Tex
Rickard Biographical Sketches
Compiled by Dennis W. Kemper
Source: Clay County, Texas
Centennial Book 1873-1973, pgs 46-47. I believe that Tex's
daughter, Maxine Rickard-Halprin wrote this biography
In 1874, Robert Wood Rickard brought his
wife Lou, their daughter Minnie, and two young sons, George
(Dink) and Merl, to Clay County from Kansas. Bob Rickard was a
millwright, born in Sangamon County, Illinois and a veteran of
four years service in the Civil War. The Rickards settled in
Cambridge, but six years later Bob bought property for his
family, which by now included Annie Katherine, Bob, Jr., and
Alice, on what is now Angelina Street in Henrietta. The war
years had taken their toll of his health, and on March 27, 1881,
Bob died and was buried at the Cambridge Cemetery. He was
forty-three years old. His widow soon moved her family to a
small farm in Blue Grove, where she raised her six children with
the help of her eldest son Dink, then eleven. He worked for the
Curtis brothers and later for Worsham's R-2 outfit.
Dink Rickard won a plurality of votes in
the election for city marshal in 1894, and he was said to have
been a fair and popular official. That same year he and Leona
Bittick, the daughter of a pioneer physician, were married. The
deaths of Leona and their baby son the following spring were
mourned by the wole community. By the end of that year, Dink
resigned his job as marshal and headed for Alaska. He was in
Circle City when Carmack discovered gold up the Klondike in 1896
and so enjoyed a head start on the hordes of gold seekers who
were to follow.
Dink was by this time known as
"Tex" Rickard, and his career became a colorful and
rewarding one. HE ranched in Paraguay and took some Henrietta
boys along to help him out; he went into show business with John
Ringling, and together they gave New Yorkers their first rodeo,
calling it the "Annual New York Round-up: Rodeo and
Stampede"; he promoted the first million-dollar gates in
boxing's history; and in 1925 he built Madison Square Garden,
which the sports writers of the country called "The House
That Tex Built." The New York Rangers' Hockey Team was
organized by him, and in the beginning they were named Tex's
Rangers.
Tex was a man who inspired the public and
held their confidence. When he died in Miami in 1929, the Boston
Herald IN AN EDITORIAL ENTITLED "The Passing of Tex"
noted that "the two most important items in the morning
papers were the arrival of President-Elect Hoover in Washington,
and the death of the great sports promoter. How do the stories
compare in journalistic value? The Boston papers printed eight
columns on our next President and thiry-two on Rickard. The New
York Times, World, and Herald Tribune gave Hoover thirteen
columns, Rickard twenty-nine." And the nation's papers were
full of editorials eulogizing this Henrietta boy who made good.
A section in one of these pretty well sums up the feelings
expressed in all of them: "Those who had dealings with him
declare that no fairer, squarer man ever lived. They say that he
said what he meant and he meant what he said; that his word was
good in any instance, whether it had to do with a few dollars or
millions. And that, certainly, is an attribute of no small
importance in these days."
Source: The Magnificent Rube, The Life
and Gaudy Times of Tex Rickard by Charles Samuels, copyright
1957 by Charles Samuels, published by the McGraw-Hill Book
Company, Inc. The following is quoted from the book jacket.
"The story of George L. (Tex)
Rickard, sports promoter and big-time gambler, is Americana at
its lusty best. None of this country's other spectacular
showmen, from Barnum down to Mike Todd, contributed so much to
our explosive history.
Tex, from the moment he was born, somehow
managed to be wherever the fast action was, and the turbulence.
As he entered the world, a twenty-six man sheriff's posse
thundered past, guns blazing. They were after the outlaw
brothers, Frank and Jesse James, whose family lived on the farm
next to the Rickards' Missouri cabin. Tex grew up on the Texas
frontier, where he saw men killed when he was ten. He became a
trail cowboy at eleven and a town marshal in his early twenties.
Rickard was up in the Yukon Valley,
working in gambling houses, two years before the Klondike gold
rush started; there he prospected, made and lost several
fortunes. His famous Northern, in Nome, is generally credited
with being the only honest gambling saloon in Alaska during the
gold-rush years. By 1906, Tex was operating another Northern, in
Goldfield, Nevada. It was the most ornate and successful
gambling saloon the Old West ever saw. Tex hunted for secret
diamond mines in South Africa and ran a 5-million-acre ranch in
the wilds of Paraguay.
His greatest fame, of course, came as the
creator, with Jack Dempsey's collaboration, of the fabulous
"million-dollar gate." But this preceded by his first
two record-breaking title fight promotions: Joe Gans and
Battling Nelsson in 1906, Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries in 1910.
His promotional masterpiece starred Dempsey and Gorgeous Georges
Carpentier, at Jersey City. His second Dempsey-Tunney title
fight at Chicago, in 1927, drew $2,658,660, still the
world-record take for a sports event (until 1957).
Though no one seemed to know Rickard
intimately, he had millions of admirers, ranging from
ex-President Theodore Roosevelt to Itchfoot Swanson, the old
Klondike prospector. He tended bar in Dawson, shoulder to
shoulder with Wilson Mizner, and chopped wood through one
terrible winter in the frozen wilderness with Rex Beach, the
best-selling novelist. And when the old Texas died, savage ring
champions cried like babies, and he was mourned aroung the world
like a beloved elder statesman."
Miscellaneous comments: On page 30 of the
above book, it states that a cattleman by the name of Jim
Roberts had gone up to Alaska in 1890 and sent a letter that was
being read by a bunch of cattlemen in Satterfield's General
Store and it mentioned a gold-strike. This happened shortly
after the death of Tex's wife and daughter and he was ready for
a change of scenery. He and Will Slack agreed to head for
Alaska.
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