It would also give them time to settle down some of the protesters at home. Many of the women of Chadron wanted the race stopped, too. The day before, they had papered the streets with posters and handbills announcing a June 12 evening meeting at the Congregational Church. The pews were soon filled with sixty people, and the gathering was also promoted by several ministers, a judge, and a professor.
The meeting was gaveled to order just before sundown, and they elected Mary E. Smith Hayward as chairwoman to speak on their behalf. An avid reader from Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, she had moved West to see with her own eyes what she had learned from the pages of library books; her favorite was titled Western Life. She had hoped to reach the Pacific, but the railroad stretched only as far as Valentine, Nebraska. So she boarded the stagecoach and kept traveling, staying one night in a boarding room with five smelly dogs next to a rowdy saloon that she later learned belonged to Doc Middleton. She pushed on, finally making her home along Chadron Creek. She raised vegetables, filed a timber claim, married a future city mayor, and opened a popular women’s clothing store at the corner of Second Street and Chadron Avenue. A horsewoman herself, she defended animal rights, planted trees on the courthouse square, and led the city’s Woman’s Suffrage Club.
That night in the Congregational Church, she silenced the anxious crowd. She urged compassion, reason, and true civic pride. After a “considerable discussion,” she pushed through a three-point resolution opposing the cowboy race:
RESOLVED: That we, citizens of Chadron, Neb., assembled in mass meeting this Monday evening, June 12, express our sentiment of opposition to the cruel treatment of animals under all circumstances, and our hearty appreciation of the widespread desire to prevent the infliction of cruelty upon the horses to be used in the cowboy race which starts from this city for Chicago tomorrow afternoon.
RESOLVED: That we are in perfect accord with the officers of the Humane Society in the endeavor to prevent the infliction of any cruelty upon the horses, and will readily cooperate in punishing the offenders.
RESOLVED: That owing to the base misrepresentations of our city and surrounding region by the eastern press, we emphatically protest against the characterization of those who live here as belonging to the brutal, lawless and desperado class.
Those jammed inside the church, many of them the wives of some of Chadron’s city leaders, made it clear they were adamantly against cowboys beating their horses to win a thousand-mile thunder to Chicago. They strongly supported the Minneapolis Humane Society officials and were angry with the Eastern press for making Chadron a national laughingstock. The women returned home convinced they had taken a noble stand, and confident that the Chadron hucksters would come to their senses. Indeed, when dawn broke the next morning and the train neared the city, more of the cowboys began asking for refunds and saddling up their horses for home.
H. J. “Harry” Rutter was one who bailed out. He had ridden down in May from the N Bar N Ranch in eastern Montana and signed up for the race. Born in Indiana and raised in Texas, he had, over a fifty-year career extending well into the next century, supported his family in Montana’s Milk River Valley as a cowpuncher, stockman, lawman, and civic leader. But cowboying was his strongest suit. He had started out at nineteen in Texas. At twenty-seven, he moved north to scout for fresh grass. At thirty-three, he served as a trail boss for a crew working 1,600 horses and 30,000 head of cattle, and in the wintertime he brought along twelve blankets for his bedding. E. C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott, a noted cowboy memoirist, recalled seeing Rutter and another cowboy water two thousand head of cattle at Skunk Springs, just the two of them. “It was the slickest piece of cow work I ever saw in my life,” said Teddy Blue.
But Rutter was not all rugged cowboy and trail herder; he had his principles. For a while he bunked in Teddy Blue’s cabin, where a pair of ruffled drawers once belonging to “Cowboy Annie” were hanging prominently on a forked stick in the wall. Rutter tore the drawers down and tossed them into the wood-burning stove. “Wasn’t decent,” he said.
Rutter recognized that cowboying was largely a young man’s endeavor and that the sun was setting on the Old West. A couple of years after he skipped the Great Cowboy Race, he staked a claim on a Milk River homestead and pinned on an undersheriff’s star. He chased horse and cattle thieves, wranglers, and outlaws and found time to pursue a bride, too. His target was Elsie Clough, the daughter of a construction engineer on the Great Northern Railway. One evening he rode over for a visit only to learn that Elsie had left for a dance forty miles away on the Montana–Canada border. Rutter climbed back on his horse. “That was the longest forty miles I’ve ever covered in the saddle,” he later said. “But I got there before the dance was over.”
He married Elsie in Glasgow, Montana. She was a schoolteacher and later superintendent of schools. He went on to serve as county commissioner, postmaster, church elder, and a bank director. He assumed all the trademarks of a city slicker—he trimmed his mustache, snapped on a natty bow tie, and sported a dark derby hat. By then the cowboy days were numbered and had been for some time. “The last of the big herds of buffalo had been killed off in this territory in 1881 and 1882,” he later recalled. All that was left was range squatters picking through the buffalo bones.
With his daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughter, he shared stories about “Long Whiskers,” the camp cook who had stirred a batter of pancakes and flopped them one at a time into a pan of sizzling bacon fat; about Dodge City, Kansas, and its junction of trail drives reeking with cow dung, choked with cattle dust, and roaring with six-guns; and about the mining camps around Deadwood, South Dakota, where gamblers and gunmen overran the streets and saloons.
In 1893, still a young man at thirty-four, Rutter realized that getting into trouble in Chadron with Humane Society representatives and a sheriff’s posse in Iowa or Illinois while running a foolhardy horse race to Chicago was not going to do him any favors as a future lawman. “I was making plans for a home and I was anxious to be independent,” he later remembered. He wanted someday to “concentrate with better peace of mind” on ridding the West of “the lawless class that was holding us from becoming civilized.” Going to jail for a cowboy race would not get him there. So he pointed his horse north and cleared out of Chadron.
Heading toward Chadron, however, was Emma Hutchinson. Thirty-three years old, a cowhand, rancher, and Sunday school teacher, she had sent word a month earlier from her home in Denver that she would race to Chicago. No man or horse could beat her, she claimed, and she would aim to reach Chicago in twenty days or less. She vowed to ride home with that prize Colt revolver tucked safely in her saddle bags, if not cradled in her holster.
She had been born in a barn in Wisconsin, raised in the Montana mountains, and for a dozen years had worked the Western horse and cattle roundups. She was, newspaper accounts said, “the complete female vaquero.” She “practically lived, ate and slept in the saddle.” She had “endured all the privations and hardships of the frontier.” Indeed, she had undertaken her share of long-distance rides already, including one 450-mile, seven-day slog with a single string of horses. The winds picked up, the rains fell, and many nights she “slept shelterless in a constant storm.” But she rode on.
Hutchinson seemed the perfect cowgirl to outpace the cowboys. Down city streets she rode sidesaddle. Out on the prairie handling stock, she wore a divided skirt and handled a horse like a man. Indians reverently called her “Lightning Squaw.” She was the only person her horse, Outlaw, ever allowed close enough to touch. They rarely parted.
She vowed to ride Outlaw into Chadron and show up all the bigheaded, big-hatted cowboys. At eighty-two pounds, she weighed far less than any of her male challengers, even though some said Emma appeared “a little plump.” “Do I expect to win the race?” she said to a journalist. “I most certainly do.… I am counting on seeing Colonel Cody in Chicago.… I will follow my usual plan. I will aim to eat only the simplest fare and, instead of an
y stimulants, will drink only milk.… The horse will be thoroughly rubbed down every night, and if I have a reason to fear that he will be ‘salted’ or in any way disabled by my contestants or anyone else I shall sleep in the stall with him. In riding I shall get out and on the road each morning as early as I can see and ride until 10 or 11 o’clock, when I will rest and refresh the horse for three or four hours, taking the road again and riding until dark. I do not like night riding, for it makes a horse nervous.… I expect to win by endurance.”
So sure was Hutchinson that she sent a letter to Buffalo Bill Cody in Chicago. “Look out for me,” she told him. Her words were no idle bluster. The newspapers reported that Emma was “one of the best offhand judges of horseflesh” on the range and “given a bunch of horses, [she] can usually pick the winner for a race.”
She seemed a darling from the start, to many just the ticket to give the Great Cowboy Race an added boost and drum up even more money and interest in Chadron. She even had made her way into a poem by Cy Warman, a failed wheat broker turned Denver railroad man turned author and warbler and—eventually—“the Poet of the Rockies.” Just a year earlier, Warman had proven his own stamina by riding from New York to Chicago in the cab of a steam locomotive called the Exposition Flyer. Warman knew a lot about long-distance feats of endurance, and after arriving in Chicago he submitted a story to McClure’s magazine describing his railroad trip as “a thousand miles in a night.” His lines about Hutchinson resemble a limerick:
Emma is her name,
Single is her station,
Her eyes are blue,
Her heart is true,
And she rides like thunderation.
Back on May 7, Hutchinson had formally notified Harvey Weir, secretary of the Chadron Citizens’ Committee sponsoring the cowboy race, of her “purpose” in running the race. Weir quickly called another committee meeting. He told the group that she had secured a financial backer in Denver also willing to wager a few thousand extra dollars in side money that she could arrive first in Chicago. The committee agreed to let Emma race—in skirts or pants, whatever she fancied. So ten days later, Hutchinson wired from Denver that she would be leaving soon for Chadron with two horses, “riding by easy stages in order to acclimate the animals gradually.” She said she would “exercise them daily,” covering twenty-five to thirty miles a day “up to the time the start is made in the race.”
She saddled up and trotted off, down the eastern slope of the Rockies and onto the thick spring grass of the High Plains. Riding with her was a growing public fascination with cowgirls and female equestrians who were challenging the notion of the West as an arena for male derring-do.
One of the most famous of American women, Elizabeth Custer, wife of the “martyr” of the Little Bighorn, had once “eclipsed all her nineteenth century sisters in horseback riding, for to her it was a necessity, not a luxury.” Mrs. Custer believed women could “manage horses with more judgment than men,” that a woman was lighter in the saddle and swayed gently with the bounce of the horse’s trot, “in harmony.”
Other American horsewomen also captured the popular imagination. Mrs. E. S. Beach, a New York riding instructor who had earned her spurs at the age of five, devoted ten hours a day to the stirrups. “My longest ride was the big tree district in California,” she said. “I was in the saddle for several weeks steadily and rode over much rough country.”
Elizabeth Jordan spent a month on horseback climbing up and over the Virginia and Tennessee hill countries. Her one regret was that the cliffs let in little sunlight. “The distance between towns was too great, and the darkness came over the paths too quickly,” she said. Alice MacGowan rode through Tennessee and down to Texas, and once circled for days around the Blue Ridge Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. She carried a small bag of food and water and stopped at mountain cabins when her supplies ran low.
“Broncho Kate” Chapman was just seventeen in the year of the cowboy race but already had forged a name for herself as the “most fearless rider in the world.” She had roped a particularly unruly wild mustang (considered the “worst horse” that ever lived), saddled it in a small corral, and climbed atop it. When she lifted the horse’s blindfold, “the brute began a terrible battle in which the girl finally came out victor and rode the horse at will wherever she pleased.” The daughter of a frontier cattleman, Kate had been riding since she was a toddler of three. Now a young woman, she was charming and fun, and, it was said, “there was not a man in the country but would walk if she would take his animal.”
So Emma Hutchinson of Denver was in good company trotting out to the Nebraska Panhandle. But by June 5 she still had not arrived, and that caused deep concern. Some worried she might have taken ill or ended up lost. Or maybe had abandoned her long skirts and floppy straw hat for a sturdier suit of cowboy jacket and jeans.
Another week wore on, and by June 12, the day before the start of the race, she still had not tethered Outlaw to a hitch rail in Chadron. Race secretary Weir began making some discreet inquiries. Sheriff Dahlman was asked to hold the race until she galloped into town or was located or rescued on the Plains. But Dahlman turned down all suggestions of a delay or a postponement, and the committee agreed to hold her entry open until race day.
In those last hours she still did not show. In her place she sent a letter, explaining that her financial supporter had backed out. None too happy, she had been forced to turn her horse around and start home for Denver.
Harry Rutter had pulled out, Emma Hutchinson was a no-show, and when race day dawned in Chadron, other cowboys nervously elbowed around the railroad depot and along Second Street, struggling with their own last-minute jitters. Heads were counted, and only eight fidgeting cowboys still stood firm, insisting they would ride in the face of angry Humane Society protesters and armed sheriffs’ posses.
Their horses—two each—were led over to Forbes’s blacksmith shop and branded by Sheriff Dahlman with the hot-iron number 2 on the right side of the neck, a mark the racing committee would recognize along the route. That drew more of the curious out into the downtown streets, the stores closing, the crowds thickening.
Yet elsewhere in Nebraska and around the nation, the Great Cowboy Race continued to raise the tempers of both those who wanted it stopped and those anxious to hear that pistol shot sending the cowboys off to Chicago. “These human cranks who protest against the cruelty of the race do not know much about the broncho of the great West,” wrote W. B. Lower in a letter to the nearby O’Neill (NE) Frontier newspaper. He complained that the “eastern people underestimate the humanity and morality of Westerners.… Eastern people are giving very little credit to the cowboy and his steed, and it will soon be manifested that they have been judging the cowboy of the Plains and the great west by a wrong standard.” Let the cowboys ride, Lower proclaimed. Let the horses run. Should the outlaw Doc Middleton prevail, he and Buffalo Bill will be “the most popular things at the fair.”
T. H. McPherson, a stockman from Dakota Junction, Nebraska, visited the Sioux City, Iowa, part of the race route and suggested that the sheriffs arrest the Humane Society officials instead and leave the cowboys untouched. “The kicking you notice comes from the East,” he told a Sioux City newspaperman. “But the general opinion in the cattle country is that the Humane Society is interfering in what it knows nothing about. We know what a broncho will stand, while most of the eastern people who are objecting to the race never even saw one.” McPherson said that the train heading into Chadron might as well turn around and start back east. The race committee managers were “not the kind of people to be scared out.”
At the state capitol in Lincoln, another letter landed on Governor Crounse’s desk on race day. This one hit with a thud, calling the race a “cruel and barbarous enterprise.” It ran three pages, handwritten on stationery from the Weekly Review in Boston, a New England journal with a large circulation and a heavy hand in American politics, literature, science, and the arts. The writer was E. C
. Walker, a free-love and free-thought firebrand from the East Coast, and he came straight to the point: “These cowboys and their abettors, including yourself, have a perfect right to run all the races to Chicago against time that may be wished,” he told the governor. “But more have the right to compel horses to stand up if they can against the awful strain. No Vienna–Berlin savagery is needed in this country. Bull fights and gladiator shows would not be more cruel and demoralizing.” Others, too, rallied around the Chadron women and the humane societies.
A writer identifying himself only as “the Rustler” dispatched an angry missive from Buffalo, Wyoming, demanding that the race be stopped, not for humane reasons and not to dodge arrests, but because the whole thing was rigged. His complaint ran in full in much of the Western press and was picked up back east, too. He belittled the race as nothing more than an “advertising scheme” for Chadron and local favorite Doc Middleton, and he said some of the cowboys who would run strong in the race were quietly being eased out to boost Doc’s chances.
Army Captain E. L. Huggins, a Medal of Honor winner and Indian fighter on General Nelson A. Miles’s staff, warned that too much whip and spur would forever tarnish the heroic reputation of the American frontiersman. He spoke from the perspective of a career horseman and commander of the Army’s 2nd Cavalry. “The race will not reflect any great credit on the men who take part in it or the man who wins it,” Huggins said. “It is really a question of endurance on the part of the ponies and not of the men. The weakest cowboy in the race can use up four or five ponies in riding from Chadron to Chicago, so that it is a test of the endurance of the animals.”
Huggins admitted he did not know the riders and had not seen their horses, and he was unfamiliar with the route and the terrain. Nevertheless, he cautioned, “there is very little excuse for it.” Each cowboy, he said, “must decide when to push his pony hard and when to rest him in order to preserve the animal’s strength. But at best it will be hard on the animals.”
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