.”
Kelly then demanded that two other newspapers, the Las Vegas (N.M.) Optic and the Santa Fe New Mexican, retract Annie’s account of their encounter, which he deemed “a stupid slander.” The New Mexican did run a letter from Kelly asking for “a correction,” but only after letting loose with a barrage of personal insults by its staff. (Kelly seems to have been a regular punching bag for other editors around the state.)
Around the World on Two Wheels Page 14