Army Captain Charles King’s statement is quoted in Robert G. Carter, On the Border with Mackenzie, or Winning West Texas from the Comanches (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2001), 46–47, as well as in Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891 (New York: Macmillan, 1973), ix.
2. The Harsh Land
The tragedy of the Haumann sisters is told in Sheldon, Nebraska Old and New, 347–51. Janice Hodges of Thedford, Nebraska, Retta’s great-niece, also helped fill in more of the family history.
For more on the Sand Hills, see C. F. Keech and Ray Bentall, “Dunes on the Plains: The Sand Hills Region of Nebraska,” a resource report published by the Nebraska Conservation and Survey Division, Lincoln, February 1971; and Solomon D. Butcher, Pioneer History of Custer County, Nebraska (Denver: Sage Books, 1965), 399–403. See also Kathryne L. Lichty, “A History of the Settlement of the Nebraska Sandhills,” master’s thesis, University of Wyoming, 1960.
Mari Sandoz was Nebraska’s most celebrated pioneer historian; her father, Jules, helped map and settle the virgin grasslands. Of her many works, her most intimate is the biography of her father, Old Jules: Portrait of a Pioneer (New York: MJF Books, 1963). A good summary of her own life and other works can be found in Virginia Faulkner, Roundup: A Nebraska Reader (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1957), 382–86.
In “Nebraska,” a feature Sandoz wrote for Holiday magazine in May 1956, she relived much of the state’s history, seen through her own pioneer eyes as a young woman coming of age in the state’s northwestern region. Here she tells of the “gradual climb toward the Continental Divide,” of how an October afternoon “can be so lovely it stops the heart,” and how she helped map out territory on the floor of her family’s dusty cabin. She recalls, too, the old Sioux who sat by their front door, “visiting over his pipe,” the Pawnee rainmaker, and the crush of white immigrants. As a young girl, she met Buffalo Bill Cody and thought him “the showiest showman of all time.”
As Sandoz wrote the state’s early history, Willa Cather captured it in literature. Raised in Red Cloud, on the state’s southern end, she too lived a young girl’s life on the open range. Her novels, particularly My Ántonia and O Pioneers!, are as rich as the state’s topsoil. Her love of the land is recounted in Faulkner, Roundup, 124–30. Cather herself, in her essay “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle,” Nation, September 5, 1923, sadly conceded that the “splendid story of the pioneers is finished.” More of her remembrances are found in Mildred R. Bennett, “Willa Cather and the Prairie,” Nebraska History (Summer 1975): 231–35; and in the introduction by Elaine Showalter to O Pioneers! (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2011), vii–xvii.
Daniel Webster’s dismissal of the West is cited in Tristram P. Coffin, “The Cowboy and the Myth,” Western Folklore (October 1953): 79.
For President Lincoln and the Homestead Act, see Paul W. Gates, “The Homestead Act,” in An American Primer, ed. Daniel J. Boorstin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 386–92.
The pioneers’ guide warning immigrants to “make up your mind to rough it” comes from “Tips for Stage Riders,” printed by the Omaha Herald throughout much of 1877. It also is cited in Huston Horn, The Pioneers (New York: Time-Life Books, 1974), 195.
George Washington Franklin’s diary was excerpted in the Journal of the West (January 1977): 37–39.
Thomas Jefferson Huntzinger appears in David J. Wishart, The Last Days of the Rainbelt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 51, 68, 70, 79, 82, 100.
Wallace Hoze Wilcock also can be found in Wishart, Last Days of the Rainbelt, 51–52, 55, 87, 97.
The value of newspaper sheets as winter blankets is mentioned in American Agriculturist (February 1862): 53.
For even more health cures and other medical miracles, see A Treasury of Nebraska Pioneer Folklore, comp. Roger L. Welsch (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 356–59.
The Antelope County growth figures are from Everett Dick, The Sod-House Frontier, 1854–1890 (Lincoln: Johnsen Publishing, 1954), 440.
The emergence of Haigler is reported in Wishart, Last Days of the Rainbelt, 60–61.
George Edwin Bushnell’s “Trip across the Plains in 1864” is available online at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~steelquist/GeoBushnell.html.
Cora A. Beels of Norfolk, Nebraska, was interviewed on August 27, 1941, by Wolfgang Schmidt for the Pioneer Life in Nebraska pamphlets, comp. by the workers of the WPA Writers’ Program of the Works Progress Administration for the state of Nebraska.
Lucy Alice Ide’s diary was memorialized as “In a Prairie Schooner, 1878,” Washington Historical Quarterly (July 1927): 191–98.
Emily Towell’s journey west was recorded in her diaries and published in Kenneth L. Holmes, ed., Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1875–1883 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 197–219.
Charles Moreau Harger’s essay “Phases of Western Life” ran in Outlook magazine, January 6, 1894, 18–20. He also wrote “Cattle Trails of the Prairies,” Scribner’s Magazine (June 1892): 732–42. His work was followed by another Outlook essay, G. M. Whicher, “Phases of Western Life,” January 13, 1894, 63–65, which described the “sameness” of the prairie.
Charles Morgan’s story about pioneer women and their use or nonuse of gloves comes from Wishart, Last Days of the Rainbelt, 93.
Martha Gilmore Lundy’s efforts to establish a town cemetery in Kit Carson County, Colorado, are also recounted in Wishart, Last Days of the Rainbelt, 105.
In 1929, Jules Haumont presented his “old settler” talk to the Daughters of the American Revolution at Broken Bow, Nebraska. It was later published as “Pioneer Years in Custer County,” Nebraska History (October–December 1932): 223–37.
Henry H. Raymond’s diary is preserved in the stacks at the Kansas Historical Society in Topeka. It also was excerpted in “Diary of a Buffalo Hunter,” ed. Joseph W. Snell, Kansas Historical Quarterly (Winter 1965): 345–95.
The surprise encounter between Matilda Peterson, No-Flesh, and her piping-hot doughnuts has been told widely and with great relish, including in Everett Dick, Tales of the Frontier: From Lewis and Clark to the Last Roundup (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 205–6; and in Horn, Pioneers, 219.
The plagues of grasshoppers and the frontier fight to contain them, including the stories of Herman Westermann and the Finch family, can be found in Alexander H. Wagner, “Grasshoppered,” Nebraska History (Winter 2008): 154–67.
The Wichita City Eagle article, dated August 13, 1874, was cited in Horn, Pioneers, 216.
For more on the grasshopper menace, see “The Plains: Some Press Bulletins,” Agricultural Experiment Station of the Colorado Agricultural College, Fort Collins, January 1908, 17–18; Compendium of History, Reminiscence, and Biography of Western Nebraska (Chicago: Alden Publishing, 1912), 92–93; and Dick, Sod-House Frontier, 202–3.
The blizzard of 1888 that so ravaged swaths of the frozen tundra covering Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota, as well as the Dakota Territory, is perhaps best told by David Laskin, The Children’s Blizzard (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). Other accounts were gleaned from Faulkner, Roundup, 263–68; Bayard H. Paine, Pioneers, Indians and Buffaloes (Curtis, NE: Curtis Enterprise, 1935), 47; and W. H. O’Gara, comp., In All Its Fury: A History of the Blizzard of Jan. 12, 1888 (Lincoln: January 12, 1888, Blizzard Club), 1947.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s thoughts about the difficult West were offered in his 1879 article “The Plains of Nebraska” and were later included in his travel memoir Across the Plains (London: Chatto & Windus, 1892). They were further excerpted in Faulkner, Roundup, 401–3.
Howard Ruede’s diary and correspondence were collected in Sod-House Days: Letters from a Kansas Homesteader, 1877–78 (1937; Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1983). They also can be found in Martin Ridge and Ray Allen Billington, eds., America’s Frontier Story: A D
ocumentary History of Western Expansion (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 624–30.
George Washington Franklin’s diary was, as noted earlier, excerpted in the Journal of the West (January 1977): 37–39.
The correspondence of Emma Robertson of North Bend, Nebraska, was published in “The Ranch Letters of Emma Robertson, 1891–1892,” Nebraska History (Summer 1975): 221–29.
Frank H. Spearman’s essay “The Great American Desert” appears in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (July 1888): 232–45.
The interview with Frank Grady of Raymond, Nebraska, was conducted on October 3, 1941, by J. Willis Kratzer for the Pioneer Life in Nebraska pamphlets, comp. by the Workers of the WPA Writers’ Program of the Works Progress Administration for the state of Nebraska.
For more on the struggles of opening the West, see Cass G. Barns, The Sod House (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970); Seth K. Humphrey, Following the Prairie Frontier (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931); Dee Brown, Wondrous Times on the Frontier (Little Rock, AR: August House, 1991); Everett Dick, Vanguard of the Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1941); Donald R. Hickey, Susan A. Wunder, and John R. Wunder, Nebraska Moments (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2007); Charles Dudley Warner, “Studies of the Great West,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (March 1888): 556–68; and David Lowenthal, “The Pioneer Landscape: An American Dream,” Great Plains Quarterly (Winter 1982): 5–19.
3. The Vanishing Cowboy West
Cora A. Beels shared her hair-raising stories of cowboy shoot-’em-ups in tiny Norfolk, Nebraska, in her August 27, 1941, interview with Wolfgang Schmidt for the Pioneer Life in Nebraska pamphlets.
The March 8, 1879, Oakdale Pen and Plow reported the cowboy violence in that small Nebraska town.
The troubles in the little Kansas towns of Winfield and Chanute are mentioned in Dick, Sod-House Frontier, 392–93.
The dark episodes in Kearney, Nebraska, are offered in Maud Marston Burrows, “The Last Cowboy Raid of Kearney,” Nebraska History (April–June 1938): 126–27.
The Dodge City, Kansas, portrait appears in Joe B. Frantz and Julian Ernest Choate Jr., The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), 93.
Fred Horne’s raucous day in court was reported in the Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1885.
The devilries of Curly Bill, Russian Bill, and Sandy King were captured in Ben C. Truman, “The Passing of the Cowboy,” Overland Monthly (November 1902): 464–67.
David Love’s memory of the wounded cowboy comes from John McPhee, Rising from the Plains (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 89–90. It also is cited in Frantz and Choate, American Cowboy, 68.
The artist Charles M. Russell’s anecdote that cowboys are only “part human” and more of his frontier observations can be found in his memoir, Trails Plowed Under: Stories of the Old West (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 1996).
The Charley O’Kieffe cowboy memoir was published as Western Story: The Recollections of Charley O’Kieffe, 1884–1898 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960). See also Welsch, Treasury of Nebraska Pioneer Folklore, xv, 307, 312–13.
Marshall W. Fishwick wrote “The Cowboy: America’s Contribution to the World’s Mythology,” Western Folklore (April 1952): 77–92.
J. T. Botkin’s stories were compiled in “Concerning a Day When Cowboys Were Cowboys,” part of the Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society, 1923–1925, Together with Addresses, Memorials and Miscellaneous Papers, ed. William Elsey Connelley (Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1925), 493–96.
Cowboy slang was lassoed in Rudolph Umland, “Nebraska Cowboy Talk,” American Speech (February 1952): 73–75. See also Mark H. Brown and W. R. Felton, Before Barbed Wire (New York: Henry Holt, 1956), 126–29; and Charles Wellington Furlong, Let ’Er Buck: A Story of the Passing of the Old West (New York: Overlook Press, 2007), 235–42.
The best description of the cowboy’s lot in life—who he was, what he wore, what he rode—remains Owen Wister, “The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (September 1895): 602–16. Also top-notch are Frantz and Choate, American Cowboy; E. C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott and Helena Huntington Smith, We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955); Lon Tinkle and Allen Maxwell, eds., The Cowboy Reader: The American Cowboy’s Life on the Range (New York: Longmans, Green, 1959); Philip Ashton Rollins, The Cowboy: An Unconventional History of Civilization on the Old-Time Cattle Range (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); David T. Courtwright, Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 87–103; John Bratt, Tails of Yesterday (Lincoln, NE: University Publishing, 1921); James H. Cook, Fifty Years on the Old Frontier as Cowboy, Hunter, Guide, Scout and Ranchman (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980); Solomon D. Butcher, Pioneer History of Custer County, Nebraska (Denver: Sage Books, 1965), 154–57, 167–72; Clifford P. Westermeier, Trailing the Cowboy: His Life and Lore as Told by Frontier Journalists (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1955), 26–37; Jack Potter, The Trail Drivers of Texas (Nashville: Cokesbury Press, 1925); Matthew Johnson Herron, “The Passing of the Cowman,” Overland Monthly (February 1910); Thomas Holmes, “A Cowboy’s Life,” Chautauquan (September 1894): 730–32; and Robert Sturgis, “The Real Cowboy,” Prairie Schooner (Winter 1932): 30–38.
L. M. Cox was interviewed on November 22, 1937, in San Angelo, Texas, by Elizabeth Doyle as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project. The session in which he discussed long-distance horse riding was titled “An 1880s Cowboy Speaks for the Record (1937).”
Julian Ralph’s article “A Talk with a Cowboy” ran in Harper’s Weekly, April 16, 1892, 375–76.
More on long-distance rider and rodeo champion Ed Richards can be found in Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 402.
Ed Lemmon’s reminiscences were published in Boss Cowman.
Cora Beels’s quotation is taken from her August 27, 1941, interview with Wolfgang Schmidt for the Pioneer Life in Nebraska pamphlets.
Kansas City Mayor William S. Cowherd’s speech was reported in the Kansas City Daily Journal, June 28, 1893.
The old trail driver’s dismay that homesteaders were “the ruin of the country” can be found in Louis Pelzer, The Cattlemen’s Frontier (Glendale, CA: Arthur Clark, 1936), 190. More on this old pioneer can be found in David Dary, Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1981), 319.
The story of cowboys looking for work in New York City came from the New York Sun; the story was reprinted on May 25, 1893, in the Kansas City Star.
Red Cloud’s speech at the Cooper Institute in New York was reported by the New York Times on June 17, 1870. It merited the lead story on p. 1 that morning. It is also included in George H. Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), 179–80.
The great chief’s Fourth of July speech in Chadron was reported by the Chadron Democrat, July 4, 1889. It also is noted in Charles W. Allen, From Fort Laramie to Wounded Knee: In the West That Was (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). Addison E. Sheldon, superintendent of the Nebraska State Historical Society, further recorded the speech in Nebraska History (January–March 1929): 44.
The story of Red Cloud visiting the reservation post office is related in Allen, From Fort Laramie to Wounded Knee. It is further discussed in Charles Wesley Allen and Red Cloud, Autobiography of Red Cloud: War Leader of the Oglalas (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1997), 1, 8–12, 196–99. Red Cloud is also discussed in a December 1907 profile by Warren K. Moorehead, “The Passing of Red Cloud,” in Transactions of the Kansas State Historical Society, 1907–1908 (Topeka: State Printing Office, 1908), 295–311.
The scavenger hunts for dried-out buffalo bones are described in M. I. McCreight
, Buffalo Bone Days (Sykesville, PA: Nupp Printing, 1939); Lemmon, “Developing the West”; and Mari Sandoz, The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1954), 357–58. She also gives figures on the thinning of the herds, 350–52. See further Wayne Gard, The Great Buffalo Hunt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), 295–308.
George Bird Grinnell’s essay “The Last of the Buffalo” was published in Scribner’s Magazine (September 1892): 267–86.
Colonel McLaughlin’s story of the final buffalo hunt is recounted in Lemmon, “Developing the West,” 5–6. For more on McLaughlin’s experiences with Indian people, see Jeffrey Ostler, “The Last Buffalo Hunt and Beyond: Plains Sioux Economic Strategies in the Early Reservation Period,” Great Plains Quarterly (Spring 2001): 115–17.
A. N. Ward of Milford, Nebraska, claimed to the Omaha World-Herald that he had shot the last buffalo in the state in 1881. The paper published his account in its sports pages on October 2, 1910. In Kansas, a hunter named Wilson Schofield claimed the last buffalo kill in that state in October 1873. His story is documented in Adolph Roenigk, Pioneer History of Kansas, a 1933 self-published collection of tales from the frontier days, 98–101.
Edward Creighton’s work stringing the telegraph is recounted in Christopher Corbett, Orphans Preferred (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 115–20. Also of interest is Dennis N. Mihelich and James E. Potter, eds., First Telegraph Line across the Continent: Charles Brown’s 1861 Diary (Lincoln: Nebraska State Historical Society Books, 2011).
Amos Ives Root was a cantankerous sort who had no love for horses, especially once the automobile screeched into town. From his home in Medina, Ohio, he published Gleanings in Bee Culture, and he unloaded his disgust for horses in his issue of January 15, 1904.
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