Charley Smith reached the town first, before the sun came up. He tethered his horse in a barn and collapsed into bed. He rose soon thereafter, gulped down breakfast, and rushed out of Rushville. But while Smith slept, Doc Middleton and some of the others tore through town and kept on racing; they did not stop. A small knot of Middleton fans had stayed up most of the night ready to cheer the outlaw on. He blazed right past them.
By 10 a.m. on Wednesday, the second day of the race, some of the cowboys neared the small hamlet of Lavaca, Nebraska, nothing more than a store and a post office. They paused for water and a nap. Time, wind, heat, and distance already were catching up with the riders, and despite aching backs they settled deeper into the saddle. Middleton, Gillespie, and Albright shook the others for a while and were first to Gordon, Nebraska, fifty miles from Chadron. They saddled up again and rode off. Reporters said it appeared the trio was in “cahoots.”
Horses were watered at a farmhouse six miles south of Gordon, and some of the cowboys followed a path south of the railroad and the Niobrara River. Some carried “wire nippers” to snip fences and slice shortcuts.
Lagging well behind, George Jones reached Gordon at what townspeople remembered as “a slow walk.” He rested for two hours, though neither man nor horse appeared fatigued. He then remounted and started again on a swinging trot, following the reliable Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad tracks. While the other cowboys pushed hard ahead of him, Jones decided that in the days ahead he would ride under the sun and at night sleep beneath a hotel blanket or a canopy of stars. He saw the race as one long haul, a test all about pacing and reserving his horse’s and his own strength.
Wednesday night, Jones rested at a small country station seventy-five miles by train from Chadron, eighty-five by wagon. He slept well and seemed in no hurry. He rose late the next morning, at about 11:30. He stretched and started out by noon. At the next town he rode in again at a jog trot, clocking himself at seven miles an hour. His horse was fresh and pulling on the bit but not sweating at all.
Jones did not realize that Middleton had pushed well past him. “His only fear is that Doc Middleton’s hard-riding qualities may defeat him,” wrote a Chicago Daily Tribune correspondent. “Middleton insists on hard riding night and day, and he’s probably the only man in the outfit who can stand such hardship. Yet Jones thinks this will kill Middleton’s horse, or at least render it worthless before the end of the race.” On Thursday, June 15, Jones trotted into Valentine, Nebraska. He arrived late in the evening, his horse apparently still not in the least fatigued. He stabled his mount and lumbered off to bed.
Other cowboys had swung south of Valentine and kept riding through. The lead kept shifting. Some of the cowboys stopped to rest and water, while others walked their horses a spell.
At Ainsworth, Nebraska, a small railroad crossing, the first to ride in on Friday were Joe Gillespie and James “Rattlesnake Pete” Stephens. They hit town at a quarter to one in the afternoon and hurried to Mosely’s livery stable. Neither said a word, and soon a crowd gathered. Jokes were tossed around about “Old Joe” and Stephens’s rattlesnake hat. Berry rode into Ainsworth, too, and put his horse Poison up in Hogan’s stable.
“Doc Middleton!” rose up a shout, and the crowd rushed to another livery stable. Middleton waved but wanted everyone kept back. “Quite a number expressed confidence in the skill and nerve of Middleton, while others banked on Gillespie’s pluck and big horse,” reported the Ainsworth Star-Journal. “Stephens had his admirers too.”
More cowboys filled more of Ainsworth’s horse stalls. “Emmett Albright’s physical condition is giving his friends some uneasiness,” noted the Star-Journal. “His horse, on being mounted, pitched at such a fearful rate that Albright is unable to retain any food in his stomach. He hopes to tone the buckskin down.”
Who might win? “So much depends upon the staying quality of the horses,” the paper concluded; “the judgment and health of the riders, as well as accidents which may be absolutely unavoidable.”
The next stop was Long Pine, Nebraska, 190 miles east of Chadron, where the first of the cowboys pulled in Friday night. Humane Society officials Fontaine and Tatro and race committee secretary Weir were waiting, just off the early train. Here was the first registration station.
“Talk about circus day,” wrote the Omaha Daily Bee’s man in Long Pine. It had been nearly impossible to learn anything about the riders out on the road, and a crowd had grown tired waiting. They were about to return home when suddenly a local wag mounted a wild broncho. He pulled a big white hat over his head and led another horse bucking down the center of Long Pine. “Everybody in town who could walk rushed out to see him,” the paper reported. But no one was fooled; he was not one of the cowboys.
Middleton, Gillespie, and Stephens reached Long Pine first. They charged side by side into town through the Long Pine Chautauqua grounds. At the house of a man named Dwinnell, Gillespie registered first, Middleton third. “They were all in good spirits and their horses in such good shape that the Humane officers could find no fault,” said the Daily Bee.
The women of Long Pine swooned around the riders and clustered about the horses, pulling strands of tail hairs as keepsakes. “If [the horses] have any hair left when they reach Chicago, it will be surprising,” another reporter wrote.
As the cowboys dashed off, Fontaine pronounced the horses fine, Middleton’s the healthiest. Fontaine’s only worry was that the cowboys “need sleep.” Race secretary Weir wired back to Chadron: “Gillespie, Stephens, Middleton in.… Horses satisfy humane men.” He added, “Nothing has been heard from John Berry or Smith since they left Gordon.”
Berry turned up in Long Pine later that night. He and several of the riders had torn through the Sand Hills, trying to avoid the small towns and big crowds that surrounded the hills. The Sand Hills were a more direct, if treacherous, route. Berry the railroad surveyor would know that.
Three days in the saddle had flown by, and the cowboys’ determination continued to trigger objections around the country about animal cruelty. “A shame to American civilization,” complained the Toledo Blade in Ohio. “An idiotic and cruel spectacle,” argued the Minneapolis Tribune. The Milwaukee Journal suggested that the cowboys should trade their horses in for bicycles and “wheel” the rest of their way to Chicago. The Lawrence (KS) Journal dared the riders to rein in their horses: “If the men who ride are real cowboys they will bring their horse through without turning a hair, and there will be no cruelty of any kind.” The New York Tribune wanted the race shut down altogether. Three days was too much; they had seen enough. “The cowboy racers appear to have made up their minds to run the gauntlet of the laws against cruelty to animals. We hope that their finish line will be just inside the doors of a strong and well-guarded jail.”
Undeterred, the cowboys pushed on. Rattlesnake Pete Stephens made Newport, Nebraska, on Saturday, June 17, and he headed straight for Barber’s barn. He treated General Grant to a mix of oatmeal water and feed. Stephens slept soundly, but just for an hour, under his white hat with a blue-ribbon band and the seventy-two rattlesnake tails. (The Chicago Evening Post called it “a hideous looking ornament.”)
Middleton and Gillespie roared up behind him. They fed their horses oatmeal water and dined at the Lee Hotel. Desperate for a few hours of sleep, they fell into bed and did not awaken until midnight. Gillespie had come into Newport riding one horse and leading another. “His horses look well,” noted the Evening Post. Middleton seemed “very tired, but his horses are all right.” Many in Newport pushed in around him, recalling that the outlaw “knew every foot of ground in the county.” The other riders were feared lost in the Sand Hills or “laid up for repairs.”
The cowboys who were currently in the lead—Stephens, Gillespie, and Middleton—vanished out of Newport at first light on Sunday, June 18. Fontaine and Tatro waited at the second inspection station in O’Neill, Nebraska. When the cowboys arrived and their horses had been inspected,
the Humane Society officials announced that the riders had “thus far won the approval of all concerned.”
Stephens still held the lead; hot behind him charged Middleton and Gillespie. A local cornet band serenaded all three. Crowds smothered in close to see them ink their names into the race register book. The men stabled their horses and took supper at the Hotel Evans. Middleton recognized many of the faces in the crowd. He and his old outlaw gangs once had terrorized this pocket of northeast Nebraska. Yet many in O’Neill still were awed by the former bandit and horse thief. They hoped Doc would win; they considered him the obvious state favorite.
But Doc felt nervous; he was agitated and jumpy. He barked at the crowds to push back. He wanted to be left alone to think and concentrate on the race. The hours and speed and fortitude, the wind and saddle burrs were wearing on him. So he told them that in the days ahead he might start “slipping” through the larger towns under the cover of night, anything to get around the finicky crowds and the fussy women pinching his horse’s tail.
O’Neill residents could see that Rattlesnake Pete was wearing down, too. He was coughing and pale, and they guided him to a doctor’s office for a bottle of syrup and an extra prescription for refills for along the line. All three leading cowboys, Gillespie included, “were kept pretty busy taking special care of their horses, of which they seemed very proud,” the local paper reported. Tired and torn, stiff-legged and bent, they sat down to dinner together, not letting any of the trio get out of sight.
Soon they were up and again in the saddle and clearing out of O’Neill, flying along the road east, battling the dust, sucking the wind, giving their horses the reins. Berry, the railroad man, missed them by just minutes. He roared into O’Neill next, but secretary Weir would not let him register, since he had been disqualified in Chadron. Some in O’Neill now jeered at Berry. They ridiculed him as the “Silent Man.” When he left O’Neill, John Berry walked his horse Poison.
In the rear limped some of the others, straggling in after 6 p.m. Sunday and early into Monday morning. Douglas had taken sick and abandoned the race back at Atkinson, Nebraska. He was out. Mike Elmore, who owned Douglas’s two horses, caught up with him. He hired a buggy and purchased some extra harness gear, vowing that he would chase after the rest of the cowboys and by “hook or crook” beat them all to Chicago. But that was the last anyone saw of Mike Elmore and his buggy.
Doc Middleton poses with his horse. All the smart money in Nebraska rode with the reformed outlaw to Chicago. (Nebraska State Historical Society)
Other riders wandered into O’Neill nearly broken. Smith had sprained an ankle when his horse threw him, and Albright had lost time, he said, trying to maneuver around “a small lake in the road.”
Deep in the O’Neill crowd, circuit judge and future congressman Moses P. Kinkaid pronounced himself “well pleased” so far. He said he was “confident” one or more of the riders would make Chicago in fairly decent shape atop a fairly healthy horse.
Late that Sunday night, with the three leading cowboys and their horses having cleared out of O’Neill, Fontaine and Tatro issued their first official Humane Society progress report. They asked the townspeople along the route to stop crowding the cowboys, pulling the horses’ tails, and slowing them down. “We desire to have the public understand,” they announced, “that so far as the race committee has made us a committee to judge of any over driving or cruelty and to lay off any horses what we may determine require it, the racers be allowed to go their way unmolested between register stations. All horses are examined at each register station by us. No over driving or cruelty will be allowed. The riders have thus far won the approval of all concerned and we trust no trouble will occur.”
Few in the press in Nebraska and around the nation bought it, and many locals resented the Humane Society officials’ interference. The writer of the “No Man’s Column” for the O’Neill Frontier newspaper complained that Fontaine and Tatro had “made themselves the laughing stock of the West.… They have but little idea of this great West and underestimate the people who inhabit it. Instead of the boys being received with hisses and cries of shame, they have been greeted by brass bands and escorted through the different towns along their route in a manner that would have flattered a Roman conqueror.”
The Nebraska columnist praised Middleton in particular, recalling an incident in a local barn where Doc was having one of his horses shod, and a blind man guided by a small boy wandered in begging for money. Middleton reached deep in his pockets and handed the man some cash “with generosity which is characteristic of all typical westerners.” Tatro, however, “had not a cent” to share, even though his organization was well funded and said it cared deeply for animals. He offered nothing for a suffering fellow human being. The world, lamented the columnist, “must be a hoodoo.”
In Iowa, the Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette also defended the cowboys and condemned the Eastern critics still railing against “cowboy cruelty” and warning that “each and every cowboy may land inside a jail.” The Gazette listed other problems in the United States, saying there were far too many to “whimper over the woes of five or six ponies” on a horse race. Twenty-two people in Washington had been “killed through official neglect,” the paper pointed out. “A dozen inmates of a ‘sweat shop’ were roasted in New York for lack of decent care of human life, and every daily paper from the East is filled with tales of want and crime and woe.” To naysayers and critics, the paper advised, “Seek out a cave in some vast wilderness with bathroom attached and soak your heads. The West has no time for sickly sentiment.”
Seventy more miles east lay Wausa, Nebraska, the third inspection station, with the registration book and the Humane Society agents waiting in the Saxton house. Again Middleton, Gillespie, and Stephens all arrived within five minutes of one another. Gillespie was first to hitch his horse to a side railing, but just by a neck ahead of the others.
A telegram projecting their arrival had been sent to Wausa overnight, and by 3:30 in the afternoon Monday everyone had lined up to welcome the three leading cowboys. A cheer escorted them in; this would be the last registration checkpoint in Nebraska.
Gillespie and Stephens scarfed down supper and rested briefly. Middleton stood guard in the stable, warning the townsfolk to stand back. All three riders scribbled their names in the registry book. They drank thirstily, watered their horses, shook off their clothes, kicked at their boots, and refilled their canteens. In no time they wobbled back to their horses, saddled up, and were gone.
Now barely speaking, the three of them rode tightly together, bunched up like ornery cattle. Gillespie, Stephens, and Middleton: the old man, the rattlesnake, and the outlaw, unable to shake one another. Each man eyed the others closely, their blouses soiled, their pants starched and hardened, their feet sore. Each man’s face was burned summer brown, their lips chapped and cracked and, occasionally, bleeding. Still they strained over their Western bronchos, heads to the wind, unwilling to slow their horses.
Late in the evening of Monday, June 19, the seventh day of the race, they came upon a wooden boat landing on the Missouri River. They smelled the water before they saw it, and Gillespie, Stephens, and Middleton reared back, slowed their horses, and then staggered onto the ferry. Their heads sagged and their eyes burned. Their hips were badly bruised. More than ever they wanted to pull off their stiff, cracked leather boots. Instead they clutched the reins of their mounts and gripped the barge railing. They held on.
In the descending twilight, amid the lapping of a thick, brown, swirling current, the ragged cowboys floated toward the far shore.
Through the shimmering mist they could make out a line of lanterns flickering on the other side. The cowboys lifted their hats in salute. The crowd, about fifteen hundred strong, answered them back with a loud roar, a welcoming hurrah.
So long, sweet Nebraska. Howdy, Iowa.
In God’s Land
9
The cowboys came tumbling off the wood-and-iron Vint
Stillings river ferry, a twelve-year-old flatboat, and the captain blared his whistle, urging the thick Sioux City, Iowa, crowds to move back from the landing gate. Doc Middleton unloaded first. He pulled off his heavy boots and knocked them dry. He hiked up his damp trousers and straightened the soiled kerchief round his neck. When he plopped his broad white sombrero back on his head, it sent up a swirl of trail dust. He petted his horse, the only one he had left.
The outlaw had abandoned his second horse, Romeo, on the other side of the muddy Missouri. Romeo had begun to limp, and with a strained hind leg gave out at a small place called Coleridge, one of the last spots in Nebraska. Now Middleton and the two other leading cowboys had crossed the river and planted their boots and horses’ hooves deep in the river muck of what Iowans and others boasted was “God’s Land.”
“We came over from Coleridge today,” Middleton announced, explaining how they had barreled through the falling dusk and the last of Nebraska to the water’s edge and town limits of Sioux City. Everyone crowded in to see what had washed ashore, men in their farm overalls and town suits, women in aprons, some in house dresses, and gangly mobs of jumpy children. Some lifted their lanterns to shine light on the cowboys; others reached out to slap at the saddles and finger the creased leather. For hours they had been waiting along the embankment, and now here were the first three tattered cowboys trying to gather themselves up, soothe their horses, and find their way into town.
“As near as I can tell, we made about 64 miles,” Middleton said, river foam lapping at his boots. “We came along at an easy jog, leaving at 5 o’clock this morning. I stopped several times on the road and fed four times during the day.”
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