It appears to me to be almost a waste of time to continue all this newspaper talk, and I will say right here that when I have finished this, my letter in answer to Miss Anderson’s, I am through, but I feel as though I must have one more opportunity to defend my reputation as a square rider against the very unjust remarks of Miss Anderson. . . .
Open up your eyes, Mr. Editor, and cease your favoritism, and you will then be able to see matters as they truly were.
—“More about the Recent Bicycle Races,” Dottie Farnsworth in the New Orleans States, September 26, 1898
Tillie and Lizzie next met three months later at Tomlinson Hall, a capacious twelve-year-old building centrally located at the corner of Delaware and Market in downtown Indianapolis. The city’s largest venue, it seated 3,500. Tillie had raced there the year before on an eighteen-lap track then called the smallest ever built. This time, thirty men spent just eleven hours constructing a nineteen-lap track. Reporters invited for a sneak peek marveled at the banked turns, which looked even steeper than last year’s. The skilled riders had no problems with it, though. “The surface was smooth,” reported the News, “and there was little spring. The riders had plenty of confidence.”1 A fast race was expected.
Perhaps as a bid to steal headlines from the women or at least further delegitimize their sport, Herbert Foltz of the LAW racing board swooped in and “opened war on the five women,” levying a mass suspension of all involved in the proceedings.2 He even threatened to suspend Indianapolis mayor Thomas Taggart if he fired the pistol to start the race as planned. Taggart backed off, but neither the women racers nor their male handlers took the suspensions seriously. “The women riders have been suspended so often,” the News pointed out, “together with their trainers and the race promoters, that they regard the affair as a joke.”3
To the local papers, Foltz and the LAW looked vindictive and silly. The women’s races were, as far as the News was concerned, “a more honest exhibition of sport than is seen on half the regulation L.A.W. tracks throughout the country.” In men’s races, “jobbery” was practically a daily occurrence, but there was no loafing or jockeying in the women’s races. Nonetheless, complained the News, the LAW “goes out of its field to condemn a sport which is much cleaner than many events that take place under its rules and regulations.”4 An Indianapolis Sun reporter agreed, neatly summing up the sentiment of those who enjoyed the women’s races: “Why the L.A.W. should take such measures,” the reporter concluded, “is more than the ordinary person can see.”5
The ordinary people of Indianapolis shrugged off the controversy and showed up in droves to see the women race. Despite a steady spring rain, several hundred eager fans were already milling around outside the auditorium when Manager Stackpole arrived at 7:00 p.m. on Monday. Doors were scheduled to open at 7:30 for the 8:00 start, but given the rain and the number of people outside, he opened the doors immediately, and a stream of spectators began entering the hall. By 7:30 five hundred people had crowded into the small open space inside the track—way more than the two hundred or so seats that Stackpole had lined up.
As the race got started, those outside the circle found their visibility hindered by poor lighting—a familiar problem in Tomlinson Hall. Spectators had trouble distinguishing the riders, and the riders themselves complained of being unable to follow the lines of the track. “There should be at least four additional lights in the hall,” said the News, “to enable everyone to see as clearly as they should.” Spectators also complained about the low-hanging signs ringing the galleries and blocking their view. Advertising bicycle manufacturers and their local outlets, the signs invited fans to think familiarly about the women below. Most prominent were “Bertie” Wagner and Lizzie Glaw, “the hottest baby in the bunch,” both of whom rode Cleveland bicycles.6
On the track, Tillie, Lizzie, and Bertha Wagner were joined by Ida Peterson and Marie Fiering. From the start, it was clear that neither Ida nor Marie was in any shape to keep up with the others. Marie lost two laps in the first ninety minutes. Ida, whose new racing bike had arrived too late for her to use, had even more trouble on the slick track using the road bike she usually used only for training. She still had her fans, though. The women in attendance admired Ida “because of her ‘sweet’ face,” according to the Journal, “and the men because she was ‘game,’ though they had no objections to the sweet face.”7
Everyone agreed that Lizzie—the “Kaisarina,” she was called, and still the world’s champion, according to the large Cleveland Bicycle Company banner at least half the crowd could see—was in the best physical condition of the three leaders.8 Her features set with “a look of determination,” she led most of the first night and easily outsprinted Tillie and Bertha at the finish.9 Onlookers who’d seen Tillie edge Dottie Farnsworth the year before remarked that the rivalry between the German and the Swede seemed even fiercer. Indeed, Tillie, who’d raced only once in the past three months—an easy cruise to victory over Ida and Marie in Racine, Wisconsin, in mid-February—came out for extra training runs Tuesday afternoon, trying to ride her way into shape. This was scheduled as a ten-hour race, not the usual twelve, with just ninety minutes slated for each of the first five nights. Monday had been an outright sprint the entire evening, and Lizzie definitely looked to be the strongest.
Tillie came back to take the second night, but then Lizzie won the third. “Like a Game of Tag,” one headline said.10 That night, Wednesday evening, Lizzie began to complain of illness—indigestion, according to her trainer, although it’s hard to say if it was anything more than overexertion. She’d been pushed so hard by Tillie at the finish of the third night that the two of them had circled the track, according to the Journal, in less than five seconds—thirty-eight miles per hour, if true.11 Tillie won again on the fourth night, after which Lizzie summoned a physician, a Dr. Earp, who attended to her for the remainder of the race.
Lizzie reportedly felt much better on Friday morning—suggesting that exhaustion after the hard finishes was indeed what plagued her—and she was able to race that night, the last of the ninety-minute sprints. Tillie won again, though, giving her three victories in the five nights and two in a row. Only Saturday night remained, and it would feature a full two and a half hours, prompting Manager Stackpole to raise ticket prices by a quarter—to fifty cents, seventy-five cents, and one dollar. Even so, Tomlinson Hall was full once again. With Bertha Wagner four laps back, it promised to be a do-or-die, head-to-head match between Tillie and Lizzie for what surely would be the undisputed championship of women’s racing.
Once again, Lizzie complained of illness, and though she’d arrived at the track suited up and apparently ready to go, at the last minute Stackpole announced to the stunned crowd that she was too ill to start. For the second straight race against Tillie, Lizzie would sit out the final night. Tillie won the race easily, and the championship would remain disputed. Like the Leader in Cleveland, the Sentinel of Indianapolis was convinced enough by Tillie’s strong riding to declare her the best in the business. “Glaw’s former victory over Anderson,” the paper said, “must have been the veriest fluke.”12
Not everyone was so convinced, however. The Indianapolis Journal, for one, smelled a hippodrome. The back-and-forth finishes earlier in the week and Lizzie’s convenient illness, which kept alive the dispute over the world’s championship, struck the paper as evidence of a fix. “Although it may have been part of the programme,” the Journal’s writer sneered, “it was with much regret that the management announced the withdrawal of Lizzie Glaw from the race. She has been suffering from indigestion.” Her stomach troubles kept Lizzie from reaching the two-hundred-mile total required for her share of what the Journal called “the vast treasure alleged to be appropriated for prizes.” Even the article’s title dripped with sarcasm: “Swede ‘Wins’ the Race.” Clearly, the staff of the Journal believed that Stackpole managed the results just as much as he managed the ticket office. “Everybody doesn’t know a hippodrome when he sees it,” the Journal concluded, “and there were many who sat with bulging eyes and rising hair when the ‘Terrible Swede’ made her terrible finish and was announced the winner.”13
Such skepticism seemed to be the minority view, but it presaged much of the coverage to come in the final years of women’s racing. The majority had no reason to question the six close finishes or the constant thrill of the racers leaning precariously into the turns. Lizzie looked strong starting the week, but Tillie proved the stronger, and no one could complain about the twenty-one-mile-per-hour pace or the thrilling five- and six-second laps at the end of each night. Bertha Wagner appeared to be a solid rider, and Ida Peterson was roundly admired for her graceful riding and great pluck in the face of adversity. The LAW racing board’s efforts had fallen flat; Indianapolis thumbed its nose at the league’s arcane rules. The city loved women’s racing.
In contrast to the Journal’s cynicism were the effusive words of the Indianapolis Trade Journal, which reported that the city’s “wheel enthusiasts” had reached a “fever heat over the ladies’ bicycle race at Tomlinson Hall.” The Trade Journal even included a poem in tribute to the sport’s greatest star:
When Tillie Rides Her Wheel
A whiz, a whir,
A dazzling blur,
A flash of yellow hair,
A whirlwind pace,
A wheel that slits the air!
Too slow our eyes—
So fast she flies
Around the tilted curve
With wheel a-cant
At dizzy slant—
To catch her swooping swerve!
With swooping swerve—
How cool her nerve!—
She swings into the lead;
She holds her place
In maddest race,
As tireless as her steed!
The goal in sight—
How wild her flight,
And how our senses reel
To see the rush
And hear the hush
When Tillie rides her wheel!14
Genuinely sick or not, Lizzie raced little over the next six months of 1898. She lost to Tillie in early April in Calumet, Michigan. In June she lost to Dottie, insisting that she let up at the end only after she thought she’d won the race when in fact there was one more lap to go. Officially, she crossed the finish line dead last. Some spectators suspected that she let up when she realized Dottie would win. In September Lizzie won two races in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, both times to inferior competition. She lost another race in October in Minneapolis, and then she and Tillie appeared back at Tattersall’s over Thanksgiving week—but there Lizzie again refused to ride the final night. It wasn’t a good year for her: she won two, lost three, and refused to finish twice. By Thanksgiving 1898 Lizzie hadn’t actually beaten Tillie since their head-to-head match in Toledo the previous year. Their rivalry, it seemed, had peaked.
Dottie, meanwhile, never shied away from a head-to-head challenge with Tillie or anyone else, and in the late summer of 1898 she got her chance of a lifetime. New Orleans hadn’t yet experienced the new style of women’s racing, but over the span of five weeks the city got just about everything the sport had to offer. The script unfolded rather exquisitely. Dottie arrived in town and headlined an eight-day, twelve-hour race that began July 25 at West End Park on a twenty-lap board track. Calling herself the Minneapolis Whirlwind, Dottie and her trainer, A. A. Hansen, fed the New Orleans reporters with details of her illustrious career, calling her the American champion and claiming she’d established all the major speed records, citing in particular an August 1897 race at Philadelphia’s Point Breeze track—a race, conveniently enough, without Lizzie or Tillie.15 Dottie lived up to her own hype and dazzled the New Orleans crowds, who watched her spin around the tiny track at well over twenty miles an hour, dominating Lillie Williams for the first six nights of the race. On the seventh night, however, New Orleans saw the sport’s dangerous side: in the final sprint Dottie took a bad spill, severely injuring her knee. She was barely able to remount and pedal through the last two laps. Overnight her knee swelled up to twice its normal size, and there was no way she could continue. Lillie Williams, the old high-wheeler, came out the final night and claimed one of her very few victories of the new era—certainly her first against the likes of Dottie Farnsworth.
Meanwhile, across town on a permanent four-lap cement track at Athletic Park, Tillie started her own New Orleans race against Ida Peterson, Bertha Wagner, and two lesser-known contestants. This far south, Tillie’s reputation apparently did not precede her, and she wasn’t singled out in the advance coverage; indeed, the five women were merely described collectively as “renowned riders with fine records.”16 Tillie dominated from start to finish, and those who’d seen Dottie dominate the earlier race recognized that the best two riders in town that month hadn’t in fact appeared on the same track. Even before Tillie’s race finished, talk began about a possible match race between the two scorchers.
Tillie’s race ended August 7. Dottie’s knee was still mending, and as it happened Tillie had a race scheduled in Chattanooga from August 15 to 20, so it was decided to postpone the match race until after that. This gave Dottie time to heal and the rivalry time to heat up. Perhaps to further showcase Tillie’s abilities to the southern fans, Phil arranged for Tillie to attempt some speed records at the quarter-mile track at Athletic Park. On Saturday, August 13, she rode twenty-five miles in front of six officials. Each mile was carefully timed. Her first and fastest mile was clocked at an even two minutes—thirty miles per hour. The rest ranged between 2:15 and 2:27. Here are her five-mile scores:
|
First five miles |
11:09.6 |
26.88 mph |
|
Second five miles |
11:45.4 |
25.52 mph |
|
Third five miles |
11:42.2 |
25.63 mph |
|
Fourth five miles |
11:33.8 |
25.94 mph |
|
Fifth five miles |
11:33.6 |
25.95 mph |
She completed the twenty-five miles in 57:44.6, an average of 25.98 mph.17 This is perhaps the best indication ever recorded of Tillie’s true abilities as a rider. The certified account of these times does not say whether or not Tillie was paced, but it seems likely that she was. Even so, her times are remarkable. Most notable is the fact that she settled, after the first fifteen miles, into a steady pace of nearly twenty-six miles per hour. It’s too bad she didn’t continue for the full hour, as the “hour record” was then and still is today the best-known cycling record, similar to the hundred-yard dash or the mile record in track. In 1897 British rider J. W. Stocks had set the men’s paced hour record at 32.6 miles. The unpaced men’s record in 1898 was 25.3 miles, held by the American Willie Hamilton. The Belgian Hélène Dutrieu is today credited with holding the 1890s women’s hour record, having completed 39.19 kilometers in 1895.18 That’s 24.35 miles. (As late as 1955, the women’s unpaced hour record was 38.47 kilometers, or 23.9 miles, so both Dutrieu’s and Tillie’s runs were almost certainly paced. The current women’s unpaced hour record is 47.98 kilometers, or 29.8 miles, established by American cyclist Evelyn Stevens in 2016.) In New Orleans, Tillie surpassed Dutrieu’s distance by almost two-thirds of a mile—with 2:15 to spare. So although the record is unofficial, it seems clear that Tillie owns the women’s hour record of the 1890s. An 1899 profile gave Tillie’s one-hour record as “twenty-six and a half miles,” although it offered no other details.19
In the meantime, Tillie and Dottie agreed to terms for a six-day, six-hour, head-to-head match race to begin Wednesday, August 24, on the twenty-lap track at West End Park. Tillie must have felt at least a little extra motivation, not just because Dottie had grabbed all the earlier New Orleans headlines, but also because the match race was billed in the papers as “Tillie Anderson, the Swedish Champion, and Dottie Farnsworth, the American Champion, for the Championship of America.”20 Tillie, apparently, was considered the challenger.
The women were paced by two local men riding a tandem. The men withdrew for the final laps, letting the two women battle head-to-head at the end of each heat. Tillie won the first two nights, Wednesday and Thursday, but she and Dottie were tied overall, with forty-eight miles plus eleven laps (24.6 mph)—considerably faster than Dottie had achieved on the same track, no doubt helped by the pacemakers, the relatively short one-hour heats, and the intensity of the competition.
Five miles into Friday night’s contest, as the women trailed the tandem at top speed, Tillie bumped Dottie’s back wheel and went down hard. She later accused Dottie of backpedaling into her, but the referee didn’t see it that way. He said Dottie’s pace was simply too hot for Tillie. Tillie lost three laps before she was able to remount and continue the race. Now Tillie was angry, but Dottie only increased her speed. Two miles after the first spill, she called impatiently to the pacemakers—“Faster, faster”—and then finally just decided to pass them. Tillie watched Dottie closely but hung back with the tandem. A few laps later, one of the men turned to check where Tillie was, and his movement nudged the tandem off the inner line of the track toward the outside, bumping Tillie’s wheel and dropping her again to the planks, “taking considerable skin off her left knee cap and bruising up her body in several places.”21 It took her several minutes to recover. By the time Tillie was able to remount, Dottie had completed nearly a mile, and since there was no allowance for accidents in this head-to-head match, Tillie ended the night a full twenty-one laps behind.
Dottie had gained her lead, the Times-Picayune said the next morning, “purely and simply by accident.”22 Phil added that Tillie’s injuries were far more severe than people realized, and he pushed for postponement. “Miss Anderson is physically unable to continue her present match with Miss Farnsworth,” he told the States, “and I am afraid that the half-finished race will have to be called off for the time being.”23 He said splinters had embedded themselves in both Tillie’s knees and that her entire side was black and blue. Phil knew that making up twenty-one laps was next to impossible, so he likely was looking for a way out of the race.
Phil’s gambit worked, and the race manager, a Mr. F. L. Albert, agreed to postpone Saturday night’s heat. He did the same on Sunday and again on Monday. Each morning Mr. Albert expressed hope of continuing the race, and each night Dottie showed up, ready to ride, no doubt realizing how close she was to finally getting the best of Tillie Anderson. By Tuesday morning it was reported that Dottie had agreed to concede all but the first three of Tillie’s lost laps. Tillie accepted the reduced deficit, according to Manager Albert, and declared her intention to continue the race Tuesday night.
It wasn’t to be. After speaking with Mr. Albert on Monday night, Tillie and Phil quietly packed up and left for Chicago, content to put the match race behind them and hope that Tillie could heal enough to begin a race—also, as it happened, with Dottie on the slate—scheduled to begin in Minneapolis the following Monday. Understandably, then, the referee awarded the match race—and the American championship—to Dottie.
At least one New Orleans paper, the States, sympathized with “the pretty Swede,” criticizing the officials for punishing Tillie for injuries she suffered through no fault of her own. The paper felt it was unfair to name Dottie the American champion. The match, in the paper’s view, hadn’t settled anything.24
Not surprisingly, Tillie agreed. She thought Dottie’s backpedaling caused the first fall, and she also blamed Dottie for the second: “For fear that I would get the place behind the tandem Miss Farnsworth rode up alongside of the tandem. When they were passing me, the track not being wide enough for so many riders abreast, Miss Farnsworth touched the tandem with her elbow and of course they could do nothing but turn down on me. One of their pedals struck my front wheel and I fell. Then Miss Farnsworth turned down in front of the tandem and struck their front wheel with her rear wheel and they fell.” “As for the pace being too hot,” Tillie added, referring to the referee’s earlier remarks, “I can only say that I have never seen the day when any woman was able to get the pace fast enough.”25
Dottie admonished the States for taking Tillie’s side and reminded readers that she, too, had suffered injuries in the earlier race at the Point Breeze track and indeed still suffered from them—yet she had been there, against her doctor’s orders, ready to compete for the championship, while Tillie called for postponement after postponement. Furthermore, it was the referee, not Dottie, who named Dottie champion—so no one should accuse her of claiming something that she didn’t deserve. “I have never posed as a champion as you say,” Dottie insisted. She was not entirely conciliatory, however: “In Miss Anderson I have my hardest competitor to defeat, but when you say in your paper that in my best form I am not Miss Anderson’s equal, I must say Mr. Editor you are greatly mistaken.”26
From any perspective, Dottie’s victory must have rung hollow, and the ordeal seemed to take something out of her. She continued on the circuit through the end of 1898 and into 1899, finishing behind Tillie three more times. Then in April she married Albert Spencer, a traveling salesman based in Minneapolis, and apparently tried to adopt a more domesticated lifestyle. She did appear with Tillie in a series of late summer races in Ohio in 1899, but after that she raced only in the upper Midwest and Canada, and sparingly at that, competing in just a half dozen six-day races in 1900 and 1901. Dottie’s final race took place in Racine, Wisconsin, in August 1901. She was twenty-eight years old.