Chapter X: Introduction (5)

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._]

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.

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.

If, on those solitary rides, Roosevelt gave much thought to politics, it was doubtless not on any immediate benefit for himself on which his mind dwelt. Sewall said, long afterward, that "Roosevelt was always thinkin' of makin' the world better, instead of worse," and Merrifield remembered that even in those early days the "Eastern tenderfoot" was dreaming of the Presidency. It was a wholesome region to dream in. Narrow notions could not live in the gusty air of the prairies, and the Bad Lands were not conducive to sentimentalism.

X

The pine spoke, but the word he said was "Silence";
The aspen sang, but silence was her theme.
The wind was silence, restless; and the voices
Of the bright forest-creatures were as silence
Made vocal in the topsy-turvy of dream.

_Paradise Found_

Roosevelt started for the Big Horn Mountains on August 18th, but Sewall, after all, did not go with him. Almost with tears, he begged off. "I'd always dreamed of hunting through that Big Horn country," he said long afterward. "I had picked that out as a happy hunting ground for years and years, and I never wanted to go anywhere so much as I wanted to go along with Theodore on that trip." But the memory of the lonely look in Will Dow's face overcame the soft-hearted backwoodsman at the last minute. He pointed out to Roosevelt that one man could not well handle the logs for the new ranch-house and suggested that he be allowed to rejoin Will Dow.

Early on the morning of the 18th, Roosevelt set his caravan in motion for the long journey. For a hunting companion he had Merrifield and for teamster and cook he had a French Canadian named Norman Lebo, who, as Roosevelt subsequently remarked, to Lebo's indignation (for he prided himself on his scholarship), "possessed a most extraordinary stock of miscellaneous mis-information upon every conceivable subject." He was a short, stocky, bearded man, a born wanderer, who had left his family once for a week's hunting trip and remained away three years, returning at last only to depart again, after a week, for further Odyssean wanderings. "If I had the money," he had a way of saying, "no two nights would ever see me in the same bed." It was rumored that before Mrs. Lebo had permitted her errant spouse to go out of her sight, she had secured pledges from Roosevelt guaranteeing her three years' subsistence, in case the _wanderlust_ should once more seize upon her protector and provider.

Roosevelt rode ahead of the caravan, spending the first night with the Langs, who were always friendly and hospitable and full of good talk, and rejoining Merrifield and "the outfit" on the Keogh trail a few miles westward next morning. Slowly and laboriously the "prairie schooner" lumbered along the uneven route. The weather was sultry, and as they crossed the high divide which separated the Little Missouri basin from the valley of the Little Beaver they saw ahead of them the towering portents of storm. The northwest was already black, and in a space of time that seemed incredibly brief the masses of cloud boiled up and over the sky. The storm rolled toward them at furious speed, extending its wings, as it came, as though to gather in its victims.

Against the dark background of the mass [Roosevelt wrote,
describing it later] could be seen pillars and clouds of
gray mist, whirled hither and thither by the wind, and
sheets of level rain driven before it. The edges of the
wings tossed to and fro, and the wind shrieked and moaned as
it swept over the prairie. It was a storm of unusual
intensity; the prairie fowl rose in flocks from before it,
scudding with spread wings toward the thickest cover, and
the herds of antelope ran across the plain like race-horses
to gather in the hollows and behind the low ridges.

We spurred hard to get out of the open, riding with loose
reins for the creek. The center of the storm swept by behind
us, fairly across our track, and we only got a wipe from the
tail of it. Yet this itself we could not have faced in the
open. The first gust caught us a few hundred yards from the
creek, almost taking us from the saddle, and driving the
rain and hail in stinging level sheets against us. We
galloped to the edge of a deep wash-out, scrambled into it
at the risk of our necks, and huddled up with our horses
underneath the windward bank. Here we remained pretty well
sheltered until the storm was over. Although it was August,
the air became very cold. The wagon was fairly caught, and
would have been blown over if the top had been on; the
driver and horses escaped without injury, pressing under the
leeward side, the storm coming so level that they did not
need a roof to protect them from the hail. Where the center
of the whirlwind struck, it did great damage, sheets of
hailstones as large as pigeons' eggs striking the earth with
the velocity of bullets; next day the hailstones could have
been gathered up by the bushel from the heaps that lay in
the bottom of the gullies and ravines.

They made camp that night at the edge of the creek whose banks had given them what little shelter there was on the plateau where the storm had struck them. All night the rain continued in a drizzle punctuated at intervals by sharp showers. Next morning the weather was no better, and after a morning's struggle with the wagon along the slippery trail of gumbo mud, they made what would under other circumstances have been a "dry camp." They caught the rain in their slickers and made their coffee of it, and spent another more or less uncomfortable night coiling themselves over and around a cracker-barrel which seemed to take up the whole interior of the wagon.

The weather cleared at last, and they pushed on southwestward, between Box Elder Creek and Powder River. It was dreary country through which Lebo and his prairie schooner made their slow and creaking way, and Roosevelt and Merrifield, to whom the pace was torture, varied the monotony with hunting expeditions on one-side or the other of the parallel ruts that were the Keogh trail. It was on one of these trips that Roosevelt learned a lesson which he remembered.

They had seen a flock of prairie chickens and Roosevelt had started off with his shot-gun to bring in a meal of them. Suddenly Merrifield called to him. Roosevelt took no heed.

"Don't you shoot!" cried Merrifield.

Roosevelt, with his eyes on the chickens, proceeded on his way undeterred. Suddenly, a little beyond where he had seen the prairie fowl go to covert, a mountain lion sprang out of the brush and bounded away. Roosevelt ran for his rifle, but he was too late. The lion was gone.

Merrifield's eyes were blazing and his remarks were not dissimilar. "Now, whenever I hold up my hand," he concluded, "you stop still where you are. Understand?"

Roosevelt, who would have knocked his ranch-partner down with earnestness and conviction if he had thought Merrifield was in the wrong, meekly bore the hunter's wrath, knowing that Merrifield was in the right; and thereafter on the expedition obeyed orders with a completeness that occasionally had its comic aspects. But Merrifield had no more complaints to make.

They plodded on, day after day, seeing no human being. When at last they did come upon a lonely rider, Roosevelt instantly pressed him into service as a mail carrier, and wrote two letters.

The first was to his sister Anna.

I am writing this on an upturned water-keg, by our
canvas-covered wagon, while the men are making tea, and the
solemn old ponies are grazing round about me. I am going to
trust it to the tender mercies of a stray cowboy whom we
have just met, and who may or may not post it when he gets
to "Powderville," a delectable log hamlet some seventy miles
north of us.

We left the Little Missouri a week ago, and have been
traveling steadily some twenty or thirty miles a day ever
since, through a desolate, barren-looking and yet
picturesque country, part of the time rolling prairie and
part of the time broken, jagged Bad Lands. We have fared
sumptuously, as I have shot a number of prairie chickens,
sage hens and ducks, and a couple of fine bucks--besides
missing several of the latter that I ought to have killed.