Six-Day Bike Race for Women

A six-day women's bicycle race is on the card to take place at the Second Regiment Lake-Front Armory shortly. A number of the women that took part in the late Minneapolis race have already entered the coming event. Among the most prominent of these is Dottie Farnsworth, who has a record of 319 1/5 miles in eighteen hours. Entries can be made to Ed Moulton, Columbia Hotel, Thirty-first and State streets.

— "Six-Day Bike Race for Women," Chicago Daily Tribune, January 12, 1896

It was a small item, less than a column inch in the newspaper, but Tillie Anderson must have seen it — or maybe it was her boyfriend, Phil, or one of the other riders she knew from the Monitors, Chicago's only Swedish cycling club. Like so many other American women, Tillie had taken up cycling shortly after the introduction of the diamond-frame safety bicycle in the early 1890s. "I didn't take to the wheel for my health, particularly," she explained later. "I suppose it was more for the reason that bicycles were being used by women and I wanted to try the fad."

Tillie was a twenty-year-old immigrant living with her family in the Swedetown neighborhood of Chicago's Near North Side. After her father died in the village of Engelsback, the family had by turns immigrated to their new home. First was Tillie's older sister, Hannah, in 1889, followed by sixteen-year-old Tillie and her younger brother, August, in 1891. Then two years later her mother and two remaining sisters joined them. August worked as a repairman in the city's streetcar barns; in the evenings he ran a small grocery out of the family's basement. The sisters worked as seamstresses.

As a teenager, Tillie would stop along the streets of her adopted hometown and watch those lucky enough to own and ride one of the new "steel steeds." The fastest street riders were popularly known as scorchers, and while some in the press complained of their heedless sprinting, Tillie saw only the joy of their freedom and speed. From the very start, she said, she was in love with wheeling.

In the Swedish newspapers, Tillie followed the career of fellow countryman John S. Johnson, who in 1892 became the first to break the two-minute mark for the mile, paced by a horse in Independence, Iowa. Then in August 1893, at the national championships in Chicago, Tillie saw Johnson beat the great Arthur Zimmerman in the five-mile event at the South Side Ball Park. She decided then and there that she wanted to break cycling records too.

Tillie worked at a local laundry and continued sewing at night for extra cash. Besides helping the family, her goal was to save enough money to buy a bike of her own. That finally happened in the summer of 1894, when she was nineteen. She purchased the cheapest model she could find, a bulky thing that even without brakes still weighed over forty pounds, and became a devoted rider. Many mornings she'd rise before five and ride twenty to forty miles before breakfast and a full day's work, and then in the late afternoon she'd again mount her wheel and ride some more, exploring the streets of Chicago and surrounding country roads.

The next summer, Tillie made a local name for herself as a "century" rider on the Elgin–Aurora road course — a hundred-mile circuit from downtown west over to Elgin, down through Geneva to Aurora, and then east past Naperville and back into the city. She was good enough to earn a sponsorship from the Excelsior Supply Company, maker of the Thistle — one of the new breed of bicycles then setting sales records all across America. It might have been Excelsior's sales representative, M. C. Watson, who saw the notice in the Tribune that January morning. One way or another, the news eventually got to Tillie.

Between her two jobs, Tillie earned just three dollars a week. The six-day race at the Second Regiment Armory would pay out a total purse of $600 — the first-place prize was $200. Even the sixth-place prize of twenty-five dollars would be more money than she or anyone in her family had ever earned in an entire month.

But was she good enough to compete in such a race? If she wavered at all, Tillie's decision to apply was likely settled two days later, when another notice in the Tribune listed some late entries, including one from Lizzie Glaw. Tillie knew that name well. Lizzie was a German immigrant, also twenty years old, who'd also run the Elgin–Aurora road course the previous summer. Tillie had ridden the hundred-mile circuit eight times between June and October; Lizzie, showing the stubborn persistence that in the coming years would become her hallmark, had completed the circuit an astonishing thirty-six times. Finally, in October, Lizzie appeared to break the women's record, going against a strong southerly wind and completing the hundred miles in six hours and forty-eight minutes, averaging almost fifteen miles an hour on those wretchedly rutted washboard roads. Some questioned, however, whether Lizzie had registered as required at the Aurora station, and the holder of the former record of 6:56 refused to acknowledge the new time. The very next day, the record was broken again, this time by Tillie. Fighting hills, wind, mud, and poor roads, she completed the course in 6:52.

Tillie knew she was at least as good as Lizzie, and that was good enough for her.

Chicago Riders Showing Speed

The two Chicago rivals showed up at the armory, along with another local, Margaret Sevier, a week before the scheduled start of the race. The promoter and manager, a Frenchman from Minneapolis named H. O. Messier (first name Henri), had his reasons for wanting the trio to compete. Locals would have someone to root for against the more seasoned professionals, names familiar to those who followed women's racing in the high-wheel era. Tillie, Lizzie, and Margaret also represented three different European countries — Sweden, Germany, and France — so they'd appeal to those sectors of Chicago's sizeable immigrant population. And Lizzie and Margaret, who belonged to the city's largest all-women cycling club, the Knickerbockers, would surely draw in those members,...