Since I wrote you life has settled down into its usual monotonous course here. It is not as rough as I had expected; I have clean sheets, the cooking is pretty good, and above all I have a sitting-room with a great fireplace and a rocking-chair, which I use as my study.

The walking is horrible; all slippery ice or else deep, sticky mud; but as we are very short of meat I generally spend three or four hours a day tramping round after prairie chickens, and one day last week I shot a deer. The rest of the time I read or else work at Benton, which is making very slow progress; writing is to me intensely irksome work.

In a day or two, when the weather gets a little milder, I expect to start down the river in a boat, to go to Mandan; the trip ought to take a week or ten days, more or less. It will be good fun. My life on the ranch this summer is not going to be an especially adventurous or exciting one; and my work will be mainly one of supervision so that there will be no especial hardship or labor.

I really enjoy being with the men out here; they could be more exactly described as my retainers than as anything else; and I am able to keep on admirable terms with them and yet avoid the familiarity which would assuredly breed contempt.

On the 30th of March the blizzard which had been raging a day or two moderated, and Roosevelt, hoping a thaw had set in, determined to set off after the thieves. They left Rowe as guard over the ranch and "the womenfolks," and with their unwieldy but water-tight craft, laden with two weeks' provision of flour, coffee, and bacon, started to drift down the river.

The region through which they passed was bare and bleak and terrible. On either side, beyond the heaped-up piles of ice, rose the scarred buttes, weather-worn into fantastic shapes and strangely blotched with spots of brown and yellow, purple and red. Here and there the black coal-veins that ran through them were aflame, gleaming weirdly through the dusk as the three men made their camp that night.

The weather was cold and an icy wind blew in their faces.

"We're like to have it in our faces all day," remarked Will Dow cheerfully, paddling at the bow.

"We can't, unless it's the crookedest wind in Dakota," answered Sewall, who was steering.

They followed the river's course hither and thither in and out among the crags, east and west, north and south.

"It is the crookedest wind in Dakota," muttered Sewall to himself.

The thermometer dropped to zero, but there was firewood in plenty, and they found prairie fowl and deer for their evening meals. Late the third day, rounding a bend, they saw their boat moored against the bank. Out of the bushes, a little way back, the smoke of a camp-fire curled up through the frosty air.

"There's your boat!" cried Sewall, who had, in his own phrase, been "looking sharp." "Get your guns ready. I'll handle the boat."

They flung off their heavy coats. Sewall was in the stern, steering the boat toward shore. Dow was at Roosevelt's side in the bow. Roosevelt saw the grim, eager look in their eyes, and his own eyes gleamed.

He was the first ashore, leaping out of the boat as it touched the shore ice and running up behind a clump of bushes, so as to cover the landing of the others. Dow was beside him in an instant. Sewall was fastening the boat.

It was rather funny business [Sewall wrote his brother subsequently] for one of the men was called a pretty hard ticket. He was also a shooting man. If he was in the bushes and saw us first he was liable to make it very unhealthy for us.

Roosevelt and Dow peered through the bushes. Beside a fire in a grove of young cottonwoods a solitary figure was sitting; his guns were on the ground at his side.

"Hands up!"

Roosevelt and Dow rushed in on the man, who was not slow to do as he was told. He was a halfwitted German named Wharfenberger, a tool of rogues more keen than he, whom Sewall later described as "an oldish man who drank so much poor whiskey that he had lost most of the manhood he ever possessed."

They searched the old man, taking his gun and his knives from him, and telling him that if he did exactly as he was told they would use him well; but if he disobeyed or tried to signal the other men, they would kill him instantly. Knowing something of the frontier, he was ready to believe that he would be given short shrift, and was thoroughly submissive.

Finnegan and the third man, a half-breed named Bernstead, had, it seems, gone hunting, believing themselves safe. Sewall guarded the German, while Roosevelt and Dow, crouching under the lee of a cutbank, prepared to greet the others.

The ground before them was as level as a floor, with no growth on it of any sort beside the short dead grass which would not have given cover to a rabbit. Beyond, to the east lay a wide stretch of level bottom covered with sagebrush as high as a man's waist, and beyond that was a fringe of bushes bordering a stretch of broken butte country. The wind had fallen. Save for the rush of the river, there was no sound.

Will and I [Sewall wrote his brother] kept watch and listened—our eyes are better than Roosevelt's, Will on the right and I on the left. R. was to rise up and tell them to hands up, Will and I both with double barrel guns loaded with Buck shot, and we were all going to shoot if they offered to raise a gun. It is rather savage work but it don't do to fool with such fellows. If there was any killing to be done we meant to do it ourselves.

About an hour before sunset they heard Finnegan and his companion crawling through the stunted bushes at the foot of the clay hill. The men started to go upstream.

"We are going to lose them," Roosevelt whispered; "they are not coming to camp."

"I think," answered Sewall, "they are looking for the camp smoke."

He was evidently right, for suddenly they saw it and came straight through the sagebrush toward the watchers. Roosevelt and his men watched them for some minutes as they came nonchalantly toward them, the barrels of their rifles glinting in the sunlight. Now they were forty yards away, now thirty, now twenty.

"Hands up!"

The half-breed obeyed, but for an instant Finnegan hesitated, glaring at his captors with wolfish eyes. Roosevelt walked toward him, covering the center of the man's chest to avoid over-shooting him.

"You thief, put up your hands!"

Finnegan dropped his rifle with an oath and put up his hands.

They searched the thieves and took away their weapons. "If you'll keep quiet," said Roosevelt, "and not try to get away, you'll be all right. If you try anything we'll shoot you."

This was language which the thieves understood, and they accepted the situation. Sewall took an old double-barrel ten-gauge Parker shot-gun and stood guard.

Dow was a little uneasy about the gun.

"The right-hand barrel goes off very easily," he warned Sewall. "It's gone off with me several times when I did not mean it to, and if you are going to cover the men with it you better be careful."

"I'll be careful," remarked Sewall in his deliberate fashion, "but if it happens to go off, it will make more difference to them than it will to me."

They camped that night where they were. Having captured their men, they were somewhat in a quandary how to keep them. The cold was so intense that to tie them tightly hand and foot meant in all likelihood freezing both hands and feet off during the night; there was no use tying them at all, moreover, unless they tied them tightly enough to stop in part the circulation. Roosevelt took away everything from the thieves that might have done service as a weapon, and corded his harvest in some bedding well out of reach of the thieves.

"Take off your boots!" he ordered.

It had occurred to him that bare feet would make any thought of flight through that cactus country extremely uninviting. The men surrendered their boots. Roosevelt gave them a buffalo robe in return and the prisoners crawled under it, thoroughly cowed.

Captors and captives started downstream in the two boats the next morning. The cold was bitter. Toward the end of the day they were stopped by a small ice-jam which moved forward slowly only to stop them again. They ran the boats ashore to investigate, and found that the great Ox-Bow jam, which had moved past Elkhorn a week ago, had come to a halt and now effectually barred their way. They could not possibly paddle upstream against the current; they could not go on foot, for to do so would have meant the sacrifice of all their equipment. They determined to follow the slow-moving mass of ice, and hope, meanwhile, for a thaw.

They continued to hope; day after weary day they watched in vain for signs of the thaw that would not come, breaking camp in the morning on one barren point, only to pitch camp again in the evening on another, guarding the prisoners every instant, for the trouble they were costing made the captors even more determined that, whatever was lost, Finnegan and Company should not be lost.

Roosevelt's journal for those days tells the story:

April 1. Captured the three boat-thieves.

April 2. Came on with our prisoners till hung up by ice-jam.

April 3. Hung up by ice.

April 4. Hung up by ice.

April 5. Worked down a couple of miles till again hung up by ice.

April 6. Worked down a couple of miles again to tail of ice-jam.

Their provisions ran short. They went after game, but there was none to be seen, no beast or bird, in that barren region. The addition to their company had made severe inroads on their larder and it was not long before they were all reduced to unleavened bread made with muddy water. The days were utterly tedious, and were made only slightly more bearable for Roosevelt by Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and Matthew Arnold, interlarded with "The History of the James Brothers," which the thieves quite properly carried among their belongings. And the thieves had to be watched every minute, and the wind blew and chilled them to the bone.

Roosevelt thought that it might be pleasant under certain circumstances to be either a Dakota sheriff or an Arctic explorer. But he did not find great joy in being both at the same time.

When the flour was nearly gone, Roosevelt and his men had a consultation.

"We can't shoot them," said Roosevelt, "and we can't feed them. It looks to me as though we'd have to let them go."

Sewall disagreed. "The flour'll last a day or two more," he said, "and it's something to know that if we're punishing ourselves, we're punishing the thieves also."

"Exactly!" cried Roosevelt. "We'll hold on to them!"

The next day Sewall, on foot, searched the surrounding region far and wide for a ranch, and found none. The day after, Roosevelt and Dow covered the country on the other side of the river, and at last came on an outlying cow-camp of the Diamond C Ranch, where Roosevelt secured a horse.

It was a wiry, rebellious beast.

"The boss ain't no bronco-buster," remarked Dow, apologetically, to the cowboys.

But "the boss" managed to get on the horse and to stay on. Dow returned to Sewall and the thieves, while Roosevelt rode fifteen miles to a ranch at the edge of the Killdeer Mountains. There he secured supplies and a prairie-schooner, hiring the ranchman himself, a rugged old plainsman, to drive it to the camp by the ice-bound river. Sewall and Dow, now thoroughly provisioned, remained with the boats. Roosevelt with the thieves started for the nearest jail, which was at Dickinson.

It was a desolate two days' journey through a bleak waste of burnt, blackened prairie, and over rivers so rough with ice that they had to take the wagon apart to cross. Roosevelt did not dare abate his watch over the thieves for an instant, for they knew they were drawing close to jail and might conceivably make a desperate break any minute. He could not trust the driver. There was nothing for it but to pack the men into the wagon and to walk behind with the Winchester.

Hour after hour he trudged through the ankle-deep mud, hungry, cold, and utterly fatigued, but possessed by the dogged resolution to carry the thing through, whatever the cost. They put up at the squalid hut of a frontier granger overnight, but Roosevelt, weary as he was, did not dare to sleep. He crowded the prisoners into the upper bunk and sat against the cabin door all night, with the Winchester across his knees.

Roosevelt's journal gives the stages of his progress.

April 7. Worked down to C Diamond Ranch. Two prairie chickens.

April 8. Rode to Killdeer Mountains to arrange for a wagon which I hired.

April 9. Walked captives to Killdeer Mountains.

April 10. Drove captives in wagon to Captain Brown's ranch.

"What I can't make out," said the ranchman from the Killdeers, with a puzzled expression on his deeply wrinkled, tough old face, which Sewall said "looked like the instep of an old boot that had lain out in the weather for years,"—"what I can't make out is why you make all this fuss instead of hanging 'em offhand."

Roosevelt grinned, and the following evening, after a three-hundred-mile journey, deposited three men who had defied the laws of Dakota in the jail at Dickinson.

He was not a vision of beauty as he emerged from the jail to find a place to scrape off two weeks' accumulation of Dakota mud. His feet were in bad shape from the long march through the gumbo, and he asked the first man he met where he could find a physician. By a curious coincidence the man he addressed happened to be the only physician within a hundred and fifty miles in any direction. It was Dr. Stickney.

They had heard of each other, and Roosevelt was glad, for more reasons than one, to follow him to his office. For the quiet man with the twinkling eyes, who combined the courage and the humanness of a cowpuncher with the unselfish devotion of a saint, was a great figure in the Bad Lands. Like Roosevelt he was under thirty.

The doctor, in after years, told of that morning's visit. "He did not seem worn out or unduly tired," he said. "He had just come from the jail, having deposited his prisoners at last, and had had no sleep for forty-eight hours, and he was all teeth and eyes; but even so he seemed a man unusually wide awake. You could see he was thrilled by the adventures he had been through. He did not seem to think he had done anything particularly commendable, but he was, in his own phrase, 'pleased as Punch' at the idea of having participated in a real adventure. He was just like a boy.

"We talked of many things that day while I was repairing his blistered feet. He impressed me and he puzzled me, and when I went home to lunch, an hour later, I told my wife that I had met the most peculiar, and at the same time the most wonderful, man I had ever come to know. I could see that he was a man of brilliant ability and I could not understand why he was out there on the frontier. I had heard his name and I had read something of his work in the New York Legislature and in the Republican Convention, two years previous, and it seemed to me that he belonged, not here on the frontier, but in the East, in the turmoil of large affairs."

I got the three horse-thieves in fine style [Roosevelt wrote to Lodge]. My two Maine men and I ran down the river three days in our boat, and then came on their camp by surprise. As they knew there was no other boat on the river but the one they had taken, and as they had not thought of our building another, they were completely taken unawares, one with his rifle on the ground, and the others with theirs on their shoulders; so there was no fight, nor any need of pluck on our part. We simply crept noiselessly up and rising, when only a few yards distant, covered them with the cocked rifles while I told them to throw up their hands. They saw that we had the drop on them completely, and I guess they also saw that we surely meant shooting if they hesitated, and so their hands went up at once. We kept them with us nearly a week, being caught in an ice-jam; then we came to a ranch where I got a wagon, and I sent my two men on downstream with the boat, while I took the three captives overland a two days' journey to a town where I could give them to the sheriff. I was pretty sleepy when I got there, as I had to keep awake at night a good deal in guarding; and we had gotten out of food and the cold had been intense.

To his sister Corinne he admitted that he was well satisfied to part from his prisoners.

I was really glad to give them up to the sheriff this morning [he writes from Dickinson], for I was pretty well done out with the work, the lack of sleep, and the constant watchfulness, but I am as brown and as tough as a pine knot and feel equal to anything.

It happened that the editor of the Herald of Newburyport, Massachusetts, had a friend in Dickinson who occasionally sent him news of the frontier which he printed as the "Dickinson (Dakota) Letter to the Newburyport Herald."



To illustrate what manner of men we need [he wrote during the week following the successful conclusion of Roosevelt's adventure], I will relate an incident which is to the point. I presume you are all acquainted, through the newspapers, with the Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, who is quite prominent in New York politics and society. He owns a ranch on the Little Missouri, about eighty miles northwest from here, and created quite a stir last Sunday by bringing to town three horse-thieves whom he had captured with the help of two of his "cow men."

Thereupon follows the story of the capture and jailing of Finnegan and Company.

When I saw him [the correspondent continues], Mr. Roosevelt had been on the "trail" for three weeks, and wore a cowboy's hat, corduroy jacket, flannel shirt, and heavy shoes, but was in excellent health and spirits.

Said he, "I don't know how I look, but I feel first-rate!"

The next morning he appeared in the justice's court, saw the outlaws indicted, and a little later took the train bound west, for his "cow camp." I had never seen Mr. Roosevelt before, although I had read many articles from his pen; and when I left home I had no idea of meeting a gentleman of his standing on the frontier masquerading in the character of an impromptu sheriff. But, only such men of courage and energy can hope to succeed in this new, beautiful, but undeveloped country.

The justice of the peace who indicted the thieves was Western Starr. He turned out to be an old acquaintance of Roosevelt's, a classmate in the Columbia Law School. The coincidence gave an added flavor to the proceeding.

In Medora there seemed to be only one opinion concerning Roosevelt's adventure, though it was variously expressed.

"Roosevelt," said his friend, John Simpson, a Texan, who was owner of the "Hash-knife" brand and one of the greatest cattlemen in the region, "no one but you would have followed those men with just a couple of cow-hands. You are the only real damn fool in the county."

The rest of the population echoed the bewildered query of the teamster from the Killdeers. "Why didn't you kill them?" every one asked. "They would have killed you."

"I didn't come out here to kill anybody," Roosevelt answered. "All I wanted to do was to defend myself and my property. There wasn't any one around to defend them for me, so I had to do it myself."

And there the matter rested. But the people of Medora began to see a little more clearly than they had ever seen before the meaning of government by law.[21]

[Footnote 21: The thieves were tried at Mandan in August, 1886. The German, known as "Dutch Chris," was acquitted, but Finnegan, and Bernstead, known as "the half-breed," were sentenced to twenty-five months in the Bismarck Penitentiary. Finnegan glared at Roosevelt as he passed him in the court room. "If I'd had any show at all," he cried, "you'd have sure had to fight!"

That was no doubt true, but his anger evidently wore off in the cool of the prison, for a little later he wrote Roosevelt a long and friendly epistle, which was intended to explain many things:

In the first place I did not take your boat Mr. Roosevelt because I wanted to steal something, no indeed, when I took that vessel I was labouring under the impression, die dog or eat the hachette.... When I was a couple of miles above your ranch the boat I had sprung a leak and I saw I could not make the Big Missouri in it in the shape that it was in. I thought of asking assistance of you, but I supposed you had lost some saddles and blamed me for taking them. Now there I was with a leaky boat and under the circumstances what was I two do, two ask you for help, the answer I expected two get was two look down the mouth of a Winchester. I saw your boat and made up my mind two get possession of it. I was bound two get out of that country cost what it might, when people talk lynch law and threaten a persons life, I think that it is about time to leave. I did not want to go back up river on the account that I feared a mob.... I have read a good many of your sketches of ranch life in the papers since I have been here, and they interested me deeply. Yours sincerely.

&c.

P.S. Should you stop over at Bismarck this fall make a call to the Prison. I should be glad to meet you.]



XXIII

Oh, I am a Texas cowboy, light-hearted, brave, and free, To roam the wide, wide prairie, 'tis always joy to me. My trusty little pony is my companion true, O'er creeks and hills and rivers he's sure to pull me through.

When threatening clouds do gather and herded lightnings flash, And heavy rain drops splatter, and rolling thunders crash; What keeps the herds from running, stampeding far and wide? The cowboy's long, low whistle and singing by their side.

Cowboy song

By a curious coincidence the culmination of Roosevelt's dramatic exposition of the meaning of government by law coincided in point of time precisely with the passing of the Bad Lands out of a state of primeval lawlessness into a condition resembling organized government.

Since the preceding summer, Packard had, in the columns of the Cowboy, once more been agitating for the organization of Billings County. The conditions, which in the past had militated against the proposal, were no longer potent. The lawless element was still large, but it was no longer in the majority. For a time a new and naive objection made itself widely heard. The stock-growers protested that if the county were organized, they would be taxed! The Mandan Pioneer explained that, according to the laws of Dakota Territory, the nearest organized county was authorized to tax all the cattle and other stock in Billings County, and that "the only possible difference that could result in organization would be to keep the taxes at home and allow them to be expended for home improvements such as roads, bridges, schoolhouses, and public buildings." The cattlemen were not in a position to explain publicly what they probably meant, namely, that a board of county commissioners and a tax assessor sitting in Medora would have far less difficulty than a similar group sitting a hundred and fifty miles east in Mandan in following the mysterious movements of their cattle during the season when assessments were made. An active agent of the county might conceivably note that when Billings County, Dakota, was making its assessments, the herds could generally be found in Fallon County, Montana, and that when Fallon County was making its assessments, the cattle were all grazing in Billings. But even in the Bad Lands it was no longer politic to protest openly against what was palpably the public welfare, and the petition for the organization of the county received the necessary signatures, and was sent to the governor. "This is a step in the right direction," patronizingly remarked the Mandan Pioneer. "Billings County is rich enough and strong enough to run its own affairs."

Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris had been active in the work of organization, and were eager to "run" Bill Sewall for County commissioner. But that shrewd individual pleaded unfitness and lack of time and refused to be cajoled into becoming a candidate.

There is some doubt concerning the exact date of the first election. Roosevelt's diary would indicate that it was held on April 12th, but the paragraph printed in the Minneapolis Tribune of April 15th would indicate that it was held on the 14th. Both statements are probably wrong, and the election in all likelihood was held on the 13th.

Roosevelt, having testified against the three thieves, returned to Medora late on the afternoon of election. There had been many threats that the party of disorder would import section hands from the neighboring railway stations to down the legions of the righteous. An especial watcher had been set at the polling-places. It was none other than Hell-Roaring Bill Jones. He was still on most cordial terms with his old intimates, the ruffians who congregated at Bill Williams's saloon, but he liked Roosevelt and the men who surrounded the young Easterner, and had cast in his lot with them. The effectiveness, as a guardian of the peace, of the man who had at the beginning of his career in the Bad Lands been saloon "bouncer" for Bill Williams was notable.

Roosevelt found a group of his friends at the polling-place.

"Has there been any disorder?" he asked.

"Disorder, hell!" said one of the men in the group. "Bill Jones just stood there with one hand on his gun and the other pointin' over toward the new jail whenever any man who didn't have the right to vote come near the polls. There was only one of them tried to vote, and Bill knocked him down. Lord!" he concluded meditatively, "the way that man fell!"

"Well," struck in Bill Jones, "if he hadn't fell, I'd of walked round behind him to see what was proppin' him up!"

The candidates for the various offices had been selected in a spirit of compromise between the two elements in the town, the forces of order securing every office except one. The county commissioners elected were "Johnny" Goodall, a blacksmith named Dan Mackenzie, and J. L. Truscott, who owned a large ranch south of the Big Ox Bow. Van Driesche, the best of all valets, was elected treasurer, and Bill Dantz superintendent of schools; but the forces of disorder could afford to regard the result without apprehension, for they had been allowed to elect the sheriff; and they had elected Joe Morrill.

Election night was lurid. Morrill, evidently desiring to make a good impression without serious inconvenience to his friends, served notice immediately after his election that there must be no "shooting up" of the town, but "the boys" did not take Morrill very seriously. Fisher, who had a room in Mrs. McGeeney's hotel next to Joe Ferris's store, found the place too noisy for comfort, and adjourned to the office of the Bad Lands Cowboy. The little shack was unoccupied, for Packard, having recently married, had moved his residence into one of the deserted cantonment buildings on the western side of the river. Truscott had neglected to secure a room in the hotel and Fisher invited him to join him in the Cowboy office.

The day had been strenuous, and the two men were soon sound asleep. Fisher was awakened by a sharp object striking him in the face. An instant later he heard a round of shots, followed instantly by another shower of broken glass. He discovered that one of the windows, which faced the Tamblyn Saloon, was completely shattered. He shook Truscott.

"I guess," he said, "we'd better look for some place not quite so convenient for a target."

They adjourned to Fisher's room in Mrs. McGeeney's hotel. After all, noise was preferable to bullets.

"The boys" were full of apologies the next morning, declaring that they had not realized that the place was occupied. Packard, it seemed, had been publishing certain editorials shortly before dealing with the criminal responsibility of drunkards, and they just thought they would give the Cowboy a "touching up."

Medora's new regime began with a call which Howard Eaton made upon Merrifield.

"Now that we're organized, we'll have some fun with Deacon Cummins," said Eaton, with a chuckle.

Eaton had apprehensions that the "Deacon" would ask for improvements, a road to his ranch, for instance, or possibly a bridge or two, so he suggested to Merrifield that they draw up a statement calculated to discourage any such aspirations. This was the statement as they finally submitted it to their fellow citizens:

We the undersigned do hereby solemnly covenant and agree to hang, burn, or drown any man that will ask for public improvements made at the expense of the County.

Eaton and Merrifield signed it, together with a dozen others; then they laid it before Mrs. Cummins's husband for his signature. "The Deacon" took it with extreme seriousness, and signed his name to it; and there was no call for improvements from the solemn couple at Tepee Bottom.

The day after the election, the Little Missouri Stock Association held its semi-annual meeting. Roosevelt presided, "preserving," as he wrote to Lodge a day or so later, "the most rigid parliamentary decorum." He was elected a representative of the Association at the meeting of the Montana Stock growers' Association in Miles City, to be held a day or two later, and, after a hurried trip to Elkhorn Ranch with Merrifield, started west for Miles City, taking Sylvane with him.

Miles City was a feverish little cowtown under ordinary circumstances, but in April of every year, when the cattlemen of Montana and western Dakota gathered there for the annual meeting of the Montana Stockgrowers' Association, it was jubilant and noisy beyond description. For a week before the convention was called to order, stockmen from near and far began to arrive, bringing in their train thirsty and hilarious cowboys who looked upon the occasion mainly as a golden opportunity for a spree. They galloped madly up and down the wide, dusty streets at every hour of the day and night, knowing no sober moment as long as the convention lasted.

Roosevelt and Sylvane arrived on April 18th, taking what quarters they could get in the Macqueen House which was crowded to the doors and was granting nobody more than half a bed. The ceremonies began early next morning with a blast from the Fifth Infantry band from Fort Keogh, the army post two miles to the west.

Promptly at 9:30 A.M. [runs the story in the Minneapolis Tribune] a procession was formed in front of the Macqueen House, with the Fifth Infantry band at its head, followed by carriages containing the officers of the Association and ladies; next a cavalcade of wild cowboys just brought in from the adjacent ranges, followed by about 150 cowmen marching four abreast. The procession was about two and one-half blocks long from end to end, and the line of march was through the principal streets to the skating rink, where the public meetings of the Association are held.

As the procession was nearing the rink, the horses of the foremost carriage, containing the president, vice-president, and secretary, took fright and dashed into the band. Both horses took the same side of the tongue and made things unpleasant. At this stage of the game President Bryan and others abandoned the carriage, and Secretary R. B. Harrison, with his large minute book, made a leap for life, and the subsequent proceedings interested him no more. The procession then broke up with a wild charge of cowboys, accompanied with such yells as would strike terror to the heart of the tenderfooted.

The actual meeting of the Stockgrowers' Association was, contrary to what might have been expected from its prelude, a thoroughly dignified affair. Roosevelt was, as one of the other stockmen later declared, "rather inclined to listen and take the advice of older men"; but it was significant that he was, nevertheless, elected to the Executive Committee as the successor of the Marquis de Mores as representative for Dakota Territory; and was appointed to one or two other committees of lesser importance.

"Roosevelt was of a restless, nervous, but aggressive disposition," said H. H. Hobson, of Great Falls, who was present at that meeting, "and took a keen interest in the proceedings. He was a great admirer of Granville Stuart, and was always on his side of every question."

The absorbing issues before the convention were the Texas fever and the overstocking of the range. Feeling ran high, and "the debates," as Hobson later remarked, "were more than warm. Roosevelt," he added, "was at all times eager and ready to champion his side."

At one of the sessions there was a fierce debate between two prominent cattlemen, which was renewed, after the meeting, at the Miles City Club. Each man had his hot partisans, who began to send messengers out for reinforcements. Most of the men were armed. It was clear that if hostilities once broke out, they would develop instantly into a miniature war.

Roosevelt saw that the situation was critical, and jumped to his feet. "If you can't settle your own difficulties," he cried to the two men who had started the quarrel, "why don't you fight it out? I'll referee."

The suggestion was received with favor. Roosevelt formed a ring and the two men expended their anger in a furious fist fight. Which man won, history does not record. The important point is that Roosevelt, by his resolute action, had prevented a fight with "six-shooters."

I have just returned from the Stockmen's Convention in Miles City [Roosevelt wrote "Bamie" from Elkhorn on April 22d], which raw, thriving frontier town was for three days thronged with hundreds of rough-looking, broad-hatted men, numbering among them all the great cattle and horse raisers of the Northwest. I took my position very well in the convention, and indeed these Westerners have now pretty well accepted me as one of themselves, and as a representative stockman. I am on the Executive Committee of the Association, am President of the Dakota branch, etc.—all of which directly helps me in my business relations here.

There is something almost touching in Roosevelt's efforts to persuade his sisters that his cattle venture was not the piece of wild recklessness which they evidently considered it.

This winter has certainly been a marvelously good one for cattle [he wrote in another letter]. My loss has been so trifling as hardly to be worth taking into account; although there may be a number who have strayed off. I think my own expenses out here this summer will be very light indeed, and then we will be able to start all square with the beginning of the New Year.

In another letter he wrote, "Unless we have a big accident, I shall get through this all right, if only I can get started square with no debt!" And a little later he sent "Bamie" a clipping from a review of his "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman," which referred to him as "a man of large and various powers in public matters as well as shrewd and enterprising in the conduct of business." "I send the enclosed slip," he wrote, "on account of the awful irony of the lines I have underscored; send it to Douglas when you write him."

"Douglas" was Douglas Robinson, the husband of Roosevelt's sister Corinne, and distinctly the business man of the family.

Bill Sewall was apprehensive. "There was always a cloud over me," he said long afterward, "because I never could see where he was going to get his money. I tried to make him see it. He was going to buy land. I urged him not to. I felt sure that what he was putting into those cattle he was going to lose."

Roosevelt admitted that spring that Sewall's conviction, that the cows would not be able in the long run to endure the hard winters, was not without reason. "Bill," he said, after he had made a careful study of the herd, "you're right about those cows. They're not looking well, and I think some of them will die."

But on the whole the herd was in good condition. He had every right to believe that with average luck his investment would emphatically justify itself.

While I do not see any great fortune ahead [he wrote to his sister Corinne], yet, if things go on as they are now going, and have gone for the past three years, I think I will each year net enough money to pay a good interest on the capital, and yet be adding to my herd all the time. I think I have more than my original capital on the ground, and this year I ought to be able to sell between two and three hundred head of steer and dry stock.

Sewall as usual, was less sanguine.

As for hard times [he wrote his brother that April] they are howling that here, and lots are leaving the country. Lots more would if they could. We are all right. Roosevelt is the same good fellow he always has been and though I don't think he expects to make much, his upper lip is stiff and he is all right.

Meanwhile, he was hammering ahead on his Life of Benton. He was a slow and rather laborious writer, but his persistence evidently atoned for his lack of speed in composition, for whereas, on April 29th, he wrote his sister that he had written only one chapter and intended to devote "the next three weeks to getting this work fairly under way," by the 7th of June he announced that the book was "nearly finished."

"Some days," Sewall related afterward, "he would write all day long; some days only a part of the day, just as he felt. He said sometimes he would get so he could not write. Sometimes he could not tell when a thing sounded right. Then he would take his gun and saunter off, sometimes alone, sometimes with me or Dow, if he was around."

Occasionally he would "try out" a passage on Sewall. "Bill," he exclaimed one morning, "I am going to commit the unpardonable sin and make you sit down and listen to something I've written."

Bill was willing. The passage was from the first chapter of the biography of the Tennessee statesman and dealt with the attitude of the frontier toward law and order and the rights of "the other fellow." Bill gave his approval and the passage stood.

Day after day Roosevelt pushed forward into his subject, writing with zest, tempered by cool judgment. He did not permit an occasional trip to Medora to interrupt his work. He had a room over Joe Ferris's store, and after Joe and his wife had gone to bed, he would throw open the doors of the kitchen and the dining-room and walk to and fro hammering out his sentences.

"Every once in a while," said Joe later, "everything would be quiet, then after fifteen minutes or so he would walk again as though he was walkin' for wages."

Mrs. Ferris, who had a maternal regard for his welfare, was always careful to see that a pitcher of milk was in his room before the night's labors commenced; for Roosevelt had a way of working into the small hours. "The eight-hour law," he remarked to Lodge, "does not apply to cowboys"; nor, he might have added, to writers endeavoring to raise the wherewithal to pay for a hunting trip to the Coeur d'Alenes in the autumn.

I wonder if your friendship will stand a very serious strain [he wrote Lodge, early in June]. I have pretty nearly finished Benton, mainly evolving him from my inner consciousness; but when he leaves the Senate in 1850 I have nothing whatever to go by; and, being by nature both a timid, and, on occasions, by choice a truthful, man, I would prefer to have some foundation of fact, no matter how slender, on which to build the airy and arabesque superstructure of my fancy—especially as I am writing a history. Now I hesitate to give him a wholly fictitious date of death and to invent all of the work of his later years. Would it be too infernal a nuisance for you to hire some of your minions on the Advertiser (of course, at my expense) to look up, in a biographical dictionary or elsewhere, his life after he left the Senate in 1850? He was elected once to Congress; who beat him when he ran the second time; what was the issue; who beat him, and why, when he ran for Governor of Missouri; and the date of his death? I hate to trouble you; don't do it if it is any bother; but the Bad Lands have much fewer books than Boston has.

The Executive Committee of the Montana Stockgrowers' Association, of which Roosevelt was a member, had, in order to unify the work of the rounding-up of the cattle throughout Montana and western Dakota, issued directions at its meeting in April for the delimitation of the various round-up districts and the opening of the round-ups. The round-up for "District No. 6," which included the valley of the Little Missouri,

commences [so ran the order] at Medora, May 25, 1886; works down the Little Missouri to the mouth of Big Beaver Creek; thence up the Big Beaver to its head; thence across to the Little Beaver at the crossing of the old government road (Keogh trail); thence down Little Beaver to its mouth; thence across to Northern Hash-knife Camp on Little Missouri, and down to Medora. John Goodall, foreman.

Roosevelt apparently could not resist the temptation which the round-up offered, especially as its course would take him back in the direction of Elkhorn, and he deserted his study and entered once more into what was to him the most fascinating activity of the cowboy's life.

There were half a dozen wagons along [he wrote subsequently]. The saddle bands numbered about a hundred each; and the morning we started, sixty men in the saddle splashed across the shallow ford of the river that divided the plain where we had camped from the valley of the long winding creek up which we were first to work.

By the 7th of June he was back at Elkhorn Ranch again on a flying visit.

I will get a chance to send this note to-morrow [he wrote his sister "Bamie"] by an old teamster who is going to town. I have been on the round-up for a fortnight, and really enjoy the work greatly; in fact I am having a most pleasant summer, though I miss all of you very, very much. We breakfast at three and work from sixteen to eighteen hours a day counting night-guard; so I get pretty sleepy; but I feel as strong as a bear. I took along Tolstoy's "La Guerre et La Paix" which Madame de Mores had lent me; but I have had little chance to read it as yet. I am very fond of Tolstoy.

In "The Wilderness Hunter" Roosevelt, two or three years later, told of that "very pleasant summer" of 1886.

I was much at the ranch, where I had a good deal of writing to do; but every week or two I left, to ride among the line camps, or spend a few days on any round-up which happened to be in the neighborhood.

These days of vigorous work among the cattle were themselves full of pleasure. At dawn we were in the saddle, the morning air cool in our faces; the red sunrise saw us loping across the grassy reaches of prairie land, or climbing in single file among the rugged buttes. All forenoon we spent riding the long circle with the cowpunchers of the round-up; in the afternoon we worked the herd, cutting the cattle, with much breakneck galloping and dextrous halting and wheeling. Then came the excitement and hard labor of roping, throwing, and branding the wild and vigorous range calves; in a corral, if one was handy, otherwise in a ring of horsemen. Soon after nightfall we lay down, in a log hut or tent, if at a line camp; under the open sky, if with the round-up wagon.

After ten days or so of such work, in which every man had to do his full share,—for laggards and idlers, no matter who, get no mercy in the real and healthy democracy of the round-up,—I would go back to the ranch to turn to my books with added zest for a fortnight. Yet even during these weeks at the ranch there was some outdoor work; for I was breaking two or three colts. I took my time, breaking them gradually and gently, not, after the usual cowboy fashion, in a hurry, by sheer main strength and rough riding, with the attendant danger to the limbs of the man and very probable ruin to the manners of the horse. We rose early; each morning I stood on the low-roofed veranda, looking out under the line of murmuring, glossy-leaved cottonwoods, across the shallow river, to see the sun flame above the line of bluffs opposite.

Almost every day he was off among the buttes or across the prairie with a rifle in his hand, shooting now a whitetail buck within a few hundred yards of the ranch-house; now a blacktail, in the hills behind. Occasionally, rising before dawn, he would hunt in the rolling prairie country ten or fifteen miles away, coming home at dusk with a prong-buck across his saddle-bow. Now and then he would take the ranch-wagon and one of the men, driving to some good hunting ground, and spending a night or two, returning usually with two or three antelope; and not infrequently he would ride away by himself on horseback for a couple of days, lying at night, as he wrote, "under the shining and brilliant multitude of stars," and rising again in the chill dawn to crawl upon some wary goat of the high hills.

After writing his sister on the 7th of June, he evidently stayed at the ranch for ten days to work on his Life of Benton. Then he was away with the round-up again. His diary succinctly records his progress:

June 18. Rode to Medora on Sorrel Joe.

June 19. Out on round-up with Maltese Cross wagon.

June 20. Worked down to South Heart.

June 21. Worked up Rocky Ridge.

June 22. Worked to Davis Creek.



Early next morning Roosevelt was in Medora.

The round-up is swinging over from the East to the West Divide [he wrote to Lodge]. I rode in to get my mail and must leave at once. We are working pretty hard. Yesterday I was in the saddle at 2 A.M., and except for two very hearty meals, after each of which I took a fresh horse, did not stop working till 8.15 P.M.; and was up at half-past three this morning.

They worked next day down to Andrews Creek.

While the round-up was camped at Andrews Creek an incident occurred which revealed Roosevelt's influence over the cowpunchers, not alone of his own "outfit." Andrews Creek was not more than a mile from Medora, and after the day's work was done, the cowboys naturally adjourned with much enthusiasm to that oasis for the thirsty. As the evening wore on, the men, as "Dutch Wannigan" remarked long afterward, "were getting kinda noisy." Roosevelt, who had also ridden to town, possibly to keep an eye on "the boys," heard the commotion, and, contrary to his usual habit, which was to keep out of such centers of trouble, entered the saloon where the revelry was in progress.

"I don't know if he took a drink or not," said "Dutch Wannigan" afterward. "I never saw him take one. But he came in and he paid for the drinks for the crowd. 'One more drink, boys,' he says. Then, as soon as they had their drinks, he says, 'Come on,' and away they went. He just took the lead and they followed him home. By gollies, I never seen anything like it!"

The round-up now worked southward. Roosevelt's diary gives its course from day to day.

June 24. To Gardiner Creek.

June 25. To Bullion's Creek.

June 26. Down Bullion's Creek.

June 27. To Chimney Butte.

June 28. Rode in to Medora.

From Medora he wrote his sister Corinne:

I have been off on the round-up for five weeks, taking a holiday of a few days when we had a cold snap, during which time I killed two elk and six antelopes, all the meat being smoke-dried and now hanging round the trees, till the ranch looks like an Indian encampment. Since June 24th, I have never once had breakfast as late as 4 o'clock. I have been in the saddle all the day and work like a beaver and am as happy and rugged as possible.

To "Bamie" he wrote:

If I did not miss all at home so much, and also my beautiful home, I would say that this free, open-air life, without any worry, was perfection.

The round-up ended in Medora, where it had begun.

You would hardly know my sunburned and wind-roughened face [Roosevelt wrote "Bamie"]. But I have really enjoyed it and am as tough as a hickory nut.

He evidently did not think he needed any vacation after the strenuous labors of the preceding weeks, for his diary records no interlude.

June 29. Rode back to Elkhorn Ranch with Merrifield.

June 30. Benton.

July 1. Benton; rode out with Bill Rowe to get and brand calves.

July 2. Benton; rode out with Bill Rowe after calves; got them into corral and branded them. Rode little black horse.

July 3. Rode up to Medora on Manitou.

Roosevelt had been invited to be the orator at Dickinson's first celebration of Independence Day, and, on the morning of the Fourth, accompanied by two New York friends, Lispenard Stewart and Dr. Taylor, and half the cowboys of Billings County, "jumped" an east-bound freight for the scene of the festivities.

Dickinson was in holiday mood. The West Missouri slope had never celebrated the Fourth with fitting ceremonies before and Dickinson, which, with its seven hundred inhabitants, considered itself somewhat of a metropolis, made up its mind to "spread itself." From near and far eager crowds streamed into the little town, on foot and on horseback. The Press reported the celebration with zest:

A BIG DAY

The First Fourth of July Celebration in Dickinson a Grand Success

An Epoch in the History of Our Town that Will Long be Remembered

Addresses by Hon. Theodore Roosevelt and Hon. John A. Rea

The first Fourth of July celebration, attempted in Dickinson, took place last Monday. It exceeded the anticipations of all and proved to be a grand success—a day that will long be remembered. The day dawned bright and cool. Early in the morning people began to arrive and by ten o'clock the largest crowd ever assembled in Stark County lined the principal streets. The train from the west brought a number of Medora people, amongst them Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, the orator of the day.

The first exercise was the parade, consisting of three divisions, under charge of Chief Marshal Auld, assisted by C. S. Langdon and Western Starr. About ten o'clock everything was in readiness and the parade began to move, headed by the Dickinson Silver Cornet Band. Following the band were the lady equestriennes, a large number of ladies being in line. They were followed by the members of Fort Sumter Post G.A.R. and Onward Lodge R.R.B. Next came a beautifully decorated wagon drawn by four white horses, containing little girls dressed in white, representing the States of the Union. This was one of the most attractive features of the parade, and was followed by a display of reaping and other farm machinery. The "Invincibles" were next in line and created considerable mirth by their fantastic and grotesque appearance. Citizens in carriages and on horseback brought up the rear. After parading through the principal streets the procession marched to the public square and were dismissed.

"The trouble with the parade," remarked Bill Dantz long after, "was that every one in town was so enthusiastic they insisted on joining the procession, and there was no one to watch except two men who were too drunk to notice anything"; which was Dantz's way of saying that the "first exercise" was eminently successful.

Western Starr [continues the Press] was introduced by Dr. V. H. Stickney, master of ceremonies, and read the Declaration of Independence in a clear, forcible tone, after which the entire audience joined in singing that familiar and patriotic song, "America." The people then partook of the free dinner prepared for the occasion. After dinner the people were called to order and Rev. E. C. Dayton offered up a prayer, followed by music by the band.

The speeches followed. The first speaker was a typical politician of the old school.

This is a big country [he said]. At a dinner party of Americans in Paris during the Civil War this toast was offered by a New Englander: "Here's to the United States, bounded on the north by British America, on the south by the Gulf of Mexico, on the east by the Atlantic, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean."

An Ohio man followed with a larger notion of our greatness: "Here's to the United States, bounded on the north by the North Pole, on the south by the South Pole, on the east by the rising sun, and on the west by the setting sun."

It took the Dakota man, however, to rise to the greatness of the subject: "I give you the United States, bounded on the north by the Aurora Borealis, on the south by the precession of the equinoxes, on the east by primeval chaos, and on the west by the Day of Judgment."

The politician proceeded with the eloquence of the professional "orator," and the audience applauded him vociferously. Then Roosevelt rose and spoke. He looked very slim and young and embarrassed.

I am peculiarly glad [he said] to have an opportunity of addressing you, my fellow citizens of Dakota, on the Fourth of July, because it always seems to me that those who dwell in a new territory, and whose actions, therefore, are peculiarly fruitful, for good and for bad alike, in shaping the future, have in consequence peculiar responsibilities. You have already been told, very truthfully and effectively, of the great gifts and blessings you enjoy; and we all of us feel, most rightly and properly, that we belong to the greatest nation that has ever existed on this earth—a feeling I like to see, for I wish every American always to keep the most intense pride in his country, and people. But as you already know your rights and privileges so well, I am going to ask you to excuse me if I say a few words to you about your duties. Much has been given to us, and so, much will be expected of us; and we must take heed to use aright the gifts entrusted to our care.

The Declaration of Independence derived its peculiar importance, not on account of what America was, but because of what she was to become; she shared with other nations the present, and she yielded to them the past, but it was felt in return that to her, and to her especially, belonged the future. It is the same with us here. We, grangers and cowboys alike, have opened a new land; and we are the pioneers, and as we shape the course of the stream near its head, our efforts have infinitely more effect, in bending it in any given direction, than they would have if they were made farther along. In other words, the first comers in a land can, by their individual efforts, do far more to channel out the course in which its history is to run than can those who come after them; and their labors, whether exercised on the side of evil or on the side of good, are far more effective than if they had remained in old settled communities.

So it is peculiarly incumbent on us here to-day so to act throughout our lives as to leave our children a heritage, for which we will receive their blessing and not their curse.

Stickney, sitting on the platform as presiding officer, was struck by the contrast which Roosevelt offered to the man who had preceded him. The first speaker had been "eloquent" in the accepted meaning of the word; Roosevelt was not consciously eloquent at all. He talked as he always talked, simply, directly, earnestly, emphatically.

We have rights [he went on], but we have correlative duties; none can escape them. We only have the right to live on as free men, governing our own lives as we will, so long as we show ourselves worthy of the privileges we enjoy. We must remember that the Republic can only be kept pure by the individual purity of its members; and that if it become once thoroughly corrupted, it will surely cease to exist. In our body politic, each man is himself a constituent portion of the sovereign, and if the sovereign is to continue in power, he must continue to do right. When you here exercise your privileges at the ballot box, you are not only exercising a right, but you are also fulfilling a duty; and a heavy responsibility rests on you to fulfill your duty well. If you fail to work in public life, as well as in private, for honesty and uprightness and virtue, if you condone vice because the vicious man is smart, or if you in any other way cast your weight into the scales in favor of evil, you are just so far corrupting and making less valuable the birthright of your children. The duties of American citizenship are very solemn as well as very precious; and each one of us here to-day owes it to himself, to his children, and to all his fellow Americans, to show that he is capable of performing them in the right spirit.

It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.

I do not undervalue for a moment our material prosperity; like all Americans, I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat-fields, railroads,—and herds of cattle, too,—big factories, steamboats, and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue. It is of more importance that we should show ourselves honest, brave, truthful, and intelligent, than that we should own all the railways and grain elevators in the world. We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune. Here we are not ruled over by others, as in the case of Europe; we rule ourselves. All American citizens, whether born here or elsewhere, whether of one creed or another, stand on the same footing; we welcome every honest immigrant no matter from what country he comes, provided only that he leaves off his former nationality, and remains neither Celt nor Saxon, neither Frenchman nor German, but becomes an American, desirous of fulfilling in good faith the duties of American citizenship.

When we thus rule ourselves, we have the responsibilities of sovereigns, not of subjects. We must never exercise our rights either wickedly or thoughtlessly; we can continue to preserve them in but one possible way, by making the proper use of them. In a new portion of the country, especially here in the Far West, it is peculiarly important to do so; and on this day of all others we ought soberly to realize the weight of the responsibility that rests upon us. I am, myself, at heart as much a Westerner as an Easterner; I am proud, indeed, to be considered one of yourselves, and I address you in this rather solemn strain to-day, only because of my pride in you, and because your welfare, moral as well as material, is so near my heart.

It was a hilarious party of cowpunchers who took the afternoon train back to Medora. For a part of the brief journey Packard sat with Roosevelt discussing his speech.

"It was during this talk," said Packard afterward, "that I first realized the potential bigness of the man. One could not help believing he was in deadly earnest in his consecration to the highest ideals of citizenship. He had already made his mark in the New York Legislature. He was known as a fighter who dared to come out in the open and depend upon the backing of public opinion. He was reputed to be wealthy enough to devote his life to any work he chose, and I learned, on the return journey to the Bad Lands that day, that he believed he could do better work in a public and political way than in any other. My conclusion was immediate, and I said, 'Then you will become President of the United States.'

"One would suppose that I could remember the actual words he used in reply, but I cannot. I remember distinctly that he was not in the least surprised at my statement. He gave me the impression of having thoroughly considered the matter and to have arrived at the same conclusion that I had arrived at. I remember only this of what he said, 'If your prophecy comes true, I will do my part to make a good one.'"



XXIV

The road is wide and the stars are out, and the breath of night is sweet, And this is the time when wanderlust should seize upon my feet, But I'm glad to turn from the open road and the starlight on my face, And leave the splendor of out-of-doors for a human dwelling-place.

Joyce KILMER

A few days after the celebration in Dickinson. Roosevelt went East. The political sirens were calling. He was restless for something to do that would bring into service the giant's strength of which he was becoming increasingly conscious, and, incidentally, would give him an opportunity to win distinction. He had been half inclined to accept an offer from Mayor Grace of New York to head the Board of Health, but Lodge, as Roosevelt wrote to his sister Corinne, thought it "infra dig," and he reluctantly rejected it. There were rumors in the air that he might have the Republican nomination for Mayor of New York if he wanted it. He went East, possibly for the purpose of investigating them, returning to Elkhorn early in August.

Roosevelt was unquestionably restless. He loved the wild country, but he had tasted all the various joys and hardships it had to offer, and, although he said again and again that if he had no ties of affection and of business to bind him to the East, he would make Dakota his permanent residence, down in his heart he was hungering for a wider field of action. The frontier had been a challenge to his manhood; now that he had stood every test it had presented to him, its glamour faded and he looked about for a sharper challenge and more exacting labors.

For a few weeks that August he half hoped that he might find them on the field of battle. Several American citizens, among them a man named Cutting, had been arrested in Mexico, apparently illegally, and Bayard, who was President Cleveland's Secretary of State, had been forced more than once to make vigorous protests. Relations became strained. The anti-Mexican feeling on the border spread over the whole of Texas, regiments were organized, and the whole unsettled region between the Missouri and the Rockies, which was inclined to look upon Mexico as the natural next morsel in the fulfillment of the nation's "manifest destiny," began to dream of war.

Roosevelt, seeing how matters were tending, set about to organize a troop of cavalry in the Bad Lands. He notified the Secretary of War that it stood at the service of the Government.

I have written to Secretary Endicott [Roosevelt wrote to Lodge on August 10th], offering to try to raise some companies of horse-riflemen out here, in the event of trouble with Mexico. Won't you telegraph me at once if war becomes inevitable? Out here things are so much behindhand that I might not hear of things for a week. I have not the least idea there will be any trouble, but as my chances of doing anything in the future worth doing seem to grow continually smaller, I intend to grasp at every opportunity that turns up. The cowboys were all eager for war, not caring much with whom. They were fond of adventure and to tell the truth [as Roosevelt wrote later], they were by no means averse to the prospect of plunder. News from the outside world came to us very irregularly, and often in distorted form, so that we began to think we might get involved in a conflict not only with Mexico, but with England also. One evening at my ranch the men began talking over English soldiers, so I got down "Napier" and read them several extracts from his descriptions of the fighting in the Spanish peninsula, also recounting as well as I could the great deeds of the British cavalry from Waterloo to Balaklava, and finishing up by describing from memory the fine appearance, the magnificent equipment, and the superb horses of the Household Cavalry and of a regiment of hussars I had once seen.

All of this produced much the same effect on my listeners that the sight of Marmion's cavalcade produced in the minds of the Scotch moss-troopers on the eve of Flodden; and at the end, one of them, who had been looking into the fire and rubbing his hands together, said, with regretful emphasis, "Oh, how I would like to kill one of them!"

Roosevelt went to Bismarck and found the Territorial Governor friendly to his project.

Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, of New York, the famous statesman, ranchman, and hunter [runs the story in the Bismarck Tribune], has been making inquiries since the announcement of the Mexican difficulties as to the available volunteer troops in the Northwest, and in the event of action being required, it is confidently believed Mr. Roosevelt would tender to the Government the services of an entire regiment of cowboys, under his command. At a recent visit here he was assured of two companies of Dakota cowboys to accompany him. Mr. Roosevelt has been the captain of a company of militia in New York, and no better man could be found to lead the daring cowboys to a seat of war and no commander would have more effective troops.

The war cloud blew over. Roosevelt evidently received a letter from Lodge explaining that the Mexican incident was of a trivial nature, for, on the 20th of August, he wrote him rather apologetically:

I wrote as regards Mexico qua cowboy, not qua statesman; I know little of the question, but conclude Bayard is wrong, for otherwise it would be phenomenal; he ought to be idolized by the mugwumps. If a war had come off, I would surely have had behind me as utterly reckless a set of desperadoes as ever sat in the saddle.

It is no use saying that I would like a chance at something I thought I could really do; at present I see nothing whatever ahead. However, there is the hunting in the fall, at any rate.

The season which began with Finnegan and Company was richer in varied experiences than it was in financial returns. Roosevelt recognized that there were already too many cattlemen in the business to make large profits possible.

In certain sections of the West [he told a reporter of the Mandan Pioneer in July] the losses this year are enormous, owing to the drought and overstocking. Each steer needs from fifteen to twenty-five acres, but they are crowded on very much thicker, and the cattlemen this season have paid the penalty. Between the drought, the grasshoppers, and the late frosts, ice forming as late as June 10th, there is not a green thing in all the region I have been over. A stranger would think a donkey could not live there. The drought has been very bad throughout the region, and there is not a garden in all of it.

Sewall was aware of that fact to his sorrow, for the garden he himself had planted and tended with infinite care had died between dawn and dusk on that memorable Fourth of July on which Roosevelt addressed the citizens of Dickinson.

They say dry years are best for cattle [he wrote his brother]. If so, this must be a nice one and they do seem to be doing well so far, but if we have much snow next winter it looks to me as if they would have short picking.

The prospect was not engaging. But, though Roosevelt was not getting much financial return on his rather generous investment, he was getting other things, for him at this time of far greater value. He who had been weak in body and subject to racking illnesses had in these three years developed a constitution as tough and robust as an Indian's. He had achieved something beside this. Living, talking, working, facing danger, and suffering hardships with the Sewalls and the Dows, the Ferrises and the Langs, and Merrifield and Packard and Bill Dantz and Hell-Roaring Bill Jones, and countless other stalwart citizens of the Bad Lands, he had come very close to the heart of the "plain American." He loved the companions of his joys and labors, and they in turn regarded him with an admiration and devotion which was all the deeper because of the amazing fact that he had come from the ranks of the "dudes."

They admired him for his courage and his feats of endurance, but, being tender-hearted themselves, they loved him for his tenderness, which had a way that they approved, of expressing itself, not in words, but in deeds. Bill Sewall had a little girl of three, "a forlorn little mite," as Roosevelt described her to "Bamie," and it was Roosevelt who sent the word East which transported the child, that had neither playmates nor toys, into a heaven of delight with picture blocks and letter blocks, a little horse and a rag doll.

His warm human sympathy found expression in a dramatic manner a day or two before his departure late that August for the Coeur d'Alenes. He was rounding up some cattle with his men near Sentinel Butte, twenty miles west of Medora, when word came that a cowpuncher named George Frazier had been struck by lightning and killed, and that his body had been taken to Medora. Frazier belonged to the "outfit" of the Marquis de Mores, but he had worked for Roosevelt two years previous, digging post-holes with George Myers in June, 1884. Roosevelt knew that the man had no relatives in that part of the world, to see that a fitting disposition of the body was made, and instantly expressed his determination to take charge of the arrangements for the funeral.

"We will flag the next train and go to Medora," he said.

The next train, they knew, was "No. 2," the finest train running over the road. It did not, on the surface, look probable that it would stop at a desolate spot in the prairie to permit a handful of cowboys to get on. "They won't stop here for nuthin'," one of the men insisted. "By Godfrey, they'll have to stop!" Roosevelt retorted, and sent a man down to the track to flag the train.

The engineer saw the warning signal and slowed down, but did not stop. The cowboys dashed alongside the engine, firing shots in the air. The engineer, believing that he was being held up by bandits and that the next shot might be aimed at himself, brought the train to a standstill. There was a wild scramble among the passengers; even the train crew expected the worst. Valuables were hurriedly secreted. "I don't believe," remarked George Myers afterward, "some of the passengers ever did find all the things that was hid away."

Leaving their horses in charge of one of the cowboys, Roosevelt, followed by Sylvane Ferris, Merrifield, Myers, and Johnny Goodall, boarded the train. The conductor was resigned by this time to a hold-up; but when he discovered the actual nature of their mission, he flew into a rage and threatened to put them all off.

"You be good," cried Roosevelt, "or you'll be the one to get off!" His vigorous advice was supplemented by impressive injunctions from other members of the party. When they finally did get off, it was at Medora.

A salvo of profanity from the train crew followed them. "You'll hear from this!" thundered the conductor. They did not hear from it. It would not have greatly disturbed Roosevelt if they had. He opened a subscription to cover the expenses of the funeral. Everybody "chipped in," and the unfortunate received the burial that a God-fearing cowpuncher deserved.

Roosevelt went with Merrifield west to the Coeur d'Alenes, in northern Idaho, almost immediately after Frazier's funeral. He was to meet a hunter named John Willis, who was to take him and Merrifield out after white goat. He had never met Willis, but his correspondence with him had suggested possibilities of interest beside the chase. Roosevelt had written Willis in July that he had heard of his success in pursuit of the game of the high peaks. "If I come out," he concluded, "do you think it will be possible for me to get a goat?"

The answer he received was written on the back of his own letter and was quite to the point. "If you can't shoot any better than you can write, I don't think it will be."

Roosevelt's reply came by wire. "Consider yourself engaged."

It would have been strange if, after this epistolary exchange, the two men should not have been rather curious about each other's personalities. Roosevelt, descending from the train at a way-station in the mountains, found a huge, broad-shouldered man his own age, waiting for him, The man was not over-cordial. He did not, he later admitted, regard Roosevelt's corduroy knee-pants with favor.

Roosevelt, knowing how to catch a hunter, showed Willis his guns. "Will you go on a trip with me?" he asked.

"I am going to start out day after to-morrow for a three or four weeks' hunt," Willis answered. "If you want to go along as my guest, you are welcome to. But I want to tell you before we go, I won't take any booze."

"Why do you say that?" asked Roosevelt, thoroughly interested in this strange creature.

"Why, I've an idea you are some brewer's son who's made a lot of money. You look as if you'd been raised on beer."

Roosevelt roared with delight. "I want to make a contract with you," he said. "I will give you twenty-five dollars for everything that you show me in the way of game."

"I don't want it," said Willis gruffly.

"Then I will buy the grub."

"All the grub I'll take along won't amount to more than three or four dollars—a hundred pounds of flour, twenty-five pounds of bacon, dried apples, and black tea. That's all you'll get."

"By George," cried Roosevelt, "that's fine!"

"You can't stand a trip like this," Willis remarked with deadly frankness.

"You take me on the trip and I'll show you. I can train myself to walk as far as you can."

Willis doubted it and said so.

They camped far up in the mountains, hunting day after day through the deep woods just below the timber-line. Roosevelt and Merrifield were accustomed to life in the saddle, and although they had varied it with an occasional long walk after deer or sheep, they were quite unable to cope with Willis when it came to mountaineering. The climbing was hard, the footing was treacherous, and the sharp rocks tore their moccasins into ribbons. There was endless underbrush, thickets of prickly balsam or laurel—but there were no goats.

At last, one mid-afternoon, as he was supporting himself against a tree, halfway across a long landslide, Roosevelt suddenly discovered one of the beasts he was after, a short distance away, making his way down a hill, looking for all the world like a handsome tame billy. He was in a bad position for a shot, and as he twisted himself about he dislodged some pebbles. The goat, instantly alert, fled. Roosevelt fired, but the shot went low, only breaking a fore-leg.

The three men raced and scrambled after the fleeing animal. It leaped along the hillside for nearly a mile, then turned straight up the mountain. They followed the bloody trail where it went up the sharpest and steepest places, skirting the cliffs and precipices.

Roosevelt, intent on the quarry, was not what Bill Sewall would have called "over-cautious" in the pursuit.

He was running along a shelving ledge when a piece of loose slate with which the ledge was covered slipped under his foot. He clutched at the rock wall, he tried to fling himself back, but he could not recover himself.

He went head first over the precipice.

Roosevelt's luck was with him that day. He fell forty or fifty feet into a tall pine, bounced through it, and landed finally, not uncomfortably, in a thick balsam, somewhat shaken and scratched, but with no bones broken and with his rifle still clutched in his hand.

From above came the hoarse voice of John Willis. "Are you hurt?" he asked.

"No," answered Roosevelt, a trifle breathless.

"Then come on!"

Roosevelt "came on," scrambling back up the steep height he had so swiftly descended, and raced after the guide. He came upon the goat at last, but winded as he was, and with the sweat in his eyes, he shot too high, cutting the skin above the spine. The goat plunged downhill and the hunters plunged after him, pursuing the elusive animal until darkness covered the trail.

"Now," said Willis, "I expect you are getting tired."

"By George," said Roosevelt, "how far have we gone?"

"About fifteen or twenty miles up and down the mountains."

"If we get that goat to-morrow, I will give you a hundred dollars."

"I don't want a hundred dollars. But we'll get the goat."

Roosevelt brought him down the next day at noon.

Roosevelt spent two weeks with Willis in the mountains. It was a rich experience for the Easterner, but for the tall Missourian it proved to be even more. Willis was a child of the frontier, who had knocked about between the Rio Grande and the Canadian border ever since his boyhood, doing a hundred different things upon which the law and civilized men were supposed to look with disapproval.[22]

[Footnote 22: Willis was a great teller of tales. See Hunting the Grizzly, by Theodore Roosevelt (The Sagamore Series, G. P. Putnam's Sons, page 216 ff.), for the most lurid of his yarns.]

To this odd child of nature, bred in the wilderness, Roosevelt opened the door to a world which John Willis did not know existed.

"He was a revelation to me," said Willis long afterward. "He was so well posted on everything. He was the first man that I had ever met that really knew anything. I had just been with a lot of roughnecks, cowpunchers, horse-thieves, and that sort. Roosevelt would explain things to me. He told me a lot of things."

Among other things, Roosevelt told Willis some of his experiences in the New York Assembly. Huge sums had been offered him to divert him from this course or that which certain interests regarded as dangerous to their freedom of action. To Willis it was amazing that Roosevelt should not have accepted what was offered to him, and he began to be aware of certain standards of virtue and honor.

To Roosevelt the trip was a splendid adventure; to Willis it proved a turning-point in his life.[23]

[Footnote 23: When Roosevelt came to Helena in 1911, John Willis was one of the crowd that greeted him. Willis clapped Roosevelt on the back familiarly. "I made a man out of you," he cried. Quick as a flash, came Roosevelt's retort: "Yes. John made a man out of me, but I made a Christian out of John."]

Roosevelt returned to Elkhorn the middle of September, to find that Sewall and Dow had come to a momentous decision. Dow had, during his absence, taken a train-load of cattle to Chicago, and had found that the best price he was able to secure for the hundreds of cattle he had taken to the market there was less by ten dollars a head than the sum it had cost to raise and transport them. Sewall and Dow had "figured things over," and had come to the conclusion that the sooner they terminated their contract with Roosevelt the less money he would lose. They recognized that they themselves were safe enough, for by the "one-sided trade," as Sewall called it, which Roosevelt had made with them, they were to share in whatever profits there were, and in case there were no profits were to receive wages. But neither of them enjoyed the part he was playing in what seemed to both of them a piece of hopeless business.



Roosevelt himself had been wondering whether it was wise to allow the two backwoodsmen to continue in an enterprise in which the future was so clouded and full of the possibilities of disaster. He himself might win through, and he might not. The thing was a gamble, in any event. He could afford to take the risk. Sewall and Dow could not.

He had written "Bamie," earlier in the summer, that he was "curious to see how the fall sales would come out." Dow's report completely satisfied his curiosity.

He called the two men into his room. He told them that he too had been "figuring up things." He would stand by his agreement, he said, if, facing an uncertain outcome, they wished to remain. But, if they were willing, he thought they had "better quit the business and go back."

Sewall and Dow did not hesitate. They said they would go back.

"I never wanted to fool away anybody else's money," Sewall added. "Never had any of my own to fool away."

"How soon can you go?" asked Roosevelt.

Sewall turned and went into the kitchen "to ask the womenfolks." It happened that three or four weeks previous the population of Elkhorn had been increased by two. Baby sons had arrived in the same week in the families of both Sewall and Dow. The ministrations of Dr. Stickney had not been available, and the two mothers had survived because they had the constitutions of frontierswomen rather than because they had the benefit of the nursing of the termagant who was Jerry Tompkins's wife. The babies—known to their families, and to the endless succession of cowboys who came from near and far to inspect them, as "the Bad Lands babies"—were just six weeks old.

"The womenfolks say they can go in three weeks," Sewall reported.

"Three weeks from to-day," answered Roosevelt, "we go."

And so the folks from Maine, who had made a rough and simple house in the wilderness into a home, began to gather together their belongings and pack up. Wise old Bill Sewall had been right.

"You'll come to feel different," he had said, two years before, when Roosevelt had been lonely and despondent. "And then you won't want to stay here."

Life, which for a while had seemed to Roosevelt so gray and dismal, had, in fact, slowly taken on new color. At times he had imagined that Dakota might satisfy him for a permanent residence, but that fancy, born of grief and disappointment, had vanished in the radiance of a new happiness. He had become engaged to Edith Carow, and he knew that the world for him and for her was that busy world where his friends were, and hers, and where he and she had been boy and girl together.

The lure of politics, moreover, was calling him. And yet, during those last weeks at Elkhorn, he was not at all sure that he wished to reenter the turmoil. He rode out into the prairie one day for a last "session" with Bill Sewall shortly before the three weeks were up. He told Sewall he had an idea he ought to go into law.

"You'd be a good lawyer," said Bill, "but I think you ought to go into politics. Good men like you ought to go into politics. If you do, and if you live, I think you'll be President."

Roosevelt laughed. "That's looking a long way ahead."

"It may look a long way ahead to you," Sewall declared stoutly, "but it isn't as far ahead as it's been for some of the men who got there."

"I'm going home now," said Roosevelt, "to see about a job my friends want me to take. I don't think I want it. It will get me into a row. And I want to write."

An Easterner, whose name has slipped from the record, hearing possibly that Roosevelt was making changes in the management of his herds, offered to buy all of Roosevelt's cattle. Roosevelt refused. The man offered to buy Merrifield's share, then Sylvane's. Both rejected the offer. The herd had increased greatly in value since they had established it. The coming spring, they said, they would begin to get great returns....

"September 25, 1886," runs an item in Bill Sewall's account-book, "squared accounts with Theodore Roosevelt." On the same day Roosevelt made a contract with Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris by which he agreed, as the contract runs, "to place all his cattle branded with the Maltese cross and all his she-stock and bulls branded with the elkhorn and triangle, some twenty-odd hundred head in all, valued at sixty thousand dollars," in charge of Ferris and Merrifield on shares for the term of four years; the men of the Maltese Cross agreeing on their part to take charge of the Elkhorn steer brand which was Roosevelt's exclusive property.

Then, knowing that his cattle were in good hands, Roosevelt once more turned his face to the East, conscious in his heart, no doubt, that, however soon he might return, or however often, the Dakota idyl was ended.



XXV

I may not see a hundred Before I see the Styx, But coal or ember, I'll remember Eighteen-eighty-six.

The stiff heaps in the coulee, The dead eyes in the camp, And the wind about, blowing fortunes out As a woman blows out a lamp.

From Medora Nights

Roosevelt accepted the Republican nomination for Mayor of New York City, "with the most genuine reluctance," as he wrote Lodge. He recognized that it was "a perfectly hopeless contest; the chance for success being so very small that it may be left out of account." It was a three-cornered fight, with Henry George as the nominee of a United Labor Party on a single-tax platform, and Abram S. Hewitt as the candidate of Tammany Hall.

The nomination gave Dakota an occasion to express its mind concerning its adopted son, and it did so, with gusto.

Theodore is a Dakota cowboy [said the Press of Sioux Falls], and has spent a large share of his time in the Territory for a couple of years. He is one of the finest thoroughbreds you ever met—a whole-souled, clearheaded, high-minded gentleman. When he first went on the range, the cowboys took him for a dude, but soon they realized the stuff of which the youngster was built, and there is no man now who inspires such enthusiastic regard among them as he.

Roosevelt conducted a lively campaign, for it was not in him to make anything but the best fight of which he was capable even with the odds against him. The thoughtful element of the city, on whose support against the radicalism of Henry George on the one hand and the corruption of Tammany on the other, he should have been able to count, became panic-stricken at the possibility of a labor victory, and gave their votes to Hewitt. He was emphatically defeated; in fact he ran third. "But anyway," he remarked cheerfully, "I had a bully time."

He went abroad immediately after election, and in December, at St. George's, Hanover Square, London, he married Edith Kermit Carow.

* * * * *

Once more, winter descended upon the Bad Lands.

Medora [remarked the Bismarck Tribune in November] has pretty nearly gone into winter quarters. To be sure, the slaughter-house establishment of Marquis de Mores will not formally shut down until the end of the month, but there are many days on which there is no killing done and the workmen have to lay off. The past season has not been of the busiest, and the near approach of winter finds this about the quietest place in western Dakota. The hotel is closed. There is only one general store and its proprietor declared that the middle of December will find him, stock and all, hundreds of miles from here. The proprietor of the drug store will move early in December, as he cannot make his board in the place.

A. T. Packard, the editor of the Bad Lands Cowboy, which now has a circulation of 650, is evidently prospering well, and, with the managers of the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Company and the railroad agents, seems to be about the only person who expresses an intention of spending the season here.

Fortunate were those who spent that season elsewhere. Old-timers, whose wits had been sharpened by long life in the open, had all the autumn been making ominous predictions. They talked of a hard winter ahead, and the canniest of them defied the skeptics by riding into Medora trailing a pack-horse and purchasing six months' supplies of provisions at one time.

Nature, they pointed out, was busier than she had ever been, in the memory of the oldest hunter in that region, in "fixin' up her folks for hard times." The muskrats along the creeks were building their houses to twice their customary height; the walls were thicker than usual, and the muskrats' fur was longer and heavier than any old-timer had ever known it to be. The beavers were working by day as well as by night, cutting the willow brush, and observant eyes noted that they were storing twice their usual winter's supply. The birds were acting strangely. The ducks and geese, which ordinarily flew south in October, that autumn had, a month earlier, already departed. The snowbirds and the cedar birds were bunched in the thickets, fluttering about by the thousands in the cedar brakes, obviously restless and uneasy. The Arctic owls, who came only in hard winters, were about.

There was other evidence that the winds were brewing misery. Not only the deer and the antelope, the wolves and the coyotes, but the older range cattle and the horses were growing unusually long coats.

Other signs of strange disturbances of Nature were not lacking. During October the usual Indian-summer haze seemed to have lifted to a higher altitude, interposing, as it were, a curtain between earth and sun. The light became subdued and unnatural. Halos appeared about the sun, with sun-dogs at opposite sides of the circle. The superstitious were startled, in the time of the full moon, at four shafts of light, which could be seen emanating from it, giving an eerie effect as of a cross over the silver disc.

There was usually a wet snowstorm in late October; this year it did not come. A weird, dull stillness was in the air. Then, one evening toward the end of the first week in November, the snow came, falling lightly and noiselessly. As the evening advanced, the wind arose; and even as it increased in violence, the spirit in the thermometer fell. The wind became a gale, and before midnight a blizzard was howling and sweeping through the Bad Lands such as no one there had ever known before. The snow was like the finest powder, driving through every crack and nail hole, and piling snowdrifts within the houses as well as without.

"Upon getting up in the morning," said Lincoln Lang long afterward, describing that storm, "the house was intensely cold, with everything that could freeze frozen solid. The light was cut off from the windows looking south. As we opened the front door, we were confronted by a solid wall of snow reaching to the eaves of the house. There was no drift over the back door, looking north, but, as I opened it, I was blown almost from my feet by the swirl of the snow, which literally filled the air, so that it was impossible to see any of the surrounding ranch-buildings or even the fence, less than fifty feet distant. It was like a tornado of pure white dust or very fine sand, icy cold, and stinging like a whip-lash."

As fast as the fine dry snow fell, it drifted and packed itself into the coulees, gulches, and depressions, filling them to a depth of a hundred feet or more. The divides and plateaus, and other exposed places, were left almost bare, except where some mound or rock or bit of sagebrush created an obstruction, about which the eddying currents piled snowdrifts which rose week after week to huge proportions. On the river bottoms where the sagebrush was thick, the snow lay level with the top of the brush, then drove on to lodge and pack about the cottonwood trees and beneath the river-banks, forming great drifts, extending here and there from bank to bank.