American Endurance

by Richard A. Serrano

  That left Gillespie and Stephens leading across central Iowa, the elusive Berry straining to catch up. And Iowa, Tatro told reporters, could well decide the winner. He reiterated that the horses needed to be reshod, rested, and fed more, and with Middleton all but bowing out, he predicted that only a half dozen or fewer of the cowboys would make it to Buffalo Bill and the World’s Columbian Exposition. “I do not think that more than six horses will be in the race when Chicago is reached,” he said. “Stephens, Jones and perhaps Gillespie will reach the city. The rest will have to stop.”

  He recalled the Humane Society’s efforts to cancel the race before it began and warned that the next week’s riding could bring out the worst. “We made a hard fight in Chadron to stop the race,” he told Sioux City’s citizens at the train station. “But it was a foregone conclusion. So we were appointed a committee to look after the cowboys, and if in my judgment I held that a horse was unfit to go further I was given the privilege of having him laid off. The cowboys agreed to the proposition, so that we will have to go through with them.

  “It will,” Tatro predicted, “take us nine or ten days yet to reach Chicago. Now we are in God’s land.”

  Correctionville, Iowa, loomed ahead, thirty-three miles east of Sioux City. A small crowd gathered there after a telegram announced they should expect Gillespie and Stephens soon. The two cowboys charged in around 6:40 in the evening. “It was extremely hot and the horses looked jaded,” reported the local paper. “Though all were in fair condition except Stephens’ brown horse which had the appearance of being nearly exhausted.”

  Few let them leave without first saying a word about Doc Middleton. Where was the famous outlaw? Gillespie and Stephens had no idea. For all they knew, his last horse had given out past Sioux City. Their concern was for some rest, dinner, and a chance to cool their horses. At midnight they rose and rushed out for Galva.

  As they rode off, most in Correctionville agreed that Rattlesnake Pete Stephens would never last and that Gillespie would win Chicago. Stephens was not holding up in the June heat, and his second horse still was dealing with colic and abdominal pain. Many thought the horse would never make Galva and certainly not the Mississippi River.

  Berry pulled into Correctionville just after Gillespie and Stephens cleared out. “He came in on a good round trot,” the paper reported, “his horses looking fresh and vigorous.” He ate, slept, and then rose up at 3 a.m.; he too rushed off for Galva.

  In Galva, the crowds had already waited hours and into the night for any dust cloud, hoof thumps, or other sign of cowboys. But blacksmiths grew sore from firing their anvils to signal what turned out to be false alarms, and everyone went home long-faced and sleepy. They left behind streamers, flags, and colored lights strung around town, now drooping in the still night air. Even secretary Weir went off to bed in Galva without any word of the cowboys approaching, though he left instructions to be awakened the moment they arrived. The few hotel rooms were filled, so country people who had come to town to greet the cowboys bedded down for the night in haystacks in the local livery stables.

  Gillespie and Stephens thundered in at 6:45 a.m. on Wednesday morning, June 21, waking half the town but showing no mood, time, or patience for any welcoming reception. They registered in a hurry at the Commercial House, Gillespie aching from a splitting pain in his side, Stephens worried over his ailing horse. To everyone’s surprise, Berry arrived just an hour behind them. His two horses, people said, looked “fresh and lively.”

  All three men took breakfast together, and they all cleared Galva by 10:30. Other cowboys trickled in much later, some staying for dinner. None rode out until later that evening.

  Tatro remained in Galva only long enough to issue another official progress report; then he and Fontaine and Weir boarded the train for Fort Dodge, Iowa. “I am well pleased with the way the horses are standing the trip,” Tatro announced. “They look fresh, if not better, than when they left Chadron.”

  His words made the papers as a new letter arrived at the Illinois Humane Society in Chicago from a Deadwood, South Dakota, rancher. He defended the strength of the Western broncho but urged the humane officials to stop the cowboys and end the race without another mile in the saddle. “There is no horse grown on the face of the globe hardier, truer, trustier or more until-death faithful than the broncho of the great ranges,” wrote the “prominent citizen,” who identified himself only as “J. H. B.”

  Unknown to the riders, more of the nation’s newspapers were calling for the cowboys to be reined in and the American Humane Association to be discredited if the horses were not spared.

  Grand Rapids (MI) Eagle: “If the Humane agents along the route do their duty, several of the ‘cowboys’ will rest behind prison bars long before they reach the World’s Fair city.”

  Boston Journal: “The cowboy race from Chadron, Neb., to Chicago is certainly senseless and probably will be brutal. It demonstrates nothing but human idiocy and recklessness.”

  Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin: “If the cowboy race proceeds to a finish, the Humane societies of the states of Iowa and Illinois ought to hang their heads lower than the heads of the fagged ponies.”

  Kalamazoo (MI) Telegraph: “The affair is wholly disgraceful.”

  Gillespie, Stephens, and Berry wore on, oblivious to the rest of the world, their eyes straining, shoulders bent, knees gripping. They aimed for Fort Dodge until heavy rains slopped the gravel into mud and the prairie into puddle. They had been expected in by 7 p.m., but the storm forced them to find shelter around Pomeroy, Iowa, twenty-five miles short of Fort Dodge.

  “A cold wind was blowing,” Gillespie years later told his granddaughter. “I was so cold I could hardly sleep all night, so I got out as soon as I could see and started on. I wrapped my blanket around me Indian style because I hadn’t brought a coat in order to save weight. Pretty soon it started to rain, and that was the coldest rain I ever saw in June. It rained pitchforks and bull yearlings until the ground was knee-deep in mud; sticky, gooey mud that almost pulled the horses’ shoes off. Somewhere in that sea of mud John Berry got ahead of me again.”

  For those waiting in Fort Dodge, several false sightings had claimed that the first of the cowboys was drawing near. Many in town were disappointed to learn Doc Middleton would not be riding with them. It was not until Thursday morning that a trample of hooves sounded and blacksmiths banged on their anvils.

  Stephens arrived first, nearly unrecognizable except for the rattlesnake tails sewn deep into his hat. He pulled in around 8 a.m. with only one horse; he had abandoned his backup, failing with colic and belly trouble, in a farm pasture. Stephens had the lead now, and he headed straight for secretary Weir. He signed the registration book at the Haire Brothers clothing store downtown. He walked General Grant to a box stall at Colby’s barn and hurried off for a bed, breakfast, and a cup of coffee. He tried to appear jaunty and spry, but his knees locked and his legs buckled as he stumbled down the center of Fort Dodge. “I feel lively, I feel first-class,” he tried to say, holding his chin high.

  Twenty-five minutes later, Berry rode into Fort Dodge. He did not bother even trying to register and instead promptly delivered his two horses, including his lead horse, Poison, to Newberry’s barn for a feeding and rubbing and a few hours’ rest. Everyone by now knew his background with the railroad and his laying out of the race route. “But I’ve never gone over it before,” he insisted, snapping at those who suspected he had memorized the route.

  Gillespie clocked in around noon. He stalled his horses at Colby’s and tossed down a meal. He staggered off in search of a hotel room and a nap. His horses looked “tired and on the lag,” reported the Fort Dodge Chronicle. Old Joe was down to 179 pounds now. He had dropped twenty pounds since he had waved goodbye more than a week ago in Chadron. The Chronicle called him “a man well along in years. He is a typical cowboy.”

  People poured through the gates at the Colby and Newberry stables for much of the morning and over the noon
hour. But many of the young boys came away shaking their heads. They had hoped to be dazzled by some tough-looking cowpokes with leather holsters and sizzling six-guns. Instead they had seen weary, droopy-eared horses and worn-out sidekicks. This was the West? “The men thus far seem to suffer more than the horses,” agreed a special edition of the Fort Dodge Post.

  The three leaders saddled and bridled their horses, kicked into the stirrups, and prepared to trot off. “The riders think that Fort Dodge is just about half way on their trip,” the Post noted. “They are making about 60 miles a day.”

  Berry was first out, gone by 11 a.m. and coping with a badly sprained ankle often too sore to hold in the stirrup. Stephens and Gillespie headed out two hours later. Stephens was not faring so well either; he and General Grant “looked tired and sleepy,” observed the Daily Citizen in Iowa City.

  Yet Tatro pronounced the horses well enough to keep pushing on, not “over driven” or mistreated, especially not Berry’s. “Fine fettle,” he said of the railroad man’s two horses. “There has not been any sign of cruel treatment of the horses,” Tatro told a gaggle of newspaper reporters from around Iowa and Chicago. “In fact, quite the reverse is the case, and they are well cared for and are not being over ridden. A stop is made every night, giving both the horses and men a good night’s rest, and stops are made during the day for from 3 to 5 hours.”

  Tatro said the men were starting to “walk their horses each day” and that “as yet, there’s been no need for me to ride with them and inspect them.” But he added that “this will be done if found to be necessary. It has been reported that when they reached DeKalb, Ill., the start of the home stretch to Chicago, they will be ridden for all that is in them.” At that point, he said, “we will ride along with them.”

  Berry held the lead to Webster City, Iowa, twenty miles beyond Fort Dodge. He breezed through without a word. Gillespie and Stephens arrived two hours later. They cooled and fed their horses, ate supper, and hurried to catch up.

  Now lead riders Berry, Stephens, and Gillespie were caught in a midday downpour outside Iowa Falls. So they rested again and waited it out; when the air dried and the dust calmed, they slogged on another fifty miles to Cedar Falls.

  There, about ten miles still short of Waterloo, Gillespie and Stephens came upon a small traveling circus run by a Missouri entertainer named Colonel William Preston Hall. At the sudden sight of the cowboys, the circus fans spun their heads, and the quick-thinking ringmaster offered Gillespie and Stephens $10 each to romp around his ring. Could they thrill his fans with their “cowboy skills,” maybe throw a lasso or two, maybe rope a calf?

  Gillespie remembered it this way: “While I was waiting for my horses I wandered around town a bit to see what excitement I could dig up, and I found a circus, a little one-horse, one-ring affair. They had a mule that couldn’t be rode, so I rode him. Nearly broke their hearts.”

  He and Stephens were nearly broken themselves, hungry and tired and knowing that if they dallied around the circus and put a few tricks on the crowd, Berry would take the lead. It was 6:40 in the evening on Friday, June 23. The sun was fading when they had limped into Cedar Falls. The last nine miles had been a slog of mud and heavy rain.

  But the thrill of a circus and cheering fans sparked something in Old Joe Gillespie. He seized the chance to show off his Western bravado in the circus arena; it also would give his horses a needed rest. So he climbed atop that bucking trick mule and bounced around the circus lot, gripping the mule with one hand and waving his other, his hat flying, his spurs jingling, his battered backside bruising all over again. Stephens ripped off his rattlesnake hat and jumped into the ring, too, not to be out-cowboyed by the old Gillespie. After two performances, it was pushing 10 p.m. when finally they called it a night. Only then did Old Joe and the younger Rattlesnake Pete collapse at the circus gates.

  Gazing down at the two worn-out figures, crumpled and exhausted, a local newspaper reporter wrote that “if the Humane Society were to extend their investigation to human cruelty, it would be much more viable than to animals.”

  Gillespie and Stephens managed to get back on their feet. Gillespie fed fresh grass to his two horses; they did not care much for hay. He stumbled off to bed at the Calumet Hotel. Stephens rubbed down General Grant and fed the horse ground oats, stirring in plenty of oatmeal. He spread his bedroll on a blanket of straw and curled up next to his horse in the livery stable.

  He instantly fell asleep. And as the stars flashed across the eastern Iowa sky, Rattlesnake Pete dreamed that he and General Grant were prancing around not in a small-time traveling circus in a tiny Iowa town, but in the majestic Wild West arena in Chicago. He dreamed he was sipping champagne and cradling a “solid gold revolver” and that Buffalo Bill Cody was paying him $500 a night for the privilege of starring in his greatest season of all next to the Chicago World’s Fair.

  When he awoke, Stephens was startled to find a reporter bending over him in the stable, eyeing him closely, wondering how that particular smile came to Stephens’s sunburned, weathered face. So Pete told the reporter about his dream. “I was enjoying all the good things in and about the White City,” he said. “I had the honor of being the greatest cowboy in the world. With 42 rattles taken from my hat placed in a silk one, together with 100 additional rattles.”

  He sat up, dusted off strands of hay, and chased away a spider. He reached for his big hat. Morning had come, so Rattlesnake Pete saddled up General Grant and met Gillespie in the middle of town, and the cowboy duo cleared out of Cedar Falls. Next stop: Waterloo. The reporter was quite impressed. “I think that ‘Pete’ will win,” he wrote.

  They ripped past Manchester, Iowa, a little after noon and were stunned to learn that Berry had already flashed through. The night before, he had kept on riding while Gillespie slept in the Cedar Falls hotel and Stephens dreamed of Wild West glory. He stopped just long enough for a few cups of milk at a farmhouse window, lit up by a night lamp. He paused in Manchester to feed Poison and his second horse, rested for three hours, and then put Manchester behind him.

  Berry was first to Waterloo as well, and he hardly stopped there, either. Stephens and Gillespie came in a half an hour behind him. Tatro and Fontaine awaited them, so Stephens and Gillespie had to stop to register and lose more time for the inspectors to examine their horses. Time was precious, more precious than miles now, and Gillespie already was thinking he should have bypassed the circus comedy in Cedar Falls.

  In Chicago, Buffalo Bill was dealing with his own troubles. He knew he needed a winning cowboy on a fine, healthy horse to dash up to his arena gate amid the roar of cheers and hurrahs. He needed to reinforce the notions of cowboy resolve and Western broncho invincibility. And Cody did not want any of his fans jeering at a mistreated, abused horse or sneering if the race collapsed into a fool’s endeavor. Nor did he want his record attendance numbers to fall during the summer season of 1893, his best Wild West ever.

  So Cody dispatched his adjutant, Major John Burke, to Waterloo to make sure that at least one of the cowboys stuck to the saddle and lasted to Chicago. Burke’s task was to shepherd the race through its final leg, from the last segments in Iowa to Cody’s showroom door.

  Burke wasted no time. Fresh off the train in Waterloo, he immediately agreed with Tatro and Fontaine that the horses were holding up well. The race must go on, Burke stressed, and at least one of the cowboys must make it to Chicago.

  A Chicago journalist left the Waterloo railway depot, too, with a bicycle in tow. He said he was going to follow the cowboys on the final laps to Chicago, pedaling after them. He said he would help keep the race honest and record whatever he saw. That was not particularly good news, for Cody, especially if those last miles turned up some bad news, like a twisted hoof on a beaten horse or one of the cowboys cutting corners and cheating.

  “Colonel Cody could put himself at a very much better enterprise than that of encouraging the cowboy race,” warned the Omaha World Herald, speaking for many
in the country who were increasingly outraged that the race had gone on for ten days with no end in sight. “The chances are the horses will simply be run beyond their strength.” The paper contrasted the image of fading cowboys with the glorious future predicted in the impressive exhibits and new inventions at the World’s Columbian Exposition. The cowboys, argued the World Herald, should have no place at the Chicago fair, no role in what the next American century would bring. “It may be characteristic of a portion of the West, but the people at the Fair do not want to see everything that is characteristic of this country. Only that which is best.”

  Surprisingly, Doc Middleton was now back in the race, too, albeit well behind. He had ridden out of Sioux City on his one good horse, pursuing one last chance at the cowboy prize. He was several days behind the leaders, and he knew that. Yet like the dwindling American frontier, Doc’s long shot encapsulated withering Western stamina. Somber, slow, taking his time, he journeyed on. He had not yet given up on Chicago.

  Far ahead of Doc, the race now seemed Berry’s to win. If he were not eligible for the Colt and the Montgomery Ward saddle and the cash prize money, at least he could savor the honor of being first at the Chicago fair. So he, Poison, and his second horse wore on across the northeastern pocket of Iowa, pointed toward that father of all American rivers, the mighty Mississippi. Past Jessup and then to Independence, Iowa, with that pesky Chicago reporter frantically pedaling on his bicycle to keep up, Berry flashed like lightning across the countryside. He stopped briefly in Independence to reshoe both horses and briefly nap, and then he was up and off once more.

  Berry was racing on his own now, well ahead of Gillespie and Stephens, letting them stop and eat and register and lose time with amateur circus stunts. His eyes were fixed squarely on Chicago, tears burning his cheeks, his arm muscles aching, his inner thighs rubbed raw. His sprained ankle kicked at his horse, and he urged Poison on.