American Endurance

by Richard A. Serrano

  Relentless boredom and routine wore many settlers down. Sameness could cover hundreds of square miles. Jules Haumont of Custer County, Nebraska, in an “old settler” talk years later, said the look of the gray, barren land was what he remembered most. “There were no houses to be seen, no groves, no trees.”

  In his 1870s diary, Henry H. Raymond described killing time by shooting at telegraph poles in south central Kansas. “Hit it from 60 yards,” Raymond wrote. “A beautiful day.” For food he hunted wild game, but his aim did not always ring true. “Drove up river, almost to Huntington, went to the lake,” he wrote in his broken lettering. “Saw no game, turned for Dodge. Stoped and eat snack where we camped. Cleaned out gun and pistol … killed duck but could not get it.”

  The West was filled with close calls. Matilda Peterson was frying doughnuts in eastern Nebraska when an Indian known as “No-Flesh” and members of his band appeared at her door. The smell of the doughnuts had drawn them; now they crowded inside the cabin and around her stove. A startled Mrs. Peterson dropped one of her doughnuts, and it rolled onto the floor. No-Flesh picked it up, smelled the pastry, and popped it in his mouth. He liked it, so Mrs. Peterson nervously kept frying. Eventually her husband returned home and persuaded the Indians to leave. But No-Flesh returned several days later. He wanted to trade his wife for Mrs. Peterson.

  Summer grasshoppers plagued the Plains. Walking to dinner one evening, a Niobrara River Valley man named Herman Westermann heard “a terrible noise” screeching up from behind. It sounded like a hailstorm rather than the cloud of hoppers it was. But the locusts swirled just ten feet above the ground, “moving north against a strong wind.” For two hours he lay in the dirt waiting them out, hoping they would pass him over. They did. But along their way the grasshoppers chomped up whole pastures of wheat, potatoes, and onions.

  In southeast Kansas, “they came in untold millions,” reported the Wichita City Eagle, “in clouds upon clouds, until their fluttering wings looked like a sweeping snowstorm in the heavens, until their dark bodies covered everything green upon the earth.” The hoppers covered the ground six inches deep. They chewed into cottonwood trees so fiercely that the limbs splintered and the branches snapped. They ate through curtains and devoured clotheslines. They loved salt and swarmed over farmers, their tools, and machinery, hungry for a drop of sweat. They dove for a man’s eyes and ears and flew into his mouth. Farmers tried to “fire them out” by setting their fields ablaze. In Custer County, Nebraska, in 1876, the Finch family planted sixty acres of corn. The ears were just about showing when the farm boys heard a cracking and a snapping, and the roar of grasshoppers was upon them. An uncle tried to beat them back with a willow bush. By his count, he killed several thousand.

  Winter blizzards were far worse, none more devastating than the fierce storm of 1888. It froze northern Nebraska and the southern rim of the Dakota Territory. A Canadian front bore down on January 12 and gripped the region for hours. The morning began unseasonably mild and then turned deadly cold. “At recess, during the forenoon, we were all out playing in our shirt sleeves, without hats or mittens,” recalled O. W. Coursey, a schoolboy in Dakota. “Suddenly we looked up and saw something rolling toward us with great fury from the northwest.… It looked like a long string of big bales of cotton.” In Nebraska, Valentine and North Platte dropped to thirty-five degrees below zero. Wind chills hovered at forty below. Men driving work teams could not see their horses. Snowdrifts buried the roads and the woods. The landscape turned crystal blue.

  At four in the afternoon, the schools’ closing time, hundreds of students and their teachers stayed shivering in their rooms, confused and uncertain. Some tried to make it for home but disappeared. Others turned back to the schoolhouses. But the doors splintered, the window glass shattered, and the roofs blew off.

  Lois Royce, a young teacher in Plainview, Nebraska, had sent six students home earlier in the day, around noon. That left three others, one six-year-old and two nine-year-olds. They huddled in the schoolroom and soon ran low on dry wood to keep warm. Miss Royce led the children toward her boardinghouse at a farm about two hundred yards away. They became hopelessly lost. Bt dawn, after cuddling next to their teacher for any breath of warm air, the students were dead. The teacher’s feet and hands were frozen. Yet she dug and clawed her way another quarter of a mile for help. Both her feet were amputated, and part of a hand.

  What forever would be remembered as the “Children’s Blizzard” claimed hundreds of lives. It took weeks, sometimes months, for the snow and the ice to melt and the earth to reveal another frozen body. Many of the little figures were discovered facedown. Many were never found at all.

  The Old West could be cold and crude, uncooperative and ugly. The Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson said Nebraska “seemed miles in length … a world almost alone without feature; an empty sky, an empty earth.”

  Settlers often were alone in those far Western reaches.

  April 19, 1877: “Maybe you think I am lonesome living all by myself on the prairie,” wrote Howard Ruede, a young Pennsylvania German who ventured to Kansas and mailed passels of letters home, hoping to encourage his family to join him. “Today the wind is north, but not very cold. Such a day as this I wish for a paper from home, if not a letter.… It takes a whole week for a letter to come out here.… Last night I dreamed I was at home with you, but woke up to find that my overcoat had slipped off of me. It was pretty cold, too. Families coming out here should bring no luggage but clothes and bedding and a clock.”

  November 14, 1885: George Washington Franklin jotted in his diary, “Made and hung door.… Grouse came in house I shut door & picked it up alive in the dark, killed dressed & salted it for morning.” Franklin slapped together a sod house, two sod barns, a livestock pen, and an orchard in Perkins County, Nebraska. Over the long years of roughing it alone, even after modern times had caught up with the West, he never owned a telephone, installed running water, or put in a bathtub.

  September 15, 1891: “I never saw so many rats,” Emma Robertson of North Bend, Nebraska, wrote to her Aunt Belle back in Iowa. “After a rain, the rat tracks are as thick as pig tracks in the hog yard. They took all the sweet corn and are working on the field corn.” Seventy-six rats were hunted down by dogs and killed one evening; another night twenty-one were caught in a single trap. “When they raised the barn,” she wrote Aunt Belle, “you ought to have seen them run.”

  The East Coast marveled at what the West was struggling against. “They are all provided with ponies,” Frank H. Spearman wrote in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine after a swing out west in 1888. “They think nothing of a horseback ride of 15 or 20 miles, either for business or pleasure.”

  For those who stayed and dug in, life would “prove up.” At the time of the great blizzard of 1888, nearly all of the free land in the Great Plains had been claimed and settled. Farms were spreading along the river runs, pushing against the Continental Divide, spilling onto the California back slopes. In the small towns, church steeples lifted up and saloon doors swung open. After the winter snows, the summer locusts, and the long droughts, telegraph wires and telephone lines that had been knocked down or eaten in half were restrung. Train cars toppled by heavy snows were righted. Spring would come. They would plant again.

  Frank Grady was born to settlers from Wisconsin. He could look back at the long arc of his life and recall how his parents “got this place” in tiny Raymond, Nebraska, in 1883, ten years before the Great Cowboy Race. “And here I have been ever since, except for a short period or two when I got wind in my whiskers and had to travel about a bit and see other places,” he reflected in a 1941 oral history, when he was sixty-five years old. “But I always came back to Nebraska, a darn good place to come back to, yes sirree!”

  Grady could still hear the thin railroad whistle and see the strong men relocating the post office in Raymond. He recalled how the wholesalers in Lincoln shipped in beans, salt, and crackers. He remembered all of his teachers: Mi
ss Stetson, “who used to knock the dickens out of me,” and Bessie Jolley, Bertie Woods, and Edith Bowman, “pretty nice women, I’d say.” He followed the farmers around on market day and the shop owners too, especially J. W. Kerns, a lumber dealer and politician from Auburn, Nebraska, who fascinated all the boys. “He used to pull up the window and spit a gob of tobacco juice clean down to Main Street.”

  Grady had known a country “still mainly governed by the hard law of nature, and they say nature in the raw is never mild. The country was pretty wild, but freedom was everywhere. Nebraska was born in freedom and here was reaped a full harvest of liberty.”

  With freedom comes change, and by 1893, the year of the racing cowboys, the Old West was dying out. Frank Grady accepted that. Most Westerners did. The search for change was why they had trudged out here and had endured such hardships to seed a new life in an old wilderness, one where little German immigrant girls no longer got lost in the beauty of the western Sand Hills. “The world has to grow,” Grady said. “It cannot stand still.”

  The Vanishing Cowboy West

  3

  In the old days, the Elkhorn Valley Hotel anchored the corner of Third and Main streets in Norfolk, Nebraska. The square-shaped building became a landmark, spacious enough to also accommodate the county courthouse, a schoolroom, a dry-goods counter, and a theater. A literary society held readings upstairs, next to the overflow guest suites.

  Cora Beels’s father opened the hotel in 1875. She had come out west with her parents after they lost everything in a fire in Indiana. With each turn of the wagon wheels westward, her mother’s spirits had sunk, but her father was itching to start anew. He was a preacher; he felt the call to save souls. They stopped in Norfolk in northeastern Nebraska, and a year later he purchased the hotel for extra income. “The town was a tiny hamlet, clustered around a well,” recalled Beels, who became a schoolteacher and never left.

  The Beels family soon became acquainted with “Relax” Hale, his gang of cowboys, and their weekly Saturday night romps into town. “They would ride their horses at breakneck speed up and down Main Street with revolvers in each hand, shooting rapidly from side to side,” Cora remembered. All business in Norfolk would shudder to a stop. Doors swung closed, curtains lowered, lamps dimmed.

  A clerk named Morris Meyer ran the dry-goods store in the downstairs of the hotel. Upstairs, Hale and his cowboys took over the extra guest rooms. “Mr. Meyer was deathly afraid of them,” Cora said. “They took particular delight in shooting through the floor into his store while he would frantically pile bolts of goods on the counter for a barricade and hide himself under the counter. Another amusement they enjoyed was to shoot at their beds ’til they set them on fire, and then throw them into the street and watch them burn. The upper floors of that old building were pitted with shots from their guns.”

  The sound of the name Relax Hale tore like prairie lightning through any town trying to keep the peace in the middle of open country. Just as treacherous were the cowboy desperadoes nicknamed “Lazy Dick,” “Itchy Jake,” “Six Shooter Bob,” and “Windy Jack.”

  As far back as 1879, cowboys were “shooting off firearms indiscriminately on our streets,” reported the Oakdale (NE) Pen and Plow. “During the past winter the report of guns and revolvers and the whizzing of bullets sent on foolish errands became so common in the town that no one thought of protesting against it.” In some burgs, residents wielded wooden sticks to fight back. In Winfield, Kansas, townspeople stormed a bar over a “misunderstanding” between the brewer and a cowboy customer. For a while in Chanute, Kansas, thirteen saloons clogged the small business strip, and the gamblers’ cry of “Keno!” jolted people awake all night. In 1875, a posse of Civil War veterans put a stop to cowboys thundering down the streets of Kearney, Nebraska, and shooting up local businesses by cornering the ruffians in a guard shack. The posse escorted them back to town for trial for shooting one of the veterans. That, they said, was the “last cowboy raid of Kearney.”

  Between 1875 and 1885, Dodge City, Kansas, reigned as the hot-gun “Cowboy Capital of the World.” Exhausted city fathers finally imposed a law against any more Texas cattle snorting up their city streets, the herds bringing not only a halo of range flies, but also the roar of Colt revolvers shattering whiskey bottles.

  In 1885 in Kansas City, Missouri, a cowboy named Fred Horne, tall and built, was hauled into criminal court for opening fire on the fairgrounds and wounding one poor man in the face. In the courtroom, he stood up and slowly fingered his gun belt. “Yer honor,” he said, “I don’t want any row in court, but I …” The judge dived under his desk, and spectators fled for the exits. “There! There!” pleaded the court clerk. “Please don’t talk that way.” Horne walked out of court a free man.

  “Curly Bill” Brocius, when riled up, could shoot the stoppers off liquor decanters from twenty paces without cracking the glass. Even when drinking, he could steady his trigger finger and knock the hats off nervous freighters and drummers hustling through town. “He was a hero of his kind, and boasted of his own private graveyard,” Ben C. Truman wrote for the Overland Monthly magazine in an essay titled “The Passing of the Cowboy.” No one knew where Curly really hailed from, though some said he almost had gotten himself hung down in Silver City, New Mexico. Six states and territories had placed a price on his head, and whenever he was reported dead he reappeared again, sometimes for another seven or eight years. He may or may not have been killed by Wyatt Earp in a shootout at Iron Springs, Arizona.

  “Russian Bill” Tattenbaum claimed to be an heir to an Old World nobleman. He sported a notched pistol and, according to Truman, “led a reckless, dissipated life and once, while practicing at a soldier’s bootheel, shot the latter in the leg.” One night he stormed into tiny Shakespeare, New Mexico, and announced, “I have just buried my twentieth man.” A vigilante committee hung Russian Bill that same night. “He begged and cried for mercy,” wrote Truman, “and died like a coward.”

  Sandy King rode west out of Erie, New York. Along the way his reputation grew with one murder after another, five in all. When his time came to climb the thirteen steps, a cord of rope fastened around his neck, the gunslinger boldly called for a shot of whiskey; then he spoke his last words. “I might reform, my friends, but possibly not. You had better stretch me up as the best thing to do.” He paused and asked for a chaser. “Now, boys, I’m ready,” said Sandy. “The devil wants us all, and I’d better lead the way. My mother is up in heaven. Of course, I shall never see her. But I will see you all again. Pull away!”

  David Love, the young son of a Scottish sheepherder on Wyoming’s Sweetwater River, would tell how a cowboy turned up at the family ranch with his finger all but torn off from being wrenched by roping. Love’s mother, a Wellesley graduate who had chosen the beauty of the Cowboy State over city life, boiled water, sterilized scissors, and snipped off the tendons. She let the dead finger fall sizzling into the hot coals of a fire box, then sewed a flap of skin over the stump. Giving the cowboy a sweet smile, she said, “In a month, you’ll never know the difference.” The cowboy saddled up, and little David watched him drift off over the far ridge, wearing, like many he had seen, one of the “eight-inch-wide heavy belts to keep their kidneys in place during prolonged hard rides.”

  Charles M. Russell, the Montana artist who depicted Old West scenes and landscapes on canvas and cowboys on horseback in bronze sculptures, liked to quote a brief exchange from his childhood:

  “Ma, do cowboys eat grass?”

  “No, dear. They’re part human.”

  Long days of driving cattle, exhausted nights under the stars, hats stained in sweat, dirt coating the neck—all were enough to land cowboys on a city’s streets for a weekend tear. When they galloped through town shouting and shooting, they could be just as frightening as a band of outlaws. In truth, though, the cowboy’s lot was mostly hard work, long hours, and lonely outposts far from human contact.

  Nebraska native Charley O’Kieffe wa
s farming around the time of the 1893 Great Cowboy Race, much of it on Sheridan County acreage in the Panhandle, and he had lived through his share of trail-bitten cowboys. At the age of seventy-seven and retired in Minneapolis, he set down his reminiscences with a preliminary note to the reader: “You will find little of romance, no heroes either real or made up, no hired gun-slingers, no hell-raisin’ but safe cowpunchers.” In his Western Story autobiography, he wrote that “among the scores of cowpunchers that I knew personally between 1884 and 1898, none were crack shots although they all could shoot straight enough when the need arose, such as for the purpose of chasing off some sneaky coyote or ending the sufferings of a horse who had broken his leg and could not be saved. And of course a rattlesnake was always an inviting target. Most of these boys were good horsemen, handy with the rope for legitimate uses, and all capable of doing the daily tasks on the average ranch. None were even fair singers, most of them not even able to carry a tune.”

  Up on the film screen, the cowboy figure was steeped in whiskey, blood, and murder. But to those who rode with him in the waning years of the West, there was something nostalgic in the saddle-sore, dust-grimed, bowlegged cowman. Though increasingly rare, he alone, one journalist wrote, “dwelt under his tent—the sky,” where “the cowboy is a good natured, rollicking, whole-souled fellow, quick to do a kindness and as quick to resent an insult. In all his glory, he was king of the West, clad in his green shirt, red handkerchief, wide-brimmed sombrero, and arsenal of weapons, his chaps, spurs, saddle and gloves.”