Intrepid Traveler

Ellen White’s pioneer spirit was probably best manifested in her remarkable travel itinerary. By 1885 she had crossed the United States from California to Michigan about twenty-four times by train, only sixteen years after the transcontinental connection had been made at Promintory, Utah! Obviously, these trips were nothing like what people today can even remember, nothing resembling the “romance” that people attached to rail travel in the first half of the twentieth century. ^{15See pp. 84-86.}MOL 104.2

Wooden passenger cars, hazardous in accidents, were the order of the day, not being replaced by all-steel cars until 1907. “Seats were straight backed and thinly cushioned, if at all. A coal stove furnished the only heat; candles and oil lamps provided the light. Open platform vestibules offered little protection from the weather when walking from one car to another.” ^{16Overland Route (No. Highlands, California: History West, 1981), p. 17.} The engineer “could be identified by his aroma of bourbon as readily as a drummer by his sample case.” ^{17Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, The Age of Steam (New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc., n.d.), p. 17. A drummer was a traveling salesman.}MOL 104.3

The first forty years of rail travel to the West were the “heyday of the miner, the cowboy, the train robber, and the bad man, any and all of whom you might find riding the plush or the wooden slats of the steam cars.” The country going west “was bare and harsh, buffeted by cruel winters, baked by torrid summers. Rain, when it came, was a destructive torrent. Droughts occurred at regular intervals.... In 1874, with most railroad construction halted by the financial panic of 1873, the grasshoppers struck, eating every growing thing from the Canadian border to northern Texas. A Union Pacific train at Kearney [Nebraska] was stalled in a three-foot drift of ‘hoppers.’” ^{18Oliver O. Jensen, The American Heritage History of Railroads in America (New York: American Heritage Publishing Company, 1975), p. 123. See Appendix C for selections from Robert Louis Stevenson’s account of his train ride west in 1879.}MOL 104.4

In 1876 the conventional travel time between the Pacific coast and New York was seven days and nights, with changes of cars at Omaha and Chicago. ^{19Lucius Beebe, The Age of Steam, p. 161. In 1848 no one had yet traveled a mile in sixty seconds in any conveyance. President Washington was told by leading physicians “that a stage-coach speed of fifteen miles an hour would invariably result in the death of anyone attempting it by causing all the blood in the body to run to the head.” Lucius Beebe, High Iron (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1938), p. 55. In his chapter, “Overland by Rail, 1869-1890,” in Gary Land, The World of Ellen G. White, pp. 63-76, Randall R. Butler II wrote that before 1880 the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific trains averaged about twenty-two miles per hour. After 1880 average speeds doubled but with stops at more than two hundred stations and water tanks, the total hours spent crossing the country remained the same. Concluding this chapter, Butler wrote: “By midmorning, westbound trains arrived at the Oakland terminal. The tired, weary passengers rejoiced universally with the conclusion of the journey. It was a long, hard four-and-a-half days from Omaha, and most passengers had begun their trip from one to three days further east or south. After a week of noise, dust, and tobacco and locomotive smoke, the disembarking passengers looked forward to a warm bath and quiet rest.”}MOL 104.5

Three times Ellen White took the hazardous ocean trip to Oregon (1878, 1880, 1884) when facilities were still primitive. Of her visit in 1878 when she was 50, a worker’s wife reported: “Sister White was so ambitious when here, when contemplating work that was to be done, that it really seemed that she forgot her years. Her visit to Oregon was of the most valuable benefit to the work of Present Truth [sic] here.” ^{20Cited in Land, The World of Ellen G. White, p. 83. For insights into the hardships that early Adventist workers endured, see The Ministry of Healing, 74-80.}MOL 104.6

In 1852, the Whites left Rochester, New York, for a two-month trip to New England by horse and carriage. James arranged the itinerary and informed Adventists through the church paper as to the time and place they could expect the Whites. The schedule was grueling; one leg of 100 miles was allotted only two days! But with good weather and no breakdowns, they managed to meet their appointments. While they bumped along in an open carriage, James thought of what he would write to the Review and Youth’s Instructor. When they stopped to let Charlie, their horse, eat, he would write the articles “on the cover of our dinner box, or the top of his hat.” ^{21Bio., vol. 1, pp. 232-234.}MOL 104.7

Ellen White’s experience trying to get to a camp meeting appointment in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, early in June, 1889, well illustrates her persevering, pioneering spirit. This was the year of the heavy rain and the Johnstown Flood. Many roads and bridges were washed away enroute. The train moved slowly from Battle Creek. When they reached Elmira, New York, they were advised to return home. But Mrs. White (now 61) and Sara McEnterfer forged ahead. When the train could go no further, these two women hired a carriage. When the carriage was forced to stop, the women walked— completing the last 40 miles in four days.MOL 104.8

The phenomenal journey is described in Ellen White’s report in the The Review and Herald, July 30, 1889. In that report she wrote: “We were obliged to walk miles on this journey, and it seemed marvelous that I could endure to travel as I did. Both of my ankles were broken years ago, and ever since they have been weak. Before leaving Battle Creek for Kansas, I sprained one of my ankles, and was confined to crutches for some time; but in this emergency I felt no weakness or inconvenience, and traveled safely over the rough, sliding rocks.” ^{22L. H. Christian recalled that “this article in the Review was read and discussed and used as an example to follow, but never thought of as something out of the ordinary.” The Fruitage of Spiritual Gifts, p. 152.} At the Williamsport camp meeting, she spoke thirteen times, including all the early-morning meetings—and that without a public address system!MOL 105.1

This persevering, cheerful, pioneer spirit was evident, as usual, when the Whites crossed the Mississippi River in December 1857. A foot of water flowed over the ice, other teams with wagons had broken through—but the White party pressed on. In Iowa, through fierce, cold winds, with their horses breaking paths through high snow, they finally reached their destination. ^{23Bio., vol. 1, pp. 346-349. See also p. 431. For another example of exciting but rigorous pioneer living, review the months spent in Texas during the winter of 1878-79 and the wagon train ordeal in the spring of 1879.—Ibid., pp. 98-120.}MOL 105.2