Recently, Terry Esfeld, Great Bend, was doing some end-of-summer organizing and ran across a print of a group of Victorian-era coursing enthusiasts and their dogs taken at Cheyenne Bottoms in 1886. Coursing, a form of greyhound racing, was once very popular in Kansas, and attracted those with a passion for dog racing similar to horse racing today. The Barton County Historical Society has devoted permanent exhibit space to the sport because of its importance in the area’s history. 

Printed in the sepia tones of the times, the panoramic photo brought back memories from when Esfeld first came to Great Bend as a young man, and became acquainted with and later friends with members of the Thies family. Having just completed college in 1965, he went to work for the family as a cattle buyer. Fred Thies had recently retired, so Esfeld was hired to take over his accounts. 

“The Thies family were big in the American State Bank, and Fred and Hody also owned the Thies Packing House, which today is Red Barn,” he said. “Fred and I got along pretty well, and he kept up on what was happening there. When something came up with horses or cattle, he’d come and visit with me.” 

Esfeld and his wife lived on a little farm northeast of Great Bend. When they learned Fred was considering selling the property, they asked his nephew to let him know they were interested. It wasn’t long before he got word that Fred was open to talking with him, so he went to see him. 

“We made a deal on the house, and we thought it was the house only at that point,” Esfeld said. But, because of health issues, Fred turned over the property along with all his personal property inside. The collection included decades worth of notes on checkers games – Thies was a champion checkers player, having attended many tournaments. It also included memorabilia from the family’s past coursing activities. 

Back in 1886, a committee of the American Coursing Club was held on July 9 in Topeka. Plans were made to hold the first official meet sometime in the fall, but first a suitable location had to be found. On July 26, 1886, the Great Bend Weekly Tribune reported that Barton County was selected. 

“The first coursing has been fixed for Oct. 19th, when prominent men from a distance will be here with the finest greyhounds in the land,” the article stated. “The chase will last from three days to a week, owing somewhat to circumstances. A clubhouse will be erected on the bluff north of C.L. Worman’s farm, which commands a most sweeping view of the entire bottoms, and will afford an opportunity for every man, woman and child to witness the exciting chase between greyhound and jackrabbits, two of the fleetest footed animals in the world. This clubhouse will be a large and commodious building with verandas facing the field.”

The photo Esfeld found in Thies’s memorabilia was likely taken at that event, but it appeared in the Great Bend Tribune in 1947 as in the “Pictorial Pageant in 50 Pictures” celebrating 75 years in Great Bend (1872-1947).

Once the site for the first meet was chosen, crews went to work building a clubhouse, which appears in a photograph we located with the help of the Barton County Historical Society through the Kansas Historical Society’s website, Kansas Memory. A more fanciful illustration appears in an article in Harper’s Weekly, published in 1886 after the event, informing readers about the birth of America’s new sport. These and more are part of the BCHS exhibit. 

In the early years of the last century, the Thies family owned a property on Railroad Ave., where they built a small racetrack where they trained their own dogs. Fred Thies’s mother and possibly a sister were heavily involved, and noted for their expertise in picking bloodlines for their dogs. Up until recently, the remnants of that course could still be seen from the road, Esfeld said. 

Coursing had been around as a sport since the sixteenth century, according to fastfriends.org, on its History of Greyhounds page. It is also said that Coronado traveled with a type of greyhound all the way to New Mexico. In Europe, it preceded horse racing.

In the late 1800s, coursing clubs were established in Europe, and later in the U.S. The sport grew in popularity, attracting huge crowds of spectators. Because of this, clubs turned a serious eye to containment, and by the 1920s, the long open coursing events were replaced with the circular course and a mechanical lure that most associate with dog racing. The Cheyenne Bottoms coursing events died out in the early 1900s. A sketch from the 1912 “Biographical History of Barton County” shows the layout of the American Coursing Club. 

Sometime between 2000 and 2005, a new pastime crossed paths with coursing, when geocachers planted a cache in an ammo can near what remained of the former American Coursing Club site. According to geocaching.com, “...the only evidence left of these activities is the names of the two parking lots near the cache called Coursing Club E and Coursing Club W.” A note on the page states the cache has been archived, as it “keeps getting destroyed.”

Editor's note:  In the Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2020 print edition, the name of the Thies family was spelled incorrectly.  This online version provides the proper spelling.  The writer offers her apologies for the mistake.