'Wheels on Ice' helped James Michener solidify a novel travel plan

A reviewer in the New York Daily News confessed to skepticism after reading of the two-wheeled conveyance pedalled across Alaska by a James Michener character in the pages of the author’s novel “Alaska.”

“It all sounds so convincing that you want to believe one character actually bicycles 1,000 miles along the frozen Yukon, from Dawson to Nome, to get to the Gold Rush in time to cash in,” wrote Bill Bell in 1988. “(In his notes, Michener says that the incident is based on a real trip).”

The reviewer claimed that it appeared Michener “hired every history, economics and geology major in the land to help amass information.”

That’s not exactly how Michener worked during the three years or so that he spent on the novel, based in Sitka, but his approach to writing did require him to gather a great deal of material on Alaska history, economics and geology.

As I continue the process of packing up my brother’s voluminous correspondence and research files, I encountered a reminder the other day of some important information that Terrence shared with Michener about Alaska history.

Michener wrote back on Jan. 1, 1986 that, among other things, a book Terrence had compiled and edited, “Wheels on Ice,” had made a real impression. It became part of his homework for the novel.

He said, “the material that really gave me a chuckle and a gasp was your own publication on bicycles. I had always known about the one case, but never realized that so many daring fellows had duplicated part of the great adventure. Makes me wonder if I don’t want to revise some of my material on how my junior hero, an Irishman, gets down to Nome.”

Terrence wrote that the Skagway Daily Alaskan reported in 1901 that 250 bicyclists were trying to get to Dawson that spring and the paper wrongly predicted that the day of the dog team had passed.

Ed Jesson, who rode a bike from Dawson to Nome in 1900, said it was not a pleasure jaunt, but the bike “didn’t eat anything and I didn’t have to cook dogfeed for it.”

Perhaps Michener had planned that the Irishman in his novel would travel by boat or dogteam to Nome—the typical options—but the oddball idea in “Wheels on Ice” proved irresistible.

Published two years later, the 868-page novel had Matt Murphy riding his bike to Nome, a “New Mail Special” built by WM. Read & Sons in Boston, Mass.

“Matt's New Mail Special performed even better than its builders in Boston had predicted, and at the halfway mark he'd had no trouble with his tires except that they froze solid at anything below minus-forty, and only one loosened spoke. During the first days his personal gear, strapped to his back, did cause chafing, but he soon solved that problem by adjusting his pack, and during his long, solitary ride down the Yukon he often amused himself by bellowing old Irish songs. The only thing that held him up was an occasional bout of snow blindness, which he cured with a day's rest in some dark cabin.”

“He kept going at more than sixty miles a day, and once when he felt he had to make up lost time after an enforced halt because of the blindness, he did seventy-eight.”

Michener’s book about Alaska has reached a worldwide audience, still inspiring some adventurers who pick it up to dream about a two-wheel trip of their own—and so art imitates life in the novel, while life imitates art on the snowy trail to Nome.