MISS ANNIE LONDONDERRY COMING TO EL PASO AFTER A TRIP THROUGH EUROPE AND ASIA, THE LADY IS BOUND FOR HER HOME ON A BIKE
I had made myself master of the most remarkable, ingenious, and inspiring motor ever yet devised upon this planet.
—Frances Willard on learning to ride a bicycle.
No one really knows how Annie Londonderry, the “circumcycler” as the Daily Star of Tucson called her, entered Arizona Territory in early June 1895. Did she cross the border by bicycle, on foot, by train, or perhaps even by hot air balloon? One thing was for certain: the longer she was on the road, the more fanciful her accounts of her travels became.
“In speaking of her trip across the desert she was exceedingly eulogistic of the train men, who showed her every kindness possible,” reported a Tucson newspaper shortly after her arrival in Arizona. “But for this it is quite evident, from what she said, that the silent steed and its lone rider would have been passengers on an incoming express.” If, as some suspected, Annie had crossed the Southern California desert by rail, she wasn’t letting on, saying only that the train crews eased her passage by offering milk and water to drink.
On June 14, accompanied by Art Bennett, editor of the Yuma Times, Annie reached Phoenix. “She has had an exciting time of it and has seen more than the average globe trotter,” stated the Arizona Republican. “She was in China during the disturbance there and witnessed one of those bloodless battles in which she came nearer to being killed than anybody else except one man who really was killed. Miss Londonderry is an attractive and very bright young lady of twenty-five, though she doesn’t look nearly so old.”
Though Tucson, with a population of 5,100, was the capital of Arizona Territory in 1895, Phoenix, whose population barely topped 3,000, was already becoming the territory’s political center of gravity. Electric streetcars plied the streets and new railroad links were being established. Just a few months earlier, the Santa Fe, Prescott and Phoenix Railroad ran its first train to the city, connecting Phoenix with northern Arizona and other parts of the west via Santa Fe. Yet despite its growth, Phoenix was, relatively speaking, a small and remote desert outpost, and the arrival of an around-the-world traveler, especially a woman on wheels, was a first-rate novelty.
As Annie explored the town in her cycling costume, she caused quite a commotion. Back east, her bloomers had raised some eyebrows, but in the sparsely settled west it was a real shock to some. It was here that an elderly woman coming out of a store “threw her hands up in speechless horror” upon spotting Annie in her bloomers and bemoaned the “depravity and boldness of the nineteenth century girl”: “‘Wal if thar aint queer doin’s now-a-days. I jest seen a woman wearin’ men’s pants.’ The clerk explained that they were bloomers. ‘Balloons, did you say! Wal if I ever ketch my darter wearin’ balloons, I’ll jest, I’ll jest….’” At least that’s how the Arizona Gazette told it.
DURING ANNIE’S STAY in Phoenix, the Valley Cycle Club entertained her and the Sterling was put on display at Pinney & Robinson’s, a bicycle dealership on North Second Street, to attract shoppers. An ad in the Arizona Daily Gazette trumpeted its appearance:
ANNIE LONDONDERRY, THE LADY WHO IS RIDING AROUND THE WORLD ON A STERLING IS IN TOWN—HER WHEEL WILL BE ON EXHIBITION AT PINNEY & ROBINSON’S
Annie also gave a “clever exhibition of fancy riding at the park” wrote an observer. “The way she can handle a wheel would make a male expert ashamed of himself.”
After she left Phoenix, she spent the night of June 17 in Red Rock, about ninety miles south, and from there headed to Tucson. During this leg of her journey, a trick rider named Claude Leslie, of Los Angeles, joined her on the road. Trick riders were a popular entertainment during cycling’s golden age, performing a variety of stunts on their bicycles.
So anticipated was Annie’s arrival that by midafternoon a small crowd armed with a telescope had climbed a bell tower in the city to search the horizon for her. “Quite a little party went on the road to meet her, and there was considerable competition…as to who should meet her first,” wrote the Tucson Daily Citizen. Three male cyclists named Hart, Heaton, and Sheldon got there first, riding twenty miles out to meet Annie, and the entourage picked up another twenty riders as they rode back toward the city. “All the Tucson riders unite in testifying to Miss Londonderry’s ability as a rider,” the Tucson Daily Star reported. But Annie was a little wobbly on her wheel for the ride into town. She had consumed a lot of water and, in the company of some two-dozen men, had no privacy. One of the riders remarked it was a good thing, though, for had she been in her best form they would have been unable to keep up with her.
Annie and her entourage arrived in Tucson at 5:30 P.M. She spent the night at the Orndorff Hotel as a guest of the local Sterling bicycle agent. While most guests who registered at the Orndorff that evening listed their city of residence, she registered with a flourish: “Annie Londonderry, Globe Girdler,” read her entry. Leslie, too, registered at the Orndorff that evening.
Before retiring for the night, Annie, accompanied by Leslie, lectured at Tucson’s opera house, honing her act and sharing stories. “Miss Londonderry, the lady of the bike, gave a talk last evening in the opera house, to a fair sized audience, on her experiences girdling the world around,” stated the Tucson Citizen. Once again, Annie’s ability to charm an audience was clear: She is “an interesting talker and very ladylike in her demeanor…she knew just what to talk about to be entertaining,” said the Daily Star. Leslie demonstrated some “fancy riding” on the stage, but was “considerably hampered for want of room.”
The following afternoon, Annie did a little sightseeing riding out by carriage to visit the San Xavier mission. She also spent the day debating how to proceed to Deming, New Mexico, some two hundred miles east: by bicycle or train. To cover her tracks, quite literally, she told the Daily Star that the wager terms included a five-hundred-mile allowance by rail. She was surely aware that time was becoming of the essence, for Chicago was still a long way off and she now had barely three months to get there to claim success.
Annie decided to start for Deming on her Sterling. She left Tucson, accompanied by several local wheelmen, including Bert Orndorff, on the morning of June 21. Temperatures during the day were in the mid nineties as the party passed through tiny Vail’s Station.
Annie reached Wilcox, Arizona, on June 23. By the time she passed through Lordsburg, New Mexico, later that day, she was on a train. During her stopover in Lordsburg, she received a telegram from the El Paso Daily Herald with a series of questions she answered for an “interview” published the following day.
DH: What make of bicycle did you ride?
AL: A Sterling.
DH: On how many bicycles did you ride during your tour?
AL: One.
DH: The hardships you encountered?
AL: It would take hours to explain.
DH: The most serious difficulties you have overcome?
AL: Held up by highwaymen and shot at by Chinese.
DH: The toughest roads you have found?
AL: The Colorado desert.
DH: The most hospitable people on the route?
AL: Through France.
DH: Where have you received the meanest treatment?
AL: At Yuma, Arizona, after walking 61 miles in the desert was refused a drink of water.
DH: Where did you have the most serious break-downs?
AL: Through the desert country, only by punctures.
As the denizens of El Paso were reading her interview, Annie arrived by rail in Deming, eighty miles west of El Paso. It was June 25, exactly one year after her departure from Boston.
The Deming Headlight published that Annie had now earned $3,000 of the $5,000 she was required to earn under the terms of the wager and that such an amount had been “remitted to an eastern banking institution.” (Again, as with accounts of her mileage, these figures are utterly inconsistent, and trying to reconcile them is impossible.) “The ‘woman-hater’ who wagered his $20,000 against her had better compromise or he must make a good show of losing his dinero,” added the Headlight, confident that Annie would win the wager.
NO TOWN she had visited since Marseilles was to give her a warmer, more enthusiastic welcome than did El Paso. In fact, Annie’s skills as a publicist served her well, for plans for her arrival in El Paso were already underway while she was still in Tucson. On the day she left the Arizona capital, the El Paso Daily Herald reported that she had departed that city and that “[t]he El Paso cyclists are preparing to give her a royal reception here, and Mr. Williams writes her today at Wilcox [Arizona] giving such information as he has at hand about the route and the reception she may expect here.” The paper continued, “Preparations are now being made for a lecture on her trip. The cycling clubs [will] meet her out on the road and escort her to the city. Other entertainments may be prepared and an effort will also be made to get her to stay over here until the Fourth of July festivities.” Clearly, Annie’s arrival in El Paso was a civic event of major proportions and proof that she was now a true celebrity in her own country, or at least in Texas.
Later on the twenty-fifth, Annie arrived at the train depot in Strauss, just over the New Mexico border from El Paso. A party of cyclists met her there including a reporter for the El Paso Daily Herald. A wonderfully colorful account of the episode appeared in the paper the following day:
Say reader, did you ever take a spin up the S.P. [Southern Pacific] road to Strauss? If you didn’t, then you should try it. The trip as far as the smelter is delightful and the bike will carry you nicely, but after passing the bridge you will have to carry the bike. The railroad company makes the distance from El Paso to Strauss at 14 miles. Well, it may be fourteen miles if you ride in a Pullman, but it is certainly forty-one miles if you walk through sand and carry your bike, at least the writer thinks so and Jim Williams says so, and Jim don’t talk about distances through his hat either. Miss Londonderry also agrees with Jim and she is a nice little lady from Boston who has been around the globe and knows something about distances—especially when it comes to desert country like that lying between the Rio Grande and Strauss. The scenery along the route is ‘jist’ beautiful, the sand dounces [dunes] rise to the hight [sic] of young mountains and there is nothing else to be seen or heard in the land except the occasional hiss of the rattlesnake….
Yesterday evening at 6 o’clock a telegram was received at the HERALD office saying that Miss Londonderry was at Strauss waiting for an escort into town. There was no time to hunt up an escort so the reporter notified Jim Williams and then mounted his bike and took the S.P. track to the smelter…Arriving at Strauss the reporter found that Jim Williams, Joe Mollinary, Randolph Terry and Herbert Bishop had passed him while at the smelter and had arrived at Strauss a few minutes in advance and were engaged in conversation with Miss Londonderry. Introduction followed and soon conversation about her trip around the globe became general. Afterwards a light lunch was spread and then all being tired out they retired for the night. Miss Londonderry being provided with a room and the balance finding peaceful slumber on the floor of the station house.
After an early start the party tramped back to Rogers station where coffee was served and several bicyclists were in waiting. Just this side of the bridge quite a number of bicyclists joined the party and in a few minutes they were rolling through the streets of El Paso and to the Vendome, where quarters had already been engaged, the party stopped and Miss Londonderry was shown to her room where her trunks and a large stack of letters awaited her. [Annie had trunks that she shipped ahead from point to point, a common practice for travelers of the era.]
In El Paso, a reporter for the Herald, possibly the same one who had ridden out to meet her, called on Annie at the Vendome and was obviously charmed. “She is a bright, vivacious woman, a good talker, and her all-round the world experiences will prove a Godsend to her for the ‘rest of her born days,’” he wrote admiringly. “Miss Londonderry says that had she known really how to ride a wheel at the time of starting out, she never would have undertaken the tour.”
Always eager to entertain and to appear larger than life, Annie told of a grueling ride across the “Hindustan Peninsular,” a ride she described as “a terrible experience, especially because of insects. From Calcutta, Miss Londonderry passed through Siberia and China, and saw the practical workings of the Russian system of treating political prisoners. She says the way the poor women were treated at the mines was simply horrible.” Annie saw nothing of the sort, of course, but she never let the facts get in the way of a good story. She again related the story of the Yuma woman who refused her a drink. “The newspapers there got after the woman with hammer and tongs,” reported the Herald, “which had some effect on her calcareous heart; she explained by saying she did not know who the rider was.” Annie also said she had hopped a train the day before arriving in El Paso, only to be “put off…because she did not have eight cents to spare which would have made up the fare.”
It was to the reporter from the Herald that Annie claimed the wager stipulated that she “should not contract matrimony” during her trip. Why did she say this? Perhaps she needed a gracious way to fend off the attentions of this very journalist without alerting anyone to the fact that she was a married woman, a fact that, even in wild El Paso, might have been looked upon with some scorn. “The necessity of this [condition of the wager] is patent, from the fact that she has received nearly 200 offers of marriage and written refusals to 147 of them…[A]ny horrid man who says she is not good looking ought to be taken out back of a cow shed and knocked in the head with an axe,” wrote the reporter, obviously smitten. She may have appeared masculine to the French, but on the Western frontier men found Annie very attractive indeed. And though El Paso was surely no haven for a feminist, the feisty, independent frontier souls who came west to settle in places like El Paso had to admire Annie’s free-spirited individuality and courage. In this respect, the lady from Boston was a lot like them.
Even the hotel extended a warm welcome to its famous guest. “The Vendome Hotel has made a special rate for the visitor which is allowable [under the terms of her wager], and efforts are being made to have her remain in town until after the fourth,” reported the Herald. “As a New Hampshire granger would say, she is a woman of considerable many parts; in fact, all fired-up smart, and with her newspaper spirit and git up and git, she ought to greatly interest an audience.”
Annie was, indeed, sure to find a receptive audience for her wild stories in a town as rough and ready as El Paso. In 1895, this was a raucous frontier town of about ten thousand, often called the “Sin City” because it was a magnet for outlaws, outcasts, and other desperados. Given its wild nature, a report that a special permit had to be coaxed from El Paso’s “horrified city fathers” to allow Annie to wear bloomers in public seems apocryphal. Its details lack the specificity to tell us whether she had returned to actual bloomers, or was instead wearing her male riding attire.
She was also the target of some good-natured fun as she arrived in El Paso. One prominent citizen, H. Godwin Mitchell, told her it was “against the laws of Texas for anyone to enter the state with a six shooter of less caliber than a 44” and that she “would be arrested if she entered the city limits in bloomer costume.” It was as if Annie was just one of the guys.
NO NEWSPAPER made more of a fuss over Annie during her entire trip than did the El Paso Daily Herald. Almost every day during her visit, small items about her doings were published and, on some days, additional lengthy features about her travels appeared, too. Annie, in turn, obliged the paper with marvelously detailed tall tales of tiger hunts in India and other adventures:
“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.