Wheels to Fortune

OVER A CENTURY AGO GOLD-CRAZED MINERS TRADED IN THEIR SLEDS FOR BIKES AND PEDALED THEIR WAY TO THEIR ALASKAN BONANZAS .

- MICHAEL ENGELHARD

The worldwide bicycle craze of the 1890s led to enthusiasts and inventors meeting the needs of bicyclists for all four seasons, including the “ice velocipede,” patented in 1893. – COURTESY US PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE –

In late February, as the days grow longer and supposedly milder, down-clad triathletes besting cranes and geese flock to western Alaska for The Iditarod Trail Invitational. “The world’s longest and toughest winter race,” like the eponymous mushing event, honors a roughly thousand-mile, life-saving 1925 serum run from Seward to Nome. Biking, running and skiing, pulling sleds and often pushing their vehicles (and their luck), thrill-seekers cross the Alaska Range into the meat locker interior—vales of boobytrap deadfall, snowdrifts, and overflows— before sighting the Bering Strait coast.

This confederacy of pain wears its moxie and ingenuity like merit badges. But it simply follows the tracks of velocipedists who swift-footed toward precious metal when the state was a territory.

In 1897, greenhorn mobs boarded steamers bound for the Klondike goldfields while bicycles, invented 80 years earlier to counter horse shortages after the Napoleonic Wars, had become a nationwide fad. Sears, Roebuck & Company offered surprisingly modern-looking “Yukon” models for ladies and gents, and black “Buffalo Soldiers” bicycle corps patrolled the Yellowstone country, scaring horses and cows.