CHAPTER III.ENTERTAINED BY A NATIONALLY FAMED CYCLIST—KRUEGER BREAKS THE COASTING RECORD—TURNED OUT OF SHELTER AT MIDNIGHT.Among my letters was one bearing a check from the Inter Ocean, and I lost no time in going to the bank to obtain the money upon it. The cashier required strong identification, which I, being a stranger, was of course unable to give. I then applied to President Lindsay in person.Mr. Lindsay, I am proud to record, is a gentleman who reads the newspapers. He had already heard of the Inter Ocean cyclists, and when he saw me he said: “My friend, you appear honest, and you look all you say you are, when it comes to riding across the country. It is a compliment when I tell you that you almost look like a tramp. Go get your money,” and he nodded to the cashier. At the hotel I found everybody well and eating, “Jim” P. Anderson doing some especially good work with a knife and fork. Mrs. McIlrath had dried her clothes and was none the worse for her icy bath. Cripple Creek by gaslight is quite an attractive place for a “rounder,” as I learned that evening, when with guides the gentlemen of our party visited the dance halls, colored people’s “rags” and free-and-easy theaters that line “Push Street.” The next day was spent in a visit to the El Paso and other mines. Friday, May 28, was scheduled for our departure, but rain made it impossible. Saturday, however, we got away at 6:30 in the morning for Leadville by way of Florrisant, Hartzel, Buena Vista and Granite. We had a day of hard riding, and by 8 o’clock in the evening Mrs. McIlrath was ill and too fagged to go further. After supper at the house of a road overseer, we came to a ranch, where we applied for shelter. For the first time since we had left Chicago we were bluntly refused. Mrs. McIlrath cried aloud when a gray-bearded, hook-nosed old man told her that he had no place for her to sleep. I argued to him that she was ill, but he shut off my pleading by telling me that two miles away was a hotel that had been built expressly for the accommodation of invalids. There was nothing to do but trudge on to this hotel, which we found to be the Hartzel Springs House, owned by and named for the gray-bearded gentleman who had without courtesy closed his doors in our face.We started Sunday morning on a 60-mile run to Buena Vista, following the railroad tracks. At Hill Top we unexpectedly met Editor-in-Chief Martin of the Rocky Mountain News, and several other writers from the Denver papers. They fell in line with us, but wished to take their time in admiring the beautiful scenery; but upon Duxbury’s suggestion that we “could not eat the blooming scenery,” they relented and we pushed on to Buena Vista, where we arrived on the 26th. Here we were entertained by Ed. Krueger, now a cyclist of national fame, Mr. and Mrs. Dean and Mr. and Mrs. C. Jones. The following day we went out to Hot Springs to see Krueger attempt to break the world’s five-mile coasting record. After dinner at the Hot Springs hotel we began preparations for Krueger’s race. The wind had subsided as if especially for his benefit. He was not satisfied with his own machine, believing it not strong enough for the test, so he used my wheel with his own saddle, handle-bars and pedals. Dean, Jones and Mr. Mason andmyself acted as timers, and Duxbury officiated as starter. At 4 o’clock Krueger mounted his wheel and shot down the hill. Duxbury had taken the time of his start, and it was left for us to note the moment of his arrival. By subtracting the difference, and also splitting the variation of time in the watches of the four timers at the end of the course, we were enabled to gain a fairly accurate estimate of the traveling time. Krueger lost both pedals half way down the incline, but he curled his feet up and crossed the line in 10 minutes and 10 seconds, which I consider wonderful. We started the next morning, May 28, for Leadville, with Krueger also in the party. It was my turn for a disaster, and I came near bringing the Inter Ocean tour to a finish. In crossing a bridge of pine logs my front wheel slipped, and with one foot entangled in the spokes of the rear wheel I stood, eyes protruding, staring at a black rock 300 feet below. A move backward with one foot on terra firma might prove fatal, and to attempt to disengage the other foot meant the release and loss of the bicycle. Nothing remained but to fall backwards on the hard road in a sitting posture, which I did, and Mrs. McIlrath rescued me, scolding as a mother would a disobedient child. We made but a short day of it in Leadville for various reasons, principally that Duxbury was seized with the hemorrhage which threatened him on Mount Rosa. At 5 in the afternoon we left for Red Cliffe, 35 miles away. At the mouth of the Tennessee Pass Tunnel, eleven miles from Leadville, we were overtaken by another storm, more violent than any we had yet passed through. We were made prisoners in the tunnel for an hour or more, the dense blackness rendering it impossible for us to proceed with any degree of safety. Cautiously feeling our way along the walls we managed to emerge from the tunnel and in the night to pedal along to the nearest section-house. This turned out to be a disused box car with bunks built along the sides for the section hands. The section boss, a kind-hearted Irishman, readily gave us permission to stretch ourselves on the floor for a night’s rest. We were soon asleep, but about 11 o’clock he waked us and informed us that he was sorry, but he could not help being forced to ask us to leave. The reason, he explained, was that his wife had suddenly returned and that she was the real “boss” of the establishment. As she had not been consulted in the beginning upon the matter of having us for lodgers she had declined to let us remain as her husband’s guests. I begged and implored but without avail, and in a storm we set off for the telegraph office, half a mile away. The operator was a young woman and the sight of one of her sisters in distress was more than enough to win an invitation to make ourselves as comfortable as the office would allow. I was enraged almost to the point of personal violence at the thought of an ill-temperedwoman’s whim causing us such needless annoyance, but as it afterward transpired our experience with the woman section boss was but trivial. It is an even break in this part of the country what manner of treatment a touring wheelman will receive at the hands of the people.A pleasant surprise was ours the morning we rode into Glenwood Springs, Colo., and registered at the palatial Colorado Hotel. A party of Chicagoans, composed of Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Hynes, Mrs. Hynes' mother and sister, Mrs. and Miss Way, en route from California, were at the hotel and soon made themselves known. They had been present at one of the Inter Ocean receptions to us in Chicago and the pleasure of meeting was therefore doubled. We spent the night at Glenwood Springs, leaving the morning of May 31. An accident to Mrs. McIlrath on June 2 between Palisades and DuBeque delayed us the greater part of the week. It was the machine that suffered the real damage, although she herself was rendered unconscious for half an hour. In riding over a sluice she took a tumble, but the accident was not discovered for some moments afterward. I chanced to look over my shoulder and saw her figure stretched in the middle of the road with the machine a shapeless mass by her side. “Tommy Atkins” and I worked hard to revive her, and the walk to DuBeque, six miles ahead, was one of the greatest efforts she was called on to put forth during our entire journey. There was no repair shop in DuBeque, and it was evident at once that we should have to take a freight train for Grand Junction, the nearest point at which we might expect repairs. Our stay at Grand Junction was pleasant in the extreme, and we certainly did not begrudge the three days spent in the city waiting the repairs to arrive from Chicago. Friends who had heard of our tour met us at Grand Junction and straightway began exerting themselves for our entertainment. Their program embraced a visit to Teller Institute, an Indian school near by, and on the evening of our second day a complimentary dinner was given the Inter Ocean tourists by Judge Gray, a jolly, 300-pound enthusiast upon all topics pertaining to the wheel. On June 8 the fork for Mrs. McIlrath’s wheel arrived from Chicago, and an hour later we were ready for one of the most difficult stages of our entire trip, that of crossing 290 miles of desert between Grand Junction and Springville, Utah. Tom Roe, known to every cyclist from coast to coast, once attempted it on his ride from San Francisco to New York City and failed. John McGuire, editor of the Cycling West, who has wheeled from Denver to Salt Lake City three times, never succeeded in crossing the desert entirely. When we announced that it was our intention to make it without a break from boundary to boundary, there was a general laugh of ridicule on all sides. Everyone predicted that we would fail before we had done 100 miles from Grand Junction. We left at noon and rolled out on the white sandy roads, making 12 miles before the first stop. The great difficulties of our trip across the desert proved to be not so much the hard ploughing through sand as the general inhospitality characteristic of the section houses which dot the vast waste. The section hands are mostly Italians and Chinamen, with a fair sprinkling of Indians. Asked for food or water, they either would not or pretended they could not understand. As the next town from Fruita, our first stop, was 67 miles distant, it will be guessed that we had many a trying meeting with section hands before we came to a hotel. We had been led to expect no kindness from these foreigners, but “Tommy Atkins” and I had sworn to win to our side every man that chance placed in our way. Some of our efforts to make ourselves agreeable in hopes of a hearty welcome were ludicrous.At a ranch near Westwater our party was refused shelter, the mother of three sons residing there telling us that the boys were away from home, one of them having gone to the next settlement for provisions. The pantry, she said, was all but empty, and were she to take in three hungry persons like myself, Mrs. McIlrath and Duxbury, there would be nothing left by the next morning. It was an uncertainty when the supplies were to arrive and a former experience had made her firm in her intentions to take no risks when food promised to be scarce. Our combined entreaties weakened the old lady to the extent that she consented to take in Mrs. McIlrath at least. She warned us that Mrs. McIlrath would have nothing to eat but bread and milk, but then even bread and milk seemed more than a dinner at Chicago’s best hotel, and leaving my wife with her benefactress, Duxbury and I went forth determined to charm the Italians at the section house we had passed a few miles back. As soon as we had convinced the Italians that we were not in the service of the railroad as private detectives, or that we were not a pair of the thousands of tramps making the journey from coast to coast on foot, they not only gave us supper but volunteered permission to spend the night before their fire. When we started the next morning I offered money to the section boss, but he declined it, saying I could repay him by delivering a letter which he handed me, addressed to his brother at a section house a few hundred miles ahead.As I have remarked before, the scarcity of water in this part of the country necessitates the shipment of it to the section houses and stations by the railroads. This same scarcity of water was indirectly responsible for a serious accident to my bicycle. I mention it here to show wheelmen what can be accomplished in the way of imprompturepairing when the emergency demands it. The tramps who steal rides on the freight trains never go without a bottle or a tin can of water. As these vessels are drained of their precious contents at different intervals along the roadbed, “Weary Willie” is in the habit of throwing them away. The result is that the tracks for miles and miles are spangled with bits of sharp glass and tin. I was not aware of the risk I was taking with my tire until I ran over one of these “mines.” There was an explosion like a shotgun, and when I found myself on the ground I realized that it was not the “mine” that had exploded, but my pneumatic. The puncture was, properly speaking, a gash three inches long in the tire of my rear wheel. Here was a pretty state of affairs! Not a dealer in supplies or a repair shop within 100 miles, and not one of the party with a complete repair kit. There seemed no alternative but a long walk to the nearest section house or ranch, there to await until “Tommy Atkins” could make the next town and express me the needed material. But “necessity is the mother of invention,” and under the press of circumstances I hit upon a scheme which afterward proved to work like a charm. First, I wet the edges of the rent with cement, sewing them together superficially, or, as the ladies would say, I “basted” them. Then I made a covering out of pieces of a buckskin glove, moistened with medicines from one of my vials. This covering I stretched on as tightly as possible over the gap. Now came a coat of cement, then the tire tape covering all, and my repair was as complete as I could make it until a cycle supply house could be found or my advance luggage reached. I did not jump on my wheel and ride directly, realizing that until the buckskin had dried and shrunken nothing was to hold the parted ends of tire but a few slight stitches. Mrs. McIlrath then came forward with a suggestion which was acted upon and proving itself to be one of much wisdom. It was that she take my mended tire and place it on her front wheel, where the pressure would be slightest, putting her front tire upon the rear wheel of my machine. For the benefit of doubting wheelmen, I must add that with three inflations daily, the crude mend held itself and answered purposes until Salt Lake City was reached a week later.
CHAPTER III.ENTERTAINED BY A NATIONALLY FAMED CYCLIST—KRUEGER BREAKS THE COASTING RECORD—TURNED OUT OF SHELTER AT MIDNIGHT.Among my letters was one bearing a check from the Inter Ocean, and I lost no time in going to the bank to obtain the money upon it. The cashier required strong identification, which I, being a stranger, was of course unable to give. I then applied to President Lindsay in person.Mr. Lindsay, I am proud to record, is a gentleman who reads the newspapers. He had already heard of the Inter Ocean cyclists, and when he saw me he said: “My friend, you appear honest, and you look all you say you are, when it comes to riding across the country. It is a compliment when I tell you that you almost look like a tramp. Go get your money,” and he nodded to the cashier. At the hotel I found everybody well and eating, “Jim” P. Anderson doing some especially good work with a knife and fork. Mrs. McIlrath had dried her clothes and was none the worse for her icy bath. Cripple Creek by gaslight is quite an attractive place for a “rounder,” as I learned that evening, when with guides the gentlemen of our party visited the dance halls, colored people’s “rags” and free-and-easy theaters that line “Push Street.” The next day was spent in a visit to the El Paso and other mines. Friday, May 28, was scheduled for our departure, but rain made it impossible. Saturday, however, we got away at 6:30 in the morning for Leadville by way of Florrisant, Hartzel, Buena Vista and Granite. We had a day of hard riding, and by 8 o’clock in the evening Mrs. McIlrath was ill and too fagged to go further. After supper at the house of a road overseer, we came to a ranch, where we applied for shelter. For the first time since we had left Chicago we were bluntly refused. Mrs. McIlrath cried aloud when a gray-bearded, hook-nosed old man told her that he had no place for her to sleep. I argued to him that she was ill, but he shut off my pleading by telling me that two miles away was a hotel that had been built expressly for the accommodation of invalids. There was nothing to do but trudge on to this hotel, which we found to be the Hartzel Springs House, owned by and named for the gray-bearded gentleman who had without courtesy closed his doors in our face.We started Sunday morning on a 60-mile run to Buena Vista, following the railroad tracks. At Hill Top we unexpectedly met Editor-in-Chief Martin of the Rocky Mountain News, and several other writers from the Denver papers. They fell in line with us, but wished to take their time in admiring the beautiful scenery; but upon Duxbury’s suggestion that we “could not eat the blooming scenery,” they relented and we pushed on to Buena Vista, where we arrived on the 26th. Here we were entertained by Ed. Krueger, now a cyclist of national fame, Mr. and Mrs. Dean and Mr. and Mrs. C. Jones. The following day we went out to Hot Springs to see Krueger attempt to break the world’s five-mile coasting record. After dinner at the Hot Springs hotel we began preparations for Krueger’s race. The wind had subsided as if especially for his benefit. He was not satisfied with his own machine, believing it not strong enough for the test, so he used my wheel with his own saddle, handle-bars and pedals. Dean, Jones and Mr. Mason andmyself acted as timers, and Duxbury officiated as starter. At 4 o’clock Krueger mounted his wheel and shot down the hill. Duxbury had taken the time of his start, and it was left for us to note the moment of his arrival. By subtracting the difference, and also splitting the variation of time in the watches of the four timers at the end of the course, we were enabled to gain a fairly accurate estimate of the traveling time. Krueger lost both pedals half way down the incline, but he curled his feet up and crossed the line in 10 minutes and 10 seconds, which I consider wonderful. We started the next morning, May 28, for Leadville, with Krueger also in the party. It was my turn for a disaster, and I came near bringing the Inter Ocean tour to a finish. In crossing a bridge of pine logs my front wheel slipped, and with one foot entangled in the spokes of the rear wheel I stood, eyes protruding, staring at a black rock 300 feet below. A move backward with one foot on terra firma might prove fatal, and to attempt to disengage the other foot meant the release and loss of the bicycle. Nothing remained but to fall backwards on the hard road in a sitting posture, which I did, and Mrs. McIlrath rescued me, scolding as a mother would a disobedient child. We made but a short day of it in Leadville for various reasons, principally that Duxbury was seized with the hemorrhage which threatened him on Mount Rosa. At 5 in the afternoon we left for Red Cliffe, 35 miles away. At the mouth of the Tennessee Pass Tunnel, eleven miles from Leadville, we were overtaken by another storm, more violent than any we had yet passed through. We were made prisoners in the tunnel for an hour or more, the dense blackness rendering it impossible for us to proceed with any degree of safety. Cautiously feeling our way along the walls we managed to emerge from the tunnel and in the night to pedal along to the nearest section-house. This turned out to be a disused box car with bunks built along the sides for the section hands. The section boss, a kind-hearted Irishman, readily gave us permission to stretch ourselves on the floor for a night’s rest. We were soon asleep, but about 11 o’clock he waked us and informed us that he was sorry, but he could not help being forced to ask us to leave. The reason, he explained, was that his wife had suddenly returned and that she was the real “boss” of the establishment. As she had not been consulted in the beginning upon the matter of having us for lodgers she had declined to let us remain as her husband’s guests. I begged and implored but without avail, and in a storm we set off for the telegraph office, half a mile away. The operator was a young woman and the sight of one of her sisters in distress was more than enough to win an invitation to make ourselves as comfortable as the office would allow. I was enraged almost to the point of personal violence at the thought of an ill-temperedwoman’s whim causing us such needless annoyance, but as it afterward transpired our experience with the woman section boss was but trivial. It is an even break in this part of the country what manner of treatment a touring wheelman will receive at the hands of the people.A pleasant surprise was ours the morning we rode into Glenwood Springs, Colo., and registered at the palatial Colorado Hotel. A party of Chicagoans, composed of Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Hynes, Mrs. Hynes' mother and sister, Mrs. and Miss Way, en route from California, were at the hotel and soon made themselves known. They had been present at one of the Inter Ocean receptions to us in Chicago and the pleasure of meeting was therefore doubled. We spent the night at Glenwood Springs, leaving the morning of May 31. An accident to Mrs. McIlrath on June 2 between Palisades and DuBeque delayed us the greater part of the week. It was the machine that suffered the real damage, although she herself was rendered unconscious for half an hour. In riding over a sluice she took a tumble, but the accident was not discovered for some moments afterward. I chanced to look over my shoulder and saw her figure stretched in the middle of the road with the machine a shapeless mass by her side. “Tommy Atkins” and I worked hard to revive her, and the walk to DuBeque, six miles ahead, was one of the greatest efforts she was called on to put forth during our entire journey. There was no repair shop in DuBeque, and it was evident at once that we should have to take a freight train for Grand Junction, the nearest point at which we might expect repairs. Our stay at Grand Junction was pleasant in the extreme, and we certainly did not begrudge the three days spent in the city waiting the repairs to arrive from Chicago. Friends who had heard of our tour met us at Grand Junction and straightway began exerting themselves for our entertainment. Their program embraced a visit to Teller Institute, an Indian school near by, and on the evening of our second day a complimentary dinner was given the Inter Ocean tourists by Judge Gray, a jolly, 300-pound enthusiast upon all topics pertaining to the wheel. On June 8 the fork for Mrs. McIlrath’s wheel arrived from Chicago, and an hour later we were ready for one of the most difficult stages of our entire trip, that of crossing 290 miles of desert between Grand Junction and Springville, Utah. Tom Roe, known to every cyclist from coast to coast, once attempted it on his ride from San Francisco to New York City and failed. John McGuire, editor of the Cycling West, who has wheeled from Denver to Salt Lake City three times, never succeeded in crossing the desert entirely. When we announced that it was our intention to make it without a break from boundary to boundary, there was a general laugh of ridicule on all sides. Everyone predicted that we would fail before we had done 100 miles from Grand Junction. We left at noon and rolled out on the white sandy roads, making 12 miles before the first stop. The great difficulties of our trip across the desert proved to be not so much the hard ploughing through sand as the general inhospitality characteristic of the section houses which dot the vast waste. The section hands are mostly Italians and Chinamen, with a fair sprinkling of Indians. Asked for food or water, they either would not or pretended they could not understand. As the next town from Fruita, our first stop, was 67 miles distant, it will be guessed that we had many a trying meeting with section hands before we came to a hotel. We had been led to expect no kindness from these foreigners, but “Tommy Atkins” and I had sworn to win to our side every man that chance placed in our way. Some of our efforts to make ourselves agreeable in hopes of a hearty welcome were ludicrous.At a ranch near Westwater our party was refused shelter, the mother of three sons residing there telling us that the boys were away from home, one of them having gone to the next settlement for provisions. The pantry, she said, was all but empty, and were she to take in three hungry persons like myself, Mrs. McIlrath and Duxbury, there would be nothing left by the next morning. It was an uncertainty when the supplies were to arrive and a former experience had made her firm in her intentions to take no risks when food promised to be scarce. Our combined entreaties weakened the old lady to the extent that she consented to take in Mrs. McIlrath at least. She warned us that Mrs. McIlrath would have nothing to eat but bread and milk, but then even bread and milk seemed more than a dinner at Chicago’s best hotel, and leaving my wife with her benefactress, Duxbury and I went forth determined to charm the Italians at the section house we had passed a few miles back. As soon as we had convinced the Italians that we were not in the service of the railroad as private detectives, or that we were not a pair of the thousands of tramps making the journey from coast to coast on foot, they not only gave us supper but volunteered permission to spend the night before their fire. When we started the next morning I offered money to the section boss, but he declined it, saying I could repay him by delivering a letter which he handed me, addressed to his brother at a section house a few hundred miles ahead.As I have remarked before, the scarcity of water in this part of the country necessitates the shipment of it to the section houses and stations by the railroads. This same scarcity of water was indirectly responsible for a serious accident to my bicycle. I mention it here to show wheelmen what can be accomplished in the way of imprompturepairing when the emergency demands it. The tramps who steal rides on the freight trains never go without a bottle or a tin can of water. As these vessels are drained of their precious contents at different intervals along the roadbed, “Weary Willie” is in the habit of throwing them away. The result is that the tracks for miles and miles are spangled with bits of sharp glass and tin. I was not aware of the risk I was taking with my tire until I ran over one of these “mines.” There was an explosion like a shotgun, and when I found myself on the ground I realized that it was not the “mine” that had exploded, but my pneumatic. The puncture was, properly speaking, a gash three inches long in the tire of my rear wheel. Here was a pretty state of affairs! Not a dealer in supplies or a repair shop within 100 miles, and not one of the party with a complete repair kit. There seemed no alternative but a long walk to the nearest section house or ranch, there to await until “Tommy Atkins” could make the next town and express me the needed material. But “necessity is the mother of invention,” and under the press of circumstances I hit upon a scheme which afterward proved to work like a charm. First, I wet the edges of the rent with cement, sewing them together superficially, or, as the ladies would say, I “basted” them. Then I made a covering out of pieces of a buckskin glove, moistened with medicines from one of my vials. This covering I stretched on as tightly as possible over the gap. Now came a coat of cement, then the tire tape covering all, and my repair was as complete as I could make it until a cycle supply house could be found or my advance luggage reached. I did not jump on my wheel and ride directly, realizing that until the buckskin had dried and shrunken nothing was to hold the parted ends of tire but a few slight stitches. Mrs. McIlrath then came forward with a suggestion which was acted upon and proving itself to be one of much wisdom. It was that she take my mended tire and place it on her front wheel, where the pressure would be slightest, putting her front tire upon the rear wheel of my machine. For the benefit of doubting wheelmen, I must add that with three inflations daily, the crude mend held itself and answered purposes until Salt Lake City was reached a week later.
CHAPTER III.ENTERTAINED BY A NATIONALLY FAMED CYCLIST—KRUEGER BREAKS THE COASTING RECORD—TURNED OUT OF SHELTER AT MIDNIGHT.
ENTERTAINED BY A NATIONALLY FAMED CYCLIST—KRUEGER BREAKS THE COASTING RECORD—TURNED OUT OF SHELTER AT MIDNIGHT.
ENTERTAINED BY A NATIONALLY FAMED CYCLIST—KRUEGER BREAKS THE COASTING RECORD—TURNED OUT OF SHELTER AT MIDNIGHT.
Among my letters was one bearing a check from the Inter Ocean, and I lost no time in going to the bank to obtain the money upon it. The cashier required strong identification, which I, being a stranger, was of course unable to give. I then applied to President Lindsay in person.Mr. Lindsay, I am proud to record, is a gentleman who reads the newspapers. He had already heard of the Inter Ocean cyclists, and when he saw me he said: “My friend, you appear honest, and you look all you say you are, when it comes to riding across the country. It is a compliment when I tell you that you almost look like a tramp. Go get your money,” and he nodded to the cashier. At the hotel I found everybody well and eating, “Jim” P. Anderson doing some especially good work with a knife and fork. Mrs. McIlrath had dried her clothes and was none the worse for her icy bath. Cripple Creek by gaslight is quite an attractive place for a “rounder,” as I learned that evening, when with guides the gentlemen of our party visited the dance halls, colored people’s “rags” and free-and-easy theaters that line “Push Street.” The next day was spent in a visit to the El Paso and other mines. Friday, May 28, was scheduled for our departure, but rain made it impossible. Saturday, however, we got away at 6:30 in the morning for Leadville by way of Florrisant, Hartzel, Buena Vista and Granite. We had a day of hard riding, and by 8 o’clock in the evening Mrs. McIlrath was ill and too fagged to go further. After supper at the house of a road overseer, we came to a ranch, where we applied for shelter. For the first time since we had left Chicago we were bluntly refused. Mrs. McIlrath cried aloud when a gray-bearded, hook-nosed old man told her that he had no place for her to sleep. I argued to him that she was ill, but he shut off my pleading by telling me that two miles away was a hotel that had been built expressly for the accommodation of invalids. There was nothing to do but trudge on to this hotel, which we found to be the Hartzel Springs House, owned by and named for the gray-bearded gentleman who had without courtesy closed his doors in our face.We started Sunday morning on a 60-mile run to Buena Vista, following the railroad tracks. At Hill Top we unexpectedly met Editor-in-Chief Martin of the Rocky Mountain News, and several other writers from the Denver papers. They fell in line with us, but wished to take their time in admiring the beautiful scenery; but upon Duxbury’s suggestion that we “could not eat the blooming scenery,” they relented and we pushed on to Buena Vista, where we arrived on the 26th. Here we were entertained by Ed. Krueger, now a cyclist of national fame, Mr. and Mrs. Dean and Mr. and Mrs. C. Jones. The following day we went out to Hot Springs to see Krueger attempt to break the world’s five-mile coasting record. After dinner at the Hot Springs hotel we began preparations for Krueger’s race. The wind had subsided as if especially for his benefit. He was not satisfied with his own machine, believing it not strong enough for the test, so he used my wheel with his own saddle, handle-bars and pedals. Dean, Jones and Mr. Mason andmyself acted as timers, and Duxbury officiated as starter. At 4 o’clock Krueger mounted his wheel and shot down the hill. Duxbury had taken the time of his start, and it was left for us to note the moment of his arrival. By subtracting the difference, and also splitting the variation of time in the watches of the four timers at the end of the course, we were enabled to gain a fairly accurate estimate of the traveling time. Krueger lost both pedals half way down the incline, but he curled his feet up and crossed the line in 10 minutes and 10 seconds, which I consider wonderful. We started the next morning, May 28, for Leadville, with Krueger also in the party. It was my turn for a disaster, and I came near bringing the Inter Ocean tour to a finish. In crossing a bridge of pine logs my front wheel slipped, and with one foot entangled in the spokes of the rear wheel I stood, eyes protruding, staring at a black rock 300 feet below. A move backward with one foot on terra firma might prove fatal, and to attempt to disengage the other foot meant the release and loss of the bicycle. Nothing remained but to fall backwards on the hard road in a sitting posture, which I did, and Mrs. McIlrath rescued me, scolding as a mother would a disobedient child. We made but a short day of it in Leadville for various reasons, principally that Duxbury was seized with the hemorrhage which threatened him on Mount Rosa. At 5 in the afternoon we left for Red Cliffe, 35 miles away. At the mouth of the Tennessee Pass Tunnel, eleven miles from Leadville, we were overtaken by another storm, more violent than any we had yet passed through. We were made prisoners in the tunnel for an hour or more, the dense blackness rendering it impossible for us to proceed with any degree of safety. Cautiously feeling our way along the walls we managed to emerge from the tunnel and in the night to pedal along to the nearest section-house. This turned out to be a disused box car with bunks built along the sides for the section hands. The section boss, a kind-hearted Irishman, readily gave us permission to stretch ourselves on the floor for a night’s rest. We were soon asleep, but about 11 o’clock he waked us and informed us that he was sorry, but he could not help being forced to ask us to leave. The reason, he explained, was that his wife had suddenly returned and that she was the real “boss” of the establishment. As she had not been consulted in the beginning upon the matter of having us for lodgers she had declined to let us remain as her husband’s guests. I begged and implored but without avail, and in a storm we set off for the telegraph office, half a mile away. The operator was a young woman and the sight of one of her sisters in distress was more than enough to win an invitation to make ourselves as comfortable as the office would allow. I was enraged almost to the point of personal violence at the thought of an ill-temperedwoman’s whim causing us such needless annoyance, but as it afterward transpired our experience with the woman section boss was but trivial. It is an even break in this part of the country what manner of treatment a touring wheelman will receive at the hands of the people.A pleasant surprise was ours the morning we rode into Glenwood Springs, Colo., and registered at the palatial Colorado Hotel. A party of Chicagoans, composed of Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Hynes, Mrs. Hynes' mother and sister, Mrs. and Miss Way, en route from California, were at the hotel and soon made themselves known. They had been present at one of the Inter Ocean receptions to us in Chicago and the pleasure of meeting was therefore doubled. We spent the night at Glenwood Springs, leaving the morning of May 31. An accident to Mrs. McIlrath on June 2 between Palisades and DuBeque delayed us the greater part of the week. It was the machine that suffered the real damage, although she herself was rendered unconscious for half an hour. In riding over a sluice she took a tumble, but the accident was not discovered for some moments afterward. I chanced to look over my shoulder and saw her figure stretched in the middle of the road with the machine a shapeless mass by her side. “Tommy Atkins” and I worked hard to revive her, and the walk to DuBeque, six miles ahead, was one of the greatest efforts she was called on to put forth during our entire journey. There was no repair shop in DuBeque, and it was evident at once that we should have to take a freight train for Grand Junction, the nearest point at which we might expect repairs. Our stay at Grand Junction was pleasant in the extreme, and we certainly did not begrudge the three days spent in the city waiting the repairs to arrive from Chicago. Friends who had heard of our tour met us at Grand Junction and straightway began exerting themselves for our entertainment. Their program embraced a visit to Teller Institute, an Indian school near by, and on the evening of our second day a complimentary dinner was given the Inter Ocean tourists by Judge Gray, a jolly, 300-pound enthusiast upon all topics pertaining to the wheel. On June 8 the fork for Mrs. McIlrath’s wheel arrived from Chicago, and an hour later we were ready for one of the most difficult stages of our entire trip, that of crossing 290 miles of desert between Grand Junction and Springville, Utah. Tom Roe, known to every cyclist from coast to coast, once attempted it on his ride from San Francisco to New York City and failed. John McGuire, editor of the Cycling West, who has wheeled from Denver to Salt Lake City three times, never succeeded in crossing the desert entirely. When we announced that it was our intention to make it without a break from boundary to boundary, there was a general laugh of ridicule on all sides. Everyone predicted that we would fail before we had done 100 miles from Grand Junction. We left at noon and rolled out on the white sandy roads, making 12 miles before the first stop. The great difficulties of our trip across the desert proved to be not so much the hard ploughing through sand as the general inhospitality characteristic of the section houses which dot the vast waste. The section hands are mostly Italians and Chinamen, with a fair sprinkling of Indians. Asked for food or water, they either would not or pretended they could not understand. As the next town from Fruita, our first stop, was 67 miles distant, it will be guessed that we had many a trying meeting with section hands before we came to a hotel. We had been led to expect no kindness from these foreigners, but “Tommy Atkins” and I had sworn to win to our side every man that chance placed in our way. Some of our efforts to make ourselves agreeable in hopes of a hearty welcome were ludicrous.At a ranch near Westwater our party was refused shelter, the mother of three sons residing there telling us that the boys were away from home, one of them having gone to the next settlement for provisions. The pantry, she said, was all but empty, and were she to take in three hungry persons like myself, Mrs. McIlrath and Duxbury, there would be nothing left by the next morning. It was an uncertainty when the supplies were to arrive and a former experience had made her firm in her intentions to take no risks when food promised to be scarce. Our combined entreaties weakened the old lady to the extent that she consented to take in Mrs. McIlrath at least. She warned us that Mrs. McIlrath would have nothing to eat but bread and milk, but then even bread and milk seemed more than a dinner at Chicago’s best hotel, and leaving my wife with her benefactress, Duxbury and I went forth determined to charm the Italians at the section house we had passed a few miles back. As soon as we had convinced the Italians that we were not in the service of the railroad as private detectives, or that we were not a pair of the thousands of tramps making the journey from coast to coast on foot, they not only gave us supper but volunteered permission to spend the night before their fire. When we started the next morning I offered money to the section boss, but he declined it, saying I could repay him by delivering a letter which he handed me, addressed to his brother at a section house a few hundred miles ahead.As I have remarked before, the scarcity of water in this part of the country necessitates the shipment of it to the section houses and stations by the railroads. This same scarcity of water was indirectly responsible for a serious accident to my bicycle. I mention it here to show wheelmen what can be accomplished in the way of imprompturepairing when the emergency demands it. The tramps who steal rides on the freight trains never go without a bottle or a tin can of water. As these vessels are drained of their precious contents at different intervals along the roadbed, “Weary Willie” is in the habit of throwing them away. The result is that the tracks for miles and miles are spangled with bits of sharp glass and tin. I was not aware of the risk I was taking with my tire until I ran over one of these “mines.” There was an explosion like a shotgun, and when I found myself on the ground I realized that it was not the “mine” that had exploded, but my pneumatic. The puncture was, properly speaking, a gash three inches long in the tire of my rear wheel. Here was a pretty state of affairs! Not a dealer in supplies or a repair shop within 100 miles, and not one of the party with a complete repair kit. There seemed no alternative but a long walk to the nearest section house or ranch, there to await until “Tommy Atkins” could make the next town and express me the needed material. But “necessity is the mother of invention,” and under the press of circumstances I hit upon a scheme which afterward proved to work like a charm. First, I wet the edges of the rent with cement, sewing them together superficially, or, as the ladies would say, I “basted” them. Then I made a covering out of pieces of a buckskin glove, moistened with medicines from one of my vials. This covering I stretched on as tightly as possible over the gap. Now came a coat of cement, then the tire tape covering all, and my repair was as complete as I could make it until a cycle supply house could be found or my advance luggage reached. I did not jump on my wheel and ride directly, realizing that until the buckskin had dried and shrunken nothing was to hold the parted ends of tire but a few slight stitches. Mrs. McIlrath then came forward with a suggestion which was acted upon and proving itself to be one of much wisdom. It was that she take my mended tire and place it on her front wheel, where the pressure would be slightest, putting her front tire upon the rear wheel of my machine. For the benefit of doubting wheelmen, I must add that with three inflations daily, the crude mend held itself and answered purposes until Salt Lake City was reached a week later.
Among my letters was one bearing a check from the Inter Ocean, and I lost no time in going to the bank to obtain the money upon it. The cashier required strong identification, which I, being a stranger, was of course unable to give. I then applied to President Lindsay in person.Mr. Lindsay, I am proud to record, is a gentleman who reads the newspapers. He had already heard of the Inter Ocean cyclists, and when he saw me he said: “My friend, you appear honest, and you look all you say you are, when it comes to riding across the country. It is a compliment when I tell you that you almost look like a tramp. Go get your money,” and he nodded to the cashier. At the hotel I found everybody well and eating, “Jim” P. Anderson doing some especially good work with a knife and fork. Mrs. McIlrath had dried her clothes and was none the worse for her icy bath. Cripple Creek by gaslight is quite an attractive place for a “rounder,” as I learned that evening, when with guides the gentlemen of our party visited the dance halls, colored people’s “rags” and free-and-easy theaters that line “Push Street.” The next day was spent in a visit to the El Paso and other mines. Friday, May 28, was scheduled for our departure, but rain made it impossible. Saturday, however, we got away at 6:30 in the morning for Leadville by way of Florrisant, Hartzel, Buena Vista and Granite. We had a day of hard riding, and by 8 o’clock in the evening Mrs. McIlrath was ill and too fagged to go further. After supper at the house of a road overseer, we came to a ranch, where we applied for shelter. For the first time since we had left Chicago we were bluntly refused. Mrs. McIlrath cried aloud when a gray-bearded, hook-nosed old man told her that he had no place for her to sleep. I argued to him that she was ill, but he shut off my pleading by telling me that two miles away was a hotel that had been built expressly for the accommodation of invalids. There was nothing to do but trudge on to this hotel, which we found to be the Hartzel Springs House, owned by and named for the gray-bearded gentleman who had without courtesy closed his doors in our face.
We started Sunday morning on a 60-mile run to Buena Vista, following the railroad tracks. At Hill Top we unexpectedly met Editor-in-Chief Martin of the Rocky Mountain News, and several other writers from the Denver papers. They fell in line with us, but wished to take their time in admiring the beautiful scenery; but upon Duxbury’s suggestion that we “could not eat the blooming scenery,” they relented and we pushed on to Buena Vista, where we arrived on the 26th. Here we were entertained by Ed. Krueger, now a cyclist of national fame, Mr. and Mrs. Dean and Mr. and Mrs. C. Jones. The following day we went out to Hot Springs to see Krueger attempt to break the world’s five-mile coasting record. After dinner at the Hot Springs hotel we began preparations for Krueger’s race. The wind had subsided as if especially for his benefit. He was not satisfied with his own machine, believing it not strong enough for the test, so he used my wheel with his own saddle, handle-bars and pedals. Dean, Jones and Mr. Mason andmyself acted as timers, and Duxbury officiated as starter. At 4 o’clock Krueger mounted his wheel and shot down the hill. Duxbury had taken the time of his start, and it was left for us to note the moment of his arrival. By subtracting the difference, and also splitting the variation of time in the watches of the four timers at the end of the course, we were enabled to gain a fairly accurate estimate of the traveling time. Krueger lost both pedals half way down the incline, but he curled his feet up and crossed the line in 10 minutes and 10 seconds, which I consider wonderful. We started the next morning, May 28, for Leadville, with Krueger also in the party. It was my turn for a disaster, and I came near bringing the Inter Ocean tour to a finish. In crossing a bridge of pine logs my front wheel slipped, and with one foot entangled in the spokes of the rear wheel I stood, eyes protruding, staring at a black rock 300 feet below. A move backward with one foot on terra firma might prove fatal, and to attempt to disengage the other foot meant the release and loss of the bicycle. Nothing remained but to fall backwards on the hard road in a sitting posture, which I did, and Mrs. McIlrath rescued me, scolding as a mother would a disobedient child. We made but a short day of it in Leadville for various reasons, principally that Duxbury was seized with the hemorrhage which threatened him on Mount Rosa. At 5 in the afternoon we left for Red Cliffe, 35 miles away. At the mouth of the Tennessee Pass Tunnel, eleven miles from Leadville, we were overtaken by another storm, more violent than any we had yet passed through. We were made prisoners in the tunnel for an hour or more, the dense blackness rendering it impossible for us to proceed with any degree of safety. Cautiously feeling our way along the walls we managed to emerge from the tunnel and in the night to pedal along to the nearest section-house. This turned out to be a disused box car with bunks built along the sides for the section hands. The section boss, a kind-hearted Irishman, readily gave us permission to stretch ourselves on the floor for a night’s rest. We were soon asleep, but about 11 o’clock he waked us and informed us that he was sorry, but he could not help being forced to ask us to leave. The reason, he explained, was that his wife had suddenly returned and that she was the real “boss” of the establishment. As she had not been consulted in the beginning upon the matter of having us for lodgers she had declined to let us remain as her husband’s guests. I begged and implored but without avail, and in a storm we set off for the telegraph office, half a mile away. The operator was a young woman and the sight of one of her sisters in distress was more than enough to win an invitation to make ourselves as comfortable as the office would allow. I was enraged almost to the point of personal violence at the thought of an ill-temperedwoman’s whim causing us such needless annoyance, but as it afterward transpired our experience with the woman section boss was but trivial. It is an even break in this part of the country what manner of treatment a touring wheelman will receive at the hands of the people.
A pleasant surprise was ours the morning we rode into Glenwood Springs, Colo., and registered at the palatial Colorado Hotel. A party of Chicagoans, composed of Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Hynes, Mrs. Hynes' mother and sister, Mrs. and Miss Way, en route from California, were at the hotel and soon made themselves known. They had been present at one of the Inter Ocean receptions to us in Chicago and the pleasure of meeting was therefore doubled. We spent the night at Glenwood Springs, leaving the morning of May 31. An accident to Mrs. McIlrath on June 2 between Palisades and DuBeque delayed us the greater part of the week. It was the machine that suffered the real damage, although she herself was rendered unconscious for half an hour. In riding over a sluice she took a tumble, but the accident was not discovered for some moments afterward. I chanced to look over my shoulder and saw her figure stretched in the middle of the road with the machine a shapeless mass by her side. “Tommy Atkins” and I worked hard to revive her, and the walk to DuBeque, six miles ahead, was one of the greatest efforts she was called on to put forth during our entire journey. There was no repair shop in DuBeque, and it was evident at once that we should have to take a freight train for Grand Junction, the nearest point at which we might expect repairs. Our stay at Grand Junction was pleasant in the extreme, and we certainly did not begrudge the three days spent in the city waiting the repairs to arrive from Chicago. Friends who had heard of our tour met us at Grand Junction and straightway began exerting themselves for our entertainment. Their program embraced a visit to Teller Institute, an Indian school near by, and on the evening of our second day a complimentary dinner was given the Inter Ocean tourists by Judge Gray, a jolly, 300-pound enthusiast upon all topics pertaining to the wheel. On June 8 the fork for Mrs. McIlrath’s wheel arrived from Chicago, and an hour later we were ready for one of the most difficult stages of our entire trip, that of crossing 290 miles of desert between Grand Junction and Springville, Utah. Tom Roe, known to every cyclist from coast to coast, once attempted it on his ride from San Francisco to New York City and failed. John McGuire, editor of the Cycling West, who has wheeled from Denver to Salt Lake City three times, never succeeded in crossing the desert entirely. When we announced that it was our intention to make it without a break from boundary to boundary, there was a general laugh of ridicule on all sides. Everyone predicted that we would fail before we had done 100 miles from Grand Junction. We left at noon and rolled out on the white sandy roads, making 12 miles before the first stop. The great difficulties of our trip across the desert proved to be not so much the hard ploughing through sand as the general inhospitality characteristic of the section houses which dot the vast waste. The section hands are mostly Italians and Chinamen, with a fair sprinkling of Indians. Asked for food or water, they either would not or pretended they could not understand. As the next town from Fruita, our first stop, was 67 miles distant, it will be guessed that we had many a trying meeting with section hands before we came to a hotel. We had been led to expect no kindness from these foreigners, but “Tommy Atkins” and I had sworn to win to our side every man that chance placed in our way. Some of our efforts to make ourselves agreeable in hopes of a hearty welcome were ludicrous.
At a ranch near Westwater our party was refused shelter, the mother of three sons residing there telling us that the boys were away from home, one of them having gone to the next settlement for provisions. The pantry, she said, was all but empty, and were she to take in three hungry persons like myself, Mrs. McIlrath and Duxbury, there would be nothing left by the next morning. It was an uncertainty when the supplies were to arrive and a former experience had made her firm in her intentions to take no risks when food promised to be scarce. Our combined entreaties weakened the old lady to the extent that she consented to take in Mrs. McIlrath at least. She warned us that Mrs. McIlrath would have nothing to eat but bread and milk, but then even bread and milk seemed more than a dinner at Chicago’s best hotel, and leaving my wife with her benefactress, Duxbury and I went forth determined to charm the Italians at the section house we had passed a few miles back. As soon as we had convinced the Italians that we were not in the service of the railroad as private detectives, or that we were not a pair of the thousands of tramps making the journey from coast to coast on foot, they not only gave us supper but volunteered permission to spend the night before their fire. When we started the next morning I offered money to the section boss, but he declined it, saying I could repay him by delivering a letter which he handed me, addressed to his brother at a section house a few hundred miles ahead.
As I have remarked before, the scarcity of water in this part of the country necessitates the shipment of it to the section houses and stations by the railroads. This same scarcity of water was indirectly responsible for a serious accident to my bicycle. I mention it here to show wheelmen what can be accomplished in the way of imprompturepairing when the emergency demands it. The tramps who steal rides on the freight trains never go without a bottle or a tin can of water. As these vessels are drained of their precious contents at different intervals along the roadbed, “Weary Willie” is in the habit of throwing them away. The result is that the tracks for miles and miles are spangled with bits of sharp glass and tin. I was not aware of the risk I was taking with my tire until I ran over one of these “mines.” There was an explosion like a shotgun, and when I found myself on the ground I realized that it was not the “mine” that had exploded, but my pneumatic. The puncture was, properly speaking, a gash three inches long in the tire of my rear wheel. Here was a pretty state of affairs! Not a dealer in supplies or a repair shop within 100 miles, and not one of the party with a complete repair kit. There seemed no alternative but a long walk to the nearest section house or ranch, there to await until “Tommy Atkins” could make the next town and express me the needed material. But “necessity is the mother of invention,” and under the press of circumstances I hit upon a scheme which afterward proved to work like a charm. First, I wet the edges of the rent with cement, sewing them together superficially, or, as the ladies would say, I “basted” them. Then I made a covering out of pieces of a buckskin glove, moistened with medicines from one of my vials. This covering I stretched on as tightly as possible over the gap. Now came a coat of cement, then the tire tape covering all, and my repair was as complete as I could make it until a cycle supply house could be found or my advance luggage reached. I did not jump on my wheel and ride directly, realizing that until the buckskin had dried and shrunken nothing was to hold the parted ends of tire but a few slight stitches. Mrs. McIlrath then came forward with a suggestion which was acted upon and proving itself to be one of much wisdom. It was that she take my mended tire and place it on her front wheel, where the pressure would be slightest, putting her front tire upon the rear wheel of my machine. For the benefit of doubting wheelmen, I must add that with three inflations daily, the crude mend held itself and answered purposes until Salt Lake City was reached a week later.