A few warnings escalated to threats: cowboys participating in the race might be handcuffed, arrested, and hauled off to jail. Many announced riders began changing their minds and dropping out. Soon the number fell to a couple dozen.
The critics kept up the pressure. At the annual session of the Illinois Humane Society on May 6 in their new meeting hall on Chicago’s State Street, John G. Shortall, president of the national and Illinois societies, urged the state legislature to pass a bill against the animal cruelty involved in such a long-distance cowboy race. He called it comparable to other “brutal fights and a disgrace to the community.” Another critic, the Reverend David Swing, took the Sunday pulpit at the Central Music Hall in Chicago, a towering theater structure with thundering acoustics and a giant American flag. The city’s most popular preacher, Swing condemned the race as “both stupid and brutal” and said, “The scheme is too inhuman for our age and nation. It should be instantly abandoned.… To think that there are men here in this city and in the far West who could deliberately plan an amusement so perfectly infamous.”
Protests spread to the state houses, and Nebraska Governor Lorenzo Crounse’s desk spilled over with letters and telegrams of complaint. “Stop it if possible,” demanded a group of Nebraska women, many from Chadron. “It is to be a blot on the name of America, civilization and Nebraska in particular.” The Wisconsin Humane Society urged the governor to “think of the unutterable suffering and death of some of the poor helpless innocent horses at the mercy of those who think only of their reward.” They suggested that “true mercy is nobility’s true badge.” The American Anti-Vivisection Society called the cowboy race no better than a “bull-fight or a pigeon-shooting tournament.”
Members of the race’s coordinating panel, now officially called the Chadron Citizens’ Committee, ignored them. Instead they invited Governor Crounse to fire the pistol to start the cowboys to Chicago. Crounse declined, but he also declined to lift his hand to stop the race, his office arguing that the governor did not possess the legal authority to bar any cowboys from racing horses anywhere.
So the protesters turned again to Chicago. Shortall met with Cody and Salsbury and urged them to drop their sponsorship. He told them their pledge of additional prize money and their “being so well known in the West” was only encouraging trouble. Salsbury responded with an extraordinary May 19 letter to race committee secretary Harvey Weir, reminding him that many of the nation’s newspapers, especially the Eastern press, were united with the humane society groups in wanting to shut down the race.
“It is quite impossible to make them understand that cruelty will not be practiced in the endeavor by individuals to win the race,” Salsbury cautioned. The committee must convince the country that the cowboys would not abuse their horses. “You may be sure,” he wrote Weir, “that unless you do this and do it with perfect candor and honesty, the race will never terminate in the city of Chicago.” If those assurances were not made, he told Weir, Cody might pull out. “So far as our connection with the race is concerned, you know that our offer was made in perfect good faith. But at the same time we will not assume any part of any discredit that may be attached to it by the better class of the community, and unless convincing proof can be given that cruelty in no form will be practiced, we shall withdraw our offer.”
Salsbury also told Weir that a skeptical public would rise up and “completely frustrate the success of your plans,” something the Wild West show wanted no part of. He noted that “Colonel Cody is an officer in good standing” of the Humane Society and also serves as “an officer of the state of Nebraska.” With that in mind, Salsbury recommended that the Chadron committee members “either abandon the race entirely or promote it on such lines as are unmistakably opposed to any form of cruelty.” He enclosed a copy of the laws of Illinois “governing matters of this kind” and issued a final warning: “The Humane Society is making no idle threats but has power under the law to greatly interfere with your plans.”
For Salsbury and Buffalo Bill, it was a brilliant public relations move to distance themselves from the troubled Chadron committee; forty letters a day were arriving in Cody’s Wild West mail bag demanding he halt the cowboys or at least stop egging them on. But they could not personally block the cowboys. And Cody insisted that his role was nothing more than offering the additional $500 in prize money and declaring the first cowboy across his finish line the winner.
Weir answered Salsbury in vague terms, saying the horses would be well cared for and that the race now would begin June 13. He also stated that the gold Colt pistol would be shipped to Chicago for Buffalo Bill to present to the winner.
Soon another letter arrived in Chadron, this one from Paul Fontaine, secretary of the Minneapolis Humane Society, and it leveled the gravest threat of all. “Those who undertake to make that race will be arrested, tried and punished,” Fontaine warned in the letter, made public on May 20. “This is not a matter of sentiment void of sense. The law-abiding people of Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Nebraska and Minnesota will make their power felt.… Again we repeat, the law against this proposed cow boy race must be enforced at all hazard.”
More cowboys pulled out; fewer than twenty riders now remained. Many felt insulted by Eastern demagogues telling Western frontiersmen how to conduct their affairs
In a third letter to Weir, less than three weeks before the race, Shortall “respectfully” asked Weir to read the letter out loud to all “those contemplating the long distance race between Chadron and Chicago.” He cited Illinois laws and fines and threatened arrest warrants for anyone “overloading, overdriving, overworking, cruelly beating, torturing, tormenting, humiliating, or cruelly killing any animal.” He believed it was “not possible to make a contest of endurance and speed between horses for 50 miles,” no less all the way to Chicago. He warned that state fines could run as high as $200. “Such violation of the law being from hour to hour, arrest after arrest of the same individual can, and will, be made,” he wrote.
The home stretch for the race would be the worst on the horses, and in DeKalb, Illinois, the last big town before Chicago, the local Chronicle noted that “right here is where the hard riding will begin. The race from this point to the city will be hot, and the way will be lined with officers of the Humane Society.” The newspaper dismissed it as a “gigantic horse race” to be unleashed “in hot weather and over all sorts of roads, for a paltry prize, and that these poor, dumb beasts are to be maimed and killed to gratify a beastly love of excitement.”
Governor John Peter Altgeld of Illinois warned that any cowboys crossing the Mississippi River into his state could be arrested before their saddles were dry. In Iowa, Governor Horace Boies prepared to grant local sheriffs special authority to collar any riders merely suspected of mistreating their horses. He cited state statutes against animal cruelty.
Many newspapers both in the East and the West continued editorializing against the race. “Everything demands its suppression,” opined the Intelligencer in Wheeling, West Virginia, “and nothing commends it to popular approval or favor.” The Omaha Daily Bee commented that “the poor bronchos will be hard pressed under whip and spur, night and day, through the terrible ordeal, in weather that may prove to be the hottest of the year.” The Philadelphia Press concurred: “A cruel contest … a barbarous trial of endurance and speed.”
In Boston, George Angell and his Massachusetts animal protection society offered their own reward of $100 and a gold medal “to the man or woman who shall do most to prevent this terrible race which if accomplished will be, in the view of all the humane people of the world both Christian and heathen, a national disgrace.”
Others fired back at humane society officials and warned them to back off. An anonymous letter writer identifying himself as “the last of the Dalton’s,” a reference to the Dalton Gang in frontier Kansas, told the humane leaders to “shut that fly trap of yours or I will shut it for you, that you will never open it again. It is none of your business wha
t we do.” He called for bloodshed, and he signed the letter, “Your Will Be Slayer.”
In Chadron, more of the cowboys packed up for home. A few stuck around, exercising their horses twenty to thirty miles a day. Doc Middleton was putting one of his horses through its paces up and down Second Street. Barns and livery stables were watering, combing, and bedding down the horses. The brand-new leather saddle from Montgomery Ward was en route, and that heavy gold Colt revolver gleamed in the downtown jewelry store window, primed to fire the opening shot.
June came at last, and with it rumors that Chadron might back down. The first of the month found Doc Middleton in a packed Fourth Street saloon; at over six feet tall, he was easy to spot above the heads of his drinking pals. His scraggly brown beard hung near to his holsters. He wanted everyone to know that he was going to race even if he had to ride alone.
“The reports to the effect that the Great Cowboy Race has been declared to be off are not true,” Doc insisted. “The humane societies have caused us some uneasiness, but we want them to cooperate with us. They will find that there will be no cruelty to animals. We know better what a broncho can stand than they do and will use judgment in handling our horses.”
Middleton said that because two horses would be allowed each rider, one could be led while the other was ridden, giving the horses a relative break. “I expect it will take us at least eight days to reach Sioux City” at the Iowa line, he said. “I have no idea what number will finish. Some of the horses will get too leg weary to finish.”
Chadron’s Sheriff James Dahlman backed the old outlaw. He announced that he would ignore the reward money and gold medals posted by the humane societies to stop the race, and he would make no arrests.
Still the opponents pressed on. Humane society officers formed a special committee in Dubuque, Iowa, announcing that they were “determined to see that the riders do not enter Chicago.” They hoped at least to stop them in Dubuque. In the churches there, ministers preached frequently against animal cruelty. Handbills were passed around, and posters were tacked up on trees, barns, and telegraph poles all along the suspected race route, calling for the arrest and conviction of any cowboys stampeding their horses.
Shortall fired off another letter to Governor Boies, repeating that the race would be a “violation of the law in Iowa.” Boies responded by directing county sheriffs to make arrests the moment any cowboys from Nebraska crossed the Missouri River on an overworked horse. “To justify an arrest in this state,” the governor told the lawmen, “it will not be sufficient to prove simply that these men were engaged in a race. To this must be added the fact that while in your county they violated the statute by over-riding their animals.”
Jack Hale, a prominent South Dakota stockman, came to Chadron and offered some of his horses for the race. Reports had cowboys Emmett Albright and Joe Gillespie working their ponies out in the rural sections of the county, near Crawford. Emma Hutchinson was also reported to be still on her way, though the papers said “nothing has been heard of her since leaving Denver.”
The streets of Chadron hummed. A traveling circus stopped in town for a summer run, and a convention of medical surgeons was in full swing. The state firemen were arriving, too. Yet most eyes were trained on the cowboys, as some were galloping their ponies around the Blaine Hotel, just to show they were fearless.
John Maher introduced the cowboys to various out-of-town visitors. “A hundred Kodaks were sprung to take pictures of the group,” reported the Chadron Signal. “And when it was announced that Doc Middleton’s horse, which came from Dr. G. P. Waller’s pasture, was the one that he rode from Crow Butte to Omaha pursued at every jump by howling Sioux Indians, several ladies insisted on hugging the horse while Doc looked on rather sheepishly.”
The circus paraded down Second Street, and the ruckus emptied the saloons. James “Rattlesnake Pete” Stephens of Kansas, with a bellyful of “John Larkin’s Poison-Weed Sagwa,” rushed outside with other drunken cowboys. They leaped on their horses and chased after the circus, jabbing the elephants and circling the clowns, leaning down to pull their hair. Two policemen brandished batons, but the cowboys scampered away.
Back in Illinois, Shortall had not given up. He enlisted veterinarians to testify about the dangers of long-distance riding. He was collecting affidavits and taking depositions. In Iowa, rewards now offering up to $500 were printed in local newspapers for any evidence of “unjustifiable cruelty.” The Chicago Inter Ocean, one of the most influential newspapers in Illinois, called upon Buffalo Bill to “exercise his influence to put a stop to the outrage,” arguing that “he, more than any other man, can prevent the riders from leaving Chadron.”
By then, though, Cody was all in. His publicity men were printing up newspaper advertisements heralding the cowboys racing to his Wild West arena next to the fair. His friend Henri Leon, widely known as long-haired “Broncho Harry,” told humane society officials that the cowboys were going to ride “fully armed” with pistols and “would fight should anyone attempt to delay them.” He also read an open letter to Shortall. “If there be any interference …,” he warned, “the perpetrators shall receive a full meal of genuine western feed—i.e. buckshot, small shot or anything at all, to hold our own.” He said the cowboys would carry two guns and a knife apiece. “The men in the race are not in the habit of having people cross their paths without doing some shooting,” he added.
Chicago preacher David Swing answered for Shortall on June 8, the race now less than a week away. “The average cowboy is heartless,” Swing said. “They brand, spur, beat and ride without mercy. They expect to work their horses to death in three years; new ones are cheap.”
For Chadron, the last-minute threats came too late; the town was all in, too. Dr. G. P. Waller would take the train and carry the $1,000 purse to Chicago. In a final town meeting, committee officials decided to hold the entries open until the day of the race. The start was now set for the coming Tuesday, June 13.
Bets were pasted around town, with Middleton in the thick of the action. Horses were groomed and rested, and they would be fed a “special” meal the morning of the race. The committee drew up a race slogan: “He who wears the spurs, must win them.” Boasted the Chadron Citizen: “There are plenty of men in the West who have ridden to exceed 100 miles a day for two or three consecutive days.… Our eastern friends are giving too little credit to the cowboy and his steed, and if any of the Humane people wish to come out here, or if they are in Chicago when the race ends, they can see that they have judged the participants in the Great Cowboy Race by the wrong standard.”
On June 11, two days before race time, Shortall tried once more to halt the proceedings. “Out on the Plains, horseflesh is cheap,” he complained. “Not much attention is paid to the comfort or discomfort of animals.” He had received hundreds of letters urging him to fight on. He had written governors, enlisted county sheriffs, and pleaded to the humanity of the fading Western cowboy. He had “begged” Chadron to change its mind. Now all he had left was to call upon “the strong arm of the law.” He vowed one last time: “We can and shall have the riders arrested every hour or oftener.” And as often as they make bail in county jails from Chadron to Chicago, Shortall cautioned, “they will be re-arrested.”
But his words were like empty dust on the Nebraska Panhandle. Some three thousand spectators (some said five thousand) were streaming into Chadron, filling up the Blaine and the smaller hotels, renting back bedrooms in local homes, the straw and the haylofts in the horse barns, and any extra boot space along the foot rail in the town saloons. Farmers and ranchers and those still homesteading in sod houses hitched up wagon teams and drove into town. From the Black Hills they came, and from over on the Wyoming flats and all along the Niobrara River Valley.
Banners were flying along Chadron’s Second Street, its main road. The town band rehearsed outdoors, its cymbals and drums stirring up the warm summer air. Young boys reserved lampposts and tree branches for the best perches whe
n the cowboys would thunder off beyond the low-slung skyline. On the evening of June 12, buggies and wagons were lining up along the eastern edges of town, poised to chase the cowboys and cheer them on to Chicago.
That evening, a pair of determined animal rights advocates, Paul Fontaine and the veterinarian W. W. Tatro, emissaries from the Minneapolis Humane Society, were aboard an overnight train to Chadron. The locomotive was chugging at fifty to sixty miles an hour across the darkened prairie and making a number of stops. According to the chalkboard at the Chadron depot, it was expected in by late morning. Barring any breakdowns, they were hoping to arrive with just a few hours left before the cowboys roared off. And if they made it, they were going to stop the race.
Race Day
6
Everyone knew that the morning train was coming. And they knew that Minneapolis Humane Society officials would be aboard, determined to shut down the race. They knew arrests might be made and that more of the cowboys were opting out and starting back home. This knowledge prompted the race committee to scratch the planned early-morning start time on Tuesday, June 13, 1893, and instead launch the cowboys to Chicago at 5 p.m. That would give them time to hear the protesters out, and maybe reach a compromise and save what was left of the Great Cowboy Race.
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