American Endurance

by Richard A. Serrano

  The O’Linns scooped a small shack out of the sod and hillside near the old trading junction and the White River. The walls were shorn up with log rafters, brush, and caked dirt. There they stayed until Fannie could “prove up” her claim, and there her son Egbert was killed when a gun misfired as he was scaring range cattle away from the family’s haystacks.

  The small O’Linn settlement gradually mushroomed: a post office run by Fannie, a few stores selling dry goods and air-tight canned goods, a stock pen, a saloon or two, a compact jail, and a small courtroom for a circuit-riding judge appeared. Then came the railroad. But the tracks swung wide of O’Linn’s little spot, and the railway announced plans for a new depot out in the country. So Fannie and her few neighbors picked up and moved to the new train station. Pioneers remembered the sight of people tearing down their homes and loading buckboards and wagons, with horses and mules carting everything they owned—chairs, dishes, blankets, bathtubs—to create what became Chadron around that new depot.

  “The road over the prairie and hill was a continuous procession of houses, stocks of merchandise, household goods and people,” recalled E. E. Egan, who launched the settlement’s first newspaper. “Many merchants left their goods on the shelves, moving the store complete. Ben Lowenthal completed the picture by keeping his store open for business while it was being trundled over the prairie.” The evening before they all up and moved, some of the settlers gathered on the crest of a nearby hill for one long last look at the sod they had broken, the homes they had built, the lives they had planned. At sunset, remembered Egan, they raised a toast. “We bade her an affectionate farewell and then turned our faces to the future.”

  Less than a month earlier, the only occupant of the new Chadron town site had been a coyote. But within another month, Chadron covered almost six blocks. Mechanics, brick masons, and carpenters streamed in. Blacksmith shops, brick kilns, and wooden structures went up, some of the timber being hauled in from the Black Hills and beyond. That first year in Chadron, eight saloons swung open their doors. Another newspaper cranked up a printing press, and then another.

  Fannie O’Linn reigned as the town’s queen mother. Reading law books eventually won her a legal license and entrée into the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court, her sponsor being the Nebraska populist William Jennings Bryan. She not only hung out her law shingle; she also verified legal documents as a notary public, sold insurance and real estate, filed abstracts, and wrote loans. She attended births, consecrated marriages, and prayed at funerals. And she dealt with her own adversity. A second son, Hugh, was killed when he toppled off a train chugging east of St. Louis. Her son-in-law, Clarence Smith, was struck by a passing train.

  While Fannie covered Chadron in her flat shoes and low heels, the cowboy known as “Billy the Bear” turned up in town with no feet at all. And yet his tough times, hard luck, and the snowdrifts that had buried him in the cold failed to keep him down. Billy would always lift himself up again.

  Born Louis John Frederick Iaeger in Philadelphia, he was, he told friends, connected to royalty. His great-grandfather had served as the spiritual advisor to King Frederick the Great, the patron of the Prussian Enlightenment, or so maintained Iaeger family history. His father had built horse carriages in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, and after his parents died of injuries from an accident, young Billy was sent to an uncle in Arizona. But Billy longed for the open sea, and at eighteen he shipped off as a navigator aboard a grain tanker called the St. John, sailing the lanes between San Francisco and Liverpool, England, a borrowed copy of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad tucked under his arm.

  In Europe, he tramped around Paris and Milan but missed his homeland. So he sailed one last time, returning to the United States, and in San Francisco he worked as a proofreader for a series of volumes on Western America. He also interviewed pioneers and immigrants about their hardships in planting a new life on the frontier. In 1877, he joined an acting troupe. There he met his destiny.

  “In the San Francisco grand opera house,” he recalled, “I was cast in a fairy play called ‘Snowflake.’ I was a wicked bear and was supposed to drop dead at the touch of Cupid’s wand. I fell directly under the heavy steel drop which started to descend on me. Simulating the dying spasms of a bear, as I imagined them, I worked myself to safety just in time to escape. My death quivers and agonies, combined with the situation, brought down the house.”

  It also brought Buffalo Bill Cody to his feet. He happened to be in the audience that evening, and when a shout rose up asking who in the world was playing the overly dramatic animal, Cody exclaimed, “Why, that’s Billy the Bear!”

  The name stuck, and so did their friendship. Billy moved out to North Platte, Nebraska, as Cody’s private secretary at Scout’s Rest. During an 1879 Cheyenne uprising on the Snake River, when ranches were burned and cattlemen scalped, he helped lead the settlers’ resistance. In the early 1880s, he watered cattle along the Niobrara River. He bought the Sugar Creek Ranch in the Sand Hills. He took title to 1,500 horses in Texas and sold them in Kansas. He sunk thousands of dollars into an Idaho silver mine that dug up empty. He managed a ranch near Rock Creek, Wyoming, for investors planning to ship beef on the hoof back east. Then he met his destiny again.

  Rushing on horseback to catch a train for Omaha, Billy became stranded in a sudden winter storm on January 31, 1883. For the next four days, the blizzard bore down on him. He abandoned his horse but could not find his own way out. To keep warm, he set fire to some fence logs, but they burned through. He huddled in the drifts as the wind howled, the snow mounted, and the white ice crinkled. Certain he would freeze to death, on the third day he wrapped his frost-bitten fingers around a lump of charcoal and in agony scratched out a farewell note to a friend. He expected it would be his epitaph.

  “I got lost after I left the hills,” Billy wrote. “It blew fearful. Oh, why did I go? I burned up Rufe’s corral. Think this is Sheep creek. As soon as it clears up I am going to try again. Send my body to my sister, Mrs. J. J. Vandersloot, York county, Pennsylvania. Good-bye, old boy, and may God take my soul. Sell my horses to Henry.”

  Yet he did not quit. He plunged his frozen feet into snow piles well past his leather belt. On the fourth day, he spied a flickering lamp from a far-off cabin. Rising up out of the snow, he stretched his black and purple fingers around his six-shooter and managed a shot. The bullet shattered a window. Billy collapsed, but he was rescued.

  Doctors amputated both of his legs below the knee. They took all of his fingers; the blizzard spared only his two thumbs. Released from a hospital, he was fitted with prosthetic limbs. He learned to crawl and then hobble, to stand erect and then balance himself. He practiced how to eat with a spoon and write with a pen. For a while he kept the books for Buffalo Bill once more, and Cody sometimes donated the funds for Billy’s “artificials” from a manufacturer in St. Louis. Other times Billy took the train from “cow country” down to Omaha and rode back with a new pair of feet and two good hands.

  But he never shed himself of the cold and the snow, never fully shook the chill, and in his diary notations he repeatedly reminded himself of what he had suffered through alone on the Wyoming tundra. “As anticipated last night the Storm is here in great Shape and ‘King Blizzard’ is at present in all his glory,” he wrote in November 1886, almost three years after his own whiteout. “Like the old Soldier ‘it reminds of me of old times.’ Oh that I may never again see or feel those agonies I suffered when freezing on the Laramie Plains.”

  By then Billy had moved to Chadron, determined to reinvent himself once more. He started his diary on his first day in town in October 1885, plunging headlong into crowded saloons and bustling brothels. He recorded the tragedies of mothers dying in childbirth and children drowning in a creek bed, the occasional cowboy outbursts, and the dwindling Indian presence on the reservation badlands. What he particularly enjoyed writing about was the thrill of the impromptu horse races up and down the city streets as cowboys whipped and hollered and
flashed past him like polished steel. Billy could no longer ride like that.

  The future and the past: Billy “the Bear” Iaeger, a retired cowboy turned city slicker, and the deposed Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud pose in the middle row of a group at Chadron, Nebraska, a new town displacing the old Sioux lands. (Dawes County Historical Museum)

  Chadron residents were deep into racing, so much so that in 1886 they pushed horses around an oblong dirt track until the winner ran a hundred miles. Ten cowboys lurched off at sunrise, and before the race was half done, one horse slammed to a dead stop, dripping blood from its sides. Another somersaulted end over end. A third staggered, groaned, fell to its knees, and perished. Only three mangy mustangs limped on. First prize went to the mayor of Chadron, whose cow pony Old Baldy crossed the finish line “just able to walk in.”

  In five years, Billy closed out his diary. By then Chadron had been blessed with its new courthouse and the Blaine Hotel, a school building and an Episcopal church, a baseball diamond, electric lights, and a skating rink. Billy blossomed as well, rising to elder in the Elks lodge, staying active in the Fraternal Order of Eagles, and becoming treasurer of the Old Time Cowboys Association. He also served as a police judge and a justice of the peace. A “Democrat to the core,” as he liked to boast, he repeatedly was elected city clerk, county court clerk, deputy federal court clerk, and a member of the Great Cowboy Race committee.

  He won the endless devotion of the niece of one of those racing cowboys, the beautiful daughter of the prominent town physician. “Look at this three times a day regularly,” his bride, Temperance, wrote on the back of her photograph when she presented it to him on their wedding day. “That should be sufficient.” He did, and it was. For a long lifetime, they remained husband and wife, the parents of two fine-looking sons.

  “As far back as I can remember,” recalled one Chadron neighbor, Billy the Bear “had a two-wheeled cariole [wagon] that he could manipulate with his hands. It ran on the sidewalk and went quite fast. Later he was presented with a small electric carriage that putt-putted through the streets.… [He was] a wonderful little man, with a strong determination not to be a cripple.… He set himself above his infirmities.”

  Billy would glide about on his morning rounds on his cart wearing a bowler hat, a scarf or bow tie tight against his neck, a natty mustache, and sometimes a small cane under his arm. When he felt stronger, he walked upright on his two metal feet, slow but moving, the clank, clank, clank of his artificials proclaiming his steps. Later he learned to roller skate.

  Billy stayed put in tiny Chadron for forty-five years. When he died there in 1930 after a series of strokes at age seventy-four, the downtown stores closed their doors for two hours on a busy Monday afternoon. At his funeral, the preacher opened his Bible to find that Billy had penciled in the exact passages he wanted read. “Read first 13 verses 51st Psalm,” Billy had instructed. Verse 7 struck home: “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean, / Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”

  So much had changed since Billy the Bear had first hit town so long ago. “Chadron Neb Oct 14th 1885,” began his first diary entry. “Arrived here and found every thing in a whirl … excitement … plenty of Cow-Boys in town and lots of gambling going.… John Keys, Allen, Harvey … are running the gambling in the Gold Bar Saloon which has just opened up and Shows Signs of doing a big business.”

  “Oct 18th. Billy Carter and Tom Christan gave me the Hazzard Table in Carters Saloon, and I drew a good play from the Start.”

  He wrote about shady characters and the lure of alcohol and drugs: “J. W. O’Brien, O. S. Sloggy, Geo Minnick, headed by Geo Spaulding are again on a drunk in Carters.… After Supper, Mrs McNutt came around and as usual Succeeded in Stirring up a fuss.… Fannie Powers is all broke up about her dear Baby Jack being in jail and amuses herself by carrying ice cream, whiskey, opium and morphine to him.”

  Billy reported on the gunfire and sputtering exploits of the last wild cowboys, lit with enough liquor to bust up the new town. “Broken nosed Curley came back to Chadron from Douglas & the West, also little smitty and Vince. Nearly all the old Gang are back and things are commencing to loom up natural again.”

  His heart sped with the sudden cowboy races that erupted around town: “Just then a horse race sprung up and I let everything rest and attended to that, which took up the rema[i]nder of the day, and made Suckers out of all the Gang.”

  In one of his last entries, he described how far his adopted hometown had come since the West was wild, and how gentle the new life could be: “Sept. 1. Nice clear day in the morning but towards noon it commenced to blow and get dusty.” That late summer afternoon he trotted a pony out to a friend’s house for dinner; he visited other acquaintances as well. “We had 2 bottles of soda water. I spent a very pleasant day with Mr Sayrs and had a long and interesting chat with Mr De Lambert about the early days of Cow Punching and about how I got froze on the Laramie Plains.”

  In his very last diary entry, on January 21, 1890, he left just three words, ominous and forewarning, but hinting in their simplicity that he no longer feared the worst, for he had already endured it. “Stormy and snowing,” he wrote.

  John Maher followed a different trail. A former schoolteacher, in Chadron he served as a town leader and government land office director, as a court reporter and stenographer. He also moonlighted as a Western correspondent and flourished as a freelance stringer for James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s New York Herald. It was through that connection, as one of the first reporters to reach Wounded Knee, that he first witnessed the might of the U.S. Army.

  “It was a war of extermination,” he reported. “It was difficult to restrain the troops. Tactics were almost abandoned. About the only tactic was to kill while it could be done, wherever an Indian could be seen. Down into the creek and up over the bare hills they were followed by artillery and musketry fire, and for several minutes the engagement went on until not a live Indian was in sight.”

  Left to right: Billy “the Bear” Iaeger, Chief Red Cloud, and John Maher. (Dawes County Historical Museum)

  Like Fannie O’Linn, Maher eventually earned a law degree. Unlike Billy the Bear, he left Chadron to explore other places. In Army uniform, he served during hostilities on the U.S.–Mexico border and in France during the First World War. Promoted to lieutenant colonel and chief disbursing officer, he oversaw finances for the Allied Expeditionary Force. From his Élysée Palace office in Paris, he handled the payout of some $500 million in war expenses.

  He founded and served as first president of the Old Line Insurance Company, helped organize the American Legion, and headed up the Nebraska Progressive League. The son of a homesteader in Platte County, Nebraska, and a product of pioneer schools, Maher lived his last years abroad, touring the capitals of the world. He died an old man in Rome, stricken with heart failure, and he was buried in Arlington Cemetery, just across the river from Washington.

  But little of that is why John Gillespie Maher is best remembered today.

  Tall and ramrod straight, with a thick mustache and thinning hair, he often displayed a sardonic sneer. In his early years in Chadron, he was above all a hoaxer, a prankster, a teller of tall tales. The Eastern press thirsted for stories of the Indian warrior lurking over the next ridge, the daring cowboy riding the Plains, the rattlesnake coiled under a rock. Maher delivered. But many of the “news” items he sent zapping across the telegraph wires popped out of his own vivid imagination. In Chadron and around the Panhandle region, he was known to all as “the Paralyzer of the Truth.”

  “The Eastern newspapers were simply crying for Wild West news,” Maher recalled many years later. “No tale was too preposterous, no supposition too ridiculous to be included in the columns of a New York newspaper provided the article carried a Western headline. At that time Chadron was a truly frontier town, made up of tent houses, gambling shacks and saloons. Nothing of national interest ever happened there. In fact, nothing ever happened, only a few cowboy f
ights. Nevertheless the East, enraptured with Buffalo Bill and his escapades and amazed at the discoveries of mammoth fossils in the Badlands, wanted news—and I needed money. So I sent them what they wanted.”

  After the Great Cowboy Race, Maher traveled to Chicago to cover the World’s Columbian Exposition. In a column for the Chadron Signal titled “Farmer John at the Fair,” he wrote that he had confessed to the Ferris wheel manager, “Occasionally I lied for the newspapers.”

  With his newspaper credentials, Maher and his hoaxes almost always were believed, at least initially. He wrote about a petrified man, complete with one foot sticking out of the dirt, discovered by fossil diggers in 1892 in the badlands north of Chadron. The mummified remains were paraded around the Midwest and for a while stored in a vault in Champaign, Illinois. Plans were drawn up to display them at the World’s Columbian Exposition. The Dawes County Journal proclaimed the ancient cadaver a puzzle of anthropology: “The face resembles that of a Negro. But his shapely heels indicate Caucasian blood.… The medical fraternity and all others who have seen the specimen laugh at the idea that it is not genuine. It is undoubtedly the most perfect specimen of the kind ever discovered and is worth many thousands of dollars.” Another newspaper testified that “even the toenails, teeth, eyebrows and pores of the skin are as natural as life.”

  In truth, Maher and friends had fashioned a sand-and-dirt cast from a soldier at nearby Fort Robinson and passed it off as a precious relic. Nevertheless, Maher said later, admitting the ruse with a chuckle, “that story provided me with columns for weeks.”

  When Chadron residents started heading to South Dakota and Wyoming in search of mineral wells and healthier water, Maher announced a new “soda springs” at the bottom of a Chadron well. He prepared news releases and reported that some invalids, after just one sip and a shout of hallelujah, “threw away their crutches.” In truth, Maher had simply sunk some sacks of soda water into that old well bottom. There was no miracle cure.