Among the materials archived at the Bancroft Library is a two page note to “Dearest Jane and Betty” from Harriet Chalmers Adams, whom the press had dubbed “Mrs. Marco Polo of the Americas,” and the “world’s greatest woman explorer.” In the note she writes…
“We are very grateful that he was our friend and we will never feel we have lost him. But with you two the loneliness must be terrible. Thank God you have one another and the memory of all you did to help him through the year and more which must have been very hard for him to bear in spite of his courage and many blessings…”
An earlier blog (“A holiday greeting…”) highlighted a Christmas note to the Mathers from “Franklin and Harriet.” The senders were Harriet Chalmers Adams and her husband Franklin Pierce Adams, syndicated columnist, Algonquin Roundtable member, and poet responsible for the line still recognized by baseball aficionados: “…from Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
If anything, in the first third of the 20th century, Harriet Adams was equally well-known.
HARRIET CHALMERS ADAMS 1875-1937
Harriet Adams was a leading American explorer, journalist, and geographer who traveled over 100,000 miles (160,000 km) in South America She was one of the first American women in the Royal Geographic Society.
During World War I, Adams was the first female journalist allowed to visit and photograph the French trenches. She stayed for three months touring the frontline operations. She wrote 21 articles, detailing her exploits, for National Geographic, more than any other woman published in the magazine’s first half century. In her condolence letter to Jane and Betty, she wrote, “I have just turned in a long article on Libia to the Geographic, a journey I made for the Nat Geog Society last summer…” That article appeared in the June 1930 issue.
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