Around the World on Two Wheels

by Peter Zheutlin

  “I met with a royal reception everywhere during my trip,” Annie told the Recorder, “but I wouldn’t take it again for $150,000. I have received the purse of $10,000 and never was $15,000 [the $10,000 purse plus the $5,000 earned en route] earned in so hard a manner. I go to Boston on Sunday and while there will arrange for the publication of my book. Then I will return here.”

  ON THE MORNING of September 24, fifteen months to the day after climbing aboard her Columbia bicycle in front of the State House, Annie arrived back home in Boston and was reunited with Max and their children. News that she had finished her trip was reported as far away as Milan and Honolulu. In Tama, Iowa, near the site where she had broken her wrist just a couple of weeks before, the Tama Free Press reported that Annie “[won] her race,” despite the “considerable trouble and pain” of her injury. The El Paso Daily Herald, one of the cyclist’s biggest boosters, reported the completion of her journey and noted, for the first time, and no doubt to the surprise of many in El Paso, that “Annie Londonderry is not her real name.”

  A few murmurs about Annie’s authenticity continued to surface. In November 1895, H. D. McIlrath, the Chicago man who, with his wife, had set out in the spring to wheel around the world, and who sought for his wife the distinction of being the first woman to do so, commented on Annie to a Yokohama newspaper. Calling her “the globe-girdling sign board,” McIlrath said that, while in Yokohama, Annie claimed to have appealed for help from the American consul general, a Colonel McIvor, and, having been turned down, had received aid from the French consul. Said McIlrath: “But as both gentlemen positively declare they never saw the lady I am inclined to believe [her] story is on a par with her visionary visits to Siberia prisons, Chinese and Japanese battles, etc.” The McIlraths spent three years traveling the globe on their bicycles, returning home in 1898.

  There is no record of Annie’s reunion with Max, Mollie, Libbie, and Simon, all of whom must have changed considerably since she’d left. Libbie, who had turned four during her mother’s absence, and Simon, who had turned three, were so young when Annie disappeared that they probably now had no memory of their mother. They may have wondered who the stranger was in their midst.

  But for thousands of people she met along her route—Jessie Padman of South Bend; the Klinkenbergs of Kendallville, Indiana; C. J. Appel of Rochester, Mr. and Mrs. Victor Sloan of Paris; Mark Johnson of San Francisco; Art Bennett of Yuma; John Wesley Hardin of El Paso; Clarence Rumble and Roy Upton of Clinton, Iowa; and surely editor Allen Kelly of Las Cruces, to name but a few—and countless others who read about her and who were pulling for her—Annie’s journey created memories of a smart, vivacious, and intensely charismatic woman of tremendous will, memories that no doubt lasted a lifetime as they did for Annie.

  When the curtain came down on her traveling road show, she wasn’t quite through with the limelight. Her trip had been one giant step on a path toward a life as an independent, freethinking woman, a woman who saw herself in every way as the equal of men. And just six weeks after it ended, she would prove it again.

  Chapter Nine

  Capture of a Very Novel “Wild Man”

  THE SUNDAY WORLD’S “NEW WOMAN” FINDS THE “FIEND” WHO HAS TERRORIZED WORCESTER COUNTY, MASS. SURPRISING DISCOVERIES WHICH BAFFLED FARMERS AND OFFICERS

  On silent steed of steel she rides

  Past nature’s beauteous bowers;

  Life’s moments spent while thus she glides,

  To her seem sweetest hours.

  —M.S., The American Jewess, June 1896

  On the night of October 26, 1895, six weeks after Annie put her bike down in Chicago, a stylish and enterprising young woman arrived in Boston by train from New York City, having been dispatched earlier in the day by her editors at the New York Sunday World. After arriving in Boston, the young woman went to Young’s Hotel in the city’s Back Bay section and registered as Nellie Bly. She was in Boston en route to the small town of Royalston, some seventy miles west, where, over the preceding weeks, a lanky young farmer named Charley Richardson had been the victim of a series of events so mysterious and so chilling that entire communities were held in fear.

  It all began in late July 1895, when Richardson was riding in his farm wagon and a wheel fell off, throwing the farmer to the ground and injuring him. The wheel nuts had been removed, and Richardson later discovered them in his barn with a note warning him not to try and find out who had done the deed. Some days later, he found his rakes and pitchforks lashed to the high beams of his barn.

  Perhaps it was all a practical joke. But with the approach of Halloween, as the night air in the hills around Royalston turned chill and darkness set in early, the harassment escalated. First, one of Richardson’s sheep had its back broken. Then, on Monday, October 21, a heavy clock pendulum was thrown through his bedroom window, narrowly missing him as he slept. The next day, the farmer’s cows disappeared from his pasture. His nerves frayed by the mysterious events of the previous days and weeks, he took a pistol and five cartridges and headed into the woods to search for his livestock. Noticing smoke in the distance, he walked slowly and cautiously toward the source, where he saw a man huddled by a fire in a small clearing.

  Richardson’s next step snapped a twig, and the man by the fire abruptly stood up and looked around. He was gaunt, about six feet tall, with a scraggly gray beard that stretched to his waist, sunken cheeks, and eyes that “blazed fiercely.” Clothed in tatters, he looked more like a creature of the woods than a man.

  Before Richardson could act, the “wild man,” as he came to be known, drew a pistol and fired a shot that ripped through the farmer’s coat near the hip. The wild man then fled into the woods, with Richardson in hot pursuit. The latter fired five times but missed. “I thought the man, by his appearance, must have been 70 or 75 years old,” Richardson told the Fitchburg Daily Sentinel. “But when he began to run he went like a man of 21.”

  After the shooting, Richardson took his mother, who lived on the farm with him, to Athol for her safety. When he returned home about five P.M. with a friend, Leslie Woodbury, who had agreed to help search for the wild man, he went into the kitchen and lit the stove to make tea. The stove exploded, sending Richardson careering across the room. He was unharmed but soon discovered that not only had gunpowder been placed in his stove, but his pantry shelves had been emptied. The wild man had struck again. Later that same evening the young farmer was shot at again, this time during a corn-husking bee at his barn. The bullet passed through his hat, slightly burning his forehead, and shattered a windowpane. Several other people at the farm heard the shot fired that night, but none saw it. Richardson was sure the strange man he had chased through the woods was responsible for all the attacks.

  As word of the violent events spread, panic gripped the residents of Royalston and neighboring Athol. On Thursday, October 24, a state detective identified only as Murray and the Athol deputy sheriff, Roswell L. Doane, a stocky, balding man with an impressive handlebar mustache, put together a posse of about two dozen well-armed men and led them into the woods to look for the wild man. The posse returned empty-handed after four hours—but in the meantime, the Richardson barn was set ablaze.

  BY THIS TIME, news of the Massachusetts wild man had reached Boston and New York, where newspaper editors spied a story sure to find a wide audience. On October 24 and again on the twenty-fifth, the Boston Daily Globe carried stories describing the assaults against Richardson, the earlier one on the front page. The reporter, who had traveled to Royalston to investigate, suggested that a “little gray-bearded man” was the “probable miscreant” and reported the unsuccessful efforts to capture the “marauder.”

  In New York City, at the Park Row offices of the New York World, the crown jewel in Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper empire, two telegrams from Boston, both dated October 25, landed on the desk of Morrill Goddard, the World’s Sunday editor. They outlined a story with all the elements of the sensational features that were a staple of the Pulit
zer papers and their competitors. The first telegram read, “We have had two or three reports of the wild man’s doing around Royalston, & farmers are surely in state of abject terror. From what I can learn, there is material for picturesque story. Have mailed clipping from local story of latest Escapade.” The Western Union telegram was signed “Sanger.”

  Apparently concerned that Goddard might not have gotten the first telegram, or that it might not have conveyed enough urgency, Sanger sent a second telegram, this one via the Postal Telegraph Cable Company: “Athol Mass. Farmers are panic stricken over antics of supposed wild man. Men armed to the teeth whenever they leave home. Looks like good material for Sunday Special. Shall I go for it? This has no connection with Connecticut wild man. Sanger.”

  But Goddard did not tell Sanger “to go for it.” Instead, on Saturday, October 26, the editor dispatched a young female reporter from New York, the one who, later that evening, registered at Young’s as Nellie Bly. But the woman assigned to cover the story of the Massachusetts wild man was not Nellie Bly. She was, of course, Annie Kopchovsky.

  As described in the nail-biting feature she wrote a week later for the New York Sunday World under the byline “The New Woman,” Annie announced to Sheriff Doane that she had been sent by the paper “to capture the desperado” and convinced him to let her join a second posse that formed on Sunday, October 27 to track down the man who had been tormenting Charley Richardson.

  Annie’s dramatic piece about the capture of the wild man consumed almost a full page in the November 3, 1895, edition of the World. It included a sketch of an intrepid young woman armed with a pistol—and sporting dainty gloves—leading a large group of men wielding axes, pitchforks, and other weapons. She set the scene with flair: “One has a strange feeling in stepping into a town where all is mystery and excitement, where men are patrolling the streets armed to the teeth, and where women peer nervously at every passer-by. Where you hear frightful accounts of the murderous doings of a mysterious somebody.”

  Annie followed Sheriff Doane in a carriage as he set out to form his posse. “At every farmhouse farmers, all well armed, would join our party until a small army was traveling the narrow, winding, rocky road through a bleak barren country,” she wrote. “Occasionally we passed a small church. But there were no divine services at them, even in Massachusetts. Everybody—pastors, deacons and brethren—was on the hunt.” When they reached Royalston, everyone gathered around as Charley Richardson “carefully described his foe. At last all was ready for the hunt.”

  The group divided into squads. Fortuitously, though a dozen reporters were on hand, according to Annie, she was the only one who ended up in Charley Richardson’s squad, and she engaged him in conversation along the way: “I sounded him on courage and found that he did not possess as much of the stuff as the knights of old. In fact, he was nothing but a timid boy.”

  When Annie quizzed Richardson about what books he liked to read, he replied that he was “fond of ‘these wild Western stories where men shoot and raise Cain.’” She asked “if he had taken it into his mind to do wild things like the men in the books,” and he said “sometimes he wanted to be a cowboy or a mountain hunter or a detective.” Finally, Annie wondered aloud if he “was not tired of life on the farm.” Richardson’s response, that he “longed for life” in the West, “was about all I wanted,” Annie declared. “I put two and two together, and with the facts I had put down out of the stories told me [about the wild man] I soon deduced the theory that Charles Richardson was the wild man who had been shooting at and attacking himself and appearing that he was frightened, and at the same time making idiots out of his neighbors.”

  Her theory was bolstered by some clever forensic work. Annie noted that the bullet holes in Richardson’s coat and hat were made by a .22-caliber pistol. When Doane later showed her Richardson’s pistol, it was a.22. She also noticed that the hole in Richardson’s coat “ranged downward,” though the farmer had said the bullet had come from below, and she spotted a powder burn on the coat, indicating a shot at very close range. “I asked the boy about this,” wrote Annie.

  “‘How far was the wild man from you when he fired?’ I asked.

  “‘About twenty paces.’

  “This was a ‘dead give away.’ Anyone with any knowledge of gun or pistol shots knows that there could be no powder burn at that distance.”

  When Annie shared her theory with Sheriff Doane, he was inclined to agree, but, he said, he “would not dare tell the Royalston farmers our opinion: ‘They would not believe us, and would most probably try to handle us roughly.’”

  The next day Doane questioned Richardson at the district attorney’s office in Worcester and, according to Annie, told the farmer that he suspected Richardson himself was the wild man. Per her account:

  “‘How do you know?’ asked the boy in a tremulous voice.

  “‘Do you remember the young lady who was searching with us yesterday?’ asked the Sheriff. Charles did remember.

  “‘Well, she is from New York, and is a mind-reader. She told us all.’”

  Richardson then broke down and confessed, allowing Annie to brag, “I solved the mystery and found the Wild Man.” Doane, she claimed, acknowledged his “grateful appreciation” in a letter to her: “Please accept my thanks for your valuable suggestions and services and your great courage. R. L. Doane, Deputy Sheriff.” Annie had pulled the mask off the vicious wild man, revealing the scared young man underneath.

  THE DENOUEMENT of the wild-man story was not reported in local newspapers quite the same way as it was in the World. One of them, the Worcester West Chronicle of Athol, questioned Richardson’s guilt, opining, somewhat obtusely, that “the difficulty in [the] situation thus far, is because the lack of other than circumstantial evidence…. The peace and safety of the community demanded a solution of the present mystery as far as possible by local investigation. With the broadest charity and the kindest sympathy, the public mind would rest more easily in a verdict of mental aberration, than to be confronted with the fact of the presence of a demon haunting our dwellings and crossing our pathway.”

  Most accepted that Richardson had invented the wild man himself, perhaps to scare his mother into selling the family farm so he could pursue his dream of life in the West. They balked, however, at making Annie the heroine of the story. For one thing, she had not been the first to suspect the young farmer. On October 25, two days before her arrival in Athol, a story in the Fitchburg Daily Sentinel had reported neighbors’ suspicions that Richardson and the wild man were one and the same: “There are…Royalston people who take very little stock in these ‘wild man’ stories. It is said that Charley Richardson has for some time wanted to move away from his dismal home, but his mother has objected…. He has up to the present time been accepted as the soul of truthfulness. It would be a stranger mystery still if it were discovered that Charley had fired the shots himself, set fire to his own barn, blown up his own stove with powder, and all at the risk of his own life.” After his identity was revealed, the Athol Transcript noted, “the ‘Wild Man’ turns out to be as has been suspected for two or three days past.”

  Annie’s starring role in provoking the man’s confession also strains credulity. Richardson admitted his guilt on the morning of October 28 to Detective Murray and Sheriff Doane after being questioned “sharply,” according to the Athol Transcript, and the first local newspaper stories about the confession appeared the next day. It is possible that either Annie, Doane, Murray, or perhaps all of them working together had put the pieces together on the twenty-seventh. But if Annie’s story in the World is to be taken at face value, she was either a very quick study, having just arrived on the scene, or local law enforcement was profoundly inept, or both.

  The portrayal of a smart-as-a-whip city girl besting the local constabulary was bound to raise hackles in the hills of north-central Massachusetts. In the judgment of the Fitchburg Daily Sentinel, credit for solving the case was due “almost entirely
” to Sheriff Doane, “who early formed the opinion that Richardson was playing upon the credulity of his friends and neighbors.”

  The Athol Transcript had harsher words for Annie and the World, charging Pulitzer’s newspaper and its reporter with “fake reporting” in a story that appeared two days after Annie’s feature (by the time she was in Royalston, of course, Annie was quite used to being the center of controversy with plenty of admirers and detractors):

  The Royalston “wild man” case does not “down” at once. The sensationalists of the New York World have got hold of the story and they are making the most of it that is possible…. It claims that the “wild man” was in reality captured through the efforts of the World Reporter, Nellie Bly, Jr., the sensation writer of that newspaper and she publishes a card of thanks purporting to come from Sheriff Doane, acknowledging his great indebtedness to her for helping to solve the “mystery” and this after the bottom had dropped out of the whole thing. Mr. Doane informs us that he never wrote such a card, or endorsed her efficiency in the case…. The laugh seems to be on Sheriff Doane for being published as endorsing this reporter’s connection with the business, but we imagine there is no little disgust at the unscrupulous attempt of a great newspaper to play upon the gullibility of its readers.

  Annie’s scrapbook does contain a receipt from Doane, but the wording is much less effusive than the purported letter that she quoted in her story. The receipt, written on a piece of notepaper from Young’s Hotel, acknowledges a payment of ten dollars to Sheriff Doane on October 27: “Received of A. Londenery [sic] $10.00 for assisting in search of wild man at Royalston Mass.” (Apparently on the trip from Boston to Athol, Annie had switched from her World alias, Nellie Bly Jr., the byline on the article about her bike trip, to her cycling alias, Annie Londonderry.) The ten dollars could indicate payment for a scoop, but more likely she secured the document as a way to confirm her role in the escapade. She had probably anticipated the very request that her editor Morrill Goddard at the World made in a telegram addressed to “Mrs. Anna Kapchiwsky” in Athol on October 28, which read in part, “can’t you get some kind of letter of thanks for your services signed by sheriff judge town officials or somebody.” Annie’s scrapbook containing documents related to the wild man story has no notes from Doane other than the receipt.