In 1887 a twenty-one-year-old newspaperman named George Nellis
(1865-1948) rode a bicycle from Herkimer, New York, to San
Francisco in seventy-two days, surpassing the transcontinental
bicycle record by several weeks. He averaged fifty miles a day
pedalling a fifty-two-inch, high-wheeled Columbia Expert "ordinary"
bicycle with a tubular steel frame and hard rubber tires, and he
lost twenty-three pounds in the process. He bicycled ever westward
through sleepy villages, farmlands, and growing cities of the
rapidly changing nation and trekked across uninhabited stretches of
prairies and mountains that marked its shrinking frontier.
Following his daily ten-hour rides, Nellis sat down and wrote
letters about his adventures to his hometown newspapers and a
national cycling magazine to finance his cross-country journey.
Nellis's epic journey over dirt paths, muddy roads, and occasional
railroad ties was plagued by terrible weather, frightening
experiences, and odd encounters; yet it was also enriched by
breathtaking natural wonders and the generous spirit of many people
he met. He nearly drowned in a flash flood, was chased by a furious
bull, killed a coyote that accosted him one night, fell victim to
mirages in Utah's Great Salt Desert, narrowly missed a tremendous
fire that wiped out half of a California town only hours after he
had left, and witnessed a horrifying accident on a train track.
Nellis also managed to meet the legendary baseball player A. G.
Spalding in Chicago, take in professional baseball games in Detroit
and Chicago, participate in several bicycle races in Omaha, attend
an opera in Cheyenne, Wyoming, enjoy a circus, and eat over two
dozen bananas in one sitting in Osceola, Indiana. Drawing on
Nellis's letters and media coverage of the trip, Kevin J. Hayes
recreates in compelling detail this amazing trip and the many
ordinary and extraordinary faces of late-nineteenth-century America
that were once revealed to a young bicyclist. Purchase the audio
edition.
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