Death of the Marquis -- Roosevelt's progress -- Return as
Governor -- Medora celebrates -- The "cowboy bunch" --
Return as President -- Death of Bill Jones -- The Bad Lands
to-day ...................................................... 453
Appendix ....................................................... 477
Index .......................................................... 483
ILLUSTRATIONS
Theodore Roosevelt on the Round-up, 1885 .......... _Frontispiece_
Photograph by Ingersoll, Buffalo, Minnesota.
Maltese Cross Ranch-House ..................................... 16
View from the Door of the Ranch-House ......................... 16
The Prairie at the Edge of the Bad Lands ...................... 32
Photograph by Holmboe, Bismarck, N. D.
"Broken Country" .............................................. 32
Photograph by Holmboe.
Roosevelt in 1883 ............................................. 48
Medora in the Winter of 1883-84 ............................... 48
"Dutch Wannigan" and Frank O'Donald ........................... 64
Scene of the Killing of Riley Luffsey ......................... 64
Antoine de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Mores ...................... 76
By courtesy of L. A. Huffman, Miles City, Montana.
Sylvane Ferris ................................................ 92
A. W. Merrifield .............................................. 92
The Maltese Cross Ranch-House as it was when Roosevelt lived
in it ....................................................... 92
Photograph by C. R. Greer, Hamilton, Ohio.
The Ford of the Little Missouri near the Maltese Cross ....... 108
A. T. Packard ................................................ 130
Office of the "Bad Lands Cowboy" ............................. 130
The Little Missouri just above Elkhorn ....................... 150
Elkhorn Bottom ............................................... 164
A Group of Bad Lands Citizens ................................ 176
Roosevelt's Brands ........................................... 190
From the _Stockgrowers Journal_, Miles City.
Fantastic Formation at Medicine Buttes ....................... 202
Medicine Buttes .............................................. 202
Poster of the Marquis de Mores's Deadwood Stage-Line ......... 212
By courtesy of the North Dakota Historical Society.
Theodore Roosevelt (1884) .................................... 236
Elkhorn Ranch Buildings from the River ....................... 252
Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt
Gregor Lang .................................................. 262
Mrs. Lang .................................................... 262
The Maltese Cross "Outfit" ................................... 276
The Maltese Cross "Chuck-Wagon" .............................. 276
The Scene of the Stampede .................................... 296
Elkhorn Ranch-House .......................................... 310
Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt.
Site of Elkhorn (1919) ....................................... 310
Hell-Roaring Bill Jones ...................................... 320
Bill Williams's Saloon (1919) ................................ 320
Hotel de Mores ............................................... 332
The Abattoir of the Marquis de Mores ......................... 332
The Bad Lands near Medora .................................... 346
Joseph A. Ferris ............................................. 360
Joe Ferris's Store ........................................... 360
Wilmot Dow and Theodore Roosevelt (1886) ..................... 370
The Piazza at Elkhorn ........................................ 370
Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt.
Dow and Sewall in the Boat ................................... 384
Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt.
Medora in 1919 ............................................... 402
Ferris and Merrifield on the Ruins of the Shack at Elkhorn ... 424
Corrals at Elkhorn ........................................... 424
Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt.
George Myers ................................................. 442
The Little Missouri at Elkhorn ............................... 442
Lincoln Lang ................................................. 456
William T. Dantz ............................................. 456
Margaret Roberts ............................................. 456
"Dutch Wannigan" ............................................. 456
Joe and Sylvane Ferris and Merrifield (1919) ................. 472
Rough Riders Hotel ........................................... 472
Photographs of Bad Lands scenes, unless otherwise indicated, were made
by the author.
The end-paper map is from a drawing made for the book by Lincoln A.
Lang. The town of Mingusville is indicated on it under its present
name--Wibaux.
INTRODUCTION
The trail-tracer of Theodore Roosevelt's frontier life has given the
members of this Advisory Committee of Three of the Roosevelt Memorial
Association the opportunity of a first reading of his book. The duty
of considering the manuscript and making suggestions has been merged
in the pleasure of the revealing account of that young man who forty
years ago founded a personal College of the Plains in raw Dakota.
Three are the essentials of the good biographer--historic sense,
common sense, and human sense. To the mind of the Committee, Mr.
Hagedorn has put into service all three of these senses. Every writer
of history must make himself an explorer in the materials out of which
he is to build. To the usual outfit of printed matter, public records,
and private papers, Mr. Hagedorn has added an unexpected wealth of
personal memories from those who were part of Roosevelt's first great
adventure in life. The book is a thorough-going historical
investigation into both familiar and remote sources.
The common sense of the work is in its choice of the things that
counted in the experience of the ranchman, hunter, and citizen of a
tumultuous commonwealth. All the essential facts are here, and also
the incidents which gave them life. Even apart from the central
figure, the book reconstructs one of the most fascinating phases of
American history.
That is not all that is expected by the host of Roosevelt's friends.
They want the man--the young Harvard graduate and New York clubman who
sought the broader horizon of the Far West in making, and from it drew
a knowledge of his kind which became the bed-rock of his later career.
The writer's personal affection for and understanding of Roosevelt
have illuminated the whole story. He paints a true portrait of an
extraordinary man in a picturesque setting.
William A. DUNNING
Albert BUSHNELL HART
John GRIER HIBBEN
ROOSEVELT IN THE BAD LANDS
My friends, I never can sufficiently express the obligations I am
under to the territory of Dakota, for it was here that I lived a
number of years in a ranch house in the cattle country, and I regard
my experience during those years, when I lived and worked with my own
fellow ranchmen on what was then the frontier, as the most important
educational asset of all my life. It is a mighty good thing to know
men, not from looking at them, but from having been one of them. When
you have worked with them, when you have lived with them, you do not
have to wonder how they feel, because you feel it yourself. Every now
and then I am amused when newspapers in the East--perhaps, I may say,
not always friendly to me--having prophesied that I was dead wrong on
a certain issue, and then finding out that I am right, express acid
wonder how I am able to divine how people are thinking. Well,
sometimes I don't and sometimes I do; but when I do, it comes simply
from the fact that this is the way I am thinking myself. I know how
the man that works with his hands and the man on the ranch are
thinking, because I have been there and I am thinking that way myself.
It is not that I divine the way they are thinking, but that I think
the same way.
Theodore ROOSEVELT
Speech at Sioux Falls
_September 3, 1910_.
ROOSEVELT IN THE BAD LANDS
I
Rainy dark or firelight, bacon rind or pie,
Livin' is a luxury that don't come high;
Oh, be happy and onruly while our years and luck allow,
For we all must die or marry less than forty years from now!
Badger CLARK
The train rumbled across three hundred feet of trestle and came to a
stop. A young man, slender, not over-tall, with spectacles and a
moustache, descended the steps. If he expected that his foot, groping
below the bottom step in the blackness for something to land on, would
find a platform, he was doomed to disappointment. The "depot" at
Little Missouri did not boast a platform. The young man pulled his
duffle-bag and gun-case down the steps; somebody waved a lantern; the
train stirred, gained momentum, and was gone, having accomplished its
immediate mission, which was to deposit a New York "dude," politician
and would-be hunter, named Theodore Roosevelt, in the Bad Lands of
Dakota.
The time was three o'clock of a cool, September morning, and the
place, in the language of the Bad Lands, was "dark as the inside of a
caow." If the traveler from afar had desired illumination and a
reception committee, he should have set his arrival not for September
7th, but for September 6th. Twenty-four hours previous, it happened,
the citizens of Little Missouri had, in honor of a distinguished party
which was on its way westward to celebrate the completion of the road,
amply anticipated any passion for entertainment which the passengers
on the Overland might have possessed. As the engine came to a stop, a
deafening yell pierced the night, punctuated with pistol-shots.
Cautious investigation revealed figures dancing wildly around a
bonfire; and the passengers remembered the worst they had ever heard
about Indians. The flames shot upward, setting the shadows
fantastically leaping up the precipitous bluffs and among the weird
petrifactions of a devil's nightmare that rimmed the circle of flaring
light. A man with a gun in his hand climbed aboard the train and made
his way to the dining-car, yelling for "cow-grease," and demanding, at
the least, a ham-bone. It took the burliest of his comrades to
transport the obstreperous one back to solid earth just as the train
moved out.
There was nothing so theatrical awaiting Theodore Roosevelt. The
"depot" was deserted. Roosevelt dragged his belongings through the
sagebrush toward a huge black building looming northeastward through
the night, and hammered on the door until the proprietor appeared,
muttering curses.
The face that Roosevelt saw, in the light of a smoky lantern, was not
one to inspire confidence in a tenderfoot on a dark night. The
features were those of a man who might have been drinking, with
inconsiderable interruptions, for a very long time. He was short and
stout and choleric, with a wiry moustache under a red nose; and seemed
to be distinctly under the impression that Roosevelt had done
something for which he should apologize.
He led the way upstairs. Fourteen beds were scattered about the loft
which was the second story of the Pyramid Park Hotel, and which,
Roosevelt heard subsequently, was known as the "bull-pen." One was
unoccupied. He accepted it without a murmur.
What the thirteen hardened characters who were his roommates said next
morning, when they discovered the "Eastern punkin-lily" which had
blossomed in their midst, is lost to history. It was unquestionably
frank, profane, and unwashed. He was, in fact, not a sight to awaken
sympathy in the minds of such inhabitants as Little Missouri
possessed. He had just recovered from an attack of cholera morbus, and
though he had written his mother from Chicago that he was already
"feeling like a fighting-cock," the marks of his illness were still on
his face. Besides, he wore glasses, which, as he later discovered,
were considered in the Bad Lands as a sign of a "defective moral
character."
It was a world of strange and awful beauty into which Roosevelt
stepped as he emerged from the dinginess of the ramshackle hotel into
the crisp autumn morning. Before him lay a dusty, sagebrush flat
walled in on three sides by scarred and precipitous clay buttes. A
trickle of sluggish water in a wide bed, partly sand and partly baked
gumbo, oozed beneath steep banks at his back, swung sharply westward,
and gave the flat on the north a fringe of dusty-looking cottonwoods,
thirstily drinking the only source of moisture the country seemed to
afford. Directly across the river, beyond another oval-shaped piece of
bottom-land, rose a steep bluff, deeply shadowed against the east, and
south of it stretched in endless succession the seamed ranges and
fantastic turrets and cupolas and flying buttresses of the Bad Lands.
It was a region of weird shapes garbed in barbaric colors, gray-olive
striped with brown, lavender striped with black, chalk pinnacles
capped with flaming scarlet. French-Canadian _voyageurs_, a century
previous, finding the weather-washed ravines wicked to travel through,
spoke of them as _mauvaises terres pour traverser_, and the name
clung. The whole region, it was said, had once been the bed of a great
lake, holding in its lap the rich clays and loams which the rains
carried down into it. The passing of ages brought vegetation, and the
passing of other ages turned that vegetation into coal. Other deposits
settled over the coal. At last this vast lake found an outlet in the
Missouri. The wear and wash of the waters cut in time through the
clay, the coal, and the friable limestone of succeeding deposits,
creating ten thousand watercourses bordered by precipitous bluffs and
buttes, which every storm gashed and furrowed anew. On the tops of
the flat buttes was rich soil and in countless pleasant valleys were
green pastures, but there were regions where for miles only sagebrush
and stunted cedars lived a starved existence. Bad lands they were, for
man or beast, and Bad Lands they remained.
The "town" of Little Missouri consisted of a group of primitive
buildings scattered about the shack which did duty as a railroad
station. The Pyramid Park Hotel stood immediately north of the tracks;
beside it stood the one-story palace of sin of which one, who shall,
for the purposes of this story, be known as Bill Williams, was the
owner, and one who shall be known as Jess Hogue, the evil genius.
South of the track a comical, naïve Swede named Johnny Nelson kept a
store when he was not courting Katie, the hired girl in Mrs.
McGeeney's boarding-house next door, or gambling away his receipts
under Hogue's crafty guidance. Directly to the east, on the brink of
the river, the railroad section-foreman, Fitzgerald, had a shack and a
wife who quarreled unceasingly with her neighbor, Mrs. McGeeney. At a
corresponding place on the other side of the track, a villainous
gun-fighter named Maunders lived (as far as possible) by his
neighbors' toil. A quarter of a mile west of him, in a grove of
cottonwood trees, stood a group of gray, log buildings known as the
"cantonment," where a handful of soldiers had been quartered under a
major named Coomba, to guard the construction crews on the railroad
from the attacks of predatory Indians seeking game in their ancient
hunting-grounds. A few huts in the sagebrush, a half-dozen miners'
shacks under the butte to the south, and one or two rather pretentious
frame houses in process of construction completed what was Little
Missouri; but Little Missouri was not the only outpost of civilization
at this junction of the railroad and the winding, treacherous river.
On the eastern bank, on the flat under the bluff that six months
previous had been a paradise for jackrabbits, a few houses and a few
men were attempting to prove to the world, amid a chorus of hammers,
that they constituted a town and had a future. The settlement called
itself Medora. The air was full of vague but wonderful stories of a
French marquis who was building it and who owned it, body and soul.
Roosevelt had originally been turned in the direction of the Bad Lands
by a letter in one of the New York papers by a man from Pittsburgh
named Howard Eaton and the corroborative enthusiasm of a high-spirited
naval officer named Gorringe, whose appeals for an adequate navy
brought Roosevelt exuberantly to his side. Gorringe was a man of wide
interests and abilities, who managed, to a degree mysterious to a
layman, to combine his naval activities with the work of a consulting
engineer, the promotion of a shipyard, and the formation of a
syndicate to carry on a cattle business in Dakota. He had gained
international notice by his skill in bringing the obelisk known as
"Cleopatra's Needle" from Alexandria to New York, and had six months
previous flared before the public in front-page headlines by reason of
a sharp controversy with the Secretary of the Navy, which had resulted
in Gorringe's resignation.
Roosevelt had said that he wanted to shoot buffalo while there were
still buffalo left to shoot, and Gorringe had suggested that he go to
Little Missouri. That villainous gateway to the Bad Lands was, it
seems, the headquarters for a motley collection of guides and hunters,
some of them experts,[1] the majority of them frauds, who were
accustomed to take tourists and sportsmen for a fat price into the
heart of the fantastic and savage country. The region was noted for
game. It had been a great winter range for buffalo; and elk,
mountain-sheep, blacktail and whitetail deer, antelope and beaver were
plentiful; now and then even an occasional bear strayed to the river's
edge from God knows whence. Jake Maunders, with his sinister face, was
the center of information for tourists, steering the visitor in the
direction of game by day and of Bill Williams, Jess Hogue, and their
crew of gamblers and confidence men by night. Gorringe had planned to
go with Roosevelt himself, but at the last moment had been forced to
give up the trip. He advised Roosevelt to let one of the men
representing his own interests find him a guide, especially the
Vines, father and son.
[Footnote 1: Roosevelt tells, in his _Hunting Trips of a
Ranchman_, of the most notable of these, a former scout
and Indian fighter named "Vic" Smith, whose exploits
were prodigious.]
Roosevelt found that Vine, the father, was none other than the crusty
old party who had reluctantly admitted him at three o'clock that
morning to the Pyramid Park Hotel. The Captain, as he was called,
refused to admit that he knew any one who would undertake the
ungrateful business of "trundling a tenderfoot" on a buffalo hunt; and
suggested that Roosevelt consult his son Frank.
Frank Vine turned out to be far less savage than his father, but quite
as bibulous, a rotund hail-fellow-well-met, oily as an Esquimau, with
round, twinkling eyes and a reservoir of questionable stories which he
tapped on the slightest provocation. The guidebook called him "the
innkeeper," which has a romantic connotation not altogether true to
the hard facts of Frank's hostelry, and spoke of him as "a jolly, fat,
rosy-cheeked young man, brimming over with animal spirits." He
habitually wore a bright crimson mackinaw shirt, tied at the neck with
a gaudy silk handkerchief, and fringed buckskin trousers, which
Roosevelt, who had a weakness for "dressing up," no doubt envied him.
He was, it seemed, the most obliging soul in the world, being
perfectly willing to do anything for anybody at any time except to be
honest, to be sober, or to work; and agreed to find Roosevelt a guide,
suggesting that Joe Ferris, who was barn superintendent for him at the
Cantonment and occasionally served as a guide for tourists who came
to see "Pyramid Park," might be persuaded to find him a buffalo.
Frank guided his "tenderfoot" to the Post store, of which he was
manager. It was a long log building, one fourth used for trading and
the rest for storage. Single window lights, set into the wall here and
there, gave the place the air of perpetual dusk which, it was rumored,
was altogether necessary to cloak Frank's peculiar business methods.
They found Joe Ferris in the store. That individual turned out to be
as harmless a looking being as any "down-East" farmer--a short,
stockily built young fellow of Roosevelt's own age, with a moustache
that drooped and a friendly pair of eyes. He did not accept the
suggestion that he take Roosevelt on a buffalo hunt, without debate.
The "dude" from the East did not, in fact, look at first sight as
though he would be of much comfort on a hunt. His large, round glasses
gave him a studious look that to a frontiersman was ominous. Joe
Ferris agreed at last to help the tenderfoot find a buffalo, but he
agreed with reluctance and the deepest misgivings.
Ferris and Frank Vine, talking the matter over, decided that the camp
of Gregor Lang on Little Cannonball Creek fifty miles up the river,
was the logical place to use as headquarters for the hunt. Gregor
Lang, it happened, had just left town homeward bound with a wagon-load
of supplies. He was a Scotchman, who had been a prosperous distiller
in Ireland, until in a luckless moment the wife of his employer had
come to the conclusion that it was wicked to manufacture a product
which, when taken in sufficient quantities, was instrumental in
sending people to hell; and had prevailed on her husband to close the
distillery. What Frank Vine said in describing Gregor Lang to
Roosevelt is lost to history. Frank had his own reason for not loving
Lang.
Ferris had a brother Sylvane, who was living with his partner, A. W.
Merrifield, in a cabin seven or eight miles south of Little Missouri,
and suggested that they spend the night with him. Late that afternoon,
Joe and his buckboard, laden to overflowing, picked Roosevelt up at
the hotel and started for the ford a hundred yards north of the
trestle. On the brink of the bluff they stopped. The hammer of
Roosevelt's Winchester was broken. In Ferris's opinion, moreover, the
Winchester itself was too light for buffalo, and Joe thought it might
be a good scheme to borrow a hammer and a buffalo-gun from Jake
Maunders.
Jake was at home. He was not a reassuring person to meet, nor one of
whom a cautious man would care to ask many favors. His face was
villainous and did not pretend to be anything else. He was glad to
lend the hammer and the gun, he said.
September days had a way of being baking hot along the Little
Missouri, and even in the late afternoon the air was usually like a
blast from a furnace. But the country which appeared stark and
dreadful under the straight noon sun, at dusk took on a magic more
enticing, it seemed, because it grew out of such forbidding
desolation. The buttes, protruding like buttresses from the ranges
that bordered the river, threw lengthening shadows across the grassy
draws. Each gnarled cedar in the ravines took on color and
personality. The blue of the sky grew soft and deep.
They climbed to the top of a butte where the road passed between gray
cliffs, then steeply down on the other side into the cool greenness of
a timbered bottom where the grass was high underfoot and the
cottonwoods murmured and twinkled overhead. They passed a log
ranch-house known as the "Custer Trail," in memory of the ill-fated
expedition which had camped in the adjacent flat seven years before.
Howard Eaton and his brothers lived there and kept open house for a
continuous stream of Eastern sportsmen. A mile beyond, they forded the
river; a quarter-mile farther on, they forded it again, passed through
a belt of cottonwoods into a level valley where the buttes receded,
leaving a wide stretch of bottom-lands dominated by a solitary peak
known as Chimney Butte, and drew up in front of a log cabin.
Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield were there and greeted Roosevelt
without noticeable enthusiasm. They admitted later that they thought
he was "just another Easterner," and they did not like his glasses at
all. They were both lithe, slender young fellows, wiry and burnt by
the sun, Sylvane twenty-four or thereabouts, Merrifield four years his
senior. Sylvane was shy with a boyish shyness that had a way of
slipping into good-natured grins; Merrifield, the shrewder and more
mature of the two, was by nature reserved and reticent. They did not
have much to say to the "dude" from New York until supper in the
dingy, one-room cabin of cottonwood logs, set on end, gave way to
cards, and in the excitement of "Old Sledge" the ice began to break. A
sudden fierce squawking from the direction of the chicken-shed,
abutting the cabin on the west, broke up the game and whatever
restraint remained; for they all piled out of the house together,
hunting the bobcat which had raided the roost. They did not find the
bobcat, but all sense of strangeness was gone when they returned to
the house, and settling down on bunks and boxes opened their lives to
each other.
The Ferrises and Merrifield were Canadians who had drifted west from
their home in New Brunswick and, coming out to the Dakota frontier two
years previous because the Northern Pacific Railroad carried emigrants
westward for nothing, had remained there because the return journey
cost five cents a mile. They worked the first summer as section hands.
Then, in the autumn, being backwoodsmen, they took a contract to cut
cordwood, and all that winter worked together up the river at Sawmill
Bottom, cutting timber. But Merrifield was an inveterate and skillful
hunter, and while Joe took to doing odd jobs, and Sylvane took to
driving mules at the Cantonment, Merrifield scoured the prairie for
buffalo and antelope and crept through the underbrush of countless
coulees for deer. For two years he furnished the Northern Pacific
dining-cars with venison at five cents a pound. He was a sure shot,
absolutely fearless, and with a debonair gayety that found occasional
expression in odd pranks. Once, riding through the prairie near the
railroad, and being thirsty and not relishing a drink of the alkali
water of the Little Missouri, he flagged an express with his red
handkerchief, stepped aboard, helped himself to ice-water, and rode
off again, to the speechless indignation of the conductor.
The three men had prospered in a small way, and while Joe turned
banker and recklessly loaned the attractive but unstable Johnny Nelson
a hundred dollars to help him to his feet, Sylvane and Merrifield
bought a few horses and a few head of cattle, took on shares a hundred
and fifty more, belonging to an old reprobate of a ranchman named
Wadsworth and a partner of his named Halley, and, under the shadow of
the bold peak that was a landmark for miles around, started a ranch
which they called the "Chimney Butte," and every one else called,
after their brand, the "Maltese Cross." A man named Bly who had kept a
hotel in Bismarck, at a time when Bismarck was wild, and had drifted
west with the railroad, was, that season, cutting logs for ties a
hundred and fifty miles south in the Short Pine Hills. He attempted
to float the timber down the river, with results disastrous to his
enterprise, but beneficial to the boys at Chimney Butte. A quantity of
logs perfectly adapted for building purposes stacked themselves at a
bend not an eighth of a mile from the center of their range. The boys
set them on end, stockade-fashion, packed the chinks, threw on a mud
roof, and called it "home."
Lang's cow-camp, which was to be the starting-point for the buffalo
hunt, was situated some forty-five miles to the south, in the
neighborhood of Pretty Buttes. Merrifield and the Ferrises had spent
some months there the previous winter, staying with a half-breed named
O'Donald and a German named Jack Reuter, known to the countryside as
"Dutch Wannigan," who had built the rough log cabin and used it as
their headquarters. Buffalo at that time had been plentiful there, and
the three Canadians had shot them afoot and on horseback, now and then
teasing one of the lumbering hulks into charging, for the excitement
of the "close shave" the maddened beast would provide. If there were
buffalo anywhere, there would be buffalo somewhere near Pretty Buttes.
[Illustration: Maltese Cross ranch-house.]
[Illustration: View from the door of the Maltese Cross ranch-house.]
Joe, who was of a sedentary disposition, decided that they would make
the long trip south in the buckboard, but Roosevelt protested. He saw
the need of the buckboard to carry the supplies, but he saw no reason
why he should sit in it all day. He asked for an extra saddle horse.
The three declared they did not have an extra saddle horse.
Roosevelt pleaded. The three Canadians thereupon became suspicious and
announced more firmly than before that they did not have an extra
saddle horse.
Roosevelt protested fervidly that he could not possibly sit still in a
buckboard, driving fifty miles.
"By gosh, he wanted that saddle horse so bad," said Joe a long time
after, "that we were afraid to let him have it. Why, we didn't know
him from Job's off ox. We didn't know but what he'd ride away with it.
But, say, he wanted that horse so blamed bad, that when he see we
weren't going to let him have it, he offered to buy it for cash."
That proposal sounded reasonable to three cautious frontiersmen, and,
before they all turned into their bunks that night, Roosevelt had
acquired a buckskin mare named Nell, and therewith his first physical
hold on the Bad Lands.
II
It rains here when it rains an' it's hot here when it's hot,
The real folks is real folks which city folks is not.
The dark is as the dark was before the stars was made;
The sun is as the sun was before God thought of shade;
An' the prairie an' the butte-tops an' the long winds, when they blow,
Is like the things what Adam knew on his birthday, long ago.
From _Medora Nights_
Joe in the buckboard and Roosevelt on his new acquisition started
south at dawn.
The road to Lang's--or the trail rather, for it consisted of two
wheel-tracks scarcely discernible on the prairie grass and only to be
guessed at in the sagebrush--lay straight south across a succession of
flats, now wide, now narrow, cut at frequent intervals by the winding,
wood-fringed Little Missouri; a region of green slopes and rocky walls
and stately pinnacles and luxuriant acres. Twenty miles south of the
Maltese Cross, they topped a ridge of buttes and suddenly came upon
what might well have seemed, in the hot mist of noonday, a billowy
ocean, held by some magic in suspension. From the trail, which wound
along a red slope of baked clay falling at a sharp angle into a
witch's cauldron of clefts and savage abysses, the Bad Lands stretched
southward to the uncertain horizon. The nearer slopes were like yellow
shores jutting into lavender waters.
West of Middle Butte, that loomed like a purple island on their left,
they took a short cut across the big Ox Bow from the mouth of Bullion
Creek on the one side to the mouth of Spring Creek on the other, then
followed the course of the Little Missouri southward once more. They
met the old Fort Keogh trail where it crossed the river by the ruins
of the stage station, and for three or four miles followed its deep
ruts westward, then turned south again. They came at last to a
crossing where the sunset glowed bright in their faces along the bed
of a shallow creek that emptied into the Little Missouri. The creek
was the Little Cannonball. In a cluster of hoary cottonwoods, fifty
yards from the point where creek and river met, they found Lang's
cabin.
Lang turned out to be stocky, blue-eyed, and aggressively Scotch,
wearing spectacles and a pair of "mutton-chop" whiskers. He had
himself just arrived, having come from town by the longer trail over
the prairie to the west in order to avoid the uncertain river
crossings which had a way of proving fatal to a heavily laden wagon.
His welcome was hearty. With him was a boy of sixteen, fair-haired and
blue-eyed, whom he introduced as his son Lincoln. The boy remembered
ever after the earnestness of the tenderfoot's "Delighted to meet
you."
* * * * *
Roosevelt talked with Gregor Lang until midnight. The Scotchman was a
man of education with views of his own on life and politics, and if he
was more than a little dogmatic, he was unquestionably sincere.
He had an interesting story to tell. A year or less ago Henry
Gorringe, Abram S. Hewitt, of New York, and a noted London financier
named Sir John Pender, who had been instrumental in laying the first
successful Atlantic cable, had, in the course of a journey through the
Northwest, become interested in the cattle business and, in May, 1883,
bought the Cantonment buildings at Little Missouri with the object of
making them the headquarters of a trading corporation which they
called the Little Missouri Land and Stock Company. The details they
left to the enterprising naval officer who had proposed the scheme.
Gorringe had meanwhile struck up a friendship with Frank Vine. This
was not unnatural, for Frank was the social center of Little Missouri
and was immensely popular. What is almost incredible, however, is
that, blinded evidently by Frank's social graces, he took the genial
and slippery post-trader into the syndicate, and appointed him
superintendent. It was possibly because he did not concur altogether
in this selection that Pender sent Gregor Lang, who, owing to Lady
Pender's scruples, was without employment, to report to Gorringe in
New York and then proceed to Little Missouri.
What a somewhat precise Scotch Presbyterian thought of that
gathering-place of the wicked, the Presbyterian himself did not see
fit to divulge. He established himself at the Cantonment, set to work
with European thoroughness to find out all there was to find out about
the cattle business, and quietly studied the ways of Frank Vine. Those
ways were altogether extraordinary. Where he had originally come from
no one exactly knew. His father, whom the new superintendent promptly
established as manager of the Pyramid Park Hotel, had been a Missouri
steamboat captain and was regarded far and wide as a terror. He was,
in fact, a walking arsenal. He had a way of collecting his bills with
a cavalry saber, and once, during the course of a "spree," hearing
that a great Irishman named Jack Sawyer had beaten up his son Frank,
was seen emerging from the hotel in search of the oppressor of his
offspring with a butcher-knife in his boot, a six-shooter at his belt,
and a rifle in his hand. Frank himself was less of a buccaneer and was
conspicuous because he was practically the only man in Little Missouri
who did not carry arms. He was big-hearted and not without charm in
his nonchalant disregard of the moralities, but there was no truth in
him, and he was so foul-mouthed that he became the model for the youth
of Little Missouri, the ideal of what a foul-mouthed reprobate should
be.
"Frank was the darndest liar you ever knew," remarked, long after, a
man who had authority on his side. "And, by jinx, if he wouldn't
preface his worst lies with 'Now this is God's truth!'"
He had an older brother named Darius who was famous as "the champion
beer-drinker of the West," having the engaging gift of being able to
consume untold quantities without ever becoming drunk. In their way
they were a notable family.
Gregor Lang, with the fortunes of his employer at heart, watched
Frank's activities as storekeeper with interest. During the military
régime, Frank had been post-trader, a berth which was an eminent
article of barter on the shelves of congressional politicians and for
which fitness seemed to consist in the ability to fill lonely soldiers
with untold quantities of bad whiskey. Frank's "fitness," as the term
was understood, was above question, but his bookkeeping, Lang found,
was largely in his mind. When he received a shipment of goods he set
the selling-price by multiplying the cost by two and adding the
freight; which saved much calculating. Frank's notions of "mine" and
"thine," Lang discovered, moreover, were elastic. His depredations
were particularly heavy against a certain shipment of patent medicine
called "Tolu Tonic," which he ordered in huge quantities at the
company's expense and drank up himself. The secret was that Frank, who
had inherited his father's proclivities, did not like the "Forty-Mile
Red Eye" brand which Bill Williams concocted of sulphuric acid and
cigar stumps mixed with evil gin and worse rum; and had found that
"Tolu Tonic" was eighty per cent alcohol.
Seeing these matters, and other matters for which the term
"irregularity" would have been only mildly descriptive, Gregor Lang
sent Sir John a report which was not favorable to Frank Vine's régime.
Sir John withdrew from the syndicate in disgust and ordered Lang to
start a separate ranch for him; and Gorringe himself began to
investigate the interesting ways of his superintendent. Why Lang was
not murdered, he himself was unable to say.
Lang had made it his business to acquire all the information he could
secure on every phase of the cattle industry, for Sir John was avid of
statistics. Roosevelt asked question after question. The Scotchman
answered them. Joe Ferris, Lincoln, and a bony Scotch Highlander named
MacRossie, who lived with the Langs, had been asleep and snoring for
three hours before Gregor Lang and his guest finally sought their
bunks.
It was raining when they awoke next morning. Joe Ferris, who was
willing to suffer discomfort in a good cause, but saw no reason for
unnecessarily courting misery, suggested to Roosevelt that they wait
until the weather cleared. Roosevelt insisted that they start the
hunt. Joe recognized that he was dealing with a man who meant
business, and made no further protest.
They left Lang's at six, crossing the Little Missouri and threading
their way, mile after mile, eastward through narrow defiles and along
tortuous divides. It was a wild region, bleak and terrible, where
fantastic devil-carvings reared themselves from the sallow gray of
eroded slopes, and the only green things were gnarled cedars that
looked as though they had been born in horror and had grown up in
whirlwinds.
The ground underfoot was wet and sticky; the rain continued all day
long. Once, at a distance, they saw two or three blacktail deer, and a
little later they came upon a single buck. They crept to within two
hundred yards. Roosevelt fired, and missed. There was every reason why
he should miss, for the distance was great and the rain made a clear
aim impossible; but it happened that, as the deer bounded away, Joe
Ferris fired at a venture, and brought him down. It was a shot in a
thousand.
Roosevelt flung his gun on the ground. "By Godfrey!" he exclaimed.
"I'd give anything in the world if I could shoot like that!"
His rage at himself was so evident that Joe, being tender-hearted, was
almost sorry that he had shot so well.
They found no buffalo that day; and returned to Lang's after dusk,
gumbo mud to the eyes.
Of the two, Ferris was the one, it happened, who wrapped himself in
his buffalo robe immediately after supper and went to sleep.
Roosevelt, apparently as fresh and vigorous as he had been when he
started out in the morning, promptly set Gregor Lang to talking about
cattle.
Lang, who had been starved for intellectual companionship, was glad to
talk; and there was much to tell. It was a new country for cattle.
Less than five years before, the Indians had still roamed free and
unmolested over it. A few daring white hunters (carrying each his vial
of poison with which to cheat the torture-stake, in case of capture)
had invaded their hunting-grounds; then a few surveyors; then grading
crews under military guard with their retinue of saloon-keepers and
professional gamblers; then the gleaming rails; then the thundering
and shrieking engines. Eastern sportsmen, finding game plentiful in
the Bad Lands, came to the conclusion that where game could survive in
winter and thrive in summer, cattle could do likewise, and began to
send short-horned stock west over the railroad. A man named Wadsworth
from Minnesota settled twenty miles down the river from Little
Missouri; another named Simpson from Texas established the
"Hash-Knife" brand sixty or seventy miles above. The Eatons and A. D.
Huidekoper, all from Pittsburgh, Sir John Pender from England, Lord
Nugent from Ireland, H. H. Gorringe from New York, came to hunt and
remained in person or by proxy to raise cattle in the new-won prairies
of western Dakota and eastern Montana. These were the first wave.
Henry Boice from New Mexico, Gregor Lang from Scotland, Antoine de
Vallombrosa, Marquis de Mores (very much from France)--these were the
second; young men all, most under thirty, some under twenty-five,
dare-devil adventurers with hot blood, seeing visions.
Roosevelt and Lang talked well into the night. The next morning it was
still raining. Roosevelt declared that he would hunt, anyway. Joe
protested, almost pathetically. Roosevelt was obdurate, and Joe,
admiring the "tenderfoot" in spite of himself, submitted. They hunted
all day and shot nothing, returning to the cabin after dark, covered
with Dakota mud.
Again it was Joe who tumbled into his corner, and the "tenderfoot"
who, after supper, fresh as a daisy, engaged his host in conversation.
They talked cattle and America and politics; and again, cattle. The
emphatic Scotchman was very much of an individual. The eyes behind the
oval glasses were alert, intelligent, and not without a touch of
defiance.
Gregor Lang was one of those Europeans to whom America comes as a
great dream, long before they set foot on its soil. He felt sharply
the appeal of free institutions, and had proved ready to fight and to
suffer for his convictions. He had had considerable opportunity to do
both, for he had been an enthusiastic liberal in an arch-conservative
family, frankly expressing his distaste for any form of government,
including the British, which admitted class distinctions and gave to
the few at the expense of the many. His insistence on naming his son
after the man who had been indirectly responsible for the closing of
England's cotton-mills had almost disrupted his household.
He enjoyed talking politics, and found in Roosevelt, who was up to his
eyes in politics in his own State, a companion to delight his soul.
Lang was himself a good talker and not given as a rule to patient
listening; but he listened to Theodore Roosevelt, somewhat because he
wanted to, and somewhat because it was difficult for any one to do
anything else in those days when Roosevelt once took the floor.
Gregor Lang had known many reformers in his time, and some had been
precise and meticulous and some had been fiery and eloquent, but none
had possessed the overwhelming passion for public service that seemed
to burn in this amazingly vigorous and gay-spirited American of
twenty-four. Roosevelt denounced "boss rule" until the rafters rang,
coupling his denunciation of corrupt politicians with denunciations of
those "fireside moralists" who were forever crying against bad
government yet raising not a finger to correct it. The honest were
always in a majority, he contended, and, under the American
Constitution, held in their hands the power to overcome the dishonest
minority. It was the solemn duty of every American citizen, he
declared, not only to vote, but to fight, if need be, for good
government.
It was two in the morning before Gregor Lang and Theodore Roosevelt
reluctantly retired to their bunks.
Roosevelt was up and about at dawn. It was still raining. Joe Ferris
suggested mildly that they wait for better weather before plunging
again into the sea of gumbo mud, but Roosevelt, who had not come to
Dakota to twiddle his thumbs, insisted that they resume their hunt.
They went and found nothing. The rain continued for a week.
"He nearly killed poor Joe," Lincoln remarked afterwards. "He would
not stop for anything."
Every morning Joe entered his protest and Roosevelt overruled it, and
every evening Joe rolled, nigh dead, into his buffalo robe and
Roosevelt talked cattle and politics with Gregor Lang until one and
two in the morning. Joe and the Highlander sawed wood, but the boy
Lincoln in his bunk lay with wide eyes.
"It was in listening to those talks after supper in the old shack on
the Cannonball," he said, a long time after, "that I first came to
understand that the Lord made the earth for all of us and not for a
chosen few."
Roosevelt, too, received inspiration from these nocturnal discussions,
but it was an inspiration of another sort.
"Mr. Lang," he said suddenly one evening, "I am thinking seriously of
going into the cattle business. Would you advise me to go into it?"
Gregor Lang was cautious. "I don't like to advise you in a matter of
that kind," he answered. "I myself am prepared to follow it out to the
end. I have every faith in it. If it's a question of my faith, I have
full faith. As a business proposition, it is the best there is."
They said no more about the matter that night.
The weather cleared at last. Joe Ferris, who had started on the hunt
with misgivings, had no misgivings whatever now. He confided in
Lincoln, not without a touch of pride in his new acquaintance, that
this was a new variety of tenderfoot, altogether a "plumb good sort."
They started out with new zest under the clear sky. They had, in
their week's hunting, come across the fresh tracks of numerous
buffalo, but had in no case secured a shot. The last great herd had,
in fact, been exterminated six months before, and though the Ferrises
and Merrifield had killed a half-dozen within a quarter-mile of the
Maltese Cross early that summer, these had been merely a straggling
remnant. The days when a hunter could stand and bombard a dull,
panic-stricken herd, slaughtering hundreds without changing his
position, were gone. In the spring of 1883 the buffalo had still
roamed the prairies east and west of the Bad Lands in huge herds, but
moving in herds they were as easy to shoot as a family cow and the
profits even at three dollars a pelt were great. Game-butchers swarmed
forth from Little Missouri and fifty other frontier "towns,"
slaughtering buffalo for their skins or for their tongues or for the
mere lust of killing. The hides were piled high at every shipping
point; the carcasses rotted in the sun. Three hundred thousand
buffalo, driven north from the more settled plains of western
Nebraska, and huddled in a territory covering not more than a hundred
and fifty square miles, perished like cattle in a stockyard, almost
overnight. It was one of the most stupendous and dramatic
obliterations in history of a species betrayed by the sudden change of
its environment.
Hunting buffalo on horseback had, even in the days of the great herds,
been an altogether different matter from the methodical slaughter from
a "stand," where a robe for every cartridge was not an unusual "bag,"
and where an experienced game-butcher could, without recourse to Baron
Munchausen, boast an average of eighty per cent of "kills." There was
always the possibility that the bison, driven to bay, might charge the
sportsman who drove his horse close in for a sure shot. With the great
herds destroyed, there was added to the danger and the privations of
the wild country where the few remaining stragglers might be found,
the zest and the arduousness of long searching. Roosevelt and Joe
Ferris had had their full share of the latter.
They came on the fresh track of a buffalo two hours after their
departure, that clear warm morning, from Lang's hospitable cabin. It
was, for a time, easy to follow, where it crossed and recrossed a
narrow creek-bottom, but became almost undiscernible as it struck off
up the side of a winding coulee, where the soil, soaked as it had been
by a week of September drizzle, was already baked hard by the hot sun.
They rode for an hour cautiously up the ravine. Suddenly, as they
passed the mouth of a side coulee, there was a plunge and crackle
through the bushes at its head, and a shabby-looking old bull bison
galloped out of it and plunged over a steep bank into a patch of
broken ground which led around the base of a high butte. The bison was
out of sight before they had time to fire. At the risk of their necks
they sped their horses over the broken ground only to see the buffalo
emerge from it at the farther end and with amazing agility climb up
the side of a butte over a quarter of a mile away. With his shaggy
mane and huge forequarters he had some of the impressiveness of a lion
as he stood for an instant looking back at his pursuers. They followed
him for miles, but caught no glimpse of him again.
They were now on the prairie far to the east of the river, a steaming,
treeless region stretching in faint undulations north, east, and
south, until it met the sky in the blurred distance. Here and there it
was broken by a sunken water-course, dry in spite of a week of wet
weather, or a low bluff or a cluster of small, round-topped buttes.
The grass was burnt brown; the air was hot and still. The country had
the monotony and the melancholy and more than a little of the beauty
and the fascination of the sea.
They ate their meager lunch beside a miry pool, where a clump of
cedars under a bluff gave a few square feet of shadow.
All afternoon they rode over the dreary prairie, but it was late
before they caught another glimpse of game. Then, far off in the
middle of a large plain, they saw three black specks.
The horses were slow beasts, and were tired besides and in no
condition for running. Roosevelt and his mentor picketed them in a
hollow, half a mile from the game, and started off on their hands and
knees. Roosevelt blundered into a bed of cactus and filled his hands
with the spines; but he came within a hundred and fifty feet or less
of the buffalo. He drew up and fired. The bullet made the dust fly
from the hide as it hit the body with a loud crack, but apparently did
no particular harm. The three buffalo made off over a low rise with
their tails in the air.
The hunters returned to their horses in disgust, and for seven or
eight miles loped the jaded animals along at a brisk pace. Now and
again they saw the quarry far ahead. Finally, when the sun had just
set, they saw that all three had come to a stand in a gentle hollow.
There was no cover anywhere. They determined, as a last desperate
resort, to try to run them on their worn-out ponies.
The bison faced them for an instant, then turned and made off. With
spurs and quirt, Roosevelt urged his tired pony forward. Night closed
in and the full moon rose out of the black haze on the horizon. The
pony plunged to within sixty or seventy yards of the wounded bull, and
could gain no more. Joe Ferris, better mounted, forged ahead. The
bull, seeing him coming, swerved. Roosevelt cut across and came almost
up to him. The ground over which they were running was broken into
holes and ditches, and the fagged horses floundered and pitched
forward at every step.
At twenty feet, Roosevelt fired, but the pony was pitching like a
launch in a storm, and he missed. He dashed in closer.
[Illustration: The prairie at the edge of the Bad Lands.]
[Illustration: "Broken Country".]
The bull's tail went up and he wheeled suddenly and charged with
lowered horns.
The pony, panic-stricken, spun round and tossed up his head, striking
the rifle which Roosevelt was holding in both hands and knocking it
violently against his forehead, cutting a deep gash. The blood poured
into Roosevelt's eyes.
Ferris reined in his pony. "All right?" he called, evidently
frightened.
"Don't mind me!" Roosevelt shouted, without turning an instant from
the business in hand. "I'm all right."
For an instant it was a question whether Roosevelt would get the
buffalo or the buffalo would get Roosevelt. But he swerved his horse,
and the buffalo, plunging past, charged Ferris and followed him as he
made off over the broken ground, uncomfortably close to the tired
pony's tail. Roosevelt, half-blinded, tried to run in on him again,
but his pony stopped, dead beat; and by no spurring could he force him
out of a slow trot. Ferris, swerving suddenly and dismounting, fired,
but the dim moonlight made accurate aim impossible, and the buffalo,
to the utter chagrin of the hunters, lumbered off and vanished into
the darkness. Roosevelt followed him for a short space afoot in
hopeless and helpless wrath.
There was no possibility of returning to Lang's that night. They were
not at all certain where they were, but they knew they were a long way
from the mouth of the Little Cannonball. They determined to camp near
by for the night.
They did not mount the exhausted horses, but led them, stumbling,
foaming and sweating, while they hunted for water. It was an hour
before they found a little mud-pool in a reedy hollow. They had drunk
nothing for twelve hours and were parched with thirst, but the water
of the pool was like thin jelly, slimy and nauseating, and they could
drink only a mouthful. Supper consisted of a dry biscuit, previously
baked by Lincoln under direction of his father, who insisted that the
use of a certain kind of grease whose name is lost to history would
keep the biscuits soft. They were hard as horn.[2] There was not a
twig with which to make a fire, nor a bush to which they could fasten
their horses. When they lay down to sleep, thirsty and famished, they
had to tie their horses with the lariat to the saddles which were
their pillows.
[Footnote 2: "I would start to make biscuits and as
usual go about putting shortening into them, which
father didn't like. We'd argue over it a little, and I
would say, 'Good biscuits can't be made without grease.'
Then he'd say, 'Well, use elbow grease.' I'd say then,
'Well, all right, I'll try it.' Then I'd go to work and
knead the dough _hard_ (on purpose), understanding, of
course, that kneading utterly spoils biscuit dough,
whether there is shortening in it or not. The result is
a pan of adamantine biscuits which, of course, I blame
on him."--_Lincoln Lang._]
They did not go quickly to sleep. The horses were nervous, restless,
alert, in spite of their fatigue, continually snorting or standing
with their ears forward, peering out into the night, as though
conscious of the presence of danger. Roosevelt remembered some
half-breed Crees they had encountered the day before. It was quite
possible that some roving bucks might come for their horses, and
perhaps their scalps, for the Indians, who were still unsettled on
their reservations, had a way of stealing off whenever they found a
chance and doing what damage they could. Stories he had heard of
various bands of horse-thieves that operated in the region between the
Little Missouri and the Black Hills likewise returned to mind to
plague him. The wilderness in which Roosevelt and Ferris had pitched
their meager camp was in the very heart of the region infested by the
bandits. They dozed fitfully, waking with a start whenever the sound
of the grazing of the horses ceased for a moment, and they knew that
the nervous animals were watching for the approach of a foe. It was
late when at last they fell asleep.
They were rudely wakened at midnight by having their pillows whipped
out from under their heads. They leapt to their feet. In the bright
moonlight they saw the horses madly galloping off, with the saddles
bounding and trailing behind them. Their first thought was that the
horses had been stampeded by horse-thieves, and they threw themselves
on the ground, crouching in the long grass with rifles ready.
There was no stir. At last, in the hollow they made out a shadowy,
four-footed shape. It was a wolf who strode noiselessly to the low
crest and disappeared.
They rose and went after the horses, taking the broad trail made by
the saddles through the dewy grass.
Once Joe Ferris stopped. "Say, I ain't ever committed any crime
deservin' that anything like this should happen!" he exclaimed
plaintively. Then, turning straight to Roosevelt, evidently suspecting
that he had a Jonah on his hands, he cried, in a voice in which wrath
was mingled with comic despair, "Have you ever done anything to
deserve this?"
"Joe," Roosevelt answered solemnly, "I never have."
"Then I can't understand," Joe remarked, "why we're runnin' in such
luck."
Roosevelt grinned at him and chuckled, and Joe Ferris grinned and
chuckled; and after that the savage attentions of an unkind fate did
not seem so bad.
They found the horses sooner than they expected and led them back to
camp. Utterly weary, they wrapped themselves in their blankets once
more and went to sleep. But rest was not for them that night. At three
in the morning a thin rain began to fall, and they awoke to find
themselves lying in four inches of water. Joe Ferris expected
lamentations. What he heard was, "By Godfrey, but this is fun!"
They cowered and shivered under their blankets until dawn. Then,
soaked to the skin, they made breakfast of Lang's adamantine biscuits,
mounted their horses, and were off, glad to bid good-bye to the
inhospitable pool.
A fine, drizzling mist, punctuated at intervals by heavy downpours of
rain, shrouded the desolate region and gathered them into a chilly
desolation of its own. They traveled by compass. It was only after
hours that the mist lifted, revealing the world about them, and, in
the center of it, several black objects slowly crossing a piece of
rolling country ahead. They were buffalo.
They picketed the horses, and crept forward on their hands and knees
through the soft, muddy prairie soil. A shower of cold rain blew
up-wind straight in their faces and made the teeth chatter behind
their blue lips. The rain was blowing in Roosevelt's eyes as he pulled
the trigger. He missed clean, and the whole band plunged into a hollow
and were off.
What Joe Ferris said upon that occasion remains untold. It was "one of
those misses," Roosevelt himself remarked afterwards, "which a man to
his dying day always looks back upon with wonder and regret." In wet,
sullen misery he returned with Joe to the horses.
The rain continued all day, and they spent another wretched night.
They had lived for two days on nothing but biscuits and rainwater, and
privation had thoroughly lost whatever charm it might have had for an
adventurous young man in search of experience. The next morning
brought sunlight and revived spirits, but it brought no change in
their luck.
"Bad luck followed us," Joe Ferris remarked long after, "like a yellow
dog follows a drunkard."
Joe's horse nearly stepped on a rattlesnake, and narrowly escaped
being bitten; a steep bluff broke away under their ponies' hoofs, and
sent them sliding and rolling to the bottom of a long slope, a pile of
intermingled horses and men. Shortly after, Roosevelt's horse stepped
into a hole and turned a complete somersault, pitching his rider a
good ten feet; and he had scarcely recovered his composure and his
seat in the saddle, when the earth gave way under his horse as though
he had stepped on a trap-door, and let him down to his withers in
soft, sticky mud. They hauled the frightened animal out by the lariat,
with infinite labor. Altogether it was not a restful Sunday.
More than once Joe Ferris looked at Roosevelt quizzically, wondering
when the pleasant "four-eyed tenderfoot" would begin to worry about
catching cold and admit at last that the game was too much for him.
But the "tenderfoot," it happened, had a dogged streak. He made no
suggestion of "quitting."
"He could stand an awful lot of hard knocks," Joe explained later,
"and he was always cheerful. You just couldn't knock him out of sorts.
He was entertaining, too, and I liked to listen to him, though, on the
whole, he wasn't much on the talk. He said that he wanted to get away
from politics, so I didn't mention political matters; and he had books
with him and would read at odd times."
Joe began to look upon his "tenderfoot" with a kind of awe, which was
not diminished when Roosevelt, blowing up a rubber pillow which he
carried with him, casually remarked one night that his doctors back
East had told him that he did not have much longer to live, and that
violent exercise would be immediately fatal.
They returned to Lang's, Roosevelt remarking to himself that it was
"dogged that does it," and ready to hunt three weeks if necessary to
get his buffalo.
If Lang had any notion that the privations of the hunt had dampened
Roosevelt's enthusiasm for the frontier, Roosevelt himself speedily
dispelled it.
Roosevelt had, for a year or more, felt the itch to be a monarch of
acres. He had bought land at Oyster Bay, including an elevation known
to the neighbors as Sagamore Hill, where he was building a house; but
a view and a few acres of woodland could not satisfy his craving. He
wanted expanses to play with, large works to plan and execute,
subordinates to inspire and to direct. He had driven his uncles, who
were as intensely practical and thrifty as Dutch uncles should be, and
his sisters, who were, at least, very much more practical in money
matters than he was, nearly frantic the preceding summer by declaring
his intention to purchase a large farm adjoining the estate of his
brother-in-law, Douglas Robinson, in the Mohawk Valley; for his kin
knew, what he himself failed to recognize, that he was not made to be
a farmer and that he who loved to be in the center of the seething
world would explode, or burn himself out, in a countryside a night's
run from anywhere. They knew also that farming was not a spiritual
adventure, but a business, and that Theodore, with his generous habit
of giving away a few thousands here and a few thousands there, was not
exactly a business man. He had yielded to their abjurations; but his
hankering for acres had remained.
Here in Dakota were all the acres that any man could want, and they
were his for the asking.
To this vague craving to be monarch of all he surveyed (or nearly
all), another emotion which Roosevelt might have identified with
business acumen had during the past year been added. Together with a
Harvard classmate, Richard Trimble, he had become interested in a
ranching project known as the Teschmaker and Debillier Cattle Company,
which "ran" some thousands of head of cattle fifty or sixty miles
north of Cheyenne; and he had invested ten thousand dollars in it.
Commander Gorringe, seeking to finance the enterprise in which he was
involved, in the course of his hunting accounts doubtlessly spoke
glowingly to Roosevelt of the huge profits that awaited Eastern
dollars in the Bad Lands. Roosevelt, it appears, asked his uncle,
James Roosevelt, his father's elder brother and head of the banking
firm of Roosevelt and Son, whether he would advise him to invest a
further sum of five thousand dollars in cattle in Dakota.
Uncle James, to whom, as investments, cattle ranches were in a class
with gold mines, emphatically informed Theodore that he would not at
all advise him to do anything of the kind. How deeply Roosevelt was
impressed by this information subsequent events clearly indicate.
Roosevelt and Lang sat at the table long after Lincoln had cleared it
that night. Joe and the Highlander were asleep, but Lincoln heard the
two men talking and, years after, remembered the conversation of that
momentous September night.
"Mr. Lang," said Roosevelt abruptly, "I have definitely decided to go
into the cattle business. I want somebody to run cattle for me on
shares or to take the management of my cattle under some arrangement
to be worked out. Will you take charge of my cattle?"
The Scotchman, who was naturally deliberate, was not prepared to meet
such precipitancy. He told Roosevelt that he appreciated his offer.
"Unfortunately," he added reluctantly, "I am tied up with the other
people."
Roosevelt's regret was evident. He asked Lang whether there was any
one he would recommend. Without hesitation, Lang suggested Sylvane
Ferris and Bill Merrifield. Early the next morning Lincoln Lang was
dispatched to the Maltese Cross.
Meanwhile Roosevelt and Joe continued the pursuit of the elusive
buffalo. But again luck was far from them. For two days they hunted in
vain. When they returned to Lang's the second dusk, Sylvane and
Merrifield were there waiting for them.
That evening, after supper, Roosevelt sat on a log outside Lang's
cabin with the two ranchmen and asked them how much in their opinion
it would cost adequately to stock a cattle-ranch.
"Depends what you want to do," answered Sylvane. "But my guess is, if
you want to do it right, that it'll spoil the looks of forty thousand
dollars."
"How much would you need right off?" Roosevelt went on.
"Oh, a third would make a start."
"Could you boys handle the cattle for me?"
"Why, yes," said Sylvane in his pleasant, quiet drawl, "I guess we
could take care of 'em 'bout as well as the next man."
"Why, I guess _so_!" ejaculated Merrifield.
"Well, will you do it?"
"Now, that's another story," said Sylvane. "Merrifield here and me is
under contract with Wadsworth and Halley. We've got a bunch of cattle
with them on shares. I guess we'd like to do business with you right
enough, Mr. Roosevelt, but there's nothing we can do until Wadsworth
and Halley releases us."
"I'll buy those cattle."
"All right," remarked Sylvane. "Then the best thing for us to do is to
go to Minnesota an' see those men an' get released from our contract.
When that's fixed up, we can make any arrangements you've a mind to."
"That will suit me."
Roosevelt drew a checkbook from his pocket, and there, sitting on the
log (oh, vision of Uncle James!) wrote a check, not for the
contemplated five thousand dollars, but for fourteen, and handed it to
Sylvane. Merrifield and Sylvane, he directed, were to purchase a few
hundred head of cattle that fall in addition to the hundred and fifty
head which they held on shares for Wadsworth.
"Don't you want a receipt?" asked Merrifield at last.
"Oh, that's all right," said Roosevelt. "If I didn't trust you men, I
wouldn't go into business with you."
They shook hands all around; whereupon they dropped the subject from
conversation and talked about game.
"We were sitting on a log," said Merrifield, many years later, "up at
what we called Cannonball Creek. He handed us a check for fourteen
thousand dollars, handed it right over to us on a verbal contract. He
didn't have a scratch of a pen for it."
"All the security he had for his money," added Sylvane, "was our
honesty."
The man from the East, with more than ordinary ability to read the
faces of men, evidently thought that that was quite enough.
The next dawn Roosevelt did not go hunting as usual. All morning he
sat over the table in the cabin with Lang and the two Canadians
laboring over the contract which three of them were to sign in case
his prospective partners were released from the obligation which for
the time bound them. It was determined that Ferris and Merrifield
should go at once to Minnesota to confer with Wadsworth and Halley.
Roosevelt, meanwhile, would continue his buffalo hunt, remaining in
the Bad Lands until he received word that the boys from the Maltese
Cross were in a position to "complete the deal." The wheels of the new
venture having thus, in defiance of Uncle James, been set in motion,
Roosevelt parted from his new friends, and resumed the interrupted
chase.
The red gods must have looked with favor on Roosevelt's adventurous
spirit, for luck turned suddenly in his favor. Next morning he was
skirting a ridge of broken buttes with Joe Ferris, near the upper
waters of the Little Cannonball west of Lang's camp over the Montana
line, when suddenly both ponies threw up their heads and snuffed the
air, turning their muzzles toward a coulee that sloped gently toward
the creek-bottom they were traversing. Roosevelt slipped off his pony
and ran quickly but cautiously up the side of the ravine. In the soft
soil at the bottom he saw the round prints of a bison's hoof.
He came upon the buffalo an instant later, grazing slowly up the
valley. Both wind and shelter were good, and he ran close. The bull
threw back his head and cocked his tail in the air.
Joe Ferris, who had followed close at Roosevelt's heels, pointed out a
yellow spot on the buffalo, just back of the shoulder. "If you hit him
there," he whispered, "you'll get him right through the heart."
It seemed to Joe that the Easterner was extraordinarily cool, as he
aimed deliberately and fired. With amazing agility the buffalo bounded
up the opposite side of the ravine, seemingly heedless of two more
bullets aimed at his flank.
Joe was ready to throw up his hands in despair. But suddenly they saw
blood pouring from the bison's mouth and nostrils. The great bull
rushed to the ridge at a lumbering gallop, and disappeared.
They found him lying in the next gully, dead, as Joe Ferris remarked,
"as Methusalem's cat."
Roosevelt, with all his intellectual maturity, was a good deal of a
boy, and the Indian war-dance he executed around the prostrate buffalo
left nothing in the way of delight unexpressed. Joe watched the
performance open-mouthed.
"I never saw any one so enthused in my life," he said in after days,
"and, by golly, I was enthused myself for more reasons than one. I was
plumb tired out, and, besides, he was so eager to shoot his first
buffalo that it somehow got into my blood; and I wanted to see him
kill his first one as badly as he wanted to kill it."
Roosevelt, out of the gladness of his heart, then and there presented
him with a hundred dollars; so there was another reason for Joe to be
happy.
They returned to Lang's, chanting pæans of victory. Early next day
Roosevelt returned with Joe to the place where they had left the
buffalo and with endless labor skinned the huge beast and brought the
head and slippery hide to camp.
The next morning Roosevelt took his departure.
Gregor Lang watched the mounted figure ride off beside the rattling
buckboard. "He is the most extraordinary man I have ever met," he said
to Lincoln. "I shall be surprised if the world does not hear from him
one of these days."
III
Some came for lungs, and some for jobs,
And some for booze at Big-mouth Bob's,
Some to punch cattle, some to shoot,
Some for a vision, some for loot;
Some for views and some for vice,
Some for faro, some for dice;
Some for the joy of a galloping hoof,
Some for the prairie's spacious roof,
Some to forget a face, a fan,
Some to plumb the heart of man;
Some to preach and some to blow,
Some to grab and some to grow,
Some in anger, some in pride,
Some to taste, before they died,
Life served hot and _a la cartee_--
And some to dodge a necktie-party.
From _Medora Nights_
Roosevelt remained in Little Missouri to wait for news from Merrifield
and Sylvane, who had departed for Minnesota a day or two previous.
Possibly it occurred to him that a few days in what was said to be the
worst "town" on the Northern Pacific might have their charm.
Roosevelt was enough of a boy rather to relish things that were
blood-curdling. Years after, a friend of Roosevelt's, who had himself
committed almost every crime in the register, remarked; in commenting
in a tone of injured morality on Roosevelt's frank regard for a
certain desperate character, that "Roosevelt had a weakness for
murderers." The reproach has a delightful suggestiveness. Whether it
was merited or not is a large question on which Roosevelt himself
might have discoursed with emphasis and humor. If he actually did
possess such a weakness, Little Missouri and the boom town were fully
able to satisfy it.
"Little Missouri was a terrible place," remarked, years after, a man
who had had occasion to study it. It was, in fact, "wild and woolly"
to an almost grotesque degree, and the boom town was if anything a
little cruder than its twin across the river. The men who had drifted
into Medora after the news was noised abroad that "a crazy Frenchman"
was making ready to scatter millions there, were, many of them,
outcasts of society, reckless, greedy, and conscienceless; fugitives
from justice with criminal records, and gunmen who lived by crooked
gambling and thievery of every sort. The best of those who had come
that summer to seek adventure and fortune on the banks of the Little
Missouri were men who cared little for their personal safety, courting
danger wherever it beckoned, careless of life and limb, reticent of
speech and swift of action, light-hearted and altogether human. They
were the adventurous and unfettered spirits of hundreds of communities
whom the restrictions of respectable society had galled. Here they
were, elbowing each other in a little corner of sagebrush country
where there was little to do and much whiskey to drink; and the hand
of the law was light and far away.
[Illustration: Roosevelt in 1883.]
[Illustration: Medora in the winter of 1883-84. The office and
company-store of the Marquis de Mores.]
Somewhere, hundreds of miles to the south, there was a United States
marshal; somewhere a hundred and fifty miles to the east there was a
sheriff. Neither Medora nor Little Missouri had any representative
of the law whatsoever, no government or even a shadow of
government. The feuds that arose were settled by the parties involved
in the ancient manner of Cain.
Of the heterogeneous aggregation of desperate men that made up the
population of the frontier settlement, Jake Maunders, the man who had
lent Roosevelt a hammer and a buffalo-gun, was, by all odds, the most
prominent and the least trustworthy.
He had been one of the first to settle at Little Missouri, and for a
while had lived in the open as a hunter. But the influx of tourists
and "floaters" had indicated to him a less arduous form of labor. He
guided "tenderfeet," charging exorbitant rates; he gambled
(cautiously); whenever a hunter left the Bad Lands, abandoning his
shack, Maunders claimed it with the surrounding country, and, when a
settler took up land near by, demanded five hundred dollars for his
rights. A man whom he owed three thousand dollars had been opportunely
kicked into oblivion by a horse in a manner that was mysterious to men
who knew the ways of horses. He had shot MacNab, the Scotchman, in
cold blood, as he came across the sagebrush flat from Bill Williams's
saloon, kneeling at the corner of his shack with his rifle on his
knee. Another murder was laid directly at his door. But the forces of
law were remote from Little Missouri, and Jake Maunders not only
lived, but flourished.
His enemies said he was "the sneakiest man in town, always figuring on
somebody else doing the dirty work for him, and him reap the
benefits"; but his friends said that "once Jake was your friend, he
was your friend, and that was all there was to it." The truth remains
that the friends Jake chose were all characters only a little less
shady than himself.
Most prominent of these were the precious pair who "operated" Bill
Williams's saloon. Bill Williams was a Welshman who had drifted into
Little Missouri while the railroad was being built, and, recognizing
that the men who made money in frontier settlements were the men who
sold whiskey, had opened a saloon to serve liquid refreshment in
various vicious forms to the grading crews and soldiers.
"He always reminded me of a red fox," said Lincoln Lang long after,
"for, besides having a marked carroty complexion, there was a cunning
leer in his face which seemed, as it were, to show indistinctly
through the transparency of the manufactured grin with which he sought
to cover it. When he got mad over something or other and swept the
grin aside, I do not think that an uglier countenance ever existed on
earth or in hell. He was rather short of stature, bullet-headed and
bull-necked, with a sloping forehead and a somewhat underslung chin.
His nose was red and bulbous, his eyes narrow-set beneath bushy red
eyebrows. He had a heavy red moustache not altogether concealing an
abnormally long mouth, and through it at times, when he smiled, his
teeth showed like fangs."
He was a man of natural shrewdness, a moneymaker, a gambler, and like
Maunders (it was rumored) a brander of cattle that were not his. But
he was not without a certain attractive quality, and when he was
slightly drunk he was brilliant. He was deathly afraid of being alone,
and had a habit on those infrequent occasions when his bar was for the
moment deserted, of setting the chairs in orderly rows as in a chapel,
and then preaching to them solemnly on the relative merits of King
Solomon and Hiram, King of Tyre.
His partner, Jess Hogue, was the brains of the nefarious trio, a dark,
raw-boned brute with an ugly, square-jawed, domineering face, a bellow
like a bull's, and all the crookedness of Bill Williams without his
redeeming wit. His record of achievement covered a broader field than
that of either of his associates, for it began with a sub-contract on
the New York water system, involved him with the United States
Government in connection with a certain "phantom mail route" between
Bismarck and Miles City, and started him on the road to affluence with
the acquisition of twenty-eight army mules which, with the aid of Bill
Williams and the skillful use of the peculiar type of intelligence
with which they both seemed to be endowed, he had secured at less than
cost from Fort Abraham Lincoln at Mandan.
Associated with Williams, Hogue, and Maunders, in their various
ventures, was a man of thirty-eight or forty named Paddock, with
florid cheeks, and a long, dark moustache and goatee that made him
look something like Buffalo Bill and something like Simon Legree. He
conducted the local livery-stable with much profit, for his rates were
what was known to the trade as "fancy," and shared with Maunders
whatever glory there was in being one of the most feared men in Little
Missouri. Like Maunders, he had his defenders; and he had a
pleasant-faced wife who gave mute tribute to a side of Jerry Paddock
which he did not reveal to the world.
The banks of the Little Missouri in those days of September, 1883,
were no place for soft hands or faint hearts; and a place for women
only who had the tough fiber of the men. There were scarcely a
half-dozen of them in all the Bad Lands up and down the river. In
Little Missouri there were four--Mrs. Roderick, who was the cook at
the Pyramid Park Hotel; Mrs. Paddock, wife of the livery-stable
keeper; Mrs. Pete McGeeney who kept a boarding-house next to Johnny
Nelson's store; and her neighbor and eternal enemy, Mrs. Fitzgerald.
Pete McGeeney was a section-boss on the railroad, but what else he
was, except the husband of Mrs. McGeeney, is obscure. He was mildly
famous in Little Missouri because he had delirium tremens, and now and
then when he went on a rampage had to be lassoed. Mrs. McGeeney's feud
with Mrs. Fitzgerald was famous throughout the countryside. They lived
within fifty feet of each other, which may have been the cause of the
extreme bitterness between them, for they were both Irish and their
tongues were sharp.
Little Missouri had, until now, known only one child, but that one had
fully lived up to the best traditions of the community. It was Archie
Maunders, his father's image and proudest achievement. At the age of
twelve he held up Fitzgerald, the roadmaster, at the point of a
pistol, and more than once delayed the departure of the Overland
Express by shooting around the feet of the conductors.
Whether he was still the waiter at the Pyramid Park Hotel when
Roosevelt arrived there is dark, for it was sometime that autumn that
a merciful God took Archie Maunders to him before he could grow into
the fullness of his powers. He was only thirteen or fourteen years old
when he died, but even the guidebook of the Northern Pacific had taken
notice of him, recounting the retort courteous he had delivered on one
occasion when he was serving the guests at the hotel.
"Tea or coffee?" he asked one of the "dudes" who had come in on the
Overland.
"I'll take tea, if you please," responded the tenderfoot.
"You blinkety blank son of a blank!" remarked Archie, "you'll take
coffee or I'll scald you!"
The "dude" took coffee.
His "lip" was, indeed, phenomenal, and one day when he aimed it at
Darius Vine (who was not a difficult mark), that individual bestirred
his two hundred and fifty pounds and set about to thrash him. Archie
promptly drew his "six-shooter," and as Darius, who was not
conspicuous for courage, fled toward the Cantonment, Archie followed,
shooting about his ears and his heels. Darius reached his brother's
store, nigh dead, just in time to slam the door in Archie's face.
Archie shot through the panel and brought Darius down with a bullet in
his leg.
Archie's "gayety" with his "six-shooter" seemed to stir no emotion in
his father except pride. But when Archie finally began to shoot at his
own brother, Jake Maunders mildly protested. "Golly, golly," he
exclaimed, "don't shoot at your brother. If you want to shoot at
anybody, shoot at somebody outside the family."
Whether or not the boy saw the reasonableness of this paternal
injunction is lost in the dust of the years. But the aphorism that the
good die young has no significance so far as Archie Maunders is
concerned.
The lawless element was altogether in the majority in the Bad Lands
and thieving was common up and down the river and in the heart of the
settlement itself. Maunders himself was too much of a coward to steal,
too politic not to realize the disadvantage in being caught
red-handed. Bill Williams was not above picking a purse when a
reasonably safe occasion offered, but as a rule, like Maunders, he and
his partner Hogue contrived to make some of the floaters and
fly-by-nights, fugitives from other communities, do the actual
stealing.
Maunders ruled by the law of the bully, and most men took him at the
valuation of his "bluff." But his attempt to intimidate Mrs. McGeeney
was a rank failure. One of his hogs wandered south across the railroad
track and invaded Mrs. McGeeney's vegetable garden; whereupon, to
discourage repetition, she promptly scalded it. Maunders, discovering
the injury to his property, charged over to Mrs. McGeeney's house with
blood in his eyes. She was waiting for him with a butcher-knife in her
hand.
"Come on, ye damn bully!" she exclaimed. "Come on! I'm ready for ye!"
Maunders did not accept the invitation, and thereafter gave Mrs.
McGeeney a wide berth.
There had been talk early in 1883 of organizing Billings County in
which Little Missouri was situated. The stimulus toward this project
had come from Jake Maunders, Bill Williams, and Hogue, backed by the
unholy aggregation of saloon rats and floaters who customarily
gathered around them. Merrifield and the Ferrises, who had taken the
first steps in the community toward the reign of law when they had
refused to buy stolen horses, were heartily anxious to secure some
form of organized government, for they had no sympathy with the
lawlessness that made the settlement a perilous place for honest men.
But they were wise enough to see that the aim of Jake Maunders and his
crew in organizing the county was not the establishment of law and
order, but the creation of machinery for taxation on which they could
wax fat. The Maltese Cross group therefore objected strenuously to any
attempt on the part of the other group to force the organization of
the county. Merrifield, Sylvane and Joe, and two or three ranchmen and
cowboys who gathered around them, among them Gregor Lang and Bill
Dantz (an attractive youngster of eighteen who had a ranch half a
dozen miles south of the Maltese Cross), were in the minority, but
they were respected and feared, and in the face of their opposition
even such high-handed scoundrels as Maunders, Hogue, and Williams
developed a vein of caution.
Meanwhile public safety was preserved in ways that were not altogether
lawful, but were well known to all who lived in frontier communities.
"Many is the man that's cleared that bend west of Little Missouri with
bullets following his heels," said Merrifield, years after. "That's
the way we had of getting rid of people we didn't like. There was no
court procedure, just a notice to get out of town and a lot of
bullets, and, you bet, they got out."
Little Missouri's leading citizens were a wild crew, but with all
their violence and their villainy, they were picturesque beings, and
were by no means devoid of redeeming traits. Frank Vine, who evidently
thought nothing of robbing his employers and was drunk more than half
the time, had an equable temper which nothing apparently could ruffle,
and a good heart to which no one in trouble ever seemed to appeal in
vain. Mrs. McGeeney was a very "Lady of the Lamp" when any one was
sick. Even Maunders had his graces. Roosevelt could not have lived
among them a week without experiencing a new understanding of the
inconsistencies that battle with each other in the making of men's
lives.
IV
No, he was not like other men.
He fought at Acre (what's the date?),
Died, and somehow got born again
Seven hundred years too late.
It wasn't that he hitched his wagon
To stars too wild to heed his will--
He was just old Sir Smite-the-dragon
Pretending he was J. J. Hill.
And always when the talk was cattle
And rates and prices, selling, buying,
I reckon he was dreaming battle,
And, somewhere, grandly dying.
From _Medora Nights_
The inhabitants of "Little Misery" who regarded law as a potential
ball-and-chain were doing a thriving business by one crooked means or
another and looked with uneasiness upon the coming of the cattlemen.
There were wails and threats that autumn in Bill Williams's saloon
over "stuck-up tenderfeet, shassayin' 'round, drivin' in cattle and
chasin' out game."
"Maunders disliked Roosevelt from the first," said Bill Dantz. "He had
no personal grudge against him, but he disliked him for what he
represented. Maunders had prospered under the loose and lawless
customs of the Northwest, and he shied at any man who he thought might
try to interfere with them."
The coming of the Marquis de Mores six months previous had served
greatly to heighten Maunders's personal prestige and to strengthen
the lawless elements. For the Marquis was attracted by Jake's evident
power, and, while he drew the crafty schemer into his inner counsels,
was himself drawn into a subtle net that was yet to entangle both men
in forces stronger than either.
When one day in March, 1883, a striking young Frenchman, who said he
was a nobleman, came to Little Missouri with a plan ready-made to
build a community there to rival Omaha, and a business that would
startle America's foremost financiers, the citizens of the wicked
little frontier settlement, who thought that they knew all the
possibilities of "tenderfeet" and "pilgrims" and "how-do-you-do-boys,"
admitted in some bewilderment that they had been mistaken. The
Frenchman's name was Antoine de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Mores. He was
a member of the Orleans family, son of a duke, a "white lily of
France," remotely in line for the throne; an unusually handsome man,
tall and straight, black of hair and moustache, twenty-five or
twenty-six years old, athletic, vigorous, and commanding. He had been
a French officer, a graduate of the French military school of Saint
Cyr, and had come to America following his marriage abroad with Medora
von Hoffman, the daughter of a wealthy New York banker of German
blood. His cousin, Count Fitz James, a descendant of the Jacobin
exiles, had hunted in the Bad Lands the year previous, returning to
France with stories of the new cattle country that stirred the
Marquis's imagination. He was an adventurous spirit. "He had no
judgment," said Merrifield, "but he was a fighter from hell." The
stories of life on the frontier lured him as they had lured others,
but the dreams that came to him were more complex and expensive dreams
than those which came to the other young men who turned toward Dakota
in those early eighties.
The Marquis arrived in Little Missouri with his father-in-law's
millions at his back and a letter of introduction to Howard Eaton in
his pocket. The letter, from a prominent business man in the East,
ended, it seemed to Eaton, rather vaguely: "I don't know what
experience he has had in business or anything of that kind, but he has
some large views."
The Marquis enthusiastically unfolded these views. "I am going to
build an abattoir. I am going to buy all the beef, sheep, and hogs
that come over the Northern Pacific, and I am going to slaughter them
here and then ship them to Chicago and the East."
"I don't think you have any idea how much stock comes over the
Northern Pacific," Eaton remarked.
"It doesn't matter!" cried the Marquis. "My father-in-law has ten
million dollars and can borrow ten million dollars more. I've got old
Armour and the rest of them matched dollar for dollar."
Eaton said to himself that unquestionably the Marquis's views were
"large."
"Do you think I am impractical?" the Marquis went on. "I am not
impractical. My plan is altogether feasible. I do not merely think
this. I know. My intuition tells me so. I pride myself on having a
natural intuition. It takes me only a few seconds to understand a
situation that other men have to puzzle over for hours. I seem to see
every side of a question at once. I assure you, I am gifted in this
way. I have wonderful insight."
But Eaton said to himself, "I wonder if the Marquis isn't raising his
sights too high?"
The Marquis formed the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company with
two brothers named Haupt as his partners and guides; and plunged into
his dream as a boy into a woodland pool. But it did not take him long
to discover that the water was cold. Frank Vine offered to sell out
the Little Missouri Land and Cattle Company to him for twenty-five
thousand dollars, and when the Marquis, discovering that Frank had
nothing to sell except a hazy title to a group of ramshackle
buildings, refused to buy, Frank's employers intimated to the Marquis
that there was no room for the de Mores enterprises in Little
Missouri. The Marquis responded by buying what was known as Valentine
scrip, or soldiers' rights, to the flat on the other side of the river
and six square miles around it, with the determination of literally
wiping Little Missouri off the map. On April Fool's Day,
1883--auspicious date!--he pitched his tent in the sagebrush and
founded the town of Medora.
The population of Little Missouri did not exhibit any noticeable
warmth toward him or his dream. The hunters did not like "dudes" of
any sort, but foreign "dudes" were particularly objectionable to them.
His plans, moreover, struck at the heart of their free and untrammeled
existence. As long as they could live by what their guns brought down,
they were independent of the machinery of civilization. The coming of
cattle and sheep meant the flight of antelope and deer. Hunters, to
live, would have to buy and sell like common folk. That meant stores
and banks, and these in time meant laws and police-officers; and
police-officers meant the collapse of Paradise. It was all wrong.
The Marquis recognized that he had stepped in where, previously,
angels had feared to tread. It occurred to him that it would be the
part of wisdom to conciliate Little Missouri's hostile population. He
began with the only man who, in that unstable community, looked solid,
and appealed to Gregor Lang, suggesting a union of forces. Lang, who
did not like the grandiose Frenchman, bluntly refused to entertain the
idea.
"I am sorry," said the Marquis with a sincerity which was attractive
and disarming. "I desire to be friends with every man."
The Marquis's efforts to win supporters were not altogether without
success, for the liveryman, Jerry Paddock, became his foreman, and
Jake Maunders, evidently seeing in the noble Frenchman one of those
gifts from the patron saint of crooked men which come to a knave only
once in a lifetime, attached himself to him and became his closest
adviser. Maunders, as one who had known him well remarked long
afterwards, "was too crooked to sleep in a roundhouse." Whether he set
about deliberately to secure a hold on the Marquis, which the Marquis
could never shake off, is a secret locked away with Maunders
underground. If he did, he was more successful than wiser men have
been in their endeavors. Insidiously he drew the Marquis into a
quarrel, in which he himself was involved, with a hunter named Frank
O'Donald and his two friends, John Reuter, known as "Dutch Wannigan,"
and Riley Luffsey. He was a crafty Iago, and the Marquis, born in a
rose-garden and brought up in a hot-house, was guileless and trusting.
Incidentally, the Marquis was "land hungry" and not altogether tactful
in regarding the rights of others. Maunders carried blood-curdling
tales from the Marquis to O'Donald and back again, until, as Howard
Eaton remarked, "every one got nervous."
"What shall I do?" the Marquis asked Maunders, unhappily, when
Maunders reported that O'Donald was preparing for hostilities.
"Look out," answered Maunders, "and have the first shot."
The Marquis went to Mandan to ask the local magistrate for advice.
"There is the situation," he said. "What shall I do?"
"Why, shoot," was the judicial reply.
He started to return to the center of hostilities. A friend
protested. "You'll get shot if you go down there," he declared.
The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. "But I have got to go."
"Now, why do you have to go?"
"Why," replied the Marquis, "William is there. He is my valet. His
father was my father's valet, and his grandfather was my grandfather's
valet. I cannot leave William in the lurch."
Whereupon, smiling his engaging smile, he boarded the west-bound
express.
What followed is dead ashes, that need not be raked over. Just west of
the town where the trail ran along the railroad track, the Marquis and
his men fired at the hunters from cover. O'Donald and "Wannigan" were
wounded, Riley was killed. Maunders, claiming that the hunters had
started the shooting, charged them with manslaughter, and had them
arrested.
[Illustration: "Dutch Wannigan" (Left) and Frank O'Donald.]
[Illustration: Scene of the killing of Riley Luffsey, June 26, 1883.]
The excitement in the little settlement was intense. Gregor Lang was
outspoken in his indignation against the Marquis, and the few
law-abiding citizens rallied around him. The Marquis was arrested and
acquitted, but O'Donald and "Dutch Wannigan" were kept under lock and
key. The better element in Little Missouri snorted in indignation and
disgust, but for the moment there was nothing to be done about it. The
excitement subsided. Riley Luffsey slept undisturbed on Graveyard
Butte; the Marquis took up again the amazing activities which the
episode of the quarrel had interrupted; and Maunders, his mentor,
flourished like the green bay tree. It was said that "after the
murder, Maunders could get anything he wanted out of the Marquis"; so,
from his point of view, the whole affair had been eminently
successful.
All this was in the summer of 1883.
* * * * *
For all their violence and lawlessness there was no denying,
meanwhile, that the settlements on both sides of the river, roughly
known as Little Missouri, were beginning to flourish, and to catch the
attention of a curious world.
The Mandan _Pioneer_ spoke of surprising improvements; and even the
Dickinson _Press_, which was published forty miles to the east and
which as a rule regarded Little Missouri as an outrageous but
interesting blot on the map of Dakota, was betrayed into momentary
enthusiasm.
This town, situated in Pyramid Park on the banks of the
Little Missouri River and surrounded by the Bad Lands with
their fine scenery, is, at the present time, one of the most
prosperous and rapidly growing towns along the line of the
Northern Pacific. New buildings of every description are
going up as fast as a large force of carpenters can do the
work and an air of business and enterprise is apparent that
would do honor to many an older town.
The "personals" that follow give a glimpse into the Little Missouri of
which Roosevelt was a part during that third week of September, 1883.
NOTES
Business booms.
J. H. Butler is right on sight.
[MCGeeney] and Walker are doing a good business.
Geo. Fitzpatrick is doing a rushing business.
J. B. Walker takes a good share of trade.
Anderson's restaurant refreshes the inner man.
Frank [Vine] rents the soldiers' quarters to tourists.
[P. McGeeney] will have a fine hotel when it is completed.
We found the Marquis de Mores a pleasant gentleman.
Little Missouri will double her population before spring.
The new depot will be soon completed and will be a good one.
It is worth remarking that Butler, McGeeney, Walker, Fitzpatrick,
Anderson, and Frank Vine all conducted bars of one description or
another. The "business" which is "booming" in the first line,
therefore, seems to have been exclusively the business of selling and
consuming liquor.
There is one further item in those "Notes":
L. D. Rumsey, of Buffalo, N.Y., recently returned from a
hunting expedition with Frank O'Donald. Frank is a good
hunter and thoroughly posted about the country.
For the bloodthirsty desperado, by whose unconscious aid Maunders had
contrived to get the Marquis into his power, was back in the Bad
Lands, earning his living by hunting as he had earned it before the
fatal June 26th when the Marquis lost his head. There had been a
"reconciliation." When O'Donald had returned to Little Missouri from
his sojourn in the Mandan jail, he had been without money, and, as the
Mandan _Pioneer_ explained, "the Marquis helped him out by buying the
hay on his ranch 'in stubble.'" He bought the hay, it was rumored, for
the sum of one thousand dollars, which was high for hay which would
not begin growing for another eight months. But the "reconciliation"
was complete.
If Roosevelt met the Marquis during the week he spent in Little
Missouri, that September, there is no record of that meeting. The
Marquis was here, there, and everywhere, for the stately house he was
building, on a grassy hill southward and across the river from his new
"town," was not yet completed, and he was, moreover, never inclined to
stay long on one spot, rushing to Miles City or St. Paul, to Helena or
to Chicago, at a moment's notice, in pursuit of one or the other of
his expensive dreams.
The Haupt brothers, it was said, were finding their senior partner
somewhat of a care. He bought steers, and found, when he came to sell
them as beef, that he had bought them at too high a price; he bought
cows and found that the market would not take cow-meat at all.
Thereupon (lest the cold facts which he had acquired concerning cattle
should rob him of the luxury of spacious expectations) he bought five
thousand dollars worth of broncos. He would raise horses, he declared,
on an unprecedented scale.
The horses had barely arrived when the Marquis announced that he
intended to raise sheep also. The Haupt brothers protested, but the
Marquis was not to be diverted.
The hunters and cattlemen looked on in anger and disgust as sheep and
ever more sheep began to pour into the Bad Lands. They knew, what the
Marquis did not know, that sheep nibble the grass so closely that they
kill the roots, and ruin the pasture for cattle and game. He tempered
their indignation somewhat by offering a number of them a form of
partnership in his enterprise. "His plan," says the guidebook of the
Northern Pacific, published that summer of 1883, "is to engage
experienced herders to the number of twenty-four, supply them with as
many sheep as they may desire, and provide all necessary buildings and
funds to carry on operations for a period of seven years. At the end
of this time a division of the increase of the flocks is to be made,
from which alone the Marquis is to derive his profits."
There was no one in the Bad Lands, that summer of 1883, who, if asked
whether he knew anything about business or live stock or the laws of
sidereal space, would not have claimed that he knew all that it was
necessary for any man to know. The Marquis had no difficulty in
finding the desired twenty-four. Each signed a solemn contract with
him and let the sheep wander where they listed, eating mutton with
relish and complaining to the Marquis of the depredations of the
coyotes.
One who was more honest than the rest went to Herman Haupt at the end
of August and drew his attention to the fact that many of the wethers
and ewes were so old that they had no teeth to nibble with and were
bound to die of starvation. Haupt rode from ranch to ranch examining
the herds and came to the conclusion that six thousand out of twelve
were too old to survive under the best conditions, and telegraphed the
Marquis to that effect, advising that they be slaughtered at once.
The answer of the Marquis was prompt. "Don't kill any sheep," it ran.
Haupt shrugged his shoulders. By the time Roosevelt left Little
Missouri the end of September, the sheep were already beginning, one
by one, to perish. But by this time the Marquis was absorbed in a new
undertaking and was making arrangements to ship untold quantities of
buffalo-meat and other game on his refrigerator cars to Eastern
markets, unaware that a certain young man with spectacles had just
shot one of the last buffalo that the inhabitants of Little Missouri
were ever destined to see.
Roosevelt, learning a great deal about the ways of men who are
civilized too little and men who are civilized too much, spent a week
waiting in Little Missouri and roundabout for word from Merrifield and
Sylvane. It came at last in a telegram saying that Wadsworth and
Halley had given them a release and that they were prepared to enter
into a new partnership. Roosevelt started promptly for St. Paul, and
on September 27th signed a contract[3] with the two Canadians.
Sylvane and Merrifield thereupon went East to Iowa, to purchase three
hundred head of cattle in addition to the hundred and fifty which they
had taken over from Wadsworth and Halley; while Roosevelt, who a
little less than three weeks previous had dropped off the train at
Little Missouri for a hunt and nothing more, took up again the sober
threads of life.
[Footnote 3: See Appendix.]
He returned East to his lovely young wife and a campaign for a third
term in the New York Legislature, stronger in body than he had ever
felt before. If he expected that his family would think as highly of
his cattle venture as he did himself, he was doomed to disappointment.
Those members of it whom he could count on most for sincere solicitude
for his welfare were most emphatic in their disapproval. They
considered his investment foolhardy, and said so. Uncle James and the
other business men of the family simply threw up their hands in
despair. His sisters, who admired him enormously and had confidence in
his judgment, were frankly worried. Pessimists assured him that his
cattle would die like flies during the winter.
He lost no sleep for apprehensions.
Little Missouri, meanwhile, was cultivating the air of one who is
conscious of imminent greatness. The Marquis was extending his
business in a way to stir the imagination of any community. In Miles
City he built a slaughter-house, in Billings he built another. He
established offices in St. Paul, in Brainerd, in Duluth. He built
refrigerator plants and storehouses in Mandan and Bismarck and
Vedalles and Portland.
His plan, on the surface, was practical. It was to slaughter on the
range the beef that was consumed along the Northern Pacific Railway,
west of St. Paul. The Marquis argued that to send a steer on the hoof
from Medora to Chicago and then to send it back in the form of beef to
Helena or Portland was sheer waste of the consumer's money in freight
rates. A steer, traveling for days in a crowded cattle-car, moreover,
had a way of shrinking ten per cent in weight. It was more expensive,
furthermore, to ship a live steer than a dead one. Altogether, the
scheme appeared to the Marquis as a heaven-sent inspiration; and
cooler-headed business men than he accepted it as practical. The
cities along the Northern Pacific acclaimed it enthusiastically,
hoping that it meant cheaper beef; and presented the company that was
exploiting it with all the land it wanted.
The Marquis might have been forgiven if, in the midst of the cheering,
he had strutted a bit. But he did not strut. The newspapers spoke of
his "modest bearing" as he appeared in hotel corridors in Washington
and St. Paul and New York, with a lady whose hair was "Titan-red," as
the _Pioneer Press_ of St. Paul had it, and who, it was rumored, was a
better shot than the Marquis. He had great charm, and there was
something engaging in the perfection with which he played the _grand
seigneur_.
"How did you happen to go into this sort of business?" he was asked.
"I wanted something to do," he answered.
In view of the fact that before his first abattoir was in operation he
had spent upwards of three hundred thousand dollars, an impartial
observer might have remarked that his desire for activity was
expensive.
Unquestionably the Marquis had made an impression on the Northwest
country. The hints he threw out concerning friends in Paris who were
eager to invest five million dollars in Billings County were
sufficient to cause palpitation in more than one Dakota bosom. The
Marquis promised telephone lines up and down the river and other civic
improvements that were dazzling to the imagination and stimulating to
the price of building lots; and implanted firmly in the minds of the
inhabitants of Medora the idea that in ten years their city would
rival Omaha. Meanwhile, Little Missouri and the "boomtown" were
leading an existence which seemed to ricochet back and forth between
Acadian simplicity and the livid sophistication of a mining-camp.
"Sheriff Cuskelly made a business trip to Little Missouri," is the
gist of countless "Notes" in the Dickinson _Press_, "and reports
everything as lively at the town on the Little Muddy."
Lively it was; but its liveliness was not all thievery and violence.
"On November 5th," the Dickinson _Press_ announces, "the citizens of
Little Missouri opened a school." Whom they opened it for is dark as
the ancestry of Melchizedek. But from somewhere some one procured a
teacher, and in the saloons the cowboys and the hunters, the
horse-thieves and gamblers and fly-by-nights and painted ladies
"chipped in" to pay his "board and keep." The charm of this outpouring
of dollars in the cause of education is not dimmed by the fact that
the school-teacher, in the middle of the first term, discovered a more
profitable form of activity and deserted his charges to open a saloon.
Late in November a man of a different sort blew into town. His name
was A. T. Packard. He was joyously young, like almost every one else
in Little Missouri, except Maunders and Paddock and Captain Vine,
having graduated from the University of Michigan only a year before.
He drifted westward, and, having a taste for things literary, became
managing editor of the Bismarck _Tribune_. Bismarck was lurid in those
days, and editing a newspaper there meant not only writing practically
everything in it, including the advertisements, but also persuading
the leading citizens by main force that the editor had a right to say
what he pleased. Packard had been an athlete in college, and his eyes
gave out before his rule had been seriously disputed. After throwing
sundry protesting malefactors downstairs, he resigned and undertook
work a trifle less exacting across the Missouri River, on the Mandan
_Pioneer_.
Packard became fascinated with the tales he heard of Little Missouri
and Medora and, being foot loose, drifted thither late in November. It
happened that Frank Vine, who had by that time been deposed as agent
of the Gorringe syndicate, was running the Pyramid Park Hotel. He had
met Packard in Mandan and greeted him like a long-lost brother. As the
newcomer was sitting in a corner of the bar-room after supper, writing
home, Frank came up and bent over him.
"You told me down in Mandan that you'd never seen an
honest-to-goodness cowboy," he whispered. "See that fellow at the
farther end of the bar? Well, that's a real cowboy."
Packard looked up. The man was standing with his back toward the wall,
and it struck the tenderfoot that there was something in his attitude
and in the look in his eye that suggested that he was on the watch and
kept his back to the wall with a purpose. He wore the paraphernalia of
the cowboy with ease and grace.
Packard started to describe him to his "folks" in distant Indiana. He
described his hat, his face, his clothes, his shaps, his loosely
hanging belt with the protruding gun. He looked up and studied the
man; he looked down and wrote. The man finally became conscious that
he was the subject of study. Packard observed Frank Vine whisper a
word of explanation.
He finished his letter and decided to take it to the "depot" and ask
the telegraph operator to mail it on the east-bound train that passed
through Little Missouri at three. He opened the door. The night was
black, and a blast of icy wind greeted him. He changed his mind.
The next afternoon he was riding up the river to the Maltese Cross
when he heard hoofs behind him. A minute later the object of his
artistic efforts of the night before joined him and for an hour loped
along at his side. He was not slow in discovering that the man was
pumping him. It occurred to him that turn-about was fair play, and he
told him all the man wanted to know.
"So you're a newspaper feller," remarked the man at length. "That's
damn funny. But I guess it's so if you say so. You see," he added,
"Frank Vine he said you was a deputy-sheriff on the lookout for a
horse-thief."
Packard felt his hair rise under his hat.
"Where was you going last night when you started to go out?"
"To the telegraph-office."
"I made up my mind you was going to telegraph."
"I was just going to mail a letter."
"Well, if you'd gone I'd have killed you."
Packard gasped a little. Frank Vine was a joker with a vengeance. They
rode on, talking of lighter matters.[4]
[Footnote 4: A year later, Packard, as Chief of Police,
officiated at what was euphemistically known as a
"necktie party" at which his companion of that ride was
the guest of honor.]
Packard had come to the Bad Lands with the idea of spending the winter
in the open, hunting, but he was a newspaper man from top to toe and
in the back of his mind there was a notion that it would be a good
deal of a lark, and possibly a not unprofitable venture, to start a
weekly newspaper in the Marquis de Mores's budding metropolis. He had,
at the tender age of thirteen, been managing editor of a country
newspaper, owned by his father, and ever since had been drawn again
and again back into the "game" by that lure which few men who yield to
it are ever after able to resist.
He broached the matter to the Marquis. That gentleman was patronizing,
but agreed that a special organ might prove of value to his Company.
He offered to finance the undertaking.
Packard remarked that evidently the Marquis did not understand. If he
started a paper it would be an organ for nobody. He intended to
finance it himself and run it to please himself. All he wanted was a
building.
The Marquis, a little miffed, agreed to rent him a building north of
his general store in return for a weekly advertisement for the
Company. Packard ordered his type and his presses and betook himself
to the solitude of the wintry buttes to think of a name for his paper.
His battle was half won when he came back with the name of _The Bad
Lands Cowboy_.
His first issue came out early in February, 1884. It was greeted with
interest even by so mighty a contemporary as the New York _Herald_.
[Illustration: Marquis de Mores.]
We hail with pleasure the birth of a new Dakota paper, _The
Bad Lands Cowboy_ [runs the note of welcome]. The _Cowboy_
is really a neat little journal, with lots to read in it,
and the American press has every reason to be proud of
its new baby. We are quite sure it will live to be a credit
to the family. The _Cowboy_ evidently means business. It
says in the introductory notice to its first number that it
intends to be the leading cattle paper of the Northwest, and
adds that it is not published for fun, but for $2 a year.
All the autumn and winter Medora and her rival across the river had
been feverishly competing for supremacy. But Little Missouri, though
she built ever so busily, in such a contest had not a chance in the
world. For the Little Missouri Land and Stock Company, which was its
only hope, was moribund, and the Marquis was playing, in a sense, with
loaded dice. He spoke persuasively to the officials of the Northern
Pacific and before the winter was well advanced the stop for express
trains was on the eastern side of the river, and Little Missouri,
protest as she would, belonged to the past. When the _Cowboy_ appeared
for the first time, Medora was in the full blaze of national fame,
having "broken into the front page" of the New York _Sun_. For the
Marquis was bubbling over with pride and confidence, and the tales he
told a credulous interviewer filled a column. A few were based on
fact, a few were builded on the nebulous foundation of hope, and a few
were sheer romance. The most conspicuous case of romance was a story
of the stage-line from Medora to the prosperous and wild little mining
town of Deadwood, two hundred miles or more to the south.
"The Marquis had observed," narrates the interviewer, "that the
divide on the top of the ridge between the Little Missouri and the
Missouri Rivers was almost a natural roadway that led directly toward
Deadwood. He gave this roadway needed artificial improvements, and
started the Deadwood and Medora stage-line. This is now diverting the
Deadwood trade to Medora, to the great advantage of both places."
Who, reading that sober piece of information, would have dreamed that
the stage-line in question was at the time nothing but a pious hope?
The Dickinson _Press_ was blunt in its comment. "Stages are not
running from Medora to Deadwood," it remarked editorially, "nor has
the roadway ever been improved. The Marquis should put a curb on his
too vivid imagination and confine himself a little more strictly to
facts."
But facts were not the things on which a nature like de Mores's fed.
His sheep meanwhile, were dying by hundreds every week. Of the twelve
thousand he had turned loose on the range during the preceding summer,
half were dead by the middle of January. There were rumors that rivals
of the Marquis had used poison.
The loss [declared a dispatch to the _Minneapolis Journal_]
can be accounted for on no other ground. It is supposed that
malicious motives prompted the deed, as the Marquis is known
to have had enemies since the killing of Luffsey.
If the Marquis took any stock in these suspicions, his partners, the
Haupt brothers, did not. They knew that it was a physical
impossibility to poison six thousand sheep scattered over ten thousand
square miles of snowbound landscape.
The Haupts were by this time thoroughly out of patience with de Mores.
There was a stormy meeting of the directors of the Northern Pacific
Refrigerator Car Company in St. Paul, in the course of which the Haupt
brothers told their distinguished senior partner exactly what they
thought of his business ability; and suggested that the Company go
into liquidation.
The Marquis jumped to his feet in a rage. "I won't let it go into
liquidation," he cried. "My honor is at stake. I have told my friends
in France that I would do so and so and so, that I would make money, a
great deal of money. I must do it. Or where am I?"
The Haupts did not exactly know. They compromised with the Marquis by
taking the bonds of the Company in exchange for their stock, and
retired with inner jubilation at having been able to withdraw from a
perilous situation with skins more or less intact.
The Marquis, as usual, secreted himself from the stern eyes of
Experience, in the radiant emanations of a new dream. The Dickinson
_Press_ announced it promptly:
The Marquis de Mores has a novel enterprise under way, which
he is confident will prove a success, it being a plan to
raise 50,000 cabbages on his ranch at the Little Missouri,
and have them ready for the market April 1. They will be
raised under glass in some peculiar French manner, and when
they have attained a certain size, will be transplanted into
individual pots and forced rapidly by rich fertilizers, made
from the offal of the slaughter-houses and for which
preparation he owns the patent. Should the cabbages come out
on time, he will try his hand on other kinds of vegetables,
and should he succeed the citizens along the line will have
an opportunity to get as early vegetables as those who live
in the sunny South.
The cabbages were a dream which seems never to have materialized even
to the point of being a source of expense, and history speaks no more
of it.
The boys at the Chimney Butte, meanwhile, were hibernating, hunting as
the spirit moved them and keeping a general eye on the stock. Of
Roosevelt's three friends, Joe was the only one who was really busy.
Joe, it happened, was no longer working for Frank Vine. He was now a
storekeeper. It was all due to the fateful hundred dollars which he
had loaned the unstable Johnny Nelson.
For Johnny Nelson, so far as Little Missouri was concerned, was no
more. He had bought all his goods on credit from some commission house
in St. Paul; but his payments, due mainly to the fact that his
receipts all drifted sooner or later into the guileful hands of Jess
Hogue, were infrequent and finally stopped altogether. Johnny received
word that his creditor in St. Paul was coming to investigate him. He
became frantic and confided the awful news to every one he met.
Hogue, Bill Williams, Jake Maunders, and a group of their satellites,
hearing the doleful recital in Bill Williams's saloon, told Johnny
that the sheriff would unquestionably close up his store and take
everything away from him.
"You give me the keys," said Jake Maunders, "and I'll see that the
sheriff don't get your stuff."
Johnny in his innocence gave up the keys. That night Jake Maunders and
his "gang" entered the store and completely cleaned it out. They did
not leave a button or a shoestring. It was said afterwards that Jake
Maunders did not have to buy a new suit of clothes for seven years,
and even Williams's two tame bears wore ready-made coats from St.
Paul.
Johnny Nelson went wailing to Katie, his betrothed.
"I've lost everything!" he cried. "I've lost all my goods and I can't
get more. I've lost my reputation. I can't marry you. I've lost my
reputation."
Katie was philosophic about it. "That's all right, Johnny," she said
comfortingly, "I lost mine long ago."
At that, Johnny "skipped the country." And so it was that Joe Ferris,
to save his hundred dollars attached Johnny's building and became
storekeeper.
For Roosevelt, two thousand miles to the east, the winter was proving
exciting. He had won his reëlection to the Assembly with ease and had
plunged into his work with a new vigor and a more solid
self-reliance. He became the acknowledged leader of the progressive
elements in the Legislature, the "cyclone member" at whom the
reactionaries who were known as the "Black Horse Cavalry" sneered, but
of whom, nevertheless, they were heartily afraid.
He "figured in the news," day in, day out, for the public, it seemed,
was interested in this vigorous and emphatic young man from the
"Silkstocking District" of New York. Roosevelt took his publicity with
zest, for he was human and enjoyed the sensation of being counted with
those who made the wheels go around. Meanwhile he worked all day and
conversed half the night on a thousand topics which his ardor made
thrilling. In society he was already somewhat of a lion; and he was
only twenty-five years old.
Life was running, on the whole, very smoothly for Theodore Roosevelt
when in January, 1884, he entered upon his third term in the
Legislature. He was happily married, he had wealth, he had a notable
book on the War of 1812 to his credit; he had, it seemed, a smooth
course ahead of him, down pleasant roads to fame.
On February 12th, at ten o'clock in the morning, his wife gave birth
to a daughter. At five o'clock the following morning his mother died.
Six hours later his wife died.
He was stunned and dazed, but within a week after the infinitely
pathetic double funeral he was back at his desk in the Assembly, ready
to fling himself with every fiber of energy at his command into the
fight for clean government. He supported civil service reform; he was
chairman of a committee which investigated certain phases of New York
City official life, and carried through the Legislature a bill taking
from the Board of Aldermen the power to reject the Mayor's
appointments. He was chairman and practically the only active member
of another committee to investigate living conditions in the tenements
of New York, and as spokesman of the worn and sad-looking foreigners
who constituted the Cigar-Makers' Union, argued before Governor
Cleveland for the passage of a bill to prohibit the manufacture of
cigars in tenement-houses. His energy was boundless, it seemed, but
the heart had gone out of him. He was restless, and thought longingly
of the valley of the Little Missouri.
The news that came from the boys at Chimney Butte was favorable. The
three hundred head of young cattle which Sylvane and Merrifield had
bought in Iowa, were doing well in spite of a hard winter. Roosevelt,
struck by Sylvane's enthusiastic report, backed by a painstaking
account-sheet, wrote Sylvane telling him to buy a thousand or twelve
hundred head more.
Sylvane's reply was characteristic and would have gratified Uncle
James. "Don't put in any more money until you're sure we've scattered
the other dollars right," he said in effect. "Better come out first
and look around."
That struck Roosevelt as good advice, and he accepted it.
While Roosevelt was winning clear, meanwhile, of the tangles and
snares in Albany, he was unconsciously being enmeshed in the web that
was spinning at Medora.
It came about this way. The Marquis, who had many likable qualities,
did not possess among them any strict regard for the rights of others.
He had a curious obsession, in fact, that in the Bad Lands there were
no rights but his; and with that point of view had directed his
superintendent, a man named Matthews, to drive fifteen hundred head of
cattle over on an unusually fine piece of bottom-land northwestward
across the river from the Maltese Cross, which, by all the laws of the
range, belonged to the "Roosevelt outfit." Matthews declared that the
Marquis intended to hold the bottom permanently for fattening
beef-cattle, and to build a cabin there.
"You'll have to move those cattle by daylight," said Merrifield, "or
we'll move them for you. You can take your choice."
"I've got my orders from the Marquis to keep the cattle here,"
answered Matthews. "That's all there is to it. They'll stay here."
It was late at night, but Sylvane and Merrifield rode to Medora taking
a neighboring cowboy named Pete Marlow along as witness, "for the
Marquis is a hard man to deal with," remarked Merrifield. To Pete it
was all the gayest sort of adventure. He confided the object of the
nocturnal expedition to the first man he came upon.