American bison skulls waiting to be processed outside glueworks (Detroit, 1892). The Indians, of course, lost their land, and the danger today is more due to wildfires and flooding. Others might join the police or an armed militia out in the woods waiting to rise up against something. In 2021, such repugnant redneck Americans join the Republican Party and even become governors of states, without needing to fight duels. The bright side of this incident was that the attack prevented a duel with pistols about to take place in an emptied railway carriage between Fogg and an obnoxious American who had insulted him. Similarly, a train today would be unlikely to be attacked by a hundred murderous Sioux Indians, as was Fogg’s. While North America had an estimated bison population of 50 million-60 million in the early 1800s, the species subsequently went into dramatic decline, primarily due to over-hunting, and after near-extinction the population today is a mere 360,000 or so. Once more, we would be unlikely to meet such a problem in 2021. (He missed it, and had to dig again into the carpet-bag’s dwindling cash for an alternative.
His steamer for Liverpool, UK, was due to leave the same day that he reached New York. No way could the train push through this insurmountable obstacle, and it simply had to wait, further imperilling Fogg’s extremely tight timetable.
Phileas fogg passepartout full#
The cow-catcher, unfortunately, was of no use when Fogg’s train came upon another unexpected hitch – a massive herd of as many as 12,000 buffalo that took a full three hours to cross the rail line. Not to mention that steam locomotives with cow-catchers on the front are a rarity in 2021. The consideration now, a century and a half later, is this – would there be any likelihood of a repeat of this dramatic moment from “Around the World in 80 Days” on our post-Fogg journey? Unfortunately, probably not this is one section of Verne’s narrative that would certainly have been lost to time – some sort of boringly restrictive health and safety regulations would surely now apply, and US President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill would likely have fixed up the bridge nicely anyway. The madcap idea worked: the train flew across at a hundred miles an hour, the bridge fell with a crash immediately afterwards and Fogg’s wager had survived yet another crisis.
Until, that is, the engineer came up with the bright idea that if the train backed up a mile and then attacked the bridge at full steam, it would hurtle across so fast that the bridge simply wouldn’t have time to collapse first. Such a delay could wreck Fogg’s plans and he would be ruined by losing his huge bet of £20,000. It would take at least six hours to get a replacement train to the other side of the bridge, and as long or longer to walk on a snow-covered plain to find a ford over the creek.
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