The day after she reached Columbus, Annie cycled to Fremont, forty-five miles further east, and spent the night at the New York Hotel. Said the Fremont Daily Tribune: “The wager made by two wealthy sugar merchants of Boston will be decided in a matter of days and the man who bet she could do it will be the winner, and so will she.”
“The roads were very muddy yesterday and today and she was compelled to take the railroad tracks,” reported the newspaper. “Under certain circumstances she is permitted to accept transportation but she has first to wire the circumstances to the parties who had wagered the money and get their permission.” Annie had added yet another new provision to the purported wager, one apparently used to explain her passage across most of Nebraska by train. And, as usual, she attracted a crowd. The Tribune continued, “At the hotel this morning there were a large number of wheelmen present to talk with her. Her bicycle had on it 50 or 60 ribbons, badges of as many wheel clubs in different towns through which she passed and which she will retain as souvenirs.”
Though the Tribune gave a thoroughly accurate list of the places she had actually been on her journey, Annie got a little more creative with the South Sioux City (Nebraska) Star. According to this paper, Annie had cycled in “France, Italy, Turkey, North Africa, Egypt, India, China and Japan. Her cyclometer registers 9,400 miles.”
On August 24, in the company of several wheelmen from Fremont, Annie rode to Omaha and checked in to the Dellone Hotel.
* * *
A WHIRL ’ROUND THE WORLD—MISS LONDONDERRY OF BOSTON HERE ON HER WAY HOME
Miss Londonderry arrived in Omaha yesterday afternoon with 9,400 miles of [her] journey completed and with nearly thirty days in which to finish the remainder of 500 miles…
To a reporter she said:
“I started to wear skirts and rode a drop frame, but I soon discarded the skirts and secured a diamond frame. I have been gone nearly fourteen months, have visited a dozen or more countries, been thrown into association with all classes and kinds of men, and have yet to receive an insult. I find it is not the bloomers, but the woman wearing them, that calls out the insults.”…
Miss Londonderry weighed 105 pounds when she started from Boston, and upon reaching Chicago…she was reduced to eighty-five pounds. She tips the scales now at 140 pounds and her muscles, so she says, are like iron.
—Omaha World Herald, August 25, 1895
* * *
On the night of August 25, Annie gave another of her colorful lectures, adding some new twists and turns to her ever-evolving story.
* * *
CHARMING LECTURE
The Omaha Wheel club was entertained yesterday in a novel manner, and in such an interesting manner that Omaha will not be surprised to see a dozen or more of young cyclists, fired with enthusiasm, starting out upon trips, with the intention of rivaling the adventures of the young lady who was the prominent feature of yesterday’s entertainment…The entertainment was termed a lecture, but it did not follow the usual course of that sometimes wearisome class of entertainments. Miss Londonderry talked. And it was the kind of a talk in which her listeners were as much the founders of ideas as the speaker. She told tales of her adventures, not connected, but as drawn out by some question among her audience, so that the lecture had more the appearance and the interest of a personal conversation, and it proved highly delightful to the members of the club.
She told of her trip through India where she was compelled to wear over her bicycle costume the loose cloth in vogue in the country. In India, the best roads were through the cemeteries, the roads being miles in length, but it was a crime punishable by death or torture to ride through a cemetery, as one would cast a shadow on the grave of the dead. But Indian religion, like many others, was susceptible to a modification, and a ten rupee piece carried Miss Londonderry through several of the cemeteries.
In China, she describes the late war as not a fight, but a slaughter. For miles she rode through fields of dead…This was in the winter, so that putrifaction [sic] had not yet set in, but she says she cannot wonder that cholera holds sway in such a country. Even in times of piping peace the streets of Canton and other large cities swarm with vermin and filth…
In this country she has been compelled to do manual labor, such as sawing wood, milking cows or general farm labor, while in foreign lands she was always afforded lighter employment….
—Omaha World Herald, August 26, 1895
* * *
By now Annie was a bona fide celebrity, and in Omaha local merchants were ready to capitalize on her presence and her ability to draw a crowd. An advertisement in The Omaha Evening Bee of August 26 announced that “the greatest lady bicycle rider,” her bicycle, and her “passports and credentials” would be on display at the Boston Store, a department store in downtown Omaha. There, Annie would “give sensible wheel talk,” and “sell handkerchiefs with her autograph on.” To add to the attraction, the store promised to give away a bicycle every evening to a lucky customer. Annie spent a few more days in that city and, on the evening of August 31, the night before her departure, the Omaha Wheelmen sponsored bicycle races for her benefit. As at previous stops, it was not unusual for local wheelmen, to organize events, whether lectures, balls or races, to raise money to help Annie continue on her way, testimony to both her fame and her ability to win people over with her wit and enthusiasm.
BY THE NEXT DAY, September 1, Annie had passed through the small town of Missouri Valley, Iowa, about twenty miles due north of Omaha, in an uncharacteristically quiet way. Reported the Missouri Valley Times, “Miss Annie Londonderry quietly wheeled into our city…from Omaha, and were it not that her wheel had a large number of pieces of silk ribbon hanging from one part of it, not one in twenty would have taken any special note of her incoming or outgoing from the Valley. Yet, the fact remains, she is a strangely unique, and, at present, noted character…She looks fresh and healthy…She has never been ill on the road. She stayed at the Cheney and started for Chicago this noon.”
Annie’s route toward Chicago through Iowa took her through Ames and toward the town of Gladbrook in east-central Iowa, about halfway between the two major railroad routes that ran east–west across Iowa: the Chicago & North Western Railroad (C.&N.W.) and the Chicago Rock Island line. Now riding alone, she reached Marshalltown on September 3 and stayed at the Tremont Hotel.
Despite her quiet passage through Missouri Valley, Annie figured out what the people of Iowa wanted and, as she had with the French, gave them plenty of it. “The people of the peerless State of Iowa she had found to be the most hospitable of any during her journeyings,” said the Marshalltown Evening Times Republican, noting that “[t]he cyclometer on her wheel registered 10.052 miles when she arrived in this city…To show her endurance and ability, she made the run from Ames to this city [about fifty miles] yesterday against the strong wind, leaving there at 8:15 A.M. and arriving here at 4:10.”
In Marshalltown, Annie related an experience very similar to one with which she had regaled the French newspapers many months earlier, about nearly being run over by a train in New York State, only this time enhanced for local effect. “Last Sunday [September 1], while riding on the C.&N.W. right of way between Council Bluffs and Crescent, Miss Londonderry met with the closest call to death during the journey,” wrote the Times Republican. “The fast mail suddenly came around a curve without whistling. There was no time to dismount, but with presence of mind she threw herself to one side, her wheel following, just in time to escape being struck. A farmer who was sitting on a fence nearby and with whom she had previously asked about the distance, was nearly scared to death, but managed to venture: ‘Yer came near finishin’ yer trip, didn’t you?’” Was the story another of Annie’s creative inventions? September 1 was the same day Annie had arrived in Missouri Valley, and the local paper there, a weekly, made no mention of the incident in its September 5 edition.
Shortly after leaving Marshalltown the next day, on a road near the towns of Tama and G
ladbrook, Annie did suffer a serious accident that threatened to end her quest just as she was nearing the finish line. Speeding downhill, she fell and broke her wrist, though she later, not surprisingly, gave two different accounts of the accident. In Clinton, Iowa, a few days afterward she told the Clinton Herald, “Yes, my fall near Tama was a bad one and it is wonderful I was not more seriously injured. I was coming down a hill when my chain slipped off. A farmer was coming up the hill. I asked him to turn out a little so I could pass but his only answer was curses. I tried to stop my wheel by catching hold of the front wheel, but it struck a rut and I was thrown over the handlebars, my hand catching in the spokes and breaking my arm at the wrist. The pain was something terrible and after riding a couple of miles I got off and bound it up as best I could and rode on sixteen miles further until I reached Tama where I had it dressed.” But, when she returned to New York a few weeks later, Annie said she had collided with “a drove of pigs” that was crossing the road as she sped downhill. That she broke her wrist is certain, however; she was still wearing the cast when seen by a New York Times reporter shortly after her return to the East Coast a few weeks later. However the accident occurred, Annie claimed in the Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette: “the farmer responsible for her injury did nothing to assist her and it is probable that the matter will be taken up by the L.A.W. Wheelmen in this city are highly indignant.” In a moment of pique, she turned on the good people of the peerless state of Iowa for not making enough of a fuss over her injury. “If I had broken my arm in France, instead of out there in prosy old Iowa,” a miffed Annie later said, “I would have been showered with money and attention.”
Wrist now in a cast, Annie came to Cedar Rapids accompanied by Charlie Bell and Tom Bray and other riders who met her near the town of Fairfax, west of Cedar Rapids. “She was walking and had started from Belle Plaine at midnight Thursday [September 5],” said the Gazette. “She is at the Grand today and will leave the city with an escort some time tomorrow morning.”
She rode out of Cedar Rapids on Sunday, September 8, spent the night in Lowden, and arrived in Clinton, on the Mississippi River, on the ninth. The Clinton Herald reported that Annie was required by the wager to travel 10,000 miles by wheel and noted that her cyclometer now read 10,200. This is peculiar because, in Omaha, two newspapers reported the cyclometer read 9,400 miles, and Omaha is less than 400 miles from Clinton. This discrepancy cannot be reconciled unless the cyclometer had been tampered with. With her arm in a cast, Annie surely did not ride 400 miles out of her way en route to Clinton. Perhaps “adjusting” the cyclometer was within her mechanical skills; it was not an easy task, but it certainly would not have been out of character. (In San Francisco, where the cyclometer reportedly read 7,280 miles, Annie had, in actuality, probably ridden a total of perhaps 3,000 miles, including 1,200 miles on her Columbia bicycle from Boston to Chicago.) To complicate matters even further, she later wrote that she had ridden precisely 9,604 miles by wheel on her journey. If the purported wager required her to ride at least 10,000 miles as many reports suggested, why would she sabotage that by saying she had covered 9,604 miles by wheel? Thus, in the end, she claimed to have ridden fewer miles than the cyclometer measured before she had even reached the end of the road in Chicago. It was pure Annie: neither the mileage on her cyclometer, the money she reportedly earned en route, or her stories added up, yet she seemed perfectly unperturbed about it.
“MISS LONDONDERRY…talked most entertainingly of her trip and her experiences, some of which are enough to make one’s hair stand on end,” declared the Clinton Herald of Annie’s visit there. “She went first to Chicago and then started towards the rising sun. She reached Sagon, China, [sic] which is two degrees below the equator.”
“And by the way,” Annie said to the reporter, “that’s the place you want to go to ride a wheel. You are not bothered with cold feet and you have no trouble in ‘warming up’ to get in condition to ride.”
Of her broken wrist Annie said, “It has pained me a great deal ever since, but I shall be able to reach Chicago all right, and as I have only $100 to make until I have secured the required $5,000, I am not worrying in the least about not winning the wager. The doctors tell me I shall probably have to have my arm broken over after my arrival in Chicago, but I don’t care for that so long as I arrive there before the time is up and succeed in winning the wager.”
Though her critics were many, some were still swallowing her story hook, line and sinker, a testament to her charm, showmanship, and good luck. “It was never believed she would come anywhere near winning the wager,” opined the Herald, “but she will and in so doing she will have accomplished a most wonderful feat and one which it is doubtful whether any other living person could…It is to be hoped that Miss Londonderry will some time write a book of her travels, for it would be one of the most interesting ever written.”
On Tuesday, September 10, Annie left Clinton with two cyclists, Roy Upton and Clarence Rumble, for the final leg of her idiosyncratic and improbable journey. By the following morning they had passed through Rochelle, Illinois, nearly halfway to Chicago.
* * *
HAS CIRCLED THE GLOBE—MISS LONDONDERRY PASSES THROUGH ROCHELLE WEDNESDAY MORNING
Miss Annie Londonderry…who has the proud distinction of being the only woman who has circled the globe on a wheel (that is the land portion thereof) passed through Rochelle Wednesday [September 11] forenoon, en route for Chicago, taking breakfast at Allen’s restaurant…The wheel ridden by the young lady…is an ordinary stock wheel and has stood the journey remarkably well.
Miss Londonderry was well-equipped in point of education to make the trip, as she speaks six languages fluently. However, this, together with her wheel and a large share of American pluck constituted her only equipment…Miss Londonderry was dressed in knickerbockers and sweater, and carried a revolver, flask, and cup.
—Rochelle Register, September 13, 1895
* * *
As Annie’s party closed in on Chicago on September 11, in Rochelle, about eighty miles to the west, the weather was oppressively hot. Temperatures at midday were in the mid nineties, the humidity soared, and the newspapers were reporting deaths in Chicago from heat prostration. Had it not been for a strong, steady southwest wind, the death toll may have been higher. Exactly where Annie spent the final night of her around-the-world journey wasn’t reported, but it was somewhere east of Rochelle.
On September 12 at around one o’clock in the afternoon, she laid her wheel down at the Wellington Hotel in Chicago “with a thankful sigh. Mrs. Kapshowsky [sic] (her real name)…looked far from feeling well as she claimed to be. In fact she looked a sick woman. Her arm was broken and bound in a sling, and the last 300 miles were ridden with it in that condition,” wrote the American Wheelman.
This rare reference to Annie by her real name seemed to bring down the curtain on her one-woman show. She was, once again, Annie Kopchovsky, the Jewish working mother of three who for the last fifteen months had played the flamboyant and provocative Annie Londonderry on the world stage.
Surprisingly, Annie’s journey ended quietly. Neither the Chicago Tribune nor the Chicago Daily News appear to have so much as mentioned it (though the Omaha World Herald declared two days later, on page one, “Miss Londonderry Wins”); there was no parade (nor would there be one in New York or Boston); and no big-shot politicians were on hand to greet her. But she was given “a rousing reception by the wheelmen of the city under the auspices of the Sterling Cycle Club.” Annie, Rumble, and Upton were also met in Chicago by representatives of the Sterling Cycle Works, “because of Miss Londonderry’s fame, because of Roy’s reputation for being the speediest local rider, and because of Mr. Rumble’s success as a [Sterling] dealer,” according to the Clinton (Iowa) Semi-Weekly Age. The Age also suggested that Annie did not raffle her Sterling, as she had contemplated to make up the balance of the $5,000. Rather, reported the newspaper, she was given a new wheel and $400 in exchange for the Sterling s
he was riding, which the company wanted for advertising purposes. That money purportedly put her over the top of the $5,000 she was required to earn under the terms of the wager.
BY SEPTEMBER 17, 1895, Annie was back east and her first stop was New Brunswick, New Jersey, to visit her younger sister Rosa. Although she had sold her Sterling in Chicago, she made one more dramatic entrance by wheel, perhaps the one she traded for the Sterling, “bowl[ing] down the long hill that leads to the Albany street bridge” before dismounting “in man fashion.” Though she told a local newspaper she had two weeks to get to Boston to win the wager, the fifteen months would expire in just one.
When challenged that round the world walkers and cyclists “passed through New Brunswick on an average of three a day for the past six months,” Annie “flared up, got very red in the face and denounced all the others as fakirs.” She then produced an autograph book with signatures she had collected along her route as proof of her claim. She told of being held up on the California border by two thieves, “spoke fluently of sickening scenes on the battle fields of China,” and admitted only to covering “over 4,000 miles by rail and water,” technically correct but a vast understatement. In New York, she gave an interview to the New York Recorder: “With her left arm in a sling and her cheeks bronzed from exposure, Miss Annie Londonderry sat in the house of a friend at 208 East Broadway and chatted about her trip around the world on a bicycle. She is a remarkable young woman. This rash and foolhardy trip was, she says, the outcome of a discussion between Dr. Albert Reeder and John Dowe, a wealthy businessman.”
Around the World on Two Wheels Page 16