Chapter IX: Introduction (4)

The four Eaton brothers were men of education and family, who had suffered financial reverses and migrated from Pittsburgh, where they lived, to "make their fortunes," as the phrase went, in the Northwest. A wealthy Pennsylvanian named Huidekoper, a lover of good horses, backed Howard at the Custer Trail and another Easterner named Van Brunt started a second ranch with him, known as the "V-Eye," forty miles down the river at the mouth of Beaver Creek; a third, named "Chris" McGee, who was a somewhat smoky light in the murk of Pennsylvania politics, went into partnership with Charles, at another ranch six miles up Beaver. The Custer Trail was headquarters for them all, and at the same time for an endless procession of Eastern friends who came for the hunting. The Eatons kept open house. Travelers wrote about the hospitality that even strangers were certain to find there, and carried away with them the picture of Howard Eaton, "who sat his horse as though he were a centaur and looked a picturesque and noble figure with his clean-shaven cheeks, heavy drooping moustache, sombrero, blue shirt, and neckerchief with flaming ends." About the time Roosevelt arrived, friends who had availed themselves of the Eaton hospitality until they were in danger of losing their self-respect, had prevailed on the reluctant brothers to make "dude-ranching" a business. "Eaton's dudes" became a notable factor in the Bad Lands. You could raise a laugh about them at Bill Williams's saloon when nothing else could wake a smile.

One of the few women up or down the river was living that June at the Custer Trail. She was Margaret Roberts, the wife of the Eatons' foreman, a jovial, garrulous woman, still under thirty, with hair that curled attractively and had a shimmer of gold in it. She was utterly fearless, and was bringing up numerous children, all girls, with a cool disregard of wild animals and wilder men, which, it was rumored shocked her relatives "back East." She had been brought up in Iowa, but ten horses could not have dragged her back.

Four or five miles above the Maltese Cross lived a woman of a different sort who was greatly agitating the countryside, especially Mrs. Roberts. She had come to the Bad Lands with her husband and daughter since Roosevelt's previous visit, and established a ranch on what was known as "Tepee Bottom." Her husband, whose name, for the purposes of this narrative, shall be Cummins, had been sent to Dakota as ranch manager for a syndicate of Pittsburgh men, why, no one exactly knew, since he was a designer of stoves, and, so far as any one could find out, had never had the remotest experience with cattle. He was an excellent but ineffective little man, religiously inclined, and consequently dubbed "the Deacon." Nobody paid very much attention to him, least of all his wife. That lady had drawn the fire of Mrs. Roberts before she had been in the Bad Lands a week. She was a good woman, but captious, critical, complaining, pretentious. She had in her youth had social aspirations which her husband and a little town in Pennsylvania had been unable to gratify. She brought into her life in Dakota these vague, unsatisfied longings, and immediately set to work to remould the manners, customs, and characters of the community a little nearer to her heart's desire. To such an attitude there was, of course, only one reaction possible; and she got it promptly.

Mrs. Roberts, energetic, simple-hearted, vigorous, plain-spoken, was the only woman within a dozen miles, and it was not long before Mrs. Roberts hated Mrs. Cummins as Jeremiah hated Babylon. For Mrs. Cummins was bent on spreading "culture," and Mrs. Roberts was determined that by no seeming acquiescence should it be spread over her.

"Roosevelt was a great visitor," said Howard Eaton in after time. "When he first came out there, he was a quiet sort of a fellow, with not much to say to anybody, but the best kind of a mixer I ever saw."

The Bad Lands no doubt required the ability to mix with all manner of men, for it was all manner of men that congregated there. Roosevelt evaded the saloons but established friendly relations with the men who did not. When he rode to town for his mail or to make purchases at Joe Ferris's new store, he contracted the habit of stopping at the office of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_, where those who loved conversation more than whiskey had a way of foregathering.

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

Bill Jones was a personage in the Bad Lands. He was, in fact, more than that. He was (like Roosevelt himself) one of those rare beings who attain mythical proportions even in their lifetime and draw about themselves the legendry of their generation. Bill Jones was the type and symbol of the care-free negation of moral standards in the wild little towns of the frontier, and men talked of him with an awe which they scarcely exhibited toward any symbol of virtue and sobriety. He said things and he did things which even a tolerant observer, hardened to the aspect of life's seamy side, might have felt impelled to call depraved, and yet Bill Jones himself was not depraved. He was, like the community in which he lived, "free an' easy." Morality meant no more to him than grammar. He outraged the one as he outraged the other, without malice and without any sense of fundamental difference between himself and those who preferred to do neither.

The air was full of tales of his extraordinary doings, for he was a fighter with pistols and with fists and had an ability as a "butter" which was all his own and which he used with deadly effect. What his history had been was a secret which he illuminated only fitfully. It was rumored that he had been born in Ireland of rather good stock, and in the course of an argument with an uncle of his with whom he lived had knocked the uncle down. Whether he had killed him the rumors failed to tell, but the fact that Bill Jones had found it necessary "to dust" to America, under an assumed name, suggested several things. Being inclined to violence, he naturally drifted to that part of the country where violence seemed to be least likely to have serious consequences. By a comic paradox, he joined the police force of Bismarck. He casually mentioned the fact one day to Roosevelt, remarking that he had left the force because he "beat the Mayor over the head with his gun one day."

"The Mayor, he didn't mind it," he added, "but the Superintendent of Police guessed I'd better resign."

He was a striking-looking creature, a man who could turn dreams into nightmares, merely by his presence in them. He was rather short of stature, but stocky and powerfully built, with a tremendous chest and long, apelike arms, hung on a giant's shoulders. The neck was a brute's, and the square protruding jaw was in keeping with it. His lips were thin, his nose was hooked like a pirate's, and his keen black eyes gleamed from under the bushy black eyebrows like a grizzly's from a cave. He was not a thing of beauty, but, at the back of his unflinching gaze, humor in some spritely and satanic shape was always disporting itself, and there was, as Lincoln Lang described it, "a certain built-in look of drollery in his face," which made one forget its hardness.

He was feared and, strange to say, he was loved by the very men who feared him. For he was genial, and he could build a yarn that had the architectural completeness of a turreted castle, created out of smoke by some imaginative minstrel of hell. His language on all occasions was so fresh and startling that men had a way of following him about just to gather up the poppies and the nightshade of his exuberant conversation.

As Will Dow later remarked about him, he was "an awfully good man to have on your side if there was any sassing to be done."

Roosevelt was not one of those who fed on the malodorous stories which had gained for their author the further sobriquet of "Foul-mouthed Bill"; but he rather liked Bill Jones.[6] It happened one day, in the _Cowboy_ office that June, that the genial reprobate was holding forth in his best vein to an admiring group of cowpunchers.

[Footnote 6: "As I recall Bill, his stories were never
half as bad as Frank [Vine's], for instance. Where he
shone particularly was in excoriating those whom he did
not like. In this connection he could--and did--use the
worst expressions I have ever heard. He was a born
cynic, who said his say in 'plain talk,' not
'langwidge.' For all that, he was filled to the neck
with humor, and was a past-master in the art of
repartee, always in plain talk, remember. Explain it if
you can. Bill was roundly hated by many because he had a
way of talking straight truth. He had an uncanny knack
of seeing behind the human scenery of the Bad Lands, and
always told right out what he saw. That is why they were
all afraid of him."--_Lincoln Lang._]

Roosevelt, who was inclined to be reserved in the company of his new associates, endured the flow of indescribable English as long as he could. Then, suddenly, in a pause, when the approving laughter had subsided, he began slowly to "skin his teeth."

"Bill Jones," he said, looking straight into the saturnine face, and speaking in a low, quiet voice, "I can't tell why in the world I like you, for you're the nastiest-talking man I ever heard."

Bill Jones's hand fell on his "six-shooter." The cowpunchers, knowing their man, expected shooting. But Bill Jones did not shoot. For an instant the silence in the room was absolute. Gradually a sheepish look crept around the enormous and altogether hideous mouth of Bill Jones. "I don't belong to your outfit, Mr. Roosevelt," he said, "and I'm not beholden to you for anything. All the same, I don't mind saying that mebbe I've been a little too free with my mouth."

They became friends from that day.

If Roosevelt had tried to avoid the Marquis de Mores on his trips to the Marquis's budding metropolis in those June days, he would scarcely have succeeded. The Marquis was the most vivid feature of the landscape in and about Medora. His personal appearance would have attracted attention in any crowd. The black, curly hair, the upturned moustaches, waxed to needle-points, the heavy eyelids, the cool, arrogant eyes, made an impression which, against that primitive background, was not easily forgotten. His costume, moreover, was extraordinary to the point of the fantastic. It was the Marquis who always seemed to wear the widest sombrero, the loudest neckerchief. He went armed like a battleship. A correspondent of the Mandan _Pioneer_ met him one afternoon returning from the pursuit of a band of cattle which had stampeded. "He was armed to the teeth," ran his report. "A formidable-looking belt encircled his waist, in which was stuck a murderous-looking knife, a large navy revolver, and two rows of cartridges, and in his hand he carried a repeating rifle."

A man who appeared thus dressed and accoutered would either be a master or a joke in a community like Medora. There were several reasons why he was never a joke. His money had something to do with it, but the real reason was, in the words of a contemporary, that "when it came to a show-down, the Marquis was always there." He completely dominated the life of Medora. His hand was on everything, and everything, it seemed, belonged to him. It was quite like "Puss in Boots." His town was really booming and was crowding its rival on the west bank completely out of the picture. The clatter of hammers on new buildings sounded, in the words of the editor of the _Cowboy_, "like a riveting machine." The slaughter-house had already been expanded. From Chicago came a score or more of butchers, from the range came herds of cattle to be slaughtered. The side-track was filled with empty cars of the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, which, as they were loaded with dressed beef, were coupled on fast east-bound trains. The Marquis, talking to newspaper correspondents, was glowing in his accounts of the blooming of his desert rose. He announced that it already had six hundred inhabitants. Another, calmer witness estimated fifty. The truth was probably a hundred, including the fly-by-nights. Unquestionably, they made noise enough for six hundred.

The Marquis, pending the completion of his house, was living sumptuously in his private car, somewhat, it was rumored, to the annoyance of his father-in-law, who was said to see no connection between the rough life of a ranchman, in which the Marquis appeared to exult, and the palace on wheels in which he made his abode. But he was never snobbish. He had a friendly word for whoever drifted into his office, next to the company store, and generally "something for the snake-bite," as he called it, that was enough to bring benedictions to the lips of a cowpuncher whose dependence for stimulants was on Bill Williams's "Forty-Mile Red-Eye." To the men who worked for him he was extraordinarily generous, and he was without vindictiveness toward those who, since the killing of Luffsey, had openly or tacitly opposed him. He had a grudge against Gregor Lang,[7] whose aversion to titles and all that went with them had not remained unexpressed during the year that had intervened since that fatal June 26th, but if he held any rancor toward Merrifield or the Ferrises, he did not reveal it. He was learning a great deal incidentally.

[Footnote 7: "He held the grudge all right, and it may
have been largely because father sided against him in
regard to the killing. But I think the main reason was
because father refused to take any hand in bringing
about a consolidation of interests. Pender was a
tremendously rich man and had the ear of some of the
richest men in England, such as the Duke of Sutherland
and the Marquis of Tweeddale."--_Lincoln Lang._]

Shortly before Roosevelt's arrival from the Chicago convention, the Marquis had stopped at the Maltese Cross one day for a chat with Sylvane. He was dilating on his projects, "spreading himself" on his dreams, but in his glowing vision of the future, he turned, for once, a momentary glance of calm analysis on the past.

"If I had known a year ago what I know now," he said rather sadly, "Riley Luffsey would never have been killed."

It was constantly being said of the Marquis that he was self-willed and incapable of taking advice. The charge was untrue. The difficulty was rather that he sought advice in the wrong quarters and lacked the judgment to weigh the counsel he received against the characters and aims of the men who gave it. He was constantly pouring out the tale of his grandiose plans to Tom and Dick and Abraham, asking for guidance in affairs of business and finance from men whose knowledge of business was limited to frontier barter and whose acquaintance with finance was of an altogether dubious and uneconomic nature. He was possessed, moreover, by the dangerous notion that those who spoke bluntly were, therefore, of necessity opposed to him and not worth regarding, while those who flattered him were his friends whose counsel he could trust.

It was this attitude of mind which encumbered his project for a stage-line to the Black Hills with difficulties from the very start. The project itself was feasible. Deadwood could be reached only by stage from Pierre, a matter of three hundred miles. The distance to Medora was a hundred miles shorter. Millions of pounds of freight were accumulating for lack of proper transportation facilities to Deadwood. That hot little mining town, moreover, needed contact with the great transcontinental system, especially in view of the migratory movement, which had begun early in the year, of the miners from Deadwood and Lead to the new gold-fields in the Coeur d'Alênes in Idaho.

Bill Williams and Jess Hogue, with the aid of the twenty-eight army mules which they had acquired in ways that invited research, had started a freight-line from Medora to Deadwood, but its service turned out to be spasmodic, depending somewhat on the state of Medora's thirst, on the number of "suckers" in town who had to be fleeced, and on the difficulty under which both Williams and Hogue seemed to suffer of keeping sober when they were released from their obvious duties in the saloon. There appeared to be every reason, therefore, why a stage-line connecting Deadwood with the Northern Pacific, carrying passengers, mail, and freight, and organized with sufficient capital, should succeed.

Dickinson, forty miles east, was wildly agitating for such a line to run from that prosperous little community to the Black Hills. The Dickinson _Press_ and the _Bad Lands Cowboy_ competed in deriding each other's claims touching "the only feasible route." The _Cowboy_ said that the Medora line would be more direct. The _Press_ agreed, but replied that the country through which it would have to go was impassable even for an Indian on a pony. The _Cowboy_ declared that "the Dickinson road strikes gumbo from the start"; and the _Press_ with fine scorn answered, "This causes a smile to percolate our features. From our experience in the Bad Lands we know that after a slight rain a man can carry a whole quarter-section off on his boots, and we don't wear number twelves either." The _Cowboy_ insisted that the Dickinson route "is at best a poor one and at certain seasons impassable." The _Press_ scorned to reply to this charge, remarking merely from the heights of its own eight months' seniority, "The _Cowboy_ is young, and like a boy, going through a graveyard at night, is whistling to keep up courage."

There the debate for the moment rested. But Dickinson, which unquestionably had the better route, lacked a Marquis. While the _Press_ was printing the statements of army experts in support of its claims, de Mores was sending surveyors south to lay out his route. From Sully Creek they led it across the headwaters of the Heart River and the countless affluents of the Grand and the Cannonball, past Slim Buttes and the Cave Hills, across the valleys of the Bellefourche and the Moreau, two hundred and twenty-five miles into the Black Hills and Deadwood. Deadwood gave the Marquis a public reception, hailing him as a benefactor of the race, and the Marquis, flushed and seeing visions, took a flying trip to New York and presented a petition to the directors of the Northern Pacific for a railroad from Medora to the Black Hills.

The dream was perfect, and everybody (except the Dickinson _Press_) was happy. Nothing remained but to organize the stage company, buy the coaches, the horses and the freight outfits, improve the highway, establish sixteen relay stations, and get started. And there, the real difficulties commenced.

The Marquis, possibly feeling that it was the part of statesmanship to conciliate a rival, forgot apparently all other considerations and asked Bill Williams, the saloon-keeper, to undertake the organization of the stage-line. Williams assiduously disposed of the money which the Marquis put in his hands, but attained no perceptible results. The Marquis turned next to Bill Williams's partner in freighting and faro and asked Jess Hogue to take charge. Hogue, who was versatile and was as willing to cheat a man in one way as in another, consented and for a time neglected the card-tables of Williams's "liquor-parlor" to enter into negotiations for the construction of the line. He was a clever man and had had business experience of a sort, but his interest in the Deadwood stage-line did not reach beyond the immediate opportunity it offered of acquiring a substantial amount of the Marquis's money. He made a trip or two to Bismarck and Deadwood; he looked busy; he promised great things; but nothing happened. The Marquis, considerably poorer in pocket, deposed his second manager as he had deposed the first, and looked about for an honest man.

One day Packard, setting up the _Cowboy_, was amazed to see the Marquis come dashing into his office.

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

Packard looked at him. "But Marquis," he answered, "I never saw a stage or a stage-line. I don't know anything about it."

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

Packard admitted the probability of the last statement. They talked matters over. To Packard, who was not quite twenty-four, the prospect of running a stage-line began to look rather romantic. He set about to find out what stage-lines were made of, and went to Bismarck to study the legal document the Marquis's lawyers had drawn up. It specified, in brief, that A. T. Packard was to be sole owner of the Medora and Black Hills Stage and Forwarding Company when it should have paid for itself from its net earnings, which left nothing to be desired, especially as the total receipts from sales of building lots in Medora and elsewhere were to be considered part of the earnings. It was understood that the Marquis was to secure a mail contract from the Post-Office Department effective with the running of the first stage sometime in June. Packard attached his name to the document, and waited for the money which the Marquis had agreed to underwrite to set the organization in motion.

Day after day he waited in vain. Weeks passed. In June began an exodus from the Black Hills to the Coeur d'Alênes that soon became a stampede. With an exasperation that he found it difficult to control, Packard heard of the thousands that were taking the roundabout journey by way of Pierre or Miles City. He might, he knew, be running every north-bound coach full from front to hind boot and from thorough-brace to roof-rail; and for once the Marquis might make some money. He pleaded for funds in person and by wire. But the Marquis, for the moment, did not have any funds to give him.

Roosevelt and the Marquis were inevitably thrown together, for they were men whose tastes in many respects were similar. They were both fond of hunting, and fond also of books, and the Marquis, who was rather solitary in his grandeur and possibly a bit lonely, jumped at the opportunity Roosevelt's presence in Medora offered for companionship with his own kind. Roosevelt did not like him. He recognized, no doubt, that if any cleavage should come in the community to which they both belonged, they would, in all probability, not be found on the same side.

VII

An oath had come between us--I was paid by Law and Order;
He was outlaw, rustler, killer--so the border whisper ran;
Left his word in Caliente that he'd cross the Rio border--
Call me coward? But I hailed him--"Riding close to daylight, Dan!"

Just a hair and he'd have got me, but my voice, and not the warning,
Caught his hand and held him steady; then he nodded, spoke my name,
Reined his pony round and fanned it in the bright and silent morning,
Back across the sunlit Rio up the trail on which he came.

Henry Herbert KNIBBS

It was already plain that there were in fact two distinct groups along the valley of the Little Missouri. There are always two groups in any community (short of heaven); and the fact that in the Bad Lands there was a law-abiding element, and another element whose main interest in law was in the contemplation of its fragments, would not be worth remarking if it had not happened that the Marquis had allowed himself to be maneuvered into a position in which he appeared, and in which in fact he was, the protector of the disciples of violence. This was due partly to Maunders's astute manipulations, but largely also to the obsession by which apparently he was seized that he was the lord of the manor in the style of the _ancien régime_, not to be bothered in his beneficent despotism with the restrictions that kept the common man in his place. As a foreigner he naturally cared little for the political development of the region; as long as his own possessions, therefore, were not tampered with, he was not greatly disturbed by any depredations which his neighbors might suffer. He employed hands without number; he seemed to believe any "fool lie" a man felt inclined to tell him; he distributed blankets, saddles and spurs. Naturally, Maunders clung to him like a leech with his train of lawbreakers about him.

The immunity which Maunders enjoyed and radiated over his followers was only one factor of many in perpetuating the lawlessness for which the Bad Lands had for years been famous. Geography favored the criminal along the Little Missouri. Montana was a step or two to the west, Wyoming was a haven of refuge to the southwest, Canada was within easy reach to the north. A needle in a haystack, moreover, was less difficult to lay one's finger upon than a "two-gun man" tucked away in one of a thousand ravines, scarred with wash-outs and filled with buckbrush, in the broken country west of Bullion Butte.

Western Dakota was sanctuary, and from every direction of the compass knaves of varying degrees of iniquity and misguided ability came to enjoy it. There was no law in the Bad Lands but "six-shooter law." The days were reasonably orderly, for there were "jobs" for every one; but the nights were wild. There was not much diversion of an uplifting sort in Medora that June of 1884. There was not even an "op'ry house." Butchers and cowboys, carpenters and laborers, adventurous young college graduates and younger sons of English noblemen, drank and gambled and shouted and "shot up the town together" with "horse-rustlers" and faro-dealers and "bad men" with notches on their guns. "Two-gun men" appeared from God-knows-whence, generally well supplied with money, and disappeared, the Lord knew whither, appearing elsewhere, possibly, with a band of horses whose brands had melted away under the application of a red-hot frying-pan, or suffered a sea-change at the touch of a "running iron." Again they came to Medora, and again they disappeared. The horse-market was brisk at Medora, though only the elect knew where it was or who bought and sold or from what frantic owner, two hundred miles to the north or south, the horses had been spirited away.

It was a gay life, as Packard remarked.

The "gayety" was obvious even to the most casual traveler whose train stopped for three noisy minutes at the Medora "depot." "Dutch Wannigan," when he remarked that "seeing the trains come in was all the scenery we had," plumbed the depths of Medora's hunger "for something to happen." A train (even a freight) came to stand for excitement, not because of any diversion it brought of itself out of a world of "dudes" and police-officers, but because of the deviltry it never failed to inspire in certain leading citizens of Medora.

For Medora had a regular reception committee, whose membership varied, but included always the most intoxicated cowpunchers who happened to be in town. Its leading spirits were Bill Williams, the saloon-keeper, Van Zander, the wayward but attractive son of a Dutch patrician, and his bosom friend, Hell-Roaring Bill Jones; and if they were fertile in invention, they were no less energetic in carrying their inventions into execution. To shoot over the roofs of the cars was a regular pastime, to shoot through the windows was not unusual, but it was a genius who thought of the notion of crawling under the dining-car and shooting through the floor. He scattered the scrambled eggs which the negro waiter was carrying, but did no other damage. These general salvos of greeting, Bill Jones, Bill Williams, and the millionaire's son from Rotterdam were accustomed to vary by specific attention to passengers walking up and down the platform.

It happened one day that an old man in a derby hat stepped off the train for a bit of an airing while the engine was taking water. Bill Jones, spying the hat, gave an indignant exclamation and promptly shot it off the man's head. The terrified owner hurried into the train, leaving the brim behind.

"Come back, come back!" shouted Bill Jones, "we don't want the blinkety-blank thing in Medora."

The old man, terrified, looked into Bill Jones's sinister face. He found no relenting there. Deeply humiliated, he walked over to where the battered brim lay, picked it up, and reëntered the train.

Medora, meanwhile, was acquiring a reputation for iniquity with overland tourists which the cowboys felt in duty bound to live up to. For a time the trains stopped both at Medora and Little Missouri. On one occasion, as the engine was taking water at the wicked little hamlet on the west bank, the passengers in the sleeping-car, which was standing opposite the Pyramid Park Hotel, heard shots, evidently fired in the hotel. They were horrified a minute later to see a man, apparently dead, being carried out of the front door and around the side of the hotel to the rear. A minute later another volley was heard, and another "dead" man was seen being carried out. It was a holocaust before the train finally drew out of the station, bearing away a car-full of gasping "dudes."

They did not know that it was the same man who was being carried round and round, and only the wise ones surmised that the shooting was a volley fired over the "corpse" every time the "procession" passed the bar.

All this was very diverting and did harm to nobody. Roosevelt himself, no doubt, took huge satisfaction in it. But there were aspects of Medora's disregard for the conventions which were rather more serious. If you possessed anything of value, you carried it about with you if you expected to find it when you wanted it. You studied the ways of itinerant butchers with much attention, and if you had any cattle of your own, you kept an eye on the comings and goings of everybody who sold beef or veal. The annoying element in all this vigilance, however, was that, even if you could point your finger at the man who had robbed you, it did not profit you much unless you were ready to shoot him. A traveling salesman, whose baggage had been looted in Medora, swore out a warrant in Morton County, a hundred and fifty miles to the east. The Morton County sheriff came to serve the warrant, but the warrant remained in his pocket. He was "close-herded" in the sagebrush across the track from the "depot" by the greater part of the male population, on the general principle that an officer of the law was out of place in Medora whatever his mission might be; and put on board the next train going east.

In all the turmoil, the Marquis was in his element. He was never a participant in the hilarity and he was never known to "take a drink" except the wine he drank with his meals. He kept his distance and his dignity. But he regarded the lawlessness merely as part of frontier life, and took no steps to stop it. Roosevelt was too young and untested a member of the community to exert any open influence during those first weeks of his active life in the Bad Lands. It remained for the ex-baseball player, the putative owner of a stage-line that refused to materialize, to give the tempestuous little community its first faint notion of the benefits of order.

Packard, as editor of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_, had, in a manner entirely out of proportion to his personal force, or the personal force that any other man except the most notable might have brought to bear, been a civilizing influence from the beginning. The train that brought his presses from the East brought civilization with it, a somewhat shy and wraithlike civilization, but yet a thing made in the image and containing in itself the germ of that spirit which is the antithesis of barbarism, based on force, being itself the visible expression of the potency of ideas. The _Bad Lands Cowboy_ brought the first tenuous foreshadowing of democratic government to the banks of the Little Missouri, inasmuch as it was an organ which could mould public opinion and through which public opinion might find articulation. It was thus that a youngster, not a year out of college, became, in a sense, the first representative of the American idea in the Marquis de Mores's feudal appanage.

Packard was extraordinarily well fitted not only to be a frontier editor, but to be a frontier editor in Medora. His college education gave him a point of contact with the Marquis which most of the other citizens of the Bad Lands lacked; his independence of spirit, on the other hand, kept him from becoming the Frenchman's tool. He was altogether fearless, he was a crack shot and a good rider, and he was not without effectiveness with his fists. But he was also tactful and tolerant; and he shared, and the cowboys knew he shared, their love of the open country and the untrammeled ways of the frontier. Besides, he had a sense of humor, which in Medora in the spring of 1884, was better than great riches.

The _Cowboy_ was Packard and Packard was the _Cowboy_. He printed what he pleased, dictating his editorials, as it were, "to the machine," he himself being the machine translating ideas into type as they came. His personal responsibility was absolute. There was no one behind whom he could hide. If any one objected to any statement in Medora's weekly newspaper, he knew whom to reproach. "Every printed word," said Packard, a long time after, "bore my brand. There were no mavericks in the _Bad Lands Cowboy_ articles. There was no libel law; no law of any kind except six-shooter rights. And I was the only man who never carried a six-shooter."

To a courageous man, editing a frontier paper was an adventure which had thrills which editors in civilized communities never knew. Packard spoke his mind freely. Medora gasped a little. Packard expressed his belief that a drunken man who kills, or commits any other crime, should be punished for the crime and also for getting drunk, and then there was trouble; for the theory of the frontier was that a man who was drunk was not responsible for what he did, and accidents which happened while he was in that condition, though unfortunate, were to be classed, not with crimes, but with tornadoes and hailstorms and thunder bolts, rather as "acts of God." The general expression of the editor's opposition to this amiable theory brought only rumblings, but the specific applications brought indignant citizens with six-shooters. Packard had occasion to note the merits as a lethal weapon of the iron "side-stick" with which he locked his type forms. It revealed itself as more potent than a six-shooter, and a carving-knife was not in a class with it; as he proved to the satisfaction of all concerned when a drunken butcher, who attempted to cut a Chinaman into fragments, came to the _Cowboy_ office, "to forestall adverse comment in the next issue."

Packard was amused to note how much his ability to defend himself simplified the problem of moulding public opinion in Medora.

The law-abiding ranchmen along the Little Missouri, who found a spokesman in the editor of the _Cowboy_, recognized that what the Bad Lands needed was government, government with a club if possible, but in any event something from which a club could be developed. But the elements of disorder, which had been repulsed when they had suggested the organization of Billings County a year previous, now vigorously resisted organization when the impetus came from the men who had blocked their efforts. But the _Cowboy_ fought valiantly, and the Dickinson _Press_ in its own way did what it could to help.

Medora is clamoring for a county organization in Billings
County [the editor reported.] We hope they will get it. If
there is any place along the line that needs a criminal
court and a jail it is Medora. Four-fifths of the business
before our justice of the peace comes from Billings County.

A week later, the _Press_ reported that the county was about to be organized and that John C. Fisher and A. T. Packard were to be two out of the three county commissioners. Then something happened. What it was is shrouded in mystery. Possibly the Marquis, who had never been acquitted by a jury of the killing of Riley Luffsey, decided at the last minute that, in case the indictment, which was hovering over him like an evil bird, should suddenly plunge and strike, he would stand a better chance away from Medora than in it. A word from him to Maunders and from Maunders to his "gang" would unquestionably have served to bring about the organization of the county; a word spoken against the move would also have served effectually to block it. There was, however, a certain opposition to the movement for organization on the part of the most sober elements of the population. Some of the older ranchmen suggested to Packard and to Fisher that they count noses. They did so, and the result was not encouraging. Doubtless they might organize the county, but the control of it would pass into the hands of the crooked. Whatever causes lay behind the sudden evaporation of the project, the fact stands that for the time being the Bad Lands remained under the easy-going despotism of the Marquis de Mores and his prime minister, Jake Maunders, unhampered and unillumined by the impertinences of democracy.

The Dickinson _Press_ had truth on its side when it uttered its wail that Medora needed housing facilities for the unruly. Medora had never had a jail. Little Missouri had had an eight by ten shack which one man, who knew some history, christened "the Bastile," and which was used as a sort of convalescent hospital for men who were too drunk to distinguish between their friends and other citizens when they started shooting. But a sudden disaster had overtaken the Bastile one day when a man called Black Jack had come into Little Missouri on a wrecking train. He had a reputation that extended from Mandan to Miles City for his ability to carry untold quantities of whiskey without showing signs of intoxication; but Little Missouri proved his undoing. The "jag" he developed was something phenomenal, and he was finally locked up in the Bastile by common consent. The train crew, looking for Black Jack at three in the morning, located him after much searching. But the Bastile had been built by the soldiers and resisted their efforts to break in. Thereupon they threw a line about the shack and with the engine hauled it to the side of a flatcar attached to the train. Then with a derrick they hoisted Little Missouri's only depository for the helpless inebriate on the flatcar and departed westward. At their leisure they chopped Black Jack out of his confinement. They dumped the Bastile over the embankment somewhere a mile west of town.

The collapse of the efforts of the champions of order to organize the county left the problem of dealing with the lawlessness that was rampant, as before, entirely to the impulse of outraged individuals. There was no court, no officer of the law. Each man was a law unto himself, and settled his own quarrels. The wonder, under such circumstances, is not that there was so much bloodshed, but that there was so little. There was, after all, virtue in the anarchy of the frontier. Personal responsibility was a powerful curb-bit.

In the Bad Lands, in June, 1884, there was a solid minority of law-abiding citizens who could be depended on in any crisis. There was a larger number who could be expected as a rule to stand with the angels, but who had friendly dealings with the outlaws and were open to suspicion. Then there was the indeterminate and increasing number of men whose sources of revenue were secret, who toiled not, but were known to make sudden journeys from which they returned with fat "rolls" in their pockets. It was to curb this sinister third group that Packard had attempted to organize the county. Failing in that project, he issued a call for a "mass meeting."

The meeting was duly held, and, if it resembled the conference of a committee more than a popular uprising, that was due mainly to the fact that a careful census taken by the editor of the _Cowboy_ revealed that in the whole of Billings County, which included in its limits at that time a territory the size of Massachusetts, there lived exactly one hundred and twenty-two males and twenty-seven females. There was a certain hesitancy on the part even of the law-abiding to assert too loudly their opposition to the light-triggered elements which were "frisking" their horses and cattle. The "mass meeting" voted, in general, that order was preferable to disorder and adjourned, after unanimously electing Packard chief of police (with no police to be chief of) and the Marquis de Mores head of the fire department (which did not exist).

"I have always felt there was something I did not know back of that meeting," said Packard afterward. "I think Roosevelt started it, as he and I were agreed the smaller ranches were losing enough cattle and horses to make the difference between profit and loss. It was a constant topic of conversation among the recognized law-and-order men and all of us agreed the thieves must be checked. I don't even remember how the decision came about to hold the meeting. It was decided to hold it, however, and I gave the notice wide publicity in the _Bad Lands Cowboy_. I was never more surprised than when Merrifield nominated me for chief of police. Merrifield was a partner with Roosevelt and the Ferris boys in the Chimney Butte Ranch and I have always thought he and Roosevelt had agreed beforehand to nominate me."

Packard took up his duties, somewhat vague in his mind concerning what was expected of him. There was no organization behind him, no executive committee to give him instructions. With a large liberality, characteristic of the frontier, the "mass meeting" had left to his own discretion the demarcation of his "authority" and the manner of its assertion. His "authority," in fact, was a gigantic bluff, but he was not one to let so immaterial a detail weaken his nerve.

The fire department died stillborn; but the police force promptly asserted itself. Packard had decided to "work on the transients" first, for he could persuade them, better than he could the residents, that he had an organization behind him, with masks and a rope. From the start he made it a point not to mix openly in any "altercation," where he could avoid it, for the simple reason that the actual fighting was in most cases done by professional "bad men," and the death of either party to the duel, or both, was considered a source of jubilation rather than of regret. He devoted his attention mainly to those "floaters" whom he suspected of being in league with the outlaws, or who, by their recklessness with firearms, made themselves a public nuisance. He seldom, if ever, made an arrest. He merely drew his man aside and told him that "it had been decided" that he should leave town at once and never again appear in the round-up district of the Bad Lands. In no case was his warning disobeyed. On the few occasions when it was necessary for him to interfere publicly, there were always friends of order in the neighborhood to help him seal the exile in a box car and ship him east or west on the next freight. A number of hilarious disciples of justice varied this proceeding one evening by breaking open the car in which one of Packard's prisoners lay confined and tying him to the cowcatcher of a train which had just arrived. Word came back from Glendive at midnight that the prisoner had reached his destination in safety, though somewhat breathless, owing to the fact that the cowcatcher "had picked up a Texas steer on the way."

Packard's activity as chief of police had value in keeping the "floaters" in something resembling order; but it scarcely touched the main problem with which the law-abiding ranchmen had to contend, which was the extinction of the horse and cattle thieves.

To an extraordinary extent these thieves possessed the Bad Lands. They were here, there, and everywhere, sinister, intangible shadows, weaving in and out of the bright-colored fabric of frontier life. They were in every saloon and in almost every ranch-house. They rode on the round-ups, they sat around the camp-fire with the cowpunchers. Some of the most capable ranchmen were in league with them, bankers east and west along the railroad were hand in glove with them. A man scarcely dared denounce the thieves to his best friend for fear his friend might be one of them.

There were countless small bands which operated in western Dakota, eastern Montana, and northwestern Wyoming, each loosely organized as a unit, yet all bound together in the tacit fellowship of outlawry. The most tangible bond among them was that they all bought each other's stolen horses, and were all directors of the same "underground railway." Together they constituted not a band, but a "system," that had its tentacles in every horse and cattle "outfit" in the Bad Lands.

As far as the system had a head at all, that head was a man named Axelby. Other men stole a horse here or there, but Axelby stole whole herds of fifty and a hundred at one daring sweep. He was in appearance a typical robber chieftain, a picturesque devil with piercing black eyes and a genius for organization and leadership. In addition to his immediate band, scores of men whom he never saw, and who were scattered over a territory greater than New England, served him with absolute fidelity. They were most of them saloon-keepers, gamblers, and men who by their prominence in the community would be unsuspected; and there were among them more than a few ranchmen who were not averse to buying horses under the market price. With the aid of these men, Axelby created his smooth-running "underground railway" from the Big Horn Mountains and the Black Hills north through Wyoming, Dakota, and Montana. His agents in the settlements performed the office of spies, keeping him in touch with opportunities to operate on a large scale; and the ranchmen kept open the "underground" route by means of which he was able to spirit his great herds of horses across the Canadian line.

By the spring of 1884, Axelby's fame had reached the East, and even the New York _Sun_ gave him a column:

Mr. Axelby is said to be at the head of a trusty band as
fearless and as lawless as himself. The Little Missouri and
Powder River districts are the theater of his operations. An
Indian is Mr. Axelby's detestation. He kills him at sight if
he can. He considers that Indians have no right to own
ponies and he takes their ponies whenever he can. Mr. Axelby
has repeatedly announced his determination not to be taken
alive. The men of the frontier say he bears a charmed life,
and the hairbreadth 'scapes of which they have made him the
hero are numerous and of the wildest stamp.

During the preceding February, Axelby and his band had had a clash with the Federal authorities, which had created an enormous sensation up and down the Little Missouri, but had settled nothing so far as the horse-thieves were concerned. In the Bad Lands the thieves became daily more pestiferous. Two brothers named Smith and two others called "Big Jack" and "Little Jack" conducted the major operations in Billings County. They had their cabin in a coulee west of the Big Ox Bow, forty miles south of Medora, in the wildest part of the Bad Lands, and "worked the country" from there north and south. They seldom stole from white men, recognizing the advisability of not irritating their neighbors too much, but drove off Indian ponies in herds. Their custom was to steal Sioux horses from one of the reservations, keep them in the Scoria Hills a month or more until all danger of pursuit was over, and then drive them north over the prairie between Belfield and Medora, through the Killdeer Mountains to the northeastern part of the Territory. There they would steal other horses from the Grosventres Indians, and drive them to their cache in the Scoria Hills whence they could emerge with them at their good pleasure and sell them at Pierre. There had been other "underground railways," but this had a charm of its own, for it "carried freight" both ways. Occasionally the thieves succeeded in selling horses to the identical Indians they had originally robbed. The efficiency of it all was in its way magnificent.

Through the record of thievery up and down the river, that spring of 1884, the shadow of Jake Maunders slips in and out, making no noise and leaving no footprints. It was rumored that when a sheriff or a United States marshal from somewhere drifted into Medora, Maunders would ride south in the dead of night to the Big Ox Bow and give the thieves the warning; and ride north again and be back in his own shack before dawn. It was rumored, further, that when the thieves had horses to sell, Maunders had "first pick." His own nephew was said to be a confederate of Big Jack. One day that spring, the Jacks and Maunders's nephew, driving a herd of trail-weary horses, stopped for a night at Lang's Sage Bottom camp. They told Lincoln Lang that they had bought the horses in Wyoming. Maunders sold the herd himself, and the news that came from the south that the herd had been stolen made no perceptible ruffle. The ranchmen had enough difficulty preserving their own property and were not making any altruistic efforts to protect the horses of ranchmen two hundred miles away. Maunders continued to flourish. From Deadwood came rumors that Joe Morrill, the deputy marshal, was carrying on a business not dissimilar to that which was making Maunders rich in Medora.

When even the officers of the law were in league with the thieves or afraid of them, there was little that the individual could do except pocket his losses with as good grace as possible and keep his mouth shut. The "system" tolerated no interference with its mechanism.

Fisher, smarting under the theft of six of the "top" horses from the Marquis de Mores's "outfit" called one of the cowboys one day into his office. His name was Pierce Bolan, and Fisher knew him to be not only absolutely trustworthy, but unusually alert.

"You're out on the range all the time," said Fisher. "Can't you give me a line on the fellows who are getting away with our horses?"

The cowboy hesitated and shook his head. "If I knew," he answered, "I wouldn't dare tell you. My toes would be turned up the first time I showed up on the range."

"What in ---- are we going to do?"

"Why, treat the thieves considerate," said Bolan. "Don't get 'em sore on you. When one of them comes up and wants the loan of a horse, why, let him have it."

Fisher turned to the foreman of one of the largest "outfits" for advice and received a similar answer. The reputable stockmen were very much in the minority, it seemed, and wise men treated the thieves with "consideration" and called it insurance.

There were ranchmen, however, who were too high-spirited to tolerate the payment of such tribute in their behalf, and too interested in the future of the region as a part of the American commonwealth to be willing to temporize with outlaws. Roosevelt was one of them, in the valley of the Little Missouri. Another, across the Montana border in the valley of the Yellowstone, was Granville Stuart.

Stuart was a "forty-niner," who had crossed the continent in a prairie-schooner as a boy and had drifted into Virginia City in the days of its hot youth. He was a man of iron nerve, and when the time came for a law-abiding minority to rise against a horde of thieves and desperadoes, he naturally became one of the leaders. He played an important part in the extermination of the famous Plummer band of outlaws in the early sixties, and was generally regarded as one of the most notable figures in Montana Territory.