CHAPTER 7 Hermann Hagedorn’s: The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt.

HE   LOOKS   FOR  ADVENTURES   AND   FINDS   THEM

THEODORE ROOSEVELT went to Dakota straight from the Chicago convention, arriving at Chimney Butte Ranch about the 8th of June.  The country was at its best, with the bright young grass in one unbroken carpet over the prairie, and here and there in daubs of vivid green on the dark red and purple of the buttes. 

Roosevelt entered with heart and soul on the work of a ranchman.  There was plenty to do, for the spring was the ranchman's busy season and matters which were merely "chores" to the expert cowpuncher had to be studied with solemn care by the tenderfoot.  For he was on trial, and he knew it.  The few inhabitants which the Bad Lands possessed were ready to scorn him and reject him at the first sign of weakness or cowardice, and he knew that only by sharing the cowboy's joys and hardships to the full could he achieve the respect of his hardy companions.  He was in the saddle from morning until night, riding among the cattle, hunting stray horses (and they were always straying), breaking ponies, assisting on the round-up.  Now and then he was a source of merriment to the experienced hands, for his skill was not always equal to his earnestness; but the various tricks they played upon him to test his temper or his nerve generally ended in the discomfiture of their authors.  The fact that one such test which included a breakneck gallop down a sharp and muddy slope resulted in the downfall of the expert while he himself kept his seat, proved discouraging to the devisers of mischief. 

One event, which occurred at a wild little "town" called Mingusville, some thirty miles west of the Little Missouri, furnished the kind of "talking material" the Bad Lands liked to hear, and gave Roosevelt a reputation. 

Mingusville boasted only one "hotel," and that was a wicked little place which Roosevelt would not have dreamed of entering if night had not overtaken him far from the ranch and left him no other choice.  As he was stabling his horse he heard two shots, fired, evidently, in the barroom.  He entered the place with misgivings. 

A shabby-looking individual in a broad-brimmed hat was walking up and down the floor, talking and swearing.  He was in full possession of the situation, for he had a cocked gun in each hand, and the half-dozen other men in the room, who were evidently sheep-herders, seemed to be in no way inclined to dispute his authority.  The clock had two holes in its face, which accounted for the shots Roosevelt had heard. 

"Four-eyes!" shouted the bully as he spied Roosevelt with his offensive spectacles.  There was a.  nervous laugh from the sheep-herders, in which Roosevelt joined.  "Four-eyes is going to treat!"

There was another laugh.  Under cover of it, Roosevelt walked quietly to a chair behind the stove and sat down, hoping to escape further notice. 

But the bully had had everything his own way and evidently had no intention of being thwarted now.  He crossed the room to where Roosevelt was sitting and repeated his command. 

Roosevelt passed the man's shout off as a joke.  But the bully leaned over Roosevelt, swinging his guns, and ordered him in foul and offensive language to "set up the drinks for the crowd. "

It occurred to Roosevelt like a flash that he was facing a crisis and that he must "make good or quit"; it occurred to him also that the man was foolish to stand so near, with his heels together.  1' Well, if I must, I must, I suppose,'' he said, and rose to his feet. 

The bully felt vainglorious and expected no retaliation.  Roosevelt struck him quick and hard with his right just to one side of the point of the jaw, hitting with his left as he straightened out, and then again with his right. 

The ruffian fired both guns, but the bullets went wide as he fell like a tree, striking the corner of the bar with his head.  He was senseless as Roosevelt bent over him, and the sheep-herders, with courage revived, carried him into a shed. 

Roosevelt took his dinner in a corner of the dining-room, away from the windows, and went to bed without a light.  But the would-be desperado made no move to recover his shattered prestige.  He departed next morning on a passing freight-train, and was seen no more. 

The news of the encounter spread like the proverbial wildfire.  "Four-eyes" became, overnight, "Old Four-eyes," which was another matter, and the Bad Lands ceased to regard 

"Teddy Roosenfelder " as a joke. 

Roosevelt had an experience of a somewhat similar sort that spring in the new and flourishing town called Medora, which a French adventurer, the Marquis de Mores, had established across the river from Little Missouri.  Medora was as raw as beef in a butcher-shop and the language that was spoken there was obscene beyond description.  The worst offender, by common consent, was a burly reprobate who went by the name of Hell-roaring Bill Jones.  He had had a checkered career, but was not without excellent qualities which Roosevelt had promptly recognized. 

It happened one day that Roosevelt was sitting in the office of the only other "literary gent" in the neighborhood, a young Michigan graduate named Packard, who was editor of the local weekly, the Bad Lands Cowboy.  There were a number of cow punchers in the room and the language was more than picturesque.  The most foul-mouthed of the lot, as usual, was Hell-roaring Bill. 

Roosevelt had no taste for foul stories.  Men who really knew him somehow failed to think of foul stories when he was about, or, if they thought of them, instinctively left them untold.      Evidently  Bill   Jones did not know   him very well. 

Roosevelt stood the foul stuff as long as he could.  Then he looked Bill Jones straight in the eye and "skinned his teeth" and said, "I can't tell why in the world I like you, for you're the nastiest-talking man I ever heard. "

The cow-punchers gasped.  Bill Jones was notoriously "light-triggered" and they expected his hand to fly to his gun. 

But Bill's hand did nothing of the sort.  There was deep silence in the room.  Then a sheepish look crept over the "bad man's" face as he said, apologetically: "I don't belong to your outfit, Mr.  Roosevelt, and I'm not beholden to you for anything.  All the same, I don't mind saying that mebbe I've been a little too free with my mouth. "

They were friends from that day; they remained friends until Bill Jones died, a pathetic wreck, thirty years later. 

It did not take many incidents of this sort to fix Roosevelt's reputation in the Bad Lands.  In a community in which the oldest inhabitant had resided only a year or two, it did not take a man long to establish himself.  In Medora there was a small law-abiding element, completely surrounded by a vast sea of iniquity.  Rascals of every degree of wickedness came and went, gamblers and game butchers, horse thieves and cattle thieves, boyish adventurers and fugitives from justice.  Roosevelt associated himself with the small group, including the editor of the Cowboy, which was endeavoring to bring law order into the untamed region.  His power was instantly recognized, and before the summer was well advanced one of the leading newspapers of western Dakota was speaking of him as a possible candidate for Congress. 

Roosevelt, however, had put politics temporarily behind him.  The vigorous outdoor life in a wild country amid hardy men thrilled him to the depths.  Beside it, the life of politics and society seemed for the moment unreal and valueless.  His double bereavement had made the very intercourse with acquaintances and friends of the happy former times a source of renewed pain.  His little daughter Alice was living with "Bamie" in the house on Fifty-seventh Street.  Soon that house was to be closed.  The old home and the home that had been his during the first years of his married life were both gone.  He determined that he would build a new home in surroundings that had no painful memories.  Forty miles north of Chimney Butte, where the Little Missouri took a long swing westward through a fertile bottom bordered along its mile or two of length by sheer cliff walls, on' a low bluff surmounted by cottonwood-trees, he found the bleached interlocked antlers of two great elk; and there he determined to build his house. 

He went East in the first days of July to take what part he could in the Presidential campaign and to make final arrangements with Bill Sewall and Will Dow, whom he had urged as early as March to try their fortunes in Dakota. 

Sewall had come to New York late the same month, elated at the prospect.    On his return to the East, early in July, Roosevelt wrote him once more:

Now, a little plain talk, though I do not think it necessary, for I know you too well.  If you are afraid of hard work and privation, do not come West.  If you expect to make a fortune in a year or two, do not come West.  If you will give up under temporary discouragements, do not come West.  If, on the other hand, you are willing to work hard, especially the first year; if you realize that for a couple of years you cannot expect, to make much more than you are now making; and if you also know that at the end of that time you will be in receipt of about a thousand dollars for the third year, with an unlimited rise ahead of you and a future as bright as you yourself choose to make it then come.  Now I take it for granted you will not hesitate at this time.  So fix up your affairs at once, and be ready to start before the end of this month. 

Sewall did not hesitate; nor did Dow.  They left New York with Roosevelt the last day of July, arriving at Chimney Butte the 5th of August. 

Sewall's eyes gleamed at the wildness of the country, but he turned that evening to Roosevelt with a troubled look.  "You won't make any money raising cattle in this country," he remarked. 

"Bill, you don't know anything about it!" retorted Theodore. 

Bill laughed.  "Well, I guess that's just about right, too," he said. 

The two backwoodsmen remained at Chimney Butte two days, and then, accompanied by one of Roosevelt's cowboys, rode north forty miles to Elkhorn, the new ranch, driving a hundred head of cattle before them; now following the dry river-bed, now branching off inland, crossing the great plateaus and winding through the ravines of the broken country.  There was already a shack on the new ranch, a primitive affair with a dirt roof, which Sewall and Dow now made their headquarters.  Now and again Roosevelt visited them. 

The cattle which were intended to be the nucleus of the Elkhorn herd were young grade short-horns of Eastern origin, less wild than the long-horn Texas steers, but liable, on new ground, to stray off and be lost in the innumerable coulees round about.  So each night they "bedded" them down on the level bottom, one or the other of them riding slowly and quietly round and round the herd, heading off and turning back into it all that tried to stray.  This was not altogether a simple business, for there was danger of stampede in making the slightest unusual noise.  Now and then they would call to the cattle softly as they rode, or sing to them until the steers had all lain down, close together.  And even then, at times, one of the men would stay on guard, riding round and round the herd, calling and singing. 

There was something magical in the strange sound of it in the clear air Under the stars. 

It was while Roosevelt was working with his men accustoming the cattle to their new surroundings that peremptory word came from the Marquis de Mores, sharply asserting that Roosevelt was building on his range and had better desist.  The Marquis had established himself in the Bad Lands with the idea of making the whole region in a sense his own feudal domain, and, as one of the cow-punchers expressed it, "he could not get over the idea that he had to run everything in sight. " He built a great slaughterhouse in Medora and had a dream that he could successfully rival the great packing industry of Chicago.  But he was not a man of experience or judgment and he had no knowledge of men.  His commands did not greatly agitate Roosevelt. 

He answered that there was nothing of the Marquis's on the land but dead sheep and he didn't think that they would hold it. 

The Marquis sent no reply.  This was curious, for Maunders, one of his chief assistants, and the ranch crew under him, were known as a "rough crowd" who had been involved in more than one shooting-affair.  Possibly the Marquis assumed that the young gentleman with the spectacles had decided to back down. 

"You'd better be on the lookout," Roosevelt remarked to Sewall and Dow.  "There's just a chance there may be trouble. "

"I cal'late we can look out for ourselves," answered Bill, with a gleam in his eye. 

The middle of August, Roosevelt set forth with Merrifield, and a queer Ulysses named Norman Lebo as teamster-a weather-beaten old plainsman "with an inexhaustible fund of misinformation"  on a hunting trip which he had long promised himself.  They traveled for weeks across the prairie, following the old Fort Keogh trail, to the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming.  There they left their wagon, proceeding with a pack-train into the heart of the high peaks. 

They followed an old Indian trail, ascending through the dense pine woods where the trunks rose like straight columns, close together, and up the sides of rocky gorges, driving the pack-train with endless difficulty over fallen timber and along ticklish ridges.  They pitched their camp at last beside a beautiful, clear mountain brook that ran through a glade ringed by slender pines; and from there hunted among the peaks round about.  The weather was clear and cold, with thin ice covering the dark waters of the mountain tarns, and now and again slight snowfalls that made the forest gleam and glisten in the moonlight like fairyland.  Through the frosty air they could hear the vibrant, musical note of the bull elk far off, calling to the cows or challenging one another. 

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

There was elk-hunting such as Roosevelt had never known before; but it was not primarily elk that he was after.  He wanted to get a bear; but the bears, it seemed, eluded him, and he had been in the mountains a week before Merrifield rode into camp one morning, shouting that at last he had come across grizzly-bear signs in a tangle of ravines some ten miles away. 

By noon next day they were at their new camp in the heart of the bear region.  That afternoon, on a crag overlooking a wild ravine, Roosevelt shot a great bull elk.  Returning with Merrifield for the carcass next day, they found that a grizzly had been feeding on it.  They crouched in hiding for the bear's return.  But night fell, owls began to hoot dismally from the tops of the tall trees, and a lynx wailed from the depths of the woods, but the bear did not come. 

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

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

There, riot ten steps off, was the great bear, slowly rising from his bed among the young spruces.  He had heard the hunters and reared himself on his haunches.  Seeing them, he dropped again on all-fours, and the shaggy hair on his neck and shoulders bristled as he turned toward them. 

Roosevelt aimed fairly between the small, glittering, evil eyes, and fired.  The huge beast half rose, fell over, and was dead. 

The hunters broke camp the following morning and in single file moved down through the woods and across the canons to the edge of the great tableland, then slowly down the steep slope to its foot, where they found the canvas-topped wagon.  Next day they set out on the three-hundred-mile journey home to Chimney Butte.  

It was long and weary traveling across the desolate reaches of burnt prairie over which, day after day, Roosevelt galloped now in this direction, now in that, on the lookout for game, while the heavy wagon lumbered on.  At last, after many days, they reached a strange and romantic region of isolated buttes of sandstone, cut by the weather into most curious caves and columns, battlements, spires, and flying buttresses.  It was a beautiful and fantastic place and they made their camp there. 

The moon was full and the night clear, and the flame of the camp-fire leaped up the cliffs, so that the weird, carved shapes seemed alive.  Outside the circle of the fire the cliffs shone like silver under the moon, throwing grotesque shadows. 

It was like a country seen in a dream. 

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

The third day dawned clear and crisp, and once more the wagon lumbered on.  That night they camped by a dry creek on a broad bottom covered with thick parched grass.  To make sure that their camp-fire would not set the surrounding grass alight, they burned a circle clear and stood about with branches to keep the flames in check.  Suddenly there came a puff of wind.  The fire roared like a wild beast as it started up.  They fought it furiously but it seemed that they were fighting it in vain.  In five minutes, they told themselves, the whole bottom would be a blazing furnace.  Their hair and eyebrows were singed dry before they subdued the flames at last. 

They were three days from home, three days of crawling voyaging beside the fagged team.  The country was monotonous, moreover, without much game.  After supper that night Roosevelt concluded to press ahead of the wagon, with Merrifield, and ride the full distance before dawn. 

At nine o'clock they saddled the tough little ponies they had ridden all day and rode off out of the circle of firelight.  The September air was cool in their faces as they loped steadily mile after mile under the moonlight, and then under the starlight, over the rolling plains that stretched on all sides.  Now and again bands of antelope swept silently away from before their path, and once a drove of long-horn Texas cattle charged by, the ground rumbling beneath their tread.  The first glow of the sunrise was flaming up behind the level bluffs of Chimney Butte as they galloped down into the valley of the Little Missouri. 

Sewall and Dow meanwhile had been having a rather exciting time.  One day, on a round-up in the neighborhood, Dow overheard one of the Marquis de Mores' men remarking to another that " there'd be some dead men round that Elkhorn shack some day. "

Dow told Sewall. 

"Well," drawled Bill, "if there's going to be any dead men hereabouts I cal'late we can fix it so it won't be us A day or two after, one of the Marquis's men rode to where they were cutting timber.  "There's a vigilance committee around, I hear," he remarked, casually.  "They got a young fellow recently what was on foot, and, reckoning that he was probably getting ready to steal a horse, they strung him up so his feet just touched the ground.  They wanted him to confess.  But he said he didn't have nothing he could confess.  It was too bad about him.  You haven't seen the vigilance committee about, have you? I hear they're considering making a call on you folks. "

The men from Maine said to each other that the thing began to look '' smoky. '' They carried rifles and revolvers after that when they went to cut timber. 

The vigilantes did not come, but six of the Marquis's men did, heralding their arrival with revolver-shots in the air.  It was Sunday morning.  Sewall was alone.  Unostentatiously his hand fell on his gun and remained there.  He invited them into the shack to have some beans. 

"The boss of the gang had been drinking," said Sewall, telling Roosevelt about it later.  '' He had a good appetite, so I got all the beans into him I could, to make him feel good.  I guess he finally decided I wasn't worth shooting. "

Sewall and Dow greeted Roosevelt on his arrival with a full account of their adventures. 

"People are breathing out slaughter against us folk," said Sewall. 

"What for?" asked Roosevelt, sharply. 

"It's that Frenchman's outfit," said Sewall. 

"I thought there'd be trouble there. " in  "Maunders he's the boss trouble-maker of the Frenchman's outfit he says he wants to shoot you," said Sewall. 

This was decidedly interesting.  Maunders was known as a good shot, and had, in fact, recently killed a man. 

Roosevelt went out to the corral, roped and saddled his horse, and rode to Maunders's shack.  Maunders was there.  Roosevelt rode up to him. 

"I hear that you want to shoot me," he said, quietly.  '' I came over to find out why. ''

After a brief conversation it appeared that Maunders did not, after all, want to shoot him.  He had been "misquoted. " They parted, excellent friends. 

Roosevelt went East again late in September to do what he could in an uninspiring campaign to help elect  Blaine President.  But Cleveland was victorious and Roosevelt, resigning himself to a fact that no effort of his could now alter, returned to Dakota. 

Sewall and Dow were at Elkhorn, busy cutting the timber for the new house, which was to stand under the shade of a row of cottonwood-trees overlooking the broad, shallow bed of the Little Missouri.  They were both mighty men with the ax.  Roosevelt himself was no amateur, but he could not compete with the stalwart backwoodsmen. 

One evening he overheard one of the cowboys ask Dow what the day's cut had been.  "Well, Bill cut down fifty-three," answered Dow, "I cut forty-nine, and the boss," he added, dryly, not realizing that Roosevelt was within hearing "the boss he beavered down seventeen Roosevelt remembered a tree-stump he had seen recently, gnawed down by a beaver, and grinned. 

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

Roosevelt was now living mainly at Chimney Butte, writing somewhat and reading much, sharing fully meanwhile in the hardship of the winter work.  It was not always pleasant to be out of doors, but the herds had to be carefully watched and every day (which began with breakfast at five three hours before sunrise) he or one of his men was in the saddle from dawn to dark, riding about among them and turning back any herd that seemed to be straggling toward the open plains.  In the open country there was always a strong wind that never failed to freeze ears or fingers or toes, in spite of flannels and furs.  The cattle suffered much, standing huddled in the bushes in the ravines; and some of the young stock died of exposure. 

During the severest weather Ferris and Merrifield, whom Roosevelt had sent out to buy ponies, returned with fifty which had to be broken then and there.  Day after day in the icy cold Roosevelt labored with his men in the corral over the refractory animals, making up in patience what he lacked in physical address.  He did not find this business altogether pleasant, and the presence of a gallery of grinning cowboys, gathered '' to see whether the high-headed bay could buck the boss off," did not make it any easier to preserve a look of smiling indifference while the panic-stricken pony went through his gyrations. 

The high-headed bay did buck the boss off; and he wasn't the only one who did.  But it is worth remarking that in the end it was not the boss, but the pony, who was "broken. "

Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-six years old, no longer asthmatic now, but as hardy in body as he was fearless in spirit, became in scarcely more than a year from that early September morning when he had first descended from the train at Medora, an important factor in the life of the Bad Lands. 

He had established himself firmly in the respect and affection of those law-abiding ranchmen whose respect and affection were worth having; and it was not long before they began to look upon him as a leader.  He had, from the first, felt the need of government in this strip of wild country which offered so secure a refuge to evil-doers and had done what he could to secure the organization of the county in which Medora was situated.  But the time was not yet ripe for this step and Roosevelt decided, therefore, to endeavor to bring the honest ranchmen together in an association for mutual protection.  Early in December, 1884, he issued the following appeal in the columns of the Bad Lands Cowboy: notice Of a Proposed Meeting of the Stockmen
of the Little Missouri. 

At the request of Messrs.  Huidekooper, Wadsworth, Eaton, Truscott, the N.  P.  R.  C.  Co. , and of several other stockmen having ranges on the Little Missouri and Beaver Creek, a meeting of the stockmen of this river and its tributaries is hereby called to be held in Roberts Hall, Medora, at u A. M. , Friday, December 19th.  The object is to bring together the cattle-men of this vicinity in order that they may discuss certain questions of immediate and pressing interest to them, and in order that they may take measures to provide for a more efficient organization of the stockmen of this vicinity in the future, both so that they may be able to act more as a unit than has been the case in the past, and so that they can combine to protect their interests against unjust interference from the outside. 
All gentlemen interested in stock-raising, both those on the Littb Missouri and those on the neighboring waters, are urgently requested to attend. 
(By request)
THEODORE ROOSEVELT. 

On December 19th a dozen or more ranchmen met, in response to this letter, in a dance-hall over Medora's leading and most wicked saloon, and formed the Little Missouri River Stockmen's Association, for mutual protection, as the by-laws ran "against frauds and swindles, and to prevent the stealing, taking, and driving away of horned cattle, sheep, horses, and other stock from the rightful owners thereof. "

Roosevelt was presiding officer at the meeting and was elected chairman of the association, though he was one of the youngest men present.  The whole matter attracted little attention; but it meant the beginning of the end of lawlessness in the Bad Lands.