- Historic Sites When The Forty-niners Went Sixty They had no
chair lifts, and they called their skis snowshoes, but they were
the fastest men alive December 1970 | Volume 22, Issue 1 What
may come as a surprise is that this swell swoop has been going
on for over a century. It was just about a hundred years ago
that a relatively unsung hero named Tommy Todd, of Howland Flat,
California, was clocked at fourteen seconds for 1,806 feet from
a standing start—which averages out to well over eighty-seven
miles an hour. Since this was at a time when even crack express
trains hadn’t made eighty miles an hour yet, there is every
reason to think that Tommy was the fastest man alive in 1870. It
all started, apparently, when a few Norwegian-American gold
miners, contemplating the Sierra Nevada’s overabundant snowfall,
decided that their native method of mastering this element made
sense in California. The Norwegian ski —which they translated,
somewhat quaintly, as “snowshoe”—was originally a utilitarian
device designed t