American Endurance

by Richard A. Serrano

  Posing at the finish line on Buffalo Bill’s show grounds are (left to right) Joe Gillespie, Charley Smith, George “Stub” Jones, James “Rattlesnake Pete” Stephens, Emmett Albright, and Joe Campbell. (Dawes County Historical Museum)

  Doc Middleton came home to Chadron with a bad cold. But he had been entranced with Chicago, and once back on his feet he talked a lot about staging his own Wild West show. He planned to start out in central Iowa and then dip south, hunting up venues in ballparks and fairgrounds. He rode up to Pine Ridge and interviewed some reservation Sioux, announcing first that he had twenty-five people ready to sign, then fifty-five, plus nine or ten head of “genuine buffalo.” He also wanted to hire some Army soldiers and cowboys. He basically was following Buffalo Bill’s model. He planned a re-creation of Wounded Knee and an attack on the Deadwood stagecoach. His biggest stars would be Thomas C. Clayton, better known as “Jerky Bill,” a deadeye rifle shot who could ride any wild bucking horse and “stick to the saddle like a shadow at noon,” and “Opportunity Hank” (real name Henry Atkins), an old-time Chadron area frontiersman, card shark, and all-around “fighting man.”

  His plans were ambitious, and Middleton did manage a few shows in a handful of small venues. But he never came close to rivaling the great Buffalo Bill. So Doc talked next to Joe Gillespie about the two of them racing each other in daily romps around a track in Chicago and getting their hands on some tourist money. That idea did not pan out either.

  Gillespie had other problems. One was the ribbing he took from those unhappy he had not been declared the out-and-out first-place winner. “Lots of our old friends were disappointed that you were not first in the cow-boy race,” his older brother William Moore Gillespie wrote to him. “But they said they knew you could have done better if you had tried and had the same chance as Berry did.”

  Before Old Joe left Chicago, he temporarily lost his prized Colt revolver. Around the middle of July, it turned up in a Chicago pawnshop, and one of Buffalo Bill’s stable boys, Edward Crespon, was arrested. Crespon was charged with stealing and pawning the trophy and was fined $25. Gillespie had his pistol back, and he rode back to Nebraska with it safely locked up in his saddlebag.

  For a time after the race, it seemed that every kid in America wanted to play cowboy. In Buffalo, New York, two teenagers from New Jersey hiding out in the Nickel Plate Road rail yards were cornered by police. One of the boys, Adolph Stander, was armed with a rifle, some fishing tackle, and a nickel-plated watch. He told the officers that they had run away from their homes in Newark “with the intention of joining the cowboys” who had raced to Buffalo Bill and the Chicago fair. Stander was sent home; the friend, however, escaped.

  With the race over, Chadron, in contrast, grew weary of cowboys. A pair of new ones showed up shortly after the race, and they were hauled into police court on drunk and disorderly charges. They were found guilty and fined $3 each. They had settled into one of the old abandoned, burned-out homesteads near town, and they threatened to “blow the brains out of anyone who disturbed them.” A night watchman and his sidekick grabbed their guns and clobbered them over the head with a cane. It was that easy now to subdue a rowdy cowboy.

  Buffalo Bill’s arena in Chicago seemed the only place left for any honest cowboy action. But everyone knew the country was changing and that Cody’s lariats and Indian war whoops were essentially playacting. Nobody got hurt; no stagecoach was robbed; no Indian warriors scalped anyone. And Buffalo Bill never missed a shot. His Wild West had become a caricature of the real Old West. America’s future now lay just past Cody’s gate, inside the pantheons of the Chicago fair.

  Doc Middleton, the “reformed” outlaw, closed out his life in 1913 in Douglas, Wyoming, twenty years after he had raced to Chicago. His attempts at going straight and cleaning up his image never really succeeded. In the end, he was arrested for selling rotten liquor and promoting a knife fight in his saloon, which locals called “a blind pig.” That was Western slang for a bar that sold bottles under the counter.

  Doc was fined $150 and court costs of just under $50, but when the old outlaw was unable to scrape up the money, they tucked him away inside the county jail. When he came down with an acute bacterial infection and pneumonia to boot, they moved him to the “pest house,” a quarantined facility for the unwanted. It was a small building with just two spare rooms on a hill near the town cemetery. The rooms were not lit, and the watchman on his rounds had to swing a kerosene lamp to peer inside and make sure Middleton had not escaped from yet another jail. But Doc’s eyes were nearly swollen shut from the erysipelas that left his face and legs splotched with red patches; his head burned with fever, and he could hardly see a thing.

  One of his sons visited, and Doc hugged his boy and “wept like a child.” He was about sixty-three years old, but no one was sure. His long, scraggly beard had been trimmed off long ago, his mustache had turned ashen white, his will had wasted away. He died in the pest house, and the county paid to bury him in an unmarked grave.

  John Berry died the same year that Middleton did. He had ended up in Wyoming, too, and took up ranching with his wife, Winifred, along Skull Creek in the northeastern part of the state, outside the small town of Newcastle. The Berry ranch home in Wyoming had once been a lively, thriving affair. But that all gradually changed. “It was an old house, just an old two-story house, with a kind of high-pitched roof, shingled, like an ordinary homestead house,” recalled his nephew David Howell. Berry’s niece Doris Bowker Bennett would walk by the house as a girl, and even then the old place seemed empty and crumbling apart. “The ranch was a few miles down the creek from ours,” she wrote in her memoirs in 1976. “I recall the house standing facing the road; the shell of it stands there today, its unpainted wood preserved by sun and wind.”

  For a while, Berry dressed in suits and ties and became a town debater. Never a cowboy and no longer a railroad surveyor, once a man of few words, he now debated a wide range of current events on the stage in the Newcastle public library, including the passing of the American West. One night he finished his argument on the question of who had been treated worse by the white man in America: the African slave or the native Indian? Berry spoke on behalf of the Indian. When he was done, he returned to his wooden chair and then sank to the floor. They carried him to a nearby sofa, just as they had done twenty years earlier in Cody’s tent, and there he died.

  After the Great Cowboy Race, Old Joe Gillespie loaded his family into a buckboard and wagon. They headed out of the Chadron area and turned south toward Indian Territory, which later became Oklahoma. He brought the fancy new Colt revolver and his beloved horse, Billy Schafer. This would be another long-distance journey: seven hundred miles in fifty days, August through October 1899. They treated Billy Schafer like one of the family, and they buried the horse next to what is now an Oklahoma asphalt highway.

  “Well,” Gillespie’s wife, Anna, wrote in her diary upon leaving the Chadron area. “I feel as if I had said goodbye to old Dawes County with the debts and discouragement, its hot winds, droughts, and hard times generally, and intend to begin a new life.”

  In the new century, Joe Gillespie would settle for a livery stable, a blacksmith shop, and a deputy sheriff’s badge. For a time he also farmed and raised livestock. Nearly up to the end, the old cowboy was still breaking horses and hunting coyotes with his riding quirt. He died forty years after the cowboy race, in 1933, a week shy of turning eighty-four. The Old West gradually vanished, but Old Joe never surrendered his cowboy spirit.

  James Stephens, a.k.a. Rattlesnake Pete, lived the longest of the long riders. He hung around a bit in Chicago and Chadron but could not establish a foothold. So he saddled up General Grant and rode home to his family in central Kansas. He took a job as a town barber above a rowdy saloon and later opened a one-chair shop in his home on North Washington Street in Hutchinson, Kansas. On the wall he hung that large oil painting of himself sitting atop General Grant, arching his shoulders back to make himself look
taller. He angrily denied drinking too much or pouring whiskey down his horse’s throat during the race. “That’s all wrong,” he snarled.

  Stephens never had children of his own. So when young boys came crashing through his door for a haircut or old men dropped in for a shave, they would settle into his chair and listen in wonder as he described barnstorming across the heart of America, through the Sand Hills and scrub grass and what little was left of the untamed prairie—one thousand miles of tough leather and hard riding to the bright white lights of the Chicago World’s Fair. And how he’d worn a crown of seventy-two poisonous rattlesnake tails, and shaken hands with Buffalo Bill.

  In his old age, he often drove around town in a big luxury Oldsmobile 98, a small man in a large cowboy hat sinking behind the steering wheel, speeding up and down the city streets like he was off to the races again. He died in 1957, just short of turning ninety. His hometown Kansas newspaper wrote of the last of the cowboys: “James ‘Rattlesnake Pete’ Stephens has ridden to that Great Range up yonder.”

  Postscript

  “Broncho Charlie” Miller was a small, mustached man who over his long years carried the mail for the Pony Express, starred in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and once, in London, raced his horse against a man on a bicycle.

  In the summer of 1931, at the age of eighty-one, he set out on one final cross-country Western adventure. He mounted his horse, pushed his long hair back over his stooped shoulders, and with trembling hands steadied his hat and rolled out of New York City. He was headed back west to deliver a packet of New York mail to San Francisco on his five-year-old brown mount named Polestar, “one of the finest horses I ever seen,” he later wrote.

  He left Manhattan with a police escort, and it took nearly a year before the clip-clop of Polestar’s hooves was heard on the far shores. He passed the big steel towns in Pennsylvania, the St. Louis gateway, and the bulging Kansas City stockyards. “The hardest part of the whole trip was goin’ through them big cities, with Polestar shyin’ and buckin’ and everybody starin’ at me like they thought sure the circus had come to town,” Charlie wrote. Worse, he recalled, was that “there was plenty of gasoline stations and automobile repair places scattered all along the route, but it was like findin’ hen’s teeth to find a blacksmith!”

  Charlie and Polestar turned left for the warmer southern route. They stopped in Oklahoma to say howdy to old “Pawnee Bill” Lillie, relaxing on his Blue Hawk Peak ranch veranda, minding his Scottish shorthorn cattle, and recalling his own Wild West show of years gone by. “I had a mighty fine time there,” remembered Charlie. “It was like the first downright breath of home and the hearty ways of the Old West.”

  In Texas, he sat down to Christmas dinner at a small cow camp: “sourdough bread and beans and good black coffee!” Through El Paso and Tucson and the Southern California desert, Charlie and Polestar rode on. “My horse’s feet and legs was cut and bleedin’ from the bitin’ sand, and the right side of my face was just plain raw. That was the only time on the whole trip that Polestar wavered.”

  In Los Angeles, the clop of the horse’s hooves echoed off the downtown streets. Charlie tipped his hat and in his teeth clenched Polestar’s reins, getting the horse to kick a bit at all the car horns and stop the noonday traffic. Then it was up the Grapevine road and through the tassel-high wheat fields of California’s Inland Valley to the Golden Gate and the blue waters of the Pacific.

  Charlie promptly went looking for the mayor of San Francisco. He had a letter for him from the mayor of New York. To the crowd outside, he announced that he was none other than the famous Broncho Charlie Miller, once the “top man” for Buffalo Bill. Dirty and worn down from his long ride, he also was loud, boisterous, and undeniably eccentric, a relic of the Old West.

  He soon went broke hanging around San Francisco and was forced to sell Polestar. All he netted was $75. He thought about trying to parachute on horseback from an airplane. He thought about making another cross-country trip, “in one of these here flyin’ gasoline buggies.” But he could not afford a car. And no pilot was going to fly any horse or crazy cowboy. Eventually he grew tired of the whole big city. “It costs too much for a plain broncho buster like me,” he said. But there was no place left for him out on the Plains, either; they had long ago been fenced, farmed, plowed up, and paved over. “So,” sighed tired old Broncho Charlie Miller, “I just moseyed along back East on the train.”

  Sources

  1. The West of Our Imagination

  During the summer of 1893, much of the nation was swept up in the excitement of the Great Cowboy Race, stretching from Second Street in Chadron, Nebraska, to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show next to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. News of the nine riders and their horses flashed across the telegraph wires, landed on the front pages of the country’s newspapers, and traveled across the thousand-mile route by anxious word of mouth. But like much of the Old West, these two weeks of racing across Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois soon galloped into history. Over time, this remarkable feat of American endurance was lost in a twentieth century of unlimited progress and spectacular innovation.

  Yet depictions of the cowboy race have resurfaced from time to time in magazine and journal articles, pamphlets, and other publications. It was from these sometimes obscure sources that I first began to learn of those fourteen days and nights of remarkable cowboy stamina.

  Some of the best accounts are William J. Deahl Jr., “The Chadron–Chicago 1,000-Mile Cowboy Race,” Nebraska History (Summer 1972): 166–93; The Chadron to Chicago Cowboy Horse Race of 1893, a forty-four-page booklet compiled by Rip Radcliffe to commemorate the Chadron Centennial (Chadron, NE: B & B Printing, 1984); Harry T. Sly, “The 1000 Mile Horse Race from Chadron to Chicago,” a seven-page, self-published, undated essay on file at the Dawes County Historical Museum in Chadron; Harold Hutton, Doc Middleton: Life and Legends of the Notorious Plains Outlaw (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1974), chap. 15; “The Great 1,000-Mile Race from Chadron to Chicago!” Sports Illustrated, September 3, 1962; Walter Livingston, “Riders East,” Adventure Magazine (December 1941): 65–73; “The Cowboy Race,” Harper’s Weekly, July 1, 1893, 633; R. C. House, “The Great Cowboy Race of 1893: Small-Town Nebraskans Tactfully Counter National Humane Societies’ Intense Opposition,” Tombstone (AZ) Epitaph, no. 11 (November 2001): 1; Chicago Inter Ocean, July 3, 1893, 1; and G. E. Lemmon, “Developing the West,” a series of columns published in the Belle Fourche (SD) Bee in 1940 and 1941.

  Undertaking further research, I discovered a good number of other books that feature the race. Among them are Walter Havighurst, Annie Oakley of the Wild West (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 174–79; Mari Sandoz, The Cattlemen: From the Rio Grande across the Far Marias (New York: Hastings House, 1958), 416–17; Ed Lemmon, Boss Cowman: The Recollections of Ed Lemmon, 1857–1946, ed. Nellie Snyder Yost (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974), 191–94; Clifford P. Westermeier, Trailing the Cowboy: His Life and Lore as Told by Frontier Journalists (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1955), 355–58; Frazier Hunt and Robert Hunt, Horses and Heroes: The Story of the Horse in America for 450 Years (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 191–95; Addison Erwin Sheldon, Nebraska Old and New (Lincoln: University Publishing, 1937), 371–73; Chadron Centennial History, 1885–1985 (Chadron, NE: Chadron Narrative History Project Committee, 1985), 32–33; Charles L. Curtis, Horses and Riders: True Tales of the Old West, vol. 7 (Carson City, NV: Pioneer Press, 1998), 60–61; Richard J. Walsh, The Making of Buffalo Bill: A Study in Heroics (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928), 302–3; Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 375–76; Robert A. Carter, Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man behind the Legend (New York: John Wiley, 2000), 372–74; and Henry Blackman Sell and Victor Weybright, Buffalo Bill and the Wild West (New York: New American Library, 1959), 233–37.

  Additional journal and magazine articles were quite helpful. They include Laura Trowbridge, “The Fabulous Cowboy Race,” The W
est (April 1968): 16–17, 48–50; Shelley R. Frear, “The 1893 Chadron to Chicago Cowboy Horse Race,” Old West (Spring 1998): 12–17; Otto Wolfgang, “1,000 Mile Race,” Quarter Horse Journal (1965): 90–92, 192; Walter Schmidt, “History’s Most Grueling Test of Horse and Rider,” Challenge (November 1955): 31–33, 70–76; “The Maddest Horse Race Ever,” Motor Club News (March–April 1966): 3; “The 1,000 Mile Horse Race,” Outdoor Nebraskaland (July 1986): 14–17, 54; Bernard Schuessler, “The Great Chadron to Chicago Horse Race,” Sunday World-Herald Magazine of the Midlands, October 15, 1972; Raymond Schuessler, “The Great Horse Race,” Boys’ Life (May 1970): 66; and Robert Beasley, “The 1,000-Mile Race: A Newspaper’s Publicity Gimmick Turned Out to Be the Longest and Toughest Horse Race Ever, from Chadron, Nebraska to Chicago,” Great West (October 1968): 30–33.

  For historical accounts by newspapers, see Elisabeth Hughes, “47 Years Ago a Railroad-Man-on-a-Horse Won Great Chadron-to-Chicago Classic,” Omaha World-Herald, June 22, 1940; “Famous Thousand-Mile Horse Race Brought Nation-Wide Attention for City of Chadron,” Chadron (NE) Record, September 4, 1967, 1; Bev Pechan, “The Chadron to Chicago Horse Race,” Rapid City Journal, September 29, 2009; and M. Timothy Nolting, “Celebrating the Anniversary of the Chadron to Chicago Cowboy Race,” Chadron Record, June 26, 2013.

  Finally, this gem provided a surprising amount of additional detail: The 1,000 Mile Chadron to Chicago Horse Race, Diamond Jubilee official historical souvenir booklet (Chadron, NE, 1960).

  The speech from Red Cloud was recorded by Charles W. Allen, a journalist from Chadron who knew the great Sioux chief quite well. It can be found in his book From Fort Laramie to Wounded Knee: In the West That Was (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 143.