Miss Tillie Anderson and Miss Dottie Farnsworth got real mad at each other last night, just because they got their numbers mixed. In the dressing room, preceding the race, while the stars were all donning their costumes for the night, Miss Farnsworth got No. 2 instead of No. 3, which number she always rides under. Miss Anderson asked her to give her No. 2 back, claiming that she had always ridden with that number, and as she had been successful, considered it her mascot. Miss Farnsworth, knowing this and probably wanting to break her rival’s good luck, steadfastly refused to give it up, and so last night the pair rode with different numbers than they did on the preceding two nights. No. 3 proved just as lucky for Miss Anderson as her old number, as she again won out, Miss Farnsworth coming in second.
—“Lady Cyclists Quarrel,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, December 2, 1897
The overlapping circuit of the Famous Fast Female Flyers, as they were now being called, continued through the fall of 1897. Without top-flight competition, Tillie won in Cleveland, Dottie in Columbus, and Lizzie in Pittsburgh. Bertha Wagner, Grace Howard, Elsie Gable, Anna Ehmer, Jennie Brown, Lucy Berry, and Ruby Richards undoubtedly raced hard, but they simply weren’t on the level of the Big Five. Lizzie started the race with Tillie in Cleveland, but after the first hour decided she was too sick to finish and eventually withdrew. Soon a pattern emerged. With putative bragging rights over Tillie, Lizzie seemed hesitant to place her title in jeopardy. In Cleveland in August she was sick. After winning over Labor Day in Pittsburgh, she agreed to join three others from that race to appear in Grand Rapids starting September 6. The local papers thought they had a championship race on their hands. But Lizzie hadn’t realized that Bobby Smiley also signed Tillie for the race, and when Lizzie appeared at the track on Sunday to run some laps and saw Tillie there, she abruptly withdrew, prompting the Grand Rapids Democrat to call it “prima facie evidence that she is afraid to compete with the Chicago blonde.”1 It happened again in Kansas City in November, when Lizzie was contracted to headline against Tillie and Dottie. She’d been in poor condition lately, explained the Star, had even lost an October race to Jennie Brown, “and she did not wish to go against Farnsworth or Anderson when not in championship form.”2
The headliners were generally brought together only in the largest cities. The 1897 indoor season culminated with races in Philadelphia, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Cleveland, and while Lizzie withdrew in Kansas City and refused to finish in Cleveland, all four contests began with Tillie, Lizzie, and Dottie on the ticket. The Philadelphia race had all the makings of a top-notch championship bout. It was the farthest east Tillie had thus far competed, and the first night drew nothing short of ten thousand spectators. Tillie, Lizzie, Dottie, and Jennie Brown comprised the faster of two squads, and after five nights and ten hours of racing, each had completed over 205 miles, with Dottie holding a slight lead heading into the final night. But there was no account of the finish. In Tillie’s scrapbook Phil simply wrote, “Race Not Finished,” with no other explanation.
The Kansas City race took place over Thanksgiving week. After Lizzie bowed out, Tillie, Dottie, and Ida Peterson were joined by Chicago-based Frenchwoman Marie Fiering and Clara Drehmel, nicknamed “the Kid” or, sometimes, “the Midget.” Featuring Tillie the Swede, Ida the Norwegian, Marie the Frenchwoman, Clara the German, and Dottie the true-blue American, this race was a good example of how management leveraged partisan affiliations to help at the box office. On opening night the local Swedes outnumbered the rest, cheering longest and loudest for Tillie, but all week the various ethnic communities of Kansas City picked sides based on the flags worn by their favorites. On Thanksgiving the University of Kansas had downed Missouri 16–0 in front of twenty-five hundred people. That night, Tillie wore the crimson and blue of the Jayhawks, all of whose players and many fans turned out to add football cheers to the occasion. Second-place Dottie, appropriately, wore the Tigers’ black and gold and drew cheers from that side of the house. The favorite of the footballers, however, was Ida Peterson—“probably on account of her massive proportions,” explained the Kansas City Star.3
On Friday Tillie arrived late for warm-ups, and she was still sprinting around the track when some of the others began lining up for the start. Ida’s trainer, Artie Hunt, was helping Ida get into position when Tillie swung into the homestretch at top speed. The collision broke the rim of Ida’s rear wheel and sent Tillie sliding across the tape. Ida needed fifteen minutes to repair her bicycle, but while Tillie limped badly and rubbed her arm for several minutes after the crash, she refused medical attention and declared herself fit to begin the race. “You can’t hurt a Swede,” she told the official starter.4
It was a race between Tillie and Dottie, but in the final minutes Tillie managed to pull a full lap ahead; realizing the race was over, Dottie straightened in her saddle and ended up losing by seven laps, just one lap ahead of Ida, who’d lagged behind all week. Clara and Marie were another twelve or thirteen miles back.
The next week it was on to St. Louis, where Messier strained his alliterative powers to the breaking point by billing the women his “magnificent mélange of muscular maidens.” Apparently recovered from her “poor condition,” Lizzie rejoined the group. Two local gals also started the race: Mollie La Tour and Toddy Shaw. St. Louis fans hadn’t yet seen the new era of women’s bicycle racing and were reportedly “quite surprised” by the speed of the racers. The two local entrants must have been surprised, too, as Toddy managed to keep up for only thirty-two laps before quitting the race, never to return. Seventeen-year-old Mollie lasted twelve miles—a little over half an hour—but couldn’t handle such lengthy continuous sprinting and finally fell into the arms of her trainer. She caught her breath and returned, however, ending the evening only three miles back on the ten-lap track. “So after all,” the Republic concluded, “Miss La Tour did not do so badly. Indeed, she did remarkably well. She is but a child in size and years, while the girls who beat her are wonderful specimens of muscular womanhood.”
The reporters could only make sense of the unfamiliar women athletes by comparing them to their male counterparts. Tillie, with her “magnificent riding proportions,” was said to “[sit] on her wheel exactly like Arthur Gardiner. In fact, were her hair cut, you would take her for the Chicago Adonis on any track.” Dottie was described as riding “pretty much like E. E. Anderson, he of locomotive fame.” (In 1896 Anderson had ridden a mile in just over a minute, tucked behind the draft of a speeding train.) Ida Peterson was called “the giantess of the party,” and one local sportsmen, “who leaned on the rail in open-mouthed astonishment, or was it admiration, stigmatized her as a ‘husky guy.’ . . . She weighs about 200 pounds, and rides like Charley Wells, the crack California heavyweight.”5
Another reporter tried to convey to his readers exactly how impressive the women’s speedy riding was: “Think of a girl on a bicycle keeping up for two whole hours and without a particle of rest with a railroad train that is speeding along at a rate of twenty-one miles an hour and then you will have some idea of the wonderful performance of at least eight of the nine girls who took part in last night’s race.” By virtue of the Toledo match race, Lizzie was matter-of-factly referred to as “the champion lady rider of the world” and considered the favorite to win the whopping $500 first prize on offer in St. Louis.6
However, the race was close from the start, with the Big Four of Tillie, Lizzie, Dottie, and Ida riding in a tight bunch. Some observers, accustomed to the men’s marathon races where the riders often separated themselves by dozens of miles, actually complained about how the leaders stuck so close together, expressing dismay, for example, that on the third night the women made exactly the same score they had the night before. Some concluded that the women simply weren’t trying, despite the fact that the quartet covered the first hundred miles while averaging twenty-one miles an hour. Manager Messier assured the doubters that the tight riding simply proved how evenly matched the four riders were. Still, showing their adherence to the nineteenth-century notion that the best athlete always wins, some reporters insisted that “Miss Glaw should finish an easy first, with Miss Anderson second, Miss Farnsworth third and Miss Peterson fourth.” In the event, Tillie won four of the first five nights, with Dottie winning one. “So far during the race,” the Chronicle concluded, “Miss Glaw has not exerted herself in riding.”7 The truth was that Lizzie was simply riding her usual race, biding her time in second or third position, content to let others set the pace.
A crowd of three thousand turned out for the final night, and they witnessed the power and speed of Tillie Anderson. With five minutes to go, the manager pulled “the little four” of Fiering, La Tour, Drehmel, and Lillie Williams, leaving the track to the Big Four. Dottie was setting a fast pace, leading the pack in laps of twelve seconds or less, about thirty miles an hour. Then Lizzie finally jumped to the lead “and vainly tried to shake the bunch.”8 She led for several laps, but Dottie took the lead once more and held it until only about ninety seconds remained in the race. With the crowd on their feet Lizzie burst ahead and gained the lead. Tillie coasted along in third place, her back hunched and her head down, waiting for Phil’s signal to begin the final push. The signal came with three laps to go, and “with a skill that appeared superhuman,” Tillie kicked it into a gear none of the others could match, making her final laps in 11.6 and then 11.2 seconds—thirty-two miles an hour—and crossed the tape fully fifty feet ahead of Lizzie.9 Dottie finished third.
After the race, a Post-Dispatch reporter talked with Lizzie, still calling her “the champion lady bicycle rider of the world.”
“This,” Lizzie is quoted as saying, “is the first time Anderson has been able to outride me.” She didn’t bother to mention the fifteen times Tillie had beaten her. “But it’s all my own fault,” she said. “I never did a day’s training for this race.” She went on to explain that she’d been in Philadelphia, “having a good time there for three weeks,” when she received the invitation to join the field in St. Louis. She accepted, even though she hadn’t ridden at all since the unfinished race in Philadelphia in mid-October. “I won’t do that sort of thing again,” she promised.
Lizzie acknowledged it had been a very fast pace here in St. Louis. “But I have ridden faster,” she said, citing her April victory over Dottie and Helen in Minneapolis and the Toledo match race against Tillie. Due to her poor conditioning here she’d even developed a stitch in her right wrist that she couldn’t shake out. “But for that,” she said, “I would have shown Anderson my heels.”10
The 1897 racing circuit finished back where it started, in Cleveland, this time at Gray’s Armory. It was the twenty-first race of the year in Ohio and the sixth in Cleveland. Situated in a nicer part of town than the Central Armory, where the previous indoor races were held, Gray’s Armory drew a more “representative” crowd, including society people.11 Advance tickets nearly sold out, and several hundred fans without tickets were turned away each night. Some of those with tickets—apparently not society people accustomed to reserve seats—rushed past the ushers on the first night and sat where they pleased, filling the front rows and blocking the way of the more genteel, late-arriving seat holders. It was standing room only every night of the week. “There was plenty of enthusiasm, too, among the society folk,” reported the Leader, “and kid gloves were clapped together as vigorously as horny palms.”12
The enthusiastic crowds were treated to a highly competitive contest that looked like anything but a hippodrome. The track was a relatively small eighteen laps per mile, so at top speeds the women were completing laps in a dizzying seven seconds or less. At times the women moved “in procession” around the track, but only rarely. It seemed as if every time the group settled into a twenty-mile-an-hour gait, someone would spurt out from third or fourth place, followed by two or three of the others, and kick into high gear for five, six, or seven laps. The crowd cheered, the music played, and gradually the rush subsided, only to be repeated by a different challenger minutes later. The small track made it easy to lose a lap, so everyone kept up her guard.
The highlight of the race came on the fourth night. Dottie held the pole when the bell rang for the final three laps. She dug hard, but Tillie was ready and pulled up beside her, leaving Lizzie nowhere to go but farther outside, which took her up the steep bank of the track, “fully as steep as the roof of a house.”13 Circling the track at thirty miles an hour, the three rode almost perfectly abreast. Tillie leaned into Dottie’s shoulder, and Lizzie, “seemingly in deadly peril of her life,” leaned from above against Tillie’s. “It was the most reckless piece of riding that has ever been seen here,” said the Plain Dealer, “and the audience was simply spellbound by it.”14
The racing men in attendance marveled at the women’s effort, particularly Lizzie’s. Local rider Louis Gimm said he wouldn’t have traded places with Lizzie for the whole state of Ohio. Gus Hanson, “the hero of 100 races,” according to the Plain Dealer, held his breath for the whole three laps. “Had one of the three wheels swerved a particle or had one tire slipped on the track,” the paper mused, “the riders could have been gathered up in baskets.”15
Dottie refused to surrender and finished first for the night, giving her one first-place finish, Lizzie another, and Tillie two. Heading into the fifth night, the leaders were averaging twenty-one miles per hour and showing no signs of slowing. Tillie almost won a lap that Friday. Just as Dottie was finishing a spurt and tiring, Tillie shot past and gained half a lap on the field. Lizzie and May jumped out to chase her, and as they gradually gained on Tillie they distanced themselves from Dottie and Jennie Brown, who led the remaining pack. It was, said the Leader, a prime opportunity to make it a three-way race. Lizzie and May finally caught up to Tillie, who now looked exhausted from her effort to pull ahead. “Here came the chance to leave Farnsworth and Brown,” said the Leader. “Many saw it, and shouts to Allen and Glaw to go up and take the pace from the exhausted Anderson were heard on every side. Farnsworth and Brown were still digging along fifteen lengths back, and had either Allen or Glaw passed Anderson and taken the pace, those three would probably have had the race to themselves.”16 Instead, Lizzie did what Lizzie always did: she latched on to Tillie’s rear wheel and contented herself with riding second while, over the next six or seven laps, the remaining riders gradually caught up. In the end, the positions barely changed in the three-minute scrum.
After the race on Friday, Lizzie’s trainer, Fred Stobbart, “a well-known distance racer,” reported that Lizzie wasn’t in good condition and in fact hadn’t been in condition all week. She had performed mightily just to keep up with the others.17 How true that was no one knows, but on Saturday Lizzie quit the race, either unable or unwilling to ride. The Cleveland Leader, at least, seemed convinced that Lizzie was both mentally and physically exhausted: “If anyone who asserts that women’s races are all ‘hippodromes’ could have heard Lizzie Glaw on Saturday, as she moaned in her delirium of ‘laps’ and ‘places,’ now beseeching the others not to lose her, now crying out that she must win, no matter what the cost, he would have no further suspicions in that direction. The one question of defeat or victory had temporarily unbalanced the German girl’s mind, and while her competitors rode like mad about the saucer track last evening she tossed in delirium at her hotel.” Yet her exhaustion, even according to the Leader, appeared to come mainly from worrying about whether she could beat Tillie “and once more regain the championship, which she prized more than anything else in the world. She had scarcely slept since the beginning of the race, and after Friday night’s finish she became delirious.”18
The other racers didn’t miss her. Tillie held the lead for most of the final night, but with under five minutes left she fell to fourth as Dottie, May, and Jennie took turns sprinting for the lead. Then, just as the three-lap bell sounded, Tillie hunched farther over her wheel, swerved up the bank, shot past the other three, and took the lead. She won going away. That left a crowd-pleasing battle for second place between Dottie and May, won finally by Dottie.
Lizzie’s absence seemed to breathe new life into May Allen. Indeed, as the Cleveland World reported, “there was a half-way sort of love feast” after everyone had crossed the finish line. May rushed up to Tillie, threw her arms around her, “and kissed her effusively. Then they sauntered off together, sharing a big bunch of chrysanthemums that some admirer had presented to Miss Allen.”19 Dottie declined to join the festivities, but clearly May and Tillie had enjoyed having the track free of Lizzie’s glowering presence. Tillie may have won the $350 first prize with Lizzie still on board, but for May, Lizzie’s dropping out likely made the difference between $50 for fourth place and $125 for third. So it was a $75 hug she gave Tillie.
To the Leader, Lizzie’s refusal to ride had mostly to do with her conceding Tillie’s superiority. “That the Swede outclasses all the rest,” the paper observed, “is very evident.”20 It’s true that, since the Toledo match race in July, Tillie had officially beaten Lizzie only once—in St. Louis. But the two were slated to race another five times: in Cleveland, Lizzie dropped out after the first hour; in Grand Rapids, Lizzie arrived in town but then refused to ride; in Philadelphia, the race was unfinished; in Kansas City, Lizzie was contracted to ride but backed out before the start; and here in Cleveland, Lizzie spent the final night back in her hotel room—sick, delirious, afraid, or perhaps all three.