I found this book a couple of years ago when I was strolling through a used book store in Antwerp. The cover immediately caught my eye because of the drawing of an old wheelman and some vintage pictures of days gone by. The book tells the journey of George T. Loher who cycled from coast to coast through the United States in 1895. His granddaughter published this book in 1978 based on a typed copy her grandfather made from his journal entries during the ride. George must have kept his journal faithfully during his trip because he names virtually every town, river, hotel and person he encountered during on his ride. As for as I know this book is probably one of the earliest accounts of a long-distance bicycling trip in history.

His granddaughter only found out about his trip 25 years after he died while she was looking through a box of her mother’s old photographs. She came across a clipping from an old San Francisco newspaper from December 1895. It carried a sketch of a young man with the classic handlebar mustache standing besides a bicycle ( the image eventually made it to the cover of her book) and headlined “The Acme cyclist back”. Was that her grandfather? Her mother confirmed and said uncle George still had a written account of that trip. So, from that moment on Ellen Smith got obsessed about this “secret” chapter of her grandfather’s life and felt like this amazing story had to be told outside of the family. The reasons why her grandfather never mentioned it were unclear, perhaps it was just something he had done long ago and seemed irrelevant, so why talk about it?

George T. Loher was part of the Acme Club, one of the earliest cycling clubs in the Bay Area, San Francisco. He started the trip in Oakland together with his fellow club member Thomas F. Cornell who bailed out of the trip after four days because he couldn’t endure the hardships connected to the journey. Loher continued the trip without maps and on a fixed gear bicycle (a Stearns “Yellow Fellow” with new “pneumatic” tires offered by the American Dunlop Tire Company) with only a little luggage comparable to a modern day bikepacking set up (frame bag, handle bar & saddle roll). Mind you this was shortly after “Wounded Knee” in a time were cyclists were resented. Farmers and horse-lovers saw the bicycle as a threat. Businessmen blamed it for a drop in sales of everything and the police found it a source of constant traffic problems. The journey took Loher up North to Portland. From Portland he continued Westward towards Billings, Minneapolis , Milwaukee, Rochester & Red Hook and finally finishing his ride in New York 80 days later.

The book is packed with witty stories and observations. Sometimes he tells us about cycling related things, fixing tires, welding frames or just early wheelmen issues like how to properly descend a mountain on a fixed gear bike: “I crossed the line into Oregon riding on the track to the foot of the Siskiyou Mountains. I had a steady climb of four miles before reaching the summit, at which point I displayed a wheelman’s ingenuity by tying a quantity of brush together and trailing it through the dust. This enabled me to ride down the steep mountainside with ease for a distance of ten miles.” Other times he talks about the beauty of the landscape or the challenges of navigating in a multicultural country: “I was in the farming country now in every sense of the word, with vegetation on all sides of me. Consequently there were numerous roads running in every conceivable direction. This part of the state is settled moty by Swedes and Norwegians, which made it difficult to find my way, owing to their inability to speak the English language. This was indeed a most serious predicament, as I discovered after leaving Rothsay.”

This book is a mandatory read for every modern day adventure cyclist and bikepacker. Not only because it is one of the earliest accounts on off-road riding and long-distance cycling it also gives the reader insight in a 1890’s cyclist mind and perspective. Most importantly this book gives the reader a sense of place. The way Loher talks about his journey, makes it easy to imagine this wild and wide post Western landscape and the booming industrializing cities of that era.

Getting your hands on this book will be another thing, since it is long out off print and there was only one edition printed in 1978. Why anyone hasn’t reprinted this book today is beyond my understandings. We suggest you search the net to get your hands on one, there’s still a couple out there.

The Wonderfull Ride, George T. Loher, Harper & Row Publisher NY, 1978, ISBN 0-06-250540-8

Words: ¨Philippe Michiels

Photos taken from the book.

The Wonderful Ride