Sensational, Kim Todd [read novels website TXT] 📗

with more conventional methods of treating hysteria, Dr. Harrison was suspended and eventually dismissed. The police commissioners sent to Chicago for a single, used ambulance, which arrived several months later.

The hospital article ran the same day as “The Race Grows Exciting,” which hyped the approaching finish line of the round-the-world caper. After keeping pace with Bly almost the whole way, Bisland had just missed her boat from France by three hours and would have to take a much slower one.

While the global contest was a boost for women’s sense of independence, it also turned Bisland and Bly into curiosities rather than authors with something significant to say. The power of stunt reporters had originally been that with their first-person focus they increased the number of female voices telling stories and female characters featured on the front page. But while Bisland and Bly would write books later, for the duration of the round-the-world stunt, they were almost exclusively written about rather than writing themselves, except for their brief telegraph dispatches. This pushed stunt reporting into increasingly uncomfortable territory, and Bly chafed at it. In a January 22, 1890, Examiner article documenting Bly’s arrival in San Francisco, she was figured as an inanimate object: “The most precious bit of freight that the Oceanic brought into this port yesterday morning came consigned to the Examiner. It was a package of Pretty Girl, with more brains than most girls who are not pretty and it was invoiced as One Globe-Trotter: Nellie Bly.” The reporter asked Bly whether she had the chance to write anything. She said no, and a bit of frustration seeped through: “What was the end of the Cronin trial?* I want to interview you. I don’t want to be interviewed.” Then she hopped on the Southern Pacific, a special bound for Chicago.

The Examiner editorial page the same day outlined the stakes of the trip, saying that what might be most surprising to a European audience was “the fact that two young, unmarried women should start on a three months’ journey unchaperoned. That is a peculiarly American feature of the affair. It is not so much that they should be going around the world, although that, of course, is remarkable, but that they should be going some thousands of miles in any direction alone. But to Americans that is not strange at all.” And it offered a hint of things to come, adding, “If the Examiner’s Annie Laurie should be detailed to-morrow to go to Central Africa and interview Tippoo Tib, she would start off as soon as she could pack a valise and think nothing about it.”

Part II

Swashbuckling

1890-1896

Chapter 7

1890–1891

Under the Gold Dome

But Mr. Dashwood rejected any but thrilling tales, and as thrills could not be produced except by harrowing up the souls of the readers, history and romance, land and sea, science and art, police records and lunatic asylums, had to be ransacked for the purpose. Jo soon found that her innocent experience had given her but few glimpses of the tragic world which underlies society, so regarding it in a business light, she set about supplying her deficiencies with characteristic energy.

—Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, 1868–1869

On January 25, 1890, as thousands of people thronged the Jersey City Depot, Bly disembarked. When her boots hit the New Jersey platform, stopping the clock, cannons fired. Roses and lilies, thrown from the crowd, pelted her. The three official timekeepers checked their pocket watches, determining she had circumnavigated the globe in seventy-two days, six hours, and ten minutes. Jersey City mayor Orestes Cleveland stopped her on the way to her carriage, welcoming her, making a speech, though struggling to be heard over the din.

“The American Girl will no longer be misunderstood. She will be recognized as pushing, determined, independent, able to take care of herself alone and single-handed wherever she may go,” he announced.

Bly, once so isolated in small-town Pennsylvania, had chatted with Jules Verne in Amiens, gambled in an Egyptian city near the Suez Canal, visited a camel market in Aden, bought a monkey in Singapore. At some point, as Bly was speeding through the heartland, it became clear she was going to do it. The speeches had already begun as a special train carrying her mother and reporters from the San Francisco Examiner, the Boston Globe, and the New York World met her in Philadelphia to ride with her the last hundred miles. Behind on her sleep as she raced the clock all the way across the country, she still had enough energy to give an interview to a “little newspaper girl” from Nebraska, joke with the men of the Chicago Press Club, and pull off her cap and wave it at the crush of people at train stations from Fresno, California, to Dodge City, Kansas.

Then police carved a path through the crowd so she and her mother could board the ferry for Manhattan, where she threaded through the packed streets of Park Row to the World offices to bask in the congratulations of friends and colleagues.

Some sniped at her, at the unseemly self-promotion of it all. But if the admiring glances, and cheers, and heaps of flowers and congratulatory telegrams were any evidence, the trip was a triumph. Once again, she’d sized up a task that seemed impossible, taken a perilous leap, and landed on her feet with grace. Maybe this would make her career and her financial situation more secure. And she won. Elizabeth Bisland had missed a fast boat from Le Havre in France, then a German steamer from Bremen, and was bobbing somewhere in the Atlantic, on a slow ship from Liverpool, days from shore.

But that spring, supposed to be on a victory tour, giving lectures to a crush of fans, Bly didn’t feel triumphant. After all the publicity she generated, the board games, the contest, the banner headlines from coast to coast, the World refused to pay her what she was worth. She’d fought with her editors before leaving for the