Walter is considered an icon to some of his riding friends because he rode across the country, but we consider him a legend because he’s still an important part of his bike community, leading rides in his mid-eighties.

Bikecentennial: Summer of 1976

How old were you when you did Bikecentennial?

I was 40 years old and had been working for IBM in Philadelphia for 10 years. I had been biking as an adult for about four years.

What inspired you to do Bikecentennial?

I had a friend who, when he was in his teens, took the train to Montreal and rode his bike back to Philadelphia. I thought that was the most marvelous thing and wished that I could do the same. Years later, I read an article about Bikecentennial in Bicycling Magazine. Here was my opportunity to take an extended bike tour. The article said the government would match grants to help fund the planning of the route. I sent in $20 or $25. Later, they asked for more money, so I sent more. The year before Bikecentennial, I asked my manager at IBM if I could take eight weeks vacation to do the ride. He agreed and wrote a letter saying he approved my time off, which was lucky because I didn’t have the same manager in 1976 and my new manager probably would not have let me take that much time off.

I took the Leadership Training course in November of 1975 in Bowmansville, Pennsylvania. Dan Burden was there for at least part of it. I remember it was during Thanksgiving week, and on Thanksgiving Day we had turkey roasted in the fireplace at the Brickerville hostel. I met Elaine Becker and her now husband, Bill Schroder, also a B76 leader, during that Leadership Training course. I am still in touch with them today and have done a lot of riding with them over the years. After the Thanksgiving week training, I got a phone call or letter saying that I could be an assistant leader for a Bikecentennial group.

Before Bikecentennial, I had ridden from Philadelphia to Atlantic City, about 65 miles, and to Cape May, NJ, a bit over 100 miles and back on a Saturday and Sunday. I had also done some other 100-mile club rides and one 150 mile ride but nothing longer. I had also traveled to Europe, including France, Germany, and Italy, and had been to Atlanta, Dallas, Miami, and Montreal, but did not bike in any of those places.

Tell me about your group and your trip.

I only had eight weeks off from work, so I signed up for a fast west-to-east Bike Inn Group. We started from Reedsport, OR on May 25. We alternated riding a single day’s mileage with doing double day mileage in one day in order to get across the country in eight weeks instead of the normally scheduled twelve weeks. The planner did not consider the daily mileage on each day and as a result, one day we did only 35 miles and the next 140 miles.

There were 13 people in our group, all men, including three men in their fifties and Arne, a 63-year-old Swede who was living in New Jersey. Arne was as dependable a rider as anyone. The worst rider was a 20-year-old. He didn’t have the strength to ride the mountains and started holding the rest of the group back. The rule was that one of the leaders had to be at the rear of the group, so John, the other leader, an electrician from California, said he would take care of the 20-year-old rider. After that, I essentially became the leader of the others. The group started doing their own thing in twos or threes, but they kept me aware of what they were doing each day.

We stayed in church basements, school gymnasiums, and small hotels along the way. We stayed in tipis in Idaho, small tents at Quake Lake, and a lean-to in Kentucky, but the rest were indoor accommodations. In Sinclair, Wyoming, in mid-June we stayed at a hotel that had been closed. They turned the heat on for us because it had snowed all day. I was quite frightened coming off that mountain into town because the snow would clog up in your brake blocks, making it very hard to brake. By the time we reached the Bike Inn, there were nearly two inches of snow on the ground.

On most days we ate five meals: a large breakfast, a mid-morning snack like a Danish or a sticky bun and coffee, a big lunch, an afternoon snack, often with ice cream, and dinner. We often negotiated our meals along the way. A restaurant in Oregon told us seconds on their salad bar were free. I told them, “Don’t tell the cyclists that,” knowing how hungry we were. But the owner insisted that it was their policy. The guys ate all of the salad at the salad bar and the restaurant had to buy more food for their regular customers. After that, I heard that the restaurant changed its policy for the other cyclists and started charging for seconds on the salad bar.

The third day into our trip, Marshall from South Carolina turned 58. We were near Eugene, OR. It was cold and it rained all day. We rode 10 miles on our way to reach a restaurant for breakfast and when we got there, it was closed. The next restaurant was 15 miles farther and when we got there, they were no longer serving breakfast and we would have to wait at least an hour for lunch. The owner had pity and phoned someone to bring food. She cooked eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee and only charged us $2 each. She even brought a cupcake for Marshall for his birthday.

An independent rider, Theresa Whalen Leland, rode with us for a week from Missoula, Montana to Lander, Wyoming, where she left us to visit a friend. Theresa and I rode together much of that week. After I finished the route and was back in Philadelphia, Theresa sent me postcards and visited my family in Philadelphia in the fall of 1976 after she finished Bikecentennial. She had taken extra time off from her teaching job in the fall to tour the east coast. We still exchange Christmas cards.

Theresa was in the bicycle wheel photograph taken by Dan Burden. You can recognize Theresa because she is the one with the mirror on her glasses. I made that mirror for Theresa. We had been riding in Jackson Hole and we got caught in a thunderstorm. It was pouring rain, lightning and thundering. I was riding ahead of Theresa and cars were passing us every 15 to 30 seconds. At some point, I realized there were no cars coming by and Theresa wasn’t behind me anymore. Soon, I could see Theresa creeping down the road with about 20 cars behind her. I told her to get off the road so the cars could pass. She said she couldn’t see anything because her glasses were fogged up and that before she was riding close enough to me that she could use me as a guide to know where to ride. I rode slower so she could follow me the rest of way.

Aside from Theresa, I was probably closest to Arne. One day, in Kansas, Arne left 20 minutes before me after challenging me to beat him to our next Bike Inn. I knew I was a faster rider than Arne, but it took me more than four hours to catch him. He was sitting in front of a grocery eating a large sandwich. He told me I could buy a large roll, meat, cheese, and the grocer would add mustard and mayo and make a sandwich like he had. When I went into the store, he took off on his bike. I ate part of my sandwich and got back on my bike. An hour later, I caught up to Arne again and passed him. Later, I stopped at a post office to get my postal passport stamped. (A Postal passport was a booklet where you could get postmarks to show when you had been to that town. I was trying to get a stamp each day.) While I was in the Post Office, Arne passed me again and I had to chase him. Before we got into the town where we were staying, I got to a railroad crossing just before the crossing gates went down. Arne was stuck behind a long freight train. Several minutes later, Arne rode in and said to Michael, the Canadian with our group, that he was racing me and didn’t beat me but he made me sweat. He certainly did. It gave me a lot of respect for what I then considered “old”. And it gave me incentive to keep riding, being 17 years older than Arne was then.

Out of our group, I also spent a lot time with Terry, who was head of manufacturing at Utility Trailer Corporation in California. Terry and I had a lot of discussions about equal rights.

I only met one other black rider who was riding coast to coast. Someone from Bikecentennial called me after the ride to ask why I thought there were so few black cyclists. I told them economics is probably one reason. If you have a job, how can you afford to take two months off? I was able to do it because my manager gave me permission and I reached my teaching quota at IBM, even though I took so much time off, by doubling up on courses before and after my trip.

I was apprehensive about being a black man in the plains and having to deal with prejudice and racism. But I had a pragmatic feel about it. I thought, if I’m going to die, I’m going to die doing what I enjoy. During Bikecentennial, there were people who knew me just because I was black. Somewhere in Kansas, my tire got a flat. I was sitting on the road repairing the tire and a woman going west stopped and asked, “Do you need any help, Walt?” I thought, “How does she know my name?” It was a little bit scary to have someone in the middle of nowhere call you by name. In town that evening, a man joined us at dinner. I asked how the woman might know my name. Apparently, days earlier, someone in town came to check us out. They had heard about us and were afraid we were like a motorcycle gang. He told everyone in the small town, “There is this black guy named Walt who seems to be running the show and things seem to be going well.” I had been wearing a bright red warm-up suit with my name monogrammed on it above a Philadelphia patch. Some of the bikers called me Red Rider because of that suit.

Another time, Theresa and I were the first of our group who rode into Crowheart, Wyoming, which had just a grocery/post office/luncheonette, and a car repair shop. Theresa and I walked into the grocery store and the lady working there asked, “Where did you guys come from?” I had stopped shaving and had a scraggly beard. I probably looked a bit threatening. We told her we rode in on our bikes. She said she hadn’t heard any bikes and we said, “Bicycles don’t make any noise.” She replied, “Oh, bicycles! You are those bicyclists who are supposed to come through.” Just then, the car repair station guy came running in and asked, “What’s the matter?” She had alerted him because she thought we had sneaked up on her to rob the store. She realized her mistake and was very nice to us after that. She served us at the restaurant and when she was done, she took off her apron and helped us at the post office, too. Fortunately, I encountered no overt racism.

One of the things we heard was that we should watch out for the bears in Yellowstone. Bears are scary when you are on a bicycle. But our group never saw any bears until we got to the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia. There’s a four-mile climb up to the Parkway and we heard that it’s hard to get up the entire hill without stopping. About half way up, I saw a little bear — only about 18-20 inches tall. I kept going, but John stopped. I was intent on climbing those four miles without stopping. When John got to the top he asked me where I thought the bear’s mother was and I got the shakes realizing what could have happened if I had been between the cub and its mother. During the trip, we saw lots of elk, moose, deer, and even a herd of cattle. We saw eagles, snakes, and everything in between. The only bear I ever saw was that little cub in Virginia.

I was proud of our group of riders. Despite a few minor scrapes and repairable damage to a few bikes or other pieces of equipment, all 13 of us made it to the end of the trip.

How are you different because of your trip across the TransAmerica Trail?

The trip made me realize how little we really need. Two months with everything I needed on the bike made me realize that people, including me, have so much unnecessary stuff. All we really need is enough food, a warm and dry place to sleep, enough clothing to survive, something to interest your mind, and a few friends. Despite all the creature comforts and “luxuries” that surround me, what really makes my day, other than the necessities, are something new to learn or experience and friends. I think I may have surmised some of that before the two months on the bike, but the bike trip locked it in.

I got to see how vast and varied this country is. You could be in snow in mountains in June, like we were in Wyoming, and the next week it could be 100 degrees in the plains where it was the same scenery all day, nothing but wheat fields, oil pumps and cows. The towns were all about 40 miles apart and that was it. I had never ridden on a dirt road until we rode into a ghost town on a dirt or gravel road in Montana. I had never seen mountains like the ones in the West. It was enlightening to see what the country looked like. I became more aware and educated about how varied this country is.

I also had an experience I will never forget. And I have become an icon to some friends I ride with because they will tell people I rode across the country.

Which bike trips have you done since then and what’s still on your bucket list?

I haven’t gone on an extended tour since Bikecentennial. I’m just glad to be still riding. In my bicycle club of about a thousand members, I think I am the oldest active rider, although by less than a year. My longest ride this year was about 50 miles from home to Valley Forge National Park and back. It’s a pretty flat route, mostly on bike trails with no major hills. And I did it slowly so I wouldn’t burn out, rarely exceeding 11 mph. I led an 80K ride for my 80th birthday, after having led a 70 mile ride for my 70th. Friends are asking what I will do for my 90th. I have promised 90 furlongs. That’s only 11.25 miles. I am planning to do it. Wish me luck! 

This blog post was originally published March 2016. It has been updated with new information from Walter Johnson in February 2023.

The post Walter Johnson: One of A Few Black Cyclists to Ride Bikecentennial 1976 appeared first on Adventure Cycling Association.

Pittsburgh, July 1894. Anna Lenz was the first to sense that something had gone terribly wrong. She had never wanted Frank, her only child, to embark on a round-the-world journey by bicycle in the first place — no matter how much fame or glory that feat might bring him. She feared for his life. She knew how reckless and stubborn he could be in the face of danger, whether introduced by nature or ill will.

Born in Pittsburgh to poor German immigrants shortly after the close of the Civil War, young Frank Lenz grew up with his doting mother and tyrannical stepfather William. The bright and energetic lad was of slight stature, with sandy blond hair and piercing blue eyes. He came of age in the 1880s, when the high wheel bicycle was king of the (unpaved) road, and a familiar — if not always welcome — sight in the Smoky City (so named on account of its bustling industries).

After acquiring accounting skills, including impeccable penmanship, Lenz landed a job at a brass manufacturer and saved up enough money to buy a Columbia roadster with a 56-inch wheel. He joined the Allegheny Cyclers to enjoy all the benefits of the clubhouse. In June 1887, he made his first century ride to Newcastle and back, returning home at midnight. Two months later, he went on his first long-distance tour, to New York City and back.

That fall, Lenz began to dabble in racing on the track and road. His competitive career would culminate a year later, when he narrowly lost a grueling 100-mile road race from Erie to Buffalo. Although he now enjoyed a national reputation, Lenz realized that at five feet, seven inches, he would always be at a disadvantage when competing against long-legged champions mounted on wheels five feet in diameter. He decided to focus instead on combining two passions: cycle touring and photography.  

That was no easy task prior to the introduction of the compact Kodak film camera, underscored by a local paper. “Lenz created quite a sensation last Sunday, when he appeared out Forbes Street with a big camera and tripod strapped to his back. The outfit makes a considerable load, but Lenz thinks he is equal to the task.”

In the summer of 1889, Lenz made another trip to New York City and back — this time toting his Blair camera. According to a local paper, in three weeks he took about 150 glass plate exposures of “street scenes, public buildings, bridges, canal streams — anything that looked at all inviting.” After every dozen photos, Lenz mailed the exposed plates home and reloaded his holder with a dozen more fresh plates. Of course, Lenz created a spectacle in his own right, and the locals “mistook him for a peddler, drummer, and quack doctor.”

Lenz soon found an ideal riding partner and soul mate in Charlie Petticord. Tall and thin, he had the stamina to keep up with Lenz and he didn’t mind stopping frequently for photo ops.  In the summer of 1890, the pair set out from Pittsburgh to Saint Louis, along the famous National Road. The following August, they embarked on an even longer trip to New Orleans. The League of American Wheelmen, the national organization to which they belonged, took note of their feats.

As the year 1892 dawned, Lenz sensed that he had come to a crossroad in life. He was 25 years old, an age when most of his friends had already given up cycling, gotten married, and settled down. His mother and his seamstress girlfriend, Annie R. Leech, wanted him to do just that. But Lenz longed to make one last grand cycling adventure with Charlie.

Lenz had long admired Thomas Stevens, an Englishman who had made a celebrated world tour on his ordinary in the mid-1880s, devouring Stevens’s monthly travel logs published in Outing magazine. He had also heard of Allen and Sachtleben, two Americans who had left London in the fall of 1890 on safeties and were now reported to have reached Asia. Lenz was confident that he and Charlie could outdo the derring-do of both parties.

But Lenz also realized that if he wanted sponsorship, he would have to switch his allegiance to the new safety. He, like most experienced riders, had initially dismissed the diminutive upstart as too low, too slow, and too cumbersome. But now it was the quaint ordinary that had become an object of ridicule.

Lenz secured the support of J. H. Worman, the editor of Outing, and of A. H. Overman, the maker of Victor Cycles, for a world tour with bicycle and camera. Lenz stressed that he would not seek to break any speed records. Rather, his mission would serve to educate the public — largely new to the sport — about the joys and benefits of cycling.

Even when Petticord begged off at the last minute, citing a job promotion, Lenz was determined to go through with his plan. To add some novelty to his tour, Lenz boldly chose to travel on a Victor equipped with newly introduced pneumatic tires. But rather than use the latest compact Kodak film camera, as Allen and Sachtleben were doing, he insisted on bringing his usual gear to get optimal photographs.

On May 15, 1892, Lenz made his unofficial departure from Pittsburgh. He estimated his total load at 240 pounds, comprised of his camera at 15, other gear (which presumably included his revolver) at 25, his bicycle at 57, and himself at 145. He then rode to New York City, where Outing was based. The magazine arranged for a grand send-off down Broadway, and thousands on the street and leaning from windows cheered on the aspiring “globe girdler.”

The following two years were crammed full of adventures, most of them chronicled in Outing. He crossed the U.S. from east to west, highlighted by a visit to Yellowstone. He then spent a month cycling through scenic Japan, his first exposure to a foreign culture. Then came forbidding China, what he deemed the most challenging part of his journey. After braving the monsoons of Burma, he crossed friendly India and arid Belluchistan (Pakistan) before finally reaching exotic Persia (Iran).

In late April 1894, Lenz arrived in Tabriz, where he was received by the crown prince at his palace. The cyclist left that Persian city after a week, by all accounts healthy in body and spirit, and confident that the worst travails were behind him. Lenz’s plan was to make the 1,100-mile trek to Constantinople (Istanbul) via Erzurum, Turkey, before crossing Europe for the final stretch, including a visit with relatives in Germany. He longed to be home as soon as possible, he wrote Charlie.

Lenz was expected to arrive in Erzurum in about 10 days, at which point he planned to send Outing another packet of reports. But June came and went, and the magazine still had not received anything from Lenz since Tabriz. Then in July came an ominous cable from Thomas Cook & Sons notifying Mrs. Lenz that her son’s trunk and mail were still awaiting pickup in Constantinople.

Anna was terrified. She was keeping a rough track of her son’s progress, not from the Outing magazine series (which lagged about six months behind real time) but from the regular letters that Frank had promised to write her (only about a month behind). She knew that he had made it to Tabriz, even as the public was speculating that Lenz had perished in the sands of present-day Pakistan. But she had not heard anything more from him in two months.

Anna turned to her brother-in-law Fred Lenz, who wrote the Outing editor asking for an update on Lenz’s fate. Worman acknowledged that he too had not heard from Frank since he had reached Tabriz, but he stressed that there was nothing to worry about. After all, Lenz had gone silent a few times before only to reemerge in fine form. He continued to publish Lenz’s accounts without expressing any concern for his well-being.

Privately, however, the editor knew something was wrong. He discretely dashed off letters to the American ministers in Persia and Turkey to inquire whether they had any news of Lenz — knowing that it might take two months for a reply (unless the recipients paid for an expensive cablegram). Lenz’s friends, meanwhile, began to meet regularly to discuss what to do. T. J. Langhans wrote and cabled various missionaries in Persia and Turkey to establish Lenz’s last known whereabouts.

Lenz had evidently disappeared somewhere along the 365-mile stretch between Tabriz and Erzurum, skirting the western border of present-day Armenia. The Persian portion — the first third of that journey — was particularly rugged, filled with narrow mountain passes. Various rivers along the way were at their peak levels that time of year. The locals, especially the nomadic Kurds, were known to rob vulnerable travelers.

The fear that something had happened to Lenz was soon compounded by sensational reports in the western press of Armenian massacres taking place near the Turkish portion of Lenz’s route. Conceivably, Lenz could have been an unintended casualty of that violence, or perhaps he had been intentionally killed simply because he was a westerner. Alternatively, if he was still alive, perhaps he had been temporarily incapacitated, gone into hiding, or kidnapped.

Increasingly desperate, Anna turned to another relative, attorney John J. Purinton of East Liverpool, Ohio. That fall, frustrated by Worman’s lack of action, he wrote the secretary of state to demand an investigation into Lenz’s disappearance. He also alerted the local papers that Lenz was missing, and soon the disturbing news was picked up by papers across the country.

As the weeks went by without news from Lenz or his presumed captors, any hope that he was still alive faded. True, some skeptics suggested that Worman and Lenz were colluding in an elaborate publicity stunt designed to sell more magazines. But Petticord immediately shot down that preposterous notion. “Oh, tut tut nonsense. Frank would never enter into such a scheme. He knows such silence would almost kill his mother. No amount of money could hire him to hide himself.”

Even the idea that Lenz was temporarily waylaid and unable to communicate with the outside world seemed increasingly unlikely. The American missionary W. S. Vanneman in Salmas, Persia, who had seen Lenz a few days after the wheelman had left Tabriz, insisted, “Had he been taken sick in a village, he would have had no difficulty in getting word to someone to come to his help.”

That left only one faint hope that Lenz was still alive: a kidnapping. Worman convinced himself that this was the most likely scenario, and he braced himself for a belated communiqué from Lenz’s captors. Meanwhile, he continued to assure everyone that all would turn out well. He resisted growing calls from Lenz’s friends to send a search party, assuring them that he had already asked the Constantinople office of Thomas Cook & Sons to send native guides to track down Lenz’s last known whereabouts. (As it turned out, the company was unable to secure Turkish permission to send anyone to that troubled region.)

By early 1895, it was clear that the famous wheelman was dead. But where were his remains? They would be needed to give Lenz a proper Christian burial back in Pittsburgh so that his inconsolable mother would have at least some sense of closure. And they would also provide the proof of death necessary for her to collect on the $3,000 life insurance policy that Frank had discretely purchased just before his departure.

Of course, the other agonizing question was this: how did Lenz die? Was it an accidental death, or was he the victim of foul play? If so, the murderer(s) must be identified and prosecuted, and the host country (Persia or Turkey) must be forced to pay an indemnity to Mrs. Lenz.

“There can hardly be any question that [Lenz] perished, in one of two ways,” Vanneman offered, “either he was drowned in crossing a river, or fell a victim to Kurdish violence. Which of these two is the more probable depends upon what point he is known to have reached.” By the missionary’s reckoning, if Lenz had gotten past Karakalissa, Turkey, he must have been killed, since there were no major streams to cross between that point and Erzurum.

A Canadian missionary in Erzurum, William Nesbitt Chambers, whose help had been enlisted as well, wrote that he had heard reliable reports that Lenz reached Diyaden, Turkey, on May 7, 1894. Chambers soon got another report that Lenz spent the night of May 9 in a farmhouse in Chilkani (today Güvence), 50 miles west of Diyaden. Since that town was past Karakalissa, it now seemed clear that Lenz had been killed. Indeed, according to Chambers’s source, the villagers heard rumors to that effect shortly after Lenz’s visit.

Robert W. Graves, the British consul in Erzurum, who was also investigating the Lenz matter, gave this somber conclusion: “Your relative must have been robbed and made away with somewhere in the dangerous district of Bayazid or Alashgerd. It will be difficult now to clear up the mystery of his disappearance.”

Lenz’s last approximate location now seemed reasonably clear, and the next obvious step was to send an investigator to that area to recover Lenz’s remains and identify his murderer(s). Worman, under mounting pressure, announced in January 1895 that he would send Robert Bruce, his former editorial assistant, to Turkey. Bruce had accompanied Lenz halfway across the U.S., so he was well familiar with the victim. Following resolution of the Lenz matter, Bruce planned to symbolically complete Lenz’s journey from Tehran on bicycle, writing his own reports for Outing.

Lenz’s friends, however, having lost all faith in Worman, were planning to send an investigator of their own: the famous cyclist William L. Sachtleben, who had cycled through that very area three years earlier on his own world tour with Thomas Allen, Jr. Not wishing to see two independent investigations, Worman sought out Sachtleben, and after the two agreed to terms, he dismissed Bruce. Now it would fall to Sachtleben to determine Lenz’s fate and to finish his journey for Outing.

Worman, however, continued to stall, perhaps still half hoping that he might finally get a ransom demand. He insisted that it would be pointless for Sachtleben to go to that region until the winter snow had fully melted, though the wheelman was impatient to get started. Meanwhile, a report surfaced in Europe that Lenz had been ambushed in the Deli Baba pass, some 25 miles farther to the west than Chambers had traced him. Sachtleben knew that notorious wild mountain gorge well. “Allen and I were warned not to take this route, but we had no choice. And Lenz’s position would be more dangerous than ours. We could watch all sides, while he could face only one way.”

Finally, in late February, Worman gave Sachtleben the green light to make his way to Constantinople. Three weeks later, after brief stops in Paris and Vienna, Sachtleben finally reached the Turkish capital aboard the celebrated Orient Express. His first order of business was to meet with the American minister to Turkey, Alexander W. Terrell, a career politician from Texas, to secure permission from the Turkish government for passage to Erzurum and points farther east.

Terrell had little sympathy for either Lenz or Sachtleben, both of whom he regarded as foolhardy. He assured Sachtleben that Turkish authorities had already looked into the Lenz matter before giving it up as “unfathomable.” He stressed the horrors of the ongoing Turkish assault on Armenians and the determination of the authorities to bar all foreigners from that region. “No, young man, let me advise you to return the same way you came. Take my advice, use your wheel on the other side of the water in God’s country.”

Sachtleben retorted that he would not be derelict in his duty, nor would he return home a laughingstock. Terrell begrudgingly pledged to do his best to get the travel papers from the Turkish government. But as Sachtleben stormed out of Terrell’s office, Luther Short, the consul general, issued a dire warning: “You’d better be careful, young man, or your bones, too, will find a resting place in some Armenian grave.”

After weeks of frustration, Sachtleben managed to finagle his own papers authorizing travel as far east as Erzurum. He hired a “dragoman,” a Christian Arab named Khadouri, to accompany him and to serve as his interpreter and personal assistant. He was elderly but fit, with a white beard and a turban. But by the time the pair got to Erzurum, it was mid-May 1895 — exactly a year after Lenz was supposed to arrive there. Sachtleben knew well that the lengthy delay may have cost him valuable clues to Lenz’s death.

Sachtleben got a warm reception from Graves and Chambers, who took him in as a houseguest. The 42-year-old missionary had taken a deep interest in the Lenz case ever since Anna Lenz had approached him for help eight months earlier, and he was eager to help the investigator any way he could. Sachtleben knew that Chambers, with his deep knowledge of the local culture and languages after 15 years in Turkey, was an invaluable resource.

But Sachtleben was still about 100 miles west of where Lenz had disappeared, and he would need more papers to get any closer to his target, inducing yet another lull and further correspondence with Terrell. To help bide his time, Sachtleben convinced Chambers to join him in a hike up Mount Ararat in nearby Armenia, a feat that he and Allen had already accomplished four years earlier.

In late May, while still in Erzurum, thanks to Chambers and Graves, Sachtleben was able to secure the services of Khazar Semonian, an Armenian who lived near Chilkani. The “spy” confirmed that Lenz had stayed at a farmer’s house in that village shortly before the locals had heard rumors of the cyclist’s demise. The spy also interviewed residents of Zedikan, 10 miles west of Chilkani, and they did not recall seeing a cyclist pass through town a year earlier, suggesting that Lenz had not reached the Deli Baba pass after all.

Moreover, the spy determined that a few days after Lenz came to Chilkani, local boys had discovered what he believed to be remnants of Lenz’s gear: “a small hand-mirror and a small box broken in pieces, and a lot of shiny paper” in the river Hopuz, about six miles northwest of Chilkani. Indeed, the spy had heard that, around the same time, a naked body matching Lenz’s description washed up in the nearby river Sherian.

The local authorities had the body buried in Kolsh, a Kurdish village on the south side of the Sherian. Hearing rumors that local Kurds possessed pieces of Lenz’s bicycle, the spy posed as a peddler looking to buy scrap metal. He purchased a piece of a bicycle bell from one, and he spotted rubber tubes dangling off a saddle at the home of Moostoe Niseh, though he was unable to purchase the object. The spy immediately fingered Niseh as the likely culprit, describing him as “a notorious robber and murderer.”

By early June, Graves’s sources had confirmed that Niseh was the ringleader who had killed Lenz and had identified five other Kurds as his accomplices. Sachtleben was now convinced that he had all the information he needed to carry out his mission. “I do not merely want to find Lenz’s grave,” he wrote Worman, “I want to see these murderers punished and an indemnity paid.” He asked Terrell to get the Turkish authorities in Constantinople to put pressure on the local vali (governor) to provide him with 10 zapitehs (armed guards on horseback) to assist in the house searches and arrests.

Even as he continued to seek help from Terrell, Sachtleben cabled Mrs. Lenz and urged her to appeal directly to the secretary of state, Walter Q. Gresham, for immediate action. Sachtleben wanted the U.S. Navy to dispatch two man-of-wars (frigates) to the Turkish coast as a show of force and to demand the immediate arrests of the accused Kurds and a $50,000 indemnity for Mrs. Lenz.

Terrell cabled back to say that he was doing everything possible, adding “Haste cannot bring back the dead.” Sachtleben vented to Worman: “Terrell made me wait five weeks at Constantinople and more than seven weeks here [in Erzurum] and then did not help me a bit.” July came and still no word from Terrell, though Sachtleben did receive a letter from Outing with a photo showing Lenz’s “peculiar” teeth, to be used to identify his skeleton.

Then Sachtleben learned that Terrell had turned over the names of the suspected Kurds to the Sublime Porte (the central authority of the Ottoman Empire), a move the wheelman was certain would backfire. He feared that the central authorities would forward the names to the local vali, who in turn would alert the accused and give them time to destroy evidence or simply disappear before the arrival of Sachtleben and his guards.

August came, and Sachtleben still had not secured a commitment from the vali to provide him support to hunt down and arrest the accused. Terrell wrote Sachtleben, “Be still patient for a while, and remember that I have neither an army or a navy to assist you.” The minister added testily: “I have been attempting to learn the fate and who are the murderers of Mr. Lenz long before you came.”

At last, in early September, came good news from Terrell. Shakir Pasha, a Turkish war hero, was about to conduct a tour of eastern Turkey to implement internationally imposed reforms designed to stop the massacres of Armenians and alleviate ethnic tensions. He agreed that Sachtleben and his assistants, including Chambers, could join his entourage, and he would oversee an investigation into the Lenz affair and provide the means to make appropriate arrests.

Sachtleben ultimately determined that Niseh and his men had called on Lenz at the farmer’s house in Chilkani, only to find the exhausted wheelman fast asleep. Lenz allegedly awoke to find the Kurdish chief fingering Lenz’s revolver, whereupon the wheelman snatched the weapon back. This action purportedly humiliated the Kurd in front of his men, and the next morning, they ambushed and killed Lenz just as he left town.

Shakir had Niseh and his men arrested, but they ultimately escaped prison and were never brought to trial. Sachtleben never did find Lenz’s remains, though he did manage to get Mrs. Lenz a small indemnity from the Turkish government, but without any formal admission of responsibility for her son’s death.

In retrospect, it seems a safe conclusion that Lenz was killed by assailants. There also appears to be evidence that he was ambushed outside of Chilkani on the morning of May 10, 1894, presumably by Niseh and his men. But was he actually killed there? Without knowing where his grave is, it is difficult to know for sure. Conceivably, Niseh and his men roughed Lenz up, stole and destroyed some of his gear, but left him alive. That could explain the original reports that Lenz was killed some 25 miles farther along, on the Deli Baba pass, perhaps later that same day or the following day, presumably by other brigands.

We may never know the full story, and Lenz’s demise is likely to remain a mystery. Sadly, his poor mother never got the closure she desperately needed. For decades, until her own death, she reportedly never gave up hope that her wayward son would appear one day at her doorstep, smiling and clutching his bicycle.

The post Frank Lenz: The Lost Cyclist appeared first on Adventure Cycling Association.

A smiling bronze cherub stands on a pedestal clutching an ancient bicycle on a street corner in Bar-le-Duc, a sleepy town in northeastern France. The imposing monument was inaugurated with great fanfare in the midst of the bicycle boom on September 30, 1894. The inscription below reads: “To Pierre and Ernest Michaux, the original inventors and developers of the pedal velocipede [a.k.a. bicycle]. The grateful cyclists of France.”

One has to read a blurb posted on a nearby stanchion to learn that the father-and-son team was actually based in Paris — and not in Pierre’s hometown of Bar-le-Duc — in 1861, the year that they allegedly invented the bicycle. For although the refurbished fountain has no fewer than six different years carved into it, no year of invention is cited. That was probably no oversight.

When the call for a memorial first sounded in 1890, the original historical premise was a longstanding, but unsubstantiated, claim in French cycling lore that the Parisian blacksmith Pierre Michaux alone had invented the bicycle in 1855, after adding pedals to a broken draisine. But three years later, in the midst of the campaign, his eldest surviving son Henry suddenly recalled that he had witnessed a collaborative invention in March of 1861 (at the tender age of six).

For a full century, Henry’s dubious account largely passed as accepted history. That is, until I challenged it during the memorial’s centennial year at the fifth annual International Cycling History Conference in Cambridge, England (this year’s in Indianapolis will be the 31st, the last two years having been canceled due to the COVID pandemic).

Recently, I revisited the Michaux memorial campaign, using digital tools that did not exist a generation ago. I discovered that that convoluted affair was even more flawed than I had originally deduced. Indeed, one key new discovery strongly suggests that the humble workman who sparked the bicycle revolution was actually the original bicycle patentee Pierre Lallement, who was buried in a pauper’s grave in Boston’s Mount Benedict Cemetery in August of 1891. But before we get to that, let’s recap how the memorial and its associated claims came about in the first place.

The Rover-style, or “modern,” bicycle was developed in England in the late 1880s. It made a modest appearance at the 1889 Paris International Exhibition (the one that produced the Eiffel Tower), before launching a full-scale invasion of France the following year.

In France, the new vehicle became known as the “bicyclette” (small bicycle), an attractively French-sounding word coined by a clever British exporter. To French ears, the term evoked fond memories of the original “boneshaker” bicycle, introduced in their country in 1867. For about four years, the pioneer French industry, headed by the Michaux company, would lead the world in bicycle production and development.

That is, until the disastrous Franco-Prussian war erupted in mid-1870 and brought down the cycling industry as well as the Second Empire. For the next two decades, thanks in large part to its mastery of high-wheel production, the British industry ruled the burgeoning cycling world, even as its American counterpart emerged as a significant rival.

As the French cycle industry began to reclaim some of its former glory, a domestic demand arose for a memorial to celebrate the true origins of the bicycle — and to correct the popular misconception that it was a British or even German invention. In the summer of 1890, a French cycling magazine, La Revue du Sport Vélocipédique, called for a memorial to Pierre Michaux, based on the 1855 claim.

Not surprisingly, given the lack of supporting evidence, the initial Michaux memorial appeal fell flat. Interest picked up the following spring (1891), however, after some four hundred German cyclists gathered in Karlsruhe to ceremoniously rebury the remains of Karl von Drais, the inventor of the draisine, who had died in poverty 40 years earlier. “When will we have a statue of Michaux, that ingenious carriage builder who took the draisine such a giant step forward?” huffed Richard Lesclide, who had recently revived Le Vélocipède Illustré, the flagship cycling journal he had founded in 1869.

Also in 1891, the widespread diffusion of practical inflatable tires, which the French firm Michelin helped to develop, greatly improved the performance of the bicyclette. Two great road races, one from Bordeaux to Paris, the other Paris to Brest and back, enthralled the public. And two bestsellers, Pierre Giffard’s La Reine Bicyclette (The Queen Bicycle) and Louis Baudry de Saunier’s Histoire Générale de la Vélocipédie (A General History of Cycling) touted the virtues of cycling.

By the 1892 season, in the midst of a full-blown cycling rage, the French cycling establishment increasingly viewed the erection of a memorial to a French bicycle inventor as a patriotic duty. That June, Le Vélocipède Illustré reiterated its call for a Michaux memorial.

As it happened, that issue fell into the hands of Henry Michaux, who was then living in London. He promptly wrote Juana Lesclide, who had just taken over the reins of the magazine following the death of her husband Richard, to express his condolences and to thank her for supporting a Michaux memorial. He stressed his willingness to participate in such a noble venture.

But before the 26-year-old widow could claim ownership of the project, La Revue du Sport Vélocipédique announced that it was finally starting its fund drive for a Michaux memorial. Shortly thereafter, however, just as contributions started to flow in, the magazine received a cease-and-desist letter from Henry who affirmed that he had authorized Le Vélocipède Illustré exclusively to pursue the memorial project. The stunned editor reluctantly complied.

In the fall of 1892, Le Vélocipède Illustré, now fully in charge of the project, began to make a historical case for the memorial, relaying information provided by Henry. Although he initially glossed over the details of his father’s alleged invention, he asserted that Pierre had made and sold over 1,000 bicycles between 1861 and April 1867, when the Universal Exhibition opened. Henry claimed to have the original ledgers to back his figures, though he never actually produced them.

Henry’s point was nonetheless clear: his father was not only the bicycle inventor but also its primary developer, contradicting the widely held notion that the blacksmith had sat on the bicycle idea for years. Henry, who was making plans to relaunch the Michaux bicycle brand, thus opportunistically cast himself as the next generation of Michaux innovators and industrialists.

Henry soon moved to Paris to orchestrate the memorial project while he raised money for his new bicycle company. By early 1893, however, Juana had soured on the project. She had discovered that Henry was defrauding his investors (including a few she had steered his way) and that another Pierre (Lallement), held the original bicycle patent, granted in 1866 in New Haven, Connecticut (neither of Pierre Michaux’s two patents prior to 1868 involved the bicycle).

Rather than explain her newfound concerns, Juana simply stopped writing about a Michaux memorial. She only hinted at her motives for inaction in brief responses to reader inquiries, such as “The Michaux files lack essential elements,” and “It is better for the memorial project that we keep our silence.”

Albert Ricaudy, a 25-year-old cycling columnist for the Parisian daily L’Événement, grew impatient. In January 1893, he wrote, “And Michaux? … What’s going on with that? Is he or isn’t he the inventor of the velocipede with pedals? If ‘yes,’ why is the memorial project stalled? If ‘no,’ why hasn’t anyone proven positively the falsity [of the memorial’s premise]?”

After Juana refused to budge, Ricaudy took matters into his own hands. He found a sculptor willing to make a bust of Michaux for a bargain price, and he announced a fund drive. Le Vélo, a cycling daily headed by the cycling evangelist Pierre Giffard, promptly issued a warning, written by someone using the nom de plume D. Cooper: “Do you know why, dear colleague, you will have a great deal of trouble bringing this project to fruition? Because the origins of the velocipede lack clarity. Michaux? Of course. But who else besides him?”

Undaunted, Ricaudy secured the patronage of a syndicate of cycling journalists to which he belonged. On February 20, the group appointed a subcommittee to oversee the Michaux memorial project, including Ricaudy as treasurer. Giffard was named president, despite his paper’s misgivings about the project.

Although Giffard was a relative newcomer to the sport of cycling (he had taken up riding the bicyclette in 1890 at his doctor’s suggestion), he was widely equated with the sport itself. And as a contributor to Le Petit Journal, Paris’s largest circulating paper, he commanded a vast readership. His participation in the memorial project thus all but guaranteed its success. And, from his perspective, the campaign promised to generate ample publicity and “filler” material.

The committee also decreed that the bust of Michaux should be placed in Bar-le-Duc, and it authorized Ricaudy to enlist the support of the mayor, Charles Busselot. The very next day, Ricaudy took a train to Bar-le-Duc, where he was warmly greeted by Busselot and reporters from two local papers who enlightened the locals about Bar-le-Duc’s previously unknown “claim to fame.”

A few days later, the mayor himself came to Paris to attend the committee’s second weekly meeting. He returned with a personal letter signed by Henry Michaux, attesting that his father was the sole inventor of the bicycle (though he neglected to give the year).

But just as the memorial project appeared headed to a swift and successful outcome, the cycle historian Louis Baudry de Saunier published an incendiary article in La Revue des Sports, alleging that the true bicycle inventor was actually Ernest, Pierre’s eldest (and deceased) son, who transformed a broken draisine into a bicycle in 1855 as a teenager. Pierre Michaux, according to Baudry, had never even ridden a bicycle, nor had he approved of his son’s involvement with two-wheelers.

Baudry’s alarming allegations threatened to make the syndicate a national laughing stock. “The commemorative committee is in deep despair,” wrote one cycling columnist. “After going to such trouble to build a statue only to learn that its likeness had never invented anything. I look forward to hearing about what they decide to do at their next meeting.”

Indeed, the committee was in a bind. It could not simply replace Pierre with Ernest in the role of inventor, since that shift would remove any rationale for placing the monument in Bar-le-Duc, Ernest having been born in Brittany.

At this point Giffard effectively took over the troubled project. A day after Baudry’s article appeared, the editor defensively pointed out that Baudry himself had credited Pierre Michaux with the bicycle invention in Histoire Générale. However, to avoid any further debate, Giffard proposed that the monument should recognize both Pierre and Ernest as co-inventors.

Baudry acknowledged that he had initially credited Pierre with the invention, but he added that he had “corrected” himself in his latest book Cyclisme Théorie et Pratique (Cycling Theory and Practice). Left unsaid, however, was that he was also acting discretely in the interests of Aimé Olivier de Sanderval, a disgruntled former Michaux inventor.

Olivier and his deceased brother René, then young engineers, had bankrolled the original Michaux operation. And Henry’s new narrative casting Pierre Michaux as a lone industrial pioneer did not sit well with him. By throwing a wrench into memorial campaign, Baudry was effectively buying Aimé time to pursue a memorial of his own, one that would recognize René and himself as the true founders of the bicycle industry. “The name ‘Michaux’ naturally attracts all the attention,” Aimé publicly lamented, “but it is really a pseudonym for Olivier.”

Giffard’s compromise proposal nonetheless placated Baudry, if not Aimé. All the editor needed now to reboot the project was Henry’s stamp of approval. By way of enticement, Giffard slipped into his revised proposal that the date of invention be shifted from 1855 to 1860-something. He no doubt knew that Le Vélocipède Illustré had stated, based on Henry’s information, that Pierre Michaux began making bicycles in 1861, even though there was no tradition whatsoever of that year having been a milestone in bicycle history.

Essentially, Giffard was signaling to Henry that he could safely pivot to a later date as long as he agreed to incorporate Ernest into the invention story. After all, 1861 would enable Henry to cast himself as an eyewitness to the invention, thus cutting off any further historical debate. And it still trumped 1863, the year Lallement claimed to have taken his bicycle on the boulevards of Paris where “all the people saw it.”

At the committee’s third meeting on March 6, it issued this statement: “Following the recent publication of certain articles that tend to establish that Pierre Michaux did not invent, but simply built and propagated, the pedal, which his son Ernest alone conceived, we unanimously endorse our President’s proposal [for a joint memorial].” Conveniently left open was the year of the claimed invention.

Despite’s Giffard’s swift and deft maneuvering, the father vs. son debate flared up again, but this time in the popular press. On March 7, the Parisian daily L’Éclair charged that the cycling world was in turmoil over the monument. It chastised the committee and Bar-le-Duc for rushing to honor Pierre Michaux while ignoring the evidence favoring Ernest.

Before writing his response, Busselot summoned Henry to Bar-le-Duc to discuss damage control. But rather than endorse Giffard’s compromise, Henry held firm to the original historical premise. Given Henry’s evident flexibility with facts, it is unclear why he was so loath to grant Ernest a role in the bicycle invention. Maybe there had been some animosity between the two brothers, or maybe Henry simply preferred a clean “like father, like son” narrative of industrial prowess as he built up his own brand.

In any case, on March 9, Busselot wrote L’Éclair: “I do indeed intend to ask our city council to help fund a monument to Pierre Michaux, but I did not make this decision without consulting the inventor’s two surviving sons [Henry and his younger brother Francisque]. I have letters from each one, independently written, affirming that their father is the sole inventor. I just saw Henry Michaux and he assured me one more time that his brother Ernest had absolutely nothing to do with the invention.”

Busselot also affirmed to L’Éclair that the date of Pierre’s invention was 1855. On March 11, the city council approved the mayor’s request for 500 francs (very roughly $5,000 in today’s currency) for the erection of a memorial to Pierre Michaux based on the original historical premise.

At this point, the memorial project had reached a crisis point. The Parisian committee had proclaimed Ernest the sole inventor, presumably in 1860-something, whereas Bar-le-Duc had vouched for Pierre as the sole inventor in 1855. Even Giffard’s compromise proposal would not be enough to paper over such a glaring discrepancy. Something had to be done to get both parties on the same page. And there was only one man who could credibly provide a new historical foundation: Henry Michaux.

Giffard no doubt warned the aspiring industrialist that the memorial project was doomed unless he provided a new invention narrative to support the compromise proposal. On March 18, Henry paid Busselot another visit to alert the mayor that the proposed monument would soon be getting a new foundation. Three days later, Henry finally wrote the editor of L’Éclair. Claiming (falsely) that he only learned of the paper’s divisive article of March 7 from his recent visit with Busselot, Henry spun an entirely new (and self-serving) invention tale.

Citing his “faithful memory,” Henry affirmed that his father and brother Ernest had indeed jointly invented the bicycle after all. But the year was 1861, not 1855. Henry even identified, apparently for the first time, the owner of the broken draisine that supposedly became the first bicycle: a hatter by the name of Brunel. Henry also revealed that he himself had witnessed the invention, quoting “verbatim” the father-and-son conversation that he claimed had led to Ernest constructing the first bicycle.

Henry’s new testimony at last gave Giffard’s compromise proposal the historical backing it needed. A jubilant colleague congratulated his editor for having correctly intuited that the bicycle was a Michaux family invention. Never mind that the committee had pronounced Ernest the inventor and Pierre the builder, whereas Henry was now saying exactly the opposite.

Although there would be a few more hiccups in the memorial campaign over the next 16 months leading to the inauguration, Henry’s new invention account essentially ended any further historical debate.

Or so I had thought, until I recently discovered that Auguste Brunel himself — Henry’s hatter — emerged days before the inauguration and gave a very different account of his encounter with the elder Michaux. Indeed, Brunel’s testimony completely undermined the monument’s raison d’être.

Why Henry suddenly invoked Brunel in his letter to L’Éclair, months into the campaign, is unclear. But it seems likely that Henry had learned that the hatter was still alive and kicking — riding the very velocipede he had bought from Michaux some three decades earlier. Henry no doubt recognized that Brunel represented another potential roadblock to the memorial and that he needed to be handled carefully. A few weeks after writing to L’Éclair, in fact, Henry revealed to Le Vélocipède Illustré that the two had had lunch together, giving Henry the opportunity to inspect Brunel’s relic.

Brunel apparently held his silence for months until Pierre Giffard published an article entitled “Père Michaux” (Father Michaux) a week before the scheduled inauguration, reiterating the claim that Brunel had been Michaux’s first bicycle customer in March of 1861. The article prompted the retired hatter, now 71 years old and living in his wife’s hometown of Jussey in southeastern France, to contact the editor of a local paper. Wrote a friend on Brunel’s behalf:

“Mr. Brunel claims [the invention of] the pedal. … I will give you many more details if you have the time to take a train here; you will see père Brunel, the original [Michaux-built] machine, and letters from the Michaux brothers.” The writer added that Brunel was not seeking personal glory, and that “he would never have said anything if the Michaux brothers had treated him correctly.”

The editor headed straight to Jussey. He described Brunel as small and spry, with lively eyes. The ex-hatter confirmed that he had indeed brought a draisine to Michaux in 1861, though he did not give a month. He stated that he had been out on the smooth alleys of the Champs-Élysées riding his vehicle when his behind became so sore that he could not stand sitting on his perch a moment longer. So he decided that it was time to implement a plan that he been entertaining for “a few days,” one that would completely transform his vehicle and soften the ride.

Chancing upon the nearby Michaux workshop, Brunel found just the man to do the job. He explained to the blacksmith that he wanted to create a tricycle by juxtaposing his two existing wheels on a single rear axle, while adding a front wheel. Michaux’s initial reaction, according to Brunel, was to warn his customer that a tricycle would be even more taxing on his feet. Brunel countered that he had no intention of waddling along on his tricycle; he wanted cranks and pedals attached to the front hub. He likened the mechanism to a coffee grinder, and Michaux quickly understood the concept. The blacksmith agreed to do the job for 35 francs, and eight days later Brunel collected his revamped machine.

Remarkably, the reporter affirmed, the spry Brunel was still riding that very machine regularly, covering between 12 and 15 kilometers an outing. Reportedly, Henry and Francisque had repeatedly tried to buy the vehicle, offering up to 500 francs. But Brunel adamantly refused to part with his pride and joy.

Brunel effectively dropped two bombshells with his explosive allegations: first, that he, not Michaux, had prescribed the pedal drive. And second, that he obtained a tricycle, not a bicycle. The French press, however, clearly in no mood for more controversy, simply dismissed Brunel’s testimony as “too little, too late.”

Meanwhile, Giffard acted quickly to marginalize the uncooperative hatter. On the morning of the inauguration, Giffard’s colleague at Le Vélo, Paul Manoury, published a lengthy article in Le Figaro entitled “La Genèse du Cyclisme” (the Genesis of Cycling) that effectively dished out Brunel’s comeuppance. Manoury implied that Brunel was not the owner of the broken draisine-turned-bicycle of 1861 after all (that man’s identity apparently reverted back into a state of anonymity). Rather, Manoury implied that Brunel had acquired a Michaux-built tricycle in 1863, and thus Brunel was simply “that odd little hatter who was France’s first tricyclist.”

Needless to say, Brunel’s attack had come too late in the memorial campaign to have had any effect on its outcome, and he was persona non grata at the inauguration ceremonies. His name never even came up in any of that day’s long speeches.

But what are we to make of Brunel’s newly discovered testimony, as we strive to construct a more accurate history of the bicycle invention? That comes down to two key questions: first, which party most likely proposed the pedals? And second, did Brunel leave the Michaux shop with a bicycle or a tricycle?

At first thought, it might seem more likely that the mechanically minded Michaux came up with a novel drive.  But as Brunel himself pointed out, if Michaux had suddenly thought of adding pedals to a draisine, he would have been better off testing that idea on his own. Indeed, experimenting with a customer’s consignment would have created something of a “no win” situation for Michaux: if the idea failed, he would alienate his  customer, and if it succeeded he would have given away a promising new design.

But it is really the second issue — bicycle or tricycle — that has the greatest historical implications. For if Brunel walked out of the Michaux shop with a three-wheeler, regardless of which party proposed the pedals, then the bicycle was evidently not invented in the Michaux shop — we would have to look beyond 1861 to identify who really sparked the original bicycle craze in Paris.

After all, treadle-driven tricycles had been known for decades and yet there is no credible evidence that anyone constructed a bicycle with a similar drive until about 1869. That is, after the original Parisian bicycle had established the surprising principle that a slender vehicle with one wheel after another could be continuously propelled, with the rider’s feet off the ground, by means of a mechanical drive.

And there is very little reason to doubt Brunel’s assertion that he left the Michaux shop with a tricycle. After all, that’s what he had in hand in 1894, and the Michaux brothers evidently accepted its authenticity. And if Brunel had been a complete fraud, he might as well have agreed with Henry that he had obtained a bicycle, in order to cast himself as the vaunted “inventor of the bicycle.”

Clearly, more research is needed before we can assess the full historical significance of Brunel’s newly discovered testimony. In particular, if the year of the Michaux/Brunel encounter was indeed 1861, then Brunel was likely responsible for an important step toward the bicycle. But if the year was actually 1863, as Manoury suggested, then Brunel may well have copied an existing machine, such as Lallement’s bicycle. In any case, the hatter may have played a pivotal role in the creation of the Michaux bicycle company.

What is already clear, however, is that the Michauxs were neither the inventors nor the original developers of the bicycle, despite what their memorial claims. And even if Lallement adapted his pedal drive from an existing tricycle, the young mechanic would still deserve the lion’s share of the credit for inventing the bicycle. That is, for building a prototype in mid-1863 that convinced himself (and others) that the bizarre arrangement was in fact practical and worthy of development.

The post A Monumental Travesty appeared first on Adventure Cycling Association.

“I was thinking strawberry and vanilla. What about you?” My husband looks at me incredulously, dismayed. “Weren’t you thinking about ice cream too? No? Were we not talking about it?” 

“Ummm, no,” he says with concern. Maybe my brain was parboiled like the water in my bottles. Outside Oaxaca, toward the coast, we pedaled to an area called the oven. All I could think about was something cold, or cool.

This familiar scene has repeated itself on summer tours across the Sierra Nevadas, through the Southern Appalachians, and along the Mississippi River. The drops of sweat have followed me to the tropics of Nicaragua and Chile’s Atacama Desert. Some landscapes are hotter than others, but one thing is consistent — we feel the heat vividly from the seat of a bicycle.

Although a bike saddle is the best seat in the house for seeing and experiencing a place, it is an earned seat. We earn it by straining our leg muscles, as they propel us through all types of weather, over mountains and through windswept valleys. Or maybe we pay with time, letting something on our nagging to-do list float into the next day or the next year, while we invest in the small slice of elation that is riding a bicycle.

When we do something outside our day-to-day existence, we step out of the manila envelope of our routines and are rewarded with a heightened awareness, an intimate awakening of the senses. We notice new landscapes, or different nooks in familiar places, a new bird song, ocean waves, and bees buzzing. We might breathe in heady aromas of fermented malt near a brewery, industrial coffee roasters, or even the less-pleasant smells of livestock manure and tar manufacturing. Whatever we experience through our senses, we are more because of it. This is why we bike tour — to see more, respect more, do more, and be more. We also get to eat ice cream more.

We all continue pedaling through this month of July, even when the heat of summer is sapping our energy and nature is reminding us more of an oven, a wilting plant, or a steam room. The challenge draws us in, because we know that challenges give momentum to the cycle of joy, and as Laura Killingbeck writes, “Joy is what the body wants to return to — again and again.”

I have ridden through deserts and dry plains with the solitary thought of future reward in the form of cold, sweetened cream. The ultimate reward for me and many others lies in the decadent treat of ice cream. Even lactose-intolerant cyclists have good options these days, thank goodness. My sweet tooth is more like a dominant canine than something small and slight. I love all flavors and types, preferably with rainbow sprinkles, which makes me feel extra adult-like. The confectionary smell that pulses from any ice cream stand encourages a spark of bliss, which smolders into a small flame of motivation to keep the pedals turning. It adds to the reasons why we ride.

For some of us, the indulgence of sweet treats comes with a feeling of weightlessness, which may or may not be carried over from childhood, when our cares and concerns were less and lighter. As adults, our cares and responsibilities, the newspaper headlines and our sore legs can all lift like altostratus clouds high into the sky. For just a moment, our greatest concern is licking a mound of sweetened cream on top of a cone made of flour, sugar, and butter. We must take a pause to enjoy the joy before it melts all over our hands. I wouldn’t go so far to say that eating an ice cream cone is an art form, but it does require prioritizing the moment. 

When we ride long distances across unfamiliar terrain, thumbtacks of civilization mark the bulletin board of open landscapes, and these can be dots of reprieve. Ice cream can be our reward, our destination, or simply a moment of sugary delight, the thought of which can help us through sweat-saturated hours. These stops can remind us that we are stronger than we think, and that we are deserving of these small rewards. The cold cream tells us that if we can just make it to the next stop, we’ll be alright, even as water simmers in our bottles. As we indulge in cookies n’ cream, strawberry, chocolate, or whatever inventive flavor you prefer, suddenly the sweat of the previous miles is a distant memory, and setting out into the heat once again feels much less daunting. 
 

The post I Scream, You Scream appeared first on Adventure Cycling Association.

In 1963, Dervla Murphy hopped on her bike in Ireland and pedaled all the way to India … alone. I was two years old. She wrote of her adventures in the highly acclaimed book Full-Tilt: Ireland to India on a Bicycle. Dervla continued to travel. While I was having fights with my brother over which Saturday morning cartoons to watch, she was exploring Ethiopia … on a mule. By the time I attempted my first long-distance bicycle trip on well-paved roads, she was Muddling Through in Madagascar, cycling nearly impossible roads without the aid of shocks, clipless pedals, or grip shifts. Little did I know that years down the road our paths would cross.

On July 2, 1981, I left on a cross-country bicycle journey with my best buddy, Thomas. This was the trip of a lifetime. Neither of us was a seasoned cyclist; our brand-new, blue Univega Gran Tourismo touring bikes with miraculous triple cranks had fewer than 100 miles on them. We had purchased the cheapest panniers we could find and splurged on maps and guidebooks from this organization called Bikecentennial. My budget was so tight I allotted myself only six rolls of film for the entire journey.

After carrying our bikes what seemed like miles across the sand at low tide to dip our back wheels in the Pacific, we were off and pedaling. Two magical months later, we pedaled down Second Avenue in Manhattan, basking in a glow of accomplishment that so many thousands of other cyclists have since enjoyed.

I had no other journeys planned. It was time to go back to college and try and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I pictured myself in my 70s outside my custom motor home parked in a prime campsite at a national park, regaling my grandchildren with the story, “Back when I was 19 years old, I pedaled my bicycle across this here country. Never did get back on that thing, but it sure was a grand trip.”

I graduated from CSU Sacramento in theatre arts and moved up to Seattle, Washington, to pursue a career as an actor. After six years of stage, film, and radio, I was bitten by the travel bug again. I considered traveling by bus, by train, by foot, but my mind always wandered back to my trip with Thomas. The more I thought about it, the more I realized our journey had been magical, not simply because we were traveling, but because we were traveling by bicycle.

I took the summer off in 1988 and pedaled 6,400 miles across Canada. I was hooked. I got a job as a bicycle tour guide and led trips in the Northwest. I lived in a garage and walked a block and a half to the nearest bathroom in order to save money to travel. The tour guide position was for five to six months each year, which allowed me to travel on my own for the remaining months.

In 1990, I cycled 4,000 miles throughout Mexico and learned that it wasn’t nearly as frightening as I’d imagined touring in a country whose language and customs differed from mine. Rather than frightening, it was exhilarating. The next year, I spent three months pedaling through all the countries of Central America. The following year, it was over 4,000 miles pedaling around New Zealand.

But it wasn’t until 1993, when I began to plan my own bicycle trip throughout India, that I was introduced to her writings. Whenever I spoke of cycling in India, Dervla’s name came up. I discovered while reading her books that this daring lady was not only a wonderful writer but the stuff of legend.

She never used the latest gear, usually buying a singlespeed bike (or a singlespeed mule) in the country she was going to explore. She carried little food and often slept outside with a blanket as her only cover. Her simple way of traveling made my gear-laden, 21-speed mountain bike feel like a lumbering custom RV. And like many admiring readers, I wondered if one day I would meet her.

In 1995, during my five-month bicycle journey of South Africa, I was invited into the home of a family in the town of Melmoth, in KwaZulu-Natal. I needed the rest. The day before, the bolt on my seatpost had snapped, and when I went to locate my tools, they were missing. For the next 25 insanely hilly kilometers, I stood and pedaled through tribal Zulu country.

As I sat with my host family around the kitchen table sipping rooibos tea, they all began to tell me how much I reminded them of a dear friend of theirs. “She was a tall Irish woman … ” I choked on my tea, “You are talking of Dervla Murphy!”

Turns out that Dervla (then in her 60s) had cycled South Africa the year before during the first free elections, and they had invited her to stay. “What were the odds?” I thought to myself.

A year later, while planning my trip through the Balkans, I read Dervla’s book Transylvania and Beyond. In it, she described an accident she had while in Romania. She slipped on a patch of vomit outside her hotel room on a cold winter’s night and broke her leg. She stayed with a Romanian family for over a month while she recuperated.

My own journey in the Balkans began with a solo swing through Hungary, Slovenia, and war-torn Croatia and Bosnia. My girlfriend, Kat, then joined me back in Budapest, and I proposed to her before we pedaled off to see Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Albania.

We both fell in love with Romania — its beautiful countryside, friendly people, and slow pace — a cyclist’s dream world. On the northern backroads, we were often the fastest vehicles on the roads as most of the locals got around on horse-drawn carts.

In a tiny village south of Sighisoara, we met a couple whom we would later refer to as Grandma and Grandpa. Mr. Bunea was seated on a bench with his back up against the stone wall of his property. He was a strong, handsome-looking man with shocking white hair, dressed in wool pants, a white shirt worn beneath a gray vest, and sporting a matching gray cap. He invited us into his home for a drink of water and we stayed for two days. His wife, Maria, although 70 years old and permanently hunched over from osteoporosis, was a compact bundle of energy. Her appearance reminded me of a cute apple doll you buy at the fair. But we soon learned, an apple doll who could knock back a shot of plum brandy like a sailor. The Buneas instantly found their way into our hearts.

On our first evening at their home, they invited over some friends, a husband and wife, who spoke English. As we sat around the kitchen table sipping plum brandy, they said, “You remind us so much of a dear friend of ours. She is from Ireland”.

I couldn’t believe my ears. “Dervla Murphy!” I replied. We all screamed with delight. Come to find out, this was the very couple who had housed Dervla while her leg mended.

Again. What were the odds? It boggles my mind.

I have never met this amazing woman, but I still hope I will someday. But until that time, I am honored to be following in her tire tracks.

The post Following Dervla appeared first on Adventure Cycling Association.

In 1974, a young Black woman in New Jersey named Miriam Martin decided to head west to Montana. Martin had been recruited to join the African-American Studies program at the University of Montana, established in 1968 by Professor Ulysses Doss. The program at UM was only the third like it in the U.S. at the time, and the first to be established outside of California.

Doss himself had been involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, working with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to integrate residential neighborhoods in the Chicago area. After King’s assassination in April 1968, Doss, struggling to contain rioting in the Black community in Chicago and dealing with his own grief over King’s death, had taken a rare vacation to Missoula, where a friend had a ministry.

A few public lectures led to an invitation to teach in the humanities program at the University of Montana, and 25 years later in 1993, Doss retired from UM, leaving behind the legacy of his African-American Studies program.

“Here I was, a little girl from a small neighborhood, Black, and from a close-knit community, and I ventured out to Missoula to attend the University of Montana,” Martin recalled.

But that wasn’t all Martin did.

“I don’t know. I was so crazy and adventurous that I went on a 1,900-mile bicycle trip as well,” Martin said.

The trip Martin went on with seven other students in the African-American Studies program began in Missoula and ended in St. Louis, retracing the route of the remarkable journey taken by 20 Black soldiers of the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps, led by James A. Moss, a white lieutenant, and accompanied by assistant surgeon J. M. Kennedy, also white.

The Buffalo Soldiers, as the Black infantrymen were known, left Fort Missoula at 5:30 AM on June 14, 1897, riding donated Spalding bicycles. They arrived in St. Louis 34 days later on July 24 to a grand reception in Forest Park, equivalent in that city to New York’s Central Park. The Buffalo Soldiers had averaged nearly 56 miles per day over the most primitive roads imaginable, sometimes resorting to bumping over railroad tracks through soaring mountains lashed by rain, over the alkali deserts of the Badlands, and into the furnace-like heat of the Midwest in summer.

The entire enterprise was pushed on the reluctant army brass by Lieutenant Moss, who was required to pull it off without expending any army money. Moss made it happen because he wanted to demonstrate the superiority of bicycles to horses for transporting soldiers. Lucky for Moss, Major General Nelson A. Miles, a titanic figure from both the Civil War and the Indian Wars, shared his fascination with the potential of the bicycle as a military vehicle, and he intervened at key moments to keep Moss’s dream alive.

In the end, however, the army let the experiment fizzle, declining to authorize Moss to organize another test of the bicycle’s effectiveness by mounting a ride from Fort Missoula to San Francisco after the success of the ride to St. Louis. The army brass coolly replied that everything that needed to be known about using bicycles in the military was already known and there was no need for further investigation. Or, as they understood reading between the lines, there was no future for a bicycle-mounted infantry.

“When we were students out there at UM and studying about the 25th Infantry’s historic feat, we were so proud to learn about the African-Americans who were there before us,” Martin said. “Although they were the first, we still felt like pioneers, especially in reenacting this experiment. We felt we had a purpose. We were coming from all parts of the country, learning about our connection with Montana. We were pioneers, just like they were.”

Martin, who had no previous cycling experience, said the most difficult part of the journey of about 30 days was getting adjusted to her bike saddle, a familiar complaint among novice cyclists. She said the ride of nearly 40 years ago helped shape the woman she is today.

“I could have said I wanted to go home and would have been taken to the next town or city and provided transportation there,” Martin said. “But my mindset was that this was something we had to do and that I had to do for myself. I wasn’t going to quit. There was no turning back. The only option was to keep going.”

Martin still remembers the remarkable western skies and the “gorgeous mountains.” When she returned home to New Jersey after graduating from the University of Montana and started working, she decided she wasn’t happy with her job and went back to get her teaching certification, later adding a master’s degree in technology and computers.

Today she is a technology coordinator, helping teachers incorporate technology in their classrooms in the public school system in Orange, New Jersey.

“You can’t stop, that’s what I got from that experience out there,” Martin said.

The Buffalo Soldiers also inspired Mike Higgins, a middle-school history teacher in tiny Deaver, Wyoming, about 40 miles north of Cody. Higgins admitted the ride of the 25th has become something of an obsession for him. His interest in the Buffalo Soldiers began with a two-page story from the children’s magazine Highlights. His brother, a “bicycle-tour kind of guy,” had sent it to him more than a decade before.

Higgins’s brother died of cancer in 1997. “Somehow that story was linked in some kind of crazy way to my brother,” Higgins said. “I just started thinking about it.”

He began to research the topic. Higgins brought his skills as a history teacher to his growing interest in the epic ride of the 25th, looking for primary source materials and piecing together the details of their route, poring through dozens of contemporary newspaper articles and letters left behind by Moss and others.  (You can find the fruits of Higgins’s research here.)

“I thought that, I need to do the trip to try to understand it more,” Higgins said. “I spent five years researching it. I had binders full of stuff.”

In 2009, Higgins decided to follow in the Buffalo Soldiers’ wheel tracks.

“I was going self-contained, and I didn’t really have a plan,” Higgins said. “I didn’t know how I was going to get back when I got to St. Louis. A daughter was going to pick me up, and that fell apart. I decided to just go for it.”

Higgins’s 73-year-old mother, a history buff herself, offered to drive sag, but Higgins turned her down.

“I said, ‘Mom, I’m 48, people bicycle tour all the time,’” Higgins said.

But things did not go well. Leaving Missoula in June, Higgins was hit with snow.

“I was ready to get wet, but not for freezing temperatures,” he said.

South of Townsend, Montana, Higgins knew the Bicycle Corps had gone through a canyon that today’s highway skirts.

“So I went into that canyon,” Higgins said. “It was about 7:00 PM. To make a long story short, I ended up walking on the railroad tracks for miles. It was 11:00 at night, and I thought I was going to get arrested or be hit by a train.”

On one side of Higgins was a river, on the other an electric fence to keep animals from getting on the tracks. Emerging from the canyon into the pitch black night, Higgins kept walking with his bike on the railroad track, an experience the Corps shared more than once.

By the time he got to Bozeman a few days later, Higgins said he was “practically hypothermic,” and in Livingston, he stopped to rethink what he was doing. 

“I thought, ‘This is not working,’” Higgins said.

He abandoned the ride.

“I was really upset that I quit,” Higgins said. “I was depressed because I had thought about this for years and years. My mother saved my butt.”

In 2010, enter Mom, now 74 years old and still willing to drive sag.

“When I succeeded in my attempt, my mom came with me,” Higgins said. “It worked out really well.”

With his mother driving his truck, Higgins rode out of Missoula on May 27 and finished in St. Louis 28 days later on June 24. Because his mother came along, he was able to do the research he wanted to do along the route. In Missouri, for example, Higgins wanted to visit the state archives in Columbia, so he was able to jump in the truck and drive there, then get back to the route the next day to continue his ride. He wouldn’t have had that kind of flexibility if he had been riding self-contained.

He also got to spend precious time with his mother.

“My mom is 74,” he said. “How much more time will I have with her? That was providential, and it gave us a lot of time together.”

Arriving in Forest Park, Higgins was moved to see two Black women sitting in chairs and talking. He had seen a photograph from the archives of a St. Louis newspaper of two Buffalo Soldiers sitting in chairs and visiting with each other at the end of their long ride, and they were occupying the same spot.

“That was poetic,” Higgins said. “To me there are so many connections in this world and this life.”

Higgins tried to trace what had happened to as many of the Buffalo Soldiers (and, to the white soldiers who led them, Moss and Kennedy) as he could. Kennedy went on to become an Assistant Surgeon General for the U.S. federal government. Higgins was able to find Kennedy’s living descendants and they sent him an account that either Kennedy or one of his children had written about his life. It included an account of the Bicycle Corps.

Other stories were tragic. Sergeant Mingo Sanders, a highly decorated soldier who served in the Spanish-American War in Cuba and the Philippines, in many ways was the glue that held the Bicycle Corps together. He was sent to Brownsville, Texas, in 1906, along with a contingent of Buffalo Soldiers, in spite of warnings from white officers that sending Black soldiers to Texas was asking for trouble.

“The army didn’t listen and sent these guys down to Brownsville,” Higgins said. “Two weeks later, that town got shot up and everybody blamed the Black guys.”

Despite their protestations of innocence, proof that their weapons had not been fired, and an absence of eyewitnesses, the Black soldiers were thrown out of the army. They were not dishonorably discharged, but discharged without honor, a little-used administrative device employed by President Theodore Roosevelt to drum the Buffalo Soldiers out of the army without a public hearing.

“Sanders was months away from retiring,” Higgins said. “They took his pension and everything. It was a really sad incident. He had diabetes and died tragically after they amputated his legs.”

Sanders appealed to Roosevelt before he died, asking for reinstatement in the army. He explained that his savings were gone and his wife was sick, but his request fell on deaf ears, according to an account in Iron Riders, George Niels Sorensen’s book about the 25th.

Moss, the leader and visionary, made a fortune writing books on subjects such as flag etiquette, said Higgins, retiring from the army to enjoy his money. Yet he too died tragically. He was killed in a traffic accident in New York City in 1941 at the age of 68.

Sorensen’s book is the definitive account available of the 25th’s epic ride. Interest in the bicycle as a military vehicle peaked toward the end of the 19th century, on the heels of a social revolution centered on the bicycle that spawned everything from six-day races in New York attended by thousands of people to popular songs like “A Bicycle Built for Two.”

As might be expected, European militaries were ahead of their American counterparts in terms of using bikes. But Moss and his benefactor, General Miles, were determined to close that gap. Moss’s original letter formally requesting permission to organize a bicycle corps was dated April 13, 1896.

As Sorensen wrote, Moss said he wanted to make a number of experiments during the coming summer and fall using the bicycle as a practical machine for military purposes.

“With this end in view, I am very desirous of organizing at this post a detachment of cycle infantry. I have taken great interest in the subject as treated in this country and abroad, and am especially anxious to give the matter a thorough test in the mountainous country hereabout, where no experiments have ever been made. The main roads and prairie trails are fine for bicycles and I am very anxious to test the practicability of the bicycle in going over some of our mountain trails,” wrote Moss.

He may have been a bit on the optimistic side concerning just how “fine” the roads and prairie trails were for cycling. After a series of group rides covering 15 to 40 miles a day, Moss and his bicycle corps were ready for their first major outing — to Lake McDonald near St. Ignatius, north of Missoula. 

Seven riders made the trip to Lake McDonald, including Moss, their packed bicycles weighing on average 76.2 pounds. Moss himself, who kept meticulous records, only weighed 135 pounds, and the average weight of the riders was 155.7 pounds. The list of rations for the trip included 35 pounds of flour, 20 pounds of bacon, and three pounds of lard. All told, provisions totaled 120 pounds to be split among the seven men.

The group left Fort Missoula at 6:20 AM on August 6, 1896, reaching Missoula in 25 minutes. (Today, of course, the city of Missoula surrounds the old fort.) In town the soldiers took to the sidewalks because the streets were so muddy. Over a six-mile stretch about 12 miles out of Missoula, they were forced to dismount at least 20 times to navigate around swampy mud pits and fallen trees, Sorensen wrote.

Still, the men covered 51 miles that first day, reaching Mission Creek, a half-mile above St. Ignatius Mission, at 7:30 PM. The next day, the riders continued to be plagued by gumbo mud and punctures, at one point stopping the entire party while 12 loose tires were cemented back on the wooden rims that the bikes used. Although the men walked rather than rode their bikes much of the way, Moss wrote an official report hailing their efforts and requested permission for a ride to Yellowstone, the nation’s first national park, established in 1872.

For the ride to Yellowstone, there would be nine riders, including Moss, again riding bikes weighing an average of nearly 80 pounds. The ride to Yellowstone began on August 15 at 6:05 in the morning. Once again, thick mud, headwinds, and dusty tracks awaited the intrepid riders. On the way back from Yellowstone, which was already beginning to see more and more cyclists, the bicycle corps had a remarkable encounter.

Outside of Bozeman, two of the riders collided, shattering the wooden rim of one of the front wheels.

“The rider carried his damaged bicycle the rest of the way into camp, and the men were trying to figure out a way to improvise a repair when a bicycle tramp appeared,” wrote Sorensen. “The tramp explained that he had been riding around the West, covering Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and other states. Always in search of work, he saw the broken bicycle as an opportunity. Claiming to be an excellent bicycle mechanic, he offered, for three dollars, to ride the six miles into Bozeman, locate a new rim, and have the cycle fixed by six o’clock the next morning. The soldiers agreed, and Wandering Willie disappeared into the night.”

What Willie went through to collect his three dollars was remarkable. He found the only bike shop in Bozeman closed but tracked down the owner at a “political meeting” and had the new rim by 9:00 that night. Then he rented a room and worked until 4:00 in the morning to reattach the tire and rim to the wheel, getting it back to the soldiers’ camp by his 6:00 AM deadline.

If Wandering Willie were alive today, his signature would undoubtedly be in the register at Adventure Cycling headquarters in Missoula, like the signatures of thousands of his spiritual descendants. The Yellowstone group made it back to Fort Missoula on September 18, 16 days after they left, covering 790 miles in 126 hours of riding at an average speed of 6.25 MPH, according to the meticulous records of Lt. Moss.

After Yellowstone, Moss felt his men were ready for the ride to St. Louis, settling once and for all the wisdom of creating a bicycle corps for every army garrison in the country, as General Miles had proposed in testimony before the House Committee on Military Affairs in December 1896. Of course, that didn’t happen, or as Sorensen put it, “As usual, there was much talk and no action.”

But that wasn’t the fault of Moss, who provided as much evidence as anyone could of the efficacy of bicycles as military vehicles. As Mike Higgins wrote to Adventure Cycling art director and cofounder Greg Siple, who photographed Higgins on his own ride to St. Louis, Moss’s inability to convince the army to adopt the bicycle was anything but a failure. Higgins noted that Moss had referred to the trip to St. Louis as “the very poetry of cycling.”

“I am happy that Lieutenant Moss’s dream of introducing bicycles into the army died,” wrote Higgins. “Bicycles are such elegant and wonderful machines. They possess the possibility to transform people in a way no other machine I can think of does. During my trip, I felt my senses enlivened, my body strengthened, and my mind freed in ways that, while not unexpected, surprised me.

“Perhaps something like that happened to the Bicycle Corps surgeon Kennedy, the only member of the trip who didn’t volunteer. He even protested when he found out he didn’t have a choice about going, but by the time the Corps was closing in on St. Louis, he told a reporter that he would do it all again. I’m glad he felt that way. It raises my hopes that he and the men I’ve come to admire experienced as I did some of the poetry Moss talked about,” he said.

The post The Bicycling Buffalo Soldiers appeared first on Adventure Cycling Association.

Okay, enough already with the grand wonderments of bicycle touring. I just finished a 3,118-mile bike ride from San Diego to Savannah, crossing parts of California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, and I’d like to share some of the myths of touring.

Myth 1: Your endless hunger will be met with an endlessly wonderful feast.

Reality: You will in fact be gloriously hungry, but too frequently the principal attribute of the food in front of you will be your own starvation. Those cute little roadside cafés with perfectly grilled Reubens and freshly baked apple pies? They exist. But often they’re separated by 500 miles of criminally indifferent hash browns.

Myth 2: Ride from west to east to take advantage of the prevailing westerly winds.

Reality: This is helpful mainly for people riding at 35,000 feet. Conditions on the ground are far more variable. For example, after being pelted by chunks of sod, bales of tumbleweed, and gale-force easterly winds for a week in Texas and Oklahoma, I checked with the National Climate Data Center, which reported that in North Texas, “The prevailing wind direction in this area is from the southeast.” In other words, ride whichever way you want.

Myth 3: Bicycle touring brings people closer together.

Reality: As Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “Hell is other people.” I rode across America with a dear old friend and bike buddy who remains both. But no one is immune to the fatigue that comes with cross-country touring, and each of us discovered new and profound ways in which the other guy is annoying. (A woman named Blanche, who runs the tiny Knox Hotel in Nahunta, Georgia, told us she regularly gets cycle touring guests and said, “Quite often it’s clear they have had enough of each other.” My friend and I simultaneously said, “Tell me about it.”)

Myth 4: Bike Route signs are meaningful.

Reality: Some local governments will post Bike Route signs on NASCAR tracks if it ups their bike-friendly mileage. Let’s consider, say, Texas. Its official regulations define a sign-worthy roadway as one that “is open to motor vehicle travel and upon which no bicycle lane is designated.” (Italics mine.) Use Street View on Google Maps for a reality check and assume — regardless of route maps and Bike Route signage — that at least a quarter of a cross-country ride will be on busy, shoulderless roads, many with rumble strips.

Myth 5: Local knowledge is invaluable.

Reality: No one wants to seem uninformed, and people will tell you absolutely anything. Several Coloradans told us a piece of highway was “pretty flat.” We had more than 2,000 feet of elevation change that day. A motel owner said there was nowhere to stay for the next 110 miles so we camped next to the highway — a mere five miles from a B&B that made its own caramel rolls. In tiny Chama, New Mexico, we asked a number of local residents (more than two, probably fewer than six) to describe the highway to Taos. We asked them that question, it should be noted, while wearing bike helmets and holding bikes. Their answers were invariably along the lines of “Very pretty highway. You’ll like it.” They — like the Rand McNally Road Atlas — forgot to mention the snow-covered, 10,300-foot pass along the way. We assumed either 1) they’d never left town, or 2) this was a little bit of fun they have with cyclists. Either way, double- or triple-check advice from random people on the street.

Bonus Myth: Presta valve air hose adaptors work at America’s gas stations.

Reality: Don’t bet on it.

The post Final Mile: Five Myths of Bicycle Touring appeared first on Adventure Cycling Association.

Some people claim to be disappointed when they first see it. But on that sunny day, when it appeared as I crested a Wiltshire rise on my bicycle, I got that familiar, childlike, traveler’s dip of excitement in the middle of my stomach. Half a mile away to the northeast, honey yellow in the sun, it looked like a set of giant toy building blocks, left to tumble randomly by a giant child who’d been hastily called away by some better amusement.

A romantic ruin, the main structure was already 2,000 years old at the time of Jesus.

No, Stonehenge didn’t disappoint me.

“It might be a once-in-a-lifetime chance,” I said to my two bicycling companions. A week earlier we had threaded our way south out of London, and by a combination of bike and British Rail, had moved west over the downlands to Salisbury, Wiltshire.

We’d found a B&B a few miles north, in the dark, at Middle Woodford, a tiny village on the Avon River. We were given our own cottage and were settling in when the idea occurred to me.

It had been a year since that sunny day when I’d first seen Stonehenge, and we had planned on going there the next morning.

But to see it at night, I thought, when it’s deserted, that would be the real Stonehenge experience. “It’s only five or six miles north,” I said. Marco looked at me skeptically through his glasses, dabbed his nose with a handkerchief, and sniffed. I turned to Jay. “Marco has a cold, but we can still go,” I said undiplomatically. “Think of it. There’ll be no one around. Maybe we can get inside!” I whispered.

Jay, torn, cautiously agreed, and at about 8:00 PM we got on our bikes and pedaled north along the lane. The stars were out, but a chilled March mist had risen, dipping and fingering its way along the somnambulant Avon. The mist thickened in some places, its milky vapor pouring over us, obscuring the constellations.

We reached the A303 and turned west. The ghostly landscape of Salisbury Plain, dotted with prehistoric tumuli and burial mounds, emptied itself out all around us. Soon, on the left side of the road, an indistinct hulk stood out like some cool, nocturnal mirage, the mist curling around and between the massive sarsen stones.

A passing car’s headlights illuminated the opposite side of the road, and I saw we weren’t alone. I grabbed my brakes, and Jay pulled up next to me. We squinted through the fog at the two figures standing in the military “atease” position across the highway from the monument. They just stood there, facing Stonehenge, now and then some body language revealing that they were in casual conversation.

Because of our headlamps, we knew they had obviously seen us. Deciding we looked suspicious cowering there on the roadside, we pedaled ahead and stopped just short of the two figures, just short of the two . . . policemen.

One appeared to be middle-aged and slightly portly. The other was younger with a medium build. They both wore the classic bobby cap with chinstrap.

Why all this official presence out here in the dark on Salisbury Plain?

“Why, to look after Stonehenge, of course,” the older copper replied. “We get all manner o’ hooligans and nutters tryin’ to get up to the stones — inside ‘em — you know.”

Jay and I, mentally reviewing our now-foiled plan, looked at each other guiltily.

“Some want to carve their initials in the stones,” the policeman went on, “others want to have some sort o’ religious experience in the circle.”

Armed only with nightsticks and torches, both men stood confidently on that ancient hallowed ground, their black-gloved hands still held characteristically behind their backs.

These were classic British coppers.

I was floored that country policemen were actually assigned “Ancient Monument Detail.” I looked at the older cop.

“Ah, well, speaking of experiences, have you ever seen anything out here?” I asked. His eyes flickered toward me and sized me up — somewhat expertly, I thought.

He cleared his throat. “I’ll tell you. I’ve slept out in the middle o’ those stones on several occasions.” He paused — for effect, it seemed. “I’ve even tempted fate and stretched myself out on the Slaughter Stone.”

“Oh, yeah?” My blood raced. I looked across the road at the shadowed megalithic circle, supposed abode of fairy folk and nature spirits. “What happened? What did you see?”

The policeman frowned slightly. “Absolutely nothing. Saw nothing, nothing happened. I slept alright, though,” he said with a chuckle.

Not exactly the bloodcurdling tale I’d been poised for.

“But,” he continued, “there is the ghost.”

This was more like it.

“Yes?”

The cop, hands still behind his back, looked at the ground and kicked a pebble. “That’s right. The ghost of Cecil Chubb. Runs like the devil alongside cars here and peers in at the drivers. Terrorizes motorists, as you can probably imagine. They say he’s got flaming hair or something. Never hurt anybody, though. Just sort of a mischief-maker. But you can bet that plenty o’ nerve-soothing pints have been swallowed in area pubs after encounters with the ghost.”

The younger policeman, who had so far been silently listening to all of this, offered, “I’ve seen him.”

Early in the 20th century, five different Druidic orders practiced their rites at Stonehenge. Sir Edmund Antrobus, owner of the Amesbury estate on which the monument stands, objected to the ceremonies. During the 1901 solstice, Antrobus had the police rout the Druids. He built a fence around Stonehenge and began charging admission. This act went against the tradition of local free access to the downlands.

In 1904, there was another confrontation. Antrobus interfered while the Druids were burying the ashes of a former Arch Druid within the stone circle.

Antrobus later had a notice posted within Stonehenge prohibiting religious services in the circle. Paying no heed, the Druids returned to celebrate the 1914 summer solstice and were thrown out by the Wiltshire Constabulary (predecessors of our two roadside cops). The Druids ceremoniously cursed Antrobus, and within a year, both he and his son were dead.

Cecil Chubb entered Stonehenge lore when the Amesbury estate went up for sale on September 21, 1915, soon after Antrobus and his son had died. The estate was auctioned at the New Theatre in Salisbury with Stonehenge as Lot 15.

The bids stuck at £6,000 for a while, but were finalized with local landowner Mr. Chubb’s offer of £6,600. Chubb allegedly had no special interest in the “Stone Grail.” He just thought a local man should be the owner — it was an impulse purchase.

Chubb seemed a more fair-minded proprietor. He halved the admission charge and cooperated with the Druids in their religious practices at the stone circle. But Chubb didn’t keep Stonehenge for long. In 1918, he donated it to the government. In return, he was knighted, and Sir Cecil earned the local nickname Viscount Chubb of Stonehenge.

“You’ve seen him … the ghost?” I asked the younger cop.

“That’s right. I’d come out o’ the loo one night in the car park,” he began, gesturing to the parking area behind him. “Now, you see, there’s a tunnel that goes under the road from the car park to Stonehenge. Well, as I said, I’d just come out o’ the loo, when I see this figure darting round the car park, hair aflame, and he’s taunting me, like. So I take off after him — that’s my job, after all — and he runs into the tunnel.” The policeman pointed. “I was right behind him — very close — and I ran the length of that tunnel, but he didn’t come out the other side. He just … poof!” The cop fluttered his gloved fingers in an abracadabra gesture in front of his face. Taking his gesture as a hint, we decided to take our leave.

Cycling back south, looking over our shoulders uneasily into the Wiltshire brume and watching for the flaming, road-running ghost, Jay and I realized there was something we hadn’t asked the night watchmen: Had the ghost of Cecil Chubb ever haunted bicyclists?

One thing we did know, we had entered the realm of Celtic-English downland folklore that night and had come away with something unique — a real Stonehenge experience. 

The post Final Mile: The Ghost of Cecil Chubb appeared first on Adventure Cycling Association.

Late in the afternoon, I arrived in a small mountain town called Kibriscik, where I filled my water bottles from the fountains by the mosque. A group of men seated on a bench beneath a nearby mulberry tree called greetings to me. “Çay!” an older man said, more of a demand than an invitation to drink tea with them. I joined the group, and we sipped from shot-glass-sized teacups while they questioned me about my home, my family, and my reasons for riding a bicycle through Turkey. The older man, who spoke some English, seemed dubious of this form of vacation. Why, he asked, was I not at the beach?

“I like the mountains better,” I said in rough Turkish.  

“Where will you stay tonight? Do you have accommodations?”

“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging and pointing at my sleeping bag, strapped over the rear rack of my bike. “I will camp somewhere.”

He wagged a finger at this idea. “There are very dangerous animals in Turkey. Wolves! Bears! You must sleep in a village, in a hotel.”

I had heard this kind of talk many times in Turkey, Bulgaria, and Georgia, and I took these warnings about as seriously as I would children’s stories about man-eating beasts. I knew that bears and wolves lived here, even just a hundred miles southeast of Istanbul, but I wasn’t afraid. Rather, I’d been hoping to see a large predator for years, and the thought that I was among them in this mountain range called the Köro?lus thrilled me.

Anyway, touring cyclists know the most basic tenet of wild camping is to get away from people at dusk, not ride into a strange town.

I nodded in feigned concern and lied, “Okay, I will sleep in a village.” I thanked them for the tea and rolled out of town parodying the men cheerfully as I pedaled. “Camping is dangerous! You must find accommodations. Outside the animals will eat you!”

I love camping and always prefer to sleep outside rather than cram into a grubby bedroom — especially when there is a clear September sky overhead. I turned off the highway on a small dirt road that led toward a high flank of alpine country covered in forest some 10 miles away. Perhaps, I thought, I could get there before dark and sleep in a green streamside meadow with soft grass under my tent, the gold standard of wild camping sites. But the road was rough and the going slow and dusk arrived long before I could reach the high country. It was dry and scrubby here with few trees, but there was no one around so it would do. With a small landslide of shale, I scurried down a steep bank into a stony riverbed and walked my bike across the cobblestones. I moved upstream, looking for some vegetation that would obscure my small tent from the road.

A pile of shriveled bear scat stopped me in my tracks. My eyes widened as I looked around, reassessing my camping spot. I moved cautiously forward — several feet farther lay another pile, also studded with berry seeds and cherry pits. I touched it with my foot. It was soft and fresh. I felt there wasn’t time now to retreat to the highway and move on so I walked another 50 yards, put up my tent behind some willows, and hoped morning would come without incident.  

I ate my dinner, tossed my melon rinds into the stream, and crawled into my tent. Darkness settled as the full moon appeared over the hills. I was dozing off when a large branch snapped a short distance off. I lifted my head and listened but heard no more. I was dozing off again when a clear noise, subtle but troubling, yanked me back awake: swoosh, swoosh, swoosh. A large, thick-legged creature was moving toward me through the grass. A shepherd, maybe? But there were no bells.

I fumbled with my sleeping bag zipper and clambered from my tent in a hurry. There it was,  clear as day in the light of the moon and only 50 feet up the streambed: the hulking figure of a brown bear. Its heavily furred shoulders rolled powerfully with each stride over the cobblestones while its huge head and nose led the way straight toward me. It had the surreal effect on me of seeing a celebrity familiar from television in person, as if Barack Obama or Bono had stumbled across my camp.

The years of ignored bear warnings convened in my head in a rush of clarity. What was I thinking? People actually get killed by bears. I had been directly warned of this, and yet here I was, thanks to my stubborn arrogance, face to face with one of the biggest carnivores in the world.   

“Hey, bear!” I shouted — a tactic learned during hiking trips in Yellowstone as a kid. The wind was flowing down the valley and the bear couldn’t smell me, but now it saw me. It stopped, jumped in alarm, and huffed a terrifying warning. A woman, I’d heard, had been fatally mauled in eastern Turkey recently. Now it was my turn — or not. The bear whirled around and sprinted as fast as a horse straight back the way it had come. It vanished into the brush, leaving me with an image of its muscular hindquarters.

The encounter was over in seconds, but I was charged with giddy adrenaline. I’d seen my brown bear. However, this place was not safe. I had to move my camp. Within five minutes, I was packed and rolling across the riverbed to the bank below the road. Pushing my bike, I started up the 20-foot slope, struggling on the shale. The rocks and gravel slipped six inches for every foot I gained. After several minutes of scrambling, my arms and lower back ached and my calves were quivering. Five feet from the top, I reached a ledge and I was stuck. I tried to calculate a way up, but my bike was a problem. It weighed 60 pounds, and with my feet slipping, I couldn’t lift it over the lip of the road. Bullets of sweat poured off my nose.  

Then I froze. A vehicle was puttering up the road. “Now what?” I whispered as I turned off my headlamp and ducked against the ledge. I saw a pickup truck round the bend moving suspiciously slowly. To my alarm, I saw a spotlight and a rifle aimed out the window. I clung to the rock and hugged my bike as the truck grumbled by just over my head. It passed slowly, rifle barrel aimed and ready to fire, and continued and rounded a curve. Half-panicked, I slid back down the bank and rolled my bike farther down the gully to find an easier way out. Two gunshots split the air. I yelped and ducked, then glanced back and hurried on.

At a gentler slope, I made another attempt at escaping the gully. As I fought my way up, I heard the truck engine again and saw the headlights on the road. The men were coming back, still at a crawl, spotlight in the gully. I knew they were hunters, but this was clearly an illicit hunt. What would these men do if they found a witness to their poaching? Praying that my feet would hold, I directed all the strength I could into my effort and was successful at last at shoving the bike over the ledge. I leaped after it, righted the bike, mounted, clicked into my pedals, and in a moment was rolling easily toward the highway. I kept my lights off until I hit the asphalt, then lit up and sprinted up a long grade and several switchbacks in the moonlight.

I crested a plateau and was greeted by what normally were the strongest deterrents to making camp — the lights of a village and men’s voices nearby in the night. I pulled over and threw out my tarp in a fallow field just 200 feet from a home. Dogs barked and unseen people chattered. There would be no bears or flying bullets here. I stretched out on my sleeping bag in the warm night and, drenched in sweat, finally got some sleep.

At dawn, I rode into town. At the water fountain, several men gathered around me. They asked what I was up to, where I was from, where I had been, and where I was going. One man nodded toward my sleeping bag and said in English, “You are camping? That is dangerous here. Many bears live in these mountains.”

The greater peril may have been trigger-happy Turkish hunters. But I nodded in honest agreement and answered, “It’s okay, I will be sleeping near a village.” And I wasn’t lying.  

The post Final Mile: Here There Be Bears, Seriously appeared first on Adventure Cycling Association.

Every bicycle trip of any duration, and I’m guessing almost any long trip of any kind, eventually has one. At least mine do. My last bicycle trip, a 1,500-mile journey from Olympia, Washington, to my hometown of Bozeman, Montana, had one. It arrived somewhere near Clayton, Idaho. It spent the night with me. It arose at about the same time I did the next morning and proceeded to follow me all the way to Salmon, Idaho. I couldn’t seem to shake it. The Dark Cloud had found me.

My experience suggests that the Dark Cloud generally has nothing to with the weather. This particular three-week trip had offered up nothing but blue skies and warm temperatures. Nary a cloud in sight. Perfect weather for cycling. Perfect weather for anything. Nope, for me the Dark Cloud had no connection to the weather. It was under sunny skies, with the Salmon River meandering peacefully through a broad valley, somewhere along Idaho Route 75, that my mood went to hell! The Dark Cloud had found me.

Looking back on that day, I admit that I was somewhat tired. I was well into the second week of the trip and perhaps I could’ve used a day off my bike. There was a slight headwind, but nothing to be particularly concerned about. Even on this trip, I’d pedaled into much worse. Headwinds, that is. Traffic was light. The birds were chirping. But this subtle grumpiness wormed its way into me and began to darken my thoughts. For the first time on this ride, my mind had made the long leap home and left me and my body stuck on this bike in the middle of Idaho. My thoughts became focused on my life in Bozeman. I found myself thinking about work projects, deadlines, emails; in short, obligations. Fatal. Mistake. I opened the door, and the Dark Cloud walked right on in and sat down in the big fat sofa of my mind.

Suddenly, I gave up on the moment — which is, in my opinion, the inherent joy of the bicycle journey. I started scheming. Planning shortcuts. I could get home a day earlier if … if only I could get over Lemhi Pass — a short cut between Salmon, Idaho, and Dillon, Montana. I had driven over this road several years before. Taking this route would buy me a day, maybe more if I got some strong tailwinds. Sure, it’s a long steep climb over rough gravel roads, but what the heck, Lewis and Clark walked over the thing in 1805. If need be I could hitchhike or throw my bike into the back of a passing pickup truck driven by a friendly rancher. Perhaps there’s a shuttle bus. I became obsessed with the idea of getting over Lemhi Pass and abandoning my original route up and over Chief Joseph Pass and through the Big Hole Valley. It would buy me a whole day! I could be home by Friday!

To facilitate my plan of escape over Lemhi Pass, I needed a Montana Highway Map. A visual aid to help me mull over my options. Rolling into Clayton, Idaho, I see a gas station on my right. Like the search for the Holy Grail, I’m drawn in my quest to locate a Montana Highway Map. Something to show me the way home — the shortest and quickest way home. The gas station offers up the nauseatingly typical mini-mart–quality products. I scan the shelves for a Montana Highway Map. And there, right between the 2009 Idaho Hunting/Fishing Regulations and the free Smokey the Bear handout reminding us that “Only You Can Prevent Wildfires!” is the Grail — a single official state-issued Montana Highway Map. And free and for the taking. I’m as good as home!

Not so quick. “You’ve got to pay for that,” says an old man who apparently owns the store and has walked up behind me. “You’re kidding,” I say, “they give these away in Montana.” “Not around here they don’t,” he bluntly replies. I turn the map in my hands. “Look,” I excitedly point out, “it says right on the map — FOR FREE DISTRIBUTION.” He takes the map from my hands. Puts on his reading glasses. Slowly and carefully, treating it like it’s the only remaining copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he opens the map. “He’s looking for a price tag which he isn’t going to find,” I think to myself. “Nope,” he says, “FOR FREE DISTRIBUTION is in Montana only.” He’s not kidding. Okay, I’ll play his game. I want that map. No, I need that map. “How much?” I ask. Slowly and carefully he folds the map and puts his reading glasses back in his shirt pocket. Looking me right in the eye, he states his price, “Five dollars.” I return his stare. My sense of injustice boils over. “Five dollars? That’s highway robbery,” I say. Fuming, I turn and leave the store, regretting that I had bought a pint of milk prior to finding the map on the shelf. The Dark Cloud happily follows me out the door.

Into Challis, Idaho I ride. I grumble to myself as I climb a persistently moderate hill into town, “Why did they put the town up here, it could be down on the river.” The wind kicks up, dust is in the air. I find a very mediocre campsite and set my tent up behind the seasonally-retired U.S. Forest Service trailers. Room with no view — and all for only 20 dollars a night! The shower is warm at best. I can’t find what I wanted for dinner. No one seems particularly friendly. You get the picture. The Dark Cloud was having a grand old time (did I just hear a chuckle?) I, however, was not.

I awake and pack up for Salmon, Idaho. Thoughts of escape over Lemhi Pass fill my head. Ignoring some delightfully lovely landscape, the day becomes a mental blur. I pedal into Salmon, arriving in the early afternoon. “Hmm,” I say to myself, “seems like a nice little town.” An attractive city park is situated right on the Salmon River. A sculpture of a grizzly bear snagging a salmon out of the air draws attention to the natural beauty of the place. I go to the Sacajawea Center and spend a pleasant hour strolling through the interpretive center which not only discusses the famous explorers, Lewis and Clark, but also the people of Sacajawea’s homeland — the Lemhi-Shoshone. The Dark Cloud shudders.

As I ride down a side street, a fellow crossing ahead of me stops and stares. “Where’re you headed?” he asks. “Montana,” I respond. “Started in Olympia, Washington, a week or so ago.” “That’s a long trip,” he says. “Need a place to stay for the night?” The Dark Cloud is in serious trouble. “Sure,” I say, “that’d be nice.” We walk down the sidewalk together — an unemployed logger and a touring cyclist. He points out his girlfriend’s front yard — “Put your tent up anywhere you like.” The Dark Cloud has been splintered by a shaft of light and, once again, I’m back in the moment. His girlfriend comes home. Lawn chairs come out. Cold beer. Good conversation. Friendly people. I’m taking a shower in the home of a complete stranger. The Dark Cloud has been blown away by a cleansing wind. I’m free of its grip. “Of course I am,” I think to myself, “I’m on a bicycle journey.”

That evening, after finally mentally mellowing out, I let go of the Lemhi Pass-shortcut obsession.
“Just stick to the original plan — ride your route,” I say out loud to no one but myself. “It’s a good route. You’ll get there when you get there.”

That night, I sleep like a baby and wake to a beautiful morning, one filled with sunshine, promising tailwinds, and not a dark cloud in sight! 

The post Final Mile: The Dark Cloud appeared first on Adventure Cycling Association.