Clarence M. Darling and Claude C. Murphey, age 19 and 20 respectively, left Jackson, Michigan, on May 2, 1904, to make a trip by bicycle through every state and territory within the boundary lines of the United States proper, namely, fortv-five states, four territories, and the District of Columbia. The trip was the result of a wager. Upon the success of the tour a purse of five thousand dollars would be won by the two contestants providing that they lived up to all the terms and stipulations of the wager. The conditions were that they were to start on this long journey penniless, while on the trip they were neither to beg, work, borrow, nor steal, all the expenses of the tour to be met by the profits resulting from the sale of an aluminum card-receiver or ash-tray, a fac-simile of which is given on one of the following pages.

Murphey, Claude Charles. Around the United States by Bicycle. Detroit: Press of Raynor & Taylor, 1906.

John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe. These words are written on the inside cover of the notebook from which the contents of this volume have been taken. They reflect the mood in which the late author and explorer undertook his thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico a half-century ago. No less does this refreshingly cosmopolitan address, which might have startled any finder of the book, reveal the temper and the comprehensiveness of Mr. Muir s mind. He never was and never could be a parochial student of nature. Even at the early age of twenty-nine his eager interest in every aspect of the natural world had made him a citizen of the universe. 

In 1887 George Nellis became the third person to ride across the United States, from Herkimer, New York to San Francisco, shaving several weeks off Thomas Stevens’ time, thus becoming the first to “race across the United States.” Throughout this account, Hayes reports on the state of bicycle touring in the late nineteenth century.