CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1
The cowboy as folk hero was still an emerging phenomenon in the 1880s, at the time Theodore went west. The mythic figure of present understanding had yet to take shape in the popular mind—the success of the dime novel and the new Wild West shows notwithstanding—largely because Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian, the first true “western,” was still in the future, as were the magazine illustrations and paintings of Frederic Remington and Theodore’s own books and articles. For it was these three upper-class “Ivy League” easterners, Wister and Roosevelt of Harvard, Remington of Yale, in their efforts to catch “the living, breathing end” of the frontier, who produced what in most respects remains the popular version of the “real West” and its leading player, the cowboy. In New York, meantime, as Clarence Day relates in Life with Father, a small boy of proper upbringing could still be informed by an all-knowing parent that cowboys were no better than tramps, wild fellows who put up with dreadful food and the worst possible accommodations.
But a ranchman (also called cattleman or stockman) was quite another matter, as Theodore was to stress in the first of two books on his time in the West, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, which was to be published in a limited, exceedingly elegant quarto-sized edition priced at an unheard-of $15, and dedicated “To that keenest of sportsmen and truest of friends, my brother Elliott Roosevelt.”
Part of the mark of the ranchman was his attire, which, though similar to that of a cowboy, was of considerably finer materials, as Theodore explained. A ranchman’s saddle, bridle, spurs, revolver, and the like were all of the first quality. A ranchman spoke (or wrote) of his men, his herds, and the quantity of horses he maintained (”on my own ranch there are eighty”). A ranchman had ample time for hunting and good books. (”No ranchman who loves sport can afford to be without Van Dyke’s Still Hunter, Dodge’sPlains of the Great West, or Caton’s Deer and Antelope of America . . .” Theodore wrote. “As for Irving, Hawthorne, Cooper, Lowell, and the other standbys, I suppose no man, East or West, would willingly be long without them.”) It was a life, he said, closely akin to that of the old southern planters.
The great appeal, of course, was the freedom and “vigorous open-air existence.” It could do wonders for the spirit, wonders for one’s health. It was also quite fashionable at the moment, a point he need not stress to those who would pay the $15 for his book, and it could be extremely profitable, which he did mention in the second and far better book, though with a cautionary reminder that financial disaster, too, was possible. The danger was a severe winter, he wrote prophetically, in advance of the winter of 1886.
Theodore’s interest in the Dakota Bad Lands probably began with Commander Henry Honeychurch Gorringe, the former naval officer and audacious entrepreneur who in 1880 masterminded the transporting of Cleopatra’s Needle (a 69-foot monolith weighing 220 tons) from Egypt to Central Park, a daring, difficult, and justly celebrated feat. Gorringe had bought up an abandoned government cantonment located on the Northern Pacific Railroad where the railroad crossed the Little Missouri in upper Dakota Territory, just east of the Montana line, in the heart of the northern Dakota Bad Lands. The idea had been to establish a hunting camp for eastern sportsmen, along the lines of Paul Smith’s in the Adirondacks. And when Theodore made his initial trip to the Bad lands in 1883, to get his buffalo, he was to have gone with Gorringe, who for some unknown reason backed out at the last moment.
But it could have also been his publishing partner George Haven Putnam who first told Theodore about the Bad Lands and/or about Gorringe, since it was Putnam who put out The Great Northwest for the Northern Pacific Railroad, the book containing the first glowing account of the Bad Lands and their charms. Or if not Putnam, it could have been any of a number of others with an interest in cattle and the West, including his own father-in-law, George C. Lee, since Lee, Higginson and Company, like many eastern banks and investment firms, was much involved in the “beef bonanza.” Eastern and European money was going into cattle in a grand way and among those jumping in were numerous Roosevelt family friends and fellow Harvard men. The Wyoming ranch Theodore invested in earlier was known as the Teschemacher & DeBillier Cattle Company. Hubert E. Teschemacher and Frederic DeBillier were in the Class of ’82 at Harvard, Owen Wister’s class, and their partner Richard Trimble, a classmate of Theodore’s and fellow New Yorker, was probably the one who enticed Theodore into that venture and schooled him on the potential profits involved. Teschemacher had decided to become a ranchman after reading a newspaper article in Paris. Trimble was to be long remembered in Wyoming strolling among his cattle with a pet poodle.
A classmate named Sanford Morison was also “pioneering” in Dakota Territory near Edmunds. Robert Bacon, now employed at Lee, Higginson, had put money in the Teschemacher & DeBillier venture, as well as in another Wyoming outfit called Riverside Land and Cattle, which was currently paying dividends of nine and a half percent. Henry L. Higginson himself was involved with the great Union Cattle Company, as was Alexander Agassiz. In New York the Seligmans were major backers of the immensely profitable Pioneer Cattle Company, and Poultney Bigelow’s father, the diplomat John Bigelow, was another of those tied into Teschemacher & DeBillier. Abram Hewitt was involved in the Gorringe venture and the biggest and most publicized splash of all in the Bad Lands was being made by a young French aristocrat, one Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, the Marquis de Mores, recently of the French cavalry, who was the husband of Medora von Hoffman, daughter of the Wall Street banker Louis A. (“Baron”) von Hoffman.
To be off to one’s ranch in the Wild West, or the ranch one had taken a “flier” in, or better still, to be just back from one’s ranch full of stories, looking brown and fit, was all the rage. Ranching was in the aristocratic tradition—requiring courage, horsemanship, offering deliverance from the tedium and pettiness of trade. It was adventurous. It was romantic. Ranching, wrote Theodore, had “little in common with the humdrum, workaday business world of the nineteenth century. . . the free ranchman in his manner of life shows more kinship to an Arab sheik than to a sleek city merchant or tradesman.” The cowboys happened also to be much better fellows and pleasanter companions than, say, farmers or farm workers; “nor are the mechanics and workmen of a great city to be mentioned in the same breath.” Cowboys, “except while on . . . sprees,” were “quiet, rather self-contained men, perfectly frank and simple, and on their own ground treat a stranger with the most whole-souled hospitality . . .”
Hundreds, possibly as many as a thousand, “dudes” were scattered over the West and more would follow, drawn often by what Theodore was to write of the life and by his warning that it was a life soon to vanish. He wrote of the adversities to be prepared for (broiling heat, hailstorms, rattlesnakes), the kinds of horses to expect (very different from eastern mounts), of the stars at night and endless reaches of prairie, of the guns to bring.
Of course every ranchman carries a revolver, a long .45 Colt or Smith & Wesson, by preference the former. When after game a hunting knife is stuck in the girdle. This should be stout and sharp, but not too long, with a round handle. I have two double-barreled shotguns: a No. 10 chokebore for ducks and geese made by Thomas of Chicago; and a No. 16 hammerless built for me by Kennedy of St. Paul, for grouse and plover. On regular hunting trips I always carry the Winchester rifle, but in riding round near home, where a man may see a deer and is sure to come across ducks and grouse, it is best to take the little ranch gun, a double-barrel No. 16, with a 40-70 rifle underneath the shotgun barrels.
His description of his own ranch “home” on the Little Missouri was every man’s dream of a place in the West.
In the hot noontide hours of midsummer the broad ranch veranda, always in the shade, is almost the only spot where a man can be comfortable; but here he can sit for hours at a time, leaning back in his rocking chair, as he reads or smokes, or with half-closed, dreamy eyes gazes across the shallow, nearly dry riverbed to the wooded bottoms opposite, and to the plateaus lying back of them. Against the sheer white faces of the cliffs, that come down without a break, the dark-green treetops stand out in bold relief. In the hot, lifeless air all objects that are not nearby seem to sway and waiver. There are few sounds to break the stillness. From the upper branches of the cottonwood trees overhead—whose shimmering, tremulous leaves are hardly ever quiet, but if the wind stirs at all, rustle and quiver and sigh all day long—comes every now and then the soft, melancholy cooing of the mourning dove, whose voice always seems far away . . .
Wister called it a “perfect picture.” Wister himself would be on his way in 1885, in search of health and big game in Wyoming, as guest of Teschemacher, DeBillier, and Trimble. “This life has a psychological effect on you,” Wister would write to his mother. “. . . You begin to wonder if there is such a place as Philadelphia anywhere.” His impression of cowboys at that time was that they were “a queer episode in the history of the country” and “without any moral sense whatsoever.”
The picture Theodore had given Lodge of his own ranchman’s costume was understated. He had spent a small fortune to look the part. Besides the big hat, the buckskin shirt, chaps, bridle, and silver spurs, he had fancy alligator boots, a silver belt buckle, beautifully tooled leather belt and holster, a silver-mounted bowie knife by Tiffany. His silver belt buckle was engraved with the head of a bear; the silver spurs had his initials on them. His Colt revolver was engraved with scrolls and geometric patterns and plated with silver and gold. On one side of its ivory handle were his initials; on the other side, the head of a buffalo to commemorate the one he shot in 1883. The buckskin shirt, all beautifully patterned and fringed, had been made to order by a woman in the Bad Lands and was part of a complete buckskin suit. He gloried in dressing up in his regalia and posing for pictures. He was in the saddle all day, he had told Bamie in June, “having a glorious time here.”
Returning from the East in midsummer he brought Bill Sewall along and Sewall’s nephew, Wilmot Dow, a rugged and resourceful man in his twenties, who, like Sewall, was an old companion from past hunting trips in Maine. They were to help out, now that he was expanding his operations. Looking the Bad Lands over, the large, homespun Sewall told Theodore it was no country for cattle. Theodore told him he was wrong and knew nothing about it. Sewall, in the privacy of a memorable letter to his family in Maine, described it as “queer country,” “a dirty country and very dirty people on an average” (so much for his impression of cowboys). “Tell the boys,” he continued, “they are better off there than here unless they could get hold with some rich man as we have and that is hard to do . . . tell all who wish to know that I think this [is] 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.”
2
The Bad Lands cattle boom had begun in 1883, the year Theodore made his first visit and his initial $14,000 investment there. Several big Texas cattle companies, pushing their herds farther and farther north in search of new range lands, had discovered the Bad Lands, and because the Northern Pacific Railroad had also penetrated the area just then, and was eager to see it developed, the buildup of cattle and money came quickly. Experienced cattlemen and eastern and European money people alike saw at once that the Bad Lands were not all the name implied.
To French-Canadian fur trappers exploring the area a hundred years before, it had been les mauvaises terres à traverser—bad lands to travel through. It was as if the rolling prairie land suddenly gave way to a weird other world of bizarrely shaped cliffs and hummocks and tablelands, these sectioned and sliced every which way by countless little ravines and draws and by the broad, looping valley of the Little Missouri River, which, unlike the Big Missouri, flowed north and in summer was not much more than a good-sized stream. It was a region of “startling appearance,” “of strange confusion,” extending some two hundred miles along the river, 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, were juxtaposed against brick-red bands of scoria or sinuous dark seams of lignite. Some formations had the overpowering presence of ancient ruins. The leader of an early military expedition against the Sioux described the landscape as hell with the fires out—though in some places, where seams of lignite had caught fire, the ground literally smoldered.
George Armstrong Custer, who spent several days snowbound in the Bad Lands en route to the Little Big Horn in 1876, called it worthless country, and Frederic Remington, when he arrived for a first look some years after Theodore, saw it as “a place for stratagem and murder, with nothing to witness its mysteries but the cold blue winter sky.”
In an effort to make it a tourist attraction, the Northern Pacific tried renaming it Pyramid Park and described the geological curiosities to be found, along with the bracing air, the good shooting, and opportunity for some real “rough riding.”
But the cattlemen saw it differently from everyone. Unlike the other Bad Lands to the south (those of present-day South Dakota, which are geologically quite different), these were green along the river bottoms and green above, on the tops of the tablelands. “What a wondrous country it was for grass!” remembered the veteran cattleman John Clay of his first visit in the summer of ’83. There was “grass and more grass” in the bottom lands and up along sweeping valleys: little blue-stem grass, “good as corn for fattening,” and curly buffalo grass, “making unexcelled winter feed.” Men like Clay and greenhorn money people alike were “dazzled by the prospects.” The land was all public domain. The grass was 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 first summer alone.
The big Texas outfits included the Berry-Boice Cattle Company (the “Three-Sevens” brand), Towers & Gudgell (the “OX”), and the still larger Continental Land and Cattle Company (the “Hashknife”). These were “the real cattlemen.” The smaller ranchers were nearly all from the East or from Canada and Europe. They were primed on such newly published authoritative works as The Beef Bonanza: or How to Get Rich on the Plains, and they were mostly all young (Bill Sewall, who was not yet forty when he arrived, would be known as “the old Mennonite”). There were the four Eaton brothers from Pittsburgh, who had been among the earliest arrivals; A. C. Huidekoper was from Meadville, Pennsylvania, and was a kinsman of a Harvard classmate of Theodore’s, Frank Huidekoper. Gregor Lang and his teenage son, Lincoln, were from Scotland and had the financial backing of Sir John Pender of London. Lloyd Roberts was from Wales; Alfred Benson was an Englishman; Laval Nugent was the son of an Irish baronet; J. A. Van Eeghan, son of a prominent Dutch family, was “wayward but attractive,” a fine musician, and could supposedly wire New York for money anytime he wished.
It was at Gregor Lang’s ranch that Theodore had put up during his initial visit in ’83, and it was from conversations with Lang, Howard Eaton, and two young Canadians named Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield that he had decided to join forces with the Canadians, whose rude cabin beside the Little Missouri was known as the Chimney Butte or, alternatively, the Maltese Cross Ranch. Theodore had handed over a check for $14,000 to buy 450 head of cattle, a small start, but the direct, trusting way he did it made an impression. “All the security he had for his money,” remembered Sylvane Ferris, “was our honesty.”
He bought no land, then or later. Like everybody in the area but the young Marquis de Mores, he was a squatter. And then, after just two weeks, he had been on his way home, having killed his buffalo and all but killed his guide, Joe Ferris, a brother of Sylvane. The chase had carried them pell-mell for seven days over some of the wildest, most difficult terrain in the Bad Lands. Twice they found a buffalo and each time Theodore had shot and missed. Exhausted by the pace Theodore set, Ferris kept praying things would get so bad they would have to give up. It rained incessantly, but Theodore’s joy was not to be extinguished; every new adversity seemed a refreshment. It was Fresh Pond all over again, Theodore exclaiming, “By Godfrey, but this is fun!” For two days they had nothing to live on but biscuits and rainwater. Remembering the expedition long afterward, Ferris would be no less 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 he shot his buffalo, just over the Montana line, Theodore broke into a wild facsimile of an Indian war dance and handed Ferris a hundred dollars. “I never saw anyone so pleased in all my life,” remembered Ferris.
The dominant figure, the dominant force and center of attention in the Bad Lands, however, was the Marquis de Mores, who on April Fools’ Day in 1883, or six months before Theodore first appeared on the scene, cracked a bottle of Mumm’s champagne over a tent peg to found the town of Medora, named in honor of his wife. He had plans far more ambitious than mere cattle ranching, as he announced; he had come 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,” said the deadly serious Frenchman in his nearly perfect English.
He was just Theodore’s age and like Theodore a passionate lover of hunting and the outdoors. Other than that, they had little in common. The Marquis was tall, spare, and supremely fit, a product of St. Cyr and of Saumur, regarded as the finest cavalry school in the world. He was a superb horseman, a crack shot. Included with his baggage the day he arrived on the Northern Pacific was a silver-headed bamboo walking stick filled with ten pounds of lead—to exercise his dueling arm, it was explained. One held the stick straight out at arm’s length for several slow counts, “thusly.” He was black-haired, dark-eyed, his handsomeness the most obvious thing about him, but it was a handsomeness of the Victorian stage-villain variety, to judge by the pictures we have. His tremendous black mustache was waxed to perfection.
In duels in France, he had already killed two men. Seen heading off on one of his forays along the Little Missouri, he looked like a mounted arsenal—weighed down with two huge Colt revolvers, two cartridge belts, a heavy-caliber rifle cradled in one arm, a bowie knife strapped to one leg. He was as well a professed anti-Semite, a devout Roman Catholic, and a royalist who liked to tell his new neighbors of his aspirations to the French throne and how the fortunes he would pile up in the Bad Lands were to be applied to that purpose.
Theodore seems not to have encountered the Marquis in person until his return in 1884, by which time the Marquis’s town and enterprise were much in evidence.
His plan was to revolutionize the beef industry by butchering cattle on the range, there in the Bad Lands beside the railroad, and thus eliminate the cost of shipping live animals all the way to Chicago. That dressed meat could be transported almost any distance in the new refrigerator cars without spoilage had already been demonstrated. So, the Marquis reasoned, 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.
He had picked the eastern side of the river for his site, just back from the Northern Pacific’s bridge, and directly across from the old cantonment. His wife, it appears, had been provided by her father with an income of $90,000 a year, and this plus backing from his own family gave him, as he said, little worry over finances. He himself would head the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, while his father-in-law, Baron von Hoffman, was listed as treasurer.
He brought in hundreds of carpenters and masons to build his town and packing plant. He drew up plans, ordered equipment. Within a year or less he had bought up twenty-one thousand acres of land. He bought cattle, brought in twelve thousand sheep, and announced plans to raise cabbages, these to be fertilized with offal from the packing plant and shipped east in his refrigerator cars. He was not wanting in imagination. Another idea was to produce pottery from Bad Lands clays. Yet another was to ship Columbia River salmon from Portland to New York, at a profit of $1,000 a carload according to his estimates.
He had intended originally to make do in a tent until his own house was ready, but finding the tent a bit more inconvenient than expected, he had a private railroad car delivered and put on a siding. “I like this country,” he remarked to one of his employees, “because there is room to turn around without stepping on the feet of others.”
But in fact he seemed incapable of doing anything without stepping on feet or sensibilities. The West, despite its aura of freedom, its apparent absence of rules and regulations, was a place—an economy, a way of life—based on very definite rules, mostly all 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 conflicted with local custom and was thus, by the prevailing ethic, extremely dangerous. Worst of all, he had begun fencing his land, and when fences were cut, as he had been warned they would be, he as quickly replaced them. When three drunken cowboys shot up the town and vowed to kill him on sight, he prudently took a train back to Mandan to ask the territorial justice of the peace what he ought to do. “Why, shoot,” he was told.
The next time the same threesome went on a rampage, the Marquis and his men were waiting by a bend in the river outside of town. It may have been an ambush—cold-blooded murder as Theodore’s friends the Langs said—or it may have been self-defense as the Marquis pleaded in court. Either way, one of the three cowboys, a skinny, long-legged nineteen-year-old named Riley Luffsey, was dead with a bullet in his neck. The Marquis was acquitted after two highly publicized hearings in Mandan and resumed his projects as before, acting as though he were unaware of how many now despised him. Medora grew by leaps and bounds, becoming overnight one of the wildest cow towns in the West, the sort of place, as Theodore once remarked, where pleasure and vice were considered synonymous. But it also had a hotel and a brick chapel built for Madame de Mores, a brick house with a picket fence to accommodate father-in-law von Hoffman during his visits, and a breezy little newspaper, The Bad Lands Cow Boy, the mission of which was “to preach King Cattle to all men.”
“Again and again is the fitness of the Bad Lands for a cattle country brought to our notice [declared the paper in an early issue]. . . . We have yet to hear of a solitary head ever having died in the Bad Lands from exposure.”
There are now in the Bad Lands many cattle men who have had experience in every cattle country in the United States [read another item]. . . . We have questioned many of them and the invariable answer has been that nowhere in the United States is there a better cattle country than the Bad Lands.
And what was good for beast was good for man, claimed the editor-publisher, twenty-two-year-old Arthur T. Packard, who was newly graduated from the University of Michigan. “There is a wonderful amount of electricity in this atmosphere,” he explained. “... This prevalence of electricity is doubtless one cause of the great vitality of anyone who lives in this climate. It takes hard and continued labor to tire a man in this country, and then a rest of a few minutes is sufficient to completely restore his energies. No one feels that lassitude so common in the East.”
Most important of all, by the summer of 1884, a gigantic, up-to-date packing plant was in operation. Cattle were being slaughtered; dressed Bad Lands beef was rolling east in the Marquis’s new refrigerator cars. It was all but impossible not to be impressed. In New York, in an article about the Marquis and his efforts, the Times described Medora as a “thriving, bustling” town with nearly one thousand people and a big future. It had become obvious to everyone “that the foreigner was not so crazy after all.” The Marquis, said the Times, was a man of “good sense” who ran a “wonderful business,” and in time would become “one of the great millionaires of the country.”
“Before long some of my wealthy friends in France will come over to build tanneries, glue factories and horn works, and so establish interests that will tend toward a speedy development of the country,” a reporter for the World was told by the Marquis, who when not in the Bad Lands lived at the fashionable Brunswick Hotel on Fifth Avenue. “My neighbors are all wealthy American ranchers. . . . We all work together and are on the best of terms.”
He had completed his own house, “the château,” as everyone in Medora called it, and Madame de Mores was in residence much of that summer. In truth, the château was an oversized frame farmhouse. There was nothing especially grand about it, except that it was large (twenty-six rooms), and since it stood in full view of town on top of a bare promontory across the river, it looked even larger. It was painted a light gray, with red shutters and a red roof. A deep porch stretched around two sides. And once the Madame’s big square piano had arrived by train from St. Paul and a staff of twenty servants had taken up their duties, it became in the minds of the local citizenry as much a château as any on the Loire.
The Madame was small and pretty, with fine features and an abundance of dark-red hair. In country almost devoid of women, she would have been talked about endlessly and regarded as a great lady however modest her attainments. But she was a superb horsewoman, spoke several languages (seven, allegedly), painted in watercolors, played Liszt and Verdi on the big piano. A local woman remembered her as “one of the most dignified, stately, and aristocratic women I ever met.” Perched sidesaddle on one of the magnificent mounts the Marquis had also had shipped from the East, with her face shielded from the fierce Dakota sun by a huge black “sugar loaf” sombrero, the Madame looked not much bigger than a child. Yet she was reputedly a better shot than her husband (he insisted she was), and on a hunting expedition with him in the Big Horns, she killed three bears, including a grizzly. He had a special hunting coach built for her, equipped with folding bunks, kitchen, china, silver, and linens.
Gregor Lang and his son, who detested the Marquis—it was they who buried Riley Luffsey the day after the killing—had warned Theodore about him, but Theodore maintained a cordial, if somewhat formal, relation, as was befitting two gentlemen. They had attended a meeting of the local stockmen’s association held at the railroad depot that June and later took a few days out to go by train together to Miles City, Montana, to volunteer for a vigilante campaign against rustlers and horse thieves, but were turned downbecause their faces were too well known. Theodore was a dinner guest at the château on several occasions as time passed, and the Marquis and Madame de Mores, we also know, dined with Theodore and Bamie at Bamie’s house in New York. Meals at the château were prepared by a French chef, served on the Madame’s blue Minton china, and accompanied by selections from her husband’s wine cellar. With her travels (she had met the Marquis in Cannes) and culture, not to mention her love of shooting, she must have been a very refreshing note for Theodore. Bamie, years later, would remark that “Theodore did not care for the Marquis, but he was sorry for his wife . . .”
Theodore had told Bamie in June that the outlook for making a business success of ranching was ”very” hopeful. “This winter I lost about 25 head, from wolves, cold, etc.; the others are in admirable shape, and I have about a hundred and fifty-five calves. I shall put on a thousand more cattle and shall make it my regular business.” With such confidence and excitement in the air at Medora, with the buildup the Marquis was getting in the eastern papers, one could hardly blame him. Like his sisters and brother, he had also by now come into his share of Mittie’s trust fund, some $62,500. So at a stroke he more than doubled his investment in cattle, sinking an additional $26,000 into another one thousand head. But while this represented a very serious commitment on his part—a full $40,000, or roughly twenty percent of his total resources—his was still a small operation compared to some others. According to the county census of the following year, he was running some forty-five hundred head of his own, while such outfits as Berry-Boice and Towers & Gudgell were running four to six times that number.
In August, with Sewall and Dow on hand, he established a second ranch, known as the Elkhorn, where he and they could live to themselves, rather than with Merrifield and Ferris at the Maltese Cross. Like the Eaton brothers’ Custer Trail Ranch and the Langs’ ranch, the Maltese Cross was south of Medora and only seven miles out. The new spot he had found was in the opposite direction, north, or downstream on the river, and more than thirty miles from town, the packing plant, and the railroad. His nearest neighbors would be ten to fifteen miles away. He wanted to be off to himself where he could write, and it was the ranch house Sewall and Dow built for him there, in a clump of cottonwoods by a bend in the river, that he was to describe at length in such passages as the one quoted earlier. It was begun in October, after Theodore had left again for the East, and by Bad Lands standards it was sumptuous, with eight rooms, numerous windows, a stone fireplace, and a cellar that Theodore was to use as a darkroom for processing his photographs. “I designed the house myself,” Bill Sewall would remember proudly, “and it was a sizable place, sixty feet long, thirty feet wide, and seven feet high, with a flat roof and a porch where after the day’s work Theodore used to sit in a rocking chair, reading poetry.”
The other ranchers called him Theodore or Roosevelt; the cowboys, Mr. Roosevelt, as he wished, or Four-Eyes or Old Four-Eyes out of hearing, and their initial impressions were about what one would have expected. Once, in an effort to head off some stray calves, he immortalized himself along the Little Missouri by calling to one of his cowboys, “Hasten forward quickly there!”
He was only an average rider and never learned to handle a rope very well, as he would readily admit. But there came a moment one night in a bar across the Montana line in what was then known as Mingusville (present-day Wibaux) when 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. Theodore knocked him cold with one punch. As Theodore later explained, the man had made the mistake of standing too close to him and with his heels close together.
After the “saloon incident,” he was looked on with new respect—it “gained him some reputation,” as Bill Sewall said. But more important as time went on, he “did all the regular work of the cowboy,” “worked the same as any man,” asking no favors and never complaining. Sewall, who had known him since he was eighteen, spoke of him in letters home as “a very fair fellow” and “as good a fellow as ever.” “He worked like the rest of us,” Sewall would recall, “and occasionally he worked longer than any of the rest of us, for often when we were through with the day’s work he would go to his room and write.”
Once, seeing one of his ablest cowboys about to put the Maltese brand on an unbranded stray found on Gregor Lang’s range, Theodore dismissed him on the spot. The cowboy could not understand. “A man who will steal for me will steal from me,” Theodore said. “You’re fired.”
Sometimes that first year, as Bill Sewall also remembered, Theodore could become “very melancholy... very much down in spirits.” It made no difference what became of him, he told Sewall; he had nothing to live for.
“‘You have your child to live for,’ I said. ’Her aunt can take care of her a good deal better than I can,’ he said. ’She never would know anything about me, anyway. She would be just as well off without me.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ’... you won’t always feel that way... you won’t always feel as you do now and you won’t always be willing to stay here and drive cattle . . .”
Whatever it was Theodore felt for the Bad Lands was quite beyond Sewall. Anybody who preferred such a place to the East, Sewall wrote his brother, “must have a depraved idea of life or hate himself or both.”
Theodore saw grandeur and mystery. The Bad Lands were “dreary and forbidding,” they were “as grim and desolate and forbidding as any spot on earth could be,” and he felt he belonged. “The country is growing on me, more and more,” he had written Bamie in June, “it has a curious, fantastic beauty of its own . . .” The Bad Lands looked, he decided, the way Poe sounds.
The words “loneliness” and “solitude” appear repeatedly in what he wrote. He writes again and again of “great dreary solitude” and “melancholy pathless plains,” “the deathlike stillness.” “Nowhere,” he writes in 1884, “not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains; and after a man has lived a little while on or near them, their very vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him. . . . Nowhere else does one seem so far off from all mankind ...”
Loneliness and desolation, a sense of exile, were old themes in the literature of the West, literature he knew and loved. Parkman, to whom he would dedicate one of his own later works, wrote in The Oregon Trail of “something impressive and awful” about the prairie. Parkman, the first Harvard man to venture beyond the Mississippi and go home to write about it, had found “something exciting in the wild solitude of the place.” Parkman, before Theodore was born, had written of “green undulations like motionless swells of the ocean”; Theodore writes that “the grassland stretches out in the sunlight like a sea.” “The very shadow of civilization lies a hundred leagues behind,” wrote Parkman. “Civilization seems as remote as if we were living in an age long past,” Theodore says.
“Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie!” was the cowboys’ song.
But in some of what he wrote it is as if Theodore has found a way at last to unburden what he could never talk about. The voice of a mourning dove in his own cottonwoods seems ever “far away and expresses more than any other sound in nature the sadness of gentle, hopeless, never-ending grief.” And later, having seen winter there, he would write:
When the days have dwindled to their shortest, and the nights seem never-ending, then all the great northern plains are changing into an abode of iron desolation. Sometimes furious gales blow out of the north, driving before them the clouds of blinding snow-dust, wrapping the mantle of death round every unsheltered being that faces their unshackled anger. They roar in a thunderous bass as they sweep across the prairie or whirl through the naked canyons; they shiver the great brittle cottonwoods, and beneath their rough touch the icy limbs of the pines that cluster in the gorges sing like the chords of an Aeolian harp. Again, in the coldest midwinter weather, not a breath of wind may stir; and then the still, merciless, terrible cold that broods over the earth like the shadow of silent death seems even more dreadful in its gloomy rigor than is the lawless madness of the storms. All the land is like granite; the great rivers stand still in their beds, as if turned to frosted steel. In the long nights there is no sound to break the lifeless silence. . . .
But as in the summer following his father’s death, this in the West also had its flights of exhilaration, of pure soaring exuberance more than matching the depths of his other moods. Again he is incapable of holding himself down. Something within refuses to be subdued. In the West, in his gaudy regalia, on his horse, he can be something entirely different from the man he had been.
He was on the frontier he had dreamed of and imagined for as long as he could remember, living a life free of more than just fences. More even than Harvard or politics it was a world without women. Background, family, all the conventions of polite society, counted for nothing. Nobody knew him; nobody knew his family or cared particularly. “Everybody in New York has always known everybody,” wrote Edith Wharton, describing “the tight little citadel” of the New York they both knew so well. Here everybody was a stranger and liked it that way. It was customary not to ask too many questions about a man’s past. “What was your name in the States?” another old song began. In Medora alone there were three men who went by the name Bill Jones. Antecedents counted for nothing and Theodore felt himself a new man. “You would be amused to see me . . .” he had written to Lodge, which was another way of saying, “You would hardly know me.” He felt, he wrote, “as absolutely free as a man could feel.”
Life here was elemental, he said. He was constantly in the midst of birds and animals. The letters and literary efforts alike are filled with deer, antelope, buffalo, bighorn sheep, pack rats and mice, the howling of wolves at night, birds on the wing, birds stalking the mud flats of the river, a great golden eagle, the gaudy black-and-white magpies that are so common to the Bad Lands, meadowlarks that sang like no meadowlarks he had ever heard: “this I could hardly get used to at first, for it looks exactly like the Eastern meadowlark, which utters nothing but a harsh disagreeable chatter. But the plains air seems to give it a voice . . .”
Most marvelous of all was his horse, Manitou. Manitou was the “best and most valuable animal on the ranch,” “a treasure,” “as fast as any horse on the river,” “very enduring and very hardy,” “perfectly sure-footed,” “willing and spirited.” There was never such a horse as “good old Manitou” and there were never such mornings as those of the “long, swift rides” over the prairie with his men, when Manitou carried him on and on endlessly in the “sweet, fresh air,” under a crystal sky . . .
and the rapid motion of the fiery little horse combine to make a man’s blood thrill and leap with sheer buoyant lightheartedness and eager, exultant pleasure in the boldness and freedom of the life he is leading. As we climb the steep sides of the first range of buttes, wisps of wavering mist still cling in the hollows of the valley; when we come out on the top of the first great plateau, the sun flames up over its edge, and in the level, red beams the galloping horsemen throw long, fantastic shadows. Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough . . .
From the Elkhorn to the Maltese Cross Ranch was a distance of forty miles. And it was all extremely “rough riding.” To get from the Elkhorn to Medora, following the river, meant crossing and recrossing the river more than twenty times. One day, as he told Bamie proudly, he covered seventy-two miles between dawn and darkness.
“I have been fulfilling a boyish ambition of mine,” he tells her at another point. “We are so very rarely able to, actually and in real life, dwell in our ideal ’hero land,’” he tells Corinne.
What with the wild gallops by day, and the wilder tales by the night watch-fires, I became intoxicated with the romance of my new life [Captain Mayne Reid had written]. . . . It grew upon me apace. The dreams of home began to die within me; and with these, the illusory ideas of many a young and foolish ambition. Died away, too—dead out of my heart—the allurements of the great city—the memory of soft eyes and silken tresses . . . all died away, as if they had never been, or I had never felt them!
My strength increased both physically and intellectually. I experienced a buoyancy of spirits and a vigor of body I had never known before. I felt a pleasure in action. My blood seemed to rush warmer and swifter through my veins; and I fancied that my eyes reached to a more distant vision. I could look boldly upon the sun, without quivering in my glance.
With his horse and his Winchester rifle, he felt like a figure from other days; and the rifle, like the horse, was the finest thing of its kind and of greatest importance to him. It was a lever-action 45-75 Winchester (Model 1876) that had been custom made to his specifications—”stocked and sighted to suit myself.” It was engraved with deer and buffalo and antelope, but more than that, “the best weapon I ever had . . . handy to carry, whether on foot or on horseback . . . comes up to the shoulder as readily as a shotgun . . . deadly, accurate . . . unapproachable for the rapidity of its fire and the facility with which it is loaded.” Not since his father presented him with his first gun had anything pleased him so much and not since the winter on the Nile had he known such shooting.
On August 18 he set out on an expedition to the Big Horns in Wyoming three hundred miles to the southwest. “How long I will be gone I cannot say,” he wrote Bamie. He took Bill Merrifield with him and a man named Lebo, who did the cooking and drove the team, and who at one point made the mistake of calling him Theodore, instead of Mr. Roosevelt, and was told not to do it again. They traveled by what Theodore described as a light prairie schooner drawn by two horses.
Days later, seeing a chance rider who agreed to serve as a mail carrier, Theodore wrote again to Bamie.
I am writing this on an upturned water keg, by our canvas-covered wagon, while the men are making tea, and the solemn old ponies are grazing round about me. I am going to trust it to the tender mercies of a stray cowboy whom we have just met, and who may or may not post it when he gets to “Powderville,” a delectable log hamlet some seventy miles north of us.
We left the Little Missouri a week ago, and have been traveling steadily some twenty or thirty miles a day ever since, through a desolate, barren-looking and yet picturesque country, part of the time rolling prairie and part of the time broken, jagged Bad Lands. We have fared sumptuously, as I have shot a number of prairie chickens, sage hens and ducks, and a couple of fine bucks—besides missing several of the latter that I ought to have killed.
Every morning we get up at dawn, and start off by six o’clock or thereabouts, Merrifield and I riding off among the hills or ravines after game, while the battered “prairie schooner,” with the two spare ponies led behind, is driven slowly along by old Lebo, who is a perfect character. He is a wizened, wiry old fellow, very garrulous, brought up on the frontier, and a man who is never put out or disconcerted by any possible combination of accidents. Of course we have had the usual incidents of prairie travel happen to us. One day we rode through a driving rainstorm, at one time developing into a regular hurricane of hail and wind, which nearly upset the wagon, drove the ponies almost frantic, and forced us to huddle into a gully for protection. The rain lasted all night and we all slept in the wagon, pretty wet and not very comfortable. Another time a sharp gale of wind or rain struck us in the middle of the night, as we were lying out in the open (we have no tent), and we shivered under our wet blankets till morning. We got into camp a little before sunset, tethering two or three of the horses, and letting the others range. One night we camped in a most beautiful natural park; it was a large, grassy hill, studded thickly with small, pine-crowned chalk buttes, with very steep sides, worn into the most outlandish and fantastic shapes. All that night the wolves kept up a weird concert around our camp—they are most harmless beasts.
As it turned out, they were gone nearly two months. They did not return until October 5. In that time Theodore shot and killed quantities of duck, grouse, prairie chickens, sage hens, doves, rabbits—more than a hundred birds and small game—as well as elk, deer, and bear. On August 29 he killed two blacktail bucks with a single shot and at a distance of more than four hundred yards. (“I went back and paced off the distance. . . . This was the best shot I ever made.”) He killed a blacktail doe, several elk, including a yearling calf, because, he later said, the party was in need of meat.
The blacktail buck, he wrote, was one of the most noble-looking of all deer. “Every movement is full of alert, fiery life and grace, and he steps as lightly as though he hardly trod the earth.” The bugling of the elk seemed such a beautiful, musical cry, he wrote, it was “almost impossible to believe that it is the call of an animal.” Yet he would kill either at any chance, he would drive himself to his physical limits to kill such animals, and to no one who was a hunter need he ever explain why. He was in the Big Horns when he shot his “best” elk of the trip, “killing him very neatly” at a distance of about seventy-five yards.
That was on September 12, somewhere along a branch of Ten Sleep Creek, at about nine thousand feet, the nearest sign of civilization being the army post at Buffalo, Wyoming. They had left their wagon behind twelve days earlier, packed into the mountains with supplies enough for two weeks. He shot the elk in the late afternoon, removed the head, and then, just before dark, crossing a patch of burned-over forest, he saw the “huge, half-human footprints” of a grizzly. The next day, September 13, he confronted “the great bear” and killed it.
“I was very proud over my first bear,” he would write in his Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. His brother, he said, had killed tigers in India, but never a grizzly, and though it would be “hard to say” which was the more savage, he himself was sure a grizzly, with its size and strength, its teeth as large as a tiger’s, its tremendous claws, could “make short work” of any tiger. And his, he stressed, was a “monstrous” bear, nearly nine feet in height, weighing about twelve hundred pounds. Until then neither he nor Merrifield had ever seen a grizzly, dead or alive.
Everything had happened very suddenly. It was all over in a matter of seconds. They had returned to where the elk was shot and found the bear had been feeding on the carcass during the night. From the size of the tracks they knew the bear was enormous. The tracks strayed off and they followed, moving noiselessly over a pine-needle forest floor, on and on in the half-light beneath tremendous pines. Presently, they picked up very distinct prints in the dust of a game trail that led across a hillside, where the terrain was broken by hollows and boulders. Then at a windfall, the trail veered off into a thicket. They could still follow the tracks, by claw-marks on the fallen trees and by bent and broken twigs.
They started slowly into the thicket and all at once there was the bear. Merrifield saw it first and Theodore, his rifle cocked, stepped forward. The bear was not more than twenty feet off, in among some young spruces. It turned and reared up on its haunches, then, seeing Theodore, dropped down again on all fours.
“I found myself face to face with the great bear,” he was to tell Bamie, “. . . doubtless my face was pretty white, but the blue barrel was as steady as a rock. . . I could see the top of the bead fairly between his two sinister-looking eyes; as I pulled the trigger I jumped aside out of the smoke, to be ready if he charged, but it was needless . . . as you will see when I bring home his skin, the bullet hole in his skull was as exactly between his eyes as if I had measured the distance with a carpenter’s rule.”
Between them, in the next few days, he and Merrifield killed three more grizzlies, including a cub that Theodore shot, as he noted, “clean through him from end to end.” And then, their horses loaded down with elk heads, antlers, bearskins, they started down out of the mountains and by September 19, having reached their wagon and repacked, set off on the three-hundred-mile trek back to the Bad Lands.
Three of the elk heads were magnificent, exactly the thing for the house at Oyster Bay, as he told Bamie.
So I have had good sport; and enough excitement and fatigue to prevent over much thought; and moreover I have at last been able to sleep well at night. But unless I was bear hunting all the time I am afraid I should soon get as restless with this life [as I] was with life at home.
I shall be very, very glad to see you all again. . . .
Long afterward he was to write, “There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears to ’mean’ horses and gunfighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.”
3
In autumn in the Bad Lands the light is luminous, the immeasurable sky something to take the breath away. Cottonwoods along the Little Missouri are a blaze of gold. Then, in no time at all, autumn is over and winter descends, the Bad Lands are the end of the world.
A fierce north wind was blowing the sand so hard one could hardly see, Bill Sewall wrote as early as October 19,1884. In December the temperature hit 26 below, then one night it got down to 65 below. In February he was writing his brother in Maine, “I never saw cold weather till this winter.” He and Dow had the cabin finished and “my grit is good,” Sewall said, “but I believe it is a better country to live in at home than here . . .”
Theodore had gone East the first week in October, immediately upon returning from the Big Horns, to see his Baby Lee, as he called her, and to take a part in the Blaine campaign as he had promised Lodge he would. In November he was back again—Blaine had lost, Grover Cleveland had won, and Theodore, convinced his own political career was finished, had decided that it was definitely as a writer that the world would hear from him. This made his fourth trip to the Bad Lands in little more than a year and his first taste of a Dakota winter. But then he departed again before Christmas, not to return until spring.
In describing the ranchman’s “very pleasant” life, Theodore would stress that the ranchman, though bound on occasion to experience hard work and hardship, need not “undergo the monotonous drudgery attendant upon the tasks of the cowboy.” A ranchman had time for hunting expeditions of a month or more, for reading or writing. But some ranchmen had also—as he did not say—the choice of not being there at all, which is what he chose more often than not. His own Bad Lands years, as they were to be known, lasted from 1883 to 1886, but in that time he was unable to keep away from New York for more than a few months at a stretch. He crossed the continent on the Northern Pacific time after time, Pullman porters came to know him by name. He never “disappeared into the West,” as Wister put it. His time in the Bad Lands, taken altogether, added up to little more than a year and most of his best writing about his home on the range was written at home in the East. As Wister was to write The Virginian in Charleston, South Carolina, and Remington to do much of his best work in a studio in suburban New Rochelle, New York, so Theodore was to write of raging Dakota blizzards and spring roundups in his “house on the hill” at Oyster Bay. As it was for Wister and Remington, the West for Theodore was a fountain of inspiration, and it was not the length of time he spent there that mattered, but the intensity of the experience.
The most immediate and important benefit of his time in the Bad Lands was what it did to restore him in body and spirit. But he had also found a subject and, with it, found he could write as he had not before—not certainly in his naval history—with life and feeling. Some of his writing on the West was to be repetitious and overly sentimental. Still the scenes and events he pictures were drawn from direct experience, from real people, real places, all closely observed. If he was never really a cowboy, but (as he stressed) a ranchman, and largely an absentee ranchman at that, he did take what he saw greatly to heart, recognizing also that he had arrived at the very last hour, that the “great free ranches,” “the pleasantest, healthiest, and most exciting kind of life an American could live,” were about to vanish forever.
Returning in mid-April for a stay of two months, he “put on” another thousand head of cattle (at a cost of another $12,500), lunched with the Marquis at the château (they discussed the rigors of the Meadow Brook hunt), and then in mid-May he started south with his “outfit” to take part in his first spring roundup, as rugged a physical test as he had ever been put through in his life and the best chance he had thus far to see cowboys in action.
“Invariably he was right on the job holding his own with the best of them . . . with all his natural intensiveness,” Lincoln Lang remembered. “Riding circle twice a day, often taking the outer swing, taking his turn on day-herd or night-guard duty, helping with the cutting-out operations, branding calves . . . he was in the saddle all of eighteen hours per day . . . like the rest of us . . .” After a time, as he himself recalled, “all strangeness . . . passed off, the attitude of my fellow cowpunchers being one of friendly forgiveness even toward my spectacles.”
The roundup involved the Langs, the Eatons, the Huidekoper outfit, the “Three-Sevens,” and the “OX,” every ranch big or small in the Little Missouri basin, a hundred men or more, nearly a thousand horses, thousands upon thousands of cattle, taking in a territory of perhaps ten thousand square miles. It was, as A. C. Huidekoper remembered, “a very vivid affair . . . like a reunion . . . There is a great deal of life. . . . The ponies are fresh and some buck hard, the men shout, ’Stay by him,’ ‘Go to him,’ and if a man is thrown they shout with glee.” Breakfast was at three in the morning, dinner about ten o’clock in the morning.
By custom, the men drew straws for their horses at the start of the day and the morning Theodore drew a mean, bucking horse he climbed on and, as Lincoln Lang said, “gave us all an exhibition of the stuff he was made of . . . he had his grip and like grim death he hung on. . . . Hat, glasses, six-shooter, everything unanchored about him took the count. But there was no breaking his grip . . . he stuck ...”
“I rode him all the way from the tip of his ear to the end of his tail,” Theodore later remarked.
Thrown by another horse, he landed on a stone and broke a rib. Still another horse pitched over backward on him and broke something in the point of his shoulder, “so that it was some weeks before I could raise the arm freely.” Still he kept on, saying nothing of the pain. He appears never to have excused himself for any reason from any part of the work. He was “very thorough in whatever work was assigned to him [and]... game to the core,” remembered John Goodall, one of the Marquis’s men, who was foreman of the roundup. “He would grab a calf or a cow and help drag it right into the fire to be branded,” Bill Merrifield recalled. “He could rassle a calf just as good as anybody. He used to be all over dirt from head to foot.”
Some days he rode as much as a hundred miles. The dust and heat were terrific. On stifling hot evenings the mosquitoes would rise from the river bottoms in great clouds to make the nights “one long torture” for men and horses. One night in early June, when the roundup had reached a point a little south of the Maltese Cross, a lightning storm stampeded the herd. Theodore was among those on night duty and there was nothing a cowboy dreaded more, nothing so dangerous as a stampede at night.
For a minute or two I could make out nothing except the dark forms of the beasts running on every side of me, and I should have been very sorry if my horse had stumbled, for those behind would have trodden me down. Then the herd split, part going to one side, while the other part seemingly kept straight ahead, and I galloped as hard as ever beside them. I was trying to reach the point—the leading animals—in order to turn them, when suddenly there was a tremendous splashing in front. I could dimly make out that the cattle immediately ahead and to one side of me were disappearing, and the next moment the horse and I went off a cut bank into the Little Missouri. I bent away back in the saddle, and though the horse almost went down he just recovered himself, and, plunging and struggling through water and quicksand, we made the other side. . . . I galloped hard through a bottom covered with big cottonwood trees, and stopped the part of the herd that I was with, but very soon they broke on me again, and repeated this twice. Finally toward morning the few I had left came to a halt.
It had been raining hard for some time. I got off my horse and leaned against a tree, but before long the infernal cattle started on again, and I had to ride after them. Dawn came soon after this, and I was able to make out where I was and head the cattle back, collecting other little bunches as I went. After a while I came on a cowboy on foot carrying his saddle on his head. . . . His horse had gone full speed into a tree and killed itself, the man, however, not being hurt. I could not help him, as I had all I could do to handle the cattle. When I got them to the wagon, most of the other men had already come in and the riders were just starting on the long circle. One of the men changed my horse for me while I ate a hasty breakfast and then we were off for the day’s work.
By the time he had finished that “day’s work” he had been in the saddle nearly forty hours and worn out five horses. “I can now do cowboy work pretty well,” he wrote Lodge a day or so later.
In his next book, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, most of which appeared first as a series of articles in Century Magazine, these illustrated by Remington, he wrote of the cowboy with an appreciation not to be found in the work of previous writers. He was, as Wister said, the pioneer in taking the cowboy seriously. He wrote of their courage, their phenomenal physical endurance. He liked their humor, admired the unwritten code that ruled the cow camp. “Meanness, cowardice, and dishonesty are not tolerated,” he observed. “There is a high regard for truthfulness and keeping one’s word, intense contempt for any kind of hypocrisy, and a hearty dislike for a man who shirks his work.” It was, of course, exactly the code he had been raised on. (Recalling his father years later, he would use very nearly the same words: “He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness.”) The cowboy was bold, cared about his work; he was self-reliant and self-confident. Perhaps most important of all, the cowboy seemed to know how to deal with death, death in a dozen different forms being an everyday part of his life.
It was not only to the meadowlark that the plains air gave new voice and spirit. Theodore was looking different, even sounding different from what he had. The change is cited in numerous surviving accounts and appears to have become obvious by the time the roundup ended. He himself was to describe the experience as “superbly health-giving.”
The spectacled dude who appeared on the scene the year before had been “a light little feller.” “I have seen him when you could have spanned his waist with your two thumbs and fingers,” remembered a cowboy named Roberts. From what Bill Sewall wrote, it appears Theodore had suffered from both asthma and stomach trouble that first year, and Bill Merrifield, recalling their hunting trip in the Big Horns, would tell how Theodore “ate heart medicine,” whatever that may have been. But after this Bad Lands spring of 1885—the point, by all signs, that marks the final turn in his lifelong battle for health—no such references are to be found again. He is even called “rugged” in an account in a St. Paul paper written in late June as he headed home again. “Rugged, bronzed, and in the prime of health, Theodore Roosevelt passed through St. Paul yesterday, returning from his Dakota ranch to New York and civilization,” we read in the Pioneer Press. In New York later, in the Tribune, another reporter wrote of “his sturdy walk and firm bearing,” again attributes not to be found in previous accounts.
Theodore, remembered William Roscoe Thayer, had become “physically a very powerful man . . . with broad shoulders and stalwart chest, instead of the city-bred, slight young friend I had known earlier.”
When Theodore passed through Pittsburgh on the Chicago Limited later that summer, on his way back to Medora, another reporter thought he had put on perhaps thirty pounds. “But what a change. . . . The voice which failed to make an echo in the . . . [Albany] capitol when he. . . piped ’Mistah Speakah,’ is now hearty and strong enough to drive oxen.”
4
The summer of 1885 the Marquis was indicted again, taken to court still another time on the old Riley Luffsey murder charge, and again, after a travesty of a trial, he got off. But in the meantime, he was kept in jail at Mandan and the story was splashed across the newspapers east and west. Alone, brooding in his cell, the Marquis saw it all as a conspiracy by his business enemies—the Chicago beef trust—to destroy him, and in this he may have been partly correct. But his notion that Theodore, too, had a hand in his troubles was nonsense.
Rumors of bad blood between Theodore and the Marquis had circulated off and on since the time they both arrived in the Bad Lands and these were now picked up by the papers. Sometime that spring, apparently, Theodore and several of his men had delivered a hundred head of cattle to Medora only to find that the Marquis had decided to disregard the agreed-to price. There had been a moment when they stood face-to-face with a number of others looking on. Theodore had asked the Marquis if he had not quoted a higher price the day before and the Marquis said he had, but that there had since been a drop in the Chicago market. Theodore asked the Marquis if he was not going to stick to his original figure, and when the Marquis said no, Theodore said nothing, then turned and ordered that the animals be driven out of the yards and back to the range. Neither man, however, had since expressed any hard feelings over the episode and they had continued to exchange the usual pleasantries.
Numbers of local people claimed later that a showdown between the two had been inevitable all along and were they two figures in a western we would know it had to come. In what actually took place, however, it is the part played by the Marquis that is particularly fascinating, since it is so at odds with the whole violent pattern of his life.
Four days after he was imprisoned at Mandan, the Marquis sent Theodore a letter that Theodore immediately took to be a challenge to a duel. Conceivably the Marquis meant is as just that, but not likely; the whole tone of the letter suggests otherwise. It was dated September 3 and read as follows:
MY DEAR ROOSEVELT,
My principle is to take the bull by the horns. Joe Ferris [Theodore’s old hunting guide, now a storekeeper in Medora] is very active against me and has been instrumental in getting me indicted by furnishing money to witnesses and hunting them up. The papers also publish very stupid accounts of our quarreling—I sent you the paper to N.Y. Is this done by your orders? I thought you my friend. If you are my enemy I want to know it. I am always on hand as you know, and between gentlemen it is easy to settle matters of that sort directly.
Yours very truly,
Mores
I hear the people want to organize the county. I am opposed to it for one year more at least.
Plainly the Marquis wanted Theodore as a friend. Nor would a formal note designed to provoke a duel close with some offhand postscript about another wholly irrelevant subject. In any event, Theodore answered at once that he was emphatically not the Marquis’s enemy, but that if the Marquis was threatening him, then he, Theodore, stood “ever ready to hold myself accountable . . .”
But there was no duel because the Marquis kept his head and let the matter drop. Theodore was sure he had called the man’s bluff—the Marquis had “backed off,” he would later boast. Others, including several who had no use for the Marquis, were equally sure he had done nothing of the kind. “Whatever else is to be said for or against de Mores,” wrote Lincoln Lang, “even his worst enemy could not accuse him of cowardice . . .” The Marquis, it was argued, made nothing of Theodore’s response because the Marquis had never challenged him in the first place.
Had there been a duel—with rifles, pistols, swords (Theodore wanted Winchester rifles at twelve paces)—almost certainly Theodore would have been killed. So it can be fairly said for the Marquis that his unaccountably cool head in this instance spared Theodore for other things.
Passing through Mandan sometime later, Theodore took time out to go to the jail to see the Marquis and is said to have found him sitting on his bunk calmly smoking a cigarette, but nothing is known of what was said.
Life at the Elkhorn had changed considerably, meantime. Will Dow had gone home to Maine to be married and returned bringing his new bride, as well as Mrs. Sewall and the Sewalls’ small daughter, who was the same age as Baby Lee. “We were all a very happy family,” Sewall wrote. That was in the summer of 1885. The next year Theodore was at work on another book, this a biography of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and seemed, Sewall thought, as happy as he had ever known him.
“I miss both you and darling Baby Lee dreadfully...” he wrote Bamie. “Yet I enjoy my life at present. I have my time fully occupied . . . so have none of my usual restless, caged wolf feeling. I work two days out of three at my book or papers; and I hunt, ride and lead the wild, half adventurous life of a ranchman all through it. The elements are combined well.”
He wished only that Bamie would send on some toys for the Sewall child. He thought a big colored ball, some picture blocks, letter blocks, a little horse and wagon, and a rag doll would be perfect.
But time was running out. The Marquis’s empire had already begun to come apart by then, that is, a whole year before the tragic winter of 1886-87. A stagecoach line from Medora to Deadwood proved a failure. The Marquis’s 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 promoting his 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 Bad Lands beef at three cents a pound below the going price. Good beef at a good price for the workingman was his dream. Stock in his National Consumers Meat Company was listed at $10 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 the bright-red stores, three of which actually opened in New York, was “From Ranch to Table.”
But the stock issue failed. 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 unlikely he could have survived. It is also true that his range-fed beef simply did not taste as good as beef fattened in the Chicago yards.
The packing plant was shut down in the fall of 1886. It is not known what the venture had cost, and estimates on the Marquis’s losses vary from $300,000 to $1.5 million. But it is also 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 at any time. And Theodore too had departed by then. “Overstocking may cause little or no harm for two or three years,” he had written that fall in one of his articles for Century, “but sooner or later there comes a winter which means ruin to the ranches that have too many cattle on them; and in our country, which is even now getting crowded, it is merely a question of time as to when a winter will come that will understock the ranges by the summary process of killing off about half of all the cattle throughout the Northwest.” There had been little or no rain all summer, the growing time for grass. The range was bone-dry and still more cattle were being driven in from the south; one outfit brought in some six thousand head. Prices fell drastically. Sewall and Dow, shipping off to Chicago what was marketable from Theodore’s herd, found the price they received was less than the cattle had cost. So they decided it was time they got out of the cattle business. “Sept. 22, 1886, squared accounts with Theodore Roosevelt,” reads the entry in Sewall’s diary. By early October the Sewalls and the Dows had departed for Maine.
Storm on top of storm, blinding snows, relentless, savage winds, the worst winter on record swept the Great Plains. In the Bad Lands, 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 and temperatures hovered at about 40 below. People locked up in their houses could only wait and hope that elsewhere conditions were not so bad. A few who could not wait blew their brains out.
The losses, when they were tallied up in March, were beyond anyone’s worst estimates. Not a rancher along the Little Missouri had come through with half his herd. The average loss was seventy-five percent. Theodore, when he finally returned to survey the damage, called it a perfect “smashup.” He rode for three days without seeing a live steer.
He would come back as time went on, every other year or so, but only for hunting, never again in the same spirit, and he seldom stayed more than a week or two. All told he had invested $52,500 in cattle, which, added to another $30,000 spent on his cabin, on wages, travel, equipment, made a total of $82,500. Eventually he sold off what little he had left in the Bad Lands, added up his losses and arrived at a figure of $20,292.63. But beyond that, of course, he had lost the interest on the investment—five percent over a period of nearly fifteen years—which figured to about $50,000. So the complete loss was more on the order of $70,000, or in present-day money, about $700,000.
So the glorious Bad Lands days had lasted all of three years, and numbers of other ranchers, like Theodore, gave up and went on to other things. Howard Eaton, for example, resettled in Wyoming, to found one of the best-known dude ranches in the West.
The subsequent career of the Marquis was one most people who had known him preferred to put out of their minds. Following a tiger hunt in India, he went home to France to proclaim himself the victim of a Jewish plot. The Chicago beef trust was now portrayed as the “Jewish beef trust.” He turned to politics, launched a crusade to save France, a blend of socialism and rabid anti-Semitism, and went parading 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 led eventually 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.
Once, on the morning of April 11, 1886, the spring before the disastrous winter, in the little town of Dickinson, forty miles east of Medora on the Northern Pacific, a young physician, a Vermonter named Victor Hugo Stickney, had come out of his office about noon on his way home to lunch when he saw “the most bedraggled figure I’d ever seen come limping down the street.” The man was covered with mud, his clothes in shreds, and he struck Stickney as “the queerest specimen of strangeness that had descended on Dickinson in the three years I had lived there.”
He was all teeth and eyes.... He was scratched, bruised and hungry, but gritty and determined as a bull dog. He was actually a slender young fellow, but I remember that he gave me the impression of being heavy and rather large. As I approached him he stopped me with a gesture asking me whether I could direct him to a doctor’s office. I was struck by the way he bit off his words and showed his teeth. I told him that I was the only practicing physician, not only in Dickinson but in the whole surrounding country.
“By George,” he said emphatically, “then you’re exactly the man I want to see. . . . My feet are blistered so badly that I can hardly walk. I want you to fix me up.”
I took him into my office and while I was bathing and bandaging his feet, which were in pretty bad shape, he told me the story. . .
The story, one Theodore was to tell many times and one that was to be told about him for years after he had left the Bad Lands, was of his last and biggest adventure in the West and may be summarized briefly as follows. It has the ring of the adventure stories he had loved so as a boy, but it also happened just as he said.
Earlier in March, having just returned to the Elkhorn after a winter in New York, Theodore was informed by Sewall one morning that a boat, a light, flat-bottomed scow that they kept on the river, had been stolen in the night by someone who had obviously taken off in it downstream. They suspected the culprit was a man named Finnegan, who lived upriver, toward Medora, with two cronies of equally bad reputation. So in the next few days Sewall and Dow put together a makeshift boat, and after waiting for a blizzard to pass, the three of them took off in pursuit, pushing into the icy current on March 30, Sewall steering.
It was a matter of principle, Theodore later said. “To submit tamely and meekly to theft or to any other injury is to invite almost certain repetition of the offense . . .”
They were three days on the river before catching up with the thieves, their boat charging along between snow-covered buttes and weird Bad Lands configurations that looked to Theodore like “the crouching figures of great goblin beasts.” He had brought along some books to read and his camera, expecting there might be a magazine article in the adventure. Each man had his rifle. The second night the temperature dropped below zero.
The next day, at a point about a hundred miles downstream from where they had started, they spotted the missing boat and going ashore found Finnegan and his partners, who surrendered without a fight. (”We simply crept noiselessly up and rising when only a few yards distant covered them with the cocked rifles.”) From there they spent another six days moving on down the river, making little headway now because of ice jams, and taking turns at night guarding the prisoners, who because of the extreme cold could not be bound hand and foot. Food ran low and the cold and biting winds continued. But not the least extraordinary part of the story is that during these same six days after catching the thieves, Theodore, in odd moments, read the whole of Anna Karenina, and “with very great interest.” (Tolstoy was truly a great writer, he would tell Corinne in a letter written at Dickinson the day after his encounter with Dr. Stickney. But had Corinne noticed the unmoral, as opposed to the immoral, tone of the book? “Do you notice how he never comments on the actions of his personages?” For his own part Theodore found Anna “curiously contradictory; bad as she was, however, she was not to me nearly as repulsive as her brother Stiva; Vronsky had some excellent points. I like poor Dolly—but she should have been less of a patient Griselda with her husband.”)
At a remote cow camp Theodore was able to borrow a horse and ride another fifteen miles to the main ranch, at the edge of the Killdeer Mountains, where he got supplies and hired a team, a wagon, and a driver. And then came the roughest part of the escapade. It was agreed that Sewall and Dow would continue downstream with the two boats and that he, Theodore, would go with the three captives overland heading due south some forty-five miles to Dickinson, where he could turn them over to the sheriff. The captives rode in the wagon with the driver; Theodore walked behind, keeping guard with his trusty Winchester. So by the time Dr. Stickney saw him he had walked forty-five miles in something less than two days with no sleep and had at last deposited his prisoners in jail.
When Stickney and others at Dickinson asked why he had not simply shot or hanged the thieves when he first found them and saved himself all that trouble, Theodore answered that the thought had never occurred to him.
“He impressed me and he puzzled me,” wrote Stickney years afterward, “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.”
At Dickinson’s Fourth of July celebration that summer, Theodore was asked to be the “orator of the day.” It was the first time Dickinson (population: 700) had made an all-out occasion of the Fourth and Dr. Stickney, who in a lifelong career of patching up broken cowboys and delivering babies at remote ranches would become as legendary locally as Theodore or the Marquis, was the presiding officer. The crowd was also the largest ever seen in Stark County and included about half of Medora, its citizens having come over on the same train as Theodore. A parade led by the Dickinson Silver Cornet Band included a wagon drawn by four white horses carrying thirty-eight little girls dressed in white, representing the states of the Union. According to one Medora man, everybody got caught up in the spirit and wanted to be part of the parade, with the result that there was no one left to watch it except two drunks who were beyond watching anything.
Somebody named Western Starr read the Declaration of Independence and the crowd joined in singing “America, the Beautiful.” Another speaker, well practiced in oratorical flourishes, spoke in advance of Theodore, his theme the size of the country on its one hundred and tenth birthday; and then it was Theodore’s turn.
I am peculiarly glad 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. . . . 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 ... 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 today so to act throughout our lives as to leave our children a heritage, for which we will receive their blessing and not their curse. . . . 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. . . .
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 today, only because of my pride in you, and because your welfare, moral as well as material, is so near my heart.
On the train back to Medora later in the day, Theodore sat with Arthur Packard, the editor-proprietor of The Bad Lands Cow Boy, and remarked to Packard that he thought now he could do his best work “in a public and political way.” “Then,” responded Packard, “you will become President of the United States.”
What impressed Packard was that Theodore seemed to have arrived at the same conclusion.
Remembering how it all had ended in the Bad Lands, Bill Sewall was to write, “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.”
Of Theodore’s status as things wound up, Sewall said simply: “When he got back into the world again, he was as husky as almost any man I have ever seen who wasn’t dependent on his arms for a livelihood. He weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, and was clear bone, muscle, and grit.”