Owney:Honorary Mascot of the Railway Mail Service

 

Owney guarding a mail sack Wikimedia photo

Originally, I had a different idea for this blog. My latest contemporary romance released this month, so I was looking for a historical dog-related theme for this month. And in the process, I found a rabbit hole to research. Over the centuries, only the wealthy had dogs as pets. Everyone else kept dogs to perform useful services such as watchdog, ratter, or cattle dog. While researching the origin of dog tags, I found a brief mention of a mixed-breed terrier who was a postal service mascot, and I had to know the story. And now I'm sharing it with you.

Vest full of medals  Wikepedia photo

During the 1890s, Owney was the unofficial mascot of the Railway Mail Service. Owney was owned by a postal clerk in Albany, New York, who took the dog to work with him. When he left that job, he left Owney behind. The dog loved traveling in the mail cars. Postal employees adopted him as their mascot. For nine years he was a mail-riding dog.

Riding the rails

He rode resting on the mailbags, protecting that mail from anyone who wasn't a mail clerk. He would growl at anyone coming near those bags unless they were mail clerks. 

Sometimes he'd leave Albany and not return for months, moving from train to train. The Albany clerks became concerned he might get lost. They purchased a collar and added a dog tag with his name and Albany post office. As he arrived at other post offices, they added tags.

Medals and Tags

Soon at every stop he made, a new tag was added. It is believed he visited all forty-eight states, Alaska, Canada and Mexico. Everywhere he went, he received a tag, some brass or silver, others made from leather or aluminum. 

John Wannamaker

There were also commemorative medals from organizations that wanted to honor him. Tokens with the date and place he visited were also added. Eventually, the Postmaster General John Wannamaker had a special vest made for him to display his tags. Wannamaker was concerned Owney would injure his neck from their weight. Overtime, as new medals were added, older ones were removed and mailed to Albany or Washington, D.C. for safekeeping. It is said he accumulated over 1,000 medals and tags. Currently, the National Postal Museum has only 372. Some of the more fragile medals didn't survive.

Tidbits from Owney's travels

While he visited Montreal, Ontario, Canada, the city postmaster kept him in a kennel. He sent a request for reimbursement of the $2.50 fee for care and feeding. Once it was paid, the dog was returned to Albany.

In 1895, Tacoma, Washington, businessmen, concocted a publicity stunt to honor George Francis Train, the inspiration for Phineas Fogg in Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 days. Train had once ended one of his world travels in Tacoma. In honor of Train, they wanted to send America's most famous K9, around the world on a mail ship.

Owney set sail on August 19,1895 on the steamship Victoria. According to an article published in The Roanoke Daily on July 24, 1896, his trip was quite fanciful. He carried a travel bag containing a comb, brush, his blanket and his vest full of medals for formal meetings, along with letters of introduction. Reportedly, the port authority in Japan, on seeing all his medals, thought he must be someone very important and treated him with respect. While in Japan, he was given a passport by the emperor. The emperor of China also gave him a passport and then arranged for Owney to tour a silk and tea factory. Chinese coins and commemorative ribbons were added to the dog's vest as well.

  Captain Panton of the Victoria took Owney on tours of the American ships in the Hong Kong harbor where he acquired more medals and letters of introduction. After touring Asia, he boarded the steamship, Port Philip, and was placed in the care of Captain Grant and his crew for his return trip to Tacoma, Washington. He returned August 19,1985 after 132 days. He broke no speed records and, according to ship's records, never visited Europe. Even so, his fame grew.

At the end of his life

Owney traveled over 144,000 miles, more than any wealthy individual in that era. He was beloved by all the postal employees along his train routes. As he aged, Post Office management felt his traveling days were over. Mail clerk J. M. Elben, of St. Louis, agreed to take him in. The Chicago manager of Railway Mail Service insisted in colorful language that the "mongrel cur" no longer be allowed to travel on the trains. Management was looking for ways to improve service. The postal employees felt their mascot represented the working class and didn't appreciate the new management's attitude toward Owney. The remarks seemed to mirror their attitude toward them as postal employees.

Smithsonian display

Owney's passing was reported in every newspaper in the country. Some gave a soft report that Owney had become ill and died. While others called it murder. Owney had become aggressive in his old age and supposedly bit a clerk and then a US Marshal, at which point a sheriff put him down.

But according to some modern research into the details of his death, they discovered a clerk had chained Owney in a basement. His freedom to roam was taken away, probably adding to his aggression. My question, if a clerk in St. Louis took him in, how did he end up in a basement in Ohio. Whether he was in a basement or outside attacking people, it was confirmed he was put down in Toledo, Ohio on June 11, 1897.

Postal Employees insist he is honored

The postal employees refused to bury him. Instead, they ask that he be preserved and presented to the Post Office Department's headquarters. Their request was granted. The postal department placed him displayed at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. Cleveland, Ohio, postal workers commissioned a silver spoon in honor of their mascot. Owney is on exhibit at the Smithsonian. He was sent there in 1911 and has been called one of the museum's most interesting artifacts.

He was the subject of two poems by postal clerks.

      And the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in 2012 published a digital edition Owney: Tails for the Rails, written by Jerry Rees, with songs by Stephen Michael Schwartz and illustrated by Fred Cline, and narrated by Trace Adkins who also voiced the songs. Here is a link to the free book.

I had never heard of Owney before. When I visited the Smithsonian years ago, I never made it to their postal museum. As I've spent few years writing contemporary romances with hero dogs in them, I couldn't pass up a chance to tell a real hero dog story.

Have you ever heard of Owney?

Cindy Ervin Huff is a multi-Award-winning, hybrid author of historical and contemporary romance. She loves researching odd historical tidbits and visiting museums with her husband of 50-plus years. Although they don't currently have a dog, Cindy takes pictures of all the ones she meets at vending events. She's addicted to chocolate and reading and loves encouraging future authors. You can visit her at www.cindyervinhuff.com or on social media. 

https://www.facebook.com/author.huff11

https://www.instagram.com/cindyervinhuff/

https://twitter.com/Cindyhuff11Huff

Here is a link to my contemporary romance series featuring adorable dogs.

 

The Other Woman in the Race around the World

Elizabeth Bisland

By Marilyn Turk

You’ve probably read about Nellie Bly, the famous journalist who went around in the world in 72 days to beat the fictional Phileas Fogg of Jules Verne’s book, Around the World in Eighty Days.

What you might not know is that the trip was a race between Nelly Bly who worked for The World, the most widely-read newspaper of its time, and Elizabeth Bisland, the literary editor of The Cosmopolitan magazine.

Elizabeth was born on Fairfax Plantation in Louisiana in 1861. Life on the family plantation was difficult after the Civil War, so the family moved to Natchez, Louisiana when she was twelve years old.  She began writing as a teenager, sending poems to the New Orleans Times Democrat under the pen name of B.L.R. Dane. When her family and the paper discovered her identity, she was paid for her work, eventually moving to New Orleans to work for the paper.

Around 1889, she moved to New York City where she worked for a variety of newspapers and magazines. When the publisher of The Cosmopolitan read about Nellie Bly’s future trip around the world, he decided to make it a race and send his literary editor, Elizabeth Bisland, in the opposite direction to do the same, hoping she would beat Bly’s time. At first, she refused, because she did not want the attention, but finally she gave in. So on the same day, November 14, 1889, both women departed New York, but Bly went east and Bisland went west. 

The World excited its readers by posting sensational accounts of Bly’s journey while ignoring Bisland’s journey. At the same time, The Cosmopolitan’s coverage was less frequent, it being a monthly magazine.

Bisland was twenty-eight years old, tall and elegant, gracious and intelligent, and an avid reader of literary works. Although a beautiful woman, she once wrote, “After the period of sex-attraction has passed, women have no power in America.” She was a hard-working woman, often working eighteen hours a day, and was proud of the fact that she arrived in New York City with only fifty dollars but had earned thousands by her own writing.

Elizabeth Bisland wrote seven articles for The Cosmopolitan about her race around the world. In 1890 these articles were published by Harper & Brothers as a book entitled In Seven Stages: A Flying Trip Around the World. Near the end of the trip, cold, sleepless and hungry, Bisland hurried by train and ferry through France, England, Wales, and Ireland to catch the steamship that was her last chance to beat Bly, only to cross a storm-tossed North Atlantic.

In the end, Elizabeth Bisland succeeded in beating Phileas Fogg’s eighty-day mark, completing the trip in seventy-six days, which would have been the fastest trip ever made around the world, except that Nellie Bly had arrived four days earlier.

She arrived home—as she had feared—famous, amazed to discover people had placed wagers on who would win. She was even more amazed by the number of strangers who sent cards and messages, who simply wanted to see her, as if she were an exotic animal.

Unlike Nellie Bly, who upon her return to New York immediately set out on a forty-city lecture tour, Bisland avoided publicity. She gave no lectures, endorsed no products, and did not comment publicly on the trip. Instead, at the very height of her popularity, Bisland left the United States and sailed for Great Britain, where she lived the following year surrounded by London’s literary society.

When she returned to New York, she married corporate attorney Charles Wetmore, and together the two designed and built an estate on Long Island they named Applegarth. At Applegarth, she became a highly productive writer of several books and essays, writing until her death. In one of her final collections of essays, she wrote “Toward Sunset” in which she observed, “That old age may be agreeable to others and tolerable to itself, no other equipment is so necessary as a vigorous sense of humour.” But old age itself, she was quick to point out, “is not an amusing episode.”

Elizabeth Bisland died of pneumonia on January 6, 1929, at the age of sixty-seven. Coincidentally, she was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, New York, the same cemetery where Nelly Bly was buried, who also died of pneumonia in 1922.

Elizabeth Bisland in later years

Marilyn Turk’s roots are in the coastal South, raised in Louisiana, moved to Georgia, then retired to Florida. Calling herself a “literary archaeologist,” she loves to discover stories hidden in history. She is the author of two World War II novels, The Gilded Curse and Shadowed by a Spy, and the Coastal Lights Legacy series set in 1800s Florida—Rebel Light, Revealing Light, Redeeming Light, and Rekindled Light—featuring lighthouse settings. Marilyn’s novella, The Wrong Survivor, is in the Great Lakes Lighthouse Brides collection. She also writes for the Daily Guideposts Devotions book.

Nellie Bly - Pioneer Journalist by Marilyn Turk

Nellie Bly, c. 1890

Elizabeth Jane Cochran knew firsthand what it was like to be a working woman. Although her father had provided well for his family in the town named for him, Cochran Mills, Pennsylvania, his sudden death when she was six years old threw her family into financial upheaval. He left no will, so the laws of the state said his wife and children had no claim to his estate. They were forced to move out of their comfortable home to Pittsburgh, where his widow bought a smaller house and rented out rooms for income.

When Elizabeth was eighteen years old, an article in the Pittsburgh Dispatch so infuriated her, she sent a heated rebuttal to the newspaper, signing it "little orphan girl." The article, entitled “What Girls are Good For,” claimed that women should be busy in their homes and that working women were “a monstrosity.”

The editor was so impressed with Cochran’s writing, he advertised to find her, then offered her a position, changing her name to the pseudonym Nellie Bly after Stephen Foster’s song “Nelly Bly.” Nellie had a passion to write about the plight of working women, but instead, she was forced to write about social events for the women’s pages. 

Frustrated with the topics she was assigned, Nellie left the Dispatch and moved to Mexico to be a travel correspondent. At the age of 21, she spent nearly half a year reporting the lives and customs of the Mexican people. Her criticism of the Mexican dictator led to threats by the government, so Nellie returned to the states, obtaining a job at the New York World, the paper owned by Joseph Pulitzer.

In a groundbreaking feat of undercover reporting, Nellie pretended insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, part of Bellevue Hospital. Several doctors examined her beforehand, declaring her “undoubtedly insane.” For ten days, Bly lived among the horrid conditions of the asylum, experiencing the brutal treatment and neglect of the patients.

After the World arranged her release, she wrote an expose called “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” creating a sensation that brought her lasting fame. While embarrassed physicians and staff fumbled to explain how so many professionals had been fooled, a grand jury launched its own investigation into conditions at the asylum. The jury's report recommended the changes she proposed, and called for increased funds for treatment of the insane.

In 1888, Bly gained more fame by convincing her editor to let her take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. Bly left New York on November 14, 1889, traveling through England, France (where she met Jules Verne), Brindisi,, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan.

Traveling first by ship, then by horse, rickshaw, sampan, burro, and other means,  she arrived back in New York on January 25, 1890, seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds after her departure. The twenty-five-year old had circumnavigated the globe practically unchaperoned.

In 1895 Nellie Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman, 40 years her senior. She retired from journalism and became the president of his company, Iron Clad Manufacturing Co., which made steel containers such as milk cans and boilers. When her husband died nine years later, she became one of the leading female industrialists in the United States, but embezzlement by employees led her into bankruptcy. Bly returned to reporting, writing stories about Europe during World War I and covered the Women’s Suffrage Movement in 1913.

Bly died in 1922, leaving a legacy of striving to improve the social conditions of widows and orphans.

Marilyn Turk has been published in Guideposts Magazine, A Joyful Heart, A Cup of Christmas Cheer, The Upper Room, Clubhouse Jr., several Chicken Soup for the Soul books, and Lighthouse Digest Magazine. Rebel Light, the first book in her four-book series, Coastal Lights Legacy, will be published in August 2014 and her Lighthouse Devotions book will be published later this year..Marilyn's website, http://pathwayheart.com, features two blogs, a Lighthouse blog and A Writer's Path. She lives in Florida with husband Chuck and enjoys fishing and tennis when she’s not climbing lighthouses or playing with her three grandsons.