A Week from Hell—The Chicago Race Riots of 1919

A Chicago Tribune cartoon published while the 1919 riots were still raging depicts the flashpoint at the 29th Street Beach.

It began 100 years ago with what might, under other circumstances, have been passed off a teenage rough house when a boy from another neighborhood wandered into waters of a Lake Michigan beach and the local rascals pelted him with stones. By all accounts 24year-old George Stauber threw the rock that ultimately caused 17-year-old Eugene Williams to drown.  When the Chicago police arrived at the chaotic scene they arrested a youth who pointed out the assailant. A melee erupted. It spread over the afternoon and evening into the city streets.

Not much to see here, move on.  Except that the incident set off eight days or deadly rioting across the South Side that ultimately left at least 38 dead and more than 535 treated by local doctors and hospitals or held injured by the police.  Probably additional dead were uncounted and hundreds of the injured did not seek medical help for fear of arrest.  Did I mention that the original victim, Williams, was Black and his attackers were all White. 

Violence spilled from the 29th Street Beach over this pedestrian overpass and rapidly spread through the South Side.

In the midst of one of the city’s suffocating heat waves on July 27 the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 was off and running.  That term can be confusing because to modern ears it evokes the bloody uprisings of despair of the 1960’s and ‘70’s when enraged Blacks in Chicago and other major cities fought police and often burned down their own neighborhoods.  But in 1919 the rioters were mostly White mobs roaming the streets and indiscriminately attacking  Black men, women, and children they encountered; burning black residences, schools, and churches; and looting not only Black businesses, but white-owned shops and stores that sold to them.  

The Chicago Defender, the city's Black newspaper of record reported more accurately on the events than the downtown dailies while trying to calm the situation.

Here and there Blacks individually and in small groups fought back—notably ex-Doughboys back from France—some times with gunfire.  But the statistics of the known victims tell the tale.  Thirty-eight people were killed—23 Black and 15 white with some White likely the victims of their own indiscriminate fire. 537 were officially reported wounded, with 2/3 injured being Black.  The 1000 to 2000 who lost their homes to arson and frenzied demolition were virtually all Black.  Hundreds were arrested by the Police or held by the Illinois National Guard after it was finally mobilized.  The records are incomplete but the majority of those were also Black.  In fact Police often turned a blind eye to racial attacks and sometimes joined them.

Stoning a Black victim to death.  The man with the raised arm is in what looks like a Chicago Fire Department uniform.

1919 was another one of those pivotal years in American history, a paradigm shift.  World War I was over and “a million men in khaki suits” were returning home to a devastating post war recession and high unemployment.  Around the world revolution was in the air while at home a massive strike wave that included a national steel strike, coal mining wars, and the defiant radicalism of the energized Industrial Workers of the World actions out West in the lumber, metal mining, agricultural industries.  War-time anti-labor actions pivoted into a full blown Red Scare with nationwide raids, mass arrests, show trials, and incarcerations. Temporary war-time prohibition was becoming permanent under the 18th Amendment to the Constitution and the enabling Volstead Act. 

On the other hand 19th Amendment for women’s suffrage passed both houses of Congress and was in the process of being ratified in the States and empowered women were ditching cumbersome, heavy garments for clothes they could move comfortably in.   And Black culture was beginning to go mainstream as jass or jazz escaped New Orleans to Chicago and the New York stage. 

But things were particularly bleak for African-Americans.  Hope had been high that the service of Blacks in the War to End All Wars and on the home front would earn respect and gratitude which would improve their daily lives and prospects.  Hundreds of thousands had escaped the Jim Crow South to the major northern industrial cities to work in defense and other heavy industry in a movement known as the Great Migration.  Now, with unemployment raging white workers saw Blacks as job thieves who undercut wages.  Blacks had also been used as strikebreakers.  Tensions were on the rise.

Meanwhile in the South Black veterans were seen as threat to the Jim Crow system of White supremacy.  The new Ku Klux Klan that arose in the afterglow of the 1914 release of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and other secret night riders were spreading widely.  Lynching’s surged including executions of Black veterans still in uniform.  

In what became known as the Red Summer, race riots erupted in more than 25 cities including Indianapolis, Indiana and Washington, DC.  While the Chicago riot lasted the longest and did by far the most property damage, Blacks in the South suffered even greater losses, often with scant attention by the press. 

An Omaha lynch mob gleefully posed with the burning body of their victim in one of the many Red Summer riots.

A mob led by White sailors in Charleston, South Carolina killed five blacks including a respected doctor who tried to defend himself with a hand gun and another died later.  A white race riot in Longview, Texas led to the deaths of at least four men and destroyed the Black neighborhood in town. Local police in Bisbee, Arizona attacked Buffalo Soldier troops of 10th U.S. Cavalry in the Battle of Brewery Gulch. In Norfolk, Virginia a mob attacked a homecoming party for Black veterans.  In Knoxville, Tennessee a lynch mob stormed the court house then They attacked the African-American business district, where they fought business owners, leaving at least seven dead and wounding more than 20 people.  In Omaha, Nebraska another lynch mob attacked a jail, seized Will Brown hanged him and burned his body before attacking Black neighborhoods and stores on the north side.

Worst of all a meeting of Black sharecropper trying to form a union near tiny Elain, Arkansas was attacked by armed mob of hundreds of whites who hunted and killed over 100 Black men and women over two days.  Then 79 surviving Blacks were tried and convicted by all-white juries, and 12 were sentenced to death for murder.  Only the Supreme Court’s ultimate overturn of the convictions for denial of due process saved their lives.  No White attacker was ever charged with anything.

Red Summer indeed.

A Tribune map marked flashpoint of the riots.

In Chicago the White rampage was largely led by Irish gangs from Bridgeport including the politically clout-heavy Hamburg Athletic Club which included 19-year-old Richard J. Daley who was the group’s president.  Another gang, Ragen’s Colts donned in blackface and set fire to Lithuanian and Polish homes in the Back of the Yards neighborhood in a deliberate attempt to incite the immigrant community to join the riots.

Black-owned Providence Hospital, which was caring for many victims, was threatened by the mob but was turned aside by Chicago Police.  In other instances the police stood aside as mobs prevented the Fire Department from responding to arson fires and some officers actually joined attacks on isolated individuals.  Street cars were targeted and Black riders pulled off and beaten even in the Loop, miles north of the main unrest.

Chicago Mayor William Hale (Big Bill) Thompson let the rioting go on for days before he was forced to accept National Guard troops.

Republican Mayor William Hale Thompson engaged in a game of brinksmanship with Illinois Governor Frank Lowden.  Thompson refused to ask Lowden to send in the Illinois National Guard for four days and gave the impression that he generally supported White rioters as “defenders of their homes. Lowden had already called up the 11th Illinois Infantry Regiment and its machine gun company, as well as the 1st, 2nd and 3rd reserve militia totaling 3,500 men and they were waiting in armories.  Lowden had to appeal to President Woodrow Wilson to put pressure on Thompson before he could finally put the troops on the streets.

The Cook County Sheriff also hastily deputized 3,000 recently discharged volunteer white veterans who were haphazardly deployed and undisciplined.  Guardsmen were deployed to protect Black property and lives and to keeps the two sides separate.  It took four days to fully restore order. 

A Black veteran outranked the young National Guardsman he contorted.

In the wake of the Lowden launched a special blue-ribbon investigation and other inquiries were led by the Coroner’s office.  The State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne only brought accused Black rioters to a Grand Jury which rebelled and refused to issue indictments until at least some White rioters were brought before it.  A Cook County judge told scolded the Police Department for only bringing charges against Blacks, “I want to explain to you officers that these colored people could not have been rioting among themselves. Bring me some white prisoners.”

The ugly legacy of the riots was a hardening racial division in the city.  Both Blacks and Whites sought protection in segregated neighborhoods.  Over the years the South Side Black Belt expanded block-by-block resulting in White flight with real estate speculators roiling the pot to make fast killings.  Mayor Daley would use massive housing developments and expressways to isolate and contain the Black communities, including those which had spread to the West Side.  Poverty festered in those communities leading directly to the riots of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s.

For decades there was a semi-official policy of forgetting the 1919 riots.  Outside of the Black community, few whites ever encountered much more than a veiled mention of the events.  No monuments to the dead were erected, no municipal commemorations held.  The DuSable Museum of African American History and the Chicago History Museum (formerly the Chicago Historical Society Museum) have had exhibits, but people had to seek them out.

With a new Black Mayor, Lori Lightfoot official recognition of the 100th anniversary is now underway.  On July 27 Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project (CRR19) is being launched in Bronzeville, the historic Black neighborhood that was the target of much of the violence.  Events will include a special exhibition at the Newberry Library including photos captured by Japanese American photographer Jun Fujita during the riots along with a timeline of the violence, and an interactive map of the 38 deaths.  Dozens of special programs are planned over the next year.

Tomorrow:  Two poets on the Chicago 1919 Race Riots.

The Last Yippie!—Paul Krassner

Paul Krassner was unrepentant and defiant to the end of his long life.

Note—This post took three days to pull together and does not even scratch the surface.

The icons and influencers of my youth are dropping like flies.  Paul Krassner was the latest.  He died on Sunday in Desert Hot Springs, California after a long period of declining health.  He was 87 years old.  Always an iconoclast and avowed humanist he would have laughed at suggestions in some Facebook posts I saw that he had gone to a better place or would somehow be reunited with former pals and co-conspirators.  Dead is dead period he would have insisted—kick the useless corpse aside and move on.  But he might have had an eye-rolling chuckle at the hippiesque announcement that “Paul Krasner has left the planet.”

Most mainstream press obituaries led with Krassner’s association with the Yippies.  Association, hell—he invented the Yippie!—he always insisted on the exclamation mark—Youth International Party, named it, and inspired its in-your-face defiance of a corrupt and rotting culture.  

Paul Krassner, right, with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.

Yippie! was born at New Year’s Eve pot party at the New York apartment of Abbie and Anita Hoffman with Jerry Rubin and Nancy Kurshan also in attendance. Krasner recalled…

We needed a name to signify the radicalization of hippies, and I came up with Yippie as a label for a phenomenon that already existed, an organic coalition of psychedelic hippies and political activists. In the process of cross-fertilization at antiwar demonstrations, we had come to share awareness that there was a linear connection between putting kids in prison for smoking pot in this country and burning them to death with napalm on the other side of the planet.

Rubin with his experience as a California activist student leader, and an organizer for the New Mobe at the March 1967 March on the Pentagon, and Hoffman with his Groucho Marx of the counter culture persona may have become the public face of the Yippies during the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention demonstrations and the subsequent Conspiracy 8/7 Trial, but Krassner invented much of the symbolism of the movement and backed it with a fierce, satiric intelligence.  The decision to nominate a Wisconsin piglet—Pigasus—at the Yippie!  Festival of Life was just one of Krassner’s inspirations along with the publicity campaign in the emerging underground press that lured many to their rendezvous with destiny.

Krassner eschewed the limelight and avoided arrest in Chicago and indictment for the conspiracy that he would have merrily admitted to being a part of.   But Rubin died as pin-stripe suit wearing Yuppie businessman and promoter of EST and other New Age hoo-ha and Hoffman emerged after years in hiding as respectable Up State New York ecology activist.  Krasner died unrepentant and unreformed—the last Yippie!

Krassner’s life was so much more than just Yippie!  His most lasting accomplishment was the extraordinary little magazine that he edited and published between 1955 and 2001.  The Realist was in his own words “Mad for adults.”  It was a daring mixture of savage satire and fearless reporting with a take-no-prisoners chip on the shoulder.

Although it never had a reported circulation much above the low ten thousands, it is hard to underestimate the impact it had on a generation of young folks coming of age in a turbulent time.

Starting in the spring on 1966 I started making semi-regular pilgrimages to Wells Street, the throbbing heart of exotic and thrilling Old Town.  Still a high school student, I made the long trek down to the City on the Skokie Swift and the L trains on weekend evenings.  I was a prototypical Skokie Hippie—not a term of admiration for the regular street people.  I may have been a bit odder than some in my battered white Stetson, Wellington boots, and sometimes a Hemingwayesque khaki safari jacket and sporting a turtle neck dickie under my shirt for that beatnik look.  I had a blonde wisp of a moustache and downy cheeks and thick glasses with heavy frames.  I smoked a corn cob pipe for studied nonchalance.

Wells street was thronged with artists, bohemians, real and would-be beatniks, run away kids and street hustlers, suburban tourists, and conventioneers looking for a little action.  I wandered up and down the street, soaking it all in stopping in Piper’s Alley and the record stores, poster shops, and the proto-type head shops.  I looked longingly at Second City, which I could not afford, and saloons like the Earl of Old Town who would not yet grant me admission.  

Barbabara's Bookstore on Wells Street in Chicago was a must visit haven for a weekend hippie.

No trip, however, would be complete without a pilgrimage to Barbara’s Bookstore.  There I would load up on paperback poetry by Alan Ginsburg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the magazines you could not find in the racks of a Skokie drugstore.  Ramparts, the slick Evergreen Review with its risqué fiction still banned in Boston, and, of course The Realist.  I devoured them all on the long train rides home and snuck them into the house under my jacket so my mother would not see, found places to discretely stash them in my basement room.

The Realist was the most eye opening for a sorta liberal kid with Wyoming dust still on his boots and literary admissions.  It challenged my every naïve assumption and rubbed my nose in the contradictions in the comfortable society of which I was a part and, evidently, an accomplice.  And it did it with savage humor, keen intelligence, and extraordinary writing by Krasner and a who’s who of important scribes and critics.  And yeah, it was tantalizing smutty and riddled with the kind of cartoons you didn’t see in the Sunday funnies.  As intended it subverted me, corrupted my mind and radicalized me. Thank you, Paul Krassner!

Krassner was born on April 9, 1932 in Brooklyn to a middle class Jewish family with cultural aspirations.  He was a brilliant child and a violin prodigy and the youngest person ever to play Carnegie Hall at age six in 1939.  Much to his parent’s dismay, he did not pursue a concert career but instead enrolled at Baruch College, then a branch of the City College of New York as journalism major.  He was also drawn instinctively to comedy and began performing under the name Paul Maul.  He met other rising comics including Lenny Bruce who was transitioning from a burlesque emcee to a night club stand-up.

Krassner's mentor and first employer Lyle Stuart publisher of The Independent.

But he took his journalism seriously and began freelancing with Lyle Stuart’s monthly tabloid, The Independent, a daring anti-censorship rag that was “designed to publish those stories and articles that others would not have dared publish because they might have offended subscribers or advertisers.” Contributors included Upton Sinclair, Norman Mailer, John Steinbeck and the ambitious young Krassner.  After graduation from college Paul went to work there full time and rose quickly to be managing editor.  “I never had a normal job where I had to be interviewed and wear a suit and tie,” he recalled.

Krassner’s boss, Lyle Stuart was a man of many interests including gambling and book publishing.  He also served as business manager for Educational Comics a/k/a EC Comics and was a close friend of publisher William Gaines.  EC comics was the focal point of a national comic book scare in the early ‘50’s charged with corrupting the nation’s youth with its graphic and gory horror, suspense, science fiction, military fiction and crime fiction books.  Congressional investigations leading to threats of censorship and eventually the establishment of the Comics Code Authority and its seal of approval without which the books could not be distributed.  Stuart, a man dedicated to fighting censorship, was in the thick of the fight to keep EC comics in business.  Ultimately the pressure was too great and Gaines had to kill all of his comic book lines in 1954.

The cover of the first issue of Mad in the magazine format.

With Stuart’s encouragement Gaines and his staff of talented writers and illustrators turned to creating a new satirical book, Mad, which debuted in 1954.  Through the connection with Stuart, Krasner was soon freelancing material in Mad and spent almost as much time in that office as at The Independent.  He worked closely with editor Harvey Kurtzman, and artists Wally Wood, Will Elder, and Jack Davis.   In 1955 Mad changed from a comic book format to a magazine to get out from under the stifling Comics Code Authority.  Al Feldstein took over as editor in 1956.  Two years later Krassner cranked out the first issue of his own new magazine The Realist at the Mad offices and using the talents of many of the artists and contributors to that magazine.  Clearly The Realist was Mad’s stepchild. 

It was no small irony that Mad announced that it would cease publication a print edition just a week before Krassner died.

The Realist under Krassner’s brilliant direction came into full flower in the 1960’s, the decade of seismic cultural change in America—a rejection of the post-war Red Scare and suffocating  family and gender roles, the Civil Rights Movement, the Pill and subsequent sexual revolution, Kennedy era idealism and the shock of political assassinations, the Vietnam War and a rapidly radicalizing peace movement,  protest music to psychedelic rock, a youth drug culture, student protest and the rise of women’s liberation and the ecology movement.  The magazine was in the thick of it all—reacting to it, actively promoting it, and satirizing it.

The cover of the first issue of The Realist.

Krassner attracted an astonishing list of contributors including major literary figures, topical comics, cartoonists including the inventors of the underground commix, and radical activists.  A woefully incomplete list includes: Lenny Bruce, Terry Southern, Ken Kesey, Richard Pryor, Joseph Heller, Woody Allen, Jules Feiffer, Mort Sahl, Herb Gardner, Norman Mailer, Vivian McPeak, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Crumb, Garry Trudeau, Harry Shearer, Jean Shepherd, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Nicholas Kazan, Bruce Jay Friedman,   Wally Wood, Mort Gerberg, Phil Ochs, Albert Ellis, Neil Postman, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, and Edward Sorel.

Krassner not only commented on his times, he adapted to them and adopted the most radical of cultural shifts.  He was born and grew up in the secular, leftist, and intellectual community common to many second and third generation New York Jews.  He matured in the iconoclastic Beat culture of the ‘50’s and slid more comfortably and seamlessly into the ‘60’s counterculture than many of his age cohort.  He enthusiastically embraced the drug culture—he not only s thamoked pot with Hoffman and Rubin, but traveled with and identified with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and later famously took an acid trip with Groucho Marx.  He admired the New Left which was abandoning rigid ideology and Stalinist authoritarianism and conformity.  He reveled in sexual liberation but became a cheerleader of sorts for women’s liberation.

Krassner famous bumper sticker evoked two American bugaboos and presented a contradiction that many could not deal with.  Today it could be un-ironically displayed on the pick-up truck of anyTrumpista.

The Realist of the ‘60’s became notorious, which made it so attractive to readers like me.  Among the most famous of its presentations was a red, white, and blue bumper sticker, decorated with stars, which proclaimed “Fuck Communism”. In advertising it, Krasner advised that if the cops pulled anyone over for displaying the most offensive word in American English, the driver should tell the officer “Go back to Russia, you Commie lover.”

The infamous Disneyland Memorial Orgy by Wally Wood.

The May 1967 issue featured the Disneyland Memorial Orgy cartoon, illustrated by Wally Wood which was so successful that Krasner printed it as a poster that was widely pirated.  The elaborate poster featured Snow White being harassed by five of the Seven Dwarfs, while the other two engage in anal sex nearby, other characters performed sex acts and a flying Dumbo shat on a picture of Mickey Mouse

Kras2ner’s most wildly successful satire was so graphic and convincing that Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers fame, actually believed it to be true.  The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book purported to be expurgated sections of William Manchester’s book on the Kennedy assassination, The Death of a President.  The published book had been censored on the demand of Jackie Kennedy. In the story, Lyndon B. Johnson is on Air Force One fucked the bullet-hole wound in the throat of JFK’s corpse. In a 1995 interview for the magazine Adbusters, Krassner exclaimed: 

People across the country believed—if only for a moment—that an act of presidential necrophilia had taken place. It worked because… because what I wrote was a metaphorical truth about LBJ’s personality presented in a literary context, and because the imagery was so shocking, it broke through the notion that the war in Vietnam was being conducted by sane men.

Paul Krassner reveling in the chaos of The Realist office.

As the decade wore on and into the ’70 Krassner became more engrossed in conspiracy theories in part because Krassner always suspected that there was more than met the eye in the violent and bazaar events of the era.  He was also influenced by the The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Bob Shea and The Realist contributor Robert Anton Wilson, wickedly paranoid and funny fantasy novels. 

The Realist was the first magazine to carry Mae Brussell’s work on conspiracies including the Symbionese Liberation Army and kidnapping of Patty Hearst, the Watergate scandal, the assassination of JFK and others.  By the late 70’s even many of the magazine’s old fans felt that it had gone off the deep-end on some of it losing many long-time readers but gaining a cult following in the burgeoning world of conspiracy theorists.

The Realist became progressively more obsessed with conspiracy theories.

The loss of readership put the publication in dire financial straits.  Krassner cut regular publication and issued new copies sporadically.  Some conspiracy theorists helped keep it afloat, John Lennon among them.  His contribution check was accompanied by a note that read, “If anything ever happens to me...it won't be an accident.”

Eventually Krassner was forced to scale back the magazine to a smaller newsletter style format.  He finally had to discontinue it in 2001 unable to compete at all with the rise of internet satire.

Krassner’s career went far beyond just The Realist.  He edited or authored several books including The Realist, as How A Satirical Editor Became A Yippie Conspirator In Ten Easy Years, Tales of Tongue Fu, in 1981, his autobiography Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in Counter-Culture in 1994, a collection of essays Who’s to Say What’s Obscene? In 2009, and he edited three collections of drug stories—Pot Stories for the Soul,  Psychedelic Trips for the Mind and Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs.

Even during the heyday of The Realist Krassner continued to freelance—he had to, his magazine provided a skimpy and unreliable income.  He contributed to Playboy which did not raise too many eyebrows since it published the work of so many literary luminaries.  But when he took on a $1000 a month column in Cavalier called The Naked Emperor he drew the wrath of some feminists.  Former Yippie ally and founder of the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH) blistered him in her fiery manifesto decrying sexism in the radical left, Goodby to All That.

Goodbye to lovely “pro-Women's Liberationist” Paul Krassner, with all his astonished anger that women have lost their sense of humor “on this issue” and don’t laugh any more at little funnies that degrade and hurt them: farewell to the memory of his “Instant Pussy” aerosol-can poster, to his column for the woman-hating men’s magazine Cavalier, to his dream of a Rape-In against legislators' wives, to his Scapegoats and Realist Nuns and cute anecdotes about the little daughter he sees as often as any properly divorced Scarsdale middle-aged father; goodbye forever to the notion that a man is my brother who, like Paul, buys a prostitute for the night as a birthday gift for a male friend, or who, like Paul, reels off the names in alphabetical order of people in the women's movement he has fucked, reels off names in the best locker-room tradition—as proof that he's no sexist oppressor.

Krassner also worked as an fm radio DJ in the ‘70’s under the name Rumpelforeskin satirizing culture and politics while flaunting his atheism.  For decades he occasionally returned to doing standup—acid pal Groucho Marks said in 1971, “I predict that in time Paul Krassner will wind up as the only live Lenny Bruce.”  He was one of the comedians included in the film The Aristocrats, 2005 documentary comedy film with comics telling versions of the same famous dirty joke. 

Krassner doin a standup comedy routine

In 1998 he was featured at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with Wavy Gravy of the Hog Farm at the exhibit entitled I Want to Take You Higher: The Psychedelic Era 1965–1969. 

Krassner is the only person to have won awards from both Playboy for satire and the Feminist Party Media Workshop for journalism. He was the first living man to be inducted into the Counterculture Hall of Fame at the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam and received an American Civil Liberties Union Uppie (for Upton Sinclair) Award for dedication to freedom of expression. 

In 2005 he received a Grammy nomination for Best Album Notes for his essay on the 6-CD package Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware.  Krassner had been the editor of Bruce’s autobiography How to Talk Dirty and Influence People and it was Bruce who first encouraged him to do standup at the Village Gate in New York.

A Oui magazine ad promoting a Krassner interview.

Krassner continue to write as a columnist for The Nation, AVN Online, and High Times Magazine and blogged at The Huffington Post and The Rag Blog.  He also frequently lectured, sat for several broadcast and print interviews, and was featured in several documentaries about the ‘60’s, Yippie!, the sexual revolution, and the drug culture.

In his later years he welcomed visits from surviving old friends and regaled young visitors with his tales and adventures before declining health restricted even that.

Cheyenne’s Daddy of ‘em All—Frontier Days

Bronc riding at the first Frontier Day cowboy competition in 1897.  Spectators watched from carriages and horse back or perched on the rail fences.  A few hundred attended, but word spread fast and an annual event became a popular tourist spectacle.

Back in my old home town of Cheyenne, Wyoming the annual rodeo completion cum bacchanal known as Cheyenne Frontier Days which has been held annually for 122 years is in full swing.  This year over the ten days around the last full week in July it will attract more than 200,000 visitors virtually swamping the Wyoming capital city’s 64,000 residents.

Known as the Daddy of ‘em All, it is both the longest continuously held cowboy competition in the world and by far the largest outdoor competition of its kind.  Although there has been a National Finals Rodeo since 1956 to crown individual champions in each main professional rodeo event, that indoor competition, currently held in Las Vegas, lacks the pageantry and history that makes Frontier Days unique.  

The first Cheyenne Frontier Day was a one day contest for local cowboys working the big ranches in the area on September 27, 1897.  The event included a raucous informal cowboy parade through downtown with the boys whooping it up and riding wildly much as they had done when they brought their herds to the rail head after round-up every year.  

The distinguished gentlemen of the firs Frontier Committee donned their formal top hats best suits in their finest carriages.  Local cattle barons, bankers, railroad executives, and politicians.  Having their fine wheels drawn by oxen and a jack ass was a nice touch.

Cheyenne was then a bustling and modern small city, not only the Wyoming state capital, but home to major Union Pacific Railroad facilities.  Its streets had been the first in the nation to be illuminated by electric arc lamps back in 1883.   Fueled by the wealth of cattle barons on Millionaire’s Row, the city considered itself up-to-date and cosmopolitan.  Even in 1896, however, just six years after statehood and four years since the bloody events of the Johnson County War, residents were becoming nostalgic for their wild west heritage.  

The first event was so successful that Frontier Day became an annual event.  The competition was soon promoted nationally by the Union Pacific to boost tourist traffic on its trains, and the local business community loved the sound of cash registers ringing in local hotels, restaurants, bars, and brothels.  

In the early years cowgirls competed separately in most of the same events as the men.  Despite the popularity of their competitions, by the 1930s they were confined to "powderpuff" events like barrel racing.

By the turn of the 20th Century elements of the wild west shows popularized by Buffalo Bill Cody and others, including mock hold-ups of the Cheyenne to Deadwood stage coach, Indian battles, and in particularly bad taste given recent the state’s recent history, a re-enacted lynching of rustlers were incorporated into pageantry surrounding the rodeo.  Other events like street dances, amateur theatrics, menageries, and carnivals were added to the ever growing event over the years as more days of competition were added to the rodeo. Cowgirl competitions were an early favorite. The cowgirls rode the same stock and took the same risks as the men but were judged separately. 

From his special box erected on the arena floor former President Theodore Roosevelt shook hands with a cowgirl at the 1910 Frontier Days.

In 1910 former President Theodore Roosevelt was delighted to be on hand to congratulate the winning riders.  In 1903 as sitting president he had visited and a special one day rodeo was staged in his honor and he participated in a ride over Sherman Hill from Cheyenne to Laramie with Senator Francis E. Warren and big-wigs of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association.   

By the 1930’s stars of Hollywood’s popular westerns, including the state’s own favorite son Col. Tim McCoy, were regularly making personal appearances and sometimes incorporating the rodeo itself into their films.  Concerts by popular Hillbilly and Cowboy singers—and later the masters of Western Swing—were added to the mix.  

Miss Frontier of 1936, Mary Helen Warren, granddaughter of Wyoming's first Governor and former Senator Francis E. Warren designed the fringed white buckskin culottes still worn by the rodeo queens. 

Since 1931 reigning over the event has been Miss Frontier and her Lady in Waiting.  The first was Jean Nimmo Dubois, a descendent of Esther Hobart Morris who was America’s first female Justice of the Peace in South Pass in 1869 and a heroine of the Wyoming suffrage movement. For the first three years the winner was selected on the basis of who could sell the most tickets to a dance.  Starting in 1934 the Frontier Committee has privately picked Miss Frontier and her Lady in Waiting, traditionally drawing on the daughters and granddaughters of local cattle barons or Cheyenne business leaders.  One requirement was that she had to be an expert horsewoman.  

Miss Frontier of 1936 was Mary Helen Warren Wolborn, granddaughter of the state’s founding patriarch Francis E. Warren.  She designed the distinctive white buckskin culottes worn to this day.  Her inspiration was a costume worn by celebrated fan dancer Sally Rand who had titillated audiences the year before.  

For a boy in Cheyenne in the 1950's rodeo champions like Casey Tibbs were bigger stars than baseball heroes like Mickey Mantel, Stan Musial, or Willie Mays.

The 1950’s were the Golden Age of Rodeo.  The most storied figures of the sport were active—Casey Tibbs, Big Jim Shoulders, the Bell Brothers, and the legendary rodeo clown and bulldogger Wilbur Plaugher—and shined in Cheyenne.  Monte Blue, known for playing the sheriff in countless B westerns, was the arena announcer famous for his signature call at the beginning of each rodeo, “Let’s go, let’s show, let’s rodeo!”  

Chief Charley Red Cloud and Princess Blue Water of the Oglala Sioux brought their band to Frontier Days for many years shown here with Miss Frontier and her Lady in Waiting in 1956.

Chief Charley Red Cloud and Princes Blue Water, who had appeared with Buffalo Bill, brought their band of Oglala Sioux each year to perform traditional dancing and live in a teepee village on the grounds of Frontier Park.  Top movie and TV stars from Roy Rogers to Hugh O’Brian made personal appearances and country music stars like Ernest Tubbs, Red Foley, and the Sons of the Pioneers performed nightly at the Frontier Pavilion. 

During that era the famous saloons and bars downtown were a nightly explosions of cowboy contestants, tourists, and pretty young local girls—many of the really, really young—carousing and drinking with intermittent brawls all of which spilled into the streets until the wee-small hours.  I am told that in the interest of family entertainment local authorities have heavily clamped down on that and the evenings are pale and tame now.  Some old timers say downright boring.

My father W. M. Murfin in his first year as Secretary of the Frontier Committee in 1954.

From 1954 through 1956 my father, W. M. Murfin as Secretary of the Frontier Committee, played a leading role in coordinating the rodeo and all of the other activities.  My brother Tim and I reveled in riding in the parades and meeting the cowboys and celebrities that often came through our house.  

Today the whole Frontier Days extravaganza stretches over ten days and includes 9 rodeos sanctioned by the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA).  Day Money is awarded to the winners in each event for each rodeo.  At the end of the schedule Cheyenne Frontier Days champions are named in each event and an All Around Cowboy, who has to compete in two or more events, are determined by the total amount of Day Money earned. There are also nights of separate Championship Bull Riding (CBR) competitions. 

Frontier Days features three grand parades down town with colorful floats, miniature trains, marching bands, equestrian units, and one of the world largest collections of functional carriages, coaches, buggies, hearses, and wagons.

More than 2,500 local volunteers work on events that include the rodeo, 3 Grand Parades, pancake breakfasts, concerts, chili and chuck wagon cook-offs, the carnival, exhibits, Indian Village, military open houses.  A traditional performance by the United States Air Force Thunderbirds is back with their aerial acrobatics. 

This year top country music acts like Lady Antebellum, Rascal Flats, Josh Turner, Miranda Lambert, Keith Urban, and Tim McGraw will headline Frontier Nights in the main arena.  Side venues will feature other acts, making Frontier Days a major music festival. 

I know many readers of this blog are animal lovers and abhor rodeo and the people who love it.  No question about it, rodeo can be brutal to both animals and human competitors—bull riding is hands down the most dangerous competitive sport in the world.  It remains so even though significant reforms have been made in how rodeo stock is handled.   Particularly dangerous events for animals like the Chuck Wagon Races—think horse drawn NASCAR with often horrific pile-ups—and Steer busting—roping a steer around the horns then pulling past the animal catching its feet and throwing it to the ground, a maneuver that often resulted in broken necks or legs—have been eliminated.  Nothing short of abolition by law of all rodeo competition will satisfy many animal rights folks.  I understand that.  But I also love a good rodeo.  I guess you will have to lump me with the heartless brutes.