Pedal and Path: Across the Continent Awheel and Afoot

By George B. Thayer188728 chapters52 images

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Contents

• Preface. (opens in a new tab)

  Thayer recalls how short recreational rides out of Hartford grew into New England tours of hundreds of miles, until he arranged with the Hartford Evening Post to file letters on a bicycle trip to California; the preface is signed 'G. B. T.'
• Chapter I. Westward Ho! The Beginning of a Seven Months' Wheeling Tour across the Continent. (opens in a new tab)

  Thayer sets out from Hartford, Connecticut on a forty-six-inch Expert Columbia bicycle bound eventually for San Francisco and back, listing his sparse kit (blue cap, brown blouse, gossamer rain suit, no firearm) and describing the first day's ride through New Haven and Port Chester toward Tarrytown, New York.
• Chapter II. Through the Highlands of the Hudson River. (opens in a new tab)

  Near Tarrytown he descends 360 feet into Shaft No. 11 of the new Croton Aqueduct works in an ore car, then rides on through Peekskill (meeting Chief Consul E. F. Hall), past the captured Mexican cannon at West Point, and into Poughkeepsie, where a policeman escorts him to the Buckeye Bicycle shop amid a crowd of onlookers.
• Chapter III. Up the Catskills and along the Erie Canal. (opens in a new tab)

  Climbs the new mountain road up Kaaterskill Clove to the Catskill Mountain House and crawls into an ice-filled amphitheatre cave where a cracking shelf of ice nearly drops him into the pool below, then rides the rutted, dangerous Erie Canal tow-path toward Buffalo, judging fifty-six miles of common road far easier than the canal path had been.
• Chapter IV. At Niagara and along Lake Erie. (opens in a new tab)

  Visits the trout hatchery at Mumford, New York and the Niagara Falls whirlpool and cantilever bridge, then makes the 200 miles from Buffalo to Cleveland along Lake Erie in three days, taking a hard fall on clay ruts near Ashtabula that knocks him nearly senseless and passing the site of the notorious Ashtabula railroad bridge disaster.
• Chapter V. Through Ohio and Indiana. (opens in a new tab)

  Visits James Garfield's old home at Mentor, Ohio and his guarded tomb at Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery, tours the Ohio statehouse at Columbus and the Soldiers' Home near Dayton, then rides the long macadamized turnpike to Indianapolis, spending an unsettling night at a farmhouse sheltering a violent, mute lunatic in a locked room.
• Chapter VI. At Chicago. (opens in a new tab)

  A broken rear tire just over the Indiana line is patched at Richmond with a wheelman's cast-off tire; tours the still-unfinished Indiana statehouse at Indianapolis, where a runaway horse wrecks a nearby buggy, before reaching Chicago and describing the smoke-blackened Palmer House and the Board of Trade Building.
• Chapter VII. Across the Mississippi. (opens in a new tab)

  Riding through Iowa, a painful outbreak of saddle boils finally forces Thayer to give up riding and board a freight train, to the sympathy of a fellow passenger who assumes he has been badly injured rather than merely saddle-sore.
• Chapter VIII. Across the Missouri. (opens in a new tab)

  Reflects on the Western dread of cyclones and the storm cellars dug beneath nearly every house, drawing on his stay in Grinnell, Iowa among survivors still recovering from the recent tornado that had killed and maimed residents and flattened two solidly built college buildings.
• Chapter IX. At the Base of the Rockies. (opens in a new tab)

  Describes booming Omaha's rivalry with Council Bluffs over the Union Pacific Railroad's Missouri River bridge and terminus, then takes an overnight train from Omaha across the plains to Denver, sharing a coach with a loudly snoring passenger accused by another rider of having 'the nightmare like a horse.'
• Chapter X. On Pike's Peak. (opens in a new tab)

  Climbs Pike's Peak on foot with companion J. A. Hasley through a blinding snowstorm above timber line, reaching the summit's signal station where Government observers Ramsay and Potter take them in, and picking wildflowers from beneath the snow at 14,147 feet.
• Chapter XI. Back to Denver. (opens in a new tab)

  Watches sunrise from the summit of Pike's Peak with signal officer John P. Ramsay, tumbles rocks down the mountainside with fellow guests, and that night sees a violent, silent thunderstorm lighting up clouds far out over the plains below.
• Chapter XII. Across the Plains. (opens in a new tab)

  Leaves Denver on June 24th for Longmont and Boulder, Colorado, visits an ore-sampling works where gold and silver are assayed by fire and nitric acid, then rides and walks nine miles up Boulder Canon to the old mining camp of Salina and the First National Mine.
• Chapter XIII. Among the Mormons. (opens in a new tab)

  Crosses the waterless Wyoming plains by freight train from Rawlins with the help of wheelman James Deitrick and celebrates the Fourth of July at Green River, then in Salt Lake City befriends the local bicycle club, all of whose members are Mormon, discusses polygamy with a club member and the Salt Lake Tribune's editor, floats in the Great Salt Lake, and tours the Tabernacle and the still-unfinished Temple.
• Chapter XIV. At the Big Trees. (opens in a new tab)

  Salt Lake City banker F. G. Brooks Sr. vouches for Thayer's unfamiliar drafts to secure $150 in gold; after a bloody header near the Utah Central Depot, he crosses the Wasatch Mountains via Ogden to Sacramento and on to the Calaveras Big Trees, riding his bicycle through the hollow trunk of the fallen sequoia known as the 'Father of the Forest.'
• Chapter XV. In the Yosemite Valley. (opens in a new tab)

  Companion Hasley turns back for San Francisco after losing his purse near the Big Trees, leaving Thayer to ride on alone across the brutally hot canyons of the Stanislaus and Tuolumne Rivers before catching his first overwhelming sight of Yosemite Valley from the zigzag road above it.
• Chapter XVI. On the Shores of the Pacific. (opens in a new tab)

  Coasts out of Yosemite Valley, breaks a wheel felloe on an embedded nail forty-five miles from any railroad and repairs it with wire and hoop iron, then crosses the windmill-irrigated wheat farms of the Sacramento Valley before reaching San Francisco, where at the Cliff House he empties a bottle of Atlantic Ocean water carried from Nahant, Massachusetts into the Pacific.
• Chapter XVII. With the Veterans. (opens in a new tab)

  Rides San Francisco's cable-car hills, the Presidio, and the Cliff House with its sea-lion rocks and Adolph Sutro's gardens, then joins the crowds for the Grand Army of the Republic's national encampment, disappointed that the Connecticut veterans' delegation marched in the parade without its colors, which arrived an hour late.
• Chapter XVIII. Monterey and the Geysers. (opens in a new tab)

  Rides through Napa Valley to Calistoga toward the Geysers and nearly collides on a blind mountain curve with Charlie Foss's six-horse stage on the same route once driven by his celebrated father, Clark Foss, who had once carried Horace Greeley.
• Chapter XIX. Out on the Pacific. (opens in a new tab)

  Leaves San Francisco aboard the steamship Columbia bound for Portland, reflecting on the wheelmen friends he made there, including Mr. Cook and Chief Consul Welch, and on the many New England travelers crowding the encampment-week steamer.
• Chapter XX. At Shoshone Falls. (opens in a new tab)

  Leaves the train before dawn to ride twenty-five waterless miles across Idaho's ancient lava beds to Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, crosses to the falls in a leaky rowboat with broken oarlocks, and judges them only a little inferior to Niagara.
• Chapter XXI. In the Yellowstone Park. (opens in a new tab)

  Rides from Beaver Canon toward Yellowstone, repeatedly fording icy branches of the Snake River that soak his clothes while a stagecoach of lady passengers waits behind, and crosses the Continental Divide on a pine-forest road en route to Fire Hole.
• Chapter XXII. Through the Black Canon and the Royal Gorge. (opens in a new tab)

  Rides the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad's open observation car through the Black Canon of the Gunnison River and over Marshall Pass, then through the Royal Gorge, where the track is suspended over the river on braces bolted into the rock walls.
• Chapter XXIII. A Visit to Prudence Crandall. (opens in a new tab)

  Takes the train from Denver to Emporia, Kansas and rides south to Elk Falls to visit the elderly abolitionist schoolteacher Prudence Crandall Philleo, who receives him warmly with apple pie and ginger snaps and shows him a collection of photographs she wants framed together.
• Chapter XXIV. The Triennial Conclave at St. Louis. (opens in a new tab)

  Lodges in St. Louis with old Ellington, Connecticut schoolmate A. W. Sumner during the Knights Templar triennial conclave, and describes the chaotic Masonic Charity Concert at the fairgrounds, where bandmaster Gilmore drills a thousand musicians, fifty anvils, and cannon into a deafening 'Anvil Chorus.'
• Chapter XXV. The Wheelmen's Illuminated Parade. (opens in a new tab)

  Joins some two hundred riders in St. Louis's wheelmen's illuminated parade on the evening of October 1st, describing costumed cyclists dressed as a giant frog, a gorilla, a devil, and Cupid, and machines strung with hundreds of Chinese lanterns down torch-lit Pine Street.
• Chapter XXVI. Through Kentucky. (opens in a new tab)

  Takes the train from St. Louis to Louisville rather than recross Illinois's clay roads, then rides the macadamized Shelbyville pike through Kentucky bluegrass country, meeting hostility to the bicycle from spooked saddle-horses and a drunken man who threatens him with a rawhide whip after his horse bolts from a saloon hitching post.
• Chapter XXVII. Down the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, and Home again. (opens in a new tab)

  Rides the smooth towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal from Cumberland, Maryland, visits Antietam's Burnside Bridge and National Cemetery and John Brown's former prison at Harper's Ferry, then returns home to Hartford, Connecticut by train from Baltimore, closing with mileage and cost totals for the full 11,000-mile, seven-month trip.