Dubuque, Iowa, would be next. And after a high bluff, the Mississippi River.
By late Saturday on June 24, clusters of boys and old men started gathering on the corner of Eighth and Main streets in downtown Dubuque, the last stop for the cowboy race in Iowa. News bulletins were tacked up on tree trunks and lamp poles proclaiming the arrival any minute of the cowboys. Members of a club for teenagers called Young America stretched along city streets, craning for any glimpse of trail dust or the thud of pounding hooves. “Cowboys on the Brain!” screamed the headline in that day’s Dubuque Herald.
Cody’s man Major Burke waited in Dubuque, too. He had taken the train from Waterloo and hastily checked into the Julien Hotel, a stately brick-front inn built in 1839, seven years before Iowa even became a state and just a leisurely seven-minute stroll to the precipitous river bluffs.
He tried to swat down ugly gossip that he was spying for Buffalo Bill. No, Burke said, adamant and angry, Cody had not put the fix in. “Neither Cody nor myself are interested in the race,” he protested, as far as money and Wild West show gate receipts went. “Only as Western men and rugged riders.”
Burke had brought with him a personally selected veterinary surgeon, and the two said they would independently examine the horses when Gillespie and Stephens made it to Dubuque. They had every intention of keeping the horses healthy for Chicago. From what he and the surgeon had learned already, Burke said, “the horses are in tiptop shape and will go through alright.”
Burke also scoffed at attempts in Iowa by animal rights activists to end the race before anyone crossed the river. The Iowa Humane Society had posted rewards of up to $800 for any proof of horse mistreatment or other evidence that could justify arrests. Reports were being mailed and wired to Des Moines, but now those efforts seemed too late. The clock was ticking down on Iowa. Only Illinois could stop the cowboys now.
And up and down the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, determined Illinois Humane Society agent Oscar Little was scoping out towns such as East Dubuque and Galena, two logical spots for the riders to breach the big river. At Galena he met with Sheriff Louis Homrich, a monument and marble dealer and twice-elected county lawman. He asked Homrich to stop the race if any cowboys or Berry tried to avoid the law. Stop them even if their horses looked healthy, he demanded. He had the paperwork in his pocket, Little told the sheriff: “I will furnish the warrants for the arrest of the cowboys.” Then he hurried to East Dubuque, fifteen miles upriver. He examined the so-called High Bridge, the long span linking the two Dubuques from Iowa to Illinois. If the cowboys rode through here, the bridge would be their sure route over the Mississippi.
Little was inspecting other Illinois riverbanks for other potential sites to cross the water by barge, ferry, or flatboat. He waved his stack of arrest warrants and passed them around to sheriffs, police chiefs, and other Illinois lawmen. Everywhere he went, he said he was furious that Fontaine and Tatro had let the race go on for so long, that they had allowed things to get so far out of hand. “They never should have sanctioned this race,” he told the Illinois sheriffs.
But others warned Agent Little that it might not be prudent to interfere. He might be asking for real trouble. Too much money had been invested, people said. Too much time had been spent racing across the country’s midsection. Too many miles had been ridden, and the new skyscrapers of Chicago beckoned too close to stop the cowboys now.
Then Little was handed an urgent telegram reporting that Berry, with Gillespie and Stephens closing in behind him, should come flying across the river and into Illinois tomorrow, Sunday, June 25, probably sometime in the morning.
The telegram advised Little not to put his life at risk. “Cowboys are noted for shooting,” the wire cautioned. “It would be well not to stop them.”
Across the River and into Illinois
10
Church bells tolled in Dubuque that Sunday morning as a small man on a big horse came barreling in on the north Cascade Road. Atop a raw-boned stallion and leading a bay horse, he was first to reach the city hosting the final inspection station in Iowa. All that would test the rider now, all that he had yet to conquer, was that big rolling river, the Illinois prairie, and the glistening shores of Lake Michigan.
When his horse’s hooves hit the pavement and the Sunday bells rang out, all of Dubuque fell still. Heads turned, and unwashed breakfast dishes were set aside. The churches emptied, and Sunday school sessions were canceled. City streets high on the river bluffs filled up, and everyone scrunched in to welcome the front-runner. The Great Cowboy Race had come to town.
Spanning the Mississippi River was the High Bridge, a creaky iron-and-wood structure strung together six years ago. It had seemed strong enough to handle most anything so far: heavy wagons and buckboards; horses, cattle, and oxen hauling rich river produce and timber, bricks, and Mississippi River limestone from Illinois and Wisconsin, all brought into downtown Dubuque to expand the bustling port city. The bridge rested atop seven concrete piers sunk into the banks and the riverbed. It stretched some 1,700 feet across the Mississippi, its shoulders bearing the surest and fastest route into Illinois.
Dubuque’s citizens had not seen anything like the cowboy race before, at least not since the celebration in 1887 when the bridge was formally opened. On that day, five hundred floats had promenaded down the river, while high above a procession of residents and horse-drawn carriages filled with dignitaries tested the bridge’s endurance. Bands played, a drum corps rolled, and banners streamed from the seven pylons and downtown lamp poles. A local military outfit called the Governor’s Greys, including Yankee veterans from Civil War campaigns in the Midwest and Tennessee, performed in matching uniforms, firing volleys up and over the river heights. The bridge company handed out thousands of commemorative bronze medals.
German and Irish Catholic immigrants, many unskilled and unschooled, had landed here by midcentury for jobs in Dubuque’s growing manufacturing center, its beer-brewing houses and boatbuilding plants. Their muscle built the High Bridge, and this Sunday their hands were joined in prayer when the first of the horses’ hooves sounded and the church bells pealed.
Everyone rushed outside. The first of the cowboys was here. Even if he was not a cowboy.
John Berry came roaring into Dubuque at 9:30 that morning aiming for the High Bridge, and there was nothing Oscar Little or anyone else could do to stop him. Berry was small, thin, and red-mustached. On his head bounced a “home-sick hat,” a Chicago reporter recalled. His $3 trousers were ripped in the back, and another Chicago reporter wrote that Berry disappointed nearly everyone because he did not appear anything like a dusty trail cowpuncher loping in off the range. “Not much like the typical cowboy of the eastern imagination did this rider look,” complained the Chicago Herald. “Nor was he rigged out in buckskin, jingling spurs, broad hat and revolvers. But he is riding the race under protest, and he says he don’t care a lasso’s lunge whether he is ever called a cowboy if he wins the race. And he stands a good show to win.”
Berry was the first rider whom Dubuque had set eyes on after days on the lookout for the first of the horsemen. Both their patience and their expectations were running thin, and John Berry, the railroad man, was going to have to do. “Dubuque has been afflicted for two days with a violent attack of insomnia waiting for these cowboys,” lamented the Herald. Yes, Berry would do.
He had ridden twenty-three miles in the past four hours, up and saddled long before dawn after a six-hour rest at Farley, Iowa. Now he led his horses straight to a stable and swathed their legs in alcohol-soaked bandages. He headed over to the Julien Hotel, slipped on a dinner jacket, and sat down to a plate of broiled chicken.
John Berry atop his horse Poison. Together they challenged eight cowboys in racing from the Nebraska Panhandle to the Chicago World’s Fair. (Courtesy of William McDowell)
Cody’s man Major Burke heard all the commotion and burst out of bed in his Julien Hotel room. He hurried downstairs to the dining hall
and started teasing the waitresses noodling around Berry, trying to get his attention. Berry soon left the restaurant without speaking to either the women or Major Burke. He took a room in the hotel and slept for ninety minutes.
Oscar Little rushed over to the livery stable and peered at Berry’s two horses. He thought them rather healthy, tired but able, though Poison seemed “feverish.”
By noon Berry was up and out of bed and back on Poison, and with his second horse in tow headed east toward the High Bridge and its gateway to Illinois. He did not wave and did not look back. He picked up speed and flew up the ramp and onto the bridge.
A large crowd chased after him, practically carrying him across the river and into Illinois. Men followed on horseback, in buggies, and on bicycles, others running on foot, women waving at the bridge railings, children jumping and screaming. The bridge creaked and groaned, but it stood the weight. Pedaling furiously after them came the persistent Chicago reporter on his bicycle, determined to follow the leader to the finish line.
Berry did not care much for the attention. In his last miles in Iowa, he had flown past farmers waiting at gate posts, ignoring them as he flashed by. He picked out shadows in farmhouse windows, figures peeking through curtains as he blazed past. This morning, nearing Dubuque, he had tipped his hat to a dairy farmer. The startled farmer spilled a pail of milk and then urged Berry on as he thundered past.
He may have been disqualified at the start of the race, but John Berry now held the lead—if not by much. For just as he hit the High Bridge, James Stephens came tearing into Dubuque. With his rattle-tail hat and dusty flannel shirt, he slowed up on his only horse, General Grant. In the middle of the street, he fed it oats and reached into a saddlebag for a horse treat of dried beef. He noticed the town was eerily deserted, and he guessed that everyone must have gone to church.
Soon, however, the bridge crowd, filing back into town, spotted Stephens. They chased after him as he led General Grant to the Noonan Brothers livery stable and then found Tatro and Fontaine at a local home near the High Bridge. He signed the registration book.
People trailed Stephens to the Julien Hotel, delighted as he swaggered into the dining room with full cowboy gusto, like a Western rascal out of a Buffalo Bill dime novel. He clomped around in his hard-heeled boots, and many giggled. He sat down to eat, and they applauded. Rattlesnake Pete glanced contemptuously at the restaurant menu. “Bring it all,” he barked to the waitresses. “And get me some fried rattlesnakes soon’s you kin.”
Stephens pulled out of Dubuque around 2:30, two hours behind Berry, crossing the High Bridge and starting his last leg through Illinois. That was about the same time when Joe Gillespie burst through the doors of the Julien Hotel, with his broad shoulders and a week’s growth of white whiskers.
“Where’s the secretary? I want to register,” he hollered. “Been hunting all over and can’t find out where I’ve got to register. And I want a map too. I don’t have a map on this road.” Old Joe’s spurs clanked as he rushed off to meet Tatro and Fontaine and sign the registration book. He stayed in Dubuque the longest, three and a half hours, clearing out around three in the afternoon. His horses appeared the “sorest,” some thought, and he hoped to give them plenty of rest. Berry was far ahead somewhere in Illinois with Stephens chasing him, and Gillespie wanted his lead horse, Billy Schafer, to be strong enough to catch up.
Charley Smith dragged in next, suffering from dysentery. He had rested near a small Iowa country creek and dipped his hat in the murky water for a long slurp. It laid him up for two hours, and in Dubuque he visited a doctor before leaving. He looked “quite weak,” observers said.
Doc Middleton rode in on the morning train. His race was done by now; he was just following out of curiosity and in an effort to preserve his name and reputation, and perhaps a seat inside Buffalo Bill’s arena. He breakfasted at the Julien, and then he and his horse boarded the next train east through Illinois. He would continue to Chicago, if only to watch.
At Dixon, Illinois, Doc stepped off the train incognito, trying to claim his name was Charles Colby. But he soon was recognized and obliged again to explain how he had dropped out of the race and was riding the Illinois Central to Chicago to meet the others. A Dixon veterinarian examined Middleton’s horse and pronounced it fit enough to ride, “in sound condition and showing no signs of ill usage or hard driving.” But Doc said no; he would ride the rails.
Other cowboys, still far back in Iowa, were harder to track. The owner of a small stable west of Dubuque claimed that Emmett Albright had stopped long enough to secretly ship his two horses on an Illinois-bound railroad boxcar. The stable proprietor said that Albright had started off for Dubuque but after about a half mile ducked into a side road and doubled back to the Illinois Central yard. A woman named Mrs. Hennessy of Manchester, Iowa, said she helped guide him to the tracks. And an Illinois Central Railroad agent said that another cowboy, “a stranger calling himself Johnson,” had shipped two horses from Manchester on an “Extra” no. 53 train east as well.
None of that much mattered now. Iowa was history, and riding the rails was cheating. Now the race was all Illinois, five horses, and three men: Berry, Stephens, and Gillespie, riding amid flat country and summer crops until pastures would give way to the bricks, sidewalks, and towers of Chicago.
From Dubuque, Galena was fifteen miles downriver, and Berry tore through there in the afternoon, still well in the lead. He looped east toward Council Hill and for a while followed the Apple River before calling it a night. The next registration stop would be Freeport, reachable sometime tomorrow, on Monday.
Oscar Little had not given up. The scrappy Illinois Humane Society agent hired a buggy and a matched team at East Dubuque and hurried off on the Hazel Green Road for Freeport. He had noticed Berry’s horse Poison flashing through there and he still thought the horse “feverish.” He wanted a better look at Freeport.
Stephens pounded after Berry, though three hours behind. Gillespie hurried after Stephens, an hour behind him. So it went until Freeport, where townspeople and county homesteaders were staying up much of the night pestering passing wagons and buggies with the same question: “Are they coming?”
Illinois rolled on, trees and small river hills, the horses passing over creek beds and through dry brush, the land crooked and hilly across the state’s northwestern hinge. The tiny towns flew by, settlements barely holding on anymore, with perhaps a church, a dry-goods store, a grocery, a coal chute, and a cluster of homes. Otherwise it was all farms, fences, and farmhouses.
At a small railroad junction called Lena, Dave Young broke up bundles of fine straw in his barn and spread it out to await the racing horses. He hoped they would stop at his place, where for thirty years he had provided stable accommodations for wayfarers traveling the old Illinois roads. Tonight he hung a lantern high on an elm pole in front of his barn, signaling for one or more of the cowboys to pull in for a while. None did.
At Elroy, a dot of a town with little more than a post office eight miles before Freeport, a country crowd gathered to wait out much of the night, straining for a glimpse of a cowboy or two stopping to water or eat and maybe rest. None showed.
Not until Freeport, on the Pecatonica River, were the men at last seen. At dawn a hundred or more people lined up in front of the Frazier and Moritz livery stable. Some suspected they may have missed the cowboys overnight, that some of them might have sneaked through town and secretly slept over at the Clifton House hotel. But the hotel manager denied any such rumors, and so people idled around town until the sun peeked over the prairie and the first horse and rider approached Freeport.
At 7:15 in the morning, Berry leaped off Poison and stumbled inside an already opened saloon. The men inside turned and stared at the “hatchet-faced, sunburned, long-haired” straggler bursting into the darkness of the bar. Some of them jeered. Berry ignored their snickering and complaints that he was not a real cowboy. He ordered not a cold beer or a Scotch whiskey like any hardw
orking cowboy, but instead a tall glass of cold lemonade. Then he let his critics have it.
“Of course I am in the contest,” Berry told those cradling their drinks in the saloon. “And the people in Chicago will shout for me.” In twenty-four hours or less, he predicted, he would ride triumphant through the streets of Chicago, 130 miles yet to go, and into the arms of Buffalo Bill. “I’m out for blood, that’s what I am,” he declared. “I have ridden this race under the same conditions and hardships as the others. I am distinctly in the race. The others are all against me and don’t want me to get in first. But I shall give them a case of disappointment. I hope to shake hands with Buffalo Bill before Joe Gillespie or Smith or Rattlesnake Pete get into Cook County.”
He scoffed at Gillespie (too old) and Rattlesnake Pete (too odd). He thought that George Jones, far in the rear but carefully trotting his horses, saving their strength, might be a bigger worry. “Jones is the man I am looking for to give me a tussle for the finish,” Berry said.
Oscar Little turned up in Freeport that morning, too. The Humane Society agent requested that Sheriff James McNamara and the chief of police inspect Berry’s two horses. But the lawmen saw no reason to arrest Berry, even for the “feverish” Poison.
Berry took a few precious minutes to hustle over to the Stephenson County courthouse. He found Tatro, Fontaine, and Little inside, and he put the three of them on notice that he, John Berry, the leader in the cowboy race, was the first rider to reach Freeport, daring them to write that down in their book. Then he scrambled out of town. It was five hours more to Byron, Illinois. Berry stopped four times along the way, slowing for water and to sponge off his horses.
Gillespie was slowing, too; the old man was wearing out. For a while he leaned well over his horse’s shoulders. Once he fell asleep and tumbled out of the saddle. Other times he hopped off Billy Schafer’s back and held onto the horse’s tail, saving its strength while he ran behind it.
American Endurance Page 19
