The Marquis was not at his home. The boys were told that he might

still be at his office, though the time was nearing midnight.

Meanwhile Pete's news had spread. From the base of Graveyard Butte,

Jake Hainsley, the superintendent of the coal mine, who dearly loved a

fight, came running with a rifle in his hand. "I've got forty men

myself," he cried, "and I've Winchesters for every mother's son of

'em, and if you need help you just let me know and we'll back you all

right, we will."

The Marquis was in his office in Medora next to the new Company store,

working with Van Driesche, his valet and secretary. He asked what the

three men wanted of him at that hour in the night. Merrifield

explained the situation.

They told him: "We want you to write an order to move those cattle at

daylight."

"If I refuse?"

Sylvane and Merrifield had thoroughly discussed the question what they

would do in case the Marquis refused. They would take tin pans and

stampede the herd. They were under no illusions concerning the

probabilities in case they took that means of ridding themselves of

the unwelcome herd. There would be shooting, of course.

"Why, Marquis," said Merrifield, "if Matthews don't move those cattle,

I guess there's nothing to it but what we'll have to move them

ourselves."

The Marquis had not lived a year in the Bad Lands without learning

something. In a more conciliatory mood he endeavored to find ground

for a compromise. But "the boys" were not inclined to compromise with

a man who was patently in the wrong. Finally, the Marquis offered them

fifteen hundred dollars on the condition that they would allow him to

use the piece of bottom-land for three weeks.

It was on its face a munificent offer; but Merrifield and Sylvane knew

that the Marquis's "three weeks" might not terminate after twenty-one

days. They knew something else. "After we had made our statement,"

Merrifield explained later, "no matter how much he had offered us we

would not have accepted it. We knew there'd be no living with a man

like the Marquis if you made statements and then backed down for any

price."

_Never draw your gun_, ran a saying of the frontier, _unless you mean

to shoot_.

"Marquis," said Merrifield, "we've made our statement once for all. If

you don't see fit to write that order there won't be any more talk. We

will move the cattle ourselves."

The Marquis was courteous and even friendly. "I am sorry you cannot do

this for me," he said; but he issued the order. Merrifield and Sylvane

themselves carried it to the offending superintendent. Matthews was

furious; but he moved the cattle at dawn. The whole affair did not

serve to improve the relations between the groups which the killing of

Riley Luffsey had originally crystallized.

Roosevelt probably remained unaware of the interesting complications

that were being woven for him in the hot-hearted frontier community of

which he was now a part; for Merrifield and Sylvane, as

correspondents, were laconic, not being given to spreading themselves

out on paper. His work in the Assembly and the pre-convention campaign

for presidential candidates completely absorbed his energies. He was

eager that a reform candidate should be named by the Republicans,

vigorously opposing both Blaine and Arthur, himself preferring Senator

Edmunds of Vermont. He fought hard and up to a certain point

successfully, for at the State Republican Convention held in Utica in

April he thoroughly trounced the Old Guard, who were seeking to send a

delegation to Chicago favorable to Arthur, and was himself elected

head of the delegates at large, popularly known as the "Big Four."

He had, meanwhile, made up his mind that, however the dice might fall

at the convention, he would henceforth make his home, for a part of

the year at least, in the Bad Lands. He had two friends in Maine,

backwoodsmen mighty with the axe, and born to the privations of the

frontier, whom he decided to take with him if he could. One was "Bill"

Sewall, a stalwart viking at the end of his thirties, who had been his

guide on frequent occasions when as a boy in college he had sought

health and good hunting on the waters of Lake Mattawamkeag; the other

was Sewall's nephew, Wilmot Dow. He flung out the suggestion to them,

and they rose to it like hungry trout; for they had adventurous

spirits.

The Republican National Convention met in Chicago in the first days of

June. Roosevelt, supported by his friend Henry Cabot Lodge and a group

of civil service reformers that included George William Curtis and

Carl Schurz, led the fight for Edmunds. But the convention wanted

Blaine, the "Plumed Knight"; and the convention got Blaine.

Roosevelt raged, but refused to follow Curtis and Schurz, who hinted

darkly at "bolting the ticket." He took the first train to Dakota,

sick at heart, to think things over.

V

He wears a big hat and big spurs and all that,

And leggins of fancy fringed leather;

He takes pride in his boots and the pistol he shoots

And he's happy in all kinds of weather;

He's fond of his horse, it's a broncho, of course,

For oh, he can ride like the devil;

He is old for his years and he always appears

Like a fellow who's lived on the level;

He can sing, he can cook, yet his eyes have the look

Of a man that to fear is a stranger;

Yes, his cool, quiet nerve will always subserve

For his wild life of duty and danger.

He gets little to eat, and he guys tenderfeet,

And for fashion, oh well! he's not in it;

But he'll rope a gay steer when he gets on its ear

At the rate of two-forty a minute.

_Cowboy song_

Blaine was nominated on June 7th. On the 8th Roosevelt was already in

St. Paul, on his way to the Bad Lands. A reporter of the _Pioneer

Press_ interviewed him and has left this description of him as he

appeared fresh from the battle at Chicago:

He is short and slight and with rather an ordinary

appearance, although his frame is wiry and his flashing eyes

and rapid, nervous gestures betoken a hidden strength. He is

not at all an ideal Harvard alumnus, for he lacks that

ingrained conceit and grace of manner that a residence at

Cambridge insures. Although of the old Knickerbocker stock,

his manner and carriage is awkward and not at all

impressive.

He arrived in Medora on the evening of the 9th. The Ferrises and

Merrifield were at the "depot" to meet him. They all adjourned to

Packard's printing-office, since that was the only place in town of a

semi-public character which was not at that hour in possession of a

noisy aggregation of Medora's thirstiest citizens.

The office of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_, which stood under a gnarled

cottonwood-tree north of the Marquis's store, was a one-room frame

building which served as the editor's parlor, bedroom, and bath, as

well as his printing-office and his editorial sanctum. It was built of

perpendicular boards which let in the wintry blasts in spite of the

two-inch strips which covered the joints on the outside. It had, in

fact, originally served as the Marquis's blacksmith shop, and the

addition of a wooden floor had not altogether converted it into a

habitable dwelling, proof against Dakota weather. On this particular

June night the thermometer was in the thirties and a cannon stove

glowed red from a steady application of lignite.

A half-dozen voices greeted Roosevelt with pleas for the latest news

of the "great Republican round-up." Roosevelt was not loath to

unburden his soul. For an hour he told of the battles and the

manipulations of the convention, of the stubborn fight against an

impending nomination which he had known would be a fatal mistake, but

which the majority seemed to be bound to make.

Packard told about it years afterward. "He gave us such a swinging

description of the stirring scenes of the convention that the eyes of

the boys were fairly popping out of their heads. But it was when he

told how Roscoe Conkling attempted to dominate the situation and

override the wishes of a large portion of the New York delegation that

the fire really began to flash in his eyes. I can see him now as

plainly as I did then, as he straightened up, his doubled fist in the

air, his teeth glittering, and his eyes squinting in something that

was far from a smile as he jerked out the words, 'By Godfrey! I will

not be dictated to!'"

Roosevelt rode to the Maltese Cross next morning. The old stockade

shack, with the dirt floor and dirt roof, had, as he had suggested,

been converted into a stable, and a simple but substantial

one-and-a-half story log cabin had been built with a shingle roof and

a cellar, both luxuries in the Bad Lands. An alcove off the one large

room on the main floor was set aside for Roosevelt's use as combined

bedroom and study; the other men were quartered in the loft above.

East of the ranch-house beside a patch of kitchen-garden, stood the

strongly made circular horse-corral, with a snubbing-post in the

middle, and at some distance from it the larger cow-corral for the

branding of the cattle. Between them stood the cowsheds and the

hayricks.

The ranch-buildings belonged to Sylvane Ferris and Merrifield. In

buying out the Maltese Cross, Roosevelt had bought only cattle and

horses; not buildings or land. The ranges on which his cattle grazed

were owned by the Northern Pacific Railroad, and by the Government. It

was the custom for ranchmen to claim for grazing purposes a certain

stretch of land north, east, south, and west of the bottom on which

the home ranch stood.

"You claim so much land each way," Sylvane explained to a tenderfoot a

long time after, "according to how many cattle you have. For instance,

if you have one hundred head of cattle, you don't require very much

range; if you have a thousand head, you need so much more. There

wouldn't be any sense of one man trying to crowd his cattle onto your

range and starve out both outfits. So each man claims as much land as

he needs. Of course, that doesn't mean that the other fellow doesn't

get over on your range--that's the reason we brand our cattle; it

simply means that a certain given number of cattle will have a certain

given amount of grazing land. Our cattle may be on the other fellow's

range and some of his may be on our range, but he'll claim so much

land each way and we'll claim so much land each way, and then it

doesn't make any difference if they do get on each other's territory,

so long as there is enough grazing for the two outfits."

The range claimed by the "Maltese Cross outfit" extended northward to

the river-crossing above Eaton's "Custer Trail Ranch," and southward

to the crossing just below what was known as "Sloping Bottom,"

covering a territory that had a frontage of four miles on both sides

of the river and extended back on each side for thirty miles to the

heads of the creeks which emptied into the Little Missouri.

[Illustration: Merrifield.]

[Illustration: Sylvane Ferris.]

[Illustration: The Maltese Cross ranch-house as it was when Roosevelt

lived in it.]

The cattle, Roosevelt found, were looking sleek and well-fed. He

had lost about twenty-five head during the winter, partly from the

cold, partly from the attacks of wolves. There were, he discovered, a

hundred and fifty fine calves.

A new cowpuncher had been added to the Maltese Cross outfit, he found,

since the preceding autumn. It was George Myers, whom he had met on

the ride down the river from Lang's. Roosevelt had purchased five

hundred dollars' worth of barbed wire and George was digging

post-holes. He was a boyish and attractive individual whom the

_wanderlust_ had driven westward from his home in Wisconsin. His

honesty fairly leaped at you out of his direct, clear eyes.

Roosevelt spent two days contemplating his new possessions. At the end

of the second he had reached a decision, and he announced it promptly.

He told Sylvane and Merrifield to get ready to ride to Lang's with him

the next day for the purpose of drawing up a new contract. He had

determined to make cattle-raising his "regular business" and intended,

at once (in riotous defiance of Uncle James!), to put a thousand head

more on the range.

The Langs were situated seven miles nearer civilization than they had

been on Roosevelt's previous visit, and were living in a dugout built

against a square elevation that looked like a low fortress or the

"barrow" of some dead Viking chief. They were building a ranch-house

in anticipation of the coming of Mrs. Lang and two children, a girl of

eighteen or nineteen and a son a half-dozen years younger than

Lincoln. The dugout was already overcrowded with three or four

carpenters who were at work on the house, and Gregor Lang suggested

that they ride five miles up the river to a cabin of his on what was

known as "Sagebrush Bottom," where he and Lincoln had spent the

winter. They had moved out of the shack on the Little Cannonball for

two reasons. One was that a large cattle outfit from New Mexico, named

the Berry-Boyce Cattle Company, had started a ranch, known as the

"Three Seven," not half a mile down the river; the other was that

Gregor Lang was by disposition not one who was able to learn from the

experience of others. For it happened that, a few weeks after

Roosevelt's departure in September, a skunk had invaded the cabin and

made itself comfortable under one of the bunks. Lincoln and the

Highlander were in favor of diplomacy in dealing with the invader. But

Gregor Lang reached for a pitchfork. They pleaded with him, without

effect. The skunk retaliated in his own fashion; and shortly after,

they moved forever out of the cabin on the Little Cannonball.

Roosevelt, who recognized Gregor Lang's limitations, recognized also

that the Scotchman was a good business man. He set him to work next

morning drawing up a new contract. It called for further investment on

his part of twenty-six thousand dollars to cover the purchase of a

thousand head or more of cattle. Merrifield and Sylvane signed it and

returned promptly to the Maltese Cross.

Roosevelt remained behind. "Lincoln," he said, "there are two things I

want to do. I want to get an antelope, and I want to get a buckskin

suit."

Lincoln thought that he could help him to both. Some twenty miles to

the east lived a woman named Mrs. Maddox who had acquired some fame in

the region by the vigorous way in which she had handled the old

reprobate who was her husband; and by her skill in making buckskin

shirts. She was a dead shot, and it was said of her that even

"Calamity Jane," Deadwood's "first lady," was forced "to yield the

palm to Mrs. Maddox when it came to the use of a vocabulary which

adequately searched every nook and cranny of a man's life from birth

to ultimate damnation."

They found her in her desolate, little mud-roofed hut on Sand Creek, a

mile south of the old Keogh trail. She was living alone, having

recently dismissed her husband in summary fashion. It seems that he

was a worthless devil, who, under the stimulus of some whiskey he had

obtained from an outfit of Missouri "bull-whackers" who were driving

freight to Deadwood, had picked a quarrel with his wife and attempted

to beat her. She knocked him down with a stove-lid lifter and the

"bull-whackers" bore him off, leaving the lady in full possession of

the ranch. She now had a man named Crow Joe working for her, a

slab-sided, shifty-eyed ne'er-do-well, who was suspected of stealing

horses on occasion.

She measured Roosevelt for his suit[5] and gave him and Lincoln a

dinner that they remembered. A vigorous personality spoke out of her

every action. Roosevelt regarded her with mingled amusement and awe.

[Footnote 5: The buckskin suit which was still doing

service thirty years later, was made under the

supervision of Mrs. Maddox by her niece, now Mrs.

Olmstead, of Medora.]

They found their antelope on the way home. They found two antelopes,

in fact, but Roosevelt, who had been as cool as an Indian an instant

before, was so elated when he saw the first drop to his rifle that he

was totally incapacitated from aiming at the second when that animal,

evidently bewildered, began to run in circles scarcely twenty-five

yards away. He had dropped his gun with a whoop, waving his arms over

his head and crying, "I got him! I got him!"

"Shoot the other one!" Lincoln called.

Roosevelt burst into a laugh. "I can't," he called back. "Not to save

my life."

They met at the side of the antelope. "This would not have seemed

nearly so good if somebody had not been here to see it," Roosevelt

exclaimed. "Do you know what I am going to do? I am going to make you

a present of my shot-gun."

Lincoln, being only sixteen, did not know exactly what to make of the

generosity of this jubilant young man. It struck him that Roosevelt,

in the excitement of the moment, was giving away a thing of great

value and might regret it on sober second thought. Lincoln replied

that he could not accept the gift. It struck him that Roosevelt looked

hurt for an instant.

They dressed the antelope together, Roosevelt taking the position of

humble pupil. The next day he returned alone to the Maltese Cross.

He now entered with vigor into the life of a Dakota ranchman. The

country was at its best in the clear June weather. The landscape in

which the ranch-house was set had none of the forbidding desolateness

of sharp bluff and scarred ravine that characterized the region

surrounding Little Missouri. The door of the cabin looked out on a

wide, semi-circular clearing covered with sagebrush, bordered on the

east by a ring of buttes and grassy slopes, restful in their gray and

green for eyes to gaze upon. Westward, not a quarter of a mile from

the house, behind a hedge of cottonwoods, the river swung in a long

circle at the foot of steep buttes crested with scoria. At the ends of

the valley were glades of cottonwoods with grassy floors where deer

hid among the buckbrush by day, or at dusk fed silently or, at the

sound of a step, bounded, erect and beautiful, off into deeper

shelter. In an almost impenetrable tangle of bullberry bushes, whose

hither edge was barely one hundred yards from the ranch-house, two

fawns spent their days. They were extraordinarily tame, and in the

evenings Roosevelt could frequently see them from the door as they

came out to feed. Walking on the flat after sunset, or riding home

when night had fallen, he would run across them when it was too dark

to make out anything but their flaunting white tails as they cantered

out of the way.

Roosevelt, who never did things by halves, took up his new activities

as though they constituted the goal of a lifetime spent in a search

for the ultimate good. Ranch-life was altogether novel to him; at no

point had his work or his play touched any phase of it. He had ridden

to hounds and was a fair but by no means a "fancy" rider. His

experience in the Meadowbrook Hunt, however, had scarcely prepared him

adequately for combat with the four-legged children of Satan that

"mewed their mighty youth" on the wild ranges of the Bad Lands.

"I have a perfect dread of bucking," he confided to an unseen public

in a book which he began that summer, "and if I can help it I never

get on a confirmed bucker." He could not always help it. Sylvane, who

could ride anything in the Bad Lands, was wedded to the idea that any

animal which by main force had been saddled and ridden was a "broke

horse," and when Roosevelt would protest mildly concerning this or

that particularly vicious animal, Sylvane would look at him in a

grieved and altogether captivating way, saying, "Why, I call that a

plumb gentle horse."

"When Sylvane says that a horse is 'plumb gentle,'" remarked

Roosevelt, on one occasion, "then you want to look out."

Sylvane and Merrifield were to start for the East to purchase the

additional cattle on the 18th of June, and Roosevelt had determined to

set forth on the same day for a solitary camping-trip on the prairie.

Into the three or four intervening days he crowded all the experiences

they would hold.

He managed to persuade Sylvane, somewhat against that individual's

personal judgment (for Sylvane was suspicious of "dudes"), that he

actually intended "to carry his own pack." Sylvane found, to his

surprise, that the "dude" learnt quickly. He showed Roosevelt once how

to saddle his horse, and thereafter Roosevelt saddled his horses

himself. Sylvane was relieved in spirit, and began to look with new

eyes on the "four-eyed tenderfoot" who was entrusting a fortune to his

care.

There was no general round-up in the valley of the Little Missouri

that spring of 1884, for the cattle had not had the opportunity to

wander to any great distance, having been on the range, most of them,

only a few months. The different "outfits," however, held their own

round-ups, at each of which a few hundred cattle might be gathered

from the immediate vicinity, the calves "cut out" and roped and

branded, and turned loose again to wander undisturbed until the "beef

round-up" in the fall.

At each of these round-ups, which might take place on any of a dozen

bottoms up or down the river, the Maltese Cross "outfit" had to be

represented, and Sylvane and Merrifield and George Myers were kept

busy picking up their "strays." Roosevelt rode with them, as "boss"

and at the same time as apprentice. It gave him an opportunity to get

acquainted with his own men and with the cowpunchers of half a dozen

other "outfits." He found the work stirring and the men singularly

human and attractive. They were free and reckless spirits, who did not

much care, it seemed, whether they lived or died; profane youngsters,

who treated him with respect in spite of his appearance because they

respected the men with whom he had associated himself. They came from

all parts of the Union and spoke a language all their own.

"We'll throw over an' camp to-night at the mouth o' Knutson Creek,"

might run the round-up captain's orders. "Nighthawk'll be corralin'

the cavvy in the mornin' 'fore the white crow squeals, so we kin be

cuttin' the day-herd on the bed-groun'. We'll make a side-cut o' the

mavericks an' auction 'em off pronto soon's we git through."

All that was ordinary conversation. When an occasion arose which

seemed to demand a special effort, the talk around the "chuck-wagon"

was so riddled with slang from all corners of the earth, so full of

startling imagery, that a stranger might stare, bewildered, unable to

extract a particle of meaning. And through it blazed such a continual

shower of oaths, that were themselves sparks of satanic poetry, that,

in the phrase of one contemplative cowpuncher, "absodarnnlutely had to

be parted in the middle to hold an extra one."

It was to ears attuned to this rich and racy music that Roosevelt came

with the soft accents of his Harvard English. The cowboys bore up,

showing the tenderfoot the frigid courtesy they kept for "dudes" who

happened to be in company, which made it impolite or inexpedient to

attempt "to make the sucker dance."

It happened, however, that Roosevelt broke the camel's back. Some cows

which had been rounded up with their calves made a sudden bolt out of

the herd. Roosevelt attempted to head them back, but the wily cattle

eluded him.

"Hasten forward quickly there!" Roosevelt shouted to one of his men.

The bounds of formal courtesy could not withstand that. There was a

roar of delight from the cowpunchers, and, instantly, the phrase

became a part of the vocabulary of the Bad Lands. That day, and on

many days thereafter when "Get a git on yuh!" grew stale and "Head off

them cattle!" seemed done to death, he heard a cowpuncher shout, in a

piping voice, "Hasten forward quickly there!"

Roosevelt, in fact, was in those first days considered somewhat of a

joke. Beside Gregor Lang, forty miles to the south, he was the only

man in the Bad Lands who wore glasses. Lang's glasses, moreover, were

small and oval; Roosevelt's were large and round, making him, in the

opinion of the cowpunchers, look very much like a curiously nervous

and emphatic owl. They called him "Four Eyes," and spoke without too

much respect, of "Roosenfelder."

Merrifield rode to town with him one day and stopped at the Marquis's

company store to see a man named Fisher, who had succeeded Edgar Haupt

as local superintendent of the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car

Company, asking Fisher as he was departing whether he did not want to

meet Roosevelt. Fisher had heard of the "four-eyed dude from New York"

and heard something of his political reforming. He went outdoors with

Merrifield, distinctly curious.

Roosevelt was on horseback chatting with a group of cowboys, and the

impression he made on Fisher was not such as to remove the natural

prejudice of youth against "reformers" of any sort. What Fisher saw

was "a slim, anæmic-looking young fellow dressed in the exaggerated

style which new-comers on the frontier affected, and which was

considered indisputable evidence of the rank tenderfoot." If any

further proof of Roosevelt's status was needed, the great round

glasses supplied it. Fisher made up his mind that he knew all he

needed to know about the new owner of the Maltese Cross.

No doubt he expressed his opinions to Merrifield. The taciturn hunter

did not dispute his conclusions, but a day or two after he dropped in

on Fisher again and said, "Get your horse and we'll take the young

fellow over the old Sully Trail and try out his nerve. We'll let on

that we're going for a little hunt."

Fisher agreed with glee in his heart. He knew the Sully Trail. It ran

mainly along the sides of precipitous buttes, southeast of Medora,

and, being old and little used, had almost lost the little semblance

it might originally have had of a path where four-footed creatures

might pick their way with reasonable security. A recent rain had made

the clay as slippery as asphalt in a drizzle.

It occurred to Fisher that it was as truly wicked a trail as he had

ever seen. Merrifield led the way; Fisher maneuvered for last place

and secured it. In the most perilous places there was always something

about his saddle which needed adjustment, and he took care not to

remount until the danger was behind them. Roosevelt did not dismount

for any reason. He followed where Merrifield led, without comment.

They came at last to a grassy slope that dipped at an angle of

forty-five degrees to a dry creek-bed. "There goes a deer!" shouted

Merrifield suddenly and started down the slope as fast as his horse

could go. Roosevelt followed at the same speed. He and Merrifield

arrived at the bottom at the identical moment; but with a difference.

Roosevelt was still on his horse, but Merrifield and his pony had

parted company about a hundred yards above the creek-bed and rolled

the rest of the way. Fisher, who was conservative by nature, arrived

in due course.

Roosevelt pretended to be greatly annoyed. "Now see what you've done,

Merrifield," he exclaimed as that individual, none the worse for his

tumble, drew himself to his feet. "That deer is in Montana by this

time." Then he burst into laughter.

A suspicion took root in Fisher's mind that Merrifield had intended

the hazardous performance as much for Fisher's education as for

Roosevelt's. He was quite ready to admit that his first impression had

been imperfect. Meanwhile, he wondered whether the joke was on himself

or on Merrifield. Certainly it was not on the tenderfoot.

Roosevelt enjoyed it all with the relish of a gourmand at a feast

cooked by the gods.

Theodore Roosevelt, the young New York reformer [remarked

the _Bad Lands Cowboy_], made us a very pleasant call Monday

in full cowboy regalia. New York will certainly lose him for

a time at least, as he is perfectly charmed with our free

Western life and is now figuring on a trip into the Big Horn

country.

In a letter to his sister Anna, written from Medora, the middle of

June, we have Roosevelt's own record of his reactions to his first

experiences as an actual ranchman. "Bamie" or "Bye," as he

affectionately called her, was living in New York. She had taken his

motherless little Alice under her protecting wing, and, since the

disasters of February, had been half a mother to him also.

Well, I have been having a glorious time here [he writes],

and am well hardened now (I have just come in from spending

thirteen hours in the saddle). For every day I have been

here I have had my hands full. First and foremost, the

cattle have done well, and I regard the outlook for making

the business a success as being _very_ hopeful. I shall buy

a thousand more cattle and shall make it my regular

business. In the autumn I shall bring out Sewall and Dow and

put them on a ranch with very few cattle to start with, and

in the course of a couple of years give them quite a little

herd also.

I have never been in better health than on this trip. I am

in the saddle all day long either taking part in the

round-up of the cattle, or else hunting antelope (I got one

the other day; another good head for our famous hall). I am

really attached to my two "factors," Ferris and Merrifield,

they are very fine men.

The country is growing on me, more and more; it has a

curious, fantastic beauty of its own; and as I own six or

eight horses I have a fresh one every day and ride on a lope

all day long. How sound I do sleep at night now! There is

not much game, however; the cattlemen have crowded it out

and only a few antelope and deer remain. I have shot a few

jackrabbits and curlews, with the rifle; and I also killed

eight rattlesnakes.

To-morrow my two men go East for the cattle; and I will

start out alone to try my hand at finding my way over the

prairie by myself. I intend to take a two months' trip in

the fall, for hunting; and may, as politics look now, stay

away over Election day; so I shall return now very soon,

probably leaving here in a week.

On the following day Ferris and Merrifield started for the East, and

Roosevelt set out on his solitary hunting trip, half to test out his

own qualities as a frontiersman and half to replenish the larder.

For the last week I have been fulfilling a boyish ambition

of mine [he wrote to "Bamie" after his return to the

Maltese Cross]; that is, I have been playing at frontier

hunter in good earnest, having been off entirely alone, with

my horse and rifle, on the prairie. I wanted to see if I

could not do perfectly well without a guide, and I succeeded

beyond my expectations. I shot a couple of antelope and a

deer--and missed a great many more. I felt as absolutely

free as a man could feel; as you know, I do not mind

loneliness; and I enjoyed the trip to the utmost. The only

disagreeable incident was one day when it rained. Otherwise

the weather was lovely, and every night I would lie wrapped

up in my blanket looking at the stars till I fell asleep, in

the cool air. The country has widely different aspects in

different places; one day I could canter hour after hour

over the level green grass, or through miles of wild-rose

thickets, all in bloom; on the next I would be amidst the

savage desolation of the Bad Lands, with their dreary

plateaus, fantastically shaped buttes, and deep, winding

canyons. I enjoyed the trip greatly, and have never been in

better health.

George Myers was holding the fort at the Maltese Cross, building his

four-mile fence, keeping an eye on the horses and cattle and acting as

general factotum and cook. He was successful in everything except his

cooking. Even that was excellent, except for an occasional and

unaccountable lapse; but those lapses were dire.

It happened that, on the day of his return to the semi-civilization of

the Maltese Cross, Roosevelt intimated to George Myers that

baking-powder biscuits would be altogether welcome. George was rather

proud of his biscuits and set to work with energy, adding an extra bit

of baking powder from the can on the shelf beside the stove to be

sure that they would be light. The biscuits went into the oven looking

as perfect as any biscuits which George had ever created. They came

out a rich, emerald green.

Roosevelt and George Myers stared at them, wondering what imp in the

oven had worked a diabolical transformation. But investigation proved

that there was no imp involved. It was merely that Sylvane or

Merrifield, before departing, had casually dumped soda into the

baking-powder can.

Evidently Roosevelt thereupon decided that if accidents of that sort

were liable to happen to George, he had better take charge of the

culinary department himself. George was off on the range the following

morning, and Roosevelt, who had stayed home to write letters, filled a

kettle with dry rice, poured on what looked like a reasonable amount

of water, and set it on the oven to cook. Somewhat to his surprise,

the rice began to swell, brimming over on the stove. He dipped out

what seemed to him a sufficient quantity, and returned to his work.

The smell of burning rice informed him that there was trouble in the

wind. The kettle, he found, was brimming over again. He dipped out

more rice. All morning long he was dipping out rice. By the time

George returned, every bowl in the cabin, including the wash-basin,

was filled with half-cooked rice.

Roosevelt handed the control of the kitchen back to George Myers.

VI

Once long ago an ocean lapped this hill,

And where those vultures sail, ships sailed at will;

Queer fishes cruised about without a harbor--

I will maintain there's queer fish round here still.

_The Bad Lands Rubáiyat_

Through the long days of that soft, green June, Roosevelt was making

himself at home in his new and strange surroundings. A carpenter,

whose name was the same as his trade, built him a bookcase out of

scraps of lumber, and on the shelves of it he assembled old

friends--Parkman and Irving and Hawthorne and Cooper and Lowell, "Ike

Marvel's breezy pages and the quaint, pathetic character-sketches of

the Southern writers--Cable, Craddock, Macon, Joel Chandler Harris,

and sweet Sherwood Bonner." Wherever he went he carried some book or

other about him, solid books as a rule, though he was not averse on

occasion to what one cowpuncher, who later became superintendent of

education in Medora, and is therefore to be regarded as an authority,

reproachfully described as "trash." He consumed the "trash," it seems,

after a session of composition, which was laborious to him, and which

set him to stalking to and fro over the floor of the cabin and up and

down through the sagebrush behind it.

[Illustration: The ford of the Little Missouri near the Maltese Cross.]

He read and wrote in odd minutes, as his body required now and then a

respite from the outdoor activities that filled his days; but in

that first deep quaffing of the new life, the intervals out of the

saddle were brief and given mainly to meals and sleep. As he plunged

into books to extract from them whatever facts or philosophy they

might hold which he needed to enrich his personality and his

usefulness, so he plunged into the life of the Bad Lands seeking to

comprehend the emotions and the mental processes, the personalities

and the social conditions that made it what it was. With a warm

humanity on which the shackles of social prejudice already hung loose,

he moved with open eyes and an open heart among the men and women whom

the winds of chance had blown together in the valley of the Little

Missouri.

They were an interesting and a diverse lot. Closest to the Maltese

Cross, in point of situation, were the Eatons, who had established

themselves two years previously at an old stage station, five miles

south of Little Missouri, on what had been the first mail route

between Fort Abraham Lincoln and Fort Keogh. Custer had passed that

way on his last, ill-fated expedition, and the ranch bore the name of

the Custer Trail in memory of the little army that had camped beside

it one night on the way to the Little Big Horn. The two-room shack of

cottonwood logs and a dirt roof, which had been the station, was

inhabited by calves and chickens who were kept in bounds by the

stockade which only a little while before had served to keep the

Indians at a distance.

The four Eaton brothers were men of education and family, who had

suffered financial reverses and migrated from Pittsburgh, where they

lived, to "make their fortunes," as the phrase went, in the Northwest.

A wealthy Pennsylvanian named Huidekoper, a lover of good horses,

backed Howard at the Custer Trail and another Easterner named Van

Brunt started a second ranch with him, known as the "V-Eye," forty

miles down the river at the mouth of Beaver Creek; a third, named

"Chris" McGee, who was a somewhat smoky light in the murk of

Pennsylvania politics, went into partnership with Charles, at another

ranch six miles up Beaver. The Custer Trail was headquarters for them

all, and at the same time for an endless procession of Eastern friends

who came for the hunting. The Eatons kept open house. Travelers wrote

about the hospitality that even strangers were certain to find there,

and carried away with them the picture of Howard Eaton, "who sat his

horse as though he were a centaur and looked a picturesque and noble

figure with his clean-shaven cheeks, heavy drooping moustache,

sombrero, blue shirt, and neckerchief with flaming ends." About the

time Roosevelt arrived, friends who had availed themselves of the

Eaton hospitality until they were in danger of losing their

self-respect, had prevailed on the reluctant brothers to make

"dude-ranching" a business. "Eaton's dudes" became a notable factor in

the Bad Lands. You could raise a laugh about them at Bill Williams's

saloon when nothing else could wake a smile.

One of the few women up or down the river was living that June at the

Custer Trail. She was Margaret Roberts, the wife of the Eatons'

foreman, a jovial, garrulous woman, still under thirty, with hair that

curled attractively and had a shimmer of gold in it. She was utterly

fearless, and was bringing up numerous children, all girls, with a

cool disregard of wild animals and wilder men, which, it was rumored

shocked her relatives "back East." She had been brought up in Iowa,

but ten horses could not have dragged her back.

Four or five miles above the Maltese Cross lived a woman of a

different sort who was greatly agitating the countryside, especially

Mrs. Roberts. She had come to the Bad Lands with her husband and

daughter since Roosevelt's previous visit, and established a ranch on

what was known as "Tepee Bottom." Her husband, whose name, for the

purposes of this narrative, shall be Cummins, had been sent to Dakota

as ranch manager for a syndicate of Pittsburgh men, why, no one

exactly knew, since he was a designer of stoves, and, so far as any

one could find out, had never had the remotest experience with cattle.

He was an excellent but ineffective little man, religiously inclined,

and consequently dubbed "the Deacon." Nobody paid very much attention

to him, least of all his wife. That lady had drawn the fire of Mrs.

Roberts before she had been in the Bad Lands a week. She was a good

woman, but captious, critical, complaining, pretentious. She had in

her youth had social aspirations which her husband and a little town

in Pennsylvania had been unable to gratify. She brought into her life

in Dakota these vague, unsatisfied longings, and immediately set to

work to remould the manners, customs, and characters of the community

a little nearer to her heart's desire. To such an attitude there was,

of course, only one reaction possible; and she got it promptly.

Mrs. Roberts, energetic, simple-hearted, vigorous, plain-spoken, was

the only woman within a dozen miles, and it was not long before Mrs.

Roberts hated Mrs. Cummins as Jeremiah hated Babylon. For Mrs. Cummins

was bent on spreading "culture," and Mrs. Roberts was determined that

by no seeming acquiescence should it be spread over her.

"Roosevelt was a great visitor," said Howard Eaton in after time.

"When he first came out there, he was a quiet sort of a fellow, with

not much to say to anybody, but the best kind of a mixer I ever saw."

The Bad Lands no doubt required the ability to mix with all manner of

men, for it was all manner of men that congregated there. Roosevelt

evaded the saloons but established friendly relations with the men who

did not. When he rode to town for his mail or to make purchases at Joe

Ferris's new store, he contracted the habit of stopping at the office

of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_, where those who loved conversation more

than whiskey had a way of foregathering.

It was there that he came to know Hell-Roaring Bill Jones.

Bill Jones was a personage in the Bad Lands. He was, in fact, more

than that. He was (like Roosevelt himself) one of those rare beings

who attain mythical proportions even in their lifetime and draw about

themselves the legendry of their generation. Bill Jones was the type

and symbol of the care-free negation of moral standards in the wild

little towns of the frontier, and men talked of him with an awe which

they scarcely exhibited toward any symbol of virtue and sobriety. He

said things and he did things which even a tolerant observer, hardened

to the aspect of life's seamy side, might have felt impelled to call

depraved, and yet Bill Jones himself was not depraved. He was, like

the community in which he lived, "free an' easy." Morality meant no

more to him than grammar. He outraged the one as he outraged the

other, without malice and without any sense of fundamental difference

between himself and those who preferred to do neither.

The air was full of tales of his extraordinary doings, for he was a

fighter with pistols and with fists and had an ability as a "butter"

which was all his own and which he used with deadly effect. What his

history had been was a secret which he illuminated only fitfully. It

was rumored that he had been born in Ireland of rather good stock, and

in the course of an argument with an uncle of his with whom he lived

had knocked the uncle down. Whether he had killed him the rumors

failed to tell, but the fact that Bill Jones had found it necessary

"to dust" to America, under an assumed name, suggested several things.

Being inclined to violence, he naturally drifted to that part of the

country where violence seemed to be least likely to have serious

consequences. By a comic paradox, he joined the police force of

Bismarck. He casually mentioned the fact one day to Roosevelt,

remarking that he had left the force because he "beat the Mayor over

the head with his gun one day."

"The Mayor, he didn't mind it," he added, "but the Superintendent of

Police guessed I'd better resign."

He was a striking-looking creature, a man who could turn dreams into

nightmares, merely by his presence in them. He was rather short of

stature, but stocky and powerfully built, with a tremendous chest and

long, apelike arms, hung on a giant's shoulders. The neck was a

brute's, and the square protruding jaw was in keeping with it. His

lips were thin, his nose was hooked like a pirate's, and his keen

black eyes gleamed from under the bushy black eyebrows like a

grizzly's from a cave. He was not a thing of beauty, but, at the back

of his unflinching gaze, humor in some spritely and satanic shape was

always disporting itself, and there was, as Lincoln Lang described it,

"a certain built-in look of drollery in his face," which made one

forget its hardness.

He was feared and, strange to say, he was loved by the very men who

feared him. For he was genial, and he could build a yarn that had the

architectural completeness of a turreted castle, created out of smoke

by some imaginative minstrel of hell. His language on all occasions

was so fresh and startling that men had a way of following him about

just to gather up the poppies and the nightshade of his exuberant

conversation.

As Will Dow later remarked about him, he was "an awfully good man to

have on your side if there was any sassing to be done."

Roosevelt was not one of those who fed on the malodorous stories which

had gained for their author the further sobriquet of "Foul-mouthed

Bill"; but he rather liked Bill Jones.[6] It happened one day, in the

_Cowboy_ office that June, that the genial reprobate was holding forth

in his best vein to an admiring group of cowpunchers.

[Footnote 6: "As I recall Bill, his stories were never

half as bad as Frank [Vine's], for instance. Where he

shone particularly was in excoriating those whom he did

not like. In this connection he could--and did--use the

worst expressions I have ever heard. He was a born

cynic, who said his say in 'plain talk,' not

'langwidge.' For all that, he was filled to the neck

with humor, and was a past-master in the art of

repartee, always in plain talk, remember. Explain it if

you can. Bill was roundly hated by many because he had a

way of talking straight truth. He had an uncanny knack

of seeing behind the human scenery of the Bad Lands, and

always told right out what he saw. That is why they were

all afraid of him."--_Lincoln Lang._]

Roosevelt, who was inclined to be reserved in the company of his new

associates, endured the flow of indescribable English as long as he

could. Then, suddenly, in a pause, when the approving laughter had

subsided, he began slowly to "skin his teeth."

"Bill Jones," he said, looking straight into the saturnine face, and

speaking in a low, quiet voice, "I can't tell why in the world I like

you, for you're the nastiest-talking man I ever heard."

Bill Jones's hand fell on his "six-shooter." The cowpunchers, knowing

their man, expected shooting. But Bill Jones did not shoot. For an

instant the silence in the room was absolute. Gradually a sheepish

look crept around the enormous and altogether hideous mouth of Bill

Jones. "I don't belong to your outfit, Mr. Roosevelt," he said, "and

I'm not beholden to you for anything. All the same, I don't mind

saying that mebbe I've been a little too free with my mouth."

They became friends from that day.

If Roosevelt had tried to avoid the Marquis de Mores on his trips to

the Marquis's budding metropolis in those June days, he would scarcely

have succeeded. The Marquis was the most vivid feature of the

landscape in and about Medora. His personal appearance would have

attracted attention in any crowd. The black, curly hair, the upturned

moustaches, waxed to needle-points, the heavy eyelids, the cool,

arrogant eyes, made an impression which, against that primitive

background, was not easily forgotten. His costume, moreover, was

extraordinary to the point of the fantastic. It was the Marquis who

always seemed to wear the widest sombrero, the loudest neckerchief. He

went armed like a battleship. A correspondent of the Mandan _Pioneer_

met him one afternoon returning from the pursuit of a band of cattle

which had stampeded. "He was armed to the teeth," ran his report. "A

formidable-looking belt encircled his waist, in which was stuck a

murderous-looking knife, a large navy revolver, and two rows of

cartridges, and in his hand he carried a repeating rifle."

A man who appeared thus dressed and accoutered would either be a

master or a joke in a community like Medora. There were several

reasons why he was never a joke. His money had something to do with

it, but the real reason was, in the words of a contemporary, that

"when it came to a show-down, the Marquis was always there." He

completely dominated the life of Medora. His hand was on everything,

and everything, it seemed, belonged to him. It was quite like "Puss in

Boots." His town was really booming and was crowding its rival on the

west bank completely out of the picture. The clatter of hammers on new

buildings sounded, in the words of the editor of the _Cowboy_, "like a

riveting machine." The slaughter-house had already been expanded. From

Chicago came a score or more of butchers, from the range came herds of

cattle to be slaughtered. The side-track was filled with empty cars of

the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, which, as they were

loaded with dressed beef, were coupled on fast east-bound trains. The

Marquis, talking to newspaper correspondents, was glowing in his

accounts of the blooming of his desert rose. He announced that it

already had six hundred inhabitants. Another, calmer witness

estimated fifty. The truth was probably a hundred, including the

fly-by-nights. Unquestionably, they made noise enough for six hundred.

The Marquis, pending the completion of his house, was living

sumptuously in his private car, somewhat, it was rumored, to the

annoyance of his father-in-law, who was said to see no connection

between the rough life of a ranchman, in which the Marquis appeared to

exult, and the palace on wheels in which he made his abode. But he was

never snobbish. He had a friendly word for whoever drifted into his

office, next to the company store, and generally "something for the

snake-bite," as he called it, that was enough to bring benedictions to

the lips of a cowpuncher whose dependence for stimulants was on Bill

Williams's "Forty-Mile Red-Eye." To the men who worked for him he was

extraordinarily generous, and he was without vindictiveness toward

those who, since the killing of Luffsey, had openly or tacitly opposed

him. He had a grudge against Gregor Lang,[7] whose aversion to titles

and all that went with them had not remained unexpressed during the

year that had intervened since that fatal June 26th, but if he held

any rancor toward Merrifield or the Ferrises, he did not reveal it. He

was learning a great deal incidentally.

[Footnote 7: "He held the grudge all right, and it may

have been largely because father sided against him in

regard to the killing. But I think the main reason was

because father refused to take any hand in bringing

about a consolidation of interests. Pender was a

tremendously rich man and had the ear of some of the

richest men in England, such as the Duke of Sutherland

and the Marquis of Tweeddale."--_Lincoln Lang._]

Shortly before Roosevelt's arrival from the Chicago convention, the

Marquis had stopped at the Maltese Cross one day for a chat with

Sylvane. He was dilating on his projects, "spreading himself" on his

dreams, but in his glowing vision of the future, he turned, for once,

a momentary glance of calm analysis on the past.

"If I had known a year ago what I know now," he said rather sadly,

"Riley Luffsey would never have been killed."

It was constantly being said of the Marquis that he was self-willed

and incapable of taking advice. The charge was untrue. The difficulty

was rather that he sought advice in the wrong quarters and lacked the

judgment to weigh the counsel he received against the characters and

aims of the men who gave it. He was constantly pouring out the tale of

his grandiose plans to Tom and Dick and Abraham, asking for guidance

in affairs of business and finance from men whose knowledge of

business was limited to frontier barter and whose acquaintance with

finance was of an altogether dubious and uneconomic nature. He was

possessed, moreover, by the dangerous notion that those who spoke

bluntly were, therefore, of necessity opposed to him and not worth

regarding, while those who flattered him were his friends whose

counsel he could trust.

It was this attitude of mind which encumbered his project for a

stage-line to the Black Hills with difficulties from the very start.

The project itself was feasible. Deadwood could be reached only by

stage from Pierre, a matter of three hundred miles. The distance to

Medora was a hundred miles shorter. Millions of pounds of freight were

accumulating for lack of proper transportation facilities to Deadwood.

That hot little mining town, moreover, needed contact with the great

transcontinental system, especially in view of the migratory movement,

which had begun early in the year, of the miners from Deadwood and

Lead to the new gold-fields in the Coeur d'Alênes in Idaho.

Bill Williams and Jess Hogue, with the aid of the twenty-eight army

mules which they had acquired in ways that invited research, had

started a freight-line from Medora to Deadwood, but its service turned

out to be spasmodic, depending somewhat on the state of Medora's

thirst, on the number of "suckers" in town who had to be fleeced, and

on the difficulty under which both Williams and Hogue seemed to suffer

of keeping sober when they were released from their obvious duties in

the saloon. There appeared to be every reason, therefore, why a

stage-line connecting Deadwood with the Northern Pacific, carrying

passengers, mail, and freight, and organized with sufficient capital,

should succeed.

Dickinson, forty miles east, was wildly agitating for such a line to

run from that prosperous little community to the Black Hills. The

Dickinson _Press_ and the _Bad Lands Cowboy_ competed in deriding each

other's claims touching "the only feasible route." The _Cowboy_ said

that the Medora line would be more direct. The _Press_ agreed, but

replied that the country through which it would have to go was

impassable even for an Indian on a pony. The _Cowboy_ declared that

"the Dickinson road strikes gumbo from the start"; and the _Press_

with fine scorn answered, "This causes a smile to percolate our

features. From our experience in the Bad Lands we know that after a

slight rain a man can carry a whole quarter-section off on his boots,

and we don't wear number twelves either." The _Cowboy_ insisted that

the Dickinson route "is at best a poor one and at certain seasons

impassable." The _Press_ scorned to reply to this charge, remarking

merely from the heights of its own eight months' seniority, "The

_Cowboy_ is young, and like a boy, going through a graveyard at night,

is whistling to keep up courage."

There the debate for the moment rested. But Dickinson, which

unquestionably had the better route, lacked a Marquis. While the

_Press_ was printing the statements of army experts in support of its

claims, de Mores was sending surveyors south to lay out his route.

From Sully Creek they led it across the headwaters of the Heart River

and the countless affluents of the Grand and the Cannonball, past Slim

Buttes and the Cave Hills, across the valleys of the Bellefourche and

the Moreau, two hundred and twenty-five miles into the Black Hills and

Deadwood. Deadwood gave the Marquis a public reception, hailing him as

a benefactor of the race, and the Marquis, flushed and seeing

visions, took a flying trip to New York and presented a petition to

the directors of the Northern Pacific for a railroad from Medora to

the Black Hills.

The dream was perfect, and everybody (except the Dickinson _Press_)

was happy. Nothing remained but to organize the stage company, buy the

coaches, the horses and the freight outfits, improve the highway,

establish sixteen relay stations, and get started. And there, the real

difficulties commenced.

The Marquis, possibly feeling that it was the part of statesmanship to

conciliate a rival, forgot apparently all other considerations and

asked Bill Williams, the saloon-keeper, to undertake the organization

of the stage-line. Williams assiduously disposed of the money which

the Marquis put in his hands, but attained no perceptible results. The

Marquis turned next to Bill Williams's partner in freighting and faro

and asked Jess Hogue to take charge. Hogue, who was versatile and was

as willing to cheat a man in one way as in another, consented and for

a time neglected the card-tables of Williams's "liquor-parlor" to

enter into negotiations for the construction of the line. He was a

clever man and had had business experience of a sort, but his interest

in the Deadwood stage-line did not reach beyond the immediate

opportunity it offered of acquiring a substantial amount of the

Marquis's money. He made a trip or two to Bismarck and Deadwood; he

looked busy; he promised great things; but nothing happened. The

Marquis, considerably poorer in pocket, deposed his second manager as

he had deposed the first, and looked about for an honest man.

One day Packard, setting up the _Cowboy_, was amazed to see the

Marquis come dashing into his office.

"I want you to put on the stage-line for me," he ejaculated.

Packard looked at him. "But Marquis," he answered, "I never saw a

stage or a stage-line. I don't know anything about it."

"It makes no difference," cried the Frenchman. "You will not rob me."

Packard admitted the probability of the last statement. They talked

matters over. To Packard, who was not quite twenty-four, the prospect

of running a stage-line began to look rather romantic. He set about to

find out what stage-lines were made of, and went to Bismarck to study

the legal document the Marquis's lawyers had drawn up. It specified,

in brief, that A. T. Packard was to be sole owner of the Medora and

Black Hills Stage and Forwarding Company when it should have paid for

itself from its net earnings, which left nothing to be desired,

especially as the total receipts from sales of building lots in Medora

and elsewhere were to be considered part of the earnings. It was

understood that the Marquis was to secure a mail contract from the

Post-Office Department effective with the running of the first stage

sometime in June. Packard attached his name to the document, and

waited for the money which the Marquis had agreed to underwrite to

set the organization in motion.

Day after day he waited in vain. Weeks passed. In June began an exodus

from the Black Hills to the Coeur d'Alênes that soon became a

stampede. With an exasperation that he found it difficult to control,

Packard heard of the thousands that were taking the roundabout journey

by way of Pierre or Miles City. He might, he knew, be running every

north-bound coach full from front to hind boot and from thorough-brace

to roof-rail; and for once the Marquis might make some money. He

pleaded for funds in person and by wire. But the Marquis, for the

moment, did not have any funds to give him.

Roosevelt and the Marquis were inevitably thrown together, for they

were men whose tastes in many respects were similar. They were both

fond of hunting, and fond also of books, and the Marquis, who was

rather solitary in his grandeur and possibly a bit lonely, jumped at

the opportunity Roosevelt's presence in Medora offered for

companionship with his own kind. Roosevelt did not like him. He

recognized, no doubt, that if any cleavage should come in the

community to which they both belonged, they would, in all probability,

not be found on the same side.

VII

An oath had come between us--I was paid by Law and Order;

He was outlaw, rustler, killer--so the border whisper ran;

Left his word in Caliente that he'd cross the Rio border--

Call me coward? But I hailed him--"Riding close to daylight, Dan!"

Just a hair and he'd have got me, but my voice, and not the warning,

Caught his hand and held him steady; then he nodded, spoke my name,

Reined his pony round and fanned it in the bright and silent morning,

Back across the sunlit Rio up the trail on which he came.

Henry Herbert KNIBBS

It was already plain that there were in fact two distinct groups along

the valley of the Little Missouri. There are always two groups in any

community (short of heaven); and the fact that in the Bad Lands there

was a law-abiding element, and another element whose main interest in

law was in the contemplation of its fragments, would not be worth

remarking if it had not happened that the Marquis had allowed himself

to be maneuvered into a position in which he appeared, and in which in

fact he was, the protector of the disciples of violence. This was due

partly to Maunders's astute manipulations, but largely also to the

obsession by which apparently he was seized that he was the lord of

the manor in the style of the _ancien régime_, not to be bothered in

his beneficent despotism with the restrictions that kept the common

man in his place. As a foreigner he naturally cared little for the

political development of the region; as long as his own possessions,

therefore, were not tampered with, he was not greatly disturbed by

any depredations which his neighbors might suffer. He employed hands

without number; he seemed to believe any "fool lie" a man felt

inclined to tell him; he distributed blankets, saddles and spurs.

Naturally, Maunders clung to him like a leech with his train of

lawbreakers about him.

The immunity which Maunders enjoyed and radiated over his followers

was only one factor of many in perpetuating the lawlessness for which

the Bad Lands had for years been famous. Geography favored the

criminal along the Little Missouri. Montana was a step or two to the

west, Wyoming was a haven of refuge to the southwest, Canada was

within easy reach to the north. A needle in a haystack, moreover, was

less difficult to lay one's finger upon than a "two-gun man" tucked

away in one of a thousand ravines, scarred with wash-outs and filled

with buckbrush, in the broken country west of Bullion Butte.

Western Dakota was sanctuary, and from every direction of the compass

knaves of varying degrees of iniquity and misguided ability came to

enjoy it. There was no law in the Bad Lands but "six-shooter law." The

days were reasonably orderly, for there were "jobs" for every one; but

the nights were wild. There was not much diversion of an uplifting

sort in Medora that June of 1884. There was not even an "op'ry house."

Butchers and cowboys, carpenters and laborers, adventurous young

college graduates and younger sons of English noblemen, drank and

gambled and shouted and "shot up the town together" with

"horse-rustlers" and faro-dealers and "bad men" with notches on their

guns. "Two-gun men" appeared from God-knows-whence, generally well

supplied with money, and disappeared, the Lord knew whither, appearing

elsewhere, possibly, with a band of horses whose brands had melted

away under the application of a red-hot frying-pan, or suffered a

sea-change at the touch of a "running iron." Again they came to

Medora, and again they disappeared. The horse-market was brisk at

Medora, though only the elect knew where it was or who bought and sold

or from what frantic owner, two hundred miles to the north or south,

the horses had been spirited away.

It was a gay life, as Packard remarked.

The "gayety" was obvious even to the most casual traveler whose train

stopped for three noisy minutes at the Medora "depot." "Dutch

Wannigan," when he remarked that "seeing the trains come in was all

the scenery we had," plumbed the depths of Medora's hunger "for

something to happen." A train (even a freight) came to stand for

excitement, not because of any diversion it brought of itself out of a

world of "dudes" and police-officers, but because of the deviltry it

never failed to inspire in certain leading citizens of Medora.

For Medora had a regular reception committee, whose membership varied,

but included always the most intoxicated cowpunchers who happened to

be in town. Its leading spirits were Bill Williams, the saloon-keeper,

Van Zander, the wayward but attractive son of a Dutch patrician, and

his bosom friend, Hell-Roaring Bill Jones; and if they were fertile in

invention, they were no less energetic in carrying their inventions

into execution. To shoot over the roofs of the cars was a regular

pastime, to shoot through the windows was not unusual, but it was a

genius who thought of the notion of crawling under the dining-car and

shooting through the floor. He scattered the scrambled eggs which the

negro waiter was carrying, but did no other damage. These general

salvos of greeting, Bill Jones, Bill Williams, and the millionaire's

son from Rotterdam were accustomed to vary by specific attention to

passengers walking up and down the platform.

It happened one day that an old man in a derby hat stepped off the

train for a bit of an airing while the engine was taking water. Bill

Jones, spying the hat, gave an indignant exclamation and promptly shot

it off the man's head. The terrified owner hurried into the train,

leaving the brim behind.

"Come back, come back!" shouted Bill Jones, "we don't want the

blinkety-blank thing in Medora."

The old man, terrified, looked into Bill Jones's sinister face. He

found no relenting there. Deeply humiliated, he walked over to where

the battered brim lay, picked it up, and reëntered the train.

Medora, meanwhile, was acquiring a reputation for iniquity with

overland tourists which the cowboys felt in duty bound to live up to.

For a time the trains stopped both at Medora and Little Missouri. On

one occasion, as the engine was taking water at the wicked little

hamlet on the west bank, the passengers in the sleeping-car, which was

standing opposite the Pyramid Park Hotel, heard shots, evidently fired

in the hotel. They were horrified a minute later to see a man,

apparently dead, being carried out of the front door and around the

side of the hotel to the rear. A minute later another volley was

heard, and another "dead" man was seen being carried out. It was a

holocaust before the train finally drew out of the station, bearing

away a car-full of gasping "dudes."

They did not know that it was the same man who was being carried round

and round, and only the wise ones surmised that the shooting was a

volley fired over the "corpse" every time the "procession" passed the

bar.

All this was very diverting and did harm to nobody. Roosevelt himself,

no doubt, took huge satisfaction in it. But there were aspects of

Medora's disregard for the conventions which were rather more serious.

If you possessed anything of value, you carried it about with you if

you expected to find it when you wanted it. You studied the ways of

itinerant butchers with much attention, and if you had any cattle of

your own, you kept an eye on the comings and goings of everybody who

sold beef or veal. The annoying element in all this vigilance,

however, was that, even if you could point your finger at the man who

had robbed you, it did not profit you much unless you were ready to

shoot him. A traveling salesman, whose baggage had been looted in

Medora, swore out a warrant in Morton County, a hundred and fifty

miles to the east. The Morton County sheriff came to serve the

warrant, but the warrant remained in his pocket. He was "close-herded"

in the sagebrush across the track from the "depot" by the greater part

of the male population, on the general principle that an officer of

the law was out of place in Medora whatever his mission might be; and

put on board the next train going east.

In all the turmoil, the Marquis was in his element. He was never a

participant in the hilarity and he was never known to "take a drink"

except the wine he drank with his meals. He kept his distance and his

dignity. But he regarded the lawlessness merely as part of frontier

life, and took no steps to stop it. Roosevelt was too young and

untested a member of the community to exert any open influence during

those first weeks of his active life in the Bad Lands. It remained for

the ex-baseball player, the putative owner of a stage-line that

refused to materialize, to give the tempestuous little community its

first faint notion of the benefits of order.

[Illustration: A. T. Packard.]

[Illustration: Office of the "Bad Lands Cowboy".]

Packard, as editor of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_, had, in a manner

entirely out of proportion to his personal force, or the personal

force that any other man except the most notable might have brought

to bear, been a civilizing influence from the beginning. The train

that brought his presses from the East brought civilization with it, a

somewhat shy and wraithlike civilization, but yet a thing made in the

image and containing in itself the germ of that spirit which is the

antithesis of barbarism, based on force, being itself the visible

expression of the potency of ideas. The _Bad Lands Cowboy_ brought the

first tenuous foreshadowing of democratic government to the banks of

the Little Missouri, inasmuch as it was an organ which could mould

public opinion and through which public opinion might find

articulation. It was thus that a youngster, not a year out of college,

became, in a sense, the first representative of the American idea in

the Marquis de Mores's feudal appanage.

Packard was extraordinarily well fitted not only to be a frontier

editor, but to be a frontier editor in Medora. His college education

gave him a point of contact with the Marquis which most of the other

citizens of the Bad Lands lacked; his independence of spirit, on the

other hand, kept him from becoming the Frenchman's tool. He was

altogether fearless, he was a crack shot and a good rider, and he was

not without effectiveness with his fists. But he was also tactful and

tolerant; and he shared, and the cowboys knew he shared, their love of

the open country and the untrammeled ways of the frontier. Besides, he

had a sense of humor, which in Medora in the spring of 1884, was

better than great riches.

The _Cowboy_ was Packard and Packard was the _Cowboy_. He printed what

he pleased, dictating his editorials, as it were, "to the machine," he

himself being the machine translating ideas into type as they came.

His personal responsibility was absolute. There was no one behind whom

he could hide. If any one objected to any statement in Medora's weekly

newspaper, he knew whom to reproach. "Every printed word," said

Packard, a long time after, "bore my brand. There were no mavericks in

the _Bad Lands Cowboy_ articles. There was no libel law; no law of any

kind except six-shooter rights. And I was the only man who never

carried a six-shooter."

To a courageous man, editing a frontier paper was an adventure which

had thrills which editors in civilized communities never knew. Packard

spoke his mind freely. Medora gasped a little. Packard expressed his

belief that a drunken man who kills, or commits any other crime,

should be punished for the crime and also for getting drunk, and then

there was trouble; for the theory of the frontier was that a man who

was drunk was not responsible for what he did, and accidents which

happened while he was in that condition, though unfortunate, were to

be classed, not with crimes, but with tornadoes and hailstorms and

thunder bolts, rather as "acts of God." The general expression of the

editor's opposition to this amiable theory brought only rumblings, but

the specific applications brought indignant citizens with

six-shooters. Packard had occasion to note the merits as a lethal

weapon of the iron "side-stick" with which he locked his type forms.

It revealed itself as more potent than a six-shooter, and a

carving-knife was not in a class with it; as he proved to the

satisfaction of all concerned when a drunken butcher, who attempted to

cut a Chinaman into fragments, came to the _Cowboy_ office, "to

forestall adverse comment in the next issue."

Packard was amused to note how much his ability to defend himself

simplified the problem of moulding public opinion in Medora.

The law-abiding ranchmen along the Little Missouri, who found a

spokesman in the editor of the _Cowboy_, recognized that what the Bad

Lands needed was government, government with a club if possible, but

in any event something from which a club could be developed. But the

elements of disorder, which had been repulsed when they had suggested

the organization of Billings County a year previous, now vigorously

resisted organization when the impetus came from the men who had

blocked their efforts. But the _Cowboy_ fought valiantly, and the

Dickinson _Press_ in its own way did what it could to help.

Medora is clamoring for a county organization in Billings

County [the editor reported.] We hope they will get it. If

there is any place along the line that needs a criminal

court and a jail it is Medora. Four-fifths of the business

before our justice of the peace comes from Billings County.

A week later, the _Press_ reported that the county was about to be

organized and that John C. Fisher and A. T. Packard were to be two out

of the three county commissioners. Then something happened. What it

was is shrouded in mystery. Possibly the Marquis, who had never been

acquitted by a jury of the killing of Riley Luffsey, decided at the

last minute that, in case the indictment, which was hovering over him

like an evil bird, should suddenly plunge and strike, he would stand a

better chance away from Medora than in it. A word from him to Maunders

and from Maunders to his "gang" would unquestionably have served to

bring about the organization of the county; a word spoken against the

move would also have served effectually to block it. There was,

however, a certain opposition to the movement for organization on the

part of the most sober elements of the population. Some of the older

ranchmen suggested to Packard and to Fisher that they count noses.

They did so, and the result was not encouraging. Doubtless they might

organize the county, but the control of it would pass into the hands

of the crooked. Whatever causes lay behind the sudden evaporation of

the project, the fact stands that for the time being the Bad Lands

remained under the easy-going despotism of the Marquis de Mores and

his prime minister, Jake Maunders, unhampered and unillumined by the

impertinences of democracy.

The Dickinson _Press_ had truth on its side when it uttered its wail

that Medora needed housing facilities for the unruly. Medora had

never had a jail. Little Missouri had had an eight by ten shack which

one man, who knew some history, christened "the Bastile," and which

was used as a sort of convalescent hospital for men who were too drunk

to distinguish between their friends and other citizens when they

started shooting. But a sudden disaster had overtaken the Bastile one

day when a man called Black Jack had come into Little Missouri on a

wrecking train. He had a reputation that extended from Mandan to Miles

City for his ability to carry untold quantities of whiskey without

showing signs of intoxication; but Little Missouri proved his undoing.

The "jag" he developed was something phenomenal, and he was finally

locked up in the Bastile by common consent. The train crew, looking

for Black Jack at three in the morning, located him after much

searching. But the Bastile had been built by the soldiers and resisted

their efforts to break in. Thereupon they threw a line about the shack

and with the engine hauled it to the side of a flatcar attached to the

train. Then with a derrick they hoisted Little Missouri's only

depository for the helpless inebriate on the flatcar and departed

westward. At their leisure they chopped Black Jack out of his

confinement. They dumped the Bastile over the embankment somewhere a

mile west of town.

The collapse of the efforts of the champions of order to organize the

county left the problem of dealing with the lawlessness that was

rampant, as before, entirely to the impulse of outraged individuals.

There was no court, no officer of the law. Each man was a law unto

himself, and settled his own quarrels. The wonder, under such

circumstances, is not that there was so much bloodshed, but that there

was so little. There was, after all, virtue in the anarchy of the

frontier. Personal responsibility was a powerful curb-bit.

In the Bad Lands, in June, 1884, there was a solid minority of

law-abiding citizens who could be depended on in any crisis. There was

a larger number who could be expected as a rule to stand with the

angels, but who had friendly dealings with the outlaws and were open

to suspicion. Then there was the indeterminate and increasing number

of men whose sources of revenue were secret, who toiled not, but were

known to make sudden journeys from which they returned with fat

"rolls" in their pockets. It was to curb this sinister third group

that Packard had attempted to organize the county. Failing in that

project, he issued a call for a "mass meeting."

The meeting was duly held, and, if it resembled the conference of a

committee more than a popular uprising, that was due mainly to the

fact that a careful census taken by the editor of the _Cowboy_

revealed that in the whole of Billings County, which included in its

limits at that time a territory the size of Massachusetts, there lived

exactly one hundred and twenty-two males and twenty-seven females.

There was a certain hesitancy on the part even of the law-abiding to

assert too loudly their opposition to the light-triggered elements

which were "frisking" their horses and cattle. The "mass meeting"

voted, in general, that order was preferable to disorder and

adjourned, after unanimously electing Packard chief of police (with no

police to be chief of) and the Marquis de Mores head of the fire

department (which did not exist).

"I have always felt there was something I did not know back of that

meeting," said Packard afterward. "I think Roosevelt started it, as he

and I were agreed the smaller ranches were losing enough cattle and

horses to make the difference between profit and loss. It was a

constant topic of conversation among the recognized law-and-order men

and all of us agreed the thieves must be checked. I don't even

remember how the decision came about to hold the meeting. It was

decided to hold it, however, and I gave the notice wide publicity in

the _Bad Lands Cowboy_. I was never more surprised than when

Merrifield nominated me for chief of police. Merrifield was a partner

with Roosevelt and the Ferris boys in the Chimney Butte Ranch and I

have always thought he and Roosevelt had agreed beforehand to nominate

me."

Packard took up his duties, somewhat vague in his mind concerning what

was expected of him. There was no organization behind him, no

executive committee to give him instructions. With a large liberality,

characteristic of the frontier, the "mass meeting" had left to his own

discretion the demarcation of his "authority" and the manner of its

assertion. His "authority," in fact, was a gigantic bluff, but he was

not one to let so immaterial a detail weaken his nerve.

The fire department died stillborn; but the police force promptly

asserted itself. Packard had decided to "work on the transients"

first, for he could persuade them, better than he could the residents,

that he had an organization behind him, with masks and a rope. From

the start he made it a point not to mix openly in any "altercation,"

where he could avoid it, for the simple reason that the actual

fighting was in most cases done by professional "bad men," and the

death of either party to the duel, or both, was considered a source of

jubilation rather than of regret. He devoted his attention mainly to

those "floaters" whom he suspected of being in league with the

outlaws, or who, by their recklessness with firearms, made themselves

a public nuisance. He seldom, if ever, made an arrest. He merely drew

his man aside and told him that "it had been decided" that he should

leave town at once and never again appear in the round-up district of

the Bad Lands. In no case was his warning disobeyed. On the few

occasions when it was necessary for him to interfere publicly, there

were always friends of order in the neighborhood to help him seal the

exile in a box car and ship him east or west on the next freight. A

number of hilarious disciples of justice varied this proceeding one

evening by breaking open the car in which one of Packard's prisoners

lay confined and tying him to the cowcatcher of a train which had just

arrived. Word came back from Glendive at midnight that the prisoner

had reached his destination in safety, though somewhat breathless,

owing to the fact that the cowcatcher "had picked up a Texas steer on

the way."

Packard's activity as chief of police had value in keeping the

"floaters" in something resembling order; but it scarcely touched the

main problem with which the law-abiding ranchmen had to contend, which

was the extinction of the horse and cattle thieves.

To an extraordinary extent these thieves possessed the Bad Lands. They

were here, there, and everywhere, sinister, intangible shadows,

weaving in and out of the bright-colored fabric of frontier life. They

were in every saloon and in almost every ranch-house. They rode on the

round-ups, they sat around the camp-fire with the cowpunchers. Some of

the most capable ranchmen were in league with them, bankers east and

west along the railroad were hand in glove with them. A man scarcely

dared denounce the thieves to his best friend for fear his friend

might be one of them.

There were countless small bands which operated in western Dakota,

eastern Montana, and northwestern Wyoming, each loosely organized as a

unit, yet all bound together in the tacit fellowship of outlawry. The

most tangible bond among them was that they all bought each other's

stolen horses, and were all directors of the same "underground

railway." Together they constituted not a band, but a "system," that

had its tentacles in every horse and cattle "outfit" in the Bad Lands.

As far as the system had a head at all, that head was a man named

Axelby. Other men stole a horse here or there, but Axelby stole whole

herds of fifty and a hundred at one daring sweep. He was in appearance

a typical robber chieftain, a picturesque devil with piercing black

eyes and a genius for organization and leadership. In addition to his

immediate band, scores of men whom he never saw, and who were

scattered over a territory greater than New England, served him with

absolute fidelity. They were most of them saloon-keepers, gamblers,

and men who by their prominence in the community would be unsuspected;

and there were among them more than a few ranchmen who were not averse

to buying horses under the market price. With the aid of these men,

Axelby created his smooth-running "underground railway" from the Big

Horn Mountains and the Black Hills north through Wyoming, Dakota, and

Montana. His agents in the settlements performed the office of spies,

keeping him in touch with opportunities to operate on a large scale;

and the ranchmen kept open the "underground" route by means of which

he was able to spirit his great herds of horses across the Canadian

line.

By the spring of 1884, Axelby's fame had reached the East, and even

the New York _Sun_ gave him a column:

Mr. Axelby is said to be at the head of a trusty band as

fearless and as lawless as himself. The Little Missouri and

Powder River districts are the theater of his operations. An

Indian is Mr. Axelby's detestation. He kills him at sight if

he can. He considers that Indians have no right to own

ponies and he takes their ponies whenever he can. Mr. Axelby

has repeatedly announced his determination not to be taken

alive. The men of the frontier say he bears a charmed life,

and the hairbreadth 'scapes of which they have made him the

hero are numerous and of the wildest stamp.

During the preceding February, Axelby and his band had had a clash

with the Federal authorities, which had created an enormous sensation

up and down the Little Missouri, but had settled nothing so far as the

horse-thieves were concerned. In the Bad Lands the thieves became

daily more pestiferous. Two brothers named Smith and two others called

"Big Jack" and "Little Jack" conducted the major operations in

Billings County. They had their cabin in a coulee west of the Big Ox

Bow, forty miles south of Medora, in the wildest part of the Bad

Lands, and "worked the country" from there north and south. They

seldom stole from white men, recognizing the advisability of not

irritating their neighbors too much, but drove off Indian ponies in

herds. Their custom was to steal Sioux horses from one of the

reservations, keep them in the Scoria Hills a month or more until all

danger of pursuit was over, and then drive them north over the prairie

between Belfield and Medora, through the Killdeer Mountains to the

northeastern part of the Territory. There they would steal other

horses from the Grosventres Indians, and drive them to their cache in

the Scoria Hills whence they could emerge with them at their good

pleasure and sell them at Pierre. There had been other "underground

railways," but this had a charm of its own, for it "carried freight"

both ways. Occasionally the thieves succeeded in selling horses to the

identical Indians they had originally robbed. The efficiency of it all

was in its way magnificent.

Through the record of thievery up and down the river, that spring of

1884, the shadow of Jake Maunders slips in and out, making no noise

and leaving no footprints. It was rumored that when a sheriff or a

United States marshal from somewhere drifted into Medora, Maunders

would ride south in the dead of night to the Big Ox Bow and give the

thieves the warning; and ride north again and be back in his own shack

before dawn. It was rumored, further, that when the thieves had horses

to sell, Maunders had "first pick." His own nephew was said to be a

confederate of Big Jack. One day that spring, the Jacks and Maunders's

nephew, driving a herd of trail-weary horses, stopped for a night at

Lang's Sage Bottom camp. They told Lincoln Lang that they had bought

the horses in Wyoming. Maunders sold the herd himself, and the news

that came from the south that the herd had been stolen made no

perceptible ruffle. The ranchmen had enough difficulty preserving

their own property and were not making any altruistic efforts to

protect the horses of ranchmen two hundred miles away. Maunders

continued to flourish. From Deadwood came rumors that Joe Morrill, the

deputy marshal, was carrying on a business not dissimilar to that

which was making Maunders rich in Medora.

When even the officers of the law were in league with the thieves or

afraid of them, there was little that the individual could do except

pocket his losses with as good grace as possible and keep his mouth

shut. The "system" tolerated no interference with its mechanism.

Fisher, smarting under the theft of six of the "top" horses from the

Marquis de Mores's "outfit" called one of the cowboys one day into his

office. His name was Pierce Bolan, and Fisher knew him to be not only

absolutely trustworthy, but unusually alert.

"You're out on the range all the time," said Fisher. "Can't you give

me a line on the fellows who are getting away with our horses?"

The cowboy hesitated and shook his head. "If I knew," he answered, "I

wouldn't dare tell you. My toes would be turned up the first time I

showed up on the range."

"What in ---- are we going to do?"

"Why, treat the thieves considerate," said Bolan. "Don't get 'em sore

on you. When one of them comes up and wants the loan of a horse, why,

let him have it."

Fisher turned to the foreman of one of the largest "outfits" for

advice and received a similar answer. The reputable stockmen were very

much in the minority, it seemed, and wise men treated the thieves with

"consideration" and called it insurance.

There were ranchmen, however, who were too high-spirited to tolerate

the payment of such tribute in their behalf, and too interested in the

future of the region as a part of the American commonwealth to be

willing to temporize with outlaws. Roosevelt was one of them, in the

valley of the Little Missouri. Another, across the Montana border in

the valley of the Yellowstone, was Granville Stuart.

Stuart was a "forty-niner," who had crossed the continent in a

prairie-schooner as a boy and had drifted into Virginia City in the

days of its hot youth. He was a man of iron nerve, and when the time

came for a law-abiding minority to rise against a horde of thieves and

desperadoes, he naturally became one of the leaders. He played an

important part in the extermination of the famous Plummer band of

outlaws in the early sixties, and was generally regarded as one of the

most notable figures in Montana Territory.

At the meeting of the Montana Stockgrowers' Association, at Miles City

in April, there had been much discussion of the depredations of the

horse and cattle thieves, which were actually threatening to destroy

the cattle industry. The officers of the law had been helpless, or

worse, in dealing with the situation, and the majority of the

cattlemen at the convention were in favor of raising a small army of

cowboys and "raiding the country."

Stuart, who was president of the Association, fought the project

almost single-handed. He pointed out that the "rustlers" were well

organized and strongly fortified, each cabin, in fact, constituting a

miniature fortress. There was not one of them who was not a dead shot

and all were armed with the latest model firearms and had an abundance

of ammunition. No "general clean-up" on a large scale could, Stuart

contended, be successfully carried through. The first news of such a

project would put the thieves on their guard, many lives would

unnecessarily be sacrificed, and the law, in the last analysis, would

be on the side of the "rustlers."

The older stockmen growled and the younger stockmen protested,

intimating that Stuart was a coward; but his counsel prevailed. A

number of them, who "stood in" with the thieves in the hope of thus

buying immunity, carried the report of the meeting to the outlaws. The

"rustlers" were jubilant and settled down to what promised to be a

year of undisturbed "operations."

Stuart himself, however, had long been convinced that drastic action

against the thieves must be taken; and had quietly formulated his

plan. When the spring round-up was over, late in June, he called a

half-dozen representative ranchmen from both sides of the

Dakota-Montana border together at his ranch, and presented his

project. It was promptly accepted, and Stuart himself was put in

charge of its execution.

Less than ten men in the whole Northwest knew of the movement that was

gradually taking form under the direction of the patriarchal fighting

man from Fergus County; but the Marquis de Mores was one of those men.

He told Roosevelt. Stuart's plan, it seems, was to organize the most

solid and reputable ranchmen in western Montana into a company of

vigilantes similar to the company which had wiped out the Plummer band

twenty years previous. Groups of indignant citizens who called

themselves vigilantes had from time to time attempted to conduct what

were popularly known as "necktie parties," but they had failed in

almost every case to catch their man, for the reason that the

publicity attending the organization had given the outlaws ample

warning of their peril. It was Stuart's plan to organize in absolute

secrecy, and fall on the horse-thieves like a bolt from the blue.

The raid was planned for late in July. It was probably during the last

days of June that Roosevelt heard of it. With him, when the Marquis

unfolded the project to him, was a young Englishman named Jameson

(brother of another Jameson who was many years later to stir the world

with a raid of another sort). Roosevelt and young Jameson, who shared

a hearty dislike of seeing lawbreakers triumphant, and were neither of

them averse to a little danger in confounding the public enemy,

announced with one accord that they intended to join Stuart's

vigilantes. The Marquis had already made up his mind that in so lurid

an adventure he would not be left out. The three of them took a

west-bound train and met Granville Stuart at Glendive.

But Stuart refused pointblank to accept their services. They were

untrained for frontier conditions, he contended; they were probably

reckless and doubtlessly uncontrollable; and would get themselves

killed for no reason; above all, they were all three of prominent

families. If anything happened to them, or if merely the news were

spread abroad that they were taking part in the raid, the attention of

the whole country would be drawn to an expedition in which the element

of surprise was the first essential for success.

The three young argonauts pleaded, but the old pioneer was obdurate.

He did not want to have them along, and he said so with all the

courtesy that was one of his graces and all the precision of phrase

that a life in the wild country had given him. Roosevelt and the

Englishman saw the justice of the veteran's contentions and accepted

the situation, but the Marquis was aggrieved. Granville Stuart,

meanwhile, having successfully sidetracked the three musketeers,

proceeded silently to gather his clansmen.

VIII

All day long on the prairies I ride,

Not even a dog to trot by my side;

My fire I kindle with chips gathered round,

My coffee I boil without being ground.

I wash in a pool and wipe on a sack;

I carry my wardrobe all on my back;

For want of an oven I cook bread in a pot,

And sleep on the ground for want of a cot.

My ceiling is the sky, my floor is the grass,

My music is the lowing of the herds as they pass;

My books are the brooks, my sermons the stones,

My parson is a wolf on his pulpit of bones.

_Cowboy song_

Roosevelt's first weeks at the Maltese Cross proved one thing to him

beyond debate; that was, that the cabin seven miles south of Medora

was not the best place in the world to do literary work. The trail

south led directly through his dooryard, and loquacious cowpunchers

stopped at all hours to pass the time of day. It was, no doubt, all

"perfectly bully"; but you did not get much writing done, and even

your correspondence suffered.

Roosevelt had made up his mind, soon after his arrival early in the

month, to bring Sewall and Dow out from Maine, and on his return from

his solitary trip over the prairie after antelope, he set out to

locate a site for a ranch, where the two backwoodsmen might hold some

cattle and where at the same time he might find the solitude he needed

for his literary work. On one of his exploring expeditions down the

river, he met Howard Eaton riding south to the railroad from his V-Eye

Ranch at the mouth of the Big Beaver, to receive a train-load of

cattle. He told Eaton the object of his journeying, and Eaton, who

knew the country better possibly than any other man in the Bad Lands,

advised him to look at a bottom not more than five miles up the river

from his own ranch. Roosevelt rode there promptly. The trail led

almost due north, again and again crossing the Little Missouri which

wound in wide sigmoid curves, now between forbidding walls of

crumbling limestone and baked clay, now through green acres of

pasture-land, or silvery miles of level sagebrush.

The country was singularly beautiful. On his left, as he advanced,

grassy meadows sloped to a wide plateau, following the curve of the

river. The valley narrowed. He forded the stream. The trail rose

sharply between steep walls of olive and lavender that shut off the

sun; it wound through a narrow defile; then over a plateau, whence

blue seas of wild country stretched northward into the haze; then

sharply down again into a green bottom, walled on the west by buttes

scarred like the face of an old man. He forded the stream once more,

swung round a jutting hill, and found the end of the bottom-land in a

grove of cottonwoods under the shadow of high buttes. At the edge of

the river he came upon the interlocked antlers of two elk who had died

in combat. He determined that it was there that his "home-ranch"

should stand.

For three weeks Roosevelt was in the saddle every day from dawn till

night, riding, often in no company but his own, up and down the river,

restless and indefatigable. On one of his solitary rides he stopped at

Mrs. Maddox's hut to call for the buckskin suit he had ordered of her.

She was a woman of terrible vigor, and inspired in Roosevelt a kind of

awe which none of the "bad men" of the region had been able to make

him feel.

She invited him to dinner. While she was preparing the meal, he sat in

a corner of the cabin. He had a habit of carrying a book with him

wherever he went and he was reading, altogether absorbed, when

suddenly Mrs. Maddox stumbled over one of his feet.

"Take that damn foot away!" she cried in tones that meant business.[8]

Roosevelt took his foot away, "and all that was attached to it," as

one of his cowboy friends explained subsequently, waiting outside

until the call for dinner came. He ate the dinner quickly, wasting no

words, not caring to run any risk of stirring again the fury of Mrs.

Maddox.

[Footnote 8: "I am inclined to doubt the truth of this

story. Mrs. Maddox was a terror only to those who took

her wrong or tried to put it over her. Normally she was

a very pleasant woman with a good, strong sense of

humor. My impression is she took a liking to T. R. that

time I took him there to be measured for his suit. If

she ever spoke as above, she must have been on the

war-path about something else at the time."--_Lincoln

Lang._]

[Illustration: The Little Missouri just above Elkhorn.]

It was on another solitary ride, this time in pursuit of stray

horses,--the horses, he found, were always straying,--that he had

an adventure of a more serious and decidedly lurid sort. The horses

had led him a pace through the Bad Lands westward out over the

prairie, and night overtook him not far from Mingusville, a primitive

settlement named thus with brilliant ingenuity by its first citizens,

a lady by the name of Minnie and her husband by the name of Gus. The

"town"--what there was of it--was pleasantly situated on rolling

country on the west bank of Beaver Creek. Along the east side of the

creek were high, steep, cream-colored buttes, gently rounded and

capped with green, softer in color than the buttes of the Bad Lands

and very attractive in spring in their frame of grass and cottonwoods

and cedars. Mingusville consisted of the railroad station, the

section-house, and a story-and-a-half "hotel" with a false front. The

"hotel" was a saloon with a loft where you might sleep if you had

courage.

Roosevelt stabled his horse in a shed behind the "hotel," and started

to enter.

Two shots rang out from the bar-room.

He hesitated. He had made it a point to avoid centers of disturbance

such as this, but the night was chilly and there was no place else to

go. He entered, with misgivings.

Inside the room were several men, beside the bartender, all, with one

exception, "wearing the kind of smile," as Roosevelt said, in telling

of the occasion, "worn by men who are making-believe to like what they

don't like." The exception was a shabby-looking individual in a

broad-brimmed hat who was walking up and down the floor talking and

swearing. He had a cocked gun in each hand. A clock on the wall had

two holes in its face, which accounted for the shots Roosevelt had

heard.

It occurred to Roosevelt that the man was not a "bad man" of the

really dangerous, man-killer type; but a would-be "bad man," a bully

who for the moment was having things all his own way.

"Four-eyes!" he shouted as he spied the newcomer.

There was a nervous laugh from the other men who were evidently

sheepherders. Roosevelt joined in the laugh.

"Four-eyes is going to treat!" shouted the man with the guns.

There was another laugh. Under cover of it Roosevelt walked quickly to

a chair behind the stove and sat down, hoping to escape further

notice.

But the bully was not inclined to lose what looked like an opportunity

to make capital as a "bad man" at the expense of a harmless "dude" in

a fringed buckskin suit. He followed Roosevelt across the room.

"Four-eyes is going to treat," he repeated.

Roosevelt passed the comment off as a joke. But the bully leaned over

Roosevelt, swinging his guns, and ordered him, in language suited to

the surroundings, "to set up the drinks for the crowd."

For a moment Roosevelt sat silent, letting the filthy storm rage

round him. It occurred to him in a flash that he was face to face with

a crisis vastly more significant to his future than the mere question

whether or not he should let a drunken bully have his way. If he

backed down, he said to himself, he would, when the news of it spread

abroad, have more explaining to do than he would care to undertake. It

was altogether a case of "Make good now, or quit!"

The bully roared, "Set up the drinks!"

It struck Roosevelt that the man was foolish to stand so near, with

his heels together. "Well, if I've got to, I've got to," he said and

rose to his feet, looking past his tormentor.

As he rose he struck quick and hard with his right just to one side of

the point of the jaw, hitting with his left as he straightened out,

and then again with his right.

The bully fired both guns, but the bullets went wide as he fell like a

tree, striking the corner of the bar with his head. It occurred to

Roosevelt that it was not a case in which one could afford to take

chances, and he watched, ready to drop with his knees on the man's

ribs at the first indication of activity. But the bully was senseless.

The sheepherders, now loud in their denunciations, hustled the

would-be desperado into a shed.

Roosevelt had his dinner in a corner of the dining-room away from the

windows, and he went to bed without a light. But the man in the shed

made no move to recover his shattered prestige. When he came to, he

went to the station, departing on a freight, and was seen no more.

The news of Roosevelt's encounter in the "rum-hole" in Mingusville

spread as only news can spread in a country of few happenings and much

conversation. It was the kind of story that the Bad Lands liked to

hear, and the spectacles and the fringed buckskin suit gave it an

added attraction. "Four-eyes" became, overnight, "Old Four Eyes,"

which was another matter.

"Roosevelt was regarded by the cowboys as a good deal of a joke until

after the saloon incident," said Frank Greene, a local official of the

Northern Pacific, many years later. "After that it was different."

Roosevelt departed for the East on July 1st. On the 4th, the Mandan

_Pioneer_ published an editorial about him which expressed, in

exuberant Dakota fashion, ideas which may well have been stirring in

Roosevelt's own mind.

Our friends west of us, at Little Missouri, are now being

made happy by the presence among them of that rare bird, a

political reformer. By his enemies he is called a dude, an

aristocrat, a theorist, an upstart, and the rest, but it

would seem, after all, that Mr. Roosevelt has something in

him, or he would never have succeeded in stirring up the

politicians of the Empire State. Mr. Roosevelt finds,

doubtless, the work of a reformer to be a somewhat onerous

one, and it is necessary, for his mental and physical

health, that he should once and again leave the scene of his

political labors and refresh himself with a little ozone,

such as is to be found pure and unadulterated in the Bad

Lands. Mr. Roosevelt is not one of the fossilized kind of

politicians who believes in staying around the musty halls

of the Albany capitol all the time. He thinks, perhaps, that

the man who lives in those halls, alternating between them

and the Delavan House, is likely to be troubled with

physical dyspepsia and mental carbuncles. Who knows but that

John Kelly might to-day be an honored member of

society--might be known outside of New York as a noble

Democratic leader--if he had been accustomed to spend some

of his time in the great and glorious West? Tammany Hall,

instead of being to-day the synonym for all that is brutal

and vulgar in politics, might be to-day another name for all

that is fresh, and true, ozonic and inspiring in the

political arena. If the New York politicians only knew it,

they might find it a great advantage to come once or twice a

year to West Dakota, to blow the cobwebs from their eyes,

and get new ambitions, new aspirations, and new ideas. Mr.

Roosevelt, although young, can teach wisdom to the

sophisticated machine politicians, who know not the value to

an Easterner of a blow among the fresh, fair hills of this

fair territory.

One wonders whether the editor is not, in part, quoting Roosevelt's

own words. No doubt, Roosevelt was beginning already to realize what

he was gaining in the Bad Lands.

Roosevelt spent three weeks or more in the East; at New York where the

politicians were after him, at Oyster Bay where he was building a new

house, and at Chestnut Hill near Boston, which was closely connected

with the memories of his brief married life. Everywhere the reporters

tried to extract from him some expression on the political campaign,

but on that subject he was reticent. He issued a statement in Boston,

declaring his intention to vote the Republican ticket, but further

than that he refused to commit himself. But he talked of the Bad Lands

to any one who would listen.

I like the West and I like ranching life [he said to a

reporter of the New York _Tribune_ who interviewed him at

his sister's house a day or two before his return to

Dakota]. On my last trip I was just three weeks at the ranch

and just twenty-one days, of sixteen hours each, in the

saddle, either after cattle, taking part in the "round-up,"

or hunting. It would electrify some of my friends who have

accused me of representing the kid-gloved element in

politics if they could see me galloping over the plains, day

in and day out, clad in a buckskin shirt and leather

chaparajos, with a big sombrero on my head. For good,

healthy exercise I would strongly recommend some of our

gilded youth to go West and try a short course of riding

bucking ponies, and assist at the branding of a lot of Texas

steers.

There is something charmingly boyish in his enthusiasm over his own

manly valor and his confidence in its "electrifying" effect.

Roosevelt wrote to Sewall immediately after his arrival in the East,

telling him that he would take him West with him. Toward the end of

July, Sewall appeared in New York with his stalwart nephew in tow. The

contract they entered into with Roosevelt was merely verbal. There was

to be a three-year partnership. If business were prosperous, they were

to have a share in it. If it were not, they were to have wages,

whatever happened.

"What do you think of that, Bill?" asked Roosevelt.

"Why," answered Bill in his slow, Maine way, "I think that's a

one-sided trade. But if you can stand it, I guess we can."

That was all there was to the making of the contract. On the 28th the

three of them started westward.

In the cattle country, meanwhile, things had been happening. Shortly

after Roosevelt's departure for the East, Granville Stuart had

gathered his clans, and, suddenly and without warning, his bolt from

the blue had fallen upon the outlaws of Montana. At a cabin here, at a

deserted lumber-camp there, where the thieves, singly or in groups,

made their headquarters, the masked riders appeared and held their

grim proceedings. There was no temporizing, and little mercy. Justice

was to be done, and it was done with all the terrible relentlessness

that always characterizes a free citizen when he takes back, for a

moment, the powers he has delegated to a government which in a crisis

has proved impotent or unwilling to exercise them. A drumhead

court-martial might have seemed tedious and technical in comparison

with the sharp brevity of the trials under the ominous cottonwoods.

Out of the open country, where "Stuart's vigilantes" were swooping on

nest after nest of the thieves, riders came with stories that might

well have sent shudders down the backs even of innocent men. The

newspapers were filled with accounts of lifeless bodies left hanging

from countless cottonwoods in the wake of the raiders, tales of

battles in which the casualties were by no means all on one side, and

snatches of humor that was terrible against the background of black

tragedy. Some of the stories were false, some were fantastic

exaggerations of actual fact sifted through excited imaginations.

Those that were bare truth were in all conscience grim enough for the

most morbid mind. The yarns flew from mouth to mouth, from ranch to

ranch. Cowboys were hard to hold to their work. Now that a determined

man had shown the way, everybody wanted to have a part in the last

great round-up of the unruly. The excitement throughout the region was

intense. Here and there subsidiary bands were formed to "clean up the

stragglers." Thoughtful men began to have apprehensions that it might

prove more difficult to get the imp of outraged justice back into the

bottle than it had been to let him out.

The raiders skirted the Bad Lands on the north, pushing on east to the

Missouri, and for a time Medora's precious collection of desperadoes

remained undisturbed. There were rumors that Maunders was on the books

of Stuart's men, but under the wing of the Marquis he was well

protected, and that time, at least, no raiders came to interrupt his

divers and always profitable activities.

Roosevelt reached Medora with Sewall and Dow on July 31st. A reporter

of the _Pioneer_ interviewed him while the train was changing engines

at Mandan.

Theodore Roosevelt, the New York reformer, was on the

west-bound train yesterday, _en route_ to his ranch near

Little Missouri [ran the item in the next day's issue]. He

was feeling at his best, dressed in the careless style of

the country gentleman of leisure, and spoke freely on his

pleasant Dakota experience and politics in the East. He

purposes spending several weeks on his ranch, after which he

will return East.... Mr. Roosevelt believes that the young

men of our country should assume a spirit of independence in

politics. He would rather be forced to the shades of private

life with a short and honorable career than be given a life

tenure of political prominence as the slave of a party or

its masters.

Roosevelt brought his two backwoodsmen straight to the Maltese Cross.

The men from Maine were magnificent specimens of manhood. Sewall,

nearing forty, with tremendous shoulders a little stooped as though he

were accustomed to passing through doorways that were too low for him;

Dow, twenty-eight or twenty-nine, erect and clear-eyed. They looked on

the fantastic landscape with quiet wonderment.

"Well, Bill," remarked Roosevelt that night, "what do you think of the

country?"

"Why," answered the backwoodsman, "I like the country well enough. But

I don't believe that it's much of a cattle country."

"Bill," said Roosevelt vigorously, "you don't know anything about it.

Everybody says that it is."

Sewall laughed softly. "It's a fact that I don't know anything about

it," he said. "I realize that. But it's the way it looks to me, like

not much of a cattle country."

During Roosevelt's absence in the East, Merrifield and Sylvane had

returned from Iowa with a thousand head of yearlings and

"two-year-olds." A hundred head of the original herd, which had become

accustomed to the country, he had already set apart for the lower

ranch, and the day after his arrival he sent the two backwoodsmen

north with them, under the general and vociferous direction of a

certain Captain Robins. The next day, in company with a pleasant

Englishman who had accompanied him West, he rode up the river to

Lang's.

The ranch of the talkative Scotchman had suffered a joyous change

since Roosevelt's last visit. A week or two previous Gregor Lang's

wife had arrived from Ireland with her daughter and younger son, and a

visit at Yule, as Lang had called his ranch, was a different thing

from what it had been when it had been under masculine control. The

new ranch-house was completed, and though it was not large it was

vastly more homelike than any other cabin on the river with the

possible exception of the Eatons'. It stood in an open flat, facing

north, with a long butte behind it; and before it, beyond a wide

semi-circle of cottonwoods that marked the river's course, low hills,

now gray and now green, stretching away to the horizon. It was a

curiously Scotch landscape, especially at dusk or in misty weather,

which was no doubt a reason why Gregor Lang had chosen it for his

home.

Mrs. Lang proved to be a woman of evident character and ability. She

was well along in the forties, but in her stately bearing and the

magnificent abundance of her golden hair, that had no strand of gray

in it, lay more than a hint of the beauty that was said to have been

hers in her youth. There was wistfulness in the delicate but firm

mouth and chin; there was vigor in the broad forehead and the

well-proportioned nose; and humor in the shrewd, quiet eyes set far

apart. She belonged to an old Border family, and had lived all her

life amid the almost perfect adjustments of well-to-do British society

of the middle class, where every cog was greased and every wheel was

ball-bearing. But she accepted the grating existence of the frontier

with something better than resignation, and set about promptly in a

wild and alien country to make a new house into a new home.

While Roosevelt was getting acquainted with the new-comers at Yule,

Sewall and Dow were also getting acquainted with many people and

things that were strange to them. They took two days for the ride from

the Maltese Cross to the site of the new ranch, for the river was high

and they were forced to take a roundabout trail over the prairie; the

cattle, moreover, could be driven only at a slow pace; but even

twenty-odd miles a day was more than a Maine backwoodsman enjoyed as

initiation in horsemanship. Dow was mounted on an excellent trained

horse, and being young and supple was able to do his share in spite of

his discomfort. But the mare that had been allotted to Sewall happened

also to be a tenderfoot, and they did not play a conspicuous rôle in

the progress of the cattle.

Captain Robins was not the sort to make allowances when there was work

to be done. He was a small, dark man with a half-inch beard almost

completely covering his face, a "seafaring man" who had got his

experience with cattle in South America; "a man of many orders" as

Sewall curtly described him in a letter home. He rode over to where

Sewall was endeavoring in a helpless way to make the mare go in a

general northerly direction.

Sewall saw him coming, and wondered why he thought it necessary to

come at such extraordinary speed.

The Captain drew rein sharply at Sewall's side. "Why in hell don't you

ride in and do something?" he roared.

Sewall knew exactly why he didn't. He had known it for some time, and

he was nettled with himself, for he had not been accustomed "to take a

back seat for any one" when feats that demanded physical strength and

skill were to be done. Robins was very close to him, and Sewall's

first impulse was to take him by the hair. But it occurred to him that

the seafaring man was smaller than he, and that thought went out of

his head.

"I know I'm not doing anything," he said at last gruffly. "I don't

know anything about what I'm trying to do and I think I've got a horse

as green as I am. But don't you ever speak to me in such a manner as

that again as long as you live."

There was a good deal that was impressive about Sewall, his shoulders,

his teeth that were like tombstones, his vigorous, brown beard, his

eyes that had a way of blazing. The Captain did not pursue the

discussion.

"That Sewall is a kind of quick-tempered fellow," he remarked to Dow.

"I don't think he is," said the younger man quietly.

"He snapped me up."

"You must have said something to him, for he ain't in the habit of

doing such things."

The Captain dropped the subject for the time being.

Roosevelt, after two days at Lang's, returned to the Maltese Cross and

then rode northward to look after the men from Maine.

Captain Robins's report was altogether favorable. "You've got two good

men here, Mr. Roosevelt," said he. "That Sewall don't calculate to

bear anything. I spoke to him the other day, and he snapped me up so

short I did not know what to make of it. But," he added, "I don't

blame him. I did not speak to him as I ought."

This was what Bill himself would have called "handsome." Roosevelt

carried the gruff apology to Sewall, and there was harmony after that

between the lumberjack and the seafaring man, punching cattle

together in the Bad Lands.

The cattle which Captain Robins and his two tenderfeet from Maine had

driven down the river from the Maltese Cross were intended to be the

nucleus of the Elkhorn herd. They were young grade short-horns of

Eastern origin, less wild than the long-horn Texas steers, but liable,

on new ground, to stray off through some of the innumerable coulees

stretching back from the river, and be lost in the open prairie. The

seafaring man determined, therefore, that they should be

"close-herded" every night and "bedded down" on the level bottom where

the cabin stood which was their temporary ranch-house. So each dusk,

Roosevelt and his men drove the cattle down from the side valleys, and

each night, in two-hour "tricks" all night long, one or the other of

them rode slowly and quietly round and round the herd, heading off all

that tried to stray. This was not altogether a simple business, for

there was danger of stampede in making the slightest unusual noise.

Now and then they would call to the cattle softly as they rode, or

sing to them until the steers had all lain down close together.

[Illustration: Elkhorn Bottom. The ranch-house was at the river's edge

directly in the center of the picture.]

It was while Roosevelt was working at Elkhorn that he received a call

from Howard Eaton, who was his neighbor there as well as at the

Maltese Cross, since his ranch at the mouth of Big Beaver Creek was

only five miles down the Little Missouri from the place where

Roosevelt had "staked his claim." Eaton brought Chris McGee, his

partner, with him. Roosevelt had heard of McGee, not altogether

favorably, for McGee was the Republican "boss" of Pittsburgh in days

when "bosses" were in flower.

"Are you going to stay out here and make ranching a business?" asked

Eaton.

"No," Roosevelt answered. "For the present I am out here because I

cannot get up any enthusiasm for the Republican candidate, and it

seems to me that punching cattle is the best way to avoid

campaigning."

Eaton asked McGee on the way home how Roosevelt stood in the East.

"Roosevelt is a nice fellow," remarked McGee, "but he's a damned fool

in politics."

Roosevelt remained with Robins and the men from Maine for three days,

varying his life in the saddle with a day on foot after grouse when

the larder ran low. It was all joyous sport, which was lifted for a

moment into the plane of adventure by a communication from the Marquis

de Mores.

That gentleman wrote Roosevelt a letter informing him that he himself

claimed the range on which Roosevelt had established himself.

Roosevelt's answer was brief and definite. He had found nothing but

dead sheep on the range, he wrote, and he did not think that they

would hold it.

There the matter rested.

"You'd better be on the lookout," Roosevelt remarked to Sewall and

Dow, as he was making ready to return to the Maltese Cross. "There's

just a chance there may be trouble."

"I cal'late we can look out for ourselves," announced Bill with a

gleam in his eye.

IX

Young Dutch Van Zander, drunkard to the skin,

Flung wide the door and let the world come in--

The world, with daybreak on a thousand buttes!

"Say, is this heaven, Bill--or is it gin?"

_Bad Lands Rubáiyat_

Roosevelt returned to the upper ranch on August 11th.

Everything so far has gone along beautifully [he wrote to

his sister on the following day]. I had great fun in

bringing my two backwoods babies out here. Their absolute

astonishment and delight at everything they saw, and their

really very shrewd, and yet wonderfully simple remarks were

a perpetual delight to me.

I found the cattle all here and looking well; I have now got

some sixteen hundred head on the river. I mounted Sewall and

Dow on a couple of ponies (where they looked like the

pictures of discomfort, Sewall remarking that his only

previous experience in the equestrian line was when he "rode

logs"), and started them at once off down the river with a

hundred head of cattle, under the lead of one of my friends

out here, a grumpy old sea captain, who has had a rather

diversified life, trying his hand as sailor, buffalo hunter,

butcher, apothecary (_mirabile dictu_), and cowboy. Sewall

tried to spur his horse which began kicking and rolled over

with him into a wash-out.

Sewall, meanwhile, was also writing letters "to the folks back East,"

and the opinions he expressed about the Bad Lands were plain and

unvarnished.

It is a dirty country and very dirty people on an average

[he wrote his brother Samuel in Island Falls], but I think

it is healthy. The soil is sand or clay, all dust or all

mud. The river is the meanest apology for a frog-pond that I

ever saw. It is a queer country, you would like to see it,

but you would not like to live here long. The hills are

mostly of clay, the sides of some very steep and barren of

all vegetation. You would think cattle would starve there,

but all the cattle that have wintered here are fat now and

they say here that cattle brought from any other part will

improve in size and quality. Theodore thinks I will have

more than $3000.00 in three years if nothing happens. He is

going to put on a lot of cattle next year.

This is a good place for a man with plenty of money to make

more, but if I had enough money to start here I never would

come, think the country ought to have been left to the

annimils that have laid their bones here.

Roosevelt had, ever since the Chicago convention, planned to go on an

extensive hunting trip, partly to take his mind from the political

campaign, from which, in his judgment, the course of events had

eliminated him, and partly to put himself out of reach of importunate

politicians in various parts of the country, who were endeavoring to

make him commit himself in favor of the Republican candidate in a way

that would make his pre-convention utterances appear insincere and

absurd. The tug of politics was strong. He loved "the game" and he

hated to be out of a good fight. To safeguard himself, therefore, he

determined to hide himself in the recesses of the Big Horn Mountains

in Wyoming.

In a day or two I start out [he wrote on August 12th to his

friend Henry Cabot Lodge, who had suffered defeat at his

side at the convention] with two hunters, six riding-ponies,

and a canvas-topped "prairie schooner" for the Bighorn

Mountains. You would be amused to see me, in my broad

sombrero hat, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horsehide

chaparajos or riding-trousers, and cowhide boots, with

braided bridle and silver spurs. I have always liked horse

and rifle, and being, like yourself, "ein echter

Amerikaner," prefer that description of sport which needs a

buckskin shirt to that whose votaries adopt the red coat. A

buffalo is nobler game than an anise-seed bag, the

Anglomaniacs to the contrary notwithstanding.

He did not start on the day he had planned, for the reason that the

six riding-ponies which he needed were not to be had for love or money

in the whole length and breadth of the Bad Lands. He sent Sylvane with

another man south to Spearfish in the Black Hills to buy a "string" of

horses. The other man was Jack Reuter, otherwise known as "Dutch

Wannigan." For "Wannigan," like his fellow "desperado," Frank

O'Donald, had returned long since to the valley of the Little Missouri

and taken up again the activities which the Marquis had rudely

interrupted. But, being a simple-hearted creature, he had sold no crop

of hay to the Marquis "in stubble" for a thousand dollars, like his

craftier associate. He had merely "gone to work." The fact that it

happened to be Roosevelt for whom he went to work had something to do,

no doubt, with the subsequent relations between Roosevelt and the

Marquis.

Various forces for which the Marquis himself could claim no

responsibility had, meanwhile, been conspiring with him to "boom" his

new town. The glowing and distinctly exaggerated accounts of farming

conditions in the Northwest, sent broadcast by the railroad companies,

had started a wave of immigration westward which the laments of the

disappointed seemed to have no power to check. "City-boomers," with

their tales of amazing fortunes made overnight, lured men to a score

of different "towns" along the Northern Pacific that were nothing but

two ruts and a section-house. From the south rolled a tide of another

sort. The grazing-lands of Texas were becoming over-stocked, and up

the broad cattle-trail came swearing cowboys in broad sombreros,

driving herds of long-horned cattle into the new grazing-country.

Altogether, it was an active season for the saloon-keepers of Medora.

The Marquis was having endless trouble with the plans for his

stage-line and was keeping Packard on tenterhooks. Packard twiddled

his thumbs, and the Marquis, plagued by the citizens of the Black

Hills whom he had promised the stage- and freight-line months

previous, made threats one day and rosy promises the next. It was the

middle of August before Packard received directions to go ahead.

Roosevelt did not see much of the genial editor of the _Cowboy_ during

those August days while he was waiting for Sylvane and "Dutch

Wannigan" to return from Spearfish with the ponies, for Packard,

knowing that every hour was precious, was rushing frantically to and

fro, buying lumber and feed, pegging out the sites of his

stage-stations, his eating-houses, his barns and his corrals, and

superintending the constructing crews at the dozen or more stops along

the route.

Roosevelt, meanwhile, was obviously restless and seemed to find peace

of mind only in almost continuous action. After two or three days at

the Maltese Cross, he was back at Elkhorn again, forty miles away, and

the next day he was once more on his travels, riding south. Sewall

went with him, for he wanted the backwoodsman to accompany him on the

trip to the Big Horn Mountains. Dow remained with the seafaring man,

looking crestfallen and unhappy.

During the days that he was waiting for Sylvane to return, Roosevelt

touched Medora and its feverish life no more than absolute necessity

demanded, greeting his acquaintances in friendly fashion, but tending

strictly to business. It seems, however, that he had already made a

deep impression on his neighbors up and down the river. The territory

was shortly to be admitted to statehood and there were voices

demanding that Theodore Roosevelt be Dakota's first representative in

Congress.

In commenting upon the rumor that Theodore Roosevelt had

come to Dakota for the purpose of going to Congress [said

the Bismarck _Weekly Tribune_ in an editorial on August

8th], the Mandan _Pioneer_ takes occasion to remark that

young Roosevelt's record as a public man is above reproach

and that he is "a vigorous young Republican of the new

school." Such favorable comment from a Mandan paper tends to

substantiate the rumor that the young political Hercules has

already got the West Missouri section solid.

"If he concludes to run," remarked the _Pioneer_, "he will give our

politicians a complete turning over."

What sirens were singing to Roosevelt of political honors in the new

Western country, and to what extent he listened to them, are questions

to which neither his correspondence nor the newspapers of the time

provide an answer. It is not unreasonable to believe that the

possibility of becoming a political power in the Northwest allured

him. His political position in the East was, at the moment, hopeless.

Before the convention, he had antagonized the "regular" Republicans by

his leadership of the Independents in New York, which had resulted in

the complete defeat of the "organization" in the struggle over the

"Big Four" at Utica; after the convention, he had antagonized the

Independents by refusing to "bolt the ticket." He consequently had no

political standing, either within the party, or without. The

Independents wept tears over him, denouncing him as a traitor; and the

"regulars," even while they were calling for his assistance in the

campaign, were whetting their knives to dirk him in the back.

If the temptation ever came to him to cut what remained of his

political ties in the East and start afresh in Dakota, no evidence of

it has yet appeared. A convention of the Republicans of Billings

County was held in the hall over Bill Williams's new saloon in Medora

on August 16th. Roosevelt did not attend it. Sylvane and "Wannigan"

had returned from Spearfish and Roosevelt was trying out one of the

new ponies at a round-up in the Big Ox Bow thirty miles to the south.

We have been delayed nearly a week by being forced to get

some extra ponies [he wrote his sister Anna on the 17th].

However, I was rather glad of it, as I wished to look

thoroughly through the cattle before going. To-morrow

morning early we start out. Merrifield and I go on

horseback, each taking a spare pony; which will be led

behind the wagon, a light "prairie schooner" drawn by two

stout horses, and driven by an old French Canadian. I wear a

sombrero, silk neckerchief, fringed buckskin shirt, sealskin

chaparajos or riding-trousers; alligator-hide boots; and

with my pearl-hilted revolver and beautifully finished

Winchester rifle, I shall feel able to face anything.

There is no question that Roosevelt's costume fascinated him. It was,

in fact, gorgeous beyond description.

How long I will be gone I cannot say; we will go in all

nearly a thousand miles. If game is plenty and my success is

good, I may return in six weeks; more probably I shall be

out a couple of months, and if game is so scarce that we

have to travel very far to get it, or if our horses give out

or run away, or we get caught by the snow, we may be out

very much longer--till toward Christmas; though I will try

to be back to vote.

Yesterday I rode seventy-two miles between dawn and

darkness; I have a superb roan pony, or rather horse; he

looks well with his beautifully carved saddle, plaited

bridle, and silver inlaid bit, and seems to be absolutely

tireless.

I grow very fond of this place, and it certainly has a

desolate, grim beauty of its own, that has a curious

fascination for me. The grassy, scantily wooded bottoms

through which the winding river flows are bounded by bare,

jagged buttes; their fantastic shapes and sharp, steep edges

throw the most curious shadows, under the cloudless, glaring

sky; and at evening I love to sit out in front of the hut

and see their hard, gray outlines gradually grow soft and

purple as the flaming sunset by degrees softens and dies

away; while my days I spend generally alone, riding through

the lonely rolling prairie and broken lands.