American Endurance Read online

  Also by Richard A. Serrano

  One of Ours: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing

  My Grandfather’s Prison: A Story of Death and Deceit in 1940s Kansas City

  Last of the Blue and Gray: Old Men, Stolen Glory, and the Mystery That Outlived the Civil War

  Text © 2016 by Richard A. Serrano

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  Published by Smithsonian Books

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  Production Editor: Laura Harger

  Editor: Duke Johns

  Designer: Nancy Bratton

  Map: Bill Nelson

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Serrano, Richard A.

  American endurance : Buffalo Bill, the Great Cowboy Race of 1893, and the vanishing Wild West / by Richard A. Serrano.

  Description: Washington, DC : Smithsonian Books, 2016. |

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015047567 | ISBN 9781588345752

  Subjects: LCSH: Endurance riding (Horsemanship)—West (U.S.)—

  History—19th century. | Horse racing—West (U.S.)—History—

  19th century. | Cross-country (Horsemanship)—West (U.S.)—

  History—19th century. | Cowboys—West (U.S.)—History—19th century. |

  Buffalo Bill, 1846–1917. | World’s Columbian Exposition

  (1893 : Chicago, Ill.) | West (U.S.)—History—1890–1945.

  Classification: LCC SF296.E5 S47 2016 | DDC 798.40978—dc23

  LC record available at http://​lccn.​loc.​gov/​2015047567

  For permission to reproduce illustrations appearing in this book, please correspond directly with the owners of the works, as listed in the individual captions. Smithsonian Books does not retain reproduction rights for these images individually or maintain a file of addresses for sources.

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-58834-576-9

  v3.1

  For Michael, Ben, Elise, and Alexander

  My buckaroos

  Daring, laughter, endurance—these were what I saw upon the countenances of the cow-boys.

  Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, 1902

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  1 The West of Our Imagination

  2 The Harsh Land

  3 The Vanishing Cowboy West

  4 Buffalo Bill Goes to the Fair

  5 A Cowboy Race

  6 Race Day

  7 Post Time

  8 So Long, Nebraska

  9 In God’s Land

  10 Across the River and into Illinois

  11 Chicago

  12 The Finish Line

  13 The Agony Is Over

  Postscript

  Sources

  Route of the Great Cowboy Race from Chadron, Nebraska, to Chicago, 1893

  The West of Our Imagination

  1

  Of all the riders in the Great Cowboy Race of 1893, none was better known or more widely feared than the notorious outlaw Doc Middleton. Some cowboys still rode the range and herded cattle; he stole horses. Many more were starting to settle down and raise families; he lived by the gun. He had been hunted for years by sheriffs’ posses, scrambling along the Niobrara River basin.

  He rode through the tiny town of Chadron, Nebraska, several days ahead of the race. In the afternoons, he trotted his horse up and down Second Street, exercising it, keeping the brown gelding lean and limber. The men peered at him from the saloon and shop windows. The ladies dashed outside and plucked strands from the horse’s tail. Souvenirs, they said; keepsakes.

  The race began near dusk on a June afternoon in 1893, with a pistol shot fired from the balcony of the new Blaine Hotel. But Doc at first held back. Under his wide-brimmed hat, his eyes followed the other eight riders as they vanished in a whirl of hooves and dust.

  “Boys,” he told the Chadron crowd, his beard so long it nearly hid his holsters. “I’m behind now. But I may be ahead.” With a cowboy holler, he galloped off.

  John Berry rode, too. He normally worked as an engineer and surveyor, and unlike Doc Middleton, he was far from being any wild cowboy. He helped lay the right-of-way for the Fremont, Elkhorn, and Missouri Valley Railroad, pushing one track at a time through the Nebraska Panhandle. He had helped plat the town of Chadron, too. When gossip around town turned serious about a thousand-mile cowboy race from Chadron to Chicago and the World’s Columbian Exposition, Berry helped map the route.

  For that, the Chadron race committee had ordered him disqualified. But Berry rode anyway—under protest. When he reached the finish line at the thousand-mile tree marker at Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show next to the fair in Chicago, he nearly fell off his horse. He was caked in dust, and his clothes were shredded. “I rode the last 150 miles in twenty-four hours,” he gasped. “Sore? Well, I should say I was.… I am so sleepy I can’t talk. I have had no sleep for ten days to amount to anything.”

  For two weeks he had raced his chestnut stallion (named Poison) through the Nebraska Sand Hills, across Iowa cornfields, and into Illinois, often just hoofbeats ahead of county deputies, humane society and animal rights protesters, and two governors who pledged to shut down the race and arrest any rider who abused his horse.

  The Great Cowboy Race of 1893 tested a particularly American virtue: endurance. It was launched at the close of the Western frontier and near the start of the twentieth century. Nine men rode leaning over their horses, hats slapping in the wind, defiant symbols of the vanishing Wild West. For two weeks they thundered toward the noisy, crowded, cobblestone metropolis of Chicago and the dazzling White City of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

  In Chicago, cable cars and electric trolleys were fast replacing horses. The exposition was focused on the future, a future that would not include cowboys. It previewed the wonders of the world that was to come, while the West looked back at the cowboy past.

  The American frontier was born of adversity; hard times rocked its cradle. The epic push to settle the vast swaths of grassland and uphill country past the Missouri River had taken muscle, courage, and ingenuity. Days filled with hard labor were followed by lonely twilight in dugouts far from families back east or across the broad Atlantic. Isolation shrouded the Plains, and in some locations the threat of Indian attacks lurked over the next ridge.

  Yet there persisted an innate drive to break the land and hammer down stakes, to launch rough-and-tumble pop-up towns on either side of the Rockies, to toughen the frontier resolve, and to carry the country into that new and modern American century.

  Chadron sprouted up just south of the purple badlands; Wounded Knee lay just a day’s ride away in southwestern South Dakota. The town was begun near the White River and Chadron Creek. It was founded by an Irish widow named Fannie O’Linn. She set up a trading store, got herself appointed postmistress, and brought in a livery stable. The saloons followed her. But when a new railroad line swung six miles out from the O’Linn settlement, people simply picked up their homesteads and moved in closer to the new depot. Thus was born the city of Chadron, another fragile Western outpost cl
inging to survival.

  Some summers, swarms of grasshoppers devoured the wheat and corn stalks, the feed lots, and the rare tree or bush on the flat, endless landscape. Wooden cattle fences and farm machinery were swallowed whole. The hoppers would burrow deep inside a man’s beard and eat his hat to pieces. Desperate pioneers set fire to their fields, hoping to block the hordes of insects. The bugs flew around them.

  In winter the land hardened and froze. During the 1886–87 season, thousands of range cattle perished in icy creek beds and along fallen fence lines in what cowboys called the “Great Die-Up.” The next winter, young students were buried in head-high snowdrifts, trying in vain to slog their little legs home. Historians have called it the “Children’s Blizzard.” Hundreds of lives were swept away by the wind, the snow, and the below-zero temperatures.

  In another fierce winter storm, a young cowboy named Billy “the Bear” Iaeger lost his way. For days he dug and searched for an abandoned barn, a silo, or a sod house, anywhere to shelter from the blowing snow. Frostbite claimed his feet and fingers. But Billy endured. In Chadron, he became a saloon keeper, police judge, city clerk, and a town leader. His old friend William “Buffalo Bill” Cody occasionally bought him new “artificials” from St. Louis, and soon Billy was gliding around town with a fresh set of legs. When the cowboy race was starting to look like a sure thing and Cody wanted it to head straight to his Wild West show in Chicago, Billy the Bear naturally was appointed to the race committee.

  Buffalo Bill was a born promoter. The famous scout and buckskin hunter had just returned in early 1893 from a triumphant tour of England, where he stunned packed audiences with his authentic cowboys and Indians chasing each other around a sand and gravel track, and with his own skilled sharpshooting from a speeding horse.

  He met and entertained the queens of England and Holland. He won the hearts of the world.

  Returning home, Cody wanted his Wild West show to share in the glory and profits of the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. Where else did he belong, if not to the world? But the fair said no. Cody represented the past, the old Western world; the fair would be about the future. So Buffalo Bill leased a large tract of land next to the fairgrounds and soon was rivaling the fair itself. That summer of 1893 would be the showman’s best run ever.

  To drum up business, he also donated a sizable hunk toward the prize money for the Great Cowboy Race. In return, Chadron marked off the thousand miles from the balcony of the Blaine Hotel to Cody’s tent door in Chicago. The Indian fighter with a record number of buffalo kills would himself be at the finish line. And he would personally award the winner a glittering, gold-laden Colt revolver. All eyes would be trained on the galloping cowboys and, naturally, Buffalo Bill.

  Something else was happening that summer in Chicago. A little-known historian from Wisconsin, Frederick Jackson Turner, addressed a gathering of the American Historical Association and delivered his new thesis, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Just three years earlier, the U.S. Census Bureau had proclaimed the frontier no more, saying that America’s quest for new Western land had run thin and the search for new expansion was over. Turner proclaimed that while the American spirit was driven by new adventures, the westward wanderlust had at last spent itself. Within the boundaries of the United States, there were no more frontiers to claim, no new lands to conquer.

  President Lincoln had begun the movement with land grants during the Civil War. Wagon trains pushed over the old scout trails. Telegraph cables and railroad lines stitched the country together. Telephone poles shot up, and the dangling phone wires, some cut by Indians desperate to preserve their own way of life, marked a new way west.

  The buffalo slaughter was nearly complete. All that remained were scavengers scooping up the bones whitening in the sun on the High Plains. Most Plains Indian peoples, their primary source of food and blankets disappearing, laid down their weapons.

  The December 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, the last of the great Indian War engagements, came less than three years before the cowboy race. The Chadron newspapers dispatched their reporters to record the slaughter, and they wired home stories of frozen Lakota corpses on the Pine Ridge tundra and the eerie prolonged echo of the Lakota Ghost Dance.

  The great Sioux chief Red Cloud, who once ruled the lush Platte River Valley, surrendered to life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Occasionally he ventured down to Chadron in full headdress for Fourth of July celebrations. But he was a shadow of what he once had been. From a platform erected in the shade of the Dawes County Courthouse, the broken chief shared a few words with the Western immigrants who had brought white ways to a red world. “I was always cheated, and so were my people,” he told them. “I don’t like to make a fuss about this, for I want to be friends to you all. This land is mine. I want you to be my friends, and we will live as friends in the future.”

  Army Captain Charles King, who helped lead the U.S. troops and went on to glorify their adventures in dozens of Western novels, remembered the Indian Wars well. “It is all a memory now,” he later told a gathering of veterans. “But what a memory to cherish!”

  The romance, the thrill, the daring, the stubbornness, the sheer adventure of the Wild West—all of it was ending. Like the cowboys sputtering to keep ahead in the Great Race, enduring saddle sores, leg blisters, raw knuckles and chapped faces, the searing summer heat, the drenching summer rain, little food, little water, tired and shredded and exhausted, like John Berry nearly falling off his horse, the Old West too was weathering away.

  Several state humane society inspectors followed the cowboys and reported their findings across the telegraph wires and new phone lines. Others chased them on bicycles, on boats, on mules, in carriages, and on foot. In small towns along the route, people stood for hours, anxious for a hint of hooves or a whiff of dust. Boys climbed trees to keep a lookout.

  A newspaperman spotted some of the cowboys sleeping in the back of a rolling buggy, trying to rest up while beating the others to Chicago. Other racers secretly shipped their horses by train to get ahead. Some carried wire cutters to snip shortcuts through fenced pastures. Many rode at night; it was cooler then, and the low-hanging lantern moon lit their way. Two competitors stopped at a small-town Iowa circus and for laughs bucked around the arena on a trick mule.

  But much of the riding and racing were done alone, on long stretches through the interior plains of the United States, pushing farther away from the cowboys’ beloved Western range. Mandatory stops at local inspection stations slowed them down, as did brief moments for a meal, a bed, and a barn. Then in a burst they would be gone again, another day’s ride, to another town over another hilltop.

  Far away in Chicago, the city was in an uproar. The Illinois governor had pardoned several anarchists, igniting calls for his ouster. Clerics and city fathers brawled over whether to close the fair on Sundays. A financial panic cleaved the downtown business district. A serial killer was at work. And Carter Harrison, the beloved mayor of Chicago, who had done so much to keep the White City glowing and the fair a success, was soon to be assassinated by an out-of-luck office seeker.

  In Chadron, news of the Great Cowboy Race sometimes rode in with a passing stranger. Otherwise the anxious crowds gathered at the local newspaper offices, and for two long weeks people hungered for updates. Who was ahead? Who had dropped out? And where the devil were they?

  The Harsh Land

  2

  Two years before the cowboys came racing through the Nebraska Sand Hills, two young sisters started for home on a late Sunday afternoon in May. Tillie and Retta Haumann, part of a German immigrant family, strolled hand in hand through the spring wildflowers, the primroses, and the native prairie grasses. The quilt of gold and yellow-green spread before their feet, perfect for trying out their new shoes.

  A coal miner in the old country, Carl August Haumann and his family had sailed in 1883 to the United States and settled first in Illinois. Eight years later, they push
ed on to rural, untamed Thomas County in north central Nebraska. The closest town, Thedford, was just four years old, founded by immigrants on new railroad tracks that lanced through the heart of the hills.

  The Haumanns were expanding rapidly, too. Carl and his wife, Henrietta, first stepped off the depot with ten children; four more would be born in Nebraska. They would become the largest family in the county, noted for the vast orchards their father and the boys tended on their homestead six miles north of town.

  On that Sunday in May 1891, Tillie, eight, and Retta, four, journeyed to visit an older sister a mile and a half away. Around four in the afternoon, they started to return home. By nightfall they had not arrived, nor in the morning. Neighbor men set aside their plows and planting and scoured the wind-scooped hills and hollows, calling the girls’ names. By sundown Monday, all they had picked up were a few signs of feet and hands and knees, small prints in the sand and grass. Over and around the hills, the men poked and prodded. By Wednesday morning they could tell that the girls had slept close to each other. Sometimes Tillie had carried her younger sister, it appeared.

  Once the girls spied a prairie fire in the distance. Tillie told Retta to wait while she climbed a hill to scan the countryside. Through the shimmering blue haze, she could see another hill and then another, a mirage of sand hills. Down below, Retta decided to catch up with Tillie by circling around that first hill. And so the girls were separated.

  Wednesday afternoon the men stumbled upon Retta, walking alone and carrying one of her new shoes, the sole worn off. The men rushed over the surrounding hills, but four more days would pass before they came upon Tillie. She had spread her apron next to a spray of rose bushes after wandering seventy-five miles and a whole county east across the Sand Hills. She had been gone a week, and there she lay down and died.

  They lifted her body onto a railway hand car and carried her home. Her devastated family hardly recognized their first child born in the new country. Her pale skin was darkened from exposure, and her little legs were blistered from thickets and brush. Only her new shoes gave Tillie away.