“Hell-Roaring Bill Jones,” a citizen of the forlorn little cattle town
of Medora, possessed four distinctions: He was sheriff of the county,
he was a gun-fighter, he was a handy man with his fists, and he became
a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, who had now acquired the two cattle
ranches, the Chimney Butte and the Elkhorn.
There was an election in town. A fight was threatened. Roosevelt,
fresh from his own political battles in the New York Assembly, heard
out on his ranch that one of the parties would import section hands
from nearby railroad stations to throw their weight into the conflict.
Instantly the place of election became the only spot in the world for
him.
The news had been late in reaching him, and when he rode into Medora
the election was well under way. Roosevelt inquired if there had been
any disorder.
“Disorder, hell!” said a bystander. “Bill Jones just stood there with
one hand on his gun and with the other pointing over toward the new
jail whenever any man who didn’t have the right to vote came near the
polls. The only one of them who tried to vote Bill knocked down! Lord!
the way that man fell!”
“Well!” Bill ejaculated, “if he hadn’t fell I’d have walked around
behind him to see what was propping him up!”
It was with men like these, in surroundings like these, that young
Roosevelt had elected to learn to the full extent the lesson of
democracy.
Before his Western trip Roosevelt had already had his manhood and his
spirit of brotherhood tested in the hard-waged battles of New York
political life. Now was to come a test infinitely greater. The former
member of the New York Assembly, the man who had occupied a high place
in New York social life, who in his earlier days was noted for his
well-tailored figure and his eyeglasses, had turned his back on all
this. He told his folks that he was going West to “rough it” and to mix
with mankind, and both of these he did to the utmost.