Professor E. H. Moore read his paper “The Cattle Industry in the United States” to the second annual convention of the National Cattle and Horse Growers Association meeting in St. Louis on November 23, 1885. The address was quoted the next day in the Cheyenne (WY) Democrat Leader.
The San Angelo Enterprise report was published on June 7, 1886, in the St. Paul (MN) Daily Globe.
The General William Tecumseh Sherman and Buffalo Bill Cody correspondence is contained in William F. Cody, The Wild West in England, ed. Frank Christianson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 130–33.
Buffalo Bill Cody’s treatise “Famous Hunting Parties of the Plains” was published in Cosmopolitan (June 1894): 131–43.
The film crew working at the Pine Ridge Reservation to dramatize the Wounded Knee massacre was cited in the Chadron Journal on October 17, 1913.
The Topeka Weekly Capital-Commonwealth ran the column “A Fading Race” on April 25, 1889.
Paul de Rousiers’s trip across the West is memorialized in his book American Life (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1892), 187–88.
The Kansas City Times article also ran in the Omaha Daily Bee on May 30, 1893.
Enthusiasm for the Great Cowboy Race was quoted by riders Doc Middleton and Emmett Albright—juxtaposed with the reality that the West was no longer what it had been just “a few years ago”—in the Chicago Daily Tribune, April 13, 1893.
For more on Robert Porter and the Census decision to no longer recognize the frontier, see Gerald D. Nash, “The Census of 1890 and the Closing of the Frontier,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly (July 1980): 98–100. See also Porter’s official report: Department of the Interior, Census Office, Compendium of the Eleventh Census: 1890 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1892).
Ray Allen Billington is the premier biographer of Frederick Jackson Turner. His keynote work is Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). He further highlighted Turner’s groundbreaking study in “Frederick Jackson Turner: The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Boorstin, American Primer.
Emerson Hough wrote “The Settlement of the West: A Study in Transportation,” which ran in Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (November 1901): 91–107.
Ray Stannard Baker’s autobiography, American Chronicle, was published in 1945 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons). His essay “The Western Spirit of Restlessness” was published by Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (July 1908): 467–69.
Doris Bowker Bennett’s memories of the fading West and her uncle were included in A Girl in Wyoming: 1905–1922, her memoir privately published in 1976. She described the once pristine Western landscape on p. 100 and mentions her uncle, the cowboy racer, on pp. 26–27.
The Cody newspaper interview ran in the Columbus (OH) Evening Dispatch, September 4, 1907.
For more on the vanishing Wild West, see Zack T. Sutley, The Last Frontier (New York: Macmillan, 1930); Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, A Short History of the United States (New York: Modern Library, 1948), esp. chap. 15, “The West Comes of Age,” 335–57; Lawrence H. Larsen, The Urban West at the End of the Frontier (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978); Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 613–30; Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880’s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 41–54; Robert M. Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963); Ralph K. Andrist, The Long Death: The Last Days of the Plains Indians (New York: Macmillan, 1964); Emerson Hough, The Passing of the Frontier: A Chronicle of the Old West (1921; New York: United States Publishers Association, 1970); D. M. Kelsey, History of Our Wild West and Stories of Pioneer Life (Chicago: Thompson and Thomas, 1901), esp. 392–437; and Dan Elbert Clark, The West in American History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1937).
Significant magazine articles on the end of the West include Chauncey Thomas, “The Frontier Is Gone,” Golden Book (November 1928): 594–96; Will C. Barnes, “The Passing of the Wild Horse,” American Forests (November 1924): 643–48; William Trowbridge Larned, “The Passing of the Cow-Puncher,” Lippincott’s (August 1895): 267–70; Woodrow Wilson, “The Making of the Nation,” Atlantic (July 1897): 1–14; Frank Norris, “The Frontier Gone at Last,” World’s Work (February 1902): 1728–31; William R. Lighton, “Where Is the West?” Outlook, July 18, 1903, 702–4; Rev. Thomas L. Riggs, “The Last Buffalo Hunt,” Independent, July 4, 1907, 32–38; Harold Peyton Steger, “Photographing the Cowboy as He Disappears,” World’s Work (January 1909): 1111–23; Bernard DeVoto, “The West: A Plundered Province,” Harper’s Monthly (August 1934): 355–64; Jeffrey Ostler, “The Last Buffalo Hunt and Beyond: Plains Sioux Economic Strategies in the Early Reservation Period,” Great Plains Quarterly (Spring 2001): 115–30; and John Cloud Jacobs, “Last of the Buffalo,” World’s Work (January 1909): 11098–100.
Also of interest is the opening address by Gurdon W. Wattles, president of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha, printed by the Omaha Daily Bee on June 2, 1898.
4. Buffalo Bill Goes to the Fair
The bible on the adventures and Wild West career of William F. Cody remains Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960). Other fine works include Robert A. Carter, Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man behind the Legend (New York: John Wiley, 2000); Helen Cody Wetmore, Buffalo Bill, Last of the Great Scouts: The Life Story of Colonel William F. Cody (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965); Buffalo Bill and His Wild West Companions, a work with no author designated (Chicago: Henneberry Company, 1893); John M. Burke, Buffalo Bill from Prairie to Palace: The Papers of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody (Lincoln: Bison Books, 2012); Joseph G. Rosa and Robin May, Buffalo Bill and His Wild West: A Pictorial Biography (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1989); Stella Foote, ed., Letters from Buffalo Bill (El Segundo, CA: Upton and Sons, 1991); Dan Cody Muller, My Life with Buffalo Bill (Whitefish, MT: Literary Licensing, 2011); William F. Cody, The Wild West in England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012); William F. Cody, The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); Judy Alter, Wild West Shows (New York: Franklin Watts, 1997); James Monaghan, “The Stage Career of Buffalo Bill,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (December 1938): 411–22; Sandra K. Sagala, “Buffalo Bill v. Doc Carver: The Battle over the Wild West,” Nebraska History (March 2004): 2–15; Nate Salsbury, “The Origin of the Wild West Show,” Colorado (July 1955): 204–14; William S. E. Coleman, “Buffalo Bill on Stage,” Players (January 1972): 80–91; Dorothy Wagner, “Buffalo Bill, Showman,” Palimpsest (December 1930): 522–40; and W. B. “Bat” Masterson, “Colonel Cody—Hunter, Scout, Indian Fighter,” Human Life (March 1908): 135–46.
My great thanks also go to the staff and archives at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming.
The Last Chance mining camp encounter appears in a Buffalo Bill dime novel by Colonel Prentiss Ingraham, Buffalo Bill’s Sweepstake; or the Wipe-Out at Last Chance (New York: Beadle and Adams, 1893). It was rushed out just as Cody pronounced the winner of the Great Cowboy Race.
The Charlotte (NC) Daily Observer reported the Wild West train wreck on October 30, 1901. More can be found in Caron Myers, “Buffalo Bill Derailed in Davidson County,” Our State (October 2011): 56–58, 60, 62.
Cody’s letter to his sister Julia can be found in Carter, Buffalo Bill Cody. Julia’s further personal recollections and correspondence with her famous brother are in Don Russell, ed., “Julia Cody Goodman’s Memoirs of Buffalo Bill,” Kansas Historical Quarterly (Winter 1962): 442–96.
To venture further into Cody’s affair with Mrs. Gould, as well as his attractions to other women, see Carter, Buffalo Bill Cody, 388; and Chris Enss, The Many Loves of Buffalo Bill: The True Story of Life on the Wild West Show (Guilford, CT: Two
Dot, 2010), 75–93. The Gould scandal electrified the daily newspapers, including the courtroom accounts of her divorce and her connection to Cody. For a sampling, try the Nebraska State Journal, April 22, 1894, 13; “Mrs. Gould’s Libel Action,” New York Times, April 14, 1899, 14; “Says Howard Gould Was Won by Fraud,” New York Times, November 15, 1907, 5; “Sordid Troubles of the Married Rich,” Covington (NY) Sun, April 16, 1908, 1; and “Mrs. Gould’s Jaunts with Dustin Parnum,” New York Times, June 12, 1909, 3.
The episode of an enraged Lulu returning home after realizing someone else was sharing her husband’s hotel bed in Chicago is told in Carter, Buffalo Bill Cody, 374; Enss, Many Loves of Buffalo Bill, 76; and Foote, Letters from Buffalo Bill, 114–15.
Warren K. Moorehead’s recollections of the day Buffalo Bill came to Newark, Ohio, appear in his The American Indian in the United States: Period 1850–1914 (Andover, MA: Andover Press, 1914), 303.
Frank C. Huss delighting in sharing drinks with Cody is drawn from an oral history taken by his daughter, Mrs. Frank Wilsey, and published in Bert L. Hall, Roundup Years: Old Muddy to Black Hills (Pierre, SD: State Publishing, 1954), 133.
Cody’s earliest plans to haul his Wild West train to Chicago in hopes of joining the world’s fair began in early 1982. See Richmond (VA) Dispatch, February 21, 1892, 5; Omaha Daily Bee, March 17, 1892, 4, and June 19, 1892, 12; Lincoln County (NE) Tribune, June 29, 1892, 3; New York Sun, July 1, 1892, 2; Omaha Daily Bee, July 24, 1892, 15; New York Evening World, October 27, 1892; Columbus (NE) Journal, November 2, 1892, 3; Omaha Daily Bee, November 3, 1892; McCook (NE) Tribune, November 4, 1892, 6; and San Francisco Morning Call, December 4, 1892, 11.
Buffalo Bill’s extensive remarks in Europe regarding long-distance racing—a prelude to the Great Cowboy Race in America and his initial plans to park his Wild West show next to the fair in Chicago—were carried in the St. Paul Daily Globe, November 13, 1892, 8.
Cody’s hopes to open a federal nature preserve are described in the Asheville (NC) Daily Citizen, April 8, 1893, 3.
Cody’s plans and meetings in Washington, D.C., are described in the Washington Evening Star, January 16, 1893, 7, and January 17, 1893, 4; the St. Paul Globe, January 24, 1893, 4; and the Omaha Daily Bee, January 25, 1893, 5, and March 6, 1893, 1.
Buffalo Bill’s lengthy interview with an Omaha Daily Bee reporter ran March 22, 1893, 2, describing his decision to “leave for North Platte tonight” and prepare for opening his Wild West show next to the Chicago fair.
Cody’s complaint about Chicago real estate men is quoted in Steve Friesen, Buffalo Bill: Scout, Showman, Visionary (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2010), 89.
The arrival of Cody’s train cars, cowboys, and wildlife was showcased in the Chicago Tribune, April 14, 1893, 2.
The archives are rich with stories of Buffalo Bill’s triumphant 1893 Wild West season in Chicago. In addition to the Cody biographies, other works include Nellie Snyder Yost, Buffalo Bill: His Family, Friends, Fame, Failures, and Fortunes (Chicago: Sage Books, 1979), 236–74; Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 93–121; Foote, Letters from Buffalo Bill, 20–35; Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill and His Wild West, 66–96; Richard J. Walsh, The Making of Buffalo Bill: A Study in Heroics (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928), 293–304; Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 63–87; Hickey, Wunder, and Wunder, Nebraska Moments, 102–9; Henry Blackman Sell and Victor Weybright, Buffalo Bill and the Wild West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 192–202; Judy Alter, Wild West Shows (New York: Franklin Watts, 1997); Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 161–71; Walter Havighurst, Annie Oakley of the Wild West (New York: Macmillan, 1994), 165–82; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 419–21; Friesen, Buffalo Bill, 89–98; Sarah J. Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business: A History of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 24–27; Daniel Justin Herman, “God Bless Buffalo Bill,” American History (June 2001): 228–37; Louis S. Warren, “Cody’s Last Stand: Masculine Anxiety, the Custer Myth, and the Frontier of Domesticity in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” Western Historical Quarterly (Spring 2003): 49–69; Louis E. Cooke, “Origin of the Wild West,” Billboard, October 2, 1915; and Kathryn White, “ ‘Through Their Eyes’: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West as a Drawing Table for American Identity,” Constructing the Past 7, no. 1 (2006): 35–50.
Cody’s introduction of his Indian actors for his Wild West performances appeared in the Chicago Inter Ocean, April 20, 1893, 7, and the Chicago Record, April 20, 1893, 1. Subsequent features ran in the Chicago Herald over the next several days.
Many useful histories have been written about the experiences of Indian peoples at the World’s Columbian Exposition and other fairs and expositions. They include L. G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883–1933 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999); Linda Scarangella McNenly, Native Performers in Wild West Shows: From Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 44, 50–52; Raymond D. Fogelson, “Red Man in the White City,” in Columbian Consequences: The Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective, vol. 3, ed. David Hurst Thomas (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 73–90; Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865–1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 319–26; Philip Burnham, Song of Dewey Beard: Last Survivor of the Little Bighorn (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 88–107; Chauncey Yellow Robe, “The Menace of the Wild West Show,” a speech he gave to the Fourth Annual Conference of the Society of American Indians, Madison, WI, October 6–11, 1914; Robert A. Trennert Jr., “Selling Indian Education and World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1893–1904,” American Indian Quarterly (Summer 1987): 203–20; L. G. Moses, “Wild West Shows, Reformers, and the Image of the American Indian, 1887–1914,” South Dakota History (Fall 1984): 193–221; Robert W. Rydell, “The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition: ‘To Work Out the Problem of Universal Civilization,’ ” American Quarterly (Winter 1981): 587–607; and L. G. Moses, “Indians on the Midway: Wild West Shows and the Indian Bureau at World’s Fairs, 1893–1904,” South Dakota History (Fall 1991): 205–29.
The opening day of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in Chicago drew rave reviews—found April 27, 1893, in the Chicago Record, Chicago Times, Chicago Inter Ocean, Chicago Post, and Chicago Dispatch, among many others.
5. A Cowboy Race
Amy Leslie was quite the newspaperwoman of her day, and her column written after visiting Cody at the fair ran on June 26, 1893, in the Chicago Daily News. Her impressions of Cody and his Wild West show were later expanded upon and incorporated into her book, a collection of her columns from the Columbian Exposition, called simply Amy Leslie at the Fair (Chicago: W. B. Conkey, 1893), 20–25, 134–39, 148, 151–52, 165–72. She is profiled in Ishbel Ross, Ladies of the Press: The Story of Women in Journalism by an Insider (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), 408–9; Alma J. Bennett, American Woman Theatre Critics: Biographies and Selected Writings of Twelve Reviewers, 1753–1919 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 103–9; Edward T. James, ed., Notable American Women, 1607–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971), 389–90; Charles Yanikoski, “Stephen Crane’s Inamorata: The Real Amy Leslie,” Syracuse University Library Associates Courier 33 (1998–2001): 117–33; Kathryn Hilt and Stanley Wertheim, “Stephen Crane and Amy Leslie: A Rereading of the Evidence,” American Literary Realism (Spring 2000): 256–69; and Joseph Katz, “Some Light on the Stephen Crane–Amy Leslie Affair,” Mad River Review (Winter 1964–65): 43–62. Alma J. Bennett further discusses Leslie in “Traces of Resistance: Displacement, Contradiction, and Appropriation in the Criticism of Amy Leslie, 1895–1915,” PhD diss., Kent State University, 1993.
Chadron is
pitched far out on the northern rim of the Nebraska Panhandle and remains today steeped in Western lore. The local Dawes County Historical Museum houses old newspapers, town diaries, photographs, and other regional artifacts and vividly tells the story of this nearly 135-year-old community. Here, too, is the largest reservoir of items from the Great Cowboy Race, including the golden Colt revolver. My thanks for the museum’s generous hospitality and willingness to share materials on both the city of Chadron and the cowboy race itself.
Other prime sources for Chadron include A. B. Wood, Pioneer Tales of the North Platte Valley and Nebraska Panhandle (Gering, NE: Courier Press, 1938), 198–204; Chadron Centennial History; George D. Watson Jr., Prairie Justice: A 100 Year Legal Study of Chadron and Dawes County (self-published, 1985), 1–37; Minnie Alice Rhoads, A Stream Called Deadhorse (Chadron, NE: Chadron Printing, 1957); Grant L. Shumway, History of Western Nebraska and Its People (Gage County, NE: Western Publishing and Engraving, 1921), esp. the Dawes County chapter; Chadron: A Chronological View of the Early History of the Old-Home-Town, a pamphlet compiled by H. D. Mead in 1925; Nebraska: A Guide to the Cornhusker State, comp. by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for the state of Nebraska (New York: Viking Press, 1939), 320–21; Addison E. Sheldon, “Life on the Frontier,” an address to the Lincoln, NE, Kiwanis Club, August 11, 1939; Tammi Deines, “Old Chadron before, during and after White Settlement,” a personal history, May 14, 1980, 1–7; “The Heroic-Classic Age of Chadron,” an unpublished typewritten history, author unknown, on file at the Dawes County Historical Museum; “Chadron’s Namesake Was Obscure Trader,” TCR Fur Trader, July 2, 1993, 11; Leslie D. Ricker, “Early Years in Dawes County,” Nebraska History (July–September 1932): 206–8; and E. E. Egan, “Old Town Story of the Trials and Hardships of the Pioneering Days in Old Chadron, and Incidents Otherwise,” repr. in the Chadron Record, September 1, 2014.
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