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PUBLICATIONS OF THE
ROOSEVELT MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION
I. ROOSEVELT IN THE BAD LANDS
COMMITTEE ON PUBLICATIONS
ROOSEVELT MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION INC.
R. J. CUDDIHY
Arthur W. PAGE
Mark SULLIVAN
E. A. van VALKENBURG
[Illustration: Theodore Roosevelt. On the round-up, 1885.]
ROOSEVELT
IN THE BAD LANDS
BY
HERMANN HAGEDORN
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
[Illustration: Editor's arm.]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1921
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY HERMANN HAGEDORN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO
WILLIAM BOYCE THOMPSON
CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY
AND DREAMER OF DREAMS
It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West, the West of
Owen Wister's stories and Frederic Remington's drawings, the West of
the Indian and the buffalo-hunter, the soldier and the cowpuncher.
That land of the West has gone now, "gone, gone with lost Atlantis,"
gone to the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories. It was a land
of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild
game stared at the passing horseman. It was a land of scattered
ranches, of herds of long-horned cattle, and of reckless riders who
unmoved looked in the eyes of life or death. In that land we led a
free and hardy life, with horse and with rifle. We worked under the
scorching midsummer sun, when the wide plains shimmered and wavered in
the heat; and we knew the freezing misery of riding night guard round
the cattle in the late fall round-up. In the soft springtime the stars
were glorious in our eyes each night before we fell asleep; and in the
winter we rode through blinding blizzards, when the driven snow-dust
burnt our faces. There were monotonous days, as we guided the trail
cattle or the beef herds, hour after hour, at the slowest of walks;
and minutes or hours teeming with excitement as we stopped stampedes
or swam the herds across rivers treacherous with quicksands or brimmed
with running ice. We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst; and
we saw men die violent deaths as they worked among the horses and
cattle, or fought in evil feuds with one another; but we felt the beat
of hardy life in our veins, and ours was the glory of work and the joy
of living.
Theodore ROOSEVELT
(_Autobiography_)
PREFACE
To write any book is an adventure, but to write this book has been the
kind of gay and romantic experience that makes any man who has
partaken of it a debtor forever to the Giver of Delights. Historical
research, contrary to popular opinion, is one of the most thrilling of
occupations, but I question whether any biographer has ever had a
better time gathering his material than I have had. Amid the old
scenes, the old epic life of the frontier has been re-created for me
by the men who were the leading actors in it. But my contact with it
has not been only vicarious. In the course of this most grateful of
labors I have myself come to know something of the life that Roosevelt
knew thirty-five years ago--the hot desolation of noon in the
scarred butte country; the magic of dawn and dusk when the long
shadows crept across the coulees and woke them to unexpected beauty;
the solitude of the prairies, that have the vastness without the
malignancy of the sea. I have come to know the thrill and the dust and
the cattle-odors of the round-up; the warm companionship of the
ranchman's dinner-table; such profanity as I never expect to hear
again; singing and yarns and hints of the tragedy of prairie women;
and, at the height of a barbecue, the appalling intrusion of death. I
have felt in all its potency the spell which the "short-grass
country" cast over Theodore Roosevelt; and I cannot hear the word
Dakota without feeling a stirring in my blood.
It was Mr. Roosevelt himself who gave me the impulse to write this
book, and it was the letters of introduction which he wrote early in
1918 which made it possible for me to secure the friendly interest of
the men who knew most about his life on the ranch and the range. "If
you want to know what I was like when I had bark on," he said, "you
ought to talk to Bill Sewall and Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris and his
brother Joe." I was writing a book about him for boys at the time, and
again and again he said, "I want you to go out to Dakota!" On one
occasion I referred to his life in the Bad Lands as "a kind of idyl."
"That's it!" he exclaimed. "That's it! That's exactly what it was!"
The wish he had expressed, living, became in a sense a command after
he was dead. The letters he had given me unsealed the lips of the men
who, for thirty-five years, had steadily refused to reveal to
"newspaper fellers" the intimate story of the romantic life they had
shared with the man who became President of the United States. From
Dickinson, North Dakota, came Sylvane Ferris; from Terry, Montana,
came "Joe" Ferris; from Somers, Montana, came "Bill" Merrifield, and,
on their old stamping-ground along the Little Missouri, unfolded, bit
by bit, the story of the four years of Roosevelt's active ranching
life. In the deserted bar-room of the old "Metropolitan Hotel" at
Medora (rechristened the "Rough Riders"); on the ruins of the Maltese
Cross cabin and under the murmuring cottonwoods at Elkhorn, they spun
their joyous yarns. Apart from what they had to tell, it was worth
traveling two thirds across the Continent to come to know these
figures of an heroic age; and to sit at Sylvane Ferris's side as he
drove his Overland along the trails of the Bad Lands and through the
quicksands of the Little Missouri, was in itself not an insignificant
adventure. Mrs. Margaret Roberts, at Dickinson, had her own stories to
tell; and in the wilderness forty miles west of Lake McDonald, on the
Idaho border, John Reuter, known to Roosevelt as "Dutch Wannigan,"
told, as no one else could, of the time he was nearly killed by the
Marquis de Mores. A year later it was Schuyler Lebo who guided me in a
further search for material, fifty miles south from Medora by
buckboard through the wild, fantastic beauty of the Bad Lands. I doubt
if there is any one I missed who had anything to tell of Roosevelt.
So far as any facts relating to Roosevelt or to the Western frontier
can ever be described as "cold," it is a narrative of cold facts which
I have attempted to tell in this book. The truth, in this case, is
romantic enough and needs no embellishment. I have made every effort
to verify my narrative, but, to some extent, I have had to depend,
inevitably, on the character of the men and women who gave me my data,
as every historical writer must who deals not with documents (which
may, of course, themselves be mendacious), but with what is, in a
sense, "raw material." One highly dramatic story, dealing with
Roosevelt's defiance of a certain desperate character, which has at
different times during the past twenty-five years been printed in
leading newspapers and periodicals, told always by the same writer, I
have had to reject because I could find no verification of it, though
I think it may well be true.
In weaving my material into a connected narrative I have consciously
departed from fact in only one respect. Certain names--a half-dozen
or so in all--are fictitious. In certain cases, in which the story I
had to tell might give needless offense to the actors in it still
surviving, or to their children, and in which I was consequently
confronted by the alternative of rejecting the story in question or
changing the names, I chose the latter course without hesitation. It
is quite unessential, for instance, what the real name was of the lady
known in this book as "Mrs. Cummins"; but her story is an important
element in the narrative. To those who may recognize themselves under
the light veil I have thrown over their portraits, and may feel
grieved, I can only say that, inasmuch as they were inhabitants of the
Bad Lands when Theodore Roosevelt and the Marquis de Mores shaped
their destinies there for good or ill, they became historical figures
and must take their chances at the judgment seat of posterity with
Nebuchadnezzar and Cæsar and St. Augustine and Calamity Jane.
The Northwestern newspapers of the middle eighties contain much
valuable material, not only about the Marquis and his romantic
enterprises, which greatly interested the public, but about Roosevelt
himself. The files of the _Press_ of Dickinson, North Dakota, and the
_Pioneer_ of Mandan, have proved especially useful, though scarcely
more useful than those of the Bismarck _Tribune_, the Minneapolis
_Journal_, and the _Dispatch_ and _Pioneer Press_ of St. Paul. The cut
of Roosevelt's cattle-brands, printed on the jacket, is reproduced
from the _Stockgrowers' Journal_ of Miles City. I have sought high and
low for copies of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_, published in Medora, but
only one copy--Joe Ferris's--has come to light. "'Bad-man'
Finnegan," it relates among other things, "is serving time in the
Bismarck penitentiary for stealing Theodore Roosevelt's boat." But
that is a part of the story; and this is only a Preface.
Colonel Roosevelt's own books, notably "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman,"
"Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," "The Wilderness Hunter," and the
"Autobiography," have furnished me an important part of my material,
giving me minute details of his hunting experiences which I could have
secured nowhere else; and I am indebted to the publishers, Messrs. G.
P. Putnam's Sons, Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, and the Century
Company, for permission to use them. I am indebted to the following
publishers, likewise, for permission to reprint certain verses as
chapter headings: Messrs. Houghton Mifflin Company ("Riders of the
Stars," by Henry Herbert Knibbs, and "Songs of Men," edited by Robert
Frothingham); the Macmillan Company ("Cowboy Songs," edited by
Professor John A. Lomax); and Mr. Richard G. Badger ("Sun and Saddle
Leather," by Badger Clark). I am especially indebted to Mr.
Roosevelt's sisters, Mrs. W. S. Cowles and Mrs. Douglas Robinson, and
to the Honorable Henry Cabot Lodge for the opportunity to examine the
unpublished letters of Colonel Roosevelt in their possession and to
reprint excerpts from them. Through the courtesy of Mr. Clarence L.
Hay I have been able to print a part of an extraordinary letter
written by President Roosevelt to Secretary Hay in 1903; through the
courtesy of Messrs. Harper and Brothers I have been permitted to make
use of material in "Bill Sewall's story of T. R.," by William W.
Sewall, and in "The Boys' Life of Theodore Roosevelt."
Partly from books and letters, partly from documents and old
newspapers, I have gathered bit by bit the story of Roosevelt's life
as a ranchman; but my main sources of material have been the men and
women (scattered now literally from Maine to the State of Washington)
who were Roosevelt's companions and friends. It is difficult to
express adequately my gratitude to them for their unfailing
helpfulness; their willingness to let themselves be quizzed, hour
after hour, and to answer, in some cases, a very drumfire of
importunate letters; above all for their resistance, to what must at
times have been an almost overpowering temptation, to "string the
tenderfoot." They took my inquisition with grave seriousness and gave
me what they had without reserve and without elaboration.
There are five men to whom I am peculiarly indebted: to Mr. Sylvanus
M. Ferris and Mr. A. W. Merrifield, who were Roosevelt's
ranch-partners at the Maltese Cross Ranch, and to Mr. William W.
Sewall, of Island Falls, Maine, who was his foreman at Elkhorn; to Mr.
Lincoln A. Lang, of Philadelphia, who, having the seeing eye, has
helped me more than any one else to visualize the men and women who
played the prominent parts in the life of Medora; and to Mr. A. T.
Packard, of Chicago, founder and editor of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_, who
told me much of the efforts to bring law and order into Billings
County. To Mr. Joseph A. Ferris and Mrs. Ferris; to Mr. William T.
Dantz, of Vineland, New Jersey; to Mrs. Margaret Roberts and Dr.
Victor H. Stickney, both of Dickinson, North Dakota; to Mr. George
Myers, of Townsend, Montana; to Mr. John Reuter, to Mr. John C.
Fisher, of Vancouver, British Columbia, and to Mr. John Willis, of
Glasgow, Montana, Roosevelt's companion of many hunts, I am indebted
to a scarcely less degree. Others who gave me important assistance
were Mr. Howard Eaton, of Wolf, Wyoming, and Mr. "Pete" Pellessier of
Sheridan, Wyoming; Mr. James Harmon, Mr. Oren Kendley, Mr. Schuyler
Lebo, and Mr. William McCarty, of Medora, North Dakota; Mr. William G.
Lang, of Baker, Montana; Mr. W. H. Fortier, of Spokane, Washington;
Mr. Edward A. Allen and Mr. George F. Will, of Bismarck, North
Dakota; Mr. J. B. Brubaker, of Terry; Mr. Laton A. Huffman and Mr. C.
W. Butler, of Miles City, Montana; Dr. Alexander Lambert, of New York
City; Dr. Herman Haupt, of Setauket, New York; the Reverend Edgar
Haupt, of St. Paul, Minnesota; Mr. Alfred White, of Dickinson; Mr.
Dwight Smith, of Chicago; Mrs. Granville Stuart, of Grantsdale,
Montana; Mr. Frank B. Linderman, of Somers, Montana; Mr. C. R. Greer,
of Hamilton, Ohio; Mrs. George Sarchet, of New England, South Dakota;
and especially, my secretary, Miss Gisela Westhoff.
I have enjoyed the writing-man's rarest privilege--the assistance of
wise and friendly critics, notably Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, of
Harvard; President John Grier Hibben, of Princeton; and Professor
William A. Dunning, of Columbia, who generously consented to serve as
a committee of the Roosevelt Memorial Association to examine my
manuscript; and Dr. John A. Lester, of the Hill School, who has read
the proof and given me valuable suggestions.
To all these friendly helpers my gratitude is deep. My warmest thanks,
however, are due Mr. William Boyce Thompson, President of the
Roosevelt Memorial Association, whose quick imagination and effective
interest made possible the collection of the material under the
auspices of the Association.
H. H.
FAIRFIELD, CONNECTICUT
_June 20, 1921_
CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................... xxv
Chapter I. Arrival -- Little Missouri -- A game country --
Joe Ferris -- The trail to Chimney Butte -- The three
Canadians -- The buckskin mare ................................ 3