American Endurance

by Richard A. Serrano

Known locally as a tough character, Smith was black-haired and dark-mustached, yet despite all the hard riding and racing to come, he wore a well-laundered, long-sleeved white shirt. He rode in a pair of leather boots so sturdy that they survive today, stiffened but still intact, at the Dawes County Historical Museum. Over time he became something of a name to fear. “I gather he was kind of a rough guy,” said Meg van Asselt of McPherson, Kansas, the granddaughter of the man who donated Smith’s boots to the museum. “Horse Thief Smith. That’s what everybody called him. And every time my granddad would start telling stories about Smith, my grandma would hush him up. She’d say, ‘Oh, don’t tell the little girls that.’ ”

  So Long, Nebraska

  8

  At last, in the middle of downtown Chadron, the Blaine Hotel clock struck the hour. Six p.m. had arrived. All nine riders were side by side, everyone’s nerves on edge. The town square fell silent; only the horses shied. Chicago and Buffalo Bill lay far, far ahead. For the sturdiest man waited a pot of money, a golden gun, and cowboy immortality.

  Sheriff Dahlman rose and walked to the front of the Blaine balcony. Everyone’s eyes turned up to him. “All ready,” he announced. He read the race rules. “There must be no jockeying en route, and everything must be conducted on the dead square,” he warned. In a bow to the Humane Society representatives, he added that “a rider cannot have his horse drop dead at the goal line and gain a prize. He must see to it that his horse is in fairly good condition on arrival.”

  Dahlman reminded all nine riders about the inspection stations, though Berry, the noncowboy, did not officially qualify for the race and would not need to report his progress. The sheriff cautioned them all against pushing their horses too hard during the long days in the saddle. That was the compromise with the Humane Society officials, he said, and that is what would keep the sheriffs in Iowa and Illinois off their trail.

  James Hartzell, a town shopkeeper, chief of the volunteer fire department, and a member of the race committee, stood and asked the cowboys to “be kind and take good care of your horses.… I know you will conduct yourselves as gentlemen and will, I trust, uphold the good name of Chadron and Nebraska.” Shouting now, he announced: “Gentlemen, the time for the cowboy race from Chadron to Chicago is upon us.” He raised high the Colt revolver, and it gleamed gold against the cobalt sky. He fired.

  June 13, 1893: Nine riders line up in front of the Blaine Hotel in Chadron, preparing to race a thousand miles for the glory of the fading Old West. (Dawes County Historical Museum)

  The roar echoed over the crowd, bounced off the rooftops and trees, and hung in the summer wind. The cowboys lumbered off at a jog trot, kicking up sand and dirt amid a shout of hurrahs. A thousand miles of stamina lay ahead; what was the rush? Some of them pranced their horses at first, bowing and waving their hats to the end of the street, then riding past the last of the town lots and onto the Panhandle flats. With a salute to the edges of the crowd perched atop a small hilltop, they slipped under the eastern horizon and vanished in a slow swirl of dust.

  Wily Doc Middleton held back briefly. He promised to overtake them all, though. He might be the last to charge out of Chadron, he said, but the last would be first to Chicago. No governors, no sheriffs, and no Humane Society agents would slow, stop, or rein him in, not this outlaw.

  “Who’s afraid of a few bullets?” asked Doc. Then he trotted off after the others.

  In the flat scrub grass, all nine riders spread out, settling into their saddles with bedrolls and canteens jolting about, kerchiefs tied tight around their necks, spurs jangling, the route map snug inside their belts. Their aims were the big city, the prize money, and that gold-plated souvenir from the Colt Firearms Company, notoriously nicknamed the “.44 cowboy equalizer.”

  But while they could not know it then (and maybe some never realized it later), they were also racing for something far more meaningful. Not for individual glory, but for the immortality of the Old West itself, to help ensure that the West would be remembered as young and hopeful and forever vast, a wild and boundless outdoors where a man on a racing, hooves-pounding, heart-galloping broncho symbolized one of America’s greatest virtues: endurance. This was the lasting legacy of the Great Cowboy Race of 1893. It was run and won in the dying light of the American frontier; it was a last desperate dash across the country before a new century and a new nation pushed the Old West aside.

  More trouble, however, lay ahead, the kind that could land the cowboys in a county jail somewhere between the high grasses of western Nebraska and the tall towers of Chicago. At the state capitol in Lincoln, the stack of letters to Governor Lorenzo Crounse continued to pile up, demanding that he call back the cowboys even after Chadron had defied the critics and launched the race.

  The latest demand came from Miriam Baird Buck, an animal rights advocate and influential force in the emerging women’s suffrage movement. From her home office in tiny Bellwood, Nebraska, she had been busy organizing county committees to push for women’s rights and, in a separate effort, to reverse her state’s image as a lawless, boisterous frontier lagging behind the coming modern times.

  “Some of the humane ladies of Nebraska have asked me to petition your Excellency, begging that you use your influence to discourage the ‘Cow Boy Race’ which threatens to disgrace our state,” she wrote to Governor Crounse. “I am very glad to do this in behalf of those to whom so much is denied—the poor horses that can neither share the sport (?) nor the prizes.… The poor animals we have always with us, and those in a position to show mercy will I sincerely believe receive the thanks of all enlightened citizens, whatever a few ignorant, misguided boys or men may think. Even they are said to be appreciative of the principles of justice, but doubtless they have so long been familiar with cruelty to the lower order among those of this vocation that their sense of right in such directions is dulled.”

  She ended her missive to the governor: “Hoping to learn that this barbarous treatment of man’s noble friend is not to be allowed.”

  Governor Crounse did not stop the cowboys.

  In Des Moines, Iowa, Governor Horace Boies telegraphed county sheriffs and granted them legal authority to arrest any cowboy overworking his horse. Be on the lookout for anyone violating state law by overriding their animals, he warned. “With this thought in your minds you will be able to judge your duty.”

  And on the first day of the great race, the reform governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld, was preparing to pardon three surviving anarchists involved in the Haymarket Square dynamite bombing. He also had just condemned the lynching of Samuel J. Bush, a black man accused of assaulting a white woman. Twenty-five vigilantes had hung Bush naked, then dragged him around the courthouse square in Decatur, the first home in Illinois of Abraham Lincoln. Now Altgeld was confronted with the cowboy race, headed directly to his state. Wasting little time, he announced he was siding with the animal rights advocates. He warned that any rough-and-tumble cowboys had better not breach the Mississippi River into Illinois wielding an overlathered whip or a bloodied spur. Fond of horses himself, Altgeld did not want the kind of brutality and embarrassment seen in the European race a year ago.

  In a signed and formal statewide directive from his executive office in Springfield, the governor described this type of long-distance racing as “barbarous cruelty” and a “shock to humanity.” He declared it “in violation of the laws of this state for the prevention of cruelty to animals.” “I hereby call,” the governor said, “upon all officers as well as upon all good citizens to see to it that no violation of our law takes place and that anyone guilty of it shall be promptly brought to justice. We will welcome the so-called ‘cowboys’ into our state and bid them come in all their glory and have thoroughly an enjoyable time while with us. But we cannot permit the laws of Illinois to be trampled under foot simply as a matter of sport.”

  Upstate, along the white-light promenades of the Chicago World’s Fair and at the front gates of the Wild West show, the Colt pi
stol shot in Chadron was reverberating as well. John Shortall, the American Humane Association president and head of its Illinois state branch, was relieved that only a small number of cowboys were racing. Still, “there must be cruelty in a long race of this character,” he suggested. “I fancy there will be.”

  Shortall was eager to hear the results from the first inspection stations, hoping to learn that the whip was being spared. “They may practice all sorts of cruelty to win, but we will be ready for them,” he said. He declined to discuss how he would monitor the race, except to note that he “planned to send men to any given point, and you can depend upon it that as soon as these cowboys are found ill-treating their horses they will be arrested and punished.”

  A sign that he meant business turned up that afternoon in the Mississippi River community of Dubuque, Iowa. Oscar Little, an Illinois Humane Society agent, was scurrying about town asking for the county sheriff’s office. He found it, and inside was a deputy named Pfiffner. Little told Pfiffner about the Illinois governor’s decree and “what the sheriff of Dubuque County should do should the cowboys come through here.” Agent Little then rushed off for smaller Mississippi River port cities in eastern Iowa where the cowboys might come barreling through—Bellevue, Clinton, and Lyons, all possible points for the riders to cross the river and tear into Illinois.

  Buffalo Bill was feeling more pressure as well. In his second career as an American stage and folk hero, Cody had to wonder whether he was on the wrong side of this one. He clearly did not want any adverse publicity to dampen the record crowds he was drawing to his arena. Nor did he wish to upset a campaign by Chicago religious leaders to close the fair on Sundays. He was all for that. The Sunday closure of the fair exhibits and machine operations would make Cody’s Wild West the chief attraction open on the Lord’s Day. It also would help make him a millionaire.

  He had already attached his name and with it his reputation to the cowboy race; with nine horsemen churning toward his show grounds, it seemed too late to turn them back. He was planning advertisements for the race in many of the big Chicago newspapers. The spectacle of cowboys racing to his Wild West arena promised to be good for business, and that was always good for Buffalo Bill.

  Yet as complaints spiked over the potential for animal abuse, the former Army scout, buffalo hunter, and Indian fighter tried having it both ways. With a crush of skeptical journalists surrounding him in his tent, Cody insisted that it never was his idea to race horses this far or that fast. He claimed he had never really encouraged it at all.

  “I knew nothing about the race until a month ago,” he protested. “And I understand it was got up over a year ago. My only interest in it is an offer of $500 to the man that brings his horses to the fair grounds in the best condition. The prize I offer is not to the winner, unless his horses are in the best condition.”

  He was saying he cared more about the horses and less about the cowboys, suggesting that he would present his personal $500 prize and the Colt revolver not to the cowboy first to scramble up to his tent ground, but to the cowboy on the healthiest horse. A dubious sentiment, coming as it did from a Western idol who had in his own days worn down many horses chasing buffalo thundering across the frontier.

  Protests be damned! Cody thought. He believed in the eternal cowboy spirit and the awesome strength of Plains horses. “Eastern people don’t understand what our western prairie horses are like, and this cowboy race will show them,” he said. “The prizes in the race are secondary in the consideration for the cowboys. What they care most for is the honor of winning the Great Cowboy Race. Of course, the man who finishes first and wins $1,500 and the Colt which was fired as the signal to start from Chadron will be satisfied with the monetary part. But the fame and honor will be dearer to him than all the money considerations. To win this, I am sure no one of them will resort to cruelty or unfair tactics.”

  Cody mentioned that Paul Fontaine and W. W. Tatro, “those two humane officers who were at Chadron to see the start” of the race, had stopped first to visit him in Chicago. They had asked him for a letter of introduction to race secretary Harvey Weir to attest that the Humane Society officers were noble men and should be heard out. Cody claimed he had waved them off, saying he and Weir “did not have a personal acquaintance.” But he also shrewdly did not tell the press that his aide Nate Salsbury had privately written to Weir that Cody and the Wild West show would pull their sponsorship of the race if the Chadron committee could not assure that none of the horses would be injured.

  Cody was pleased, however, that Fontaine and Tatro had reached a compromise in Chadron that was “sufficient to show everyone” that by the time the race was run there would be “no cruelty.” The great showman was squirming a bit in his chair by now, anxious but expansive, agitated but chatty. Still, Buffalo Bill knew how to play a crowd, including these niggling reporters pushing in around him, trying to weigh whether the country’s foremost Western champion endorsed the days and nights of hard riding of horses.

  “No,” Cody argued, “neither the eastern people nor the Europeans know what is in that little rough pony, without which the great development of the western country would have been delayed many years.” He leaned back in his camp chair. He seemed, according to the Chicago Evening Post, to be “in an abstracted mood for a minute, thinking, no doubt, of some big spring round-up or a hard sweep across the Bad Lands after a recalcitrant band of Redskins.”

  He straightened up. “Why, this little rat of a horse can stand more pounding rides up hill and down dale than most people imagine,” he said. “What would kill a Thoroughbred just puts a keen edge on the pony’s appetite. In this cowboy race from Chadron to Chicago the hardiness of the western horse can and will be amply proved.”

  There was no need, he said, to call the race “brutal or apply any harsh epithets.” It was time to stop asking Humane Society officials to intervene or the governors to issue arrest warrants. Unlike what had happened last year in the European death slog, the American cowboys would not push their horses to exhaustion.

  “A cowboy knows the value of livestock,” Cody cautioned. Together a man and his horse could withstand any long ride through any thunderstorm. “His horse is his best friend, the one that stands the long night’s vigil on the plains with him and many times faces the norther [wind]. And of the two, the horse gets decidedly the best of it.” The average cowboy, said Cody, “loves his cow-pony a great deal better than many people love each other.”

  He dismissed Thoroughbreds as promptly as he had brought them up, saying they would crumple with day-and-night riding. The Western broncho could cover fifty or sixty miles a day, “and can be ridden into this city without turning a hair.” He recalled the past conflicts with the Sioux and the Cheyenne, when “horses were ridden day and night continuously without even a chance to take the saddle or bridle off or to groom them a bit.… Many a time have I had to throw the reins over my horse’s head and let him get a few nibbles of bunch grass while I took just 40 winks. Then up to the saddle again without even a chance to give him a rub.”

  Ever the showman, Cody had swung the conversation back to himself. Nearby hung his new ceremonial saddle commissioned by a silversmith in Omaha. It came with russet saddle skirting, tanned California leather, “Hon. W. F. Cody” in silver letters inlaid in the seat, and a horn mounted with a silver crescent and an engraving: “World’s Fair, Chicago, 1893.”

  Cody hyped his Wild West show, too, of course. “I ought to know the animal pretty thoroughly in my many years’ service on the Plains and in the Army,” he said. “And look at our horses in the show. They are cared for in the best manner possible and are sleek and fat. I defy anyone to find any cruelty in our treatment!”

  He rose, stepped into an outer tent, and shook hands with Senator Edward “Ed” O. Wolcott of Colorado. The hair-slicked, mustached Republican was paying a social call on Buffalo Bill with his wife and a party of Washington women. Cody offered Ed a pull on a small bottle. But the politi
cian demurred. Wolcott had spied the reporters in the other room and announced he had better run. But not without first proclaiming to Cody, “You’ve got the greatest show on earth! I never saw the like!”

  Ed dashed off, and Cody glowed. He turned and delivered a final thought about the cowboy race. It will be, he said, “an honest, manly struggle,” and he predicted it would be run in less than two weeks. “The first man should put in an appearance about June 26,” said Buffalo Bill.

  And so the cowboys raced. They dodged sheriffs and arrest warrants and governors’ warnings and statehouse proclamations. Their mission was to stay focused in the saddle and to win the race. Or at least make it to Chicago. Or if not that, to one day tell their grandsons driving gas-choking tin cans in some crowded big city that they had once sat atop a living, breathing mortal being in the greatest adventure of their long lives. That for two weeks of one short, glorious summer across Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and two mighty rivers, they had endured the challenge of a lifetime. And how they had become one with their ponies, pitching and slapping in a creaking leather saddle, man and horse chasing a combined dream. How on those horses they could see and feel and smell each mile flying past them—the haunches pounding, the muscles burning, the piston-fired syncopation of the horses’ heavy hooves. And above all, they could taste the sweat from the horses’ bit and bridle as it splashed back wet and hot into their own windswept, reddening faces.

  Oh, yes, the race was on. They were riding to reassert the grandeur of the Old West, defying the fair promoters who had dismissed cowboys and horses as relics of a bygone American past. With each thud of their horses’ hooves, the cowboys engraved their own names in the dirt, grass, and trails their immigrant fathers had trudged a generation earlier to reach the West.

  The first stop was twenty miles out at Hays Springs, Nebraska. That first night, the bunch of them, with big cowboy Joe Gillespie in a slight lead, thundered into the town one county east of Chadron. They hooted and bucked their horses and drowned out a welcoming party. They fed, watered, and rubbed their horses and hurried on to Rushville, Nebraska, another small railroad town with lamp lights twinkling in the night.