Chapter VI: Introduction (1)

The trail-tracer of Theodore Roosevelt's frontier life has given the members of this Advisory Committee of Three of the Roosevelt Memorial Association the opportunity of a first reading of his book. The duty of considering the manuscript and making suggestions has been merged in the pleasure of the revealing account of that young man who forty years ago founded a personal College of the Plains in raw Dakota.

Three are the essentials of the good biographer--historic sense, common sense, and human sense. To the mind of the Committee, Mr. Hagedorn has put into service all three of these senses. Every writer of history must make himself an explorer in the materials out of which he is to build. To the usual outfit of printed matter, public records, and private papers, Mr. Hagedorn has added an unexpected wealth of personal memories from those who were part of Roosevelt's first great adventure in life. The book is a thorough-going historical investigation into both familiar and remote sources.

The common sense of the work is in its choice of the things that counted in the experience of the ranchman, hunter, and citizen of a tumultuous commonwealth. All the essential facts are here, and also the incidents which gave them life. Even apart from the central figure, the book reconstructs one of the most fascinating phases of American history.

That is not all that is expected by the host of Roosevelt's friends. They want the man--the young Harvard graduate and New York clubman who sought the broader horizon of the Far West in making, and from it drew a knowledge of his kind which became the bed-rock of his later career. The writer's personal affection for and understanding of Roosevelt have illuminated the whole story. He paints a true portrait of an extraordinary man in a picturesque setting.

William A. DUNNING
Albert BUSHNELL HART
John GRIER HIBBEN

ROOSEVELT IN THE BAD LANDS

My friends, I never can sufficiently express the obligations I am under to the territory of Dakota, for it was here that I lived a number of years in a ranch house in the cattle country, and I regard my experience during those years, when I lived and worked with my own fellow ranchmen on what was then the frontier, as the most important educational asset of all my life. It is a mighty good thing to know men, not from looking at them, but from having been one of them. When you have worked with them, when you have lived with them, you do not have to wonder how they feel, because you feel it yourself. Every now and then I am amused when newspapers in the East--perhaps, I may say, not always friendly to me--having prophesied that I was dead wrong on a certain issue, and then finding out that I am right, express acid wonder how I am able to divine how people are thinking. Well, sometimes I don't and sometimes I do; but when I do, it comes simply from the fact that this is the way I am thinking myself. I know how the man that works with his hands and the man on the ranch are thinking, because I have been there and I am thinking that way myself. It is not that I divine the way they are thinking, but that I think the same way.

Theodore ROOSEVELT
Speech at Sioux Falls
_September 3, 1910_.

ROOSEVELT IN THE BAD LANDS

I

Rainy dark or firelight, bacon rind or pie,
Livin' is a luxury that don't come high;
Oh, be happy and onruly while our years and luck allow,
For we all must die or marry less than forty years from now!

Badger CLARK

The train rumbled across three hundred feet of trestle and came to a stop. A young man, slender, not over-tall, with spectacles and a moustache, descended the steps. If he expected that his foot, groping below the bottom step in the blackness for something to land on, would find a platform, he was doomed to disappointment. The "depot" at Little Missouri did not boast a platform. The young man pulled his duffle-bag and gun-case down the steps; somebody waved a lantern; the train stirred, gained momentum, and was gone, having accomplished its immediate mission, which was to deposit a New York "dude," politician and would-be hunter, named Theodore Roosevelt, in the Bad Lands of Dakota.

The time was three o'clock of a cool, September morning, and the place, in the language of the Bad Lands, was "dark as the inside of a caow." If the traveler from afar had desired illumination and a reception committee, he should have set his arrival not for September 7th, but for September 6th. Twenty-four hours previous, it happened, the citizens of Little Missouri had, in honor of a distinguished party which was on its way westward to celebrate the completion of the road, amply anticipated any passion for entertainment which the passengers on the Overland might have possessed. As the engine came to a stop, a deafening yell pierced the night, punctuated with pistol-shots. Cautious investigation revealed figures dancing wildly around a bonfire; and the passengers remembered the worst they had ever heard about Indians. The flames shot upward, setting the shadows fantastically leaping up the precipitous bluffs and among the weird petrifactions of a devil's nightmare that rimmed the circle of flaring light. A man with a gun in his hand climbed aboard the train and made his way to the dining-car, yelling for "cow-grease," and demanding, at the least, a ham-bone. It took the burliest of his comrades to transport the obstreperous one back to solid earth just as the train moved out.

There was nothing so theatrical awaiting Theodore Roosevelt. The "depot" was deserted. Roosevelt dragged his belongings through the sagebrush toward a huge black building looming northeastward through the night, and hammered on the door until the proprietor appeared, muttering curses.

The face that Roosevelt saw, in the light of a smoky lantern, was not one to inspire confidence in a tenderfoot on a dark night. The features were those of a man who might have been drinking, with inconsiderable interruptions, for a very long time. He was short and stout and choleric, with a wiry moustache under a red nose; and seemed to be distinctly under the impression that Roosevelt had done something for which he should apologize.

He led the way upstairs. Fourteen beds were scattered about the loft which was the second story of the Pyramid Park Hotel, and which, Roosevelt heard subsequently, was known as the "bull-pen." One was unoccupied. He accepted it without a murmur.

What the thirteen hardened characters who were his roommates said next morning, when they discovered the "Eastern punkin-lily" which had blossomed in their midst, is lost to history. It was unquestionably frank, profane, and unwashed. He was, in fact, not a sight to awaken sympathy in the minds of such inhabitants as Little Missouri possessed. He had just recovered from an attack of cholera morbus, and though he had written his mother from Chicago that he was already "feeling like a fighting-cock," the marks of his illness were still on his face. Besides, he wore glasses, which, as he later discovered, were considered in the Bad Lands as a sign of a "defective moral character."

It was a world of strange and awful beauty into which Roosevelt stepped as he emerged from the dinginess of the ramshackle hotel into the crisp autumn morning. Before him lay a dusty, sagebrush flat walled in on three sides by scarred and precipitous clay buttes. A trickle of sluggish water in a wide bed, partly sand and partly baked gumbo, oozed beneath steep banks at his back, swung sharply westward, and gave the flat on the north a fringe of dusty-looking cottonwoods, thirstily drinking the only source of moisture the country seemed to afford. Directly across the river, beyond another oval-shaped piece of bottom-land, rose a steep bluff, deeply shadowed against the east, and south of it stretched in endless succession the seamed ranges and fantastic turrets and cupolas and flying buttresses of the Bad Lands.

It was a region of weird shapes garbed in barbaric colors, gray-olive striped with brown, lavender striped with black, chalk pinnacles capped with flaming scarlet. French-Canadian _voyageurs_, a century previous, finding the weather-washed ravines wicked to travel through, spoke of them as _mauvaises terres pour traverser_, and the name clung. The whole region, it was said, had once been the bed of a great lake, holding in its lap the rich clays and loams which the rains carried down into it. The passing of ages brought vegetation, and the passing of other ages turned that vegetation into coal. Other deposits settled over the coal. At last this vast lake found an outlet in the Missouri. The wear and wash of the waters cut in time through the clay, the coal, and the friable limestone of succeeding deposits, creating ten thousand watercourses bordered by precipitous bluffs and buttes, which every storm gashed and furrowed anew. On the tops of the flat buttes was rich soil and in countless pleasant valleys were green pastures, but there were regions where for miles only sagebrush and stunted cedars lived a starved existence. Bad lands they were, for man or beast, and Bad Lands they remained.

The "town" of Little Missouri consisted of a group of primitive buildings scattered about the shack which did duty as a railroad station. The Pyramid Park Hotel stood immediately north of the tracks; beside it stood the one-story palace of sin of which one, who shall, for the purposes of this story, be known as Bill Williams, was the owner, and one who shall be known as Jess Hogue, the evil genius. South of the track a comical, naïve Swede named Johnny Nelson kept a store when he was not courting Katie, the hired girl in Mrs. McGeeney's boarding-house next door, or gambling away his receipts under Hogue's crafty guidance. Directly to the east, on the brink of the river, the railroad section-foreman, Fitzgerald, had a shack and a wife who quarreled unceasingly with her neighbor, Mrs. McGeeney. At a corresponding place on the other side of the track, a villainous gun-fighter named Maunders lived (as far as possible) by his neighbors' toil. A quarter of a mile west of him, in a grove of cottonwood trees, stood a group of gray, log buildings known as the "cantonment," where a handful of soldiers had been quartered under a major named Coomba, to guard the construction crews on the railroad from the attacks of predatory Indians seeking game in their ancient hunting-grounds. A few huts in the sagebrush, a half-dozen miners' shacks under the butte to the south, and one or two rather pretentious frame houses in process of construction completed what was Little Missouri; but Little Missouri was not the only outpost of civilization at this junction of the railroad and the winding, treacherous river. On the eastern bank, on the flat under the bluff that six months previous had been a paradise for jackrabbits, a few houses and a few men were attempting to prove to the world, amid a chorus of hammers, that they constituted a town and had a future. The settlement called itself Medora. The air was full of vague but wonderful stories of a French marquis who was building it and who owned it, body and soul.

Roosevelt had originally been turned in the direction of the Bad Lands by a letter in one of the New York papers by a man from Pittsburgh named Howard Eaton and the corroborative enthusiasm of a high-spirited naval officer named Gorringe, whose appeals for an adequate navy brought Roosevelt exuberantly to his side. Gorringe was a man of wide interests and abilities, who managed, to a degree mysterious to a layman, to combine his naval activities with the work of a consulting engineer, the promotion of a shipyard, and the formation of a syndicate to carry on a cattle business in Dakota. He had gained international notice by his skill in bringing the obelisk known as "Cleopatra's Needle" from Alexandria to New York, and had six months previous flared before the public in front-page headlines by reason of a sharp controversy with the Secretary of the Navy, which had resulted in Gorringe's resignation.

Roosevelt had said that he wanted to shoot buffalo while there were still buffalo left to shoot, and Gorringe had suggested that he go to Little Missouri. That villainous gateway to the Bad Lands was, it seems, the headquarters for a motley collection of guides and hunters, some of them experts,[1] the majority of them frauds, who were accustomed to take tourists and sportsmen for a fat price into the heart of the fantastic and savage country. The region was noted for game. It had been a great winter range for buffalo; and elk, mountain-sheep, blacktail and whitetail deer, antelope and beaver were plentiful; now and then even an occasional bear strayed to the river's edge from God knows whence. Jake Maunders, with his sinister face, was the center of information for tourists, steering the visitor in the direction of game by day and of Bill Williams, Jess Hogue, and their crew of gamblers and confidence men by night. Gorringe had planned to go with Roosevelt himself, but at the last moment had been forced to give up the trip. He advised Roosevelt to let one of the men representing his own interests find him a guide, especially the Vines, father and son.

[Footnote 1: Roosevelt tells, in his _Hunting Trips of a
Ranchman_, of the most notable of these, a former scout
and Indian fighter named "Vic" Smith, whose exploits
were prodigious.]

Roosevelt found that Vine, the father, was none other than the crusty old party who had reluctantly admitted him at three o'clock that morning to the Pyramid Park Hotel. The Captain, as he was called, refused to admit that he knew any one who would undertake the ungrateful business of "trundling a tenderfoot" on a buffalo hunt; and suggested that Roosevelt consult his son Frank.

Frank Vine turned out to be far less savage than his father, but quite as bibulous, a rotund hail-fellow-well-met, oily as an Esquimau, with round, twinkling eyes and a reservoir of questionable stories which he tapped on the slightest provocation. The guidebook called him "the innkeeper," which has a romantic connotation not altogether true to the hard facts of Frank's hostelry, and spoke of him as "a jolly, fat, rosy-cheeked young man, brimming over with animal spirits." He habitually wore a bright crimson mackinaw shirt, tied at the neck with a gaudy silk handkerchief, and fringed buckskin trousers, which Roosevelt, who had a weakness for "dressing up," no doubt envied him. He was, it seemed, the most obliging soul in the world, being perfectly willing to do anything for anybody at any time except to be honest, to be sober, or to work; and agreed to find Roosevelt a guide, suggesting that Joe Ferris, who was barn superintendent for him at the Cantonment and occasionally served as a guide for tourists who came to see "Pyramid Park," might be persuaded to find him a buffalo.

Frank guided his "tenderfoot" to the Post store, of which he was manager. It was a long log building, one fourth used for trading and the rest for storage. Single window lights, set into the wall here and there, gave the place the air of perpetual dusk which, it was rumored, was altogether necessary to cloak Frank's peculiar business methods.

They found Joe Ferris in the store. That individual turned out to be as harmless a looking being as any "down-East" farmer--a short, stockily built young fellow of Roosevelt's own age, with a moustache that drooped and a friendly pair of eyes. He did not accept the suggestion that he take Roosevelt on a buffalo hunt, without debate. The "dude" from the East did not, in fact, look at first sight as though he would be of much comfort on a hunt. His large, round glasses gave him a studious look that to a frontiersman was ominous. Joe Ferris agreed at last to help the tenderfoot find a buffalo, but he agreed with reluctance and the deepest misgivings.

Ferris and Frank Vine, talking the matter over, decided that the camp of Gregor Lang on Little Cannonball Creek fifty miles up the river, was the logical place to use as headquarters for the hunt. Gregor Lang, it happened, had just left town homeward bound with a wagon-load of supplies. He was a Scotchman, who had been a prosperous distiller in Ireland, until in a luckless moment the wife of his employer had come to the conclusion that it was wicked to manufacture a product which, when taken in sufficient quantities, was instrumental in sending people to hell; and had prevailed on her husband to close the distillery. What Frank Vine said in describing Gregor Lang to Roosevelt is lost to history. Frank had his own reason for not loving Lang.

Ferris had a brother Sylvane, who was living with his partner, A. W. Merrifield, in a cabin seven or eight miles south of Little Missouri, and suggested that they spend the night with him. Late that afternoon, Joe and his buckboard, laden to overflowing, picked Roosevelt up at the hotel and started for the ford a hundred yards north of the trestle. On the brink of the bluff they stopped. The hammer of Roosevelt's Winchester was broken. In Ferris's opinion, moreover, the Winchester itself was too light for buffalo, and Joe thought it might be a good scheme to borrow a hammer and a buffalo-gun from Jake Maunders.

Jake was at home. He was not a reassuring person to meet, nor one of whom a cautious man would care to ask many favors. His face was villainous and did not pretend to be anything else. He was glad to lend the hammer and the gun, he said.

September days had a way of being baking hot along the Little Missouri, and even in the late afternoon the air was usually like a blast from a furnace. But the country which appeared stark and dreadful under the straight noon sun, at dusk took on a magic more enticing, it seemed, because it grew out of such forbidding desolation. The buttes, protruding like buttresses from the ranges that bordered the river, threw lengthening shadows across the grassy draws. Each gnarled cedar in the ravines took on color and personality. The blue of the sky grew soft and deep.

They climbed to the top of a butte where the road passed between gray cliffs, then steeply down on the other side into the cool greenness of a timbered bottom where the grass was high underfoot and the cottonwoods murmured and twinkled overhead. They passed a log ranch-house known as the "Custer Trail," in memory of the ill-fated expedition which had camped in the adjacent flat seven years before. Howard Eaton and his brothers lived there and kept open house for a continuous stream of Eastern sportsmen. A mile beyond, they forded the river; a quarter-mile farther on, they forded it again, passed through a belt of cottonwoods into a level valley where the buttes receded, leaving a wide stretch of bottom-lands dominated by a solitary peak known as Chimney Butte, and drew up in front of a log cabin.

Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield were there and greeted Roosevelt without noticeable enthusiasm. They admitted later that they thought he was "just another Easterner," and they did not like his glasses at all. They were both lithe, slender young fellows, wiry and burnt by the sun, Sylvane twenty-four or thereabouts, Merrifield four years his senior. Sylvane was shy with a boyish shyness that had a way of slipping into good-natured grins; Merrifield, the shrewder and more mature of the two, was by nature reserved and reticent. They did not have much to say to the "dude" from New York until supper in the dingy, one-room cabin of cottonwood logs, set on end, gave way to cards, and in the excitement of "Old Sledge" the ice began to break. A sudden fierce squawking from the direction of the chicken-shed, abutting the cabin on the west, broke up the game and whatever restraint remained; for they all piled out of the house together, hunting the bobcat which had raided the roost. They did not find the bobcat, but all sense of strangeness was gone when they returned to the house, and settling down on bunks and boxes opened their lives to each other.

The Ferrises and Merrifield were Canadians who had drifted west from their home in New Brunswick and, coming out to the Dakota frontier two years previous because the Northern Pacific Railroad carried emigrants westward for nothing, had remained there because the return journey cost five cents a mile. They worked the first summer as section hands. Then, in the autumn, being backwoodsmen, they took a contract to cut cordwood, and all that winter worked together up the river at Sawmill Bottom, cutting timber. But Merrifield was an inveterate and skillful hunter, and while Joe took to doing odd jobs, and Sylvane took to driving mules at the Cantonment, Merrifield scoured the prairie for buffalo and antelope and crept through the underbrush of countless coulees for deer. For two years he furnished the Northern Pacific dining-cars with venison at five cents a pound. He was a sure shot, absolutely fearless, and with a debonair gayety that found occasional expression in odd pranks. Once, riding through the prairie near the railroad, and being thirsty and not relishing a drink of the alkali water of the Little Missouri, he flagged an express with his red handkerchief, stepped aboard, helped himself to ice-water, and rode off again, to the speechless indignation of the conductor.

The three men had prospered in a small way, and while Joe turned banker and recklessly loaned the attractive but unstable Johnny Nelson a hundred dollars to help him to his feet, Sylvane and Merrifield bought a few horses and a few head of cattle, took on shares a hundred and fifty more, belonging to an old reprobate of a ranchman named Wadsworth and a partner of his named Halley, and, under the shadow of the bold peak that was a landmark for miles around, started a ranch which they called the "Chimney Butte," and every one else called, after their brand, the "Maltese Cross." A man named Bly who had kept a hotel in Bismarck, at a time when Bismarck was wild, and had drifted west with the railroad, was, that season, cutting logs for ties a hundred and fifty miles south in the Short Pine Hills. He attempted to float the timber down the river, with results disastrous to his enterprise, but beneficial to the boys at Chimney Butte. A quantity of logs perfectly adapted for building purposes stacked themselves at a bend not an eighth of a mile from the center of their range. The boys set them on end, stockade-fashion, packed the chinks, threw on a mud roof, and called it "home."

Lang's cow-camp, which was to be the starting-point for the buffalo hunt, was situated some forty-five miles to the south, in the neighborhood of Pretty Buttes. Merrifield and the Ferrises had spent some months there the previous winter, staying with a half-breed named O'Donald and a German named Jack Reuter, known to the countryside as "Dutch Wannigan," who had built the rough log cabin and used it as their headquarters. Buffalo at that time had been plentiful there, and the three Canadians had shot them afoot and on horseback, now and then teasing one of the lumbering hulks into charging, for the excitement of the "close shave" the maddened beast would provide. If there were buffalo anywhere, there would be buffalo somewhere near Pretty Buttes.

Joe, who was of a sedentary disposition, decided that they would make the long trip south in the buckboard, but Roosevelt protested. He saw the need of the buckboard to carry the supplies, but he saw no reason why he should sit in it all day. He asked for an extra saddle horse.

The three declared they did not have an extra saddle horse.

Roosevelt pleaded. The three Canadians thereupon became suspicious and announced more firmly than before that they did not have an extra saddle horse.

Roosevelt protested fervidly that he could not possibly sit still in a buckboard, driving fifty miles.

"By gosh, he wanted that saddle horse so bad," said Joe a long time after, "that we were afraid to let him have it. Why, we didn't know him from Job's off ox. We didn't know but what he'd ride away with it. But, say, he wanted that horse so blamed bad, that when he see we weren't going to let him have it, he offered to buy it for cash."

That proposal sounded reasonable to three cautious frontiersmen, and, before they all turned into their bunks that night, Roosevelt had acquired a buckskin mare named Nell, and therewith his first physical hold on the Bad Lands.

II

It rains here when it rains an' it's hot here when it's hot,
The real folks is real folks which city folks is not.
The dark is as the dark was before the stars was made;
The sun is as the sun was before God thought of shade;
An' the prairie an' the butte-tops an' the long winds, when they blow,
Is like the things what Adam knew on his birthday, long ago.

From _Medora Nights_

Joe in the buckboard and Roosevelt on his new acquisition started south at dawn.

The road to Lang's--or the trail rather, for it consisted of two wheel-tracks scarcely discernible on the prairie grass and only to be guessed at in the sagebrush--lay straight south across a succession of flats, now wide, now narrow, cut at frequent intervals by the winding, wood-fringed Little Missouri; a region of green slopes and rocky walls and stately pinnacles and luxuriant acres. Twenty miles south of the Maltese Cross, they topped a ridge of buttes and suddenly came upon what might well have seemed, in the hot mist of noonday, a billowy ocean, held by some magic in suspension. From the trail, which wound along a red slope of baked clay falling at a sharp angle into a witch's cauldron of clefts and savage abysses, the Bad Lands stretched southward to the uncertain horizon. The nearer slopes were like yellow shores jutting into lavender waters.

West of Middle Butte, that loomed like a purple island on their left, they took a short cut across the big Ox Bow from the mouth of Bullion Creek on the one side to the mouth of Spring Creek on the other, then followed the course of the Little Missouri southward once more. They met the old Fort Keogh trail where it crossed the river by the ruins of the stage station, and for three or four miles followed its deep ruts westward, then turned south again. They came at last to a crossing where the sunset glowed bright in their faces along the bed of a shallow creek that emptied into the Little Missouri. The creek was the Little Cannonball. In a cluster of hoary cottonwoods, fifty yards from the point where creek and river met, they found Lang's cabin.

Lang turned out to be stocky, blue-eyed, and aggressively Scotch, wearing spectacles and a pair of "mutton-chop" whiskers. He had himself just arrived, having come from town by the longer trail over the prairie to the west in order to avoid the uncertain river crossings which had a way of proving fatal to a heavily laden wagon. His welcome was hearty. With him was a boy of sixteen, fair-haired and blue-eyed, whom he introduced as his son Lincoln. The boy remembered ever after the earnestness of the tenderfoot's "Delighted to meet you."

* * * * *

Roosevelt talked with Gregor Lang until midnight. The Scotchman was a man of education with views of his own on life and politics, and if he was more than a little dogmatic, he was unquestionably sincere.

He had an interesting story to tell. A year or less ago Henry Gorringe, Abram S. Hewitt, of New York, and a noted London financier named Sir John Pender, who had been instrumental in laying the first successful Atlantic cable, had, in the course of a journey through the Northwest, become interested in the cattle business and, in May, 1883, bought the Cantonment buildings at Little Missouri with the object of making them the headquarters of a trading corporation which they called the Little Missouri Land and Stock Company. The details they left to the enterprising naval officer who had proposed the scheme. Gorringe had meanwhile struck up a friendship with Frank Vine. This was not unnatural, for Frank was the social center of Little Missouri and was immensely popular. What is almost incredible, however, is that, blinded evidently by Frank's social graces, he took the genial and slippery post-trader into the syndicate, and appointed him superintendent. It was possibly because he did not concur altogether in this selection that Pender sent Gregor Lang, who, owing to Lady Pender's scruples, was without employment, to report to Gorringe in New York and then proceed to Little Missouri.

What a somewhat precise Scotch Presbyterian thought of that gathering-place of the wicked, the Presbyterian himself did not see fit to divulge. He established himself at the Cantonment, set to work with European thoroughness to find out all there was to find out about the cattle business, and quietly studied the ways of Frank Vine. Those ways were altogether extraordinary. Where he had originally come from no one exactly knew. His father, whom the new superintendent promptly established as manager of the Pyramid Park Hotel, had been a Missouri steamboat captain and was regarded far and wide as a terror. He was, in fact, a walking arsenal. He had a way of collecting his bills with a cavalry saber, and once, during the course of a "spree," hearing that a great Irishman named Jack Sawyer had beaten up his son Frank, was seen emerging from the hotel in search of the oppressor of his offspring with a butcher-knife in his boot, a six-shooter at his belt, and a rifle in his hand. Frank himself was less of a buccaneer and was conspicuous because he was practically the only man in Little Missouri who did not carry arms. He was big-hearted and not without charm in his nonchalant disregard of the moralities, but there was no truth in him, and he was so foul-mouthed that he became the model for the youth of Little Missouri, the ideal of what a foul-mouthed reprobate should be.

"Frank was the darndest liar you ever knew," remarked, long after, a man who had authority on his side. "And, by jinx, if he wouldn't preface his worst lies with 'Now this is God's truth!'"

He had an older brother named Darius who was famous as "the champion beer-drinker of the West," having the engaging gift of being able to consume untold quantities without ever becoming drunk. In their way they were a notable family.

Gregor Lang, with the fortunes of his employer at heart, watched Frank's activities as storekeeper with interest. During the military régime, Frank had been post-trader, a berth which was an eminent article of barter on the shelves of congressional politicians and for which fitness seemed to consist in the ability to fill lonely soldiers with untold quantities of bad whiskey. Frank's "fitness," as the term was understood, was above question, but his bookkeeping, Lang found, was largely in his mind. When he received a shipment of goods he set the selling-price by multiplying the cost by two and adding the freight; which saved much calculating. Frank's notions of "mine" and "thine," Lang discovered, moreover, were elastic. His depredations were particularly heavy against a certain shipment of patent medicine called "Tolu Tonic," which he ordered in huge quantities at the company's expense and drank up himself. The secret was that Frank, who had inherited his father's proclivities, did not like the "Forty-Mile Red Eye" brand which Bill Williams concocted of sulphuric acid and cigar stumps mixed with evil gin and worse rum; and had found that "Tolu Tonic" was eighty per cent alcohol.

Seeing these matters, and other matters for which the term "irregularity" would have been only mildly descriptive, Gregor Lang sent Sir John a report which was not favorable to Frank Vine's régime. Sir John withdrew from the syndicate in disgust and ordered Lang to start a separate ranch for him; and Gorringe himself began to investigate the interesting ways of his superintendent. Why Lang was not murdered, he himself was unable to say.

Lang had made it his business to acquire all the information he could secure on every phase of the cattle industry, for Sir John was avid of statistics. Roosevelt asked question after question. The Scotchman answered them. Joe Ferris, Lincoln, and a bony Scotch Highlander named MacRossie, who lived with the Langs, had been asleep and snoring for three hours before Gregor Lang and his guest finally sought their bunks.

It was raining when they awoke next morning. Joe Ferris, who was willing to suffer discomfort in a good cause, but saw no reason for unnecessarily courting misery, suggested to Roosevelt that they wait until the weather cleared. Roosevelt insisted that they start the hunt. Joe recognized that he was dealing with a man who meant business, and made no further protest.

They left Lang's at six, crossing the Little Missouri and threading their way, mile after mile, eastward through narrow defiles and along tortuous divides. It was a wild region, bleak and terrible, where fantastic devil-carvings reared themselves from the sallow gray of eroded slopes, and the only green things were gnarled cedars that looked as though they had been born in horror and had grown up in whirlwinds.

The ground underfoot was wet and sticky; the rain continued all day long. Once, at a distance, they saw two or three blacktail deer, and a little later they came upon a single buck. They crept to within two hundred yards. Roosevelt fired, and missed. There was every reason why he should miss, for the distance was great and the rain made a clear aim impossible; but it happened that, as the deer bounded away, Joe Ferris fired at a venture, and brought him down. It was a shot in a thousand.

Roosevelt flung his gun on the ground. "By Godfrey!" he exclaimed. "I'd give anything in the world if I could shoot like that!"

His rage at himself was so evident that Joe, being tender-hearted, was almost sorry that he had shot so well.

They found no buffalo that day; and returned to Lang's after dusk, gumbo mud to the eyes.

Of the two, Ferris was the one, it happened, who wrapped himself in his buffalo robe immediately after supper and went to sleep. Roosevelt, apparently as fresh and vigorous as he had been when he started out in the morning, promptly set Gregor Lang to talking about cattle.

Lang, who had been starved for intellectual companionship, was glad to talk; and there was much to tell. It was a new country for cattle. Less than five years before, the Indians had still roamed free and unmolested over it. A few daring white hunters (carrying each his vial of poison with which to cheat the torture-stake, in case of capture) had invaded their hunting-grounds; then a few surveyors; then grading crews under military guard with their retinue of saloon-keepers and professional gamblers; then the gleaming rails; then the thundering and shrieking engines. Eastern sportsmen, finding game plentiful in the Bad Lands, came to the conclusion that where game could survive in winter and thrive in summer, cattle could do likewise, and began to send short-horned stock west over the railroad. A man named Wadsworth from Minnesota settled twenty miles down the river from Little Missouri; another named Simpson from Texas established the "Hash-Knife" brand sixty or seventy miles above. The Eatons and A. D. Huidekoper, all from Pittsburgh, Sir John Pender from England, Lord Nugent from Ireland, H. H. Gorringe from New York, came to hunt and remained in person or by proxy to raise cattle in the new-won prairies of western Dakota and eastern Montana. These were the first wave. Henry Boice from New Mexico, Gregor Lang from Scotland, Antoine de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Mores (very much from France)--these were the second; young men all, most under thirty, some under twenty-five, dare-devil adventurers with hot blood, seeing visions.

Roosevelt and Lang talked well into the night. The next morning it was still raining. Roosevelt declared that he would hunt, anyway. Joe protested, almost pathetically. Roosevelt was obdurate, and Joe, admiring the "tenderfoot" in spite of himself, submitted. They hunted all day and shot nothing, returning to the cabin after dark, covered with Dakota mud.

Again it was Joe who tumbled into his corner, and the "tenderfoot" who, after supper, fresh as a daisy, engaged his host in conversation. They talked cattle and America and politics; and again, cattle. The emphatic Scotchman was very much of an individual. The eyes behind the oval glasses were alert, intelligent, and not without a touch of defiance.

Gregor Lang was one of those Europeans to whom America comes as a great dream, long before they set foot on its soil. He felt sharply the appeal of free institutions, and had proved ready to fight and to suffer for his convictions. He had had considerable opportunity to do both, for he had been an enthusiastic liberal in an arch-conservative family, frankly expressing his distaste for any form of government, including the British, which admitted class distinctions and gave to the few at the expense of the many. His insistence on naming his son after the man who had been indirectly responsible for the closing of England's cotton-mills had almost disrupted his household.

He enjoyed talking politics, and found in Roosevelt, who was up to his eyes in politics in his own State, a companion to delight his soul. Lang was himself a good talker and not given as a rule to patient listening; but he listened to Theodore Roosevelt, somewhat because he wanted to, and somewhat because it was difficult for any one to do anything else in those days when Roosevelt once took the floor. Gregor Lang had known many reformers in his time, and some had been precise and meticulous and some had been fiery and eloquent, but none had possessed the overwhelming passion for public service that seemed to burn in this amazingly vigorous and gay-spirited American of twenty-four. Roosevelt denounced "boss rule" until the rafters rang, coupling his denunciation of corrupt politicians with denunciations of those "fireside moralists" who were forever crying against bad government yet raising not a finger to correct it. The honest were always in a majority, he contended, and, under the American Constitution, held in their hands the power to overcome the dishonest minority. It was the solemn duty of every American citizen, he declared, not only to vote, but to fight, if need be, for good government.

It was two in the morning before Gregor Lang and Theodore Roosevelt reluctantly retired to their bunks.

Roosevelt was up and about at dawn. It was still raining. Joe Ferris suggested mildly that they wait for better weather before plunging again into the sea of gumbo mud, but Roosevelt, who had not come to Dakota to twiddle his thumbs, insisted that they resume their hunt. They went and found nothing. The rain continued for a week.

"He nearly killed poor Joe," Lincoln remarked afterwards. "He would not stop for anything."

Every morning Joe entered his protest and Roosevelt overruled it, and every evening Joe rolled, nigh dead, into his buffalo robe and Roosevelt talked cattle and politics with Gregor Lang until one and two in the morning. Joe and the Highlander sawed wood, but the boy Lincoln in his bunk lay with wide eyes.

"It was in listening to those talks after supper in the old shack on the Cannonball," he said, a long time after, "that I first came to understand that the Lord made the earth for all of us and not for a chosen few."

Roosevelt, too, received inspiration from these nocturnal discussions, but it was an inspiration of another sort.

"Mr. Lang," he said suddenly one evening, "I am thinking seriously of going into the cattle business. Would you advise me to go into it?"

Gregor Lang was cautious. "I don't like to advise you in a matter of that kind," he answered. "I myself am prepared to follow it out to the end. I have every faith in it. If it's a question of my faith, I have full faith. As a business proposition, it is the best there is."

They said no more about the matter that night.

The weather cleared at last. Joe Ferris, who had started on the hunt with misgivings, had no misgivings whatever now. He confided in Lincoln, not without a touch of pride in his new acquaintance, that this was a new variety of tenderfoot, altogether a "plumb good sort."

They started out with new zest under the clear sky. They had, in their week's hunting, come across the fresh tracks of numerous buffalo, but had in no case secured a shot. The last great herd had, in fact, been exterminated six months before, and though the Ferrises and Merrifield had killed a half-dozen within a quarter-mile of the Maltese Cross early that summer, these had been merely a straggling remnant. The days when a hunter could stand and bombard a dull, panic-stricken herd, slaughtering hundreds without changing his position, were gone. In the spring of 1883 the buffalo had still roamed the prairies east and west of the Bad Lands in huge herds, but moving in herds they were as easy to shoot as a family cow and the profits even at three dollars a pelt were great. Game-butchers swarmed forth from Little Missouri and fifty other frontier "towns," slaughtering buffalo for their skins or for their tongues or for the mere lust of killing. The hides were piled high at every shipping point; the carcasses rotted in the sun. Three hundred thousand buffalo, driven north from the more settled plains of western Nebraska, and huddled in a territory covering not more than a hundred and fifty square miles, perished like cattle in a stockyard, almost overnight. It was one of the most stupendous and dramatic obliterations in history of a species betrayed by the sudden change of its environment.

Hunting buffalo on horseback had, even in the days of the great herds, been an altogether different matter from the methodical slaughter from a "stand," where a robe for every cartridge was not an unusual "bag," and where an experienced game-butcher could, without recourse to Baron Munchausen, boast an average of eighty per cent of "kills." There was always the possibility that the bison, driven to bay, might charge the sportsman who drove his horse close in for a sure shot. With the great herds destroyed, there was added to the danger and the privations of the wild country where the few remaining stragglers might be found, the zest and the arduousness of long searching. Roosevelt and Joe Ferris had had their full share of the latter.

They came on the fresh track of a buffalo two hours after their departure, that clear warm morning, from Lang's hospitable cabin. It was, for a time, easy to follow, where it crossed and recrossed a narrow creek-bottom, but became almost undiscernible as it struck off up the side of a winding coulee, where the soil, soaked as it had been by a week of September drizzle, was already baked hard by the hot sun. They rode for an hour cautiously up the ravine. Suddenly, as they passed the mouth of a side coulee, there was a plunge and crackle through the bushes at its head, and a shabby-looking old bull bison galloped out of it and plunged over a steep bank into a patch of broken ground which led around the base of a high butte. The bison was out of sight before they had time to fire. At the risk of their necks they sped their horses over the broken ground only to see the buffalo emerge from it at the farther end and with amazing agility climb up the side of a butte over a quarter of a mile away. With his shaggy mane and huge forequarters he had some of the impressiveness of a lion as he stood for an instant looking back at his pursuers. They followed him for miles, but caught no glimpse of him again.

They were now on the prairie far to the east of the river, a steaming, treeless region stretching in faint undulations north, east, and south, until it met the sky in the blurred distance. Here and there it was broken by a sunken water-course, dry in spite of a week of wet weather, or a low bluff or a cluster of small, round-topped buttes. The grass was burnt brown; the air was hot and still. The country had the monotony and the melancholy and more than a little of the beauty and the fascination of the sea.

They ate their meager lunch beside a miry pool, where a clump of cedars under a bluff gave a few square feet of shadow.

All afternoon they rode over the dreary prairie, but it was late before they caught another glimpse of game. Then, far off in the middle of a large plain, they saw three black specks.

The horses were slow beasts, and were tired besides and in no condition for running. Roosevelt and his mentor picketed them in a hollow, half a mile from the game, and started off on their hands and knees. Roosevelt blundered into a bed of cactus and filled his hands with the spines; but he came within a hundred and fifty feet or less of the buffalo. He drew up and fired. The bullet made the dust fly from the hide as it hit the body with a loud crack, but apparently did no particular harm. The three buffalo made off over a low rise with their tails in the air.

The hunters returned to their horses in disgust, and for seven or eight miles loped the jaded animals along at a brisk pace. Now and again they saw the quarry far ahead. Finally, when the sun had just set, they saw that all three had come to a stand in a gentle hollow. There was no cover anywhere. They determined, as a last desperate resort, to try to run them on their worn-out ponies.

The bison faced them for an instant, then turned and made off. With spurs and quirt, Roosevelt urged his tired pony forward. Night closed in and the full moon rose out of the black haze on the horizon. The pony plunged to within sixty or seventy yards of the wounded bull, and could gain no more. Joe Ferris, better mounted, forged ahead. The bull, seeing him coming, swerved. Roosevelt cut across and came almost up to him. The ground over which they were running was broken into holes and ditches, and the fagged horses floundered and pitched forward at every step.

At twenty feet, Roosevelt fired, but the pony was pitching like a launch in a storm, and he missed. He dashed in closer.

The bull's tail went up and he wheeled suddenly and charged with lowered horns.

The pony, panic-stricken, spun round and tossed up his head, striking the rifle which Roosevelt was holding in both hands and knocking it violently against his forehead, cutting a deep gash. The blood poured into Roosevelt's eyes.

Ferris reined in his pony. "All right?" he called, evidently frightened.

"Don't mind me!" Roosevelt shouted, without turning an instant from the business in hand. "I'm all right."

For an instant it was a question whether Roosevelt would get the buffalo or the buffalo would get Roosevelt. But he swerved his horse, and the buffalo, plunging past, charged Ferris and followed him as he made off over the broken ground, uncomfortably close to the tired pony's tail. Roosevelt, half-blinded, tried to run in on him again, but his pony stopped, dead beat; and by no spurring could he force him out of a slow trot. Ferris, swerving suddenly and dismounting, fired, but the dim moonlight made accurate aim impossible, and the buffalo, to the utter chagrin of the hunters, lumbered off and vanished into the darkness. Roosevelt followed him for a short space afoot in hopeless and helpless wrath.

There was no possibility of returning to Lang's that night. They were not at all certain where they were, but they knew they were a long way from the mouth of the Little Cannonball. They determined to camp near by for the night.

They did not mount the exhausted horses, but led them, stumbling, foaming and sweating, while they hunted for water. It was an hour before they found a little mud-pool in a reedy hollow. They had drunk nothing for twelve hours and were parched with thirst, but the water of the pool was like thin jelly, slimy and nauseating, and they could drink only a mouthful. Supper consisted of a dry biscuit, previously baked by Lincoln under direction of his father, who insisted that the use of a certain kind of grease whose name is lost to history would keep the biscuits soft. They were hard as horn.[2] There was not a twig with which to make a fire, nor a bush to which they could fasten their horses. When they lay down to sleep, thirsty and famished, they had to tie their horses with the lariat to the saddles which were their pillows.

[Footnote 2: "I would start to make biscuits and as
usual go about putting shortening into them, which
father didn't like. We'd argue over it a little, and I
would say, 'Good biscuits can't be made without grease.'
Then he'd say, 'Well, use elbow grease.' I'd say then,
'Well, all right, I'll try it.' Then I'd go to work and
knead the dough _hard_ (on purpose), understanding, of
course, that kneading utterly spoils biscuit dough,
whether there is shortening in it or not. The result is
a pan of adamantine biscuits which, of course, I blame
on him."--_Lincoln Lang._]

They did not go quickly to sleep. The horses were nervous, restless, alert, in spite of their fatigue, continually snorting or standing with their ears forward, peering out into the night, as though conscious of the presence of danger. Roosevelt remembered some half-breed Crees they had encountered the day before. It was quite possible that some roving bucks might come for their horses, and perhaps their scalps, for the Indians, who were still unsettled on their reservations, had a way of stealing off whenever they found a chance and doing what damage they could. Stories he had heard of various bands of horse-thieves that operated in the region between the Little Missouri and the Black Hills likewise returned to mind to plague him. The wilderness in which Roosevelt and Ferris had pitched their meager camp was in the very heart of the region infested by the bandits. They dozed fitfully, waking with a start whenever the sound of the grazing of the horses ceased for a moment, and they knew that the nervous animals were watching for the approach of a foe. It was late when at last they fell asleep.

They were rudely wakened at midnight by having their pillows whipped out from under their heads. They leapt to their feet. In the bright moonlight they saw the horses madly galloping off, with the saddles bounding and trailing behind them. Their first thought was that the horses had been stampeded by horse-thieves, and they threw themselves on the ground, crouching in the long grass with rifles ready.

There was no stir. At last, in the hollow they made out a shadowy, four-footed shape. It was a wolf who strode noiselessly to the low crest and disappeared.

They rose and went after the horses, taking the broad trail made by the saddles through the dewy grass.

Once Joe Ferris stopped. "Say, I ain't ever committed any crime deservin' that anything like this should happen!" he exclaimed plaintively. Then, turning straight to Roosevelt, evidently suspecting that he had a Jonah on his hands, he cried, in a voice in which wrath was mingled with comic despair, "Have you ever done anything to deserve this?"

"Joe," Roosevelt answered solemnly, "I never have."

"Then I can't understand," Joe remarked, "why we're runnin' in such luck."

Roosevelt grinned at him and chuckled, and Joe Ferris grinned and chuckled; and after that the savage attentions of an unkind fate did not seem so bad.

They found the horses sooner than they expected and led them back to camp. Utterly weary, they wrapped themselves in their blankets once more and went to sleep. But rest was not for them that night. At three in the morning a thin rain began to fall, and they awoke to find themselves lying in four inches of water. Joe Ferris expected lamentations. What he heard was, "By Godfrey, but this is fun!"