“This,” said Cody, introducing the members of his new cast, “is Rocky Bear, being a very honest Indian. He stands well with his tribe as well as the whites.… This is No Neck, who became famous as a scout while General Crook was conducting the Sioux campaign of 1876.”
Rain-in-the-Face, a Lakota war chief who had helped surround and slay Custer, hobbled forward on crutches. Nearly sixty, he startled easily at the blast of trolley horns. For a while he crouched on the ground in the back, away from the city noises. He would headline the Wild West show, and he would visit the fair. But not, he said, rolling a cigarette to calm his nerves, “until my eyes are rested and I do not see so big.”
Cody (or Pahaska, for “Long Hair,” as the Lakotas called him) turned many of the Sioux loose upon the Chicago streets to promote ticket sales once the Wild West extravaganza was under way. They snacked on buttered popcorn and Cracker Jack, sipped soda water, and chewed gum. In uncomfortable suits and ties, some twirled walking canes and adorned their buttonholes with fresh flowers.
Chief Standing Bear rode to the top of the Ferris wheel, his two hundred eagle feathers floating in the high breeze. Others strolled along the beach at Lake Michigan, marveling at the vast body of water and the endless tide, paddling boats, and climbing atop the rainbow-colored ponies on the carnival merry-go-round. Around and around they whirled, the steam organ grinding out the Irish waltz “Maggie Murphy’s Home,” with its lyrics about “kisses on the sly.” Chief No Neck held on tight, singing, “Yip, yip, yi, yi, yip!” Downtown, some rode office elevators, at first wide-eyed and frightened, hugging the sides.
The fair was set to open on May 1; Cody would beat it by a week. His glossy color programs already were printed, along with a sixty-four-page booklet filled with lithographs and articles touting Cody as the savior of the frontier. The booklet noted that the Old West was “a class that is rapidly disappearing from our country.” Now this new 1893 season in Chicago would enshrine that past, the booklets pledged, and simplify “the work of the historian, the romancer, the painter, and the student of the future.” And more: “America is making history faster than any other country in the world. Her pioneers are fast passing away. A few years more and the great struggle for possession will be ended, and generations will settle down to enjoy the homes their fathers located and fenced in for them.”
Cody’s green wooden gates swung open on April 26, 1893. From that first two-hour performance, the Wild West would run for six months, with two shows a day, a matinee and an evening gala. It would pull in upward of six million fans. Profits peaked from $700,000 to $1 million. By the time it ended in late October, it had forever transformed Cody from a one-time Army scout in a dwindling American West into the greatest showman of a modern world.
That first performance was staged at three in the afternoon. Guest invitations pictured Cody leaning on his rifle and decked out in his fat sombrero, high black boots, tan frayed coat, and yellow scarf. The show boasted a new name, too, long and wordy but full of Western self-righteousness: “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” Admission was fifty cents, a quarter for children under ten.
First came an overture and a grand procession of cowboys. The announcer would indulge the crowd. “In the East,” he would say, “the few who excel are known to all. In the far West, the names we offer to you are the synonyms of skill, courage, and individual excellence.”
A crew of cowboy rough riders relaxes between twice-a-day performances during Buffalo Bill’s signature season next to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. (Nebraska State Historical Society)
Fans would thrill, said the ads, to “450 People in the Saddle: Indians, Cowboys, Mexican Rurales, Spanish Gauchos, Vaqueros, Detachments of Cavalry, Soldiers of All Nations in International Drill. A Monster Musical.” Herds of buffalo, wild steers, and bucking bronchos would roam the show floor in what everyone voted “a world beater.”
“More than historic,” proclaimed the Wild West posters plastered about Chicago and full of drawings of Cody leading a charge against Indian warriors, Cody heading up lines of military dragoons, Cody lowering his hat to the roar of applause. “It is history itself in living lessons, not the imitations of fancy, but the stupendous realism of facts. If any seek to imitate it, they defraud it. If any claim to rival it, they falsify it. If any copy its announcements, it is forgery.”
Cody would proclaim, “Wild West, are you ready?” and the great show would launch to thunderous applause. Rain or shine, it did not matter; the new grandstands were full, breathless, and covered.
And it did rain. On the first day, the skies opened and torrents poured down on Cody and his show. Lightning flashed over the lakefront. The floor grimed to puddles and then to muck. Through a side door, the performers marched anyway; nothing could stop Cody now.
From the first the show sparked a series of rave reviews. “A sturdy young man clad in the uniform of the United States army stepped from one of the entrances,” reported the Chicago Record. “In his hand was a bugle. He raised the instrument to his lips and sent the stirring notes of assembly around and through the camp.”
Miss Annie Oakley, America’s “Little Miss Sure Shot,” a single star pinned on her upturned hat, blasted glass balls out of the air and sent them splattering into mud holes. Cody fired at clay pigeons, splintering them into clay chips. “A howling success,” concluded the Chicago Times.
Riders chased each other around the ring, every man for himself, every race for blood. “Full of stirring action,” noted the Chicago Inter Ocean.
Buffalo were lassoed, the stage was robbed, a settler’s cabin was ambushed. “The merry crack of the rifle,” exulted the Chicago Post. “The yell of the cowboy.”
Sioux braves beat on drums, shook spears, shrieked, and lunged. “Everything was wild,” enthused the Chicago Dispatch. “There was nothing tame about it.”
The highest drama was reserved for Cody himself. Astride a powerful chestnut horse, he bolted across the mud-floor arena, wearing a long Astrakhan fur–trimmed overcoat and a big slouch hat. The rain by now was a deluge, but Cody galloped into the teeth of the storm. He reined up close to the grandstand rail. He doffed his big sombrero. He shook back his dripping gray locks, lifted his face, and shouted up to the wet heavens.
Whatever he said, it was lost to the slap of rain and the clap of thunder. Scarcely a word was heard. But those thousands in the stands and the hundreds more left stranded outside without a show ticket, men and boys leaning their ears between the board pickets, their eyes peering through the knot holes—all of them understood. They could not hear, but they got the message. The Old West was alive again. They cheered madly.
A Cowboy Race
5
Reporter Amy Leslie found Buffalo Bill sitting in the shade. All season long, the Chicago Daily News correspondent had been touring the World’s Columbian Exposition and writing of its elegance and grace, its brilliant Midway Plaisance, and its overwhelming exhibits. This warm afternoon in June 1893, she turned her pen to William Cody.
Following a brick walk lined with garden flowers, she approached his ivy-thatched cottage “in the shadiest corner” of his Wild West campground. Ducking through a door flap, she stepped across a woven Indian rug. The walls were covered with what she described as “rude pictures” of Western scenes. Cody, relaxing between shows, spoke to her not as much about his Wild West cast or his European conquests as he did about a cowboy race.
It was some years ago, he said, when he had raced in what was called a “Nebraska derby.” A Mexican caballero pitted his steed against what Cody boasted was “the fastest horse on my ranch.” Cody knew he could beat the Mexican. He had been eyeing his rival’s horse for a day or two, tethered to a cluster of old adobe ruins and grazing listlessly.
“But the race day,” Leslie wrote in her story, “the horse appeared in pattern trim, surmounted with a dapper little jockey the like of which North Platte had never seen. Cody had all h
is money on his own horse and a glimpse of the opponent showed him that he had been watching the wrong horse.”
Cody believed he could win anyway, and he saddled up. The competitors steered their horses together and at the drop of a flag sped off. After about half the distance, Cody fell well behind and squinted at the jockey’s chipper colors in the lead. The jockey glanced back at Cody. “How much of this do you want?” he taunted. Buffalo Bill pulled on his reins. “I guess this is far enough,” he said.
About a thousand miles west of Chicago and Cody’s cottage, the small community of Chadron, Nebraska, was not even ten years old that summer of 1893. But its founders and its town leaders were big-idea people, and they nurtured high hopes out on the Nebraska Panhandle, tucked in next to the badlands, Pine Ridge, and Wounded Knee. Their aim that year was to create their own showpiece in the West and thereby boost their former fur-trading post. They hoped to see the town rise up over the silent prairie and attract more homesteaders, draw in more banks and investments, and expand their business district along Second Street. One day, maybe, they could even challenge a thriving metropolis such as Chicago itself.
Their plan to accomplish all this was built on a cowboy race.
The settlement began as a creek-side trading post and within a decade had expanded into a frontier boom town. “These people,” remembered H. D. Mead, an area rancher and town engineer, “endowed with the indomitable pluck and energy which never fail to succeed, suffered hardships and adversities, but always overcame them. There was scarcely a day in the years gone by but which presented difficulties before which a weaker people would have turned in despair. But over and through it all, they pressed onward.”
Nebraska’s Panhandle faded brown in winter, dripped wet in spring, and turned lush and green each summer. Red Cloud and his tribal Sioux once hunted its endless flatlands, the high buttes and snaky-tail canyons. The spectral Black Hills peaked just to the north. But after white families began arriving in covered wagons and by rail, horseback, and buckboard, all that changed. The old Pete Nelson ranch house on Bordeaux Creek was one of the first signposts for wagon trains and settlers looping into the White River Valley in the early 1880s. Next were the white tops of a tent city for the newest arrivals, then Chadron itself. In ten years’ time, the town of Chadron was growing rapidly, and the Dawes County countryside had thickened with wheat, oats, corn, and sugar beets. W. W. Wilson farmed 640 acres, “all nicely fenced,” he said. By 1892, after just six years on his tract, he estimated “the place was worth five times what it cost me.”
The Dawes County Courthouse was dedicated in 1889. Thirty thousand dollars in lumber, brick, and labor were poured into it, and the building anchored Chadron as a place of reckoning on the once lawless High Plains. The courthouse was, reported the Bee newspaper in Omaha, “large and well built, and far superior to that of many of the more wealthy counties of the state.” At the opening ceremony lawyers, judges, and local dignitaries lifted champagne bottles and clinked glasses, relieved that hired guns and cowboy vigilantes at last had been ridden out of their small patch of the prairie. No longer would they tolerate renegades storming through Chadron shooting chickens.
One of the courthouse’s first customers was Orlan Carty, sentenced to two and a half years of hard labor at the state penitentiary for assault with intent to murder. “I hope that the sentence of this court will bring about a complete reformation,” admonished Judge Moses P. Kinkaid, later a ten-term congressman in Washington whose signature measure expanded the Homestead Act. “You are a young man; you have been tried here by a jury of Dawes County. You had a fair trial. You have been well and ably defended. Nothing more could be done that was possible to do, and there is nothing left for the court but to pass sentence.”
“Oh,” responded Carty, breaking into tears. “How I pity my poor mother.”
There still lingered a few flinty vestiges of the rugged past swirling about the dust and mud of the town’s streets. Chadron’s first saloon, Angel’s Place, was known to be commandeered by as many as a hundred cowboys, most from the Three Crow Ranch, on rowdy weekends. “Not a bottle or glass was left unbroken,” recalled one western Nebraska history. “Every article of furniture was shot to pieces, the stove was perforated, windows broken and the walls and ceilings riddled with bullets.” Finally Angel pinned a star on an armed guard, “a hired man with whiskers that was some gun man himself.” One day one of the cowboys, by the name of Bill Malone, strutted into Angel’s Place and sized up the new guard, peering closely at his long red beard. Malone pulled on the beard. Then he lit up the bar with a few pistol shots right through the guard’s whiskers, sending him fleeing for the next train to Omaha.
Chadron was filled with outsized characters. In the gambling halls, none was more notorious than “Opportunity Hank.” An old frontiersman, he would fix a wild stare on any tinhorn who ventured to shuffle a deck of cards. “I’m a fighting man,” Hank would growl. “Red Jacket,” a gorgeous woman in her early days, survived three husbands (some said she killed them) and finally lived alone, cloistered, cranky, and ill-tempered, in a small shack outside of town, her last companion her Winchester rifle. The sheriff jailed her for shooting a man who trespassed on her claim but let her out when she set her cell on fire. She died in poverty, according to the state history, as “a dope fiend.”
By the time of the Great Cowboy Race, the rutted cattle and trail days were folding up like a worn-out bedroll, and the old cow herders seemed to be relics of a bygone time. That year in Chadron, members of a state convention of physicians were surprised to spot a few “cowboys, horse thieves and bad men” still jangling their spurs and tumbling in and out of bars, including Angel’s Place and the Red Front Saloon, reported the Omaha Daily Bee. The doctors were so charmed they took “Kodak snaps” of outlaw Doc Middleton and a younger fellow nicknamed “Rattlesnake Pete,” though they did not realize he was merely a farmhand from central Kansas. Both would soon race to Chicago.
Meanwhile Chadron had continued to grow. The First National Bank, a wooden structure, was outfitted with fireproof safes and vaults. Pioneer woman Mary E. Smith Hayward ran the M. E. Smith and Company women’s clothing store, “the finest of its kind in northwest Nebraska.” The brick-and-stone $20,000 Nelson Opera House seated 650 and featured weekly entertainments. The Pace Theater doubled as a roller-skating rink. The two-story Union Block building traded in new furniture on the first floor, with a bordello up above.
What most impressed Chadron residents was the Blaine Hotel, framed out in 1888 but not furnished or opened for two more years. The delay was caused by overdue construction loans; some of the money was supplied by the Fremont, Elkhorn, and Missouri Valley Railroad to board its business passengers seeking new sales territory out west. By all accounts, the hotel was a modern-day dandy. Running water and indoor bathrooms were showcased on each of the three floors. Night lamps powered by coal-fired generators lit the hallways, with coal bins lined up on Second Street. Maids bending over “vacuum pumps” spruced up the thirty-eight guest rooms. The Blaine offered a grand banquet hall and ballroom, a billiard parlor, an elegant bar, a barbershop, its own laundry room, and a live-in apartment for the hotel manager. Above the front doorway stretched a second-floor rail balcony; from up there, the pistol shot would be fired to start the cowboy race.
By the time of the race, area newspapers were touting Chadron and Dawes County as a growing center for the coming century, a pioneer settlement that in a few short years had blossomed into a jewel of the New West. Dawes County, according to the Daily Bee, was “one of the best counties in the great commonwealth.” Here for the march of immigrant wagon trains were “water-courses and bluffs, which make the finest of pasture and grazing.” Here was “a large belt of [as] fine wheat land as can be found anywhere.”
The county agricultural society had converted eighty acres outside of Chadron and “nicely fitted it up with fences, buildings, sheds and a first-class half-mile race track.” Farms were selling fo
r as much as $20 an acre as the railroad steamed through the center of the county, bringing cheaper goods, modern farm equipment, and always more settlers.
Indeed, “a wide-awake city is Chadron,” concluded the Daily Bee. The population had soared to 3,500 by June 1893, and the community was “regarded as the best town in northwestern Nebraska.” Plans were under way to build a new college campus, the old one having burned in a fire a few months back.
Before there was a race, before there was even a Chadron, there lived a small, stout widow named Fannie O’Linn. She almost always dressed in drab, dark clothing. Her thick gray hair was wound in a knot and plumped atop her head. She clomped around in flat shoes or low heels, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and sometimes placed a black hat on top of that thick hair. In winter—and the winters were fierce out on the Panhandle—she bundled up in a raglan coat.
Her full name was Frances Maria Brainard O’Linn. Her father had practiced law and presided as a county judge in Iowa. She had married a doctor and borne two boys and a girl before heading west in 1872. The family stopped first in Blair, Nebraska, on the Iowa line. Her husband died in 1880, and four years later Fannie and her children pressed on to Valentine, Nebraska, at that time the end of the railway tracks marching toward the Rockies. From there the family hired a freight schooner and pushed even farther, landing near a creek named after a long-gone French fur trapper.
The trading post had been built forty years earlier; it was run by Louis B. Chartran. He had lost his wife and three children to a series of misfortunes in the 1830s, and in his grief he had moved alone to the frontier. He made friends with the still unpredictable Sioux, swapping liquor, blankets, guns, and ammunition for their tanned buffalo robes. Some early maps placed the negotiating site on “Chartran’s Creek” in honor of that first French trader. Settlers from Missouri took to calling it “Shattron.” The Irish, German, and Norwegian immigrants who followed, struggling with the English language, called it simply “Chadron.”
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