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PUBLICATIONS OF THE
ROOSEVELT MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION

I. ROOSEVELT IN THE BAD LANDS

COMMITTEE ON PUBLICATIONS
ROOSEVELT MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION INC.

R. J. CUDDIHY
Arthur W. PAGE
Mark SULLIVAN
E. A. van VALKENBURG

Theodore Roosevelt. On the round-up, 1885.

ROOSEVELT
IN THE BAD LANDS

BY
HERMANN HAGEDORN

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

Editor's arm.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1921

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY HERMANN HAGEDORN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

TO
WILLIAM BOYCE THOMPSON
CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY
AND DREAMER OF DREAMS

It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West, the West of Owen Wister's stories and Frederic Remington's drawings, the West of the Indian and the buffalo-hunter, the soldier and the cowpuncher. That land of the West has gone now, "gone, gone with lost Atlantis," gone to the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories. It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman. It was a land of scattered ranches, of herds of long-horned cattle, and of reckless riders who unmoved looked in the eyes of life or death. In that land we led a free and hardy life, with horse and with rifle. We worked under the scorching midsummer sun, when the wide plains shimmered and wavered in the heat; and we knew the freezing misery of riding night guard round the cattle in the late fall round-up. In the soft springtime the stars were glorious in our eyes each night before we fell asleep; and in the winter we rode through blinding blizzards, when the driven snow-dust burnt our faces. There were monotonous days, as we guided the trail cattle or the beef herds, hour after hour, at the slowest of walks; and minutes or hours teeming with excitement as we stopped stampedes or swam the herds across rivers treacherous with quicksands or brimmed with running ice. We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst; and we saw men die violent deaths as they worked among the horses and cattle, or fought in evil feuds with one another; but we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins, and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living.

Theodore ROOSEVELT
(Autobiography)

PREFACE

To write any book is an adventure, but to write this book has been the kind of gay and romantic experience that makes any man who has partaken of it a debtor forever to the Giver of Delights. Historical research, contrary to popular opinion, is one of the most thrilling of occupations, but I question whether any biographer has ever had a better time gathering his material than I have had. Amid the old scenes, the old epic life of the frontier has been re-created for me by the men who were the leading actors in it. But my contact with it has not been only vicarious. In the course of this most grateful of labors I have myself come to know something of the life that Roosevelt knew thirty-five years ago--the hot desolation of noon in the scarred butte country; the magic of dawn and dusk when the long shadows crept across the coulees and woke them to unexpected beauty; the solitude of the prairies, that have the vastness without the malignancy of the sea. I have come to know the thrill and the dust and the cattle-odors of the round-up; the warm companionship of the ranchman's dinner-table; such profanity as I never expect to hear again; singing and yarns and hints of the tragedy of prairie women; and, at the height of a barbecue, the appalling intrusion of death. I have felt in all its potency the spell which the "short-grass country" cast over Theodore Roosevelt; and I cannot hear the word Dakota without feeling a stirring in my blood.

It was Mr. Roosevelt himself who gave me the impulse to write this book, and it was the letters of introduction which he wrote early in 1918 which made it possible for me to secure the friendly interest of the men who knew most about his life on the ranch and the range. "If you want to know what I was like when I had bark on," he said, "you ought to talk to Bill Sewall and Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris and his brother Joe." I was writing a book about him for boys at the time, and again and again he said, "I want you to go out to Dakota!" On one occasion I referred to his life in the Bad Lands as "a kind of idyl." "That's it!" he exclaimed. "That's it! That's exactly what it was!"

The wish he had expressed, living, became in a sense a command after he was dead. The letters he had given me unsealed the lips of the men who, for thirty-five years, had steadily refused to reveal to "newspaper fellers" the intimate story of the romantic life they had shared with the man who became President of the United States. From Dickinson, North Dakota, came Sylvane Ferris; from Terry, Montana, came "Joe" Ferris; from Somers, Montana, came "Bill" Merrifield, and, on their old stamping-ground along the Little Missouri, unfolded, bit by bit, the story of the four years of Roosevelt's active ranching life. In the deserted bar-room of the old "Metropolitan Hotel" at Medora (rechristened the "Rough Riders"); on the ruins of the Maltese Cross cabin and under the murmuring cottonwoods at Elkhorn, they spun their joyous yarns. Apart from what they had to tell, it was worth traveling two thirds across the Continent to come to know these figures of an heroic age; and to sit at Sylvane Ferris's side as he drove his Overland along the trails of the Bad Lands and through the quicksands of the Little Missouri, was in itself not an insignificant adventure. Mrs. Margaret Roberts, at Dickinson, had her own stories to tell; and in the wilderness forty miles west of Lake McDonald, on the Idaho border, John Reuter, known to Roosevelt as "Dutch Wannigan," told, as no one else could, of the time he was nearly killed by the Marquis de Mores. A year later it was Schuyler Lebo who guided me in a further search for material, fifty miles south from Medora by buckboard through the wild, fantastic beauty of the Bad Lands. I doubt if there is any one I missed who had anything to tell of Roosevelt.

So far as any facts relating to Roosevelt or to the Western frontier can ever be described as "cold," it is a narrative of cold facts which I have attempted to tell in this book. The truth, in this case, is romantic enough and needs no embellishment. I have made every effort to verify my narrative, but, to some extent, I have had to depend, inevitably, on the character of the men and women who gave me my data, as every historical writer must who deals not with documents (which may, of course, themselves be mendacious), but with what is, in a sense, "raw material." One highly dramatic story, dealing with Roosevelt's defiance of a certain desperate character, which has at different times during the past twenty-five years been printed in leading newspapers and periodicals, told always by the same writer, I have had to reject because I could find no verification of it, though I think it may well be true.

In weaving my material into a connected narrative I have consciously departed from fact in only one respect. Certain names--a half-dozen or so in all--are fictitious. In certain cases, in which the story I had to tell might give needless offense to the actors in it still surviving, or to their children, and in which I was consequently confronted by the alternative of rejecting the story in question or changing the names, I chose the latter course without hesitation. It is quite unessential, for instance, what the real name was of the lady known in this book as "Mrs. Cummins"; but her story is an important element in the narrative. To those who may recognize themselves under the light veil I have thrown over their portraits, and may feel grieved, I can only say that, inasmuch as they were inhabitants of the Bad Lands when Theodore Roosevelt and the Marquis de Mores shaped their destinies there for good or ill, they became historical figures and must take their chances at the judgment seat of posterity with Nebuchadnezzar and Caesar and St. Augustine and Calamity Jane.

The Northwestern newspapers of the middle eighties contain much valuable material, not only about the Marquis and his romantic enterprises, which greatly interested the public, but about Roosevelt himself. The files of the Press of Dickinson, North Dakota, and the Pioneer of Mandan, have proved especially useful, though scarcely more useful than those of the Bismarck Tribune, the Minneapolis Journal, and the Dispatch and Pioneer Press of St. Paul. The cut of Roosevelt's cattle-brands, printed on the jacket, is reproduced from the Stockgrowers' Journal of Miles City. I have sought high and low for copies of the Bad Lands Cowboy, published in Medora, but only one copy--Joe Ferris's--has come to light. "'Bad-man' Finnegan," it relates among other things, "is serving time in the Bismarck penitentiary for stealing Theodore Roosevelt's boat." But that is a part of the story; and this is only a Preface.

Colonel Roosevelt's own books, notably "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman," "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," "The Wilderness Hunter," and the "Autobiography," have furnished me an important part of my material, giving me minute details of his hunting experiences which I could have secured nowhere else; and I am indebted to the publishers, Messrs. G. P. Putnam's Sons, Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, and the Century Company, for permission to use them. I am indebted to the following publishers, likewise, for permission to reprint certain verses as chapter headings: Messrs. Houghton Mifflin Company ("Riders of the Stars," by Henry Herbert Knibbs, and "Songs of Men," edited by Robert Frothingham); the Macmillan Company ("Cowboy Songs," edited by Professor John A. Lomax); and Mr. Richard G. Badger ("Sun and Saddle Leather," by Badger Clark). I am especially indebted to Mr. Roosevelt's sisters, Mrs. W. S. Cowles and Mrs. Douglas Robinson, and to the Honorable Henry Cabot Lodge for the opportunity to examine the unpublished letters of Colonel Roosevelt in their possession and to reprint excerpts from them. Through the courtesy of Mr. Clarence L. Hay I have been able to print a part of an extraordinary letter written by President Roosevelt to Secretary Hay in 1903; through the courtesy of Messrs. Harper and Brothers I have been permitted to make use of material in "Bill Sewall's story of T. R.," by William W. Sewall, and in "The Boys' Life of Theodore Roosevelt."

Partly from books and letters, partly from documents and old newspapers, I have gathered bit by bit the story of Roosevelt's life as a ranchman; but my main sources of material have been the men and women (scattered now literally from Maine to the State of Washington) who were Roosevelt's companions and friends. It is difficult to express adequately my gratitude to them for their unfailing helpfulness; their willingness to let themselves be quizzed, hour after hour, and to answer, in some cases, a very drumfire of importunate letters; above all for their resistance, to what must at times have been an almost overpowering temptation, to "string the tenderfoot." They took my inquisition with grave seriousness and gave me what they had without reserve and without elaboration.

There are five men to whom I am peculiarly indebted: to Mr. Sylvanus M. Ferris and Mr. A. W. Merrifield, who were Roosevelt's ranch-partners at the Maltese Cross Ranch, and to Mr. William W. Sewall, of Island Falls, Maine, who was his foreman at Elkhorn; to Mr. Lincoln A. Lang, of Philadelphia, who, having the seeing eye, has helped me more than any one else to visualize the men and women who played the prominent parts in the life of Medora; and to Mr. A. T. Packard, of Chicago, founder and editor of the Bad Lands Cowboy, who told me much of the efforts to bring law and order into Billings County. To Mr. Joseph A. Ferris and Mrs. Ferris; to Mr. William T. Dantz, of Vineland, New Jersey; to Mrs. Margaret Roberts and Dr. Victor H. Stickney, both of Dickinson, North Dakota; to Mr. George Myers, of Townsend, Montana; to Mr. John Reuter, to Mr. John C. Fisher, of Vancouver, British Columbia, and to Mr. John Willis, of Glasgow, Montana, Roosevelt's companion of many hunts, I am indebted to a scarcely less degree. Others who gave me important assistance were Mr. Howard Eaton, of Wolf, Wyoming, and Mr. "Pete" Pellessier of Sheridan, Wyoming; Mr. James Harmon, Mr. Oren Kendley, Mr. Schuyler Lebo, and Mr. William McCarty, of Medora, North Dakota; Mr. William G. Lang, of Baker, Montana; Mr. W. H. Fortier, of Spokane, Washington; Mr. Edward A. Allen and Mr. George F. Will, of Bismarck, North Dakota; Mr. J. B. Brubaker, of Terry; Mr. Laton A. Huffman and Mr. C. W. Butler, of Miles City, Montana; Dr. Alexander Lambert, of New York City; Dr. Herman Haupt, of Setauket, New York; the Reverend Edgar Haupt, of St. Paul, Minnesota; Mr. Alfred White, of Dickinson; Mr. Dwight Smith, of Chicago; Mrs. Granville Stuart, of Grantsdale, Montana; Mr. Frank B. Linderman, of Somers, Montana; Mr. C. R. Greer, of Hamilton, Ohio; Mrs. George Sarchet, of New England, South Dakota; and especially, my secretary, Miss Gisela Westhoff.

I have enjoyed the writing-man's rarest privilege--the assistance of wise and friendly critics, notably Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, of Harvard; President John Grier Hibben, of Princeton; and Professor William A. Dunning, of Columbia, who generously consented to serve as a committee of the Roosevelt Memorial Association to examine my manuscript; and Dr. John A. Lester, of the Hill School, who has read the proof and given me valuable suggestions.

To all these friendly helpers my gratitude is deep. My warmest thanks, however, are due Mr. William Boyce Thompson, President of the Roosevelt Memorial Association, whose quick imagination and effective interest made possible the collection of the material under the auspices of the Association.

H. H.
FAIRFIELD, CONNECTICUT
June 20, 1921

CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................... xxv

Chapter I. Arrival -- Little Missouri -- A game country -- Joe Ferris -- The trail to Chimney Butte -- The three Canadians -- The buckskin mare ................................ 3

Chapter II. Gregor Lang -- The Vine family -- The buffalo hunt -- The argonauts -- Politics -- The passing of the buffalo -- Pursuit -- The charge of the buffalo -- Broken slumbers -- Failure -- "It's dogged that does it" -- Roosevelt makes a decision -- He acquires two partners -- He kills his buffalo ............................................ 18

Chapter III. Jake Maunders -- The "bad men" -- Archie the precocious -- County organization -- The graces of the wicked ....................................................... 47

Chapter IV. Marquis de Mores -- Founding of Medora -- The machinations of Maunders result in bloodshed -- The boom begins -- The Marquis in business -- Roosevelt returns East -- The Marquis's idea -- Packard -- Frank Vine's little joke -- Medora blossoms forth -- The Marquis has a new dream -- Joe Ferris acquires a store -- Roosevelt meets disaster -- Invasion -- Roosevelt turns West ............................. 58

Chapter V. "I will not be dictated to!" -- George Myers -- Mrs. Maddox -- The Maltese Cross -- On the round-up -- "Hasten forward quickly there!" -- Trying out the tenderfoot -- A letter to "Bamie" -- The emerald biscuits ............... 89

Chapter VI. The neighbors -- Mrs. Roberts -- Hell-Roaring Bill Jones -- A good man for "sassing" -- The master of Medora -- The Marquis's stage-line -- The road to Deadwood -- The Marquis finds a manager .............................. 108

Chapter VII. The gayety of Medora -- Holocaust -- Influence of the cowboy -- Moulding public opinion -- The "Bastile" -- The mass meeting -- The thieves -- The underground railway -- Helplessness of the righteous -- Granville Stuart -- The three argonauts ............................................. 123

Chapter VIII. The new ranch -- The bully at Mingusville -- The end of the bully -- Dakota discovers Roosevelt -- Stuart's vigilantes -- Sewall and Dow -- Mrs. Lang -- Sewall speaks his mind -- Enter the Marquis ........................ 148

Chapter IX. "Dutch Wannigan" -- Political sirens -- "Able to face anything" .............................................. 167

Chapter X. The start for the Big Horns -- Roosevelt writes home -- A letter to Lodge -- Indians -- Camp in the mountains -- Roosevelt gets his bear ........................ 175

Chapter XI. Rumblings from the Marquis -- The "stranglers" -- The band of "Flopping Bill" -- Fifteen marked men -- Maunders the discreet -- Sewall receives callers ............ 189

Chapter XII. "Medicine Buttes" -- Roosevelt returns to Elkhorn -- Maunders threatens Roosevelt -- Packard's stage-line -- The dress rehearsal -- Another bubble bursts ................ 202

Chapter XIII. Bleak camping -- Roosevelt "starts a reform" -- The deputy marshal -- Winter activities -- Breaking broncos -- A tenderfoot holds his own -- Wild country -- Mountain sheep -- The stockmen's association ................ 215

Chapter XIV. Winter misery -- Return to Medora -- Illness and recovery -- Mingusville -- "He's drunk and on the shoot" -- The seizure of Bill ...................................... 235

Chapter XV. The spring of 1885 -- Swimming the Little Missouri -- Ranching companions -- Golden expectations -- The boss of the Maltese Cross -- The buttermilk -- Hospitality at Yule -- Lang's love of debate -- Nitch comes to dine ..................................................... 248

Chapter XVI. Cattle torture -- Trailing cattle -- Roosevelt's horsemanship -- Gentling the Devil -- The spring round-up -- The first encampment -- The day's work -- Diversions -- Profanity -- "Fight or be friends" ............ 266

Chapter XVII. The "mean" horse -- Ben Butler -- Dr. Stickney -- Dinner with Mrs. Cummins -- The stampede -- Roping an earl's son -- A letter to Lodge -- Sylvane's adventure -- Law ......................................................... 286

Chapter XVIII. Sewall's skepticism -- Interview at St. Paul -- The womenfolks -- The Elkhorn "Outfit" -- The Wadsworths' dog ......................................................... 305

Chapter XIX. Medora -- "Styles in the Bad Lands" -- The coming of law -- The preachers -- Packard's parson -- Johnny O'Hara ...................................................... 318

Chapter XX. De Mores the undaunted -- Genealogy of the Marquis -- Roosevelt and the Marquis -- Hostility -- The first clash -- Indictment of the Marquis -- The Marquis's trial -- The Marquis sees red -- Peace ...................... 331

Chapter XXI. Red man and white -- Roosevelt's adventure -- Good Indian, dead Indian -- Prairie fires -- Sewall delivers a lecture -- The testing of Mrs. Joe -- Mrs. Joe takes hold ... 350

Chapter XXII. The theft of the boat -- Redhead Finnegan -- Preparations for pursuit -- Departure -- "Hands up!" -- Capture of the thieves -- Marooned -- Cross country to jail -- Arrival in Dickinson -- "The only damn fool" ............. 365

Chapter XXIII. Medora's first election -- The celebration -- Miles City meeting -- Roosevelt's cattle prospects -- "His upper lip is stiff" -- Completing "Benton" -- The summer of 1886 -- Influence over cowboys -- "A Big Day" -- Oratory -- Roosevelt on Americanism -- "You will be President" ......... 387

Chapter XXIV. A troop of Rough Riders -- Premonitions of trouble -- The hold-up -- The Coeur d'Alenes -- Hunting white goats -- John Willis -- Elkhorn breaks up -- Facing east ........................................................ 412

Chapter XXV. The bad winter -- The first blizzard -- Destruction of the cattle -- The spring flood -- The boneyard .................................................... 429

Chapter XXVI. Roosevelt's losses -- Morrill vs. Myers -- Roosevelt takes a hand -- A country of ruins -- New schemes of the Marquis -- The fading of Medora ...................... 440

Chapter XXVII. Bill Jones -- Old friends -- Seth Bullock -- Death of the Marquis -- Roosevelt's progress -- Return as Governor -- Medora celebrates -- The "cowboy bunch" -- Return as President -- Death of Bill Jones -- The Bad Lands to-day ...................................................... 453

Appendix ....................................................... 477

Index .......................................................... 483

ILLUSTRATIONS

Theodore Roosevelt on the Round-up, 1885 .......... Frontispiece Photograph by Ingersoll, Buffalo, Minnesota.

Maltese Cross Ranch-House ..................................... 16

View from the Door of the Ranch-House ......................... 16

The Prairie at the Edge of the Bad Lands ...................... 32 Photograph by Holmboe, Bismarck, N. D.

"Broken Country" .............................................. 32 Photograph by Holmboe.

Roosevelt in 1883 ............................................. 48

Medora in the Winter of 1883-84 ............................... 48

"Dutch Wannigan" and Frank O'Donald ........................... 64

Scene of the Killing of Riley Luffsey ......................... 64

Antoine de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Mores ...................... 76 By courtesy of L. A. Huffman, Miles City, Montana.

Sylvane Ferris ................................................ 92

A. W. Merrifield .............................................. 92

The Maltese Cross Ranch-House as it was when Roosevelt lived in it ....................................................... 92 Photograph by C. R. Greer, Hamilton, Ohio.

The Ford of the Little Missouri near the Maltese Cross ....... 108

A. T. Packard ................................................ 130

Office of the "Bad Lands Cowboy" ............................. 130

The Little Missouri just above Elkhorn ....................... 150

Elkhorn Bottom ............................................... 164

A Group of Bad Lands Citizens ................................ 176

Roosevelt's Brands ........................................... 190 From the Stockgrowers Journal, Miles City.

Fantastic Formation at Medicine Buttes ....................... 202

Medicine Buttes .............................................. 202

Poster of the Marquis de Mores's Deadwood Stage-Line ......... 212 By courtesy of the North Dakota Historical Society.

Theodore Roosevelt (1884) .................................... 236

Elkhorn Ranch Buildings from the River ....................... 252 Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt

Gregor Lang .................................................. 262

Mrs. Lang .................................................... 262

The Maltese Cross "Outfit" ................................... 276

The Maltese Cross "Chuck-Wagon" .............................. 276

The Scene of the Stampede .................................... 296

Elkhorn Ranch-House .......................................... 310 Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt.

Site of Elkhorn (1919) ....................................... 310

Hell-Roaring Bill Jones ...................................... 320

Bill Williams's Saloon (1919) ................................ 320

Hotel de Mores ............................................... 332

The Abattoir of the Marquis de Mores ......................... 332

The Bad Lands near Medora .................................... 346

Joseph A. Ferris ............................................. 360

Joe Ferris's Store ........................................... 360

Wilmot Dow and Theodore Roosevelt (1886) ..................... 370

The Piazza at Elkhorn ........................................ 370 Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt.

Dow and Sewall in the Boat ................................... 384 Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt.

Medora in 1919 ............................................... 402

Ferris and Merrifield on the Ruins of the Shack at Elkhorn ... 424

Corrals at Elkhorn ........................................... 424 Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt.

George Myers ................................................. 442

The Little Missouri at Elkhorn ............................... 442

Lincoln Lang ................................................. 456

William T. Dantz ............................................. 456

Margaret Roberts ............................................. 456

"Dutch Wannigan" ............................................. 456

Joe and Sylvane Ferris and Merrifield (1919) ................. 472

Rough Riders Hotel ........................................... 472

Photographs of Bad Lands scenes, unless otherwise indicated, were made by the author.

The end-paper map is from a drawing made for the book by Lincoln A. Lang. The town of Mingusville is indicated on it under its present name--Wibaux.

INTRODUCTION

The trail-tracer of Theodore Roosevelt's frontier life has given the members of this Advisory Committee of Three of the Roosevelt Memorial Association the opportunity of a first reading of his book. The duty of considering the manuscript and making suggestions has been merged in the pleasure of the revealing account of that young man who forty years ago founded a personal College of the Plains in raw Dakota.

Three are the essentials of the good biographer--historic sense, common sense, and human sense. To the mind of the Committee, Mr. Hagedorn has put into service all three of these senses. Every writer of history must make himself an explorer in the materials out of which he is to build. To the usual outfit of printed matter, public records, and private papers, Mr. Hagedorn has added an unexpected wealth of personal memories from those who were part of Roosevelt's first great adventure in life. The book is a thorough-going historical investigation into both familiar and remote sources.

The common sense of the work is in its choice of the things that counted in the experience of the ranchman, hunter, and citizen of a tumultuous commonwealth. All the essential facts are here, and also the incidents which gave them life. Even apart from the central figure, the book reconstructs one of the most fascinating phases of American history.

That is not all that is expected by the host of Roosevelt's friends. They want the man--the young Harvard graduate and New York clubman who sought the broader horizon of the Far West in making, and from it drew a knowledge of his kind which became the bed-rock of his later career. The writer's personal affection for and understanding of Roosevelt have illuminated the whole story. He paints a true portrait of an extraordinary man in a picturesque setting.

William A. DUNNING
Albert BUSHNELL HART
John GRIER HIBBEN

ROOSEVELT IN THE BAD LANDS

My friends, I never can sufficiently express the obligations I am under to the territory of Dakota, for it was here that I lived a number of years in a ranch house in the cattle country, and I regard my experience during those years, when I lived and worked with my own fellow ranchmen on what was then the frontier, as the most important educational asset of all my life. It is a mighty good thing to know men, not from looking at them, but from having been one of them. When you have worked with them, when you have lived with them, you do not have to wonder how they feel, because you feel it yourself. Every now and then I am amused when newspapers in the East--perhaps, I may say, not always friendly to me--having prophesied that I was dead wrong on a certain issue, and then finding out that I am right, express acid wonder how I am able to divine how people are thinking. Well, sometimes I don't and sometimes I do; but when I do, it comes simply from the fact that this is the way I am thinking myself. I know how the man that works with his hands and the man on the ranch are thinking, because I have been there and I am thinking that way myself. It is not that I divine the way they are thinking, but that I think the same way.

Theodore ROOSEVELT
Speech at Sioux Falls
September 3, 1910.

ROOSEVELT IN THE BAD LANDS

I

Rainy dark or firelight, bacon rind or pie, Livin' is a luxury that don't come high; Oh, be happy and onruly while our years and luck allow, For we all must die or marry less than forty years from now!

Badger CLARK

The train rumbled across three hundred feet of trestle and came to a stop. A young man, slender, not over-tall, with spectacles and a moustache, descended the steps. If he expected that his foot, groping below the bottom step in the blackness for something to land on, would find a platform, he was doomed to disappointment. The "depot" at Little Missouri did not boast a platform. The young man pulled his duffle-bag and gun-case down the steps; somebody waved a lantern; the train stirred, gained momentum, and was gone, having accomplished its immediate mission, which was to deposit a New York "dude," politician and would-be hunter, named Theodore Roosevelt, in the Bad Lands of Dakota.

The time was three o'clock of a cool, September morning, and the place, in the language of the Bad Lands, was "dark as the inside of a caow." If the traveler from afar had desired illumination and a reception committee, he should have set his arrival not for September 7th, but for September 6th. Twenty-four hours previous, it happened, the citizens of Little Missouri had, in honor of a distinguished party which was on its way westward to celebrate the completion of the road, amply anticipated any passion for entertainment which the passengers on the Overland might have possessed. As the engine came to a stop, a deafening yell pierced the night, punctuated with pistol-shots. Cautious investigation revealed figures dancing wildly around a bonfire; and the passengers remembered the worst they had ever heard about Indians. The flames shot upward, setting the shadows fantastically leaping up the precipitous bluffs and among the weird petrifactions of a devil's nightmare that rimmed the circle of flaring light. A man with a gun in his hand climbed aboard the train and made his way to the dining-car, yelling for "cow-grease," and demanding, at the least, a ham-bone. It took the burliest of his comrades to transport the obstreperous one back to solid earth just as the train moved out.

There was nothing so theatrical awaiting Theodore Roosevelt. The "depot" was deserted. Roosevelt dragged his belongings through the sagebrush toward a huge black building looming northeastward through the night, and hammered on the door until the proprietor appeared, muttering curses.

The face that Roosevelt saw, in the light of a smoky lantern, was not one to inspire confidence in a tenderfoot on a dark night. The features were those of a man who might have been drinking, with inconsiderable interruptions, for a very long time. He was short and stout and choleric, with a wiry moustache under a red nose; and seemed to be distinctly under the impression that Roosevelt had done something for which he should apologize.

He led the way upstairs. Fourteen beds were scattered about the loft which was the second story of the Pyramid Park Hotel, and which, Roosevelt heard subsequently, was known as the "bull-pen." One was unoccupied. He accepted it without a murmur.

What the thirteen hardened characters who were his roommates said next morning, when they discovered the "Eastern punkin-lily" which had blossomed in their midst, is lost to history. It was unquestionably frank, profane, and unwashed. He was, in fact, not a sight to awaken sympathy in the minds of such inhabitants as Little Missouri possessed. He had just recovered from an attack of cholera morbus, and though he had written his mother from Chicago that he was already "feeling like a fighting-cock," the marks of his illness were still on his face. Besides, he wore glasses, which, as he later discovered, were considered in the Bad Lands as a sign of a "defective moral character."

It was a world of strange and awful beauty into which Roosevelt stepped as he emerged from the dinginess of the ramshackle hotel into the crisp autumn morning. Before him lay a dusty, sagebrush flat walled in on three sides by scarred and precipitous clay buttes. A trickle of sluggish water in a wide bed, partly sand and partly baked gumbo, oozed beneath steep banks at his back, swung sharply westward, and gave the flat on the north a fringe of dusty-looking cottonwoods, thirstily drinking the only source of moisture the country seemed to afford. Directly across the river, beyond another oval-shaped piece of bottom-land, rose a steep bluff, deeply shadowed against the east, and south of it stretched in endless succession the seamed ranges and fantastic turrets and cupolas and flying buttresses of the Bad Lands.

It was a region of weird shapes garbed in barbaric colors, gray-olive striped with brown, lavender striped with black, chalk pinnacles capped with flaming scarlet. French-Canadian voyageurs, a century previous, finding the weather-washed ravines wicked to travel through, spoke of them as mauvaises terres pour traverser, and the name clung. The whole region, it was said, had once been the bed of a great lake, holding in its lap the rich clays and loams which the rains carried down into it. The passing of ages brought vegetation, and the passing of other ages turned that vegetation into coal. Other deposits settled over the coal. At last this vast lake found an outlet in the Missouri. The wear and wash of the waters cut in time through the clay, the coal, and the friable limestone of succeeding deposits, creating ten thousand watercourses bordered by precipitous bluffs and buttes, which every storm gashed and furrowed anew. On the tops of the flat buttes was rich soil and in countless pleasant valleys were green pastures, but there were regions where for miles only sagebrush and stunted cedars lived a starved existence. Bad lands they were, for man or beast, and Bad Lands they remained.

The "town" of Little Missouri consisted of a group of primitive buildings scattered about the shack which did duty as a railroad station. The Pyramid Park Hotel stood immediately north of the tracks; beside it stood the one-story palace of sin of which one, who shall, for the purposes of this story, be known as Bill Williams, was the owner, and one who shall be known as Jess Hogue, the evil genius. South of the track a comical, naive Swede named Johnny Nelson kept a store when he was not courting Katie, the hired girl in Mrs. McGeeney's boarding-house next door, or gambling away his receipts under Hogue's crafty guidance. Directly to the east, on the brink of the river, the railroad section-foreman, Fitzgerald, had a shack and a wife who quarreled unceasingly with her neighbor, Mrs. McGeeney. At a corresponding place on the other side of the track, a villainous gun-fighter named Maunders lived (as far as possible) by his neighbors' toil. A quarter of a mile west of him, in a grove of cottonwood trees, stood a group of gray, log buildings known as the "cantonment," where a handful of soldiers had been quartered under a major named Coomba, to guard the construction crews on the railroad from the attacks of predatory Indians seeking game in their ancient hunting-grounds. A few huts in the sagebrush, a half-dozen miners' shacks under the butte to the south, and one or two rather pretentious frame houses in process of construction completed what was Little Missouri; but Little Missouri was not the only outpost of civilization at this junction of the railroad and the winding, treacherous river. On the eastern bank, on the flat under the bluff that six months previous had been a paradise for jackrabbits, a few houses and a few men were attempting to prove to the world, amid a chorus of hammers, that they constituted a town and had a future. The settlement called itself Medora. The air was full of vague but wonderful stories of a French marquis who was building it and who owned it, body and soul.

Roosevelt had originally been turned in the direction of the Bad Lands by a letter in one of the New York papers by a man from Pittsburgh named Howard Eaton and the corroborative enthusiasm of a high-spirited naval officer named Gorringe, whose appeals for an adequate navy brought Roosevelt exuberantly to his side. Gorringe was a man of wide interests and abilities, who managed, to a degree mysterious to a layman, to combine his naval activities with the work of a consulting engineer, the promotion of a shipyard, and the formation of a syndicate to carry on a cattle business in Dakota. He had gained international notice by his skill in bringing the obelisk known as "Cleopatra's Needle" from Alexandria to New York, and had six months previous flared before the public in front-page headlines by reason of a sharp controversy with the Secretary of the Navy, which had resulted in Gorringe's resignation.

Roosevelt had said that he wanted to shoot buffalo while there were still buffalo left to shoot, and Gorringe had suggested that he go to Little Missouri. That villainous gateway to the Bad Lands was, it seems, the headquarters for a motley collection of guides and hunters, some of them experts,[1] the majority of them frauds, who were accustomed to take tourists and sportsmen for a fat price into the heart of the fantastic and savage country. The region was noted for game. It had been a great winter range for buffalo; and elk, mountain-sheep, blacktail and whitetail deer, antelope and beaver were plentiful; now and then even an occasional bear strayed to the river's edge from God knows whence. Jake Maunders, with his sinister face, was the center of information for tourists, steering the visitor in the direction of game by day and of Bill Williams, Jess Hogue, and their crew of gamblers and confidence men by night. Gorringe had planned to go with Roosevelt himself, but at the last moment had been forced to give up the trip. He advised Roosevelt to let one of the men representing his own interests find him a guide, especially the Vines, father and son.

[Footnote 1: Roosevelt tells, in his Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, of the most notable of these, a former scout and Indian fighter named "Vic" Smith, whose exploits were prodigious.]

Roosevelt found that Vine, the father, was none other than the crusty old party who had reluctantly admitted him at three o'clock that morning to the Pyramid Park Hotel. The Captain, as he was called, refused to admit that he knew any one who would undertake the ungrateful business of "trundling a tenderfoot" on a buffalo hunt; and suggested that Roosevelt consult his son Frank.

Frank Vine turned out to be far less savage than his father, but quite as bibulous, a rotund hail-fellow-well-met, oily as an Esquimau, with round, twinkling eyes and a reservoir of questionable stories which he tapped on the slightest provocation. The guidebook called him "the innkeeper," which has a romantic connotation not altogether true to the hard facts of Frank's hostelry, and spoke of him as "a jolly, fat, rosy-cheeked young man, brimming over with animal spirits." He habitually wore a bright crimson mackinaw shirt, tied at the neck with a gaudy silk handkerchief, and fringed buckskin trousers, which Roosevelt, who had a weakness for "dressing up," no doubt envied him. He was, it seemed, the most obliging soul in the world, being perfectly willing to do anything for anybody at any time except to be honest, to be sober, or to work; and agreed to find Roosevelt a guide, suggesting that Joe Ferris, who was barn superintendent for him at the Cantonment and occasionally served as a guide for tourists who came to see "Pyramid Park," might be persuaded to find him a buffalo.

Frank guided his "tenderfoot" to the Post store, of which he was manager. It was a long log building, one fourth used for trading and the rest for storage. Single window lights, set into the wall here and there, gave the place the air of perpetual dusk which, it was rumored, was altogether necessary to cloak Frank's peculiar business methods.

They found Joe Ferris in the store. That individual turned out to be as harmless a looking being as any "down-East" farmer--a short, stockily built young fellow of Roosevelt's own age, with a moustache that drooped and a friendly pair of eyes. He did not accept the suggestion that he take Roosevelt on a buffalo hunt, without debate. The "dude" from the East did not, in fact, look at first sight as though he would be of much comfort on a hunt. His large, round glasses gave him a studious look that to a frontiersman was ominous. Joe Ferris agreed at last to help the tenderfoot find a buffalo, but he agreed with reluctance and the deepest misgivings.

Ferris and Frank Vine, talking the matter over, decided that the camp of Gregor Lang on Little Cannonball Creek fifty miles up the river, was the logical place to use as headquarters for the hunt. Gregor Lang, it happened, had just left town homeward bound with a wagon-load of supplies. He was a Scotchman, who had been a prosperous distiller in Ireland, until in a luckless moment the wife of his employer had come to the conclusion that it was wicked to manufacture a product which, when taken in sufficient quantities, was instrumental in sending people to hell; and had prevailed on her husband to close the distillery. What Frank Vine said in describing Gregor Lang to Roosevelt is lost to history. Frank had his own reason for not loving Lang.

Ferris had a brother Sylvane, who was living with his partner, A. W. Merrifield, in a cabin seven or eight miles south of Little Missouri, and suggested that they spend the night with him. Late that afternoon, Joe and his buckboard, laden to overflowing, picked Roosevelt up at the hotel and started for the ford a hundred yards north of the trestle. On the brink of the bluff they stopped. The hammer of Roosevelt's Winchester was broken. In Ferris's opinion, moreover, the Winchester itself was too light for buffalo, and Joe thought it might be a good scheme to borrow a hammer and a buffalo-gun from Jake Maunders.

Jake was at home. He was not a reassuring person to meet, nor one of whom a cautious man would care to ask many favors. His face was villainous and did not pretend to be anything else. He was glad to lend the hammer and the gun, he said.

September days had a way of being baking hot along the Little Missouri, and even in the late afternoon the air was usually like a blast from a furnace. But the country which appeared stark and dreadful under the straight noon sun, at dusk took on a magic more enticing, it seemed, because it grew out of such forbidding desolation. The buttes, protruding like buttresses from the ranges that bordered the river, threw lengthening shadows across the grassy draws. Each gnarled cedar in the ravines took on color and personality. The blue of the sky grew soft and deep.

They climbed to the top of a butte where the road passed between gray cliffs, then steeply down on the other side into the cool greenness of a timbered bottom where the grass was high underfoot and the cottonwoods murmured and twinkled overhead. They passed a log ranch-house known as the "Custer Trail," in memory of the ill-fated expedition which had camped in the adjacent flat seven years before. Howard Eaton and his brothers lived there and kept open house for a continuous stream of Eastern sportsmen. A mile beyond, they forded the river; a quarter-mile farther on, they forded it again, passed through a belt of cottonwoods into a level valley where the buttes receded, leaving a wide stretch of bottom-lands dominated by a solitary peak known as Chimney Butte, and drew up in front of a log cabin.

Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield were there and greeted Roosevelt without noticeable enthusiasm. They admitted later that they thought he was "just another Easterner," and they did not like his glasses at all. They were both lithe, slender young fellows, wiry and burnt by the sun, Sylvane twenty-four or thereabouts, Merrifield four years his senior. Sylvane was shy with a boyish shyness that had a way of slipping into good-natured grins; Merrifield, the shrewder and more mature of the two, was by nature reserved and reticent. They did not have much to say to the "dude" from New York until supper in the dingy, one-room cabin of cottonwood logs, set on end, gave way to cards, and in the excitement of "Old Sledge" the ice began to break. A sudden fierce squawking from the direction of the chicken-shed, abutting the cabin on the west, broke up the game and whatever restraint remained; for they all piled out of the house together, hunting the bobcat which had raided the roost. They did not find the bobcat, but all sense of strangeness was gone when they returned to the house, and settling down on bunks and boxes opened their lives to each other.

The Ferrises and Merrifield were Canadians who had drifted west from their home in New Brunswick and, coming out to the Dakota frontier two years previous because the Northern Pacific Railroad carried emigrants westward for nothing, had remained there because the return journey cost five cents a mile. They worked the first summer as section hands. Then, in the autumn, being backwoodsmen, they took a contract to cut cordwood, and all that winter worked together up the river at Sawmill Bottom, cutting timber. But Merrifield was an inveterate and skillful hunter, and while Joe took to doing odd jobs, and Sylvane took to driving mules at the Cantonment, Merrifield scoured the prairie for buffalo and antelope and crept through the underbrush of countless coulees for deer. For two years he furnished the Northern Pacific dining-cars with venison at five cents a pound. He was a sure shot, absolutely fearless, and with a debonair gayety that found occasional expression in odd pranks. Once, riding through the prairie near the railroad, and being thirsty and not relishing a drink of the alkali water of the Little Missouri, he flagged an express with his red handkerchief, stepped aboard, helped himself to ice-water, and rode off again, to the speechless indignation of the conductor.

The three men had prospered in a small way, and while Joe turned banker and recklessly loaned the attractive but unstable Johnny Nelson a hundred dollars to help him to his feet, Sylvane and Merrifield bought a few horses and a few head of cattle, took on shares a hundred and fifty more, belonging to an old reprobate of a ranchman named Wadsworth and a partner of his named Halley, and, under the shadow of the bold peak that was a landmark for miles around, started a ranch which they called the "Chimney Butte," and every one else called, after their brand, the "Maltese Cross." A man named Bly who had kept a hotel in Bismarck, at a time when Bismarck was wild, and had drifted west with the railroad, was, that season, cutting logs for ties a hundred and fifty miles south in the Short Pine Hills. He attempted to float the timber down the river, with results disastrous to his enterprise, but beneficial to the boys at Chimney Butte. A quantity of logs perfectly adapted for building purposes stacked themselves at a bend not an eighth of a mile from the center of their range. The boys set them on end, stockade-fashion, packed the chinks, threw on a mud roof, and called it "home."

Lang's cow-camp, which was to be the starting-point for the buffalo hunt, was situated some forty-five miles to the south, in the neighborhood of Pretty Buttes. Merrifield and the Ferrises had spent some months there the previous winter, staying with a half-breed named O'Donald and a German named Jack Reuter, known to the countryside as "Dutch Wannigan," who had built the rough log cabin and used it as their headquarters. Buffalo at that time had been plentiful there, and the three Canadians had shot them afoot and on horseback, now and then teasing one of the lumbering hulks into charging, for the excitement of the "close shave" the maddened beast would provide. If there were buffalo anywhere, there would be buffalo somewhere near Pretty Buttes.

Maltese Cross ranch-house.

View from the door of the Maltese Cross ranch-house.

Joe, who was of a sedentary disposition, decided that they would make the long trip south in the buckboard, but Roosevelt protested. He saw the need of the buckboard to carry the supplies, but he saw no reason why he should sit in it all day. He asked for an extra saddle horse.

The three declared they did not have an extra saddle horse.

Roosevelt pleaded. The three Canadians thereupon became suspicious and announced more firmly than before that they did not have an extra saddle horse.

Roosevelt protested fervidly that he could not possibly sit still in a buckboard, driving fifty miles.

"By gosh, he wanted that saddle horse so bad," said Joe a long time after, "that we were afraid to let him have it. Why, we didn't know him from Job's off ox. We didn't know but what he'd ride away with it. But, say, he wanted that horse so blamed bad, that when he see we weren't going to let him have it, he offered to buy it for cash."

That proposal sounded reasonable to three cautious frontiersmen, and, before they all turned into their bunks that night, Roosevelt had acquired a buckskin mare named Nell, and therewith his first physical hold on the Bad Lands.

II

It rains here when it rains an' it's hot here when it's hot, The real folks is real folks which city folks is not. The dark is as the dark was before the stars was made; The sun is as the sun was before God thought of shade; An' the prairie an' the butte-tops an' the long winds, when they blow, Is like the things what Adam knew on his birthday, long ago.

From Medora Nights

Joe in the buckboard and Roosevelt on his new acquisition started south at dawn.

The road to Lang's--or the trail rather, for it consisted of two wheel-tracks scarcely discernible on the prairie grass and only to be guessed at in the sagebrush--lay straight south across a succession of flats, now wide, now narrow, cut at frequent intervals by the winding, wood-fringed Little Missouri; a region of green slopes and rocky walls and stately pinnacles and luxuriant acres. Twenty miles south of the Maltese Cross, they topped a ridge of buttes and suddenly came upon what might well have seemed, in the hot mist of noonday, a billowy ocean, held by some magic in suspension. From the trail, which wound along a red slope of baked clay falling at a sharp angle into a witch's cauldron of clefts and savage abysses, the Bad Lands stretched southward to the uncertain horizon. The nearer slopes were like yellow shores jutting into lavender waters.

West of Middle Butte, that loomed like a purple island on their left, they took a short cut across the big Ox Bow from the mouth of Bullion Creek on the one side to the mouth of Spring Creek on the other, then followed the course of the Little Missouri southward once more. They met the old Fort Keogh trail where it crossed the river by the ruins of the stage station, and for three or four miles followed its deep ruts westward, then turned south again. They came at last to a crossing where the sunset glowed bright in their faces along the bed of a shallow creek that emptied into the Little Missouri. The creek was the Little Cannonball. In a cluster of hoary cottonwoods, fifty yards from the point where creek and river met, they found Lang's cabin.

Lang turned out to be stocky, blue-eyed, and aggressively Scotch, wearing spectacles and a pair of "mutton-chop" whiskers. He had himself just arrived, having come from town by the longer trail over the prairie to the west in order to avoid the uncertain river crossings which had a way of proving fatal to a heavily laden wagon. His welcome was hearty. With him was a boy of sixteen, fair-haired and blue-eyed, whom he introduced as his son Lincoln. The boy remembered ever after the earnestness of the tenderfoot's "Delighted to meet you."

* * * * *

Roosevelt talked with Gregor Lang until midnight. The Scotchman was a man of education with views of his own on life and politics, and if he was more than a little dogmatic, he was unquestionably sincere.

He had an interesting story to tell. A year or less ago Henry Gorringe, Abram S. Hewitt, of New York, and a noted London financier named Sir John Pender, who had been instrumental in laying the first successful Atlantic cable, had, in the course of a journey through the Northwest, become interested in the cattle business and, in May, 1883, bought the Cantonment buildings at Little Missouri with the object of making them the headquarters of a trading corporation which they called the Little Missouri Land and Stock Company. The details they left to the enterprising naval officer who had proposed the scheme. Gorringe had meanwhile struck up a friendship with Frank Vine. This was not unnatural, for Frank was the social center of Little Missouri and was immensely popular. What is almost incredible, however, is that, blinded evidently by Frank's social graces, he took the genial and slippery post-trader into the syndicate, and appointed him superintendent. It was possibly because he did not concur altogether in this selection that Pender sent Gregor Lang, who, owing to Lady Pender's scruples, was without employment, to report to Gorringe in New York and then proceed to Little Missouri.

What a somewhat precise Scotch Presbyterian thought of that gathering-place of the wicked, the Presbyterian himself did not see fit to divulge. He established himself at the Cantonment, set to work with European thoroughness to find out all there was to find out about the cattle business, and quietly studied the ways of Frank Vine. Those ways were altogether extraordinary. Where he had originally come from no one exactly knew. His father, whom the new superintendent promptly established as manager of the Pyramid Park Hotel, had been a Missouri steamboat captain and was regarded far and wide as a terror. He was, in fact, a walking arsenal. He had a way of collecting his bills with a cavalry saber, and once, during the course of a "spree," hearing that a great Irishman named Jack Sawyer had beaten up his son Frank, was seen emerging from the hotel in search of the oppressor of his offspring with a butcher-knife in his boot, a six-shooter at his belt, and a rifle in his hand. Frank himself was less of a buccaneer and was conspicuous because he was practically the only man in Little Missouri who did not carry arms. He was big-hearted and not without charm in his nonchalant disregard of the moralities, but there was no truth in him, and he was so foul-mouthed that he became the model for the youth of Little Missouri, the ideal of what a foul-mouthed reprobate should be.

"Frank was the darndest liar you ever knew," remarked, long after, a man who had authority on his side. "And, by jinx, if he wouldn't preface his worst lies with 'Now this is God's truth!'"

He had an older brother named Darius who was famous as "the champion beer-drinker of the West," having the engaging gift of being able to consume untold quantities without ever becoming drunk. In their way they were a notable family.

Gregor Lang, with the fortunes of his employer at heart, watched Frank's activities as storekeeper with interest. During the military regime, Frank had been post-trader, a berth which was an eminent article of barter on the shelves of congressional politicians and for which fitness seemed to consist in the ability to fill lonely soldiers with untold quantities of bad whiskey. Frank's "fitness," as the term was understood, was above question, but his bookkeeping, Lang found, was largely in his mind. When he received a shipment of goods he set the selling-price by multiplying the cost by two and adding the freight; which saved much calculating. Frank's notions of "mine" and "thine," Lang discovered, moreover, were elastic. His depredations were particularly heavy against a certain shipment of patent medicine called "Tolu Tonic," which he ordered in huge quantities at the company's expense and drank up himself. The secret was that Frank, who had inherited his father's proclivities, did not like the "Forty-Mile Red Eye" brand which Bill Williams concocted of sulphuric acid and cigar stumps mixed with evil gin and worse rum; and had found that "Tolu Tonic" was eighty per cent alcohol.

Seeing these matters, and other matters for which the term "irregularity" would have been only mildly descriptive, Gregor Lang sent Sir John a report which was not favorable to Frank Vine's regime. Sir John withdrew from the syndicate in disgust and ordered Lang to start a separate ranch for him; and Gorringe himself began to investigate the interesting ways of his superintendent. Why Lang was not murdered, he himself was unable to say.

Lang had made it his business to acquire all the information he could secure on every phase of the cattle industry, for Sir John was avid of statistics. Roosevelt asked question after question. The Scotchman answered them. Joe Ferris, Lincoln, and a bony Scotch Highlander named MacRossie, who lived with the Langs, had been asleep and snoring for three hours before Gregor Lang and his guest finally sought their bunks.