He was born on an Iowa farm near the Mississippi River, two miles north of Farley (where he and the other riders would come tearing through in a week or so). In the 1870s, his father sold out and brought the family to the North Loup River Valley in eastern Nebraska. Young Joe, tall and big-shouldered, lean and handsome, took to breaking wild horses. He won some government contracts working as a teamster and surveyor and relaying the U.S. mail out of St. Paul. He opened a livery barn in Ord in central Nebraska.
But that kind of life was too quiet for Gillespie, and he soon turned up in the Chadron area and a Dawes County settlement called Coxville. He farmed and ranched near Crow Butte. He sold horses to the U.S. Cavalry at Fort Robinson and for some time drove a stage line through Sioux lands from the fort to the Pine Ridge Agency in the Dakotas. For a while he ran a sawmill. Family legend said he supplied relief horses after the disaster at the Little Bighorn. He was a Mason and a Methodist and an Odd Fellow, and his politics were rigid. He voted straight Republican until America entered the First World War. Then he tended toward the side of the Democrats.
Like many young men who answered the call to “go West,” Gillespie was eternally restless. Yet he did one day manage to stand still for a formal indoor photograph. At twenty-one, he posed leaning against a studio prop, decked out in a heavy coat and broad tie, white shirt, dark vest, and starched trousers. He did not smile. His expression instead seemed one of angst, as if he could not wait to tear off those city duds and rush back out onto the open range.
Another regional favorite, Joe Gillespie was the oldest to ride and also was hailed as the “cowboyest” of them all. (Gillespie family photo)
Gillespie was always taking new turns in life. At forty-eight, he enlisted as a private in the Second Nebraska Volunteer Infantry before the Spanish-American War. Even when he was much older and living in a small central Oklahoma town, he helped patrol the county as a deputy sheriff.
“Joe was always a horseman,” though, recalled the Cedar Rapids Journal in Iowa when the native son came racing to Chicago in the summer of 1893. “And to find him in this race is just what one would expect. He has been in so many counties in Nebraska that there seems to be no place where he is not known.”
Some called him “Indestructible Joe,” a man “totally unafraid of anything,” and he steadied the dapple gray Billy Schafer in line in front of the Blaine Hotel, waiting with the other cowboys for the roar of the Colt .44. He wore spurs with knotted rope ends tied around his boots, designed to tickle his horse’s flanks and nudge them faster. For race day, he sported a gray laced shirt, brown trousers, high-top boots, and a flat sombrero to keep him cool under the mid-June sun. He also packed a pair of pistols.
“Gillespie talks in a glib manner on various topics and does no bragging,” reported a Chicago paper, which caught up to him as he raced through Illinois. Although he weighed 185 pounds, “he is the lightest in his saddle of any of his competitors.”
For sport he would gallop through scrub grass and hunt wild coyotes, challenging himself not just to shoot at his prey. That was too easy for Indestructible Joe. Instead he kept his guns holstered, whacking the coyotes with the heavy end of his riding quirt. Sometimes he would stand on their chests to stop their hearts if, as he said, “I think they have need of additional treatment.”
His toughness was legendary. Billy the Bear recorded in his diary an encounter in 1887 when a Chadron town marshal bothered Gillespie about something. The marshal, Timothy Morrissey, born in New York to hardy Irish immigrants, was no softy, either; he had come to northwest Nebraska leading a team of oxen, and he had walked the last 135 miles from Valentine to Chadron. His was the first board shack to be put up in the new city. The day of the encounter with Gillespie, the county fair was under way, celebrating rural farmers, and a number of horse races were lined up in honor of what was left of the fading cowboy era. Then, around 5:30 p.m., wrote Billy, “quite a disgraceful affair was indulged in by the marshal of the day Timothy Morrissey who, forgetting the duties of a peace officer, engaged himself in a free fight with Joe Gillespie. But happily he got just what he deserved, for Joe drew blood on Ireland’s pet in the twinkling of an eye.”
Joe’s wife, Anna, was a notably tough lady, too. She was small but not to be tangled with, their grandson Harold Comer said. “She wasn’t afraid of the devil himself,” Comer recalled, adding that one time “some gunfighter was going to kill a kid; he had him backed into a corner. I was told that she went up to him and took his gun and slapped his face.” Anna Eliza Cook Gillespie was Canadian-born and educated in an Iowa seminary, and she taught youngsters in a small-town schoolhouse before marrying Joe in 1873 in Dubuque County. Soon afterward, they moved to Nebraska and produced seven children. They had gone there to join Joe’s father, Andrew Gillespie. Also out west was Joe’s older brother, Dr. Andrew Jackson Gillespie, a respected physician and school superintendent in Chadron and Dawes County.
Joe was among the first of the cowboys to toss in for the Great Cowboy Race, over the misgivings of his wife. “She said a man with a family should stay home instead of gallivantin’ off on a thousand-mile race,” he later told his granddaughter Ora Fay Gillespie Niegel. “Seems like when I heard of it, I couldn’t keep from going. Everybody said my size was against me. Hundred and eighty-five pounds is a lot of tallow for a horse to carry so far.”
Some in his family thought he initially registered to help guide another cowboy—possibly Doc Middleton—through the difficult Sand Hills, where the ground shifts and water holes pop up, tough to spot from the back of a flying horse. But Old Joe decided to ride those hills himself. He would cross the Mississippi and he would set his sights on Chicago. He aimed to show these younger boys what an older cowhand was made of. When Billy Schafer grew tired from days and nights tearing up the countryside, Gillespie would jump out of the saddle, grab the end of the horse’s tail, and run behind him. The horse would have a lighter load, and Gillespie’s boots would wear through. “He would get off and just hang on,” insisted Harold Comer. “He’d just let him drag him sometimes.” By the time the race was over, Old Joe had dropped thirty pounds.
He treated his horses well, and he earned their respect. He was especially fond of Billy Schafer and would not sell the horse for any price, even when he was offered $1,000 after the race. “Billy Schafer was talked about like he was family,” Comer recalled. “I was six or seven before I realized Billy was a horse.”
With the Great Cowboy Race about to launch on the evening of June 13, Gillespie said he did not care much for the prize money, the fame and notoriety, or even the leather-tanned Montgomery Ward saddle. It would be enough for him just to steal a peek at a big city such as Chicago, cast his eyes on the World’s Columbian Exposition, and meet Buffalo Bill.
“Of course,” admitted Old Joe, “that prize Colt .44 looks pretty good to me too.”
Also eyeing that revolver was young, untested, red-headed James Stephens. The pistol was just the prize he craved to carry back to Kansas so that he could grow old in the saddle, spinning stories of how he had raced a thousand miles as a genuine American cowboy.
Single and not at all interested in settling down, he had ridden from central Kansas and hit Chadron a few days ago. He was twenty-five years old, short and thin, and at five feet four inches the smallest of the nine competitors. He was so green-looking that many in Chadron figured they had to cowboy him up a bit. He just did not look Western enough bouncing around town in a ten-gallon white hat, dusty flannel shirt, and fancy off-the-rack trousers from a South Halsted Street store in Chicago.
James “Rattlesnake Pete” Stephens, a small man who rode tall in the saddle, hung this oil portrait of himself mounted on General Grant in his tiny barbershop in central Kansas. (Reno County Historical Society)
So they gave him a new nickname, “Rattlesnake Pete,” and that helped make a cowboy out of Jim Stephens. It gave him a swagger around town, and soon he was firing up cigars and swilling drinks in the Second Stre
et saloons. His horse, General Grant, had been a wild pony on the Plains, so that helped toughen up his image, too. Part of the trick was to feed the horse well. For that, Stephens kept some dried beef hidden in his saddlebag. For dessert, he told the horse.
He was born James Harold Stephens on April Fools’ Day 1868 in Adel, Iowa, near the North Raccoon River. His older brother, Frank Stephens, was the first in the family to relocate to the Kansas prairie, near Ness City. Jim followed. He worked his father’s horse ranch and broke horses for the U.S. Army; more than likely, they were remnants of Custer’s doomed 7th Cavalry. He wore his long, thick mustache precisely trimmed and combed, and he was so small in the saddle that he often leaned back and hoisted his shoulders high. It made him appear larger and more like a cowboy.
Stephens saw the race as a perfect way to advertise his father’s ranch. A little publicity could go a long way. “Times were tough and western horses were pretty cheap then,” he recalled later. So he tied his bedroll on General Grant and rode out to Chadron. Stephens had tamed the mustang in a week; what was another week and a half’s ride to western Nebraska?
New to Chadron, he bunked in a spare bedroom at Sheriff Dahlman’s house. The sheriff’s wife, Hattie, an Easterner educated at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, knew the Old West well; for a while she had lived on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, before the Ghost Dance. She took the rattles from six dozen dead snakes and sewed them into Stephens’s hat band. “They hung it on me in Chadron before the race began,” he said years later. “They started calling me Rattlesnake Pete. [The name] was given to me by Jim Dahlman. He handed me my hat back with a belt of 72 rattles from rattlesnakes and dubbed me Rattlesnake Pete, and that name’s stayed with me ever since.”
In front of the Blaine Hotel, all saddled up and ready to ride, Stephens had high praise for the eight others, and he never forgot them. “They were really tough men,” he would say. “I was just a kid.”
Being Rattlesnake Pete, however, was both hard to live up to and hard to live down. The moniker had been bandied about around the country and pasted on a good number of other characters seeking their own fortune and a fearsome reputation. Even Buffalo Bill had a Rattlesnake Pete. His real name was William Henry Liddiard, a federal marshal, grocer, and implement dealer in Springfield, Nebraska. He toured with Cody’s Wild West show for a spell. Liddiard was notable for his handlebar mustache and was known in the Marshals Service as rather “quick on the draw.” He was buried in Springfield’s Ball Cemetery, but he apparently refused to lie still. For years his ghost was said to haunt the Nebraska graveyard, upholding the law in the spirit world.
More Petes showed up over the years. As late as 1935, an impostor rode in on a roan horse for the annual Days of ’76 celebrations in Deadwood, South Dakota. He climbed down and strutted bowlegged along Main Street’s crooked gulch, carrying on about hunting buffalo and shooting Indians. He claimed he personally had witnessed Wild Bill Hickok taking that bullet in the back of his head during a Deadwood game of stud poker in 1876. He tossed about a fair number of names, too, old pals such as “Poker Alice” Ivers and Jack McCall. But he went too far when he claimed he was the Rattlesnake Pete who had raced to Chicago in 1893.
“I’m the cowboy who rode the horse from Chadron to Chicago in the World’s Fair,” he lied. “I rode in 14 days and three-quarters, registering my horse every 60 miles. It was a thousand miles and I got a thousand dollars for it. I was the only cowboy who got it.” A journalist asked him whether he would do it again. “Just show me the color of your thousand dollars, pardner. Let me feed this pony and I’ll be in Chicago a week come next Monday.”
Four years later, another stranger, born August “Gus” Robson but passing himself off as yet another Rattlesnake Pete, barged into San Francisco with long hair, a thick beard, and a cowboy kerchief wound round his neck. He appeared “wild and woolly, spry and rarin’ to go,” despite his seventy-seven years. He said he had ridden with some of the best—Buffalo Bill, Calamity Jane, and Wild Bill. He said he also was Teddy Roosevelt’s personal barber when the former president had hunted wild game in Africa. He claimed he still shaved with the same razor he had used to “whack off” Roosevelt’s whiskers.
Even back in June 1893, many in the press confused James Stephens with another oddity named “Rattlesnake Pete” Gruber of Oil City, Pennsylvania. He often modeled in a suit of 125 rattlesnake skins and kept live snakes in his local barroom. “Naturally,” noted one paper, “it had a depressing effect on business.”
But Jim Stephens wore his nickname proudly. For years after the race to Chicago, he worked as a small-town barber in central Kansas and hung on his wall a large painting of himself as Rattlesnake Pete astride General Grant (this page). He was pictured sitting upright under a big white hat, his shoulders arched back, pistols at the ready around his waist. Someone wrote on a bottom corner of the picture, describing Stephens when the race ended as looking “jaded and sleepy.” But, the note added, “Pete himself is lively as a cricket and feeling first rate.”
Like any good cowboy, Stephens could be cranky. When the barbers’ union went on strike in Hutchinson, Kansas, most of them steered clear of Stephens’s shop; he scared them off. “I gave them a cordial invitation to come in but they gave it up,” he said. “I set ’em on their heads. I’m not afraid of them.” He also ran a barber school in a room above a saloon. When the boys in the bar got too loud, Stephens fired off a pistol and marched the drunkards to jail. “He had a six-gun,” recalled his nephew Bill Stephens. “One of those big, old-fashioned long guns with a pearl handle.” When Stephens once appeared at the jailhouse door with a group of rowdies in tow, the sheriff cited him for firing a loaded pistol inside the town.
Recalled Jack S. Gellerstedt, one of many Hutchinson youths who loved hearing Wild West stories from the old trail hand, “I once asked if he had ever shot anyone. After all, my knowledge about cowboys was gained from the silver screen at the afternoon matinees and, mainly, cowboys in the movies shot people. He said he once shot a man in the leg, but for whatever reason I do not remember. Perhaps there was some disagreement. I don’t have the impression he intended to ‘do him in,’ but just slow him down some.” Upon reflection, Gellerstedt added, “But I don’t think he was ever in a gunfight. That’s romantic Old West stuff.”
Rattlesnake Pete married Florence Lawson two years after the race. In sixty years of marriage, she always referred to him as “Mr. Stephens” in public; at home, behind closed doors, he was “Jimmy.” The couple never had children, and so it fell to his nephews, nieces, and other town children to listen to his cowboy stories. He shared with many of the young lessons in life’s difficulties. “He warned us many times if we wanted to take a toke, it would rot our stomachs,” recalled niece Joan Pivonka. “He’d put a nickel in a glass of beer and say, ‘See what’s going to happen to you?’ … He was just a very small, very feisty person. Tons of energy even for his age. He was using up all kinds of energy.”
The remaining cowboys are largely lost to history, overshadowed by the outsized personalities of the better-known riders and one sly railroad surveyor. But they had their moments.
Emmett Albright owned a ranch in a section outside Chadron, which locals called “the Table.” Earlier he had worked horses in Texas and then shifted operations to northern Nebraska. When he first showed an interest in the race, back in February, he rode to town and was photographed for the papers booted up and spurred, with a broad Stetson hat and a six-shooter on his hip, poised to rope and ride. He sat upon a “fierce looking broncho,” and he called his horse Outlaw. For a while he and Billy the Bear were equal partners in a money-lending and business concern. When in town, he often stayed the night at Billy’s home.
Joe Campbell from Colorado rode penniless, bet others he would not be last to Chicago, and wound up with a small spot in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. (Dawes County Historical Museum)
Joe Campbell rode a horse named Boom-de-aye or Boomerang and had h
is picture taken, too, waving from atop the big gray gelding. He came from a crossroads called Watkins on the Colorado Plateau. He had ridden from Denver in eight days in mid-May and hung around town to make sure the race would be a go. He would need but one horse, he said; he decided not to bring along a spare. He also rode penniless, his pockets empty, but he bet some of the Chadron sharpies $250 that he would not be the last of the nine to reach Chicago.
“Little Davy” Douglas was still in his teens and arrived with two horses, Wide Awake and Monte Cristo.
George “Stub” Jones rode the bay gelding Romeo and brought along a second gelding, a black named George, after himself. His uncle, the stockman Ed Lemmon of South Dakota, the so-called Dean of the Range from the Northern Plains, had selected his two horses. “My nephew was a small man, weighing 135 pounds,” Lemmon would remember. “He rode a light stock saddle. He was hardened into the saddle and knew how to ride, both to save himself and just as necessary to save his horse.” Lemmon knew what his nephew would need to pull through on a long-distance, two-week sprint: “The horse and the rider are tested to the limit of their endurance.”
Last to saddle up was Charley “C. W.” Smith from Hot Springs, South Dakota, the son of a liveryman. When he worked, he pitched hay or hunted professionally, often dressing in fancy buckskins. Smith also did a turn at the U Cross cattle ranch on the Cheyenne River in South Dakota, and he almost missed the race altogether. While heading down to Chadron, one of his two horses, Dynamite, was stolen and ridden fifty miles in three hours, he said, before it was recovered. Yet the horse appeared “none the worse for the experience.”
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