Pedal and Path: Across the Continent Awheel and Afoot

by George B. Thayer

Euclid is a small village full of rum-holes, and surrounded by mud and water, the most forsaken place I have yet seen, and in every respect, excepting distance, Euclid avenue in Cleveland is as far removed from Euclid as Paradise from Purgatory. Buffalo has streets as beautiful, with better pavements, but none as long. The poplar seems to be the popular tree, long stately rows lining the sides of the street. I was using the sidewalk on what is called the “bob” side of this street when a rider, using the pavement on the opposite, the “Nabob” side, warned me I had better get off the sidewalk, and so I rode into the city over poor pavements with the gentleman that proved to be the president of the Cleveland club, Mr. H. B. Payne. Plank roads are a necessity in the clay soil of the outer suburbs of Cleveland, but covered with two or three inches of mud and sunken about eight or ten inches below the level of the ground, these plank roads are neither pleasant to look at nor easy to ride over. Much of the low, wet land between Buffalo and Cleveland that will not produce a profitable crop of any of the cereals, is lately being used in raising grapes, currants, and other small fruits. This industry, new for this section of the country, is assuming enormous proportions, and I passed acres and acres of land entirely devoted to grapes. In fact the country seemed to be one vast vineyard, and I could easily imagine what a delicious sight it must present in the fall of the year, and my parched mouth seemed to get drier as I rode past the immense cellars that I knew were full of the cool wine. The route I was to take to Columbus was given me very explicitly at Cleveland as far as Wellington, and from that place I was told to “go right on to Columbus,” from which I understood that the latter place was only a short distance ahead. But at Wellington, wheelmen could tell me nothing, livery stable keepers could only guess at the best route, which I was equally able to do, and so I struck out blindly. I went right on, not always right, however, often wrong, but still I went. The Ohio wheelmen are to issue a road book soon, but if the information in it is no more extended than the knowledge of roads possessed by all the northern Ohio wheelmen I have met, from the consuls up to the riders of baby bicycles, the value of the book will not be very great.

And this is the kind of country I went into. Land, low, level, and wet. Very little land under cultivation and that little producing a very thin crop of wheat. Houses small and out of repair. Barns tumbling down and propped up. No pebbly brooks or clean wells, but plenty of stagnant pools and plenty of warm rain-water to drink. If a farm-house has happened to burn down the farm is deserted. Nobody seemed to be doing anything and everybody was waiting for the land to dry up or something to turn up. The farmers were all fat, good natured, and wanted to talk. The roads were in awful condition, full of hard, dry ruts, and chunks of clay, that would beat a man’s brains out if his head came in contact with them. No one was going from place to place, and over a portion of one main road only two teams had passed in three days—since the last rain. Everybody seemed to have settled down into the wet clay and to become contented; as happy as a great fat hog wallowing in the mud and grunting with satisfaction. To be sure there are a few places of three or four thousand inhabitants scattered along through this otherwise thinly populated section, but this is the general impression a traveler gets. I had to walk over a good portion of the road and so had plenty of chance to observe the condition of things for seventy-five miles south of Cleveland.

Besides, the farmers are as ignorant as they are indolent, knowing little about their own State and less about other States. Not one in ten of them could tell me within a hundred and fifty miles the distance to Columbus, their own capital. One man persisted in thinking Connecticut was a small village with a cotton mill, in the State of Rhode Island, and I could not hammer—we were in a blacksmith’s shop out of the rain at the time—I could not hammer anything else into the fat old simpleton’s head. Then, in the large towns along the way, as if to add insult to injury, the people, in talking to me about this section of poor roads and poor farmers, referred to them as “Yankee roads” and “Yankee farmers.” But the people out here, although rather despising the close, saving habits of the average New Englander, yet do respect the perseverance, the tenacity, the sort of bull-dog grip that they think the inhabitants of the Eastern States are noted for. They pity the farmers of New England who contend against a stony, barren soil, but they regard with admiration their constant endeavors to obtain a competency. Here they get their living, such as it is, so easy. At the risk of making a too egotistical illustration of how they regard a little perseverance I will give a little incident that occurred at Wellington, a place of three or four thousand inhabitants. A large portly gentleman, fifty or sixty years old, sitting in a carriage in front of a fine residence, stopped me to ask the inevitable questions, where from, where to, and all about it. Then he “hollered” loud enough for all Wellington to hear, “Wife, wife, come out here and see this boy; this boy from Connecticut. Come all the way on a bicycle, goes sixty and seventy miles a day some days; going clear out to Denver on it. There’s an Eastern boy for you, that’s Eastern grit, that is. That’s Eastern,” and he smiled all over his round face and wished me all the good luck in the world.

FROM MUD TO MEADOW.—(Page 40.)

Tuesday I experienced some of the difficulties of the Western mud. A light drizzling rain in the morning made the roads too slippery to ride, and walking was hardly possible. The sticky mud accumulated under the brake and between the forks till, obliged to turn the machine around and push it backwards with the little wheel in the air, the big wheel finally stuck fast and slid along in the road. Then in pushing up hill with all the strength I had my feet would slip back and in going down hill I slipped up, paradoxical as it may seem. But a heavy rain the next morning made the highways impassable for a pedestrian even, and so I took to the lots, avoiding the plowed fields whenever possible. Through ordinary soil the sides of the roads would be passable, but all the holes made by cattle during the spring mud for the last twenty-five years remain to-day just as they were made along the sides, and when these holes are filled with water it is not pleasant to have your foot slip into one of them and then have the water squirt all over you, therefore I took the lots, climbing post and rail fences, crawling through and lifting the machine over barbed wire fences, any way to get along, but all day I made only twelve miles and worked hard too.

A DRAG THROUGH THE MUD.—(Page 40.)

Along in the afternoon a gentleman in a buggy, the first team I had seen during the day, offered to help me along a mile or so. Seated in the backside of his buggy with my legs hanging off and dragging the machine after me, I thought that was not just the advertised way of going “right on to Columbus,” but it was to Columbus I was going, someway. If the machine was muddy the day before, it was plastered all over now. The sticky clay would accumulate under the forks and saddle, and drop off in such big chunks that at times I did not know but I had kept hold of the wrong chunk, and had left the machine back somewhere in the road. Then from the shape of the mass of mud near the locality where the cyclometer was last seen, I observed that the ingenious little appliance was gliding gracefully along bottom-side up. But all this did not last. The roads dried up before night so I could walk in them. A mound of clay beside the road marks the spot where I cleaned up the machine, and after passing through Ashland, Mansfield, and some other smaller places, the next day, thirty-five miles above Columbus I came to a “double-track” road and the hard work was over. These double-track or “summer” roads, as they are called, are made of coarse gravel on one side, and the natural soil, the clay, on the other, the clay track being preferred in the summer, and the gravel in the winter and spring. But I forgot to mention one little incident of the day before. In jumping into a team-wagon for a short ride, the corduroy breeches, with a loud report, split open across the seat, really to such an extent that a change of apparel was absolutely necessary, but before I could get to a barn, in which to disrobe, I met several teams, in which were young ladies, and I know they thought me very bold to turn about and face them after they had passed. Stopping at Cardington, I found a wheelman, Mr. Samuel Brown, who was also a tailor, and he put my breeches in riding order again.

The State capitol at Columbus is a heavy, square, granite building, with piles of immense grindstones laid one on top of the other that answers for pillars in front. It has very much the appearance of an Egyptian temple, and is dark inside and dingy out. The buildings in these Western cities, whether built of marble, granite, sand-stone, or brick, all soon have the same dingy look, the smoke from the immense amount of soft coal used being the probable cause. The members of the legislature there convened all had an easy-going happy way about them, and the clerk and messengers were slow and innocent in their manners, in sharp contrast to the business-like, clean-cut appearance of many Eastern legislators, and the rapid actions of Eastern clerks and messengers. On the way out of the city I passed the insane asylum, an institution that to outward appearances will accommodate more patients and that certainly did produce more noise by yelling lunatics than the one at Middletown, Conn. Both north and west of Columbus for many miles log huts are seen on all sides, some deserted, but most of them still occupied, that confounded clay pasted into the cracks between the logs, making the best kind of protection against the weather. Great black sows with chunked little black pigs are as plenty by the roadside as hens and chickens are in the East, and they are often seen roaming around the streets in good sized towns.