CHAPTER 8 Hermann Hagedorn’s: The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt.

SOME FOLKS FROM MAINE TURN A NEW HOUSE INTO A  NEW HOME

'"THE ranch-house was completed in the late A spring.  It was a spacious place for that region, and, in its plain fashion, comfortable and homelike.  It was, above all, "fit for women folks," which was more than could be said of the shack with a dirt roof at Chimney Butte.  Wilmot Dow was sent East in July "to fetch them out. "

They came in early August, Will Dow with his newly wedded bride, escorting Bill Sewall's wife and three-year-old daughter.  They were back-woodswomen, self-reliant, fearless, high-hearted, true mates to their stalwart men.  Before Roosevelt knew what was happening they had turned the new house into 'a home. 

And now for them all began a season of deep and quiet contentment that was to remain in the memories of all of them as a kind of idyl.  It was a life of elemental toil, hardship, and danger, and of strong, elemental pleasures rest after labor, food after hunger, warmth and shelter after bitter cold.  In that life there was no room for distinctions of social position or wealth.  They respected one another and cared for one another because and only because each knew that the others were brave and loyal and steadfast. 

Life on the ranch proved a more joyous thing than ever, after the women had taken charge.  They demanded certain necessities at once.  They demanded chickens; they demanded at least one cow.  No one had thought of a cow.  So Roosevelt and Sewall and Dow between them roped one on the range and threw her, and sat on her, and milked her upside down, which was not altogether satisfactory, but was, for the time being, the best thing they could do.  There was now a new charm in shooting game, with women at home to cook it.  And Mrs.  Sewall baked bread that was not at all like the bread Bill baked.  Soon she was even baking cake, which was an unheard-of luxury in the Bad Lands.  Then, after a while, the buffalo berries and wild plums began to disappear from the bushes round about and appear on the table as jam. 

"However big you build the house, it won't be big enough for two.  women," pessimists had remarked.  But their forebodings were not realized.  At Elkhorn no cross word was heard.  They were, taken alltogether, a very happy family.  Roosevelt was "the boss," in the sense that, since he footed the bills, power of final decision was his; but only in that sense.  He saddled his own horse; now and then he washed his own clothes; he fed the pigs; and once, on a rainy day, he blacked the Sunday boots of every man, woman, and child in the place.  He not encouraged to repeat that performance.  The folks from Maine made it quite clear that if the boots needed blacking at all, which was doubtful, they thought some one else ought to do the blacking not at all because it seemed to them improper that Roosevelt should black anybody's boots, but because he did it so badly.  The paste came off on everything it touched.  The women "mothered" him, setting his belongings to rights at stated intervals, for he was not conspicuous for orderliness.  He, in turn, treated the women with the friendliness and respect he showed to the women of his own family.  And the little Sewall girl was never short of toys. 

Elkhorn Ranch was a joyous place those days.  Cowboys, hearing of it, came from a distance for a touch of home life and the luxury of hearing a woman's voice. 

The summer days were for Roosevelt, as well as for his men, full of vigorous toil, beginning before the stars had fully faded out of the sky at dawn and ending in heavy slumber before the last of the sunset had been swallowed by the night.  He was in the saddle much of the time, working among the cattle, salvaging steers mired in the numerous bog-holes and quicksands, driving in calves overlooked in the spring branding, breaking ponies, hunting.  Meanwhile he was writing a series of magazine articles dealing with politics, and was preparing for the press a remarkably entertaining volume of hunting experiences called Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, which he had written the previous winter.  Much of the time he was away from the ranch on the various round-ups, either alone or with as many of his men as could be spared from the daily chores of the ranch.  He enjoyed enormously the excitement and rough but hearty comradeship of these round-ups, which brought him in touch with ranchmen and cowboys from hundreds of miles around.  The work was hard and incessant and not without danger from man and beast.  The cattle never harmed him, but the ponies did.  He was a good, but not extraordinary, rider, and even extraordinary riders were at times sent over the heads of their ponies.  During the round-up that summer Roosevelt was bucked off more than once.  On one occasion the point of his shoulder was broken.  There were no surgeons in that round-up.  The shoulder had to mend by itself as well as it could while its owner went about his work as usual. 

As for the men, with them Roosevelt had little trouble.  There were rough characters among them and his spectacles were always a source of deep suspicion; but the diplomacy of "do your job and keep your mouth shut ". kept him, as a rule, out of difficulties.  Arriving at a strange round-up camp with his drove of eight or ten ponies always late in the day, if possible, so that the horses would be ready to rest he reported to the captain of the round-up, and then to whatever wagon-boss the captain assigned him, or, in his absence, to the cook, a privileged, outspoken character always.  Having received in polite silence the outburst of profanity which was that functionary's habitual form of friendly greeting, he deposited his roll of bedding a little outside the ring, where it would be in no one's way, ate supper in silence, turned a deaf ear to certain derogatory remarks about "four eyes" which were sure to be made by some one or other, and went to sleep.  Now and then it happened that his quiet demeanor was misunderstood. 

There was one man at one of the round-ups, a Texan, who insisted on "picking on" Roosevelt as a "dude. " Roosevelt laughed.  But the man continued, in season and out of season, to make him the butt of his gibes. 

It occurred to the object of all this attention that the Texan was evidently under the impression that the "dude" was also a coward.  Roosevelt decided that, for the sake of general harmony, that impression had better be corrected at once. 

One evening, when the man was being particularly offensive, Roosevelt strode up to him. 

"You're talking like an ass!" he said, sharply, and drew his gun.  "Put up or shut up! Fight now, or be friends!"

The Texan stared, his shoulder dropped a little, and he shifted his feet.  "I didn't mean any harm," he said.  "Make it friends. "

They shook hands, and a little later the Texan joined the Elkhorn "outfit. "

The day's work on the round-up commenced at three in the morning with a yell from the cook, and lasted until sundown or after, and not infrequently the whole night through.  All day Roosevelt remained in the saddle.  The morning and it was generally eight hours long was given to "riding the long circle" in couples, driving into the wagon camp whatever cattle had been found in the hills.  The afternoon was spent in '' cutting out'' of the herd thus gathered the cattle belonging to the various brands.  This was difficult and dangerous work.  Representatives of each brand rode in succession into the midst of the herd, working the animal they were after gently to the edge, then with a sudden dash taking it off at a run.  The calves would follow their mothers and would then be branded with the mark of the owner of the cow. 

At night there was occasionally guard duty, a two hours' slow patrol about the restless herd.  It was monotonous work, and in stormy weather no joy at all; but on clear, warm nights Roosevelt, sleepy as he was from the day's exertion, was not sorry to lope through the lonely silence under the stars, listening to the breathing of the cattle, alert every instant to meet whatever emergency might arise from out that dark, moving mass, 

One night there was a heavy storm.  Fearing a stampede, the night herders sent a call of "all hands out. " Roosevelt leaped on the pony he always kept picketed near him.  Suddenly there was a terrific peal of thunder.  The lightning struck almost into the herd itself, and with heads and tails high the panic-stricken animals plunged off into the blackness.  For an instant Roosevelt could distinguish nothing but the dark forms of the cattle rushing by him like a spring freshet on both sides.  The herd split, half turning off to the left, the rest thundering on.  He galloped at top speed, hoping to reach the leaders and turn them. 

He heard a wild splashing ahead.  One instant he was aware that the cattle in front of him and beside him were disappearing; the next, he himself was plunging over a cut bank into the Little Missouri.  He bent far back.  His horse almost fell, recovered himself, plunged forward, and, struggling through water and quicksand, made the other side. 

For a second he saw another cowboy beside him.  The man disappeared in the darkness and the deluge, and Roosevelt galloped off through a grove of cotton-woods after the diminished herd.  The ground was rough and full of pitfalls.  Twice his horse turned a somersault, throwing him.  At last the cattle came to a halt and after one more half-hearted stampede, as the white dawn came, turned reluctantly back toward camp. 

Roosevelt gathered in stray groups of cattle as he went, driving them before him.  After a while he came upon a cowboy carrying his saddle on his head.  It was the man he had seen for a flash during the storm.  His horse had run into a tree and been killed.  He himself had escaped by a miracle. 

The men in the camp were just starting on the long circle when Roosevelt returned.  Only half the herd had been brought back, they said.  He snatched a hurried breakfast, leaped on a fresh horse, and again was away into the hills.  It was ten hours before he was back at the wagon camp once more for a hasty meal and a fresh horse. 

When he went to sleep that night he had been in the saddle forty hours.  The cow-punchers decided that "the man with four eyes" "had the stuff" in him. 

And so, quietly "doing his job" from day to day, in no way playing on his position or his wealth, but accepting the discipline of the camp and the orders of the captain of the round-up as every other selfrespecting cowboy accepted them, Theodore Roosevelt gradually made his place in the rough world of the Bad Lands.  He was not a crack rider or a fancy roper, but the captain of the round-up learned by and by that if a cow persisted in lying down in a thick patch of bulberry-bushes, refusing to come out, Roosevelt's persistence could be relied on to outlast the cow's.  At the end of the day, as well as the beginning, he could be counted on to do the unattractive task that fell in his way.  That, the captain decided, was of considerably greater importance for the success of a round-up than any handiness with a lariat. 

Roosevelt's leadership of the forces of order, meanwhile, had brought him into rather strained relations with the romantic and dazzling Marquis de Mores.  For events over which he exercised only partial control had forced the Marquis into a position where he was virtually the protector of the unruly element.  A few months previous to Roosevelt's advent in the Bad Lands the Marquis had been drawn into a local feud, and in consequence of the machinations of Jake Maunders, the Marquis's wily foreman, who wanted to get the Marquis into his power, had been made a party to an ambuscade in which a hunter named Riley Luffrey was killed.  Maunders and his friends thereafter enjoyed immunity, and carried on a flourishing trade in stolen horses without hindrance.  The Marquis was indicted for murder, but the case did not come to trial until September, 1885, two and a half years after the killing.  One of the murdered man's friends, who had been instrumental in bringing the case to trial, was a German known as "Dutch Wannigan," who worked for Roosevelt.  He had previously deposited certain savings with Joe Ferris, who had become storekeeper and was the local banker.  On his way to the trial he withdrew it.  The Marquis heard of the transaction and jumped to the conclusion that Roosevelt was backing the prosecution. 

He wrote Roosevelt angrily.  He had supposed, he said, that there was nothing but friendly feeling between himself and Roosevelt, but, since it was otherwise, there was always "a way of settling such differences between gentlemen. "

Roosevelt read the letter aloud.  "That's a threat," he said.  "He's trying to bully me.  He can't bully me.  I'm going to write him a letter myself. "

He wrote the letter and brought it to Sewall for inspection.  He had no unfriendly feeling for the Marquis, he wrote, "but, as the closing sentence of your letter implies a threat, I feel it my duty to say that I am ready at all times and all places to answer for my actions. "

"Now," said Roosevelt, "I expect he'll challenge me.  I don't believe in fighting duels.  My friends don't any of them believe in it.  They would be very much opposed to anything of the kind, but if he challenges me I shall have the choice of weapons, which will be quite a different matter than if I should challenge him and he were able to choose the weapons, which would probably be swords, which he can use and I can't.  If he does challenge me, I shall tell him that I choose Winchesters at twelve paces, shoot and advance, until one or the other gets enough. " He paused.  "Then we'll see. "

Sewall grunted.  "You'll never have to fight any duel of that kind with that man," he said.  "He won't challenge you.  He'll find some way out of it. "

Roosevelt was not at all sure of this.  The Marquis was a bully, but he was no coward. 

A few days later the answer came.  Roosevelt brought it over to Sewall. 

"You were right, Bill, about the Marquis," he said. 

It seemed that the Marquis, though a game man, recognized that now and then discretion was the better part of valor.  So long as he did not publicly lose caste or incur ridicule by backing down, he did not intend, it appeared, to run the risk of losing his life without an adequate object. 

Sewall read the letter.  The Marquis declared that Roosevelt had completely misconstrued the meaning of his message.  The idea he had meant to convey was that there was always a way of settling affairs of that sort between gentlemen without trouble.  And wouldn't Mr.  Roosevelt do him the honor of dining with him, and so forth and so on? 
 
And so it came about that there was profound peace thereafter between the herdsmen of Lot and the herdsmen of Abraham. 

Roosevelt found the life of the Bad Lands wonderfully satisfying, and he loved the plain, great-hearted people.  But he could not easily forget what he had lost.  It was in his hours of deep loneliness and depression that Bill Sewall would take him out into the open prairie and, to use his own expression, "go for him bow-legged. " He talked to him as though he were a boy. 

'' I know how you feel,'' he would say to him, '' and I sympathize with you.  But you'll feel different by and by and then you won't want to stay here.  If you can't think of anything else to do, start some reform.  You'd be a good reformer.  You're made of the right kind of stuff.  You're always thinking of making things better instead of worse. "

And at that Roosevelt would grin, in spite of the blues. 

Roosevelt did not then and there "start a reform. " He merely entered more deeply than ever into the life on the ranch, living in the saddle all day, and then, at dusk, grimy and hot, sinking into a rocker on the porch and reading Keats or Swinburne or just rocking and looking sleepily out across the river at the weird buttes, "while the green and brown of the hilltops changed to amber and purple and then to shadowy gray as the somber darkness deepened. " The leaves of the cottonwood-trees before the house were never still, and often the cooing of mourning-doves would come down to him from some high bough.  He heard the skylark and the thrush in the thicket near by, and in the distance the clanging cries of the water-fowl.  He knew the note of every bird, and they were like friends calling to him. 

Roosevelt went East just before Christmas, returning early in March.  It was like coming home from a foreign country to see the Little Missouri once more, and the strangely fascinating desolation of the Bad Lands, and the home ranch, and the "folks " from Maine and the loyal friends of Chimney, Butte.  He had good friends in the East, but there was a warmth and a stalwart sincerity in the comradeship of these men and women which he had scarcely found elsewhere.  Through the cold evenings of that early spring he loved to lie stretched at full length on the elk-hides and wolf-skins in front of the great fireplace, while the blazing logs crackled and roared and Sewall and Dow and the "women folks" recounted the happenings of the season of his absence.  There were great stories to tell.  There was the tale of Hell-roaring Bill Jones and the lunatic, for instance, and how Bill Jones, who was the sheriff, used to let the lunatic escape once a day just to see if Snyder, the huge Dutchman who was his deputy, could catch him; and how Bixby, the town joker, tried to plague the lunatic, and how Bill Jones "learned him" by letting the lunatic out at him one night, and how the lunatic nearly bit off Bixby's ear.  There were other stories that were not quite so humorous stories of cattle frozen in the drifts, of "line-riding" from outlying camp to camp in the bitter, biting cold, stories of a year's profits  gone  glimmering in a week of wild weather. 

Spring came early that year, and about the middle of March a great ice-jam which had formed at a bend far up the river came slowly past Elkhorn, roaring and crunching and piling the ice high on both banks, grinding against the cottonwoods in front of the porch and threatening to sweep away the house.  But the force of the freshet carried the jam onward, leaving an open channel at last between solid masses of ice.  The water ran through it like a mill-race. 

Roosevelt had brought out a clinker-built boat to ferry him and his men to the opposite shore when the river was high.  One afternoon they crossed the raging channel to bring home the carcasses of a number of deer they had shot for meat and hung up in a thicket of dwarf cedars.  They found that the carcasses had been completely devoured, evidently by mountain-lions.  They followed the tracks into a tangle of rocky hills, but the oncoming night obscured the footprints and they returned home, resolved to renew the pursuit at dawn.  They tied the boat securely to a tree high up on the bank.  The next morning the boat was gone. 

It was Bill Sewall who made the discovery.  He was not a man easily excited and he took a certain quiet satisfaction in sitting down to breakfast and saying nothing while Roosevelt expatiated on what they were going to do to the mountain-lions.   "I guess we won't go to-day," said Sewall, at length, munching the last of his breakfast. 

"Why not?" Roosevelt demanded. 

"Some one has gone off with the boat. "

Roosevelt leaped indignantly to his feet to see for himself.  Sure enough, the rope had been cut. 

They had little doubt who the thieves were.  They had heard that there were three suspicious characters up the river who had good reasons for wanting to ''skip the country. '' The leader was a man named Finnegan, who had been heard to boast that he was "from Bitter Creek, where the farther up you went the worse people got,'' and he lived '' at the fountain-head. " The vigilantes had been looking his way for some months.  Travel by horse or foot was impossible.  The Elkhorn boat had evidently appeared to Finnegan and company in the nature of a godsend. 

Roosevelt ran to saddle his horse.  But Sewall restrained him, pointing out that if the country was impassable for the horses of the thieves it was no less impassable for the pursuers.  He declared that he and Dow could build a flat-bottomed boat in three days.  Roosevelt told him to go ahead.  With the saddle-band his forty or fifty cow-ponies on the farther side of the river, he could not afford to lose the boat.  As a deputy sheriff, moreover, he had certain responsibilities.  In an unsettled community he knew it was fatal to submit tamely to injury. 

They left a cowboy named Rowe as guard over the ranch and "the women folk," and, with their unwieldy but watertight craft laden with two week?' provisions of flour, coffee, and bacon, started, one old morning toward the end of March, to drift down the river. 

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

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

"We're like to have it in our faces all day," remarked Will Dow, cheerfully, paddling at the bow.  "We can't, unless it's the crookedest wind in Dakota," answered Sewall, who was steering. 

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

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

The thermometer dropped to zero, but there was firewood in plenty, and they found prairie-fowl and deer for their evening meals.  Late the third day, rounding a bend, they saw their boat moored against the bank.  Out of the bushes, a little way back, the smoke of a camp-fire curled up through the frosty air.  They flung off their heavy coats.  Sewall was in the stern, steering the boat toward shore.  Dow was at Roosevelt's side in the bow.  Roosevelt saw the grim, eager look in their eyes, and his own eyes gleamed.  

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

They peered through the bushes.  Beside a fire in a grove of young cottonwoods in the lee of a cut bank a solitary figure was sitting; his guns were on the ground at his side. 

"Hands up!"

Roosevelt and Dow rushed in on the man, who was not slow to do as he was told.  He was a halfwitted German, a tool of rogues more keen than he, and he readily promised, at the point of a gun, to make no move to warn the others. 

Finnegan and the third man, a half-breed Swede named Bernstein, had gone hunting, believing themselves safe.  Sewall guarded the German while Roosevelt and Dow crouched under the bank and prepared to greet the others. 

They waited an hour or more.  Then, afar off, they heard them coming, and then they saw them, walking leisurely through the long, dry grass, with the sun glinting on the rifles they carried over their shoulders, now forty yards away, now thirty, now twenty .  .  . 

"Hands up!"

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

"You thief, put up your hands!" 

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

They camped that night where they were.  Sewall and Dow set to work chopping firewood, while Roosevelt kept watch over the sullen prisoners.  To secure them effectually the obvious resource was to tie them hand and foot.  But the air was icy; before morning hands and feet would have been frozen off.  Roosevelt searched them, taking away everything that might have done service as a weapon.  He corded his harvest in some bedding well out of reach of the thieves.  Then a further precaution occurred to him. 

"Take off your boots!" he ordered. 

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

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

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

Their provisions ran short.  They went after game, but there was none to be seen, no beast or bird, in that barren region.  Soon they were reduced to unleavened bread made with muddy water.  The days were utterly tedious, and were made only slightly more bearable by a perusal of The History of the James Brothers, which the thieves quite properly carried among their belongings.  And the thieves had to be watched every minute.  And the wind blew and chilled them all to the bone. 

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

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

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

Sewall disagreed.  "The flour '11 last a day or two more," he said, "and it's something to know that if we're punishing ourselves we're punishing the thieves also. "

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

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

It was a wiry, rebellious beast. 

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

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

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

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

"What I can't make out," said the ranchman from the Kildeers, bewildered, "is why you make all this fuss instead of hanging 'em offhand?"

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