The hunting trips which Roosevelt and Merrifield made on this side or the other of the trail had their charm, and their perils also. There was one excursion, while the wagon was crawling up the Clear Fork of the Powder River, which for several reasons remained memorable.

The party was out of food, for the country they had been traversing was not favorable for game, and Roosevelt and Merrifield started forth one afternoon, with hope goaded by necessity, to replenish the larder.

Where the hilly country joined the river bottom, it broke off into steep bluffs, presenting an ascent before which even a bronco, it seemed, had his hesitations. Roosevelt and his companion rode into a wash-out, and then, dismounting, led their ponies along a clay ledge from which they turned off and went straight up an almost perpendicular sandy bluff. As Merrifield, who was in the lead, turned off the ledge, his horse, plunging in his attempt to clamber up the steep bluff, overbalanced himself, and for a second stood erect on his hind legs trying to recover his equilibrium. As Roosevelt, who was directly beneath him, made a frantic leap with his horse to one side, Merrifield's pony rolled over backwards, turned two complete somersaults and landed with a crash at the bottom of the wash-out, feet uppermost. They did not dare to hope that the horse would not be "done for," but he proved on investigation to be very much alive. Without aid he struggled to his feet, looking about in a rather shame-faced fashion, apparently none the worse for his fall. With vigorous pulling, they drew Roosevelt's pony to the top, and by the same method, augmented with coaxing and abuse, they brought his fellow to his side at last, and proceeded on their excursion.

Late in the afternoon they came on three blacktail deer. Roosevelt took a running shot at two hundred yards and missed, took another and missed again, though this time he managed to turn the animals in their flight. They disappeared round the shoulder of a bluff, and Roosevelt, suspecting that they would reappear when they had recovered from their terror, elevated his sights to four hundred yards and waited. It was not long before one of the three stepped out. Roosevelt raised his rifle. The shot, at that distance, was almost impossible, but there was zest in the trying. Suddenly another buck stepped out and walked slowly toward the first. Roosevelt waited until the heads were in line and fired. Over went both bucks. Roosevelt paced off the distance. It was just four hundred and thirty-one long paces.

It was while they were ascending the Clear Fork of the Powder that they discovered a band of Indians camped a short distance from the place where they themselves had halted for the night.

"I'm going over to see those Indians," remarked Merrifield after dinner that evening.

"What do you want to go over there for?" asked Roosevelt.

"Out in this country," responded the hunter dryly, "you always want to know who your neighbors are."

They rode over together. The Indians were Cheyennes. Experience had taught Merrifield that nothing was so conducive to peaceful relations with a red neighbor as to prove to him that you could beat him at his own game. He consequently suggested a shooting-match. The Indians agreed. To Roosevelt's astonishment they proved to be very bad shots, and not only Merrifield, but Roosevelt himself, completely outclassed them in the competition. The Indians were noticeably impressed. Merrifield and Roosevelt rode back to their camp conscious that so far as those particular Indians were concerned no anxiety need disturb their slumbers.

"Indians," remarked Merrifield later, "are the best judges of human nature in the world. When an Indian finds out that you are a good shot, he will leave you absolutely alone to go and come as you like. Indians are just like white men. They are not going to start something when they know you can out-shoot them."

For three weeks they traveled through desolation before they came at last to the goal of their journey. At the foot of the first steep rise, on the banks of Crazy Woman Creek, a few miles south of the army post at Buffalo, they left the wagon, and following an old Indian trail started into the mountains, driving their pack-ponies before them.

It was pleasant, after three burning weeks of treeless prairie, to climb into the shadowy greenness of the mountains. All about them was the music of running water, where clear brooks made their way through deep gorges and under interlacing boughs. Groves of great pines rose from grassy meadows and fringed the glades that lay here and there like quiet parks in the midst of the wilderness.

The hunters pitched their camp at last in a green valley beside a boisterous mountain brook. The weather was clear, with thin ice coursing the dark waters of the mountain tarns, and now and again slight snowfalls that made the forest gleam and glisten in the moonlight like fairyland. Through the frosty air they could hear the vibrant, musical notes of the bull elk far off, calling to the cows or challenging one another.

No country could have been better adapted to still hunting than the great, pine-clad mountains, studded with open glades. Roosevelt loved the thrill of the chase, but he loved no less the companionship of the majestic trees and the shy wild creatures which sprang across his path or ran with incredible swiftness along the overhanging boughs. Moving on noiseless moccasins he caught alluring glimpses of the inner life of the mountains.

The days passed very pleasantly in the crystal air and vibrant solitude of their mountain hunting grounds. The fare that old Lebo provided was excellent, and to the three men, who had for weeks been accustomed to make small fires from dried brush or from sagebrush roots laboriously dug out of the ground, it was a treat to sit at night before the roaring pine-logs.

"We've come to a land at last," remarked the quaint old teamster with satisfaction, "where the wood grows on trees."

They shot several elk promptly, but the grizzlies they were after eluded them. At last, after a week Merrifield, riding into camp one dusk, with a shout announced that he had come upon grizzly-bear signs some ten miles away. They shifted camp at once.

That afternoon, on a crag overlooking a wild ravine, Roosevelt shot another great bull elk. To Merrifield it seemed as though the elk might constitute a day's satisfactory achievement. But Roosevelt was indefatigable. "Now," he said with gusto, contemplating the magnificent antlers, "we'll go out to-night and get a bear."

But that night they found nothing. Returning next day with Merrifield for the carcass of the elk however, they found that a grizzly had been feeding on it. They crouched in hiding for the bear's return. Night fell, owls began to hoot dismally from the tops of the tall trees, and a lynx wailed from the depths of the woods, but the bear did not come.

Early next morning they were again at the elk carcass. The bear had evidently eaten his fill during the night. His tracks were clear, and they followed them noiselessly over the yielding carpet of moss and pine-needles, to an elk-trail leading into a tangled thicket of young spruces.

Suddenly Merrifield sank on one knee, turning half round, his face aflame with excitement. Roosevelt strode silently past him, his gun "at the ready."

There, not ten steps off, was the great bear slowly rising from his bed among the young spruces. He had heard the hunters and reared himself on his haunches. Seeing them, he dropped again on all-fours, and the shaggy hair on his neck and shoulders bristled as he turned toward them.

Roosevelt aimed fairly between the small, glittering eyes, and fired.

Doubtless my face was pretty white [Roosevelt wrote "Bamie" a week later,] but the blue barrel was as steady as a rock as I glanced along it until I could see the top of the bead fairly between his two sinister-looking eyes; as I pulled the trigger I jumped aside out of the smoke, to be ready if he charged, but it was needless, for the great brute was struggling in his death agony, and as you will see when I bring home his skin, the bullet hole was as exactly between his eyes as if I had measured the distance with a carpenter's rule.

At last, one cool morning, when the branches of the evergreens were laden with the feathery snow that had fallen overnight, the hunters struck camp, and in single file, with the pack-ponies laden with the trophies of the hunt, moved down through the woods and across the canyons to the edge of the great table-land, then slowly down the steep slope to its foot, where they found the canvas-topped wagon. Next day they set out on the three-hundred-mile journey home to the Maltese Cross.

For once I have made a very successful hunting trip [Roosevelt wrote "Bamie" from Fort McKinney.] I have just come out of the mountains and will start at once for the Little Missouri, which I expect to reach in a fortnight, and a week afterwards will be on my way home. Merrifield killed two bears and three elk; he has been an invaluable guide for game, and of course the real credit for the bag rests with him, for he found most of the animals. But I really shot well this time. Merrifield, who is a perfectly fearless and reckless man, has no more regard for a grizzly bear than he has for a jack-rabbit; the last one he killed, he wished to merely break his leg with the first shot "so as to see what he'd do." I had not at all this feeling, and fully realized that we were hunting dangerous game; still I never made steadier shooting than at the grizzlies. I had grand sport with the elk, too, and the woods fairly rang with my shouting when I brought down my first lordly bull, with great branching antlers; but after I had begun bear-killing, other sport seemed tame.

So I have had good sport; and enough excitement and fatigue to prevent overmuch thought; and, moreover, I have at last been able to sleep well at night. But unless I was bear-hunting all the time I am afraid I should soon get as restless with this life as with the life at home.



XI

The rattlesnake bites you, the scorpion stings, The mosquito delights you with buzzing wings; The sand-burrs prevail, and so do the ants, And those who sit down need half-soles on their pants.

Cowboy song

The day that Roosevelt started south on his journey to the mountains, Sewall returned north down the river to rejoin his nephew. Will Dow was watching the cattle on the plateau a few miles south of Elkhorn Bottom, near the mouth of the defile which the cowboys called Shipka Pass.

"You never looked so good to me," he said to Sewall that night, "as you did when I saw your head coming up the Shipka Pass."

They worked together among the cattle for another two or three weeks. They were on the best of terms with Captain Robins by this time, for there was much to like and much to respect in the gruff, dark little seafaring man, who had suffered shipwreck in more ways than one, and was out on the plains because of a marriage that had gone on the rocks. He was an excellent man with the horses, and good company about a camp-fire, for somewhere he had picked up an education and was well-informed. He gave the two tenderfeet a good training in the rudiments of "cattle-punching," sending first one and then the other off to distant round-ups to test their abilities among strangers. Sewall proved unadaptable, for he was rather old to learn new tricks so far removed from the activities that were familiar to him; but Dow became a "cowhand" overnight.

Experience was not greatly mollifying Sewall's opinion of the region in which his lot had been cast.

The sun when it shines clear [he wrote his brother Sam after he had been in the Bad Lands six weeks] strikes the bare sides of the Buttes and comes down on the treeless bottoms hot enough to make a Rattlesnake pant. If you can get in the shade there is most always a breeze. The grand trouble is you can't get in the shade. There's no shade to get into and the great sandy Desert is cool compared with some of the gulches, but as you ride it is not quite so bad. The Ponys when they are up to some trick are lively and smart, all other times they are tired, are very tame and look very meek and gentle. But just let one of them get the start of you in any way and you are left. Am glad to say mine has never really got the start yet. We have had a number of differences and controverseys, but my arguments have always prevailed so far.

About the middle of September, the two backwoodsmen moved down to Elkhorn Bottom, leaving Robins in charge of the cattle. Dow went away on a round-up and Sewall undertook to put in livable shape a dugout that stood on the river-bank some thirty or forty yards from the place which Roosevelt had, on a previous visit, selected as the site for the ranch-house which Sewall and Dow were to build. The shack had belonged to a hunter who had left the country, and was not sumptuous in its fittings.

as in cut on left hip and right side, both or either, and down cut dewlap.

Horse brand, [brand drawing] on left hip.

ELKHORN RANCH. THEODORE ROOSEVELT, Proprietor. SEAWALL & DOW, Managers.

P. O. address, Little Missouri, D. T. Range, Little Missouri, twenty-five miles north of railroad.

as in cut, [brand drawing] on left side, on right, [brand drawing] or the reverse.

Horse brand, [brand drawing] on right or left shoulder.]

Dow returned from the round-up with interesting news. The Marquis, it seemed, had by no means resigned his claim to the territory on which Roosevelt had established "squatter's rights." Dow overheard one of the Marquis's men confiding to another that "there'd be some dead men round that Elkhorn shack some day."

Sewall received the news with calm satisfaction. "Well," he drawled, "if there's going to be any dead men hereabouts, I cal'late we can fix it so it won't be us."

Sewall and Dow began cutting timber for the house in a thick grove of cottonwoods two or three hundred yards from the river, keeping a weather eye open for trouble. A day or two after Dow's return from the round-up, one of the Marquis's men rode up to them where they were working.

"There's a vigilance committee around, I hear," he remarked casually. "You haven't seen anything of 'em yet hereabouts, have you? I hear they're considerin' makin' a call on you folks."

The men from Maine said to each other that the thing began to look "smoky." They consulted Captain Robins, who agreed that "smoky" was the word, and they carried rifles after that when they went to cut timber.

For they knew very well that the hint which the Marquis's man had lightly thrown out was no idle attempt at intimidation based on nothing but the hope that the Easterners were timid. The activities of Granville Stuart's raiders had stimulated the formation of other vigilance committees, inspired in part by less lofty motives than those which impelled the president of the Montana Stockgrowers' Association and his friends. On the border between Dakota and Montana a company of rough characters who called themselves vigilantes began to make themselves the topic of excited conversation. They were said to be after horse-thieves, but it became noticeable that their activities seemed to be directed mainly against the small ranchers on the edge of the Bad Lands. It was rumored that certain large ranchmen were backing them in the hope of driving the "nesters" out of the country.

The cowmen here are opposed, not only to the Indians, but also to white settlers [wrote the Western correspondent of the New York Sun]. They want the land these white and red settlers are taking up. Vast tracts—uncultivated ranges, not settlements—are what they desire. The small holder—the man with a little bunch of cattle—is not wanted. They freeze him out. Somehow he loses cattle, or they are killed by parties unknown.

Sewall and Dow had a right to keep their guns near them while they were at work in the grove on Elkhorn Bottom.

Meanwhile, the endeavors of Granville Stuart's vigilantes were having their results. The precipitous methods of the "stranglers," as they were grimly called, began to give the most hardened "the creeps." Who the "stranglers" themselves were, nobody seemed to know. It was rumored, on the one hand, that they included the biggest ranch-owners in the Northwest; on the other hand, it was stated that they were bands of lawless Texans driven out of the Panhandle and hired by the ranchmen at thirty dollars a month "to clean up the country." Whoever they were, they moved swiftly and acted without hesitation. The newspapers said little about them, partly because they knew little, partly because there was a general tacit understanding that the whole thing, though necessary, was a disagreeable business, and the less said of it the better.

The truth seems to be that behind the whole movement to rid eastern Montana and western Dakota of the horse-thieves was a loose organization of cattlemen of which Granville Stuart and his friends were the directing heads. What funds were needed they provided. They designated, moreover, certain responsible men in the different round-up districts, to whom subordinate bands of the "stranglers" reported from time to time for orders. Each subordinate band operated independently of the others, and the leader in one district knew nothing as a rule of the operations of the other bands. He told the "stranglers" what men to "get," and that was all; and a day or two later a man here and a man there would be found dangling from a cottonwood.

In certain cases, Packard, who successfully combined the functions of law officer and news-gatherer, knew beforehand what men were to be hanged. On one occasion he was informed that two notorious characters were to be done away with on the following Thursday. The operations of the stranglers were as a rule terrifyingly punctual, and as Thursday was the day on which the Cowboy went to press, he announced in it, with an awful punctuality of his own, the sudden demise of the thieves in question.

He carried the papers to the depot to put them on the afternoon train bound for the west, for the Cowboy was popular with the passengers and he disposed of an edition of seven or eight hundred weekly with them in excess of his regular edition. As he was about to step on the train, two men stepped down. They were the horse-thieves whose death he had too confidently announced.

He stared at them, shocked to the marrow, feeling as though he had seen ghosts. Would they stay in Medora, or would they go on to where frontier justice was awaiting them? Would they see the announcement in the Cowboy? He remembered that they could not read.

Fascinated, he watched them. The train started. The two men jumped aboard.

That night they were hanged.

Exactly what relation the vigilance committee which was seeking to drive the "nesters" out of western Montana bore to Granville Stuart's organization, is difficult to determine. They had probably originally been one of the subordinate bands, who were "feeling their oats," and, under the pretense of "cleaning up the country," were cleaning up personal scores. The captain of the band was a man called "Flopping Bill," a distinctly shady character, and the band itself was made up of irresponsible creatures who welcomed the opportunity to do, in the cause of righteousness, a number of things for which under ordinary circumstances they would have been promptly hanged. Their first act as a body was to engage a French Canadian named Louis La Pache as guide. La Pache was himself awaiting trial at Miles City for horse-stealing, but there is no indication in the records that he was chosen because he was ready to turn State's evidence. He was merely the type that Flopping Bill's guardians of law and order would naturally choose.

The raiders began their activities near the mouth of Beaver Creek, not ten miles from the spot where Sewall and Dow (with their rifles at hand) were hewing timber for the new house. Two cowpunchers had recently started a ranch there. They were generally considered honest, but the vigilantes had marked them for destruction, and descended upon the ranch ready to hang any one in sight. They found only a hired man, an Englishman, for the ranchmen had got wind of the raid and fled; and spent their enthusiasm for order in "allowing the Englishman to feel the sensation of a lariat round his neck," as the record runs, releasing him on his promise to leave the country forever. Thereupon they nailed a paper, signed with skull and cross-bones, on the door of the cabin ordering the ranchmen "to vacate"; and proceeded to other pastures.

They stopped at a half dozen ranches, terrorizing and burning, but catching no horse-thieves. It is impossible through the obscurity that shrouds the grim events of that autumn to determine to what extent they were honestly in pursuit of lawbreakers or were merely endeavoring, at the behest of some of the great cattle-owners, to drive the small stockmen out of the country. Their motives were possibly mixed. The small ranchers were notoriously not always what they seemed. Most of the horse-thieves posed as "nesters," hiding in underground stables by day the horses they stole by night. Each registered his own brand and sometimes more than one; but the brands were carefully contrived. If you intended, for instance, to prey on the great herds of the "Long X outfit," thus [X brand], you called your brand "Four Diamonds," marking it thus [diamond brand]. A quick fire and a running iron did the trick. It was all very simple and very profitable and if you were caught there was always a Certain Person (to whom you were accustomed to give an accounting), and beyond him a vague but powerful Somebody Else to stand between you and the law. There would be no trial, or, if there were a trial, there would be no witnesses, or, if there were witnesses, there would be a lenient judge and a skeptical jury. The methods of Flopping Bill's party were no doubt reprehensible, but in attacking some of the little "nesters" the raiders came close to the heart of many troubles.

But indiscriminate terrorizing by any one in any cause was not to the taste of the ranchmen up and down the Little Missouri who happened to be law-abiding. The raiders were starting prairie fires, moreover, with the purpose evidently of destroying the pasture of the small stockmen, and were in consequence vitally affecting the interests of every man who owned cattle anywhere in the valley. That these acts of vandalism were the work of a body from another Territory, invading the Bad Lands for purposes of reform, did not add greatly to their popularity. The ranchmen set about to organize a vigilance committee of their own to repel the invaders, if necessary, by force.

Whether the raiders got wind of this purpose is not known, but they evidently decided that they had overplayed their hand, for they suddenly veered in their course and troubled the Bad Lands no more. But before they went they dropped a bomb which did more than many conflagrations to carry out their ostensible mission as discouragers of evil-doing.

It happened that not far from Elkhorn Bottom the vigilantes came upon Pierce Bolan, who, it will be remembered, had some time previous discoursed to Fisher on the merits of the "considerate treatment" in relations with horse-thieves. He was himself as honest as daylight, but, as ill-luck would have it, the raiders found him afoot, and, assuming that he was about to steal a horse, called on him to confess. He declared that he had nothing to confess. The raiders thereupon threw a rope around his neck and drew him up in such a way that his feet just touched the ground. The victim continued to proclaim his innocence and the vigilantes finally released him, but not until he was unconscious. When he came to, the raiders were gone, but nearby he found a paper possibly dropped not altogether inadvertently. It bore the names of fifteen men along the Little Missouri whom Granville Stuart's committee had marked for punishment.

What Bolan did with the list, to whom he showed the list, in what way he reached the men whose names were on the list—all that is lost to history. All that we know is that there was a great scattering during the succeeding days, and certain men who were thought most reputable discovered suddenly that they had pressing business in California or New York.

"I never saw a full list of the names on that paper," said Fisher years afterward, "and knew nothing of what was going on until two of them came to me about the matter. They found that I was really ignorant and then asked what I would do if in their place. I advised hiding out for a while until matters had cooled off, which they did."

Who the men were whose names were on that list is a secret which those who held it never revealed and inquisitive minds along the Little Missouri could never definitely solve. Rumor suggested this man and that whose ways had been devious, but only one name was ever mentioned with certainty. That name was Maunders. No one seemed to question that if any one was going to be hanged, Maunders was the most likely candidate.

That gentleman, meanwhile, was fully aware that he had been marked for slaughter, but he kept his head, and, trusting no doubt to the protection of the Marquis, calmly remained in Medora, refusing by flight to present his enemies with evidence of an uneasy conscience. To his friends he declared that Fisher alone was responsible for having his name placed on the list, and breathed dire threats against the manager of the Marquis's Refrigerator Company.

Fisher was not greatly disturbed by the rumors that reached him of Maunders's determination to kill him at the first opportunity. He even went hunting alone with the outwardly affable "bad man."

Some of the "boys" thought he was taking unnecessary risks, and told him so. "You're taking a big chance in going out alone with Maunders. He's got it in for you."

Fisher smiled. "Perhaps you haven't noticed," he said, "that I always make certain that one or the other of you fellows sees us leave. Maunders would break his neck to see me get back safely."

Unquestionably, Maunders had an almost over-developed bump of caution. He left Fisher unharmed and turned his attention to the two backwoodsmen from Maine who were holding down the most desirable claim north of Medora for an Eastern tenderfoot.

One Sunday morning late in September Sewall was alone in the dugout at the river-bank. Dow was off on a stroll and Sewall was writing his weekly letter home, when he suddenly heard hoof-beats punctuated with shots. He went to the door. Six rough-looking characters on horseback were outside with smoking rifles in their hands. He knew only one of them, but he was evidently the leader. It was Maunders. Sewall took in the situation and invited them all inside.

The men had been drinking, and, suspecting that they would be hungry, Sewall offered them food. Dow was an excellent cook and in the ashes of the hearth was a pot of baked beans, intended for their own midday meal. Sewall, keeping carefully within reach of one or the other of his weapons which hung on the wall, set the pot before the evil-faced gunmen.

Maunders, who was slightly drunk, ate ravenously and directly began to sing the praises of the beans. Sewall filled his plate, and filled it again.

"I thought I would do everything I could to make them comfortable," he remarked, telling about it later, "and then if they cooked up any racket we should have to see what the end would be. I knew that if they were well filled, it would have a tendency to make them good-natured, and besides that it puts a man in rather an awkward position, when he's got well treated, to start a rumpus."

Sewall watched the men unostentatiously, but with an eagle eye. He had made up his mind that if there were to be any dead men thereabouts Maunders was to be the first. "He being the leader I thought I would make sure of him whatever happened to me."

He noted, not without satisfaction, that the men were looking around the cabin, regarding the weapons with attention. He showed Maunders about. The gunman agreed without enthusiasm that they had "got things fixed up in very fine shape," and departed. He treated Sewall most affably thereafter, but the backwoodsmen were made aware in one way and another that the old mischief-maker had not yet given up the idea of driving Theodore Roosevelt and his "outfit" off the claim at Elkhorn Bottom.



XII

It was underneath the stars, the little peeking stars, That we lay and dreamed of Eden in the hills: We were neither sad nor gay, but just wondering, while we lay, What a mighty lot of space creation fills.

Our fire was just a spark; dot of red against the dark, And around the fire an awful lot of night. The purple, changing air was as quiet as a prayer, And the moon came up and froze the mountains white.

Henry Herbert KNIBBS



The "boss" of Elkhorn Ranch, meanwhile, oblivious of the heat which he was generating in the Marquis's Prime Minister, was taking his slow course northeastward across Wyoming to the Bad Lands. It was long and weary traveling across the desolate reaches of burnt prairie. The horses began to droop. At last, in some heavy sand-hills east of the Little Beaver, one of the team pulling the heavily laden wagon played out completely, and they had to put the toughest of the saddle ponies in his place. Night was coming on fast as they crossed the final ridge and came in sight of as singular a bit of country as any of them had ever seen. Scattered over a space not more than three quarters of a mile square were countless isolated buttes of sandstone, varying in height from fifteen to fifty feet. Some of them rose as sharp peaks or ridges or as connected chains, but the greater number by far were topped with diminutive table-lands, some thirty feet across, some seventy, some two hundred. The sides were perpendicular, and were cut and channeled by the weather into most curious caves and columns and battlements and spires. Here and there ledges ran along the faces of the cliffs and eerie protrusions jutted out from the corners. Grave pine-trees rose loftily among the strange creations of water and wind set in a desert of snow-white sand. It was a beautiful and fantastic place and they made their camp there.

The moon was full and the night clear. In an angle of a cliff they built a roaring pine-log fire whose flames, leaping up the gray wall, made wild sport of the bold corners and strange-looking escarpments of the rock. Beyond the circle that the firelight brought luridly to life, the buttes in the moonlight had their own still magic. Against the shining silver of the cliffs the pines showed dark and somber, and when the branches stirred, the bright light danced on the ground making it appear like a sheet of molten metal.

It was like a country seen in a dream.

The next morning all was changed. A wild gale was blowing and rain beat about them in level sheets. A wet fog came and went and gave place at last to a steady rain, as the gale gave place to a hurricane. They spent a miserable day and night shifting from shelter to shelter with the shifting wind; another day and another night. Their provisions were almost gone, the fire refused to burn in the fierce downpour, the horses drifted far off before the storm....

"Fortunately," remarked Roosevelt later, "we had all learned that, no matter how bad things were, grumbling and bad temper can always be depended upon to make them worse, and so bore our ill-fortune, if not with stoical indifference, at least in perfect quiet."

The third day dawned crisp and clear, and once more the wagon lumbered on. They made camp that night some forty miles southwest of Lang's. They were still three days from home, three days of crawling voyaging beside the fagged team. The country was monotonous, moreover, without much game.

"I think I'd like to ride in and wake the boys up for breakfast," remarked Merrifield.

"Good!" exclaimed Roosevelt. "I'll do it with you."

Merrifield argued the matter. Roosevelt had been in the saddle all day and it was eighty miles to the Maltese Cross.

"I'm going with you. I want to wind up this trip myself," said Roosevelt, and there the argument ended.

At nine o'clock they saddled their tough little ponies, and rode off out of the circle of firelight. The October air was cool in their faces as they loped steadily mile after mile over the moonlit prairie.

Roosevelt later described that memorable ride.

The hoof-beats of our horses rang out in steady rhythm through the silence of the night, otherwise unbroken save now and then by the wailing cry of a coyote. The rolling plains stretched out on all sides of us, shimmering in the clear moonlight; and occasionally a band of spectral-looking antelope swept silently away from before our path. Once we went by a drove of Texan cattle, who stared wildly at the intruders; as we passed they charged down by us, the ground rumbling beneath their tread, while their long horns knocked against each other with a sound like the clattering of a multitude of castanets. We could see clearly enough to keep our general course over the trackless plain, steering by the stars where the prairie was perfectly level and without landmarks; and our ride was timed well, for as we galloped down into the valley of the Little Missouri the sky above the line of the level bluffs in our front was crimson with the glow of the unrisen sun.

Roosevelt rode down to Elkhorn a day or two after his return to the Maltese Cross, and found Sewall and Dow busy cutting the timber for the new house, which was to stand in the shade of a row of cottonwood trees overlooking the broad, shallow bed of the Little Missouri. They were both mighty men with the axe. Roosevelt worked with them for a few days. He himself was no amateur, but he could not compete with the stalwart backwoodsmen.

One evening he overheard Captain Robins ask Dow what the day's cut had been. "Well, Bill cut down fifty-three," answered Dow. "I cut forty-nine, and the boss," he added dryly, not realizing that Roosevelt was within hearing—"the boss he beavered down seventeen."

Roosevelt remembered the tree-stumps he had seen gnawed down by beavers, and grinned.

Roosevelt found that the men from Maine were adapting themselves admirably to their strange surroundings. Dow was already an excellent cowhand. Sewalls abilities ran in other directions.

We are hewing away at the stuff for the house [Sewall wrote his brother on October 19th]. It is to be 60 ft. long and 30 wide, the walls 9 ft. high, so you can see it is quite a job to hew it out on three sides, but we have plenty of time. Theodore wants us to ride and explore one day out of each week and we have to go to town after our mail once a week, so we don't work more than half the time. It is a good job and a big one, but we have lots of time between this and spring.

Meanwhile, he stubbornly insisted that the country was not adapted to cattle.

I think I already see a good many drawbacks to this country [he wrote]. The Stock business is a new business in the Bad Lands and I can't find as anybody has made anything at it, yet they all expect to. I think they have all lost as yet. Talked the other day with one of the biggest Stock men here. He is hired by the month to boss. He said nobody knew whether there was anything in it or not, yet. He had been here three years and sometimes thought there was not much in it, said it was very expensive and a great many outs to it and I believe he told the truth. Out about town they blow it up, want to get everybody at it they can. We shall see in time. Can tell better in the spring after we see how they come in with their cattle.

The truth was, Bill knew the ways of cattle, for he had run cattle in the open in Maine under climatic conditions not dissimilar to those of the Dakota country. His experience had taught him that when a cow is allowed to have one calf after another without special feeding, she is more than likely to die after the third calf. He knew also that when a cow calves in cold weather, she is likely to freeze her udder and be ruined, and lose the calf besides.

"Those cows will either have to be fed," he said to Roosevelt, "or they'll die."

Roosevelt took Sewall's pessimism with a grain of salt. "No one hereabouts seems to think there's any danger of that sort," he said. "I think, Bill, you're wrong."

"I hope I am," said Bill; and there the matter dropped.

It was while Roosevelt was working at Elkhorn that further rumors of trouble came from the party of the Marquis. Maunders insisted that he had a prior claim to the shack in which Sewall and Dow were living and all the land that lay around it, and demanded five hundred dollars for his rights. Roosevelt had from the first scouted the claim, for Maunders had a way of claiming any shack which a hunter deserted anywhere. Vague threats which Maunders was making filled the air, but did not greatly disturb Roosevelt. Sewall and Dow, however, had heard a rumor which sounded authentic and might require attention. Maunders had said that he was going to shoot Roosevelt at the next opportunity. They passed the news on to "the boss."

This was decidedly interesting. Maunders was known as a good shot and was well protected by the Marquis.

Roosevelt promptly saddled his horse and rode back up the river. Maunders's shack stood on the west bank a few hundred yards from the Pyramid Park Hotel. Roosevelt knocked on the door. Maunders opened it.

"Maunders," said Roosevelt sharply, "I understand that you have threatened to kill me on sight. I have come over to see when you want to begin the killing and to let you know that, if you have anything to say against me, now is the time for you to say it."

Maunders looked unhappy. After a brief conversation it appeared that Maunders did not after all want to shoot him. He had been "misquoted," he said. They parted, understanding one another perfectly.

Roosevelt left Medora on October 7th, bound for New York. He had decided, after all, not to remain aloof from the political campaign. He deeply distrusted the Democratic Party, on the one hand, and he was enraged at the nominations of the Republican Party, on the other; but the "Mugwumps," those Republicans who, with a self-conscious high-mindedness which irritated him almost beyond words, were supporting the Democratic nominee, he absolutely despised. Besides, it was not in him to be neutral in any fight. He admitted that freely. During the final weeks of the campaign he made numerous speeches in New York and elsewhere which were not neutral in the least.

By leaving Medora on the 7th of October he missed a memorable occasion, for on the following day Packard at last opened his stage-line. The ex-baseball player had met and surmounted an array of obstacles that would have daunted anybody but a youngster on the Western frontier. He had completed his building operations by the end of September, and by the first of October he had distributed his hostlers, his eating-house keepers, his helpers and his "middle-route" drivers, among the sixteen relay-stations that lined the wheel-tracks which the Marquis was pleased to call the "highway" to the Black Hills. The horses which he had purchased in a dozen different places in the course of the summer were not such as to allay the trepidation of timid travelers. They had none of them been broken to harness before Packard's agents had found them and broken them in their own casual and none too gentle fashion. Packard would have preferred to have horses which had become accustomed to the restraining hand of man, but "harness-broke" horses where rare in that country. Besides, they were expensive, and, with the money coming from the Marquis only in little sums, long-delayed, Packard that summer was hunting bargains. As it was, Baron von Hoffman, who was a business man of vision and ability, was none too pleased with the mounting expenses of his son-in-law's new venture.

"How many horses have you bought?" he asked; Packard one day rather sharply.

"A hundred and sixty-six."

"How many are you using on the stage-line?"

"A hundred and sixty."

"What are you doing with the other six?"

"They're out on the line."

"Humph!" grunted the Baron in despair. "Eating their heads off!"

What the Baron said to the Marquis is lost to history. The family in the new house across the river from Medora had plenty of dignity and pride. Whatever disagreements they had they kept securely within their own walls, and there was nothing but a growing querulousness in the voice of the man who held the purse-strings to reveal to the world that Baron von Hoffman was beginning to think he was laying away his money in a hole that had no bottom. Something of that feeling seems to have been in the Marquis's own mind, for in the interviews he gave to the newspapers the words "I won't be bled" recur.

On the first of October, Packard was ready for the "dress rehearsal" of his stage-line. That performance partook of more than the usual quantity of hazard connected with such occasions. At every station, for instance, some or all of the six horses had to be roped, thrown, and blindfolded before they would let themselves be harnessed. To adjust the harness was itself a ticklish undertaking and had to be done with minute regard for sensitive nerves, for if any part of it struck a horse except with the pressure of its own weight, the devil was loose again, and anything might happen. But even when the harness was finally on the refractory backs, the work was not half done. Still blindfolded, the horses had to be driven, pulled, pushed, and hauled by main force to their appointed places in front of the coach. Noiselessly, one at a time, the tugs were attached to the single-tree, and carefully, as though they were dynamite, the reins were handed to the driver. At the Moreau Station, two thirds of the way to Deadwood, all six horses, it happened were practically unbroken broncos. The driver was on his box with Packard at his side, as they prepared to start, and at the head of each horse stood one of the station-hands.

"Ready?" asked the man at the head of the near leader.

"All set," answered the other helpers.

"Let 'er go!" called the driver.

The helpers jerked the blinds from the horses' eyes. The broncos jumped into their collars as a unit. As a unit, however, they surged back, as they became suddenly conscious of the horror that they dreaded most—restraint. The off leader made a wild swerve to the right, backing toward the coach, and dragging the near leader and the near swing-horse from their feet. The off leader, unable to forge ahead, made a wild leap for the off swing horse, and fairly crushed him to earth with his feet, himself tripping on the harness and rolling at random in the welter, his snapping hoofs flashing in every direction. The wheel team, in the meantime, was doing what Packard later described as "a vaudeville turn of its own." The near wheeler was bucking as though there were no other horse within a hundred miles; the off wheeler had broken his single-tree and was facing the coach, delivering kicks at the melee behind him with whole-hearted abandon and rigid impartiality.

"It was exactly the kind of situation," Packard remarked later, "that George Myers would have called 'a gol-darned panorama.'"

But the horses were not to have matters altogether their own way, for the helpers were experienced "horse-wranglers." By main strength they pulled the off leader to his place and blindfolded him, delegating one of their number to sit on his head until the snarl might be untangled. The process was repeated with the other horses. The damage proved to be negligible. A few small harness straps had snapped, and a single-tree was broken. A second trial resulted no better than the first. After the half-crazy animals had been a second time disentangled and a third time harnessed, quivering, to the coach, the driver had his way with them. The horses jumped forward into a wild run, thrashing the heavy coach about as a small boy might be thrashed about as the tail in "crack the whip." It was a wild ride, but they reached Spearfish with no bones broken.



"Our entrance into Deadwood was spectacular," said Packard later, "and ended in an invitation ride to Lead City with Mayor Seth Bullock at the head of the local dignitaries, riding in state inside the coach."

On the 8th of October, Packard offered the dubious joys of his stage-line for the first time to the public; and began to see a faint prospect of return on his rather extravagant investment of energy and time. But his satisfaction died stillborn. The Marquis's sanguine temperament had once more proved the undoing of what might have been a profitable venture. The mail contract, which the easy-going Frenchman had thought that he had secured, proved illusory. Packard, who had been glad to leave that part of the business to his principal, discovered, as soon as he began to inquire for the mail-bags, that what his principal had actually secured from the Postmaster-General was not a contract at all, but merely a chance to bid when the annual offers for star routes came up for bidding the following May. It was a body blow to the putative owner of a stage-line.

Long after the last of his Deadwood coaches had been rattled to kindlings in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Packard told the last chapter of his connection with the Medora and Black Hills Forwarding and Transportation Company.

"No mail contract; hardly a month of earnings before winter, when there was no chance of paying operating expenses; responsible for the pay-roll, but not on it; with a private pay-roll and expenses equal to or greater than my private income; with all my cash savings gone in the preliminary expenses of putting on the line, and finally with no chance, under my contract, of getting a cent from the stage-line before that nebulous time when it had paid for itself. The Marquis soon returned and I told him I could not consider myself bound by the contract. The delay in providing funds I had condoned by staying with the proposition, but a mail contract which was essential in helping to pay expenses was not even a possibility for seven or more months in the future. I stayed until another man was hired and left my duties with a grunt of relief."[9]

[Footnote 9: It was Packard's stage-line which brought Scipio le Moyne (in Owen Wister's novel) from the Black Hills to Medora to become the substitute cook of the Virginian's mutinous "outfit." The cook whom the Virginian kicked off the train at Medora, because he was too anxious to buy a bottle of whiskey, is said to have been a man named Macdonald. He remained in the Bad Lands as cook for one of the ranches, but he was such an inveterate drinker that "Nitch" Kendley was forced to take drastic measures. Finding him unconscious one day, just outside of Medora, he tied him hand and foot to the sagebrush. The cook struggled twelve hours in the broiling sun before he could free himself. Tradition has it that he did not touch another drop of liquor for three years.]

For Packard the failure of his venture was not a serious matter. The Cowboy was flourishing and there was enough in all conscience to keep him occupied in his duties as Chief of Police. But for the Marquis it was bad business. He had, as it was, few enough honest men at his side.



XIII

Oh, we're up in the morning ere breaking of day, The chuck-wagon's busy, the flapjacks in play; The herd is astir o'er hillside and vale, With the night riders rounding them into the trail. Oh, come take up your cinches, come shake out your reins; Come, wake your old bronco and break for the plains; Come, roust out your steers from the long chaparral, For the outfit is off to the railroad corral.

The Railroad Corral

Roosevelt returned to the Bad Lands on the 16th of November and was greeted with enthusiasm by Merrifield and Sylvane. The next day he started for the new ranch. He had intended to get under way by noon, but Sylvane and Merrifield wanted to drive a small beef herd, which they were shipping to Chicago, to the shipping corrals near the Cantonment, and it was mid-afternoon before he was able to put spurs to his smart little cowpony and start on the long ride to Elkhorn. The day was bitterly cold, with the mercury well down toward zero, and the pony, fresh and impatient, went along at a good rate. Roosevelt had not gone many miles before he became conscious that darkness was falling. The trail followed along the bottom for a half-dozen miles and then turned off into the bad lands, leading up and down through the ravines and over the ridge crests of a rough and broken country. He crossed a wide plateau where the wind blew savagely, sweeping the powdery snow into his face, then dipped again into the valley where the trail led along the bottoms between the rows of high bluffs, continually crossing and recrossing the river. The ice was too thin to bear the horse, for the cold had come suddenly and had not yet frozen it solid, and again and again, as the pony cautiously advanced, the white surface would suddenly break and let horse and rider down into the chilling water.

Roosevelt had made up his mind that he could under no circumstances reach the new ranch that night and had determined to spend the night with Robins, the seafaring man, whose hut was three or four miles nearer. But the sun set while he was still several miles from his goal, and the darkness, which had been closing round him where he rode in the narrow valley, crept over the tops of the high bluffs and shut out from his vision everything but a dim track in the snow faintly illuminated by the stars. Roosevelt hurried his pony. Clouds were gathering overhead, and soon, Roosevelt knew, even the light that the stars gave would be withdrawn. The night was very cold and the silence was profound. A light snow rendered even the hoof-beats of his horse muffled and indistinct, and the only sound that came out of the black world about him was the long-drawn, melancholy howling of a wolf.

Captain Robins's shack stood in the midst of a large clump of cottonwoods thickly grown up with underbrush. It was hard enough to find in the day-time, but in the darkness of that wintry night it proved tantalizingly elusive. There was no light in it to guide him, which depressed him.

He found the cabin at last, but it was empty and chill. He lit a fire and hunted about among the stores of the old seafaring man for something of which to make supper. The place was stripped bare. He went down to the river with an axe and a pail and brought up some water; in his pocket he had a paper of tea. It was not an altogether satisfying supper for a tired and hungry man.

He was out with his rifle at break of day. Outside the hut the prairie fowl were crowing and calling to one another in the tall trees, evidently attracted by the thick growth of choke-cherries and wild plums. As the dawn deepened, the sharp-tails began to fly down from their roosts to the berry bushes. Up among the bare limbs of the trees, sharply outlined against the sky, they offered as good a target as any hungry man might ask. He shot off the necks of five in succession, and it was not long before two of the birds, plucked and cleaned, were split open and roasting before the fire.

He found that Sewall and Dow had cut all the timber for the house, and were beginning work on the walls. It was a roomy place they were building, a palace as houses went in the Bad Lands. Roosevelt worked with them for two days. Both men were excellent company, Dow a delightful spinner of yarns, witty and imaginative, Sewall full of horse sense and quiet philosophizing. Roosevelt himself was much depressed. His virtual elimination from politics, together with the tragic breaking-up of his home life, had left him for the moment aimless and without ambition. There is a wistful note in a letter he wrote, that week to Lodge. "The statesman (?) of the past has been merged, alas, I fear for good, in the cowboy of the present." He was not in the habit of talking of himself or of asking others to share his negations; but there was something avuncular about Sewall that impelled confidences. He told the backwoodsman that he did not care what became of himself; he had nothing to live for, he said. Sewall "went for him bow-legged," as he himself described it in later years.

"You ought not to allow yourself to feel that way," he insisted. "You have your child to live for."

"Her aunt can take care of her a good deal better than I can," Roosevelt responded. "She never would know anything about me, anyway. She would be just as well off without me."

"You won't always feel that way," said Sewall. "You will get over this after a while. I know how such things are; but time heals them over. You won't always feel as you do now, and you won't always be willing to stay here and drive cattle, because, when you get to feeling differently, you will want to get back among your friends where you can do more and be more benefit to the world than you can driving cattle. If you can't think of anything else to do, you can go home and start a reform. You would make a good reformer. You always want to make things better instead of worse."

Roosevelt laughed at that, and said no more concerning the uselessness of his existence. An amusing angle of the whole matter was that "starting a reform" was actually in the back of his head at the time.

The reform in question was fundamental. It concerned the creation of an organization, ostensibly, in the absence of constituted government, for the purpose of making and enforcing certain sorely needed laws for the regulation of the cattle industry; but actually with the higher aim in view of furnishing a rallying point for the scattered forces of law and order. Montana had such an organization in the Montana Live Stock Association and more than one ranchman with large interests in the valley of the Little Missouri had appealed to that body for help. But the Montana Association found that it had no authority in Dakota. Roosevelt determined, therefore, to form a separate organization.

The need unquestionably was great. To an unusual extent the cattle industry depended upon cooeperation. Each ranchman "claimed" a certain range, but no mark showed the boundaries of that range and no fence held the cattle and horses within it. On every "claim" the brands of twenty different herds might have been found. No ranchman by himself, or with the aid only of his own employees, would ever have been able to collect his widely scattered property. It was only by the cooeperative effort known as "the round-up" that it was possible once or twice a year for every man to gather his own. The very persistence of the range as a feeding-ground and the vitality and very life of the cattle depended upon the honest cooeperation of the stock-owners. If one man over-stocked his range, it was not only his cattle which suffered, but in an equal measure the cattle of every other ranchman along the river.

Regulating this industry, which depended so largely on a self-interest looking beyond the immediate gain, was a body of tradition brought from the cattle ranges of the South, but no code of regulations. There were certain unwritten laws which you were supposed to obey; but if you were personally formidable and your "outfit" was impressive, there was nothing in heaven or earth to force you to obey them. It was comparatively simple, moreover, to conduct a private round-up and ship to Chicago cattle whose brands were not your own. If ever an industry needed "regulation" for the benefit of the honest men engaged in it, it was the cattle industry in Dakota in 1884.

But the need of a law of the range which the stockmen would respect, because it was to their own interests to respect it, was only a phase of a greater need for the presence in that wild and sparsely settled country of some sort of authority which men would recognize and accept because it was an outgrowth of the life of which they were a part. Sheriffs and marshals were imposed from without, and an independent person might have argued that in a territory under a Federal governor, they constituted government without the consent of the governed. Such a person would look with entirely different eyes on a body created from among the men with whom he was in daily association.

Medora was blest with a deputy United States Marshal, and much good did law and order derive from his presence. He happened to be the same Joe Morrill who had gained notoriety the preceding winter in the Stoneville fight, and who had long been suspected, by law-abiding folk between Medora and the Black Hills, of being "in cahoots" with everything that was sinister in the region. He had for years been stationed at Deadwood for the purpose mainly of running down deserting soldiers, and one of the rumors that followed him to Medora was to the effect that he had made himself the confidant of deserters only to betray them for thirty dollars a head. The figure was unfortunate. It stuck in the memory with its echoes of Judas.

The law-abiding element did not receive any noticeable support from Joe Morrill. He was a "gun-toting" swashbuckler, not of the "bad man" type at all, but, as Packard pointed out, altogether too noisy in denouncing the wicked when they were not present and too effusive in greeting them when they were. He gravitated naturally toward Maunders and Bill Williams and Jess Hogue, and if law and order derived any benefits from that association, history has neglected to record them. Thievery went on as before.

Roosevelt, no doubt, realized that the hope of the righteous lay not in Joe Morrill or in any other individual whom the Federal authorities might impose on the Bad Lands, but only in an organization which was the expression of a real desire for cooeperation. He set about promptly to form such an organization.

After two days of house-building at Elkhorn, Roosevelt, who was evidently restless, was again under way, riding south through a snowstorm all day to the Maltese Cross, bringing Sewall and Dow with him.

It was late at night when we reached Merrifield's [he wrote "Bamie" on November 23d], and the thermometer was twenty degrees below zero. As you may imagine, my fur coat and buffalo bag have come in very handily.

I am now trying to get up a stockman's association, and in a day or two, unless the weather is too bad, I shall start up the river with Sewall to see about it.

At one ranch after another, Roosevelt, riding south through the biting cold with his philosophic backwoodsman, stopped during the week that followed, to persuade fifteen or twenty stockmen along the valley of the Little Missouri of the benefits of cooeperation. It was an arduous journey, taking him well south of Lang's; but it was evidently successful.

Theodore Roosevelt, who used to be a great reformer in the New York Legislature, but who is now a cowboy, pure and simple [remarked the Bismarck Weekly Tribune in an editorial on December 12th], calls a meeting of the stockmen of the West Dakota region to meet at Medora, December 19th, to discuss topics of interest, become better acquainted, and provide for a more efficient organization. Mr. Roosevelt likes the West.

Winter now settled down on the Bad Lands in earnest. There was little snow, but the cold was fierce in its intensity. By day, the plains and buttes were dazzling to the eye under the clear weather; by night, the trees cracked and groaned from the strain of the biting frost. Even the stars seemed to snap and glitter. The river lay fixed in its shining bed of glistening white, "like a huge bent bar of blue steel." Wolves and lynxes traveled up and down it at night as though it were a highway.

Winter was the ranchman's "slack season"; but Roosevelt found, nevertheless, that there was work to be done even at that time of year to test a man's fiber. Activities, which in the ordinary Eastern winter would have been merely the casual incidents of the day's work, took on some of the character of Arctic exploration in a country where the thermometer had a way of going fifty degrees below zero, and for two weeks on end never rose above a point of ten below. It was not always altogether pleasant to be out of doors; but wood had to be chopped, and coal had to be brought in by the wagon-load. Roosevelt had a mine on his own ranch some three or four miles south of Chimney Butte. It was a vein of soft lignite laid bare in the side of a clay bluff by the corrosive action of the water, carving, through the centuries, the bed of the Little Missouri. He and his men brought the coal in the ranch-wagon over the frozen bed of the river. The wheels of the wagon creaked and sang in the bitter cold, as they ground through the powdery snow.

The cattle, moreover, had to be carefully watched, for many of them were slow in learning to "rustle for themselves," as the phrase went. A part of every day at least was spent in the saddle by one or the other or all of the men who constituted the Chimney Butte outfit. In spite of their great fur coats and caps and gauntlets, in spite of heavy underclothing and flannel-lined boots, it was not often that one or the other of them, returning from a ride, did not have a touch of the frost somewhere about him. When the wind was at his back, Roosevelt found it was not bad to gallop along through the white weather, but when he had to face it, riding over a plain or a plateau, it was a different matter, for the blast cut through him like a keen knife, and the thickest furs seemed only so much paper. The cattle were obviously unhappy, standing humped up under the bushes, except for an hour or two at midday when they ventured out to feed. A very weak animal they would bring into the cow-shed and feed with hay; but they did this only in cases of the direst necessity, as such an animal had then to be fed for the rest of the winter, and the quantity of hay was limited. As long as the cattle could be held within the narrow strip of Bad Lands, they were safe enough, for the deep ravines afforded them ample refuge from the icy gales. But if by any accident a herd was caught by a blizzard on the open prairie, it might drift before it a hundred miles.

Soon after Roosevelt's return from the East, he had sent Sylvane Ferris to Spearfish to purchase some horses for the ranch. About the first week in December his genial foreman returned, bringing fifty-two head. They were wild, unbroken "cayuses," and had to be broken then and there. Day after day, in the icy cold, Roosevelt labored with the men in the corral over the refractory animals making up in patience what he lacked in physical address.

Bill Sewall, who with Dow was on hand to drive a number of the ponies north to Elkhorn Ranch, did not feel under the same compulsion as "the boss" to risk his neck in the subjugation of the frantic animals. Will Dow had become an excellent horseman, but Sewall had come to the conclusion that you could not teach an old dog new tricks, and refused to be bulldozed into attempting what he knew he could not accomplish. There was something impressive in the firmness with which he refused to allow the cowboys to make him look foolish.

The night the horses arrived, Sewall overheard a number of the cowboys remark that they would get the men from Maine "on those wild horses and have some fun with them." "I was forewarned," said Sewall, years after, telling about it, "and so I was forearmed."

One of the men came up to Sewall, and with malice aforethought led the subject to Sewall's participation in the breaking of the horses.

"I am not going to ride any of those horses," said Sewall.

"You will have to," said the cowboy.

"I don't know so much about that."

"If you don't," remarked the cowboy, "you will have the contempt of everybody."

"That won't affect me very much," Sewall answered quietly. "If I were younger, it might, but it won't now."

"Oh, well," said the other lightly, "you will have to ride them."

"No," remarked Sewall, "I didn't come out here to make a fool of myself trying to do what I know I can't do. I don't want to be pounded on the frozen ground."

The cowboy made a sharp reply, but Sewall, feeling his blood rise to his head, became only more firm in refusing to be bulldozed.

"I suppose you fellows can ride broncos," he said, "but you cannot ride me, and if you get on, your feet will drag."

There the conversation ended. The next morning Sewall heard the cowboy remark, not too pleasantly, "I suppose it is no use to saddle any bad ones for Sewall, for he said he wouldn't ride them."

Sewall paid no attention to the thrust. The whole affair had a comic conclusion, for it happened that, quite by accident, Sewall, in attempting to pick out a gentle horse, picked one who ultimately proved to be one of the worst in the herd. For all the time that Sewall was on his back, he acted like a model of the virtues. It was only when Dow subsequently mounted him that he began to reveal his true character, bucking Dow within an inch of his life. The cowboy, however, made no more efforts at intimidation.

To Roosevelt—to whom difficulty and peril were always a challenge, and pain itself was a visitant to be wrestled with and never released until a blessing had been wrung from the mysterious lips—the hardships and exertions of those wintry day were a source of boyish delight. It partook of the nature of adventure to rise at five (three hours ahead of the sun) and ride under the starlight to bring in the saddle-band; and it gave a sense of quiet satisfaction to manly pride later to crowd around the fire where the cowboys were stamping and beating their numbed hands together and know that you had borne yourself as well as they. After a day of bronco-busting in the corral, or of riding hour after hour, head on into the driven snow-dust, there was a sense of real achievement when night fell, and a consciousness of strength. The cabin was small, but it was storm-proof and homelike, and the men with whom Roosevelt shared it were brave and true and full of humor and good yarns. They played checkers and chess and "casino" and "Old Sledge" through the long evenings, and read everything in type that came under their hands. Roosevelt was not the only one, it seemed, who enjoyed solid literature.

Did I tell you about my cowboys reading and in large part comprehending, your "Studies in Literature"? [Roosevelt wrote to Lodge]. My foreman handed the book back to me to-day, after reading the "Puritan Pepys," remarking meditatively, and with, certainly, very great justice, that early Puritanism "must have been darned rough on the kids." He evidently sympathized keenly with the feelings of the poor little "examples of original sin."

Roosevelt spent all his time at the Maltese Cross and went to Medora only for his mail. The quiet of winter had descended upon the wild little town. The abattoir was closed for the season, the butchers (who did their part in enlivening the neighborhood) had gone East, the squad of carpenters was silent. There was nothing for anybody to do except to drink, which the citizens of Medora did to the satisfaction of even the saloon-keepers.

Roosevelt had planned all the autumn to go on a hunting trip with Merrifield after mountain sheep, but his departure had been delayed by Sylvane's return with the horses, and the need for all hands in the "outfit" in the arduous undertaking of preparing their free spirits for the obligations of civilization. It was well toward the middle of December before they were able to make a start. Roosevelt sent George Myers ahead with the buckboard and himself followed on horseback with Merrifield. It was a savage piece of country through which their course took them.

There were tracts of varying size [Roosevelt wrote later describing that trip], each covered with a tangled mass of chains and peaks, the buttes in places reaching a height that would in the East entitle them to be called mountains. Every such tract was riven in all directions by deep chasms and narrow ravines, whose sides sometimes rolled off in gentle slopes, but far more often rose as sheer cliffs, with narrow ledges along their fronts. A sparse growth of grass covered certain portions of these lands, and on some of the steep hillsides, or in the canyons, were scanty groves of coniferous evergreens, so stunted by the thin soil and bleak weather that many of them were bushes rather than trees. Most of the peaks and ridges, and many of the valleys, were entirely bare of vegetation, and these had been cut by wind and water into the strangest and most fantastic shapes. Indeed, it is difficult, in looking at such formations, to get rid of the feeling that their curiously twisted and contorted forms are due to some vast volcanic upheavals or other subterranean forces; yet they are merely caused by the action of the various weathering forces of the dry climate on the different strata of sandstones, clays, and marls. Isolated columns shoot up into the air, bearing on their summits flat rocks like tables; square buttes tower high above surrounding depressions, which are so cut up by twisting gullies and low ridges as to be almost impassable; shelving masses of sandstone jut out over the sides of the cliffs; some of the ridges, with perfectly perpendicular sides, are so worn away that they stand up like gigantic knife-blades; and gulches, wash-outs, and canyons dig out the sides of each butte, while between them are thrust out long spurs, with sharp, ragged tops.

They hunted through the broken country on foot. Up the slippery, ice-covered buttes they climbed, working their way across the faces of the cliffs or cautiously groping along narrow ledges, peering long and carefully over every crest. But they found no sheep. The cold was intense and they were glad when, at sunset, they reached the cabin, which was to be their headquarters. George Myers had already arrived.

It was a bitter night, and through the chinks of the crazy old hut it invaded their shelter, defying any fire which they could build.

By the time the first streak of dawn had dimmed the brilliancy of the stars, the hunters were under way. Their horses had proved a bother the day before, and they were afoot, striding briskly through the bitter cold to where the great bulk of Middle Butte loomed against the sunrise. They hunted carefully through the outlying foothills and toiled laboriously up the steep sides to the level top. It was a difficult piece of mountaineering, for the edges of the cliffs had become round and slippery with the ice, and it was no easy task to move up and along them, clutching the gun in one hand and grasping each little projection with the other. That day again they found no sheep.

Hour by hour the cold grew more intense. All signs indicated a blizzard.

The air was thick and hazy as Roosevelt and Merrifield early next morning reached the distant hills where they intended that day to make their hunt. Off in the northwest a towering mass of grayish-white clouds hung, threatening trouble. The region was, if anything, even wilder and more difficult than the country they had hunted through on the two previous days. The ice made the footing perilous, and in the cold thin air every quick burst they made up a steep hill caused them to pant for breath. But they were not unrewarded. Crawling cautiously over a sharp ledge they came suddenly upon two mountain rams not a hundred yards away. Roosevelt dropped on his knee, raising his rifle. At the report, the largest of the rams staggered and pitched forward, but recovered himself and disappeared over another ridge. The hunters jumped and slid down into a ravine, clambering up the opposite side as fast as their lungs and the slippery ice would let them. They had not far to go. Two hundred yards beyond the ridge they found their quarry, dead. They took the head for a trophy.

It was still early in the day, and Roosevelt and Merrifield made up their minds to push for home. The lowering sky was already overcast by a mass of leaden-gray clouds; they had no time to lose. They hurried back to the cabin, packed up their bedding and provisions, and started northward. Roosevelt rode ahead with Merrifield, not sparing the horses; but before they had reached the ranch-house the storm had burst, and a furious blizzard was blowing in their teeth as they galloped along the last mile of the river bottom.

George Myers celebrated the successful conclusion of the hunt in his own fashion. In one of his unaccountable culinary lapses, he baked the beans that night in rosin. With the first mouthful Roosevelt dropped his knife and fork and made for the door.

"George," he remarked as he returned to the table with his eye fixed on the offender, "I can eat green biscuits and most of your other infernal concoctions, but I am hanged if I can eat rosined beans."

He did not eat them, but he did not let the memory of them die either, to George's deep chagrin.

I have just returned from a three days' trip in the Bad Lands after mountain sheep [Roosevelt wrote to "Bamie" on December 14th], and after tramping over the most awful country that can be imagined, I finally shot one ram with a fine head. I have now killed every kind of plains game.

I have to stay here till after next Friday to attend a meeting of the Little Missouri Stockmen; on Saturday, December 20th, I start home and shall be in New York the evening of December 23d. I have just had fifty-two horses brought in by Ferris, and Sewall and Dow started down the river with their share yesterday. The latter have lost two horses; I am afraid they have been stolen.

The meeting of the stockmen was held in Medora on the day appointed, and it is notable that it was Roosevelt who called it to order and who directed its deliberations. He was one of the youngest of the dozen stockmen present, and in the ways of cattle no doubt one of the least experienced. Most of the men he greeted that day had probably been discussing the problems he was undertaking to solve long before he himself had ever heard of the Bad Lands. It was Roosevelt's distinction that having observed the problems he determined to solve them, and having made this determination he sought a solution in the principles and methods of democratic government. The stockmen had confidence in him. He was direct, he was fearless; he was a good talker, sure of his ground, and, in the language of the Bad Lands, "he didn't take backwater from any one." He was self-reliant and he minded his own business; he was honest and he had no axe to grind. The ranchmen no doubt felt that in view of these qualities you might forget a man's youth and forgive his spectacles. They evidently did both, for, after adopting a resolution that it was the sense of the meeting "that an Association of the Stockmen along the Little Missouri and its tributaries be forthwith formed," they promptly elected Theodore Roosevelt chairman of it.

Lurid tales have been told of what went on at that meeting. There is a dramatic story of Joe Morrill's sudden appearance, backed by a score of ruffians; of defiance and counter-defiance; of revolvers and "blood on the moonlight"; and of a corrupt deputy marshal cowering with ashen face before the awful denunciations of a bespectacled "tenderfoot"; but unhappily, the authenticity of the story is dubious. The meeting, so far as the cold eye of the historian can discern, was dramatic only in its implications and no more exciting than a sewing-circle. The Marquis de Mores was present; so also was Gregor Lang, his most merciless critic; but whatever drama was inherent in that situation remained beneath the surface. By-laws were adopted, the Marquis was appointed "as a Committee of One to work with the committee appointed by the Eastern Montana Live Stock Association in the endeavor to procure legislation from the Territorial Legislature of Dakota favorable to the interests of the cattlemen"; and the meeting was over. It was all most amiable and commonplace. There was no oratory and no defiance of anybody. What had been accomplished, however, was that, in the absence of organized government, the conservative elements in the county had formed an offensive and defensive league for mutual protection, as the by-laws ran, "against frauds and swindlers, and to prevent the stealing, taking, and driving away of horned cattle, sheep, horses, and other stock from the rightful owners thereof."

It meant the beginning of the end of lawlessness in the Bad Lands.



XIV

I'll never come North again. My home is the sunny South, Where it's never mo' than forty below An' the beans don't freeze in your mouth; An' the snow ain't like white smoke, An' the ground ain't like white iron; An' the wind don't stray from Baffin's Bay To join you on retirin'.

From Medora Nights

Roosevelt arrived in New York a day or two before Christmas with the trophies of his hunt about him and his hunting costume in his "grip." He settled down at his sister's house, at 422 Madison Avenue, where his little girl Alice was living, and, with his characteristic energy in utilizing every experience to the full, promptly began work on a series of hunting sketches which should combine the thrill of adventure with the precise observation of scientific natural history. It is worth noting that, in order to provide a frontispiece for his work, he solemnly dressed himself up in the buckskin shirt and the rest of the elaborate costume he had described with such obvious delight to his sister; and had himself photographed. There is something hilariously funny in the visible records of that performance. The imitation grass, not quite concealing the rug beneath, the painted background, the theatrical (slightly patched) rocks against which the cowboy leans gazing dreamily across an imaginary prairie, the pose of the hunter with rifle ready and finger on the trigger, grimly facing dangerous game which is not there—all reveal a boyish delight in play-acting. For once his sense of humor was in abeyance, but posterity is the richer for this glimpse of the solemn boy in the heart of a powerful man.



Winter closed over the Bad Lands, bringing Arctic hardships. Even Bill Sewall, who had been born and bred in the Maine woods, declared that he had never known such cold. There was a theory, fostered by the real estate agents, that you did not feel the cold which the thermometer registered; and the Marquis, who never missed an opportunity to "boom" his new town in the newspapers, insisted stoutly not only that he habitually "walked and rode about comfortably without an overcoat"; but also that he "felt the cold much more severely in New York, and in Washington even." Other landowners maintained the same delusion, and it was considered almost treason to speak of the tragedies of the cold. The fact remained, however, that a snowfall, which elsewhere might scarcely make good sleighing, in the Bad Lands became a foe to human life of inconceivable fury. For with it generally came a wind so fierce that the stoutest wayfarer could make no progress against it. The small, dry flakes, driven vertically before it, cut the flesh like a razor, blinding the vision and stifling the breath and shutting out the world with an impenetrable icy curtain. A half-hour after the storm had broken, the traveler, lost in it, might wonder whether there were one foot of snow or five, and whether the greater part of it were on the ground or whirling about him in the air. With the snow came extreme cold that pierced the thickest garments.

The horses, running free on the range, seemed to feel the cold comparatively little, eating the snow for water, and pawing through it to the stem-cured prairie-grass for food. But the cattle suffered intensely, especially the Southern stock which had not yet learnt that they must eat their way through the snow to the sustenance beneath. They stood huddled together at every wind-break, and in the first biting storm of the new year even sought the shelter of the towns, taking possession of the streets. The cows, curiously enough, seemed to bear the hardship better than the bulls. The male, left to his own resources, had a tendency to "give up" and creep into the brush and die, while the females, reduced to skin and bones, struggled on, gnawing at the frozen stumps of sagebrush, battling to the last.

Western newspapers, "booming" the cattle business, insisted that every blizzard was followed by a warm wind known as a "chinook" which brought a prompt return of comfort and sleekness to the most unhappy steer; but wise men knew better. For the cattle, seeking a livelihood on the snowy, wind-swept wastes, the winter was one long-protracted misery.

It was in fact not an unalloyed delight for human beings, especially for those whose business it was to guard the cattle. The hardest and the bitterest work was what was called "line riding." The ranchmen cared little if their cattle grazed westward toward the Yellowstone; it was a different matter, however, if they drifted east and southeast to the granger country and the Sioux Reservation, where there were flat, bare plains which offered neither food nor shelter, and where thieves were many and difficult to apprehend. Along the line where the broken ground of the Bad Lands met the prairie east of the Little Missouri, the ranchmen, therefore, established a series of camps, from each of which two cowboys, starting in opposite directions, patrolled the invisible line halfway to the adjoining camps.

Bill Sewall gazed out over the bleak country with a homesick and apprehensive heart.

As for our coming back [he wrote his brother in January], you need not worry about that. As soon as I serve out my time and my sentence expires I shall return. Am having a good time and enjoy myself, should anywhere if I knew I could not do any better and was obliged to, but this is just about like being transported to Siberia, just about as cold, barren and desolate and most as far out of the way. It was hotter here last summer than it ever was at home and it has been colder here this winter than it ever was at home, 50 and 65 below all one week. Don't see how the cattle live at all and there is lots of them dieing. You can find them all around where they lay nights in the bushes. The poor ones will all go, I guess. They say they will die worse in the spring. The fat strong ones will get through, I guess. Don't know that any of our hundred have died yet, but I don't believe this is a good country to raise cattle in.

Am afraid Theodore will not make so much as he has been led to think he would. There are lots of bleeders here, but we mean to fend them off from him as well as we can.

Roosevelt spent the coldest months in New York, working steadily on his new book which was to be called "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman." On the 8th of March he wrote Lodge, "I have just sent my last roll of manuscript to the printers"; adding, "in a fortnight I shall go out West." But he postponed his departure, held possibly by the lure of the hunting-field; for on the 29th he rode with the Meadowbrook hounds and was "in at the death." It was presumably in the first days of April that he arrived at Medora. If tradition may be trusted, he came in all the glory of what were known as "store clothes." The Pittsburgh Despatch, which sent out a reporter to the train to interview him as he passed through that city, westward-bound, refers to "the high expanse of white linen which enclosed his neck to the ears," which sounds like a slight exaggeration. Tradition does insist, however, that he wore a derby hat when he arrived, which was considered highly venturesome. Derby hats as a rule were knocked off on sight and then bombarded with six-shooters beyond recognition. Roosevelt informed his fellow citizens early in his career as a cowpuncher that he intended to wear any hat he pleased. Evidently it was deemed expedient to suspend the rule in his case, for he was not molested.

After a brief sojourn at the Maltese Cross, Roosevelt made his way north to Elkhorn Ranch. The house was nearing completion. It was a one-story log structure, with a covered porch on the side facing the river; a spacious house of many rooms divided by a corridor running straight through from north to south. Roosevelt's bedroom, on the southeast corner, adjoined a large room containing a fireplace, which was to be Roosevelt's study by day and the general living-room by night. The fireplace, which had been built by an itinerant Swedish mason whom Sewall looked upon with disapproval as a dollar-chaser, had been designed under the influence of a Dakota winter and was enormous. Will Dow, who was somewhat of a blacksmith, had made a pair of andirons out of a steel rail, which he had discovered floating down the river loosely attached to a beam of yellow pine.[10]

[Footnote 10: The andirons are still doing service at the ranch of Howard Eaton and his brothers in Wolf, Wyoming.]

The cattle, Roosevelt found, were looking well. "Bill," he said to Sewall, remembering the backwoodsman's pessimism, "you were mistaken about those cows. Cows and calves are all looking fine."

But Sewall was not to be convinced. "You wait until next spring," he answered, "and see how they look."

Roosevelt was himself physically in rather bad shape, suffering from that affliction which has, by common consent, been deemed of all of Job's troubles the one hardest to bear with equanimity. Douglas Robinson wrote Sewall telling him that Theodore's sisters were worried about him and asking him for news of Roosevelt's health. Roosevelt heard of the request and was indignant, "flaring up," as Sewall described it.