II
CHAPTER FOUR
PART OF what is enshrined in our collective memory as the “real West” had its origins in a little town in the Badlands of North Dakota—a place called Medora, which by all rights ought to be as celebrated as Dodge City or Tombstone. And the fact that Medora was founded by a “crazy Frenchman” only serves to make it quite as authentic a bit of Western Americana as does the fact that young Theodore Roosevelt once rode high, wide, and handsome down the main street. It’s the “Heart of Rough Rider Country” the truck drivers read as they roar by on 1-94, resplendent in their $150 Tony Lama boots.
The setting is best seen from Graveyard Butte, out on the windy point on the west side of the river, where they buried Riley Luffsey. The river and the railroad and the little town are spread below. There is a steep gray cliff behind the town that turns pink in the late afternoon light, and in front of town, in a grassy picnic ground, a brick smokestack, prominent as the point on a sundial, marks the spot where the packing plant stood.
The château, as everyone in Medora still calls it, is nearer at hand, on a bare, high bluff this side of the river, just back from the railroad bridge. Except for the big box elder beside the back door, the house looks no different today from the way it does in the old photographs.
Whether Theodore Roosevelt ever stood here, I can’t say. But his friends the Langs did—it was they who “planted Riley” the day after the shooting—and so doubtless did the Marquis de Mores, if only to enjoy the panorama, nearly all of which he owned.
The view has suffered scarcely at all in the intervening years. The light on the landscape is no less extraordinary, the immeasurable North Dakota sky is something to take your breath away. In early fall the cottonwoods are a blaze of gold beside the mudbrown river, and with the disappearance of the summer tourist traffic, Medora might still be the end of the world.
Come winter, it is the end of the world. Only about one hundred and thirty people, including the staff of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and their families, hang on in the town itself, while on outlying ranches, as snowbanks grow and temperatures drop to 20 below and worse, the isolation and hardships of daily life are compounded a hundredfold.
Winter is what ended the cowboy dream for Roosevelt, as for so many others along the Little Missouri River. When the thaw came in the spring of 1887, the carcasses of dead cattle surged downstream past Medora like cordwood. But I am ahead of my story, and it is the story, the odd little history that goes with the place, that makes it something considerably more than just scenery. Harold Schafer, who owns the Badlands Motel, the Rough Riders Hotel, and much else in Medora, likes to tell visitors that the charm of the Badlands is their scaled-down grandeur. “These aren’t faraway mountains you can’t get to, that you can’t feel under your own feet,” he says, pointing to the surrounding hills. “This is scenery you can reach out and touch.” And then he adds, “Teddy’s here, too, of course…and so is the Marquis.”
The beginning was in 1883, when the cattle boom had hit its peak on the Great Plains. The Northern Pacific had also pushed on through the Badlands by then, and this coming of the railroad coincided with the discovery by the Texans and the Eastern and European money people that the Badlands themselves were not all the name implied. To French-Canadian fur trappers penetrating the area a hundred years before, it had been les mauvaises terres à traverser—bad lands to travel across. It is as if the rolling prairie land has suddenly given way to a weird otherworld of bizarrely shaped cliffs and hummocks and tablelands, these sectioned off every which way by countless little ravines and draws and by the broad, looping valley of the Little Missouri, which, unlike the big Missouri, flows north and in summer is not much more than a good-size stream.
Extending along the Little Missouri for nearly two hundred miles, the area is a kind of Grand Canyon in miniature, the work of millions of years of erosion on ancient, preglacial sediments. Stratified layers of clay, clays as pale as beach sand, are juxtaposed against brick-red bands of scoria or sinuous, dark seams of lignite. Some formations have the overpowering presence of ancient ruins, of things remembered from unpleasant dreams. The leader of an early military expedition against the Sioux described the landscape as hell with the fires out. George Armstrong Custer, who spent several days snowbound in the Badlands on his way to the Little Bighorn in 1876, called it worthless country.
The cattlemen knew differently. Unlike the other Badlands to the south (those of present-day South Dakota, which are geologically quite different), these of the uppermost reaches of what was then the Dakota Territory were green along the river bottoms and green above, on the tops of the tablelands. It was “wondrous country” for grass, wrote one veteran cattleman, remembering that summer of 1883. There was “grass and more grass” in the bottomlands and up along sweeping valleys: little bluestem grass, “good as corn for fattening,” and curly buffalo grass, “making unexcelled winter feed.” Veteran cattlemen and greenhorn money people alike were “dazzled by the prospects.” The grass was all free for the taking; there was water; and the very outlandishness of the terrain promised shelter from winter storms. Possibly fifty thousand cattle were driven into the Little Missouri basin that summer alone.
The Texas outfits included the big Berry-Boice Cattle Company (the “Three-Sevens” brand) and the Continental Land and Cattle Company (the “Hashknife”). The smaller ranchers were nearly all from the East or from Canada or Europe, young men primed on such newly published, authoritative works as The Beef Bonanza; or How to Get Rich on the Plains.
The main attraction, however—the man of the hour—was one Antoine Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Mores, recently of the French cavalry, who planned, he said, not just to raise cattle but to found an enterprise unlike any in the West. “It takes me only a few seconds to understand a situation that other men have to puzzle over for hours,” declared this altogether humorless young aristocrat in his nearly perfect English. Roosevelt’s arrival on the scene, several months later, was by contrast a minor occurrence.
De Mores was Roosevelt’s age—twenty-five—and like Roosevelt he was a passionate lover of the hunt and the kill and of the great outdoors. But beyond that, the two had little in common. About six feet tall, spare and wonderfully fit, the Marquis was inordinately handsome, with black eyes and a tremendous black mustache that he kept waxed to perfection. It was the handsomeness of a Victorian stage villain, to judge by the few photographs we have. There is something vaguely unpleasant in the face, not arrogance only, something more threatening than that—but possibly I am influenced by the knowledge of what he became later in life.
Included with his baggage as he got off the train at the Badlands was a silver-headed bamboo walking stick filled with ten pounds of lead—to exercise his dueling arm. One was supposed to hold the stick straight out at arm’s length for several slow counts, a trick I myself have tried unsuccessfully at the château, where the stick still stands in a corner of his bedroom.
In duels in France the Marquis had already killed two men, and on his forays along the Little Missouri he looked like a mounted arsenal—weighted down as he was with two huge Colt revolvers, two cartridge belts, a heavy-caliber French rifle cradled in one arm, a bowie knife strapped to one leg. A Roman Catholic of vigorous piety, a royalist, and an anti-Semite, the Marquis liked to tell his new neighbors of his aspirations to the French throne and how the fortunes he would make in the Badlands were to be applied to that specific purpose.
His plan was to revolutionize the beef industry by butchering cattle on the range, there in the Badlands beside the railroad, and thus eliminate the whole costly process of shipping live animals all the way to Chicago. That dressed meat could be shipped almost any distance in the new refrigerator cars without spoilage had already been demonstrated. So why not put the packing plant where the cattle were? It would do away with the Chicago middlemen, which would mean lower prices for the consumer, which in turn would produce an ever-greater demand for beef.
On April Fools’ Day, 1883, the Marquis cracked a bottle of champagne over a tent peg to found Medora, which was to be the center of his operations. He had picked the eastern side of the river for his site. The name Medora was in honor of his American wife, the former Medora von Hoffman, whose father, a Wall Street banker, had provided her with an income of about $90,000 a year (which would be roughly a million in present-day dollars). This plus his own family backing gave the Marquis, as he said, little worry over finances. He would spend whatever was needed. He himself would be president and general manager of the new Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, while his father-in-law, Louis von Hoffman, was listed as treasurer.
The young Frenchman was suddenly everywhere at once, seeing to plans, hiring carpenters, masons, ordering equipment for the packing plant, issuing statements to reporters. He bought up all the land he could lay his hands on, twenty-one thousand acres before he was through. He bought cattle; he brought in twelve thousand sheep. He announced plans to raise cabbages, these to be fertilized with offal from the packing plant and shipped east in his refrigerator cars.
There was nothing slack about his imagination. Another idea was to produce pottery from Badlands clays. Yet another was to ship Columbia River salmon from Portland to New York (at a profit of $1,000 a carload, he figured). As for living quarters, he had originally intended to make do with a tent, pending completion of his own Château de Mores, on the bluff across the river, and the arrival of Madame de Mores. But finding tent life a bit more inconvenient than he expected, he had a private railroad car brought in and placed on a siding. “I like this country,” he wrote to his wife, “for there is room to move about without stepping on the feet of others.”
Yet since arriving, he had done little else but step on feet and sensibilities. The West, for all its aura of freedom, its apparent absence of rules and regulations, was a place—an economy, a way of life—founded on very definite rules and regulations, most of them unwritten. If there was nothing illegal or even illogical about bringing in sheep or buying up land in country where nobody else owned any or believed in owning any, it was all contrary to local tradition and thus, by the prevailing ethic, highly dangerous. Worst of all, the Marquis began fencing his land, and when the fences were promptly cut, as he had been warned they would be, he as quickly replaced them. When three drunken cowboys named O’Donnell, Wannegan, and Luffsey shot up the town and vowed to kill him on sight, he prudently left town for nearby Mandan to ask the territorial justice of the peace what he ought to do. “Why, shoot!” he was told.
So the next time the three cowboys went on a rampage, the Marquis and his men were waiting for them by a bend in the river outside of town. It may have been an ambush, pure and simple—cold-blooded murder, as the Langs insisted—or the Marquis may have been acting in self-defense, as he said. Either way, Riley Luffsey was dead, one slug in the neck, another in the chest.
There were two formal hearings at Mandan, during which witnesses had free run of the saloons, and as things wound to a close, the prosecuting attorney let fly with a scathing burst of frontier oratory, a speech so offensive to the Marquis that he pulled a revolver on the attorney that night at the hotel, aimed, fired, and would have had another killing to answer for had not a bystander struck his arm.
The outcome was an acquittal, and so back to Medora the young Frenchman went, to resume his business in the manner of a man who considered the issue closed and who assumed others did too. Probably he never knew how close he came to being lynched—which is how things stood in early September, when Roosevelt arrived.
Roosevelt got off the train about three in the morning, when it was still cold and dark. He was alone and he looked very little like the man he was to become. At most he weighed 135 pounds, “a little feller” with a wispy mustache and large, metal-rimmed eyeglasses. That he was the classic child of privilege, the very essence of the era’s gilded youth by all appearances, escaped no one once day came and he made his presence known. There was something faintly comic about him. He talked in a thin, piping voice and with the swallowed broad a’s of an upper-class New Yorker. Later, in an effort to head off some stray calves, he would immortalize himself along the Little Missouri by calling out to one of his cowboys, “Hasten forward quickly there!”
He had come, he said, to shoot a buffalo while there were still one or two left to shoot. He had also come for his health, but of this he said nothing. His vocation was politics. He was an assemblyman from New York’s safely Republican Twenty-first District.
He put up at the Langs’ ranch south of town, and in a matter of days—having talked to the Langs, having talked to Howard Eaton and a couple of young Canadians named Ferris and Merrifield—he decided to join forces with the Canadians, whose rude cabin, also south of town, was known as the Chimney Butte or, alternatively, the Maltese Cross ranch. What this meant for the moment was money only. He gave Ferris and Merrifield a check for $14,000 to buy some 450 head of cattle, which represented a small start (the Marquis was running something over three thousand head by then), but the direct, trusting manner in which he did it made an impression. He bought no land. Like nearly everybody except the Marquis, he would remain a squatter.
In two weeks Roosevelt was heading home again to West 57th Street and the lovely young wife who was pregnant with their first child. He had killed his buffalo, but only after seven days that had all but killed his guide, Joe Ferris, brother of one of his new partners in the cattle business. The chase had carried them pell-mell over some of the wildest, most difficult terrain in the Badlands. Twice they found a buffalo for Roosevelt to shoot, and each time Roosevelt shot and missed. Exhausted by the pace set by the little Easterner, Ferris kept praying things would get so bad they would have to give up. It rained incessantly, but Roosevelt’s joy was not to be extinguished; every new adversity seemed a refreshment. Awaking one morning to find himself lying in several inches of water, Roosevelt exclaimed, “By Godfrey, but this is fun!” For two days he and Ferris had nothing to subsist on but biscuits and rainwater.
Remembering the expedition a lifetime afterward, Ferris was still incredulous. “You just couldn’t knock him out of sorts…and he had books with him and would read at odd times.” When at last Roosevelt shot his buffalo, just across the Montana line, he broke into a wild facsimile of an Indian war dance and handed Ferris a hundred dollars.
He returned in June a changed man. He would stake his future on the Badlands, he said; he would become a cattle baron. There would be time as well to think and to write and to make himself whole again. For by then he had suffered the worst tragedy of his life. Three and a half months earlier, his wife had died of complications resulting from the birth of their daughter, and his mother—the same day, in the same house—had died of typhoid. He saw his political career leading nowhere. He was plagued by stomach trouble, insomnia, and asthma, the torture of his childhood. Added to that was what he called his “caged wolf” feeling. Craving change, craving release from everything in the East, everything in his past, the conventions, the confinement, he was bent on a new life in the open air. New clothes, new work, new companions. Had he been able to change his name as well, as so many others did—there were three men named Bill Jones in Medora alone—he might have done that too, one suspects, given his frame of mind.
The very haunted, often foreboding spirit of the Badlands appealed to him powerfully now. The light in his life had gone out forever, he wrote in a tribute to his dead wife. The Badlands, he said, looked like Poe sounds.
Still…something within him refused to be subdued. His depression was serious, but it was also highly sporadic and never, so far as we know, was it immobilizing. He had spent a small fortune on his cowboy getup—big sombrero, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horsehide chaps, cowhide boots, silver belt buckle, fancy tooled-leather belt and holster, custom-engraved Colt revolver, fancy monogrammed silver spurs. The works. He gloried in dressing up and having his picture taken. “You would be amused to see me,” he wrote to his stuffy Boston friend Henry Cabot Lodge. Truth was, he himself was amused—and unabashedly proud. “I shall put on a thousand more cattle and make it my regular business,” he informed his sister Anna. He was in the saddle all day, “having a glorious time here.”
Spring mornings were the best, with the mist on the river. He loved the presence of so many birds and animals, the wild roses, the sweet scent of sage and ground juniper. He went off on long early-morning rides on a fiery little horse called Manitou. The dry air and open space and the speed of the horse made “a man’s blood thrill and leap with sheer buoyant lightheartedness.”
“Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough,” he declared in one of the most self-revealing lines he ever wrote. Get action! It was the old Roosevelt family cure-all—for illness, grief, self-doubt. Seize the moment! In the agony of an asthmatic childhood, the free and open out-of-doors had meant survival, literally life itself.
With very few exceptions, the cowboys took to him from the start. They called him Mr. Roosevelt or Theodore, as he wished; or Four-Eyes or Old Four-Eyes out of his hearing. So far as I know, nobody called him Teddy, a name he never cared for.
He was only an average rider and never much of a roper. He also abhorred foul language and said so, and he did not like to drink. But the cowboys judged him “game to the core.” He ate, lived, worked “the same as any man,” asking no favors. Besides, he was interesting—he had read a lot, he knew a lot. Once, in a hotel bar in present-day Wibaux, Montana, he stood up and in quiet, businesslike fashion flattened an unknown drunken cowboy who, a gun in each hand, had decided to make a laughingstock of him because of his glasses. The man had chosen to stand foolishly close to him and with his heels too close together, Roosevelt later explained.
He found a beautiful, quiet spot on the Little Missouri some thirty-five miles north of Medora and brought two Maine woodsmen named Sewall and Dow, friends from hunting trips in his college days, to help him establish another ranch, this to be called the Elkhorn. His stake in the Badlands was now up to some $40,000, a fifth of his inheritance.
Bill Sewall, a big, homespun expounder of common sense, arrived from Maine and after looking things over told Roosevelt it was no country for cattle. Roosevelt told Sewall he didn’t know what he was talking about. In the privacy of a memorable letter to his family back in Maine, Sewall said, “Tell all who wish to know that I think this a good place for a man with plenty of money to make more, but if I had enough money to start here I never would come here.”
The ranch house Sewall and Dow built is gone now. It was a long, low log cabin with a deep front porch where, in the heat of the day, Roosevelt liked to sit in a rocking chair and read poetry or just gaze at the river and the distant plateaus. But the same line of cottonwoods still shades the spot, and there is not another house or road or sign of civilization anywhere in sight.
Roosevelt thought he could write there, and it was as a writer, he had concluded, that the world would take him seriously. In his time in the Badlands, along with everything else, he produced magazine articles, a book on ranch life and hunting, a biography of Thomas Hart Benton, and notes for his epic history, The Winning of the West. Most important, he wrote from firsthand experience about the cowboy and the hard realities of the cowboy’s life, and this, with but one or two exceptions, was something no writer had done before. Owen Wister, author of the classic western The Virginian, called him “the pioneer in taking the cowboy seriously”; and indeed, it was Roosevelt, Wister, and the artist Frederic Remington—three Eastern contemporaries of “good background”—who in their efforts to catch the “living breathing end” of the frontier produced what in large measure remains the popular vision of the “real West.”
For his part, Roosevelt threw a charm over the Badlands in much the way other American writers have over other specific locales. And it was the Badlands cowboy, the rough rider as Roosevelt found him in and around Medora, that he fixed in the public imagination. If he didn’t exactly invent Marlboro Country, he brought it into focus as nobody had before him, and ironically enough, a Badlands location not far from Roosevelt’s Elkhorn ranch site has on occasion served literally as Marlboro Country. The weathered Badlands rancher who can tell you from personal experience what Roosevelt and the others were up against in their time also knows the going rate for commercial modeling.
To what extent Roosevelt’s faith in his ranching ventures was buoyed by the activities of the Marquis, Roosevelt himself never divulged. But by 1884, when Roosevelt had more than doubled his investment, it was all but impossible not to be impressed. Growing by leaps and bounds, Medora had become one of the wildest cow towns anywhere in the West, the sort of place, as Roosevelt said, where vice and pleasure were considered synonymous. The packing plant was in operation; cattle were actually being slaughtered; dressed Badlands beef was rolling east in the Marquis’s new refrigerator cars. Most important to a young man like Roosevelt, a man with no business experience and some very hardheaded family advisers to face, the big eastern papers, and the New York Times in particular, were now paying respectful attention to the Marquis, the thought being “that the foreigner was not so crazy after all.” The Marquis, said the Times, ran a “wonderful business.”
The château was completed and Madame de Mores took up residence, which to most of Medora was the surpassing event of the summer. In truth, the château was not much more than an overgrown frame farmhouse. There was nothing very fancy about it inside or out. But it was large—twenty-six rooms—and once the big, square piano arrived from St. Paul and a staff of twenty servants moved in, it became in the minds of the local citizenry as much a château as any on the Loire.
The Madame played Liszt and Verdi on the big piano. She painted in watercolors. Perched sidesaddle on one of the magnificent horses the Marquis had shipped from the East, her face shielded from the fierce Dakota sun by an oversize black sombrero, she looked no bigger than a child. Her features were delicate, and beneath the hat she had a great abundance of lustrous, dark red hair. On a shooting expedition in the Big Horns in Wyoming, the delicate-appearing Madame shot and killed three bears, including a grizzly. The Marquis boasted that she was a better shot than he—the ultimate compliment—and had a special hunting coach built for her, equipped with folding bunks and kitchen.
It would be interesting to know Roosevelt’s impressions of her on those occasions when he dined at the château; or when they called on him in New York, for it must also be mentioned here that none of these three, not the Marquis or his Madame or Roosevelt, could ever keep away from New York for more than a few months at a stretch, however fervently or sincerely they espoused life on the frontier. Roosevelt was actually in New York more than half of his famous Badlands years—to be with his infant daughter, Alice, and to keep tabs on the political world he could never willingly abandon, whatever else he felt or said.
Presumably Roosevelt and the Madame found much in common, but he never said so in writing. In the dining room at the château, her patterned Minton china is set out today as though guests are expected momentarily. The little landscapes she painted hang in the parlor. Her books are there; her sheet music is piled on the piano. Years later, Roosevelt’s sister Anna would say only that “Theodore did not care for the Marquis, but he was sorry for the wife.”
That there should be an underlying tension between two such men was inevitable. Were they figures in fiction, we would know a confrontation had to come. And so it did. But what is so fascinating is the behavior of the Marquis. It was he, not Roosevelt, who played the deciding card, though not in a way that the whole violent pattern of his life would naturally suggest.
It happened this way. The summer of 1885, the Marquis was taken to court still another time on the Luffsey murder charge, and again, after another travesty of a trial, he got off. But from the time the issue was revived and splashed across the newspapers east and west, he saw it as a conspiracy by his business enemies, the beef trust, to destroy him. And in this he appears to have been partly right. Convinced also that Roosevelt had had a secret hand in his troubles—which was nonsense—he wrote a letter to Roosevelt asking him just where he stood, a letter Roosevelt took to be a challenge to a duel. Maybe the Marquis meant it as just that, but the whole tone of it suggests otherwise.
Roosevelt answered that he was emphatically not the Marquis’s enemy, but that if the Marquis was threatening him, then he, Roosevelt, stood “ever ready to hold myself accountable.” Which made it the Marquis’s move.
There was no duel, however, because the Marquis kept his head and let the matter drop. Roosevelt was sure he had called the man’s bluff; the Marquis had “backed off,” Roosevelt would boast. Others were equally sure the Marquis had done nothing of the kind. Some were so sure, in fact, that they would insist ever after that no such showdown had ever occurred, that the story was a fiction devised by the Roosevelt cult, and one might be tempted to accept that had the actual letters not survived. The Marquis made nothing of Roosevelt’s response, it seems reasonable to conclude, because he had never challenged him in the first place.
Had there been a duel—with rifles, pistols, swords (Roosevelt wanted rifles at twelve paces)—almost certainly Roosevelt would have been killed. So if it can be said for the Marquis, as I think it can, that his charismatic presence in the Badlands was partly responsible for Roosevelt’s own continued presence—and thus for what was an immensely important experience for Roosevelt—it can also be said that his almost unaccountably cool head in this instance spared Roosevelt for other things.
The Marquis’s empire began coming apart a year before the tragic winter of 1886-1887. A stagecoach line he had started proved a failure. His sheep turned out to be the wrong breed for the climate, and more than half died. His powerful father-in-law began questioning expenditures, then withdrew his financial support.
Yet none of this seemed to faze the young entrepreneur. Like another celebrated Frenchman of the day, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who was then leading a doomed attempt at a Panama canal, the Marquis talked only of success and dazzled reporters with still more innovative schemes to come. He would open his own retail stores in New York and sell his Badlands beef at three cents a pound under the going price. Good beef at a good price for the working man was his dream. Stock in his National Consumers Meat Company was listed at ten dollars a share. His shareholders, he said, were to be the common working people (just as de Lesseps was counting on the common people of France to pay for his canal). The slogan for his bright red stores, three of which actually opened in New York, was “From Ranch to Table.”
But the stock didn’t sell. Pressures—from the railroad interests, the Chicago packers, the retail butchers—were too strong. Even had the Marquis been a more adroit businessman, it is very unlikely that he could have survived. It is also true that his range-fed beef simply didn’t taste as good as beef fattened in the Chicago yards.
The packing plant was shut down in the fall of 1886. Nobody knows what the venture had cost, and estimates on the Marquis’s losses vary from $300,000 to $1.5 million. But it is also quite possible that he lost nothing at all, such was the eventual market value of his landholdings.
He and Madame de Mores were gone before winter came. The château was left exactly as it was, as though they would return any time. Roosevelt, too, had departed by then to run for mayor of New York (unsuccessfully) and to be married again. He was in Italy on his honeymoon when the disaster struck.
Storm on top of storm, blinding snows, relentless, savage winds, the worst winter on record swept the Great Plains. In the Badlands the temperatures went to 40 below. Children were lost and froze to death within a hundred yards of their own doors. Cattle, desperate for shelter, smashed their heads through ranch house windows. The snow drifted so deep in many places that cattle were buried alive. People locked up in their houses could only wait and hope that elsewhere conditions were not so bad. A few who couldn’t wait blew their brains out.
The losses, when they were tallied up in March, were beyond anybody’s imagining. Not a rancher along the Little Missouri had come through with more than half his herd. The average loss was about 75 percent. Roosevelt, when he finally returned to survey the damage, called it a “perfect smashup.” He rode for three days without seeing a live steer.
He kept coming back from year to year but never again in the same spirit, and he seldom stayed more than a week or so. His cowboy time was over. In the mid-nineties, he sold off what little he had left in the Badlands, added up his losses, and arrived at a net figure of $23,556.68, or roughly a quarter of a million dollars in present-day money.
But by every measure other than financial the venture had been a huge success. Roosevelt’s physical transformation had been astonishing. He came home “bronzed,” “thirty pounds heavier,” “rugged,” as the newspapers noted. “When he got back to the world again,” wrote Bill Sewall, “he was as husky as almost any man I have ever seen…clear bone, muscle and grit.”
In Medora, Roosevelt had his first direct experience with real democracy, as one Eastern friend observed. In the view of his family he never would have become president had it not been for the Badlands years. They had put him back in shape for life, for politics, for a new marriage and a new family. Out of the experience came the whole Rough Rider idea and, consequently, the TR of San Juan Hill. Of course, some were to find his Wild West enthusiasms just a little tiresome, even questionable in a grown man. On the news that William McKinley was dead, Mark Hanna is said to have exclaimed, “Now look! That damn cowboy is president!”
The subsequent career of the Marquis is appalling. The fact that nobody much likes to talk about that in Medora today is certainly understandable. It is easier to forget that the cowboy getup figured not only in the heroics in Cuba but also in the dreadful anti-Semitic craze that swept France toward the turn of the century.
The Marquis went home to France to proclaim himself the victim of a Jewish plot. The beef trust was now portrayed as the “Jewish beef trust.” He, too, turned to politics. He launched his own crusade, a blend of socialism and rabid anti-Semitism, and paraded about Paris at the head of a gang of toughs, all of them dressed in ten-gallon hats and cowboy shirts. With the collapse of the French effort at Panama, he joined with the unsavory Edouard Drumont, a notorious anti-Semite, in an attempt to blame that failure, too, on the Jews. It was this mania that eventually led to the Dreyfus Affair, and the Marquis, before he went storming off to Africa, kept himself in the forefront. His platform rantings set off riots, and in a series of duels with important Jewish army officers he became known as one of the most dangerous duelists in France.
The Marquis was himself murdered in June 1896 by a band of Tuareg tribesmen in North Africa, where he had set off on a lone, harebrained scheme to unite the Muslims under the French flag in an all-out holy war against the Jews and the English. He seems to have been mourned only by his children and by Madame de Mores, who remained his stout defender until her dying day.
A statue of the Marquis stands in a little park in Medora beside Harold Schafer’s Chuck Wagon restaurant. The statue and the park were gifts of the de Mores heirs. It was they who turned the chateau over to the State Historical Society of North Dakota, complete with all its furnishings. And like some of the descendants of Theodore Roosevelt, Antoine de Vallombrosa, grandson of the marquis and present holder of the title Marquis de Mores, is a frequent summer visitor to the town.
I asked him once why he keeps coming back. We were on the road south of town, on our way to see Joe Hild, who owns Roosevelt’s old Maltese Cross ranch. Until then we had been talking about his homes in Geneva and Biarritz. Tony, as he likes to be called, picks his words carefully and speaks in perfect American English, without a trace of an accent. “Oh, I like the people here,” he said. “Where in my normal life would I meet such wonderful people, so different?” He is circumspect, graying; he wears both a belt and suspenders, a watch on each wrist, a red baseball cap and black basketball sneakers.
I stopped the car to pick up a chunk of scoria from the side of the road, a memento for my writing desk, and he asked me to get one for him also. “Are you interested in geology?” I asked as I got back behind the wheel. “Oh, no,” he said softly. “Unless perhaps in connection with oil! I am very interested in oil. Do you know anything about oil?” And we both laughed. Those small oil pumps that look like nodding grasshoppers have become a ubiquitous part of the Badlands landscape, except within the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
It is the park that remains Roosevelt’s Badlands memorial—more than a hundred square miles of natural splendor, camping and picnic areas beside the river, hiking trails, miles of scenic roads. Open year-round, it attracts some 800,000 visitors a year, about 75 percent of them during North Dakota’s brief summer.
Antelope, whitetail, and mule deer abound. So do squirrels, beaver, rabbits (eastern and mountain cottontail), skunks, prairie dogs, coyotes, and yes, rattlesnakes. The birdwatcher’s checklist issued by the Park Service lists 116 species, but if there is a Badlands bird it is the magpie, with the crow running a close second. Elk, moose, black bear, grizzlies, and the gray wolf have all vanished from the area since Roosevelt’s day, but the buffalo herd that roams the park now surpasses any he ever saw.
The great days in Medora lasted all of three years, from 1883 to 1886. Nothing much had ever happened there before and nothing much has happened since, as the world judges these things. Though some ranchers survived the Marquis’s collapse and the winter of 1886-1887, Medora did not, and were it not for the château, the park and Harold Schafer’s commercial enterprises, the place today would be a ghost town.
In 1919, the year of Roosevelt’s death, Sewall set down some of his recollections. Remembering how it had all ended, he wrote, “We were glad to get back home—gladder, I guess, than about anything that had ever happened to us, and yet we were melancholy, for with all the hardships and work it was a very happy life…the happiest time that any of us have known.”