It would be remiss of me not to include animals in the Pioneer Profiles series, since they were, at times, just as pioneering as humans were. A perfect example of such animals are Thunder and Buttons, two elk that lived a crazier life as a trained team than they ever would have if left in the wild.
Sometime in 1888, Thunder and Buttons were living in North Park where they most likely lost their mom to a hunter. They were brought to Denver where they were auctioned off as a pair, and were bought secondhand by John “Prairie Dog” O’Byrne. He took them home to Colorado City and trained them as a team to pull his wagon.
O’Byrne came to Colorado City in the 1880s. As a young man he alternated between odd jobs with the railroad and operating a hack and delivery service. How did he get his nickname? Some say he kept a prairie dog in a cage on his wagon and would take it out and pet it between stops. Others say he had two prairie dogs, and others say the prairie dog ran on a wheel like a hamster. Modern research confirms none of these rumors, but they are fun to imagine.
In order to get Thunder and Buttons used to pulling his wagon, O’Byrne had to train them every day, so he ran them up and down Colorado Avenue, which at the time went from 30th Street to Limit (near 8th Street) and was a dirt road. Limit marked the edge of Colorado Springs, and O’Byrne claimed that he could get all the way down Colorado, a four-mile strip, in six to seven minutes. That’s fast even in a car on paved roads, so I can only imagine the teeth clenching of his patrons as they held on for dear life.
In between fares, he would stop in to patronize the saloons and gambling halls on the south side of the street. (The north side was reserved for legitimate businesses.) He’d have a few drinks, lose at faro, and pick up the next fare. Laura Bell McDaniel, the madam of Colorado City’s red light district, was a frequent passenger. In the winters, he replaced his wagon’s wheels with sleigh runners, and tied bells to the elks’ antlers. As if the elk weren’t spooking other people’s horses enough. I wonder how he kept them calm when they made all the horses bolt? Not very well, I guess, since he was arrested fairly frequently for that.
O’Byrne racked up some serious gambling debt, mostly to Soapy Smith (according to some), so he moved to Denver for better work and took Thunder and Buttons with him. He worked one season as Santa with his elk-reindeer, but he likely was more like Krampus than Santa Claus. After awhile he moved to Chicago and sold Thunder and Buttons for $500. Years later, when he ran across them, he was saddened to realize they didn’t recognize him.
Pioneers don’t have to be human. Sometimes they can be the first elk driven through the gateway at Garden of the Gods, as O’Byrne claimed. Or they can be the first team of elk to have a restaurant named after them. Either way, they are one of the reasons we call it “Colorful Colorado.”
Special thanks to Dave Hughes for help with this article.
