Bicycling to Nome
Dog mushing wasn't the only way to get around Alaska. Stampeders used
horses, reindeer, ice skates and even bicycles! One adventurous young
man, Ed Jesson, left Dawson on February 22, 1900 astride a bicycle that
he had just learned to ride the week before, and arrived 1000 miles away
in Nome on March 29, tired, bruised and almost snowblind. Jesson wrote
that the bicycle "stood the trip in splendid shape and to my great surprise
I never had a puncture or broke a spoke the entire trip." With the frozen
Yukon River as his trail, Jesson encountered some pretty rough traveling,
"but," Jesson said, "it didn't eat anything and I didn't have to cook
dogfeed for it." Jesson was not the only one to use a bicycle for transportation;
others tried similar feats with varied degrees of success.
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Used with
permission.
Gold Rush Centennial Task Force, State of Alaska.
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