Mesannie Mabel Libby Wilkins was a resident of Maine, born in 1891.
Considered somewhat of an eccentric loner, she spoke her mind and regularly wore pants at a time when the practice was not common with women and raised eyebrows.
She also drew attention for riding a mule to her job at a shoe factory in Lewiston out of convenience and necessity. She also farmed. This behavior all served to have many of her neighbors eye her warily.
In 1954, sixty-three-year-old Annie Wilkins embarked on an impossible journey. She had no money and no family, she had just lost her farm, and her doctor had given her only two years to live.
But Annie wanted to see the Pacific Ocean before she died. She ignored her doctor’s advice to move into the county charity home.
Instead, she bought a cast-off brown gelding named Tarzan, donned men’s dungarees, and headed south in mid-November, hoping to beat the snow.
Annie had little idea what to expect beyond her rural crossroads; she didn’t even have a map. But she did have her ex-racehorse, her faithful mutt, and her own unfailing belief that Americans would treat a stranger with kindness.
Annie, Tarzan, and her dog, Depeche Toi, rode straight into a world transformed by the rapid construction of modern highways.
Between 1954 and 1956, they (she acquired a pack horse, Rex, along the way) pushed through blizzards, forded rivers, climbed mountains, and clung to the narrow shoulder as cars whipped by them at terrifying speeds.
During her stay in Waverley, Tennessee, she shared stories of sleeping in prisons and hotels, emphasizing the great kindness and generosity she experienced from the people she encountered. She also expressed pride in her new life as a “tramp of fate.”
As news of Annie’s remarkable journey spread across the United States, she often received police protection while traveling to different cities. Journalists sought her out for interviews in parking lots.
In May 1955, Annie was interviewed on two radio and television channels in Missouri. She also visited a local school to share her journey. During her travels, she sold self-portraits and postcards to raise money for her expenses.
In August 1955, she reached Cheyenne, Wyoming, where she witnessed the annual Frontier Days, a renowned rodeo event.
Annie rode more than four thousand miles, through America’s big cities and small towns.
Along the way, she met ordinary people and celebrities—from Andrew Wyeth (who sketched Tarzan) to Art Linkletter and Groucho Marx. She received many offers—a permanent home at a riding stable in New Jersey, a job at a gas station in rural Kentucky, even a marriage proposal from a Wyoming rancher.
Wilkins traveled for nearly two years, arriving in Reading, California, in mid-December. She experienced winter while staying in California and explored various locations in the state, finally witnessing the Pacific Ocean for the first time—an unforgettable moment in her life.
Shortly before her planned journey to Hollywood to make an appearance on “Art Linkletter Show,” tragedy struck Wilkins. Her packhorse, Rex, accidentally stepped on a rusty nail, resulting in a fatal case of tetanus, and sadly passed away on March 1, 1956. Despite this setback, Annie remained in California for at least another year before eventually returning to her hometown in Maine in 1957.
Surpassing her initial prognosis of only two years, Annie lived an additional 24 years.
Wilkins, aged 88, passed away on Tuesday, February 19, 1980, in Whitefield, Maine. She was laid to rest in the Libby family plot at Maple Grove Cemetery in Minot, ME where her gravestone bears the inscription “the last of the saddle tramps.”
In a decade when car ownership nearly tripled, when television’s influence was expanding fast, when homeowners began locking their doors, Annie and her four-footed companions inspired an outpouring of neighborliness in a rapidly changing world.
☆☆☆☆☆
IN GOD WE TRUST
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A great piece of Americana we didn’t know about. I doubt she could do that today. Only Forest Gump could run across the country. I had a dear friend, Annie Golightly that in her 60s, was the only female on a across the nation cattle drive. She was also a musician and a writer and wrote a book about the exploit. Great write, Jack.
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I was camped out near Stanley, Idaho around 2007 when I saw this guy pushing a cart down the road. He started out in Maine and was heading to Oregon. He said that when he was finished with his walking tour that he was going to write a book. I’m not sure if he ever did.
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Wow! Hope he suceeded.
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Thank you.
I enjoyed the story.
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I may never be quite that brave, but I am feeling a definite kinship with Annie. They used to make them tough in Maine; my mother is from there. And good for her: she didn’t listen to her doctor’s death sentence!!! I love her dog riding on Rex.
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I know a lady, tough as nails, in her mid 70s whose doctor & daughter wanted to put her in a nursing home.
She said no and her son agreed with her. She weaned herself off that doctor’s meds, went to her son’s doctor. Meds was reduced considerably.
Long story, short. She died in her home at age 89 happy. I learned something from that.
Dodie doesn’t take any prescriptions. I’m down from over a dozen a few years ago, to just 3.
We do take vitamins, supplements that she studies extensively for quality etc. It is a fact that I feel better than I did when I retired (early) in 2009. I’m thankful to be married to Nurse Dodie.
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You are a very fortunate guy, isn’t he, Dodie? I love your second tale of the 70 year old who decided not to listen to her doctor and chose life. “Blessed is the man whose trust is in the Lord…Cursed is the man who makes the arm of flesh his strength…’ (Jeremiah Ch. 17)
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Lovely story of a brave and independent woman. The photos and news clips were a bonus. Thanks for sharing Wilkins’ trek across the USA.. 🙂
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Sometimes you gotta hit the road and ask questions later.
I was hitchhiking in Montana years ago when I met his guy who was riding his horse from Texas to somewhere in Montana or Canada.
When you take that step of faith, the Lord will put people in your path. People will help you out and your experiences on the road will interest a lot of people. Most people are curious as to why someone is riding a horse down the road or why someone is walking or hitchhiking.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a man and a woman walking through town with backpacks. They were carrying this sign that said, “Jesus loves you”. So I walked over to talk with them. They were coming from Des Moines, Iowa (I told them that I used to live in Ames; I used to drive a lumber truck to Des Moines quite a bit.) and heading to Utah. We had great fellowship. I emptied out my billfold and gave them all of my money. I know the Lord was with them.
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Love this. When I was in Journalism at Texas State Univ in San Marcos, one of our columnists wrote “Nimrod’s Nook” each week. One summer, he prepared to walk (he said not by roads, but on open land, private & public property with stop offs in towns (no cities) along the way. At the beginning of the fall semester he took off with his backpack & walking stick (he used also for fishing) with destination plans of his first leg to Crater Lake, Oregon.
The intent was for him to mail us his weekly comment along the way. As I recall, we received only one & never heard from him again.
I contacted campus police in attempt to find his kin and ask about him. There was some controversy in his family. They didn’t seem to care or be intetrested. Over the years I wondered.
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This must be God’s perfect timing. Earlier this evening I began to watch this video by Trey Smith. The title of the video is “Nimrod: The True Story of the Tower of Babel”.
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ROAD QUOTES:
“Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere – on water and land.”
–Walt Whitman
___
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door,” says Bilbo Baggins. “You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
–J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
___
Luke 24: 32: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”
___
“Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.”
–T.S. Eliot
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” . . . and when I choose to travel in the beaten road, it is not because I find it is the road, but because I judge it is the way.”
–John Milton
___
“Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward.”
–Gerard Manley Hopkins
___
Psalm 39: 12: “Hear my prayer, O LORD, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears: for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.”
___
“Don’t think now, take the road.”
–Oswald Chambers
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“Think nothing and do nothing without a purpose directed to God. For to journey without direction is wasted effort.”
–Saint Mark the Ascetic
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“Faith expressly signifies the deep, strong, blessed restlessness that drives the believer so that he cannot settle down at rest in this world, and therefore the person who has settled down completely at rest has also ceased to be a believer, because a believer cannot sit still as one sits with a pilgrim’s staff in one’s hand – a believer travels forward.”
–Søren Kierkegaard
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Inspiring indeed.
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