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.