Frank Lenz, the Cyclist Who Vanished

In the 1890s, Frank Lenz started a bicycle tour around the world. He never finished, and his ultimate fate remains uncertain, though there are pretty solid clues indicating how he met his end. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody. Tracy here with news about some live appearances
we have coming up. Saturday, July seven, I will be
at History Camp Boston, where I will be part of
the History Podcaster panel. And then the next day, Sunday,
July eight, at two pm, Holly and I both will
be doing a live podcast at Adams National Historical Park

(00:20):
in Quincy, Massachusetts, where our show will be John Quincy
and Luisa Catherine Adams Abroad. This is an outdoor show
and it will happen rain or shine, and we're coming
back to Convention Days in Seneca Falls, New York. Our
show is at four pm on Saturday, July twenty one
in the historic Wesleyan Chapel. You can get more information

(00:41):
about all of these shows with links to buy tickets
where applicable at missed in History dot com. Click on
live shows in the menu. Welcome to Steph you missed
in History class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hell,

(01:06):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, it's a bit since we've had
a history mystery. Well apart from the Mysterious Ancient City,
we haven't had a more conventional mystery. Yeah, I feel
like once we get back a certain a number of
years in the historical record, everything is a little bit

(01:28):
of a history mystery. But this is an actual, we
don't know what went down mystery. It involves a man
who attempted to travel around the world on a bicycle
at the end of the nineteenth century. And I'm not
going to say much more than that because i want
to let the story of cyclists Franklin's unfold on its own.

(01:48):
So Franklins was born Frank George Reinhardt in eighteen sixty
seven to Adam and Maria Reinhardt, who had moved from
Germany to the United States in eighteen sixty five. The
family was living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the time, where
Adam was working as a cigar maker, but Frank never
really knew his father. Adam died when Frank was just

(02:09):
a baby, and when he was six, his mother, Maria Anna, remarried.
This time she married William Lenz. He was also a
German immigrant. As Frank grew up in Pittsburgh, which is
where his mother had moved after his father had died.
He and his stepfather had a rather strained relationship. William

(02:29):
never really saw Frank as his son, and William treated
Maria Anna quite poorly. And Frank, though was a good kid.
He sold papers to bring an extra money for the
family and he did well in high school. And after
high school he put himself through business school and he
got a bookkeeping job before he was even twenty. Cycling

(02:50):
had first made its way to the United States via
Great Britain in the eighteen seventies, and it caught on
as an entertainment for wealthy people who were looking for
a bit of excitement. In the eighties, it was starting
to attract a wider audience of enthusiasts, and this was
just perfect timing to to capture the attention of teenage
Frank Lens. He was unhappy at home and he was

(03:12):
looking for some kind of adventure and diversion. By eight seven,
Pittsburgh boasted more than three hundred cycling enthusiasts, including a
few ladies, and the nation was deep in the throes
of cycling fever. Lens purchased his first bicycle. It was
a high wheeler model called a Columbia Expert, for a

(03:32):
hundred and twenty five dollars. After saving and scrimping. He
was working, as we said, as a bookkeeper at a
brass fittings company, and his salary was twelve hundred dollars
a year, so this bicycle was no small investment. It
was more than ten percent of his annual wages, but
to him it was really worth it. He took to
the sport instantly, and he was not content to take short,

(03:55):
leisurely rides. He rode five miles a day during the
work week and then on the weekends. His excur jsians
were much longer. He was still living with his mother
and his stepfather at that point, and so some of
his enthusiasm for cycling probably came from letting him escape
from his home life. It also gave him a whole
new social circle, as he joined the Allegheny Cycle Club

(04:16):
and quickly became one of its most prominent members. In
June seven, he made his first one hundred mile ride
round trip from Pittsburgh to Newcastle, Pennsylvania. He completed the
journey despite the fact that his handlebars broke on the
return trip. He just kept peddling and kind of aiming
the bicycle. But from that point his long trips only

(04:38):
got longer, and he started racing. He did really well
for himself in competition, even though his high wheeler was
much heavier than a true racing model. He upgraded to
a lighter model and then a true racing bike, but
it turned out that that racing bike uh was a
little too light for him. He was better at handling
a cycle that carried a little more weight, So he

(05:00):
went back to that mid range ride, not his first one,
but the second one he had purchased. He transitioned from
short track racing into long distance competition, so that went
back to his existing love of long rides. A one
hundred mile race from Erie, Pennsylvania to Buffalo, New York
was slated for September eight, and he was confident of

(05:21):
his chances. These were routes that he had traveled many
times on his long rides, and even though that morning
dawned through a pouring rain, he was still up for it.
Lens ended up coming in third after a race that
was just grueling and did not have a lot of
on course amenities. Yeah, it was kind of one of
those things that if you've ever done any any like

(05:43):
running or competition and distance races yourself a lot of
times New races will tell you all the great like
there's gonna be a snack stop here and water stop here,
and sometimes if it's not well organized, you don't always
get those things. That was absolutely what happened here. They
had been promised, like that they were going to be
sandwiches at one point in the race, and that you know,
there would be all of these support people along the way,

(06:04):
and largely due to the rain, those things did not happen.
I think under normal circumstances, if I were promised sandwiches
and there were no sandwiches, I would be upset about it.
But if I was biking a hundred miles and would
not have promised sandwiches would So by the time the
finishers got to Buffalo, they were starving and they were

(06:24):
completely depleted, and Lens was really disappointed. He had intended
to win, and not securing a victory was a huge blow.
But things were dismal beyond that. His teammates from the
Allegheny Cycle Club had not been on course where he
expected them to serve as a support crew, so they
were also supposed to have some refreshments and some help

(06:46):
and be able to look over his bike for him
and they were not there. They were only at the
end to meet him. And he had also sent a
parcel ahead to Buffalo so that he would have some
money and a change of clothes when the race was over,
but that parcel hadn't arrived, so he had to borrow
clothes and money so he could stay in a hotel
overnight and recover from the race. That race, unsurprisingly, really

(07:08):
impacted Lens and his relationship with cycling. He was never
happier than when he was peddling, but he became way
less interested in competing, and Steady started to think about
traveling as a full time cyclist, and about the same
time he took up photography. These two things kind of
went hand in hand. There were other people that were
starting to make names for themselves as sort of cyclist

(07:31):
journalists that would go around and take pictures, and so
he thought that might be a good career path. Uh
In eighty nine, an article in American Athlete featured Lens
and described his recent three week, eight hundred and thirty
six mile trip. He had traveled with a thirty five
pound pack of photography equipment, and he took a hundred
and fifty exposures along the way shipping them home as

(07:53):
he traveled. And he was hoping that this rite up
of this trip that he had taken would add to
his image because we said his long term plan was
forming that he wanted to be hired by a periodical
to travel the world by base bicycle and take photos
along the way. It cracks me up that this is
a job that exists today still, Like I just saw

(08:17):
an ad for uh An Airline looking for a couple
to live out of an apartment in Reiki, Vic and
basically travel around and post things on social media as
their job for a period of time. And it's the
same basic thing that he was talking about doing here.
M hm in Lens made his way from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
to St. Louis by bike. In the late summer of

(08:39):
one he once again started a lengthy bike ride from
Pittsburgh and this time went all the way to New Orleans.
He took both trips with friend and fellow cycling enthusiast
Charles Petticord, and this New Orleans journey was a month long.
It was another opportunity for him to build up his
reputation as a photographer on wheels. As they made their
way south. The two young men met with cycling clubs

(09:01):
along the way, and they encountered all manner of terrain
challenges and curious onlookers in Birmingham, Alabama, after having fought
through heavy brush for several days. There's also a hilarious
side story that they had been warned that there was
a crazy moonshiner somewhere in the woods that they should
be afraid of, So they were battling through this brush
and trying to keep an eye out for someone who
might attack them. They finally emerged and they entered a

(09:25):
restaurant's dining room on a Sunday evening. They were hot
and dirty and ravenous, and this drew a mixed reaction
of wonder and dismay from the townspeople that were just
sitting down to Sunday dinner. There was actually a rite
up in the local paper with a reminder to the
travelers that they should mind their manners in the South.

(09:46):
They didn't travel exclusively on pedal power. They also took
a train for a brief ride through Mississippi to make
up for some lost time. Once they got to New Orleans,
they were treated like royalty by the Louisiana Bicycle Club,
and they really enjoyed their visit. But where it was
time to board a ship that would take them back
to New York. Along the way, and in New Orleans itself,
Lynn's had still been taking pictures. He got better and

(10:09):
better at photography as he practiced, of course, and he
even figured out a way to take photos of himself
on his bike by attaching his bulb, by which I
mean that mechanism that's attached to a long shutter release cord,
not a bulb as in a light. And he attached
that to a very long rubber tube that would open
the shutter of a camera that was preset nearby, and
he would place that bulb in the road, and then

(10:31):
he would carefully aim his bike to run over the
bulb and the shutter mechanism would be triggered. And he
practiced his timing at this so he could look right
into the camera at the moment the photo was taken.
When he got home from his trip, he started writing
for various publications, describing his travels to New Orleans, laying
out his plan to bicycle around the world, and proposing

(10:52):
to each magazine that they employ him and sponsor this
whole project. He was quick to give himself a bit
of pr by writing about his selfies or his ingenious
system he had devised to mount an umbrella above the
camera to keep the rain and the sun at bay.
And coming up, we'll talk about some changes in bicycles
and how those impacted Frank's sport and his plans. But

(11:16):
first we're gonna pause for a little sponsor break. Over time,
cycling had evolved like any sport, and the high wheeler
that Lenz favored was starting to seem outdated after the
introduction of the so called safety bicycle. The high wheeler,
which had a much larger front wheel than back wheel

(11:39):
with the seat perched atop the apex of that high wheel,
was dangerous, and the safeties were introduced to combat that danger.
The primary problem with the high wheeler was that if
the front wheel hit an obstacle, the rider tended to
be thrown over the handlebars. That could be dangerous and
in some cases, even fatal. The safety bicycle, like most
bikes today, had two wheels of the same size, and

(12:02):
after entering a race in which he rode the only
high wheeler that had entered and getting trounced by less
experienced riders on safety bicycles, Lens finally decided that it
was time to change up his ride. He finally got
the offer he had been hoping for, when James Henry Warman,
the editor of Outing Magazine, wrote to say that the

(12:22):
magazine was willing to go along with Lens's plan. He
just had to use a Victor Brand's safety bicycle for
the journey, So Lens quickly agreed, Yeah, that seemed like
a pretty easy stipulation to him. There was the formality
still of two interviews. Warman first sent his assistant Robert
Bruce to Pittsburgh to meet Lens in person before the

(12:44):
deal was completed, and Bruce actually got more than he
bargained for on that trip, as both Lens's mother and
his employer each approached him while he was visiting and
begged him to shut Frank's idea down. But Robert Bruce
knew that even if Outing Magazine said no to this
whole plan, Lens was going anyway, so he thought at
least that way they could kind of help make sure

(13:05):
it all went uh safely and that there was funding
for it. So Bruce reported back to Warman that he
thought Frank Lenz was absolutely up for the job. Lens
was invited to New York City after that to meet
with Warman in person. That meeting went well and in
the end Lens has offered two thousand dollars for expenses.
Warman said he would take out an insurance policy on

(13:28):
his correspondent for three thousand dollars to be paid to
his mother, and then Warman and Lenz traveled together to
Massachusetts to the factory where Victory bicycles were being made.
They made arrangements for Lens to have a custom made bicycle. Yeah,
that three thousand dollar life insurance policy was something they
kind of kept between the two of them. Basically, Lenz

(13:49):
knew that he was doing something dangerous and he really
adored his mother and if something went wrong, he wanted
her to at least have some sort of financial cushion
so she would have something to kind of help deal
with this the grief he knew she would feel if
something happened while he was on the road, and so
he settled his affairs at home. He also wrote out

(14:09):
a will that left everything to his mother. He quit
his job that he had held for seven years, This
was heartbreaking to his employer because you remember they asked
Robert Bruce to please not let him do this, uh,
And his employer said, when you get back, you can
have your job back if you want it. And he
prepared for what he thought was going to be a
two year adventure. He also promised his girlfriend Andy Leach

(14:31):
that once he returned, they could start a life together.
And while Lens had hoped that Charlie Petticord would once
again be his traveling companion, and Charlie had kind of
suggested that he would go along with this earlier before
the offer actually materialized, Charlie opted out, but he told
Frank that he could meet him in Europe so that
they could finish the trip together. A second cycling friend

(14:52):
also turned down the offer to travel with Frank, so
Frank Lens decided to travel around the world alone. To
prepare his bicycle and himself, Frank packed satchel with a
change of clothes, a tripod, his umbrella, rig an extra
enter tube and several harmonicas. He were, a belt with
pouches for all of his valuables, and he carried his

(15:13):
camera as always on his back. Frank Lens started his
journey in May of He had planned to leave at
the beginning of the month, but that custom bicycle that
he ordered took a little longer than anticipated, so he
didn't leave Pittsburgh until May fifteenth. He went first to Washington,
d C. To pick up his passport, and then he
made his way to New York for the official send off.

(15:35):
So Lens was at this point and realizing his dream.
He made several stops along the way and there were
celebrations and banquets in his honor. Petticord and a small
crowd of other cycling enthusiasts rode alongside him for the
first stretch of road as he left Pittsburgh, and then
it was just Peticord. At Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the friends said

(15:57):
their goodbyes and Lens continued on a loane. His official
start date once all those parties and paperwork stops were over,
was June four. Newspaper writeups covered the event with a
mix of optimism and pessimism over the potential success of
the journey, particularly since he was making the trip on
his own. Yeah, there have been other people that had

(16:20):
had done a similar trip, but they always were in
pairs or larger numbers. It took Lenz five months to
cross the United States, sticking to the northern part of
the country. He actually spent a week in Canada near
the very beginning of his journey, and then he traveled
down through Michigan into Indiana and stopped in Chicago to
celebrate Independence Day. From there, he went to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. St. Paul, Minnesota,

(16:44):
and then Minneapolis. He traveled further west to through the Dakotas,
although he was waylaid there when he got sick, and
then he rode into Montana once he was sufficiently recovered.
As he made his way to the west coast, he
ran into a few issues. Heat, cacti, and river crossings
all made for some precarious moments, but he remained undeterred

(17:05):
and he wrote it out. It took him three days
to get over the Rocky Mountains. He passed into Idaho
and then south to San Francisco, where he boarded a
ship bound for Asia. Yeah, and this is definitely the
abbreviated version of his travels. Like he had all kinds
of crazy adventures. In one instance, he was on a
bridge when a train was coming and there wasn't gonna

(17:26):
be room for him and the bike and the bridge,
so he hucked himself over the edge and like held
onto the edge of the bridge while the train went by.
He had a lot of cookie things happened to him
on the road. But once he was on the ship,
he first made a brief stop in Hawaii, which Frank loved.
He spoke really, really highly of Hawaii and the people
there and how beautiful it all was. And then the

(17:47):
ship that he was on, the Oceanic, continued to Japan.
Lenz spent a month there before heading into China, and
Frank lens reached Shanghai in December, and his plan from
there was to follow the tele graph line through the
country along the Yancey River into Mandalay and then eventually
make his way into Burma and Indian Kolkata. From there,

(18:08):
he intended to continue through India and Persia and then
into Turkey. And this was an ambitious plan in and
of itself, but it was also really dangerous because a
very very steep anti foreigner sentiment in China at the time.
Before arriving in Asia, Frank had experienced a dip in
his spirits for the first time on this trip. He

(18:28):
yearned for the freedom of travel, in part to get
away from his stepfather and his home life, and that
spirit really stayed with him while crossing North America. But
as he left the only country he had ever known,
he started to have moments of doubt. He wrote home
to reassure his family that he was fine throughout this trip,

(18:49):
and even in Asia, local newspapers reported his movements. He
also sent reports back to Outing magazine every other month.
Reporters for English language papers interviewed him, and while he
was in Shanghai, he also spoke with missionaries and telegraph operators,
and they gave him advice for the trip ahead, but
mostly they just told him not to do it. But

(19:10):
he was going to do it, and he left his
Shanghai hotel just before Christmas intent on completing his mission.
He thought he would reach Europe in the winter of
eight and across the continent to the Atlantic Ocean, and
then travel back to New York by steamer, but going
through China slowed him down considerably. As he moved through

(19:32):
the country, the winter became really brutal. The snow caused
him to stay in one place for much longer than
he wanted in a month, he only managed five hundred miles.
And we're gonna talk about Frank's struggles while crossing China
once the snow lit up in just a moment after
we take a quick break for a word from one
of our sponsors. As Frank had been warned what happened,

(20:01):
he was called foreign devil almost everywhere he went in China.
He was stoned in the road on several occasions, and
several times he was frightened enough that he fired his
revolver into the air to scare off his attackers. The
telegraph line that he was following had ended at a
canal with no obvious way to cross, and then he

(20:21):
was robbed. He was mobbed in various towns. He hired
guides at one point, but they argued and they ended
up taking him off course, costing him more than a
hundred and fifty extra miles of travel. And this is
just a handful of the many problems he ran into.
To make matters worse, the roads were difficult, and they
took its hole on his bike. He stayed it ends
along the way, but also gladly accepted the hospitality of

(20:45):
missionaries and telegraph workers when it was offered to him.
In one especially frightening encounter, he was attacked by farmers
in the countryside, and the conflict escalated until he was
hit in the head with a hoe and his ear
was injured. He eventually managed to dispel the hostility of
the situation by acting goofy and sort of doing crazy

(21:06):
tricks on his bike and making the people surrounding him
kind of laugh and lose their intent to hurt him.
And an interview shortly after this incident, he told a
reporter that the Chinese were quote a plaguey, bad lot.
And it should be noted that in his writings and interviews,
his impressions are exactly what one would expect from a
young man who had never traveled farther than New Orleans

(21:28):
before setting out to explore the world. So if you
read any of his accounts, you'll definitely find some presumption
and racism in the mix. So on one on the
one hand, Lynd seems to have wanted to learn about
the world and he's happy to interact with people, and
on the other he often he often characterizes them as simpletons.
He praised their work ethic and was dismayed by the

(21:52):
poverty that he witnessed in many areas, and he also
wrote about the troubling status of women and girls. So
for somebody who adored his mother, is frank did that
was particularly affecting. Yeah, it really did trouble him to
see how devalued women were in some of the places
he visited. He also told press after in an interview

(22:12):
that took place after his scare with the crowd and
the hoe to the head, that he hoped his trip
would ultimately be educational. He said, quote, I have always
had a strong desire to travel, and my trip before
I got to China, and I hope after I get
out of it will go to prove that there is
a fraternal feeling among the human race. Besides the natural
love of self that was civilization comes tolerance in a

(22:35):
more sympathetic appreciation of fellow men among all nations. But
even having had plenty of close calls, Franklin's remained dedicated
to this whole plan. He pressed on with his world tour,
and that means that his rain moved into China. He
had to walk a lot of the way, but by September,
after having spent two weeks, laid up sick. While still

(22:55):
in China. He finally reached Kolkata and he felt really
bolstered by having put the China leg of his journey
behind him and total. It had taken him six months
to cross through China, which was twice as long as
he had anticipated. He wrote quote, God helped the unfortunate
cycler or traveler who crosses China. I could never do
it again. The Burma Bicycle Club had welcomed him with

(23:19):
open arms and they treated him like a celebrity. He
was treated to a banquet and the club picked up
the tab for his lodgings. This was of course, before
he got to Colcata, and just before he sailed to Colkata,
he posted a letter to his friends saying that he
was doing well. He was repairing his bicycle after all
of that damage from the roads in China, and he
was really happy to have the hardest part of his

(23:40):
trip completed. He eventually set out once again and made
his way to Delhi and then Punjab, and he made
the decision to head towards the Arabian Sea through the
Indus Valley rather than going through Afghanistan. Shortly after the
New Year, which was a he crossed into Persia, he
made his way to the city of Tabreez. He had
some inner problems, at one point, coming down with a

(24:02):
week long fever, but nothing like what he had dealt
with while he was traveling through China. He was really
eager to finish this trip, so eager that he decided
he would travel directly through Turkey, which was at that
time also known as the Ottoman Empire to get to Europe.
That decision was made despite the Westerners he spoke with
in Persia saying that he should take the safer and

(24:25):
longer route through Russia. They basically begged him, like, please
do not go that way, and he all he could
see was like, it's so short. If I just crossed
this country, I'll be at Europe versus having to go
all the way around. And he wrote to his friend
Charlie that he missed pie and ice cream, and then
he also wrote to his editor at Outing magazine that

(24:46):
he was desperately homesick. And at the same time, I
should say, when he would write to his family, he
always reassured his mother that he was doing great. So
there were kind of two stories of what was going
on with Frank uh Reaching in North America. One that
he was just desperately homesick and kind of miserable, even
though he still acknowledged he was having fun at some

(25:07):
points on the trip, and the other was like, everything's fine,
everything's great. And so he left the city of Tabreeze
after sending these letters in May, and that was the
last time anyone saw him alive. The summer stretched on
and no one heard from him. His family and friends
were worried by the lack of correspondence because Frank had

(25:28):
always been had always been really regular in his communications.
At one point, one of his friends did get a letter,
and that offered a spark of hope, but soon they
realized that that letter had been sent before Frank vanished.
It had just been delayed in transit. Initial theories as
to Frank's whereabouts tended to be pretty hopeful. There were
early suspicions that this disappearance may have actually been a

(25:50):
hoax or a publicity stunt for the magazine, or that
he merely wanted to spend some truly alone time apart
from his life before he returned, and those ideas were
really all very out of character for Frank Lens And
as time advanced and there was still no word. Hope
started to really fade. Cycling magazines and newspapers throughout the

(26:11):
world posed the question where is Frank Lens. This whole
issue was then further confused by Outing magazine falsely reporting
that Lenz had actually reached Constantinople. Diplomats and Tehran and
Constantinople were asked to investigate, but as summer turns to autumn,
there was still no word. Outing editor James Henry Warman

(26:33):
believed that Frank had been captured and was being held
for some kind of ransom. He intended to handle the
matter of payment. Outing printed no more information on Lens's travels,
even as the periodical was criticized for not having any
kind of update. The public thought that Warman might be
withholding information. Yeah, it seems like Warman thought like, I'm

(26:54):
just gonna handle whatever this ransom situation is on my own.
I will pay whatever it takes and we will Like,
I don't want to keep reporting things because he thought
he might somehow like mess up a deal that might
come his way. But really people were like, why won't
you You must know something and you're not telling us anything.
It was a very frustrating time of course for everyone involved.

(27:15):
The State Department conducted an investigation and eventually it was
confirmed that Lenz had crossed into Turkey, and it was
confirmed exactly where that had happened, but the trail kind
of went cold after that. In another cyclist, William Sackleben,
who had himself made a successful round the world journey again,
he did it with a friend, set out to find

(27:36):
Lens or at least any information as to what had
happened to him, and that trip was also funded by
Lenz's outing editor, James Henry Warman. Before Sackleben had even
started the journey, a Paris cycling journal reported that Lenz
had been shot and killed by Kurds while on the road.
This information came from an unnamed source. Once he arrived

(27:57):
in Constantinople, William Sackoban beginning hering rumors of a man
who had been shot in the Delhi Baba pass. Yeah,
the rumors that were circulating in Constantinople basically were exactly
the same as this Paris paper had reported, and eventually
Sacramen uncovered a story that Lenz had inadvertently insulted a

(28:17):
high ranking Curd while traveling. Some of Lenz's camera equipment
was found near the village where this whole insult incident
was said to have taken place, but nobody was ever recovered.
The State Department pressured the Turkish government to make financial
amends for what was believed to have happened to Lens.
They did agree to a settlement, but with the condition

(28:38):
that there was no admittance of guilt. Frank's mother received
seventy undred dollars in the settlement. She had planned to
use the money to travel to Turkey herself to try
to find her son's remains and bring them home, and
then amended that plan to send somebody else on her behalf,
probably Charles Petticord. But then her husband, William became paralyzed
and his medical expenses quickly into that settlement money. Mrs

(29:02):
Lenz's desire to have her son's remains brought home was
never fulfilled, and there are still people who debate over
the true fate of Frank Lenz. So, while there was
circumstantial evidence to back up this murder idea, and which
was pretty much what a lot of people just accepted
at the time, that's really all there was, though, were
camera pieces and rumors, So uh, we still don't know

(29:24):
for certain what happened to him. There are certainly people
who like to theorize that he may have met his
end in a much more troubling but benign way, like
that he may have fallen from a high ledge that
he didn't see coming up, or that uh, you know,
he may have been crossing a body of water like
a river and not really made it. Those things all

(29:46):
could potentially have happened to him. We just will probably
never ever know, which is a pity. I think about
some of the things he was doing early on in
his cycling career, like the fact that he figured out
basically how to take selfies ahead of that game, and
how he had rigged up this you know, interesting umbrella system,
Like he was clearly a young man with some ingenuity

(30:09):
and a lot of drive, and so it's one of
those things where you pity sort of what could have
been had he survived this trip. Do you have some
listener mail? Also? I do, and it's way more chipper
than people disappearing with no knowledge of whatever happened to them.
Oh god, this is from our listener, Carl uh, and
he has written to us. Was before he had sent
a laminated postcard a couple of years back, and he said,

(30:31):
I write to you for two reasons. The first is
that I really enjoyed your episode about Henry Box Brown.
I've been fascinated with his story for many years. I
first heard about it when someone at the Rudisill Public
Library here in Tulsa built a replica of Brown's box
that's still kept there. If you ever visit Tulsa, be
sure to check it out, along with other other cultural icons.

(30:51):
And then he kind of gives us a lovely list
of things to tour, and he said, the second reason
I wanted to write is to brag that I am
now officially a missed in history completest have a listen
to every single episode by every combination of hosts going
back to Genghis Khan in June of two eight. It's
so exciting to think that your ten year anniversary is
coming up just in just a couple of months. I

(31:12):
also wanted to say that it amuses me to listen
to you now, because in order to work through the
archives more quickly, I listened to most of the episodes
on one point five speed. Now that I'm caught up,
I've switched back to normal speed, and it seems like
you talk so slowly. I love this so much. My
experience has gone from a rapid fire blitz of information

(31:35):
to a more relaxing listening experience. But no matter whether
faster or slow, I always enjoy hearing your voices, and
you remain one of my very favorite podcasts. Thanks so much,
Oh Carl, that is such a lovely letter. Thank you
so much. I have done that before where I have
done the faster speed listen to a podcast and then
when it goes back to normal, it really does feel
like everyone is talking through some sort of like molasses filter.

(31:58):
It's a very strange from moment on, but hopefully it
will soon start to seem normal again. If you would
like to write to us, you can do so at
History Podcast at house to works dot com. You can
also find us across the spectrum of social media as
missed in History, and you can visit us at our
website missed in History dot com, where we have an
archive of every episode that has ever existed, as well

(32:19):
as show notes for any of the episodes Tracy and
I have worked on. So come and visit us at
missed in History dot com and you can explore history
with us. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how staff works dot com.