Marie A. Riedeselle (née Landry, died April 26, 1915) was a Canadian-born American bicyclist, dress designer, osteopath, hiker and hermit.
Riedeselle was born in Montreal and raised in New York state.[1] She had a farm in Connecticut, and studied osteopathy in St. Louis, Missouri.[2]
In 1893, Riedeselle won $50 in a New York Herald contest for designing the best practical bicycling dress. Her design included billowy trousers gathered below the knee, flat boots, and a bodice with gathers and smocking, to hold the fabric close to the torso while riding.[3] [4] She used dark navy fabric, with "dashes of red Chinese silk" and long tassels fastened at the waist.[5]
In 1897, after some months of physical training and study,[6] and sewing her own wardrobe for the cold,[7] she went to Alaska. She stayed in the mining camps of the Klondike,[8] practicing as a healer for humans and sled dogs. She opened a sanatarium at Dawson City in 1900,[9] offering massages, baths, haircare, rest, and healthful meals to exhausted or injured miners.[10]
After making a reported fortune in Alaska,[11] she moved to Southern California, where she lived alone as a "hermitress" in a cabin in Santa Anita Canyon. "It is the life of a free woman," she assured a visiting reporter, "unchecked and freed from the trammels of a sordid civilization which binds its devotees to the petty conventionalities of life."[12] In spring 1909, she was the only woman participating in the Los Angeles Athletic Club's annual hiking race up Mount Wilson; she completed the hike in 2 hours and 30 minutes.[13] She returned to Alaska from California in summer 1909, and described her plans to move to Minnesota next.[14]
Riedeselle was a vegetarian from 1889, and was described as a widow. She died in 1915, from dysentery, while on a pilgrimage at an ashram in Dehradun, India: "In her struggle against cooked food, which she always disliked, she swallowed nothing but water of the holy Ganges," explained an acquaintance who was with her in the end.[15]