One season he and his chums inflamed fears by reporting that British reprisals were being planned against Irish settlers in Nebraska’s Niobrara River region. Towns such as Valentine and O’Neill were likely to be attacked, they warned, probably by British regiments marching south from Canada. He even mailed a crate labeled “rifles” to Irish immigrants in Valentine, available for self-defense. Cracked open, the box contained no firearms at all but rather, according to state historian Mari Sandoz, “a lot of Irish clubs cut, I hear, along the brush of Bordeaux creek in Northwestern Nebraska.”
Another time, Maher claimed he had discovered the body of a Spanish prisoner during a visit to Louisiana and announced it was none other than the saboteur who sank the USS Maine. Actually, Maher had acquired a cadaver, placed it in a ruined fort, and set it afire. Voilà!—the missing “man who blew up the Maine.”
He wrote of a sea monster lurking at the bottom of Nebraska’s Alkali (now Walgren) Lake, and his accounts compared its head to an “oil barrel shiny black in the moonlight.” The eyes glowed green and “spit fire.” The mouth roared, and the teeth gnashed like rips of thunder. The creature would sneak ashore at night and devour a dozen calves at a time, flattening cornfields.
Many years later, Sandoz visited Maher in his office in Lincoln, hoping to clear up his history of hoaxes. He quickly brushed her aside and started in on another “fantastic version” about an old pioneer, a rattlesnake, and a horrible bite. The pioneer grabbed his .30-30 Winchester rifle, Maher told her, aimed at the snake, and in misfiring shot off his own hand.
John Maher long after he had abandoned Chadron, where he was notorious for his hoaxes, including one doozy about a thousand-mile horse race. (Nebraska State Historical Society)
Sandoz stopped him right there. She told him that the old pioneer in his “story” was her father, and she accused Maher of spooling out another “fantastic fabrication.”
Maher turned pink. “You’re the girl, the daughter who was with him when he was bitten?” he stammered. Yes, she was. “Well,” he replied, “it was a damn good story the way I was telling it, wasn’t it?”
Sometime in late 1892, a story began quietly circulating about a proposed cowboy race. Not an ordinary cowboy race down a dusty rural road or around a swirling oval track. This one, according to John Maher’s reports to the Eastern newspapers, was going to be a big race, with real cowboys and Western-bred bronchos. It was going to capitalize on the long-distance horse-racing craze that was sweeping Europe. It was going to start from northwestern Nebraska and the Panhandle plains and lead straight to the steel-and-iron skyscrapers towering above Chicago, just in time for the next summer’s world’s fair. This one was going to be a thousand miles.
On November 9, 1892, the small-town True Northerner newspaper in Paw Paw, Michigan, picked up on the report and ran a brief, one-paragraph item in the middle of page 2—what appears to be one of the first published notices to surface about a cowboy race. “Will Ride to the Fair,” announced the headline. The story fudged, noodled, and embellished some of the facts, but the idea was there. “The old-time cowboys of Northwestern Nebraska are going to the World’s Fair,” the story claimed. “It will be a pistol-shot mount and start, and the winner will get $1,000 and a gold medal. Side purses will be numerous. Over 300 old-time cowboys have agreed to enter the race, and have posted forfeits. A system of registry will be agreed upon to insure fair riding, and as many horses will be used as each rider may deem necessary.”
Some of the big South Dakota ranchers and town leaders in Deadwood and Sturgis along the Black Hills, and in Chadron too, had been chewing over such a race for some time. But no cowboys had entered, and no gold medal had been struck. One weekend in Chadron, Emmett Albright, a cowhand from Texas, rode into town and over a beer at one of the saloons said an idea had been knocking around in his head about a long-distance “chase” to prove the Western broncho’s durability and the cow man’s endurance. He thought it a grand idea, especially if the cowboys could romp around Chicago and demonstrate their skills roping, riding, and “cutting” cattle. He thought they could draw a thousand or more fans for a show at the Union Stock Yards.
More news items began popping up, as though the race already were a done deal. Newspaper telegraph reports datelined Deadwood said $1,000 was being put up for a cowboy run from Chadron to the fair, to start next May 15. The New York Sun reported that the contest would prove the Western broncho could beat the time and endurance of the German and Austrian breeds in that fatal race of the summer before. “Westerners claim that their ponies can stand more hardship than any other four-legged thing on earth,” according to the Sun.
Soon Chadron found itself over a barrel. Maher’s latest prank had taken hold, and some in town worried that their city would be embarrassed for promising something it could never deliver. “The whole thing originated in the fertile brain of one of our local correspondents to the eastern press,” complained the Chadron Citizen. “And well it might be to curb his imagination in the future.”
In December 1892, an anxious rancher named McGinley, who owned the JA brand of horses in Sioux County, Nebraska, appeared on Chadron’s streets, demanding, “Is there going to be a cowboy race, or not?” He proposed that some preliminary arrangements be laid down, and he called for a meeting to adopt a set of race rules, including a stipulation that horses not be ridden near to death the last fifty or hundred miles to the fair. He predicted that the cowboys would “jog” their horses about seventy-five miles a day to reach Chicago and suggested that “the best horses will be saddled and a grand rush will be made” in the final lap to the world’s fair.
McGinley thought up to three hundred cowboys would enter. One of them, the notorious outlaw Doc Middleton, was among the first to raise a gloved hand. Emmett Albright, in his broad-brimmed Stetson and with a six-shooter strapped to his hip, hailed as “the finest rifle shot in these parts,” announced that he was in, too. Winn Satterlee, the eleven-year-old son of the owner of the Blaine Hotel, begged to ride with them.
“Chadron is not as large a city as Chicago,” noted the local Dawes County Journal. “But her people, like those of the city of the lakes, have some original ideas and purpose to cut something of a figure themselves at the big show. Hurrah for the Chadron–Chicago cowboy race!”
George Edward “Ed” Lemmon, the old-time cowhand from the Dakotas, cautioned that a trip of that many miles would not come easy in the saddle. “To ride 75 miles in one day is not out of the ordinary,” he wrote in his log books.
Many men have done it. But to average that many miles for 13 days in a row would test men and horses to the limit.
The rider would not be mounting a fresh horse every relay and riding without regard for the horse, as he’d do if he knew he’d have a fresh mount at each stop. No, these men would have to save their horses’ strength all they could.
Then, too, a rider with a fresh mount under him can stand a long ride much better than he can on a jaded horse. And if the road was rocky he’d have to let the horse pick his way, lest he sprain his leg or be lamed by a rock bruise. If the road led through hilly country with steep slopes he’d not dare ride at high speed either uphill or down, but would have to take advantage over every chance to make time when the temperature and the lay of the ground would let him.
But a real horseman understands his horse, and it is almost unbelievable how a good horse will respond to such a rider.
On Christmas Day 1892, the Daily Bee in Omaha thought Chadron could pull it off: “It is quite an undertaking for a city of this size to get up such a race, but there are some very energetic rustlers behind it and they say it will be carried out.” The Chadron Citizen newspaper, in February 1893, boasted that its hometown was “getting a big lot of advertising all over the country.” It was said that Nebraska alone might send three hundred riders, along with two hundred others from across the Western states. The purse money had fattened, and the finish line now would be the front door of the Nebrask
a state building at the Chicago Fair.
So on a Saturday night in March 1893, Billy the Bear, one of the race’s biggest boosters, called a mass meeting to order inside Nelson’s Opera House. E. D. Satterlee, owner of the Blaine Hotel, was elected chairman of the race committee. Harvey Weir was named committee secretary and Sheriff James Dahlman a committee member. In the back of the crowded hall, John Maher stood silent, a grin creasing his face.
They discussed raising more prize money, and how they hoped the race would come off as “a success with a big S.” They adopted an initial set of rules:
—Cowboys could ride no more than two horses.
—Horses must be Western bred and raised.
—Saddles would be Western cowboy stock weighing not less than 35 pounds, and the combined weight of cowboy and saddle must be more than 150 pounds.
—Entries would close on June 1, with rider fees ranging from $10 to $25, depending on how soon the cash would be presented to the window teller at the Bank of Chadron.
—The cowboys would ride the morning of June 13 from the front of the Blaine Hotel, “this being the first day of the state’s firemen’s tournament.”
No race route was laid out for the cowboys, but some committee officials began sketching the most direct path across the Nebraska Panhandle, over the Missouri River into Iowa, and over the Mississippi into Illinois, with a last dash for Chicago’s Columbian Exposition. They would bill the race with that nicely rounded-out, precise number of one thousand miles, though some in Nebraska claimed it would be more like 1,040 miles with all the zigzagging and diverting around the Sand Hills and two big rivers. Computations today put the beeline distance at closer to nine hundred miles.
The panel completed one final task: they sent a wire to Buffalo Bill Cody and asked whether his show grounds next to the fair might not make the perfect finish line. Cody wired back to Sheriff Dahlman: “Am delighted to hear of the proposed thousand mile cowboy race from Chadron to Chicago (stop) Would appreciate having the race end at my Wild West Show in the Columbian Exposition (stop) Will donate five hundred dollars to be added to the purse of the winning ride (stop) Colonel (Buffalo Bill) Cody.”
Not everyone was enthusiastic about pushing horses to the limit, though. To many there was a distinction between endurance and abuse. “It would be better for the ‘boys’ to choose some other amusement in coming to the great fair,” the secretary of the Aurora, Illinois, Humane Society wrote in a letter to the Chadron Citizen. “Something that does not have about it the elements of cruelty.”
George T. Angell, lawyer, philanthropist, and president of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, pictured “300 wild cowboys” driving their horses far too hard, “semi-barbarians” on steeds at full gallop for days and nights “under whip and spur.” He encouraged everyone along the route of the race to confront the cowboys “with hisses and cries of shame!” Angell believed that the Chadron race would be much worse than those in central Europe a year earlier. One of those horses, Angell said, was left “bleeding from her flanks, where she had been stabbed a hundred times with spurs, and from wales [weals] inflicted with the whip.” Fifteen horses were disabled for life; “their sides are sunken in, their spines were twisted awry.” At least eight of the Austrian horses died on the road.
What further agitated Angell was learning that the German Kaiser had hosted a postrace dinner to honor his riders. “If these gentlemen had undertaken this fine sport in Massachusetts,” Angell warned, “instead of being dined they would quite likely have landed in a Massachusetts jail.”
But interest in the West was building, drummed up by promotions such as one from the Chicago Inter Ocean that proclaimed the winner would gallop home “the Uncrowned King of the Cowboys.”
Doc Middleton began laying down bets around Chadron, wagering up to $500 that he would arrive first in Chicago.
Clabe Young had for some years ridden bronchos for Buffalo Bill, and he would be sponsored by the state of Wyoming atop a big gray gelding that once ran wild and nearly attacked anyone who approached it. Young had won the horse in a poker game, named it Balmaceda, and broken it in. He had once been tried and acquitted of murder in Texas, and he had been wounded in a gunfight with Mexican smugglers. Now he was confident he could push his new horse a hundred miles or more a day to Chicago.
Jeptha Sweat, a Chadron youngster who had run off to Wyoming and worked a sheep ranch, trapped and hunted, shot a bear, and once raced for a $100 prize, said he would ride to Chicago. Narcisse Valleaux Jr., nicknamed “Young Nelse” of the Teton Range, announced he would slam his boots in the stirrups and race as well.
The committee announced more rules:
—The race would be open to the world.
—Each horse would be given a special commemorative brand.
—Riders would be required to register at designated stops.
—Anyone sneaking off for a train depot and “riding the rails” would be disqualified.
—Before the jump-off shot was fired, each rider would be handed an official map of the race route.
Originally from Minnesota, “Texas Ben” called himself a “titled cowboy” and said he was headed for Chadron and a spot in the lineup. From the Pine Ridge Reservation were expected a score of Oglala Lakota riders, including Big Bat, Yeast Powder Bill, and Yellow Bird. In Colorado, the people of San Miguel County rallied around a character called “Rattlesnake Bill,” trusting in his “wonderful record” in the saddle. William Lessig and Joe Campbell, two other deeply tanned Colorado cowboys, rode in eight days to Chadron on one pony each, three hundred miles in all, just to show off their horses’ strength. A young, feisty cowgirl named Emma Hutchinson was also trotting up from Denver, aiming to beat them all.
Sioux County, Nebraska, was backing “Rattlesnake Dick,” a Yale graduate known for his predilection for snakeskins. Wiltz Earnest, the so-called Cowboy Giant at over seven feet tall, would ride. Huron, South Dakota, backed O. M. Bell, the local agent for the American Express company. He had recently picked out a new horse from a boxcar full of mounts.
Missouri and Iowa communities reported that they would put up several entrants, and as far away as Pennsylvania, local enthusiasts found someone to saddle up. Wyoming’s list was growing, since many cowboys were idling and bored, or eager to escape fallout from the Powder River Range War in Johnson County. From the Bighorn Basin, Jack Flagg, who once had zigzagged his horse past a murdering posse of Wyoming cattlemen who had killed two of his friends, would compete. Kearney, Nebraska, promised to send a trio of cowboys: Tony Cornelius, Ed Finch, and Mike Sanders. When these three men “undertake a thing of this kind,” promised the Kearney Daily Hub, “it means business.”
Chadron itself would not be outdone. Along with Middleton and Albright, another hometown hero said he would ride. Jim Murray had traveled up from Texas in the 1870s as a boy, reached Omaha, and was bound for Montana when he decided that the Panhandle and Chadron were far enough. (He had stepped from the train with $1.50 in the pocket of his button-fly trousers; first off he bought some suspenders to help hold them up.)
Also bustling in and out of Chadron was John Berry, an area railway surveyor who had helped plat the city. He was mysteriously taking the morning express to Chadron and then departing on the night train home. All around town Berry kept his eyes trained and his ears alert. “When spoken to now-a-days on railroad matters,” reported the Chadron Citizen, “he at once turns the subject to the cowboy race to Chicago, and the great advertisement the race is going to be for Chadron.”
By the end of April 1893 the race seemed unstoppable, and Buffalo Bill had pledged his separate cash prize of $500, welcoming the haystack of free publicity. His adjutants Major John Burke and Nate Salsbury loved the idea, too. In their Chicago newspaper ads for their Wild West show, they began including updates on the race. In front of Cody’s tent, they hammered up a wooden “Thousand Mile Tree” to mark the official finish line. The first cowboy in was to
report to Buffalo Bill. He would shake his hand and declare him the winner.
To further sweeten the pot, the Colt Arms Company offered a specially manufactured “piece of side artillery”—a gold-plated revolver—as yet another prize. Colt called the pistol one of its cherished “cowboy companions.” The .44-caliber revolver, with an ivory handle, blue-steel barrel, and gold-plated cylinder (this page), was displayed in the front window of Hayes & Bargelt’s jewelry store in downtown Chadron, its sparkle impossible to miss.
The Montgomery Ward dry-goods company in Chicago announced that it would toss in one of its finest leather saddles. The rancher H. D. Mead presented two locally known favorites, Doc Middleton and Charley Smith, with handcrafted leather bridles inscribed with silver plates: “World’s Fair Cowboy Race, June 13, 1893.” Separately, the Lowenthal Brothers’ Second Street store chipped in a $25 saddle blanket and a $12 white Stetson hat for Middleton. The blanket was sewn with gold letters stitched in, reading, “Lowenthal Brothers, Chadron Nebraska Rider.” The sweatband on Doc’s new hat was printed in silver lettering: “Doc Middleton, Lowenthal Brothers’ Rider to the World’s Fair.”
Criticism of the race heated up. At the state capital at Lincoln, a county judge grew disgusted with the idea. “Who does not pity as well as despise the man who shall sit for hours, for days and weeks astride some noble animal and see his quivering flanks, his distended nostrils and finally his faltering, failing limbs?” the judge asked. “Most of all to be despised is the man, or rather monster, who shall succeed in prolonging the torture.”
From Barron, Wisconsin, a letter arrived on the Nebraska governor’s desk from a group of bank executives, warning that the cowboy race would “see this country retrograding to the low place of the Romans in Nero’s time.” They complained that “the Spanish bull fighters” were equally brutal. In Philadelphia, the Women’s Branch of the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals met in their headquarters office on South Seventeenth Street and adopted a resolution condemning the race. Their president, Caroline Earle White, a pioneer in animal care who particularly championed horses, called for “prompt and efficient action” to put a halt to the cowboys and all the race mania. “Cruelty inevitably will be its result,” she declared.
American Endurance Page 9