Minnie Hill Wood, Afoot and Alone: From Washington D.C. to San Francisco. The Christopher Publishing House, Boston USA 1924
Garry Whannel
Minnie Hill Wood walked from Washington DC to San Francisco in or around 1916, on her own. She subsequently published her diary of the walk, Afoot and Alone, in 1924. She did it, she wrote, to establish that a woman could walk alone, safely, right across America. Walking at least twelve miles a day and sometimes as much as 50, it took her 157 days, from 7 June to 11 November. And she has no Wikipedia entry, although, dammit, she deserves one.
I first discovered Afoot and Alone around the time that the spread of Covid 19 prompted the announcement of lockdown in the UK. I was staying in a cottage in rural North Buckinghamshire, the family home of my partner. In the cottage, there are many books, inherited from parents and grandparents. They are a great resource, and, contemplating house arrest for an indefinite period, one day I pulled a book off the shelf to see what it was. I discovered Minnie Hill Wood and her quest. I began reading, and because the book, in the form of a day-to-day diary, discloses so little about its author, I also commenced an internet search - who was Minnie? What was she? I was amazed that there was so little to be found.
Her book contains virtually no clues as to who she was, why she was driven to make such an ambitious walk, and why she, presumably a hiker of experience, appeared to set off with totally inappropriate shoes, and it seems at first, no proper maps nor a route plan. There have, of course, been many other long distance walkers, both male and female. For example, Minta Beach walked from New York to Chicago in 1912. Eleanora Sears, an all-round sportswoman, set a speed hiking record in 1925, walking the 74 miles between Newport, Rhode Island and Boston in seventeen hours.[1]
In response to my enquiries, a correspondent reminded me of Dr. Barbara Moore, who did a number of long walks in the 1950s and 1960s - Land’s End to John O’Groats, 1200 miles in 23 days, and San Francisco to New York, 3,387-miles in 86 days, so a fraction under 40 miles a day, which seems barely imaginable. Born in Russia in 1903, as Anna Cherkasova, she was among the first generation of Soviet female engineers after the Russian Revolution. She emigrated to the UK in 1939.[2]
My findings were sparse. Minnie Hill Wood was a journalist, married to Alonzo Wood, also a journalist as far as I can tell.[3] It is evident from the book that she had a specialist interest in mines. Her expertise in this area was sufficient to enable local mining officials along her route to provide guided tours of their mines, and it seems clear that despite being a woman, her understanding of mine engineering gained her the respect of her male guides. However, these visits were an occasional side benefit of her walk, rather than a motivation for embarking upon it.
Minnie Hill Wood died on 26 November 1932.[4] She was described in one obituary as a noted writer and journalist who had been had been associated with newspapers throughout the country. She was a native of Massachusetts and a graduate of Radcliffe College. She died at home in Larkspur, California, following a brief illness when she was over sixty years of age. Mrs. Hill was a member of the Washington chapter of the National League of American Pen Women. At the time of her death she was in charge of publicity for Crater National Park.[5] I have been able to unearth little else about her.
That the walk was arduous hardly needs elaboration. Simply crossing Colorado, which one would imagine involved some of the more challenging terrain, took 24 days. The book is rigorously in diary form. The entries appear to have been written contemporaneously on each day of the walk. Minnie tells us that they took the form of daily letters to ‘one with whom I had tramped many summers.’ There is no other indication as to who this person was, and if there were any personal sentiments regarding the relationship, they have been removed. There is no contextual apparatus, beyond a very short introduction which reveals little. The introduction describes the walk and its route. It contains factual detail: she walked on 140 days in stages that varied between twelve and fifty miles. There is no reflexive or summative afterword. Minnie simply arrives in San Francisco on 11 November 1916, completing the total of 4,000 miles, some seven weeks ahead of her schedule. After walking around 20 miles from San Mateo, the last entry in the book concludes, ‘The last day of my long tramp is ended.’[6] There is no afterword and no further consideration of her achievement. There are some 35 photographs, largely views of landscapes, but none of them show Mrs Wood, nor were they taken by her, so apart form an appreciation of the geography, they add nothing to our sense of the author.
What the book does do is record what Minnie saw and heard, with rather less reflection on what she felt, with a reporter's precision. It is a record of the landscapes she traversed and the people with whom she interacted. In particular it details the landladies she encounters, along with an assessment of the accommodation and food. She passes judgement on those whose sheets are not fresh and clean, on those who insist on closed windows when she wants them open, or vice versa, and on those whose provision of food is inadequate or produced with poor grace. On the other hand, she is generous in her description of those who are warm, welcoming, and kind. One can readily see that, at the end of a walk of some 25 miles each day, such things matter greatly.
Considering the great rigour of the task, Minnie is sparing with her own emotions. Broadly, she faces heat, cold, and wetness with a stoic determination. Dogs loom large, especially at the points when she arrives in a new town at the end of a long hike, and is seeking accommodation. There are brief episodes in which she is concerned at the presence of snakes or coyotes. In general, though she is relatively unfazed by the various dangers that could be threatening, especially to a woman travelling alone. There is just one exception. In navigating the country, there are constantly options - which road to travel? The shorter route may also have steeper gradients, for example. One further option is to walk along the railroad tracks, which often avoid the extremes of gradient. Unfortunately for Minnie, though, they also have what she refers to as trestles - wooden bridges, often to cross deep ravines. These bridges were not constructed to accommodate pedestrians. They lack fences, handrails or any safety protection. They do not even have boarding that prevents gazing downwards through gaps to the drop below. Minnie Hill Wood has a deep, and to my mind wholly justifiable, fear of crossing them. Yet, often, the alternative is a long and difficult climb down one side, and up the other. So, time and time again, she has to conquer her fear and navigate the dreaded trestle bridges. The low-key emotions of the rest of the account merely serve to heighten the horror effect of these terrifying transits. I have no direct experience of these bridges, and certainly no intention of ever crossing one, yet Minnie's vivid exposure of her own dark fears was enough to induce in me one or two nightmares. Her other occasional worries - snakes, coyotes, and tramps, are all, by comparison, minor worries, relatively easily managed.
Consequently, as one plods across America with Minnie (and yes, you do begin to feel as if you are part of it) one's own concerns mirror hers - will we get to the next town before dark? Will there be somewhere clean, pleasant and welcoming to stay? Will there be food and will it be at least adequate, or will we need to continue in search of a restaurant? Because Minnie accepts these problems with a high degree of stoicism, then so do we.
It is remarkable how little reflection backwards or projection forwards there is in this narrative. Almost never does she look back in contemplation or forwards in speculation. The personal (except in its immediate experiential mode) is almost entirely excised. No clues are dropped - we cannot work out whether she is young or old, married or single. Although she rarely gives clear indications as to the racial identity of those she encountered, I found myself assuming she was white and wondering if she was prejudiced against black people. However, such attitudes as she has towards strangers appear fairly consistently linked to the degree of kindness they show her. There is some suggestion of a prejudice towards Mexicans, based on a stereotypical imagining, which is somewhat dissipated as she gets to meet and talk to some real Mexicans.
Even though her mining expertise appears at points in the story when she has the chance of a conducted visit to a mine, nothing is revealed as to how she has come to develop this specialism, rather unusual in a female journalist, even nowadays. In fact, this is the only point at which one can find evidence that she is a journalist - she certainly does not declare herself as such.
The enigmatic qualities of the story, the lack of full emotional disclosure, the absence of any autobiographical context, are part of the appeal, of course but also a source of frustration. By the end, the reader still does not understand who she is, quite why she embarked on the journey nor what she felt upon its completion. Normally one would then turn to secondary sources, biography or at the least Wikipedia references. There is hardly anything that I could find. I put out this appeal. If there are any feminist historians with an interest, this could make an admirable topic for a doctoral thesis. Keep me posted. And more broadly, to anyone who might have more information about Minnie Hill Wood and her journey, please get in touch.
Author
Garry Whannel
Notes
[1] http://hollywoodwalker.blogspot.com/2017/04/walking-with-women-walkers.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Moore_(vegetarian)
[3] San Anselmo Herald, Volume 19, Number 24, 25 May 1928.
[4] Bakersfield Californian Newspaper Archives
[5] Woman Journalist Dies in Larkspur, Oakland Tribune Oakland, California 26 November 1932, p.12.
[6] Wood, Minnie Hill (Afoot and Alone: From Washington D.C. to San Francisco (1924) p.359.