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Wheels West: The Early Days of Bicycling in New Mexico

by Michael Taylor on 2016-09-22T18:07:00-06:00 in American Studies, CSWR | 0 Comments

In late-nineteenth-century New Mexico, two "iron horses" changed how people interacted with the landscape. One, of course, was the railroad. Much less well-known today was the bicycle, which by the 1890s could have been found all over the Territory—an extension of the "cycling craze" that saw Americans from nearly every walk of life fall in love with this novel new form of transportation.

New Mexicans who had come from the East may have seen bicycles as early as the 1860s, when the "ordinary" or "high wheel" bicycle was invented. It is not certain when the first of these unwieldy (and dangerous) machines showed up in the Southwest, but they would have been a strange sight to many people in the crowd when, in 1882, three bicycle trick-riders from Kansas came west on the recently completed Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway and put on a show. Stopping in Las Vegas and Santa Fe before going on to Albuquerque, they entertained audiences with bicycle acrobatics and speed races, "a novel sight to New Mexico people," according to one newspaper (1). 

In his encyclopedic Ten Thousand Miles on a Bicycle (1883), Lyman Hotchkiss Bagg, an important early chronicler of bicycling better known by his pen name Karl Kron, provides a directory of wheelmen (a nineteenth-century synonym for cyclists). While a hundred or more names were listed for some states, New Mexico had just one—V.C. Place of Pinos Altos, a mining boomtown near Silver City. Originally from western Pennsylvania, Place, "a racing man," thought the roads in that part of New Mexico were "very fine"; one stretch of nine miles, he said, could be ridden in thirty minutes (2). 

Though there were no paved roads in New Mexico in those days, dirt roads, packed hard as rock by generations of burros and wagon trains, were probably smoother than we might think. One newspaper proudly declared: "This country is a veritable cycler's paradise, and there are few places, if any, which afford such elegant natural roads as are found in the vicinity of Santa Fe." An 1894 article on "Cycling in the Rockies" recommended mining roads as being surprisingly great places to ride (3). 

Cycling became almost an obsession in the U.S. after the invention in the late 1880s of the modern "safety" bicycle, with two wheels of equal size, which opened up the sport to a much wider audience, including women. By the 1890s, New Mexican cyclists could have purchased bicycles, including ladies' models, by mail order or from a growing number of local shops. Albuquerque had at least two bike dealers in 1892. A year earlier, Browne & Manzanares, a general store in Las Vegas and Socorro, had the latest Victor bicycles in stock and promised they would "at all times compete with Eastern prices." Even sparsely settled San Juan County in the Four Corners region had a bicycle agent by 1895, when F.M. Pierce of Farmington advertised that he was running a sale on Navajo blankets and could offer Monarch bicycles "at factory prices."

Despite their practicality to people in remote areas, bikes were still a plaything for some. William G. Walz of El Paso—brother-in-law of Thomas B. Catron, the powerful leader of the Santa Fe Ring—advertised bikes for sale in New Mexico newspapers alongside his main source of income, musical instruments; Walz was also a well-known dealer in Mexican and Indian "curiosities" as well as silverwork and other jewelry (4).

New Mexican cyclists formed social clubs from an early date. Albuquerque had a bike club at least as early as 1890, when several of its members rode to Tijeras Canyon, ten miles south of town near where the airport lies today. The fastest return ride, on an already outdated "high-wheel" bicycle, took thirty minutes. The Taos Cyclers applied for membership in the League of American Wheelmen, a powerful national organization, in 1895. The League had held its annual convention in Denver in 1894, a testament to the rise of cycling in the West (5).

Cyclists pedaling their way from coast to coast or even around the world occasionally passed through New Mexico. In 1895, the aptly named Tom Wheeler of New Orleans, weighing in at a trim 125 pounds, crossed "the sandy desert of New Mexico" while attempting to ride the perimeter of the United States in 300 days. Frank A. Elwell, an organizer of European bicycle tours, proposed a three-month tour from Buffalo to San Francisco via New Mexico in 1893. Around the same time, C.A. Boyle of Pittsburgh rode a bike from Albuquerque to San Francisco. Boyle later became a traveling salesman for the Chicago bicycle manufacturing firm of Gormully & Jeffery, some of whose advertisements showed an American Indian dismounting a dead horse and climbing onto a two-wheeled one made of iron.

Perhaps the most ambitious cyclists ever to pass through New Mexico were Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben. After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis in 1890, they spent the next three years circling the globe. Their travel account, Across Asia on a Bicycle (1897), hardly mentions New Mexico, which they visited on the homeward leg of their journey, but their experience crossing the mountains and deserts of Central Asia would have prepared them for the similar landscapes of the Southwest (6). 

Shown in this post are several photographs related to cycling in New Mexico Territory. All are from UNM's Center for Southwest Research & Special Collections. Newspaper advertisements come from the UNM Libraries' contributions to the Chronicling America digital newspaper project at the Library of Congress.

Above: Group of New Mexico cyclists, ca. 1880s. Early Transportation Photograph Collection.

Above: Though this picture was taken at his home in Ohio, UNM's third president, William Tight, was a cyclist. Source: William Davis, Miracle on the Mesa.

Above: Ad for rental bikes. Albuquerque city directory, 1896.

Above: Cyclist at Westy Peterson's log cabin in Chloride, New Mexico, ca. 1905. Henry A. Schmidt Photograph Collection.

Above: Cyclist at Tom Scales' house, Winston, New Mexico, ca. 1890s. Henry A. Schmidt Photograph Collection.

Above: Ad for Gendron Cycles, sold by W. H. Goebel of Santa Fe. Santa Fe Daily New Mexican, June 7, 1893.

 

Michael Taylor is Public Services Librarian in the Center for Southwest Research & Special Collections. He can be reached at mtaylor6@unm.edu.  

 

Sources: 

(1) “The Bicyclists,” Albuquerque Morning Journal, Sept. 22, 1882.

(2)  Karl Kron, Ten Thousand Miles on a Bicycle (New York, 1887), 788; The Wheelman, June 1883, p. 233.

(3) Santa Fe Daily New Mexican, March 18, 1893; Willis L. Hall, “Cycling in the Rockies,” Midland Monthly, Sept. 1894, p. 173-4.

(4) For info on mail order bikes, see, for example, the Kansas City Bicycle Co. ads in the Los Cerrillos Rustler, 1891; The Sportsman’s Directory and Year Book (Milwaukee, 1892), 177; San Juan Times, Nov. 29, 1895; The Chieftain (Socorro, N.M.), Nov. 27, 1891.

(5) “Territorial Tips,” Santa Fe Daily New Mexican, Feb. 12, 1890; L.A.W. Bulletin and Good Roads, July 5, 1895, p. 29.

(6) Recreation, Oct. 1895, vol. 3, no. 4, p. 197; The Wheel and Cycling Trade Review, Jan. 13, 1893, p. 38; Wheel and Cycling Trade Review, Dec. 16, 1892, p. 24; Allen and Sachtleben, Across Asia on a Bicycle (New York, 1897), xii.


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