Chapter 15
(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.)

When did we long for the sheltered gloom
Of the older game with its cautious odds?
Gloried we always in sun and room,
Spending our strength like the younger gods.
By the wild, sweet ardor that ran in us,
By the pain that tested the man in us,
By the shadowy springs and the glaring sand,
You were our true-love, young, young land.

Badger Clark

Spring came to the Bad Lands in fits and numerous false starts, first the "chinook," uncovering the butte-tops between dawn and dusk, then the rushing of many waters, the flooding of low bottom-lands, the agony of a world of gumbo, and, after a dozen boreal setbacks, the awakening of green things and the return of a temperature fit for human beings to live in.   Snow buntings came in March, flocking familiarly round the cow-shed at the Maltese Cross, now chittering on the ridge-pole, now hovering in the air with quivering wings, warbling their loud, merry song.   Before the snow was off the ground, the grouse cocks could be heard uttering their hollow booming.   At the break of morning, their deep, resonant calls came from far and near through the clear air like the vibrant sound of some wind instrument.   Now and again, at dawn or in the early evening, Roosevelt would stop and listen for many minutes to the weird, strange music, or steal upon the cocks where they were gathered holding their dancing rings, and watch them posturing and strutting about as they paced through their minuet.

The opening of the ground—and it was occasionally not unlike the opening of a trap-door—brought work in plenty to Roosevelt and his friends at the Maltese Cross.   The glades about the water-holes where the cattle congregated became bogs that seemed to have no bottom.   Cattle sank in them and perished unless a saving rope was thrown in time about their horns and a gasping pony pulled them clear.   The ponies themselves became mired and had to be rescued.   It was a period of wallowing for everything on four feet or on two.   The mud stuck like plaster.   [Footnote 11: "I never was bothered by gumbo in the Bad Lands.   There wasn't a sufficient proportion of clay in the soil.   But out on the prairie, oh, my martyred Aunt Jane's black and white striped cat!"—A.   T.   Packard.   End Footnote]

Travel of every sort was hazardous during early spring, for no one ever knew when the ground would open and engulf him.   Ten thousand wash-outs, a dozen feet deep or thirty, ran "bank-high" with swirling, merciless waters, and the Little Missouri, which was a shallow trickle in August, was a torrent in April.   There were no bridges.   If you wanted to get to the other side, you swam your horse across, hoping for the best.

At Medora it was customary, when the Little Missouri was high, to ride to the western side on the narrow footpath between the tracks on the trestle; and after the Marquis built a dam nearby for the purpose of securing ice of the necessary thickness for use in his refrigerating plant, a venturesome spirit now and then guided his horse across its slippery surface.   It happened one day early in April that Fisher was at the river's edge, with a number of men, collecting certain tools and lumber which had been used in the cutting and hauling of the ice, when Roosevelt, riding Manitou, drew up, with the evident intention of making his way over the river on the dam.   The dam, however, had disappeared.   The ice had broken up, far up the river, and large cakes were floating past, accumulating at the bend below the town and raising the water level well above the top of the Marquis's dam.   The river was what Joe Ferris had a way of calling "swimmin' deep for a giraffe."

"Where does the dam start?" asked Roosevelt.

"You surely won't try to cross on the dam," exclaimed Fisher, "when you can go and cross on the trestle the way the others do?"

"If Manitou gets his feet on that dam," Roosevelt replied, "he'll keep them there and we can make it finely."

"Well, it's more than likely," said Fisher, "that there's not much of the dam left."

"It doesn't matter, anyway.   Manitou's a good swimmer and we're going across."

Fisher, with grave misgivings, indicated where the dam began.   Roosevelt turned his horse into the river; Manitou did not hesitate.

Fisher shouted, hoping to attract the attention of some cowboy on the farther bank who might stand ready with a rope to rescue the venturesome rider.   There was no response.

On the steps of the store, however, which he had inherited from the unstable Johnny Nelson, Joe Ferris was watching the amazing performance.   He saw a rider coming from the direction of the Maltese Cross, and it seemed to him that the rider looked like Roosevelt.   Anxiously he watched him pick his way out on the submerged dam.

Manitou, meanwhile, was living up to his reputation.   Fearlessly, yet with infinite caution, he kept his course along the unseen path.   Suddenly the watchers on the east bank and the west saw horse and rider disappear, swallowed up by the brown waters.   An instant later they came in sight again.   Roosevelt flung himself from his horse "on the downstream side," and with one hand on the horn of the saddle fended off the larger blocks of ice from before his faithful horse.

Fisher said to himself that if Manitou drifted even a little with the stream, Roosevelt would never get ashore.   The next landing was a mile down the river, and that might be blocked by the ice.

The horse struck bottom at the extreme lower edge of the ford and struggled up the bank.   Roosevelt had not even lost his glasses.   He laughed and waved his hand to Fisher, mounted and rode to Joe's store.   Having just risked his life in the wildest sort of adventure, it was entirely characteristic of him that he should exercise the caution of putting on a pair of dry socks.

Joe received him with mingled devotion and amazement.   "Landsake, man!" he cried, "weren't you afraid?"

"I was riding Manitou," Roosevelt responded quietly.   "Just," exclaimed Joe later, "as though Manitou was a steam engine." He bought a new pair of socks, put them on, and proceeded on his journey.

Fisher saw him shortly after and accused him of being reckless.

"I suppose it might be considered reckless," Roosevelt admitted.   "But it was lots of fun."

Roosevelt spent his time alternately at the two ranches, writing somewhat and correcting the proofs of his new book, but spending most of his time in the saddle.   The headquarters of his cattle business was at the Maltese Cross where Sylvane Ferris and Merrifield were in command.   Elkhorn was, for the time being, merely a refuge and a hunting-lodge where Sewall and Dow "ran" a few hundred cattle under the general direction of the more experienced men of the other "outfit."

At the Maltese Cross there were now a half-dozen hands, Sylvane and "our friend with the beaver-slide," as Merrifield, who was bald, was known; George Myers, warm-hearted and honest as the day; Jack Reuter, known as "Wannigan," with his stupendous memory and his Teutonic appetite; and at intervals "old man" Thompson who was a teamster, and a huge being named Hank Bennett.   Roosevelt liked them all immensely.   They possessed to an extraordinary degree the qualities of manhood which he deemed fundamental,—courage, integrity, hardiness, self-reliance,—combining with those qualities a warmth, a humor, and a humanness that opened his understanding to many things.   He had come in contact before with men whose opportunities in life had been less than his, and who in the eyes of the world belonged to that great mass of "common people" of whom Lincoln said that "the Lord surely loved them since he made so many of them." But he had never lived with them, day in, day out, slept with them, eaten out of the same dish with them.   The men of the cattle country, he found, as daily companions, wore well.

They called him "Mr. Roosevelt," not "Theodore" nor "Teddy." For, though he was comrade and friend to all, he was also the "boss," and they showed him the respect his position and his instinctive leadership merited.   More than once a man who attempted to be unduly familiar with Roosevelt found himself swiftly and effectively squelched.   He himself entered with enthusiasm into the work of administration.   He regarded the ranch as a most promising business venture, and felt assured that, with ordinary luck, he should make his livelihood from it.   On every side he received support for this assurance.   The oldest cattleman as well as the youngest joined in the chorus that there never had been such a country for turning cattle into dollars.   In the Territorial Governor's Report for 1885, Packard is quoted, waxing lyric about it:

Bunch and buffalo-grass cover almost every inch of the ground.   The raw sides of buttes are the only places where splendid grazing cannot be found.   On many of the buttes, however, the grass grows clear to the summit, the slopes being the favorite pasture-lands of the cattle.   Generally no hay need be cut, as the grass cures standing, and keeps the cattle in as good condition all winter as if they were stall-fed.   The only reason for putting up hay is to avoid a scarcity of feed in case of heavy snow.   This very seldom happens, however, as very little snow falls in the Bad Lands.   A curious fact with cattle is that the ones that have been here a year or two, and know how to rustle, will turn away from a stack of hay, paw away the snow from the grass, and feed on that exclusively.   Even in the dead of winter a meadow has a very perceptible tinge of green.

A realist might have remarked that very little snow fell in the Bad Lands mainly because the wind would not let it.   The Cowboy editor's exultant optimism has an aspect of terrible irony in the light of the tragedy that was even then building itself out of the over-confidence of a hundred enthusiasts.

Bill Sewall and Will Dow alone remained skeptical.

Perhaps we are wrong (Sewall wrote his brother), but we think it is too cold and barren for a good cattle country.   Nobody has made anything at it yet.   All expect to.   Guess it's very much like going into the woods in fall.   All are happy, but the drive is not in yet.   When it does get in, am afraid there will be a shortness somewhere.   The men that furnish the money are not many of them here themselves and the fellows that run the business and are supposed to know, all look for a very prosperous future, consider the troubles and discouragements, losses, etc., temporary.   They are like us—getting good and sure pay.

Roosevelt recognized the possibility of great losses; but he would have been less than human if in that youthful atmosphere of gorgeous expectation he had not seen the possibilities of failure less vividly than the possibilities of success.   Sylvane and Merrifield were confident that they were about to make their everlasting fortunes; George Myers invested every cent of his savings in cattle, "throwing them in," as the phrase went, with the herd of the Maltese Cross.   In their first year the Maltese Cross "outfit" had branded well over a hundred calves; the losses, in what had been a severe winter, had been slight.   It was a season of bright hopes.   Late in April, Roosevelt sent Merrifield to Minnesota with Sewall and Dow and a check for twelve thousand five hundred dollars to purchase as many more head of stock as the money would buy.

Roosevelt, meanwhile, was proving himself as capable as a ranchman as he was courageous as an investor.   The men who worked with him noted with satisfaction that he learned quickly and worked hard; that he was naturally progressive; that he cared little for money, and yet was thrifty; that, although conferring in all matters affecting the stock with Sylvane and Merrifield, and deferring to their experience even at times against his own judgment, he was very much the leader.   He was never "bossy," they noted, but he was insistent on discipline, on regularity of habits, on prompt obedience, on absolute integrity.

He was riding over the range one day with one of his ablest cowpunchers, when they came upon a "maverick," a two-year-old steer, which had never been branded.   They lassoed him promptly and built a fire to heat the branding-irons.

It was the rule of the cattlemen that a "maverick" belonged to the ranchman on whose range it was found.   This particular steer, therefore, belonged, not to Roosevelt, but to Gregor Lang, who "claimed" the land over which Roosevelt and his cowboy were riding.   The Texan started to apply the red-hot iron.

"It is Lang's brand—a thistle," said Roosevelt.

"That's all right, boss," answered the cowboy.   "I know my business."

"Hold on!" Roosevelt exclaimed an instant later, "you are putting on my brand."

"That's all right.   I always put on the boss's brand."

"Drop that iron," said Roosevelt quietly, "and go to the ranch and get your time.   I don't need you any longer."

The cowpuncher was amazed.   "Say, what have I done? Didn't I put on your brand?"

"A man who will steal for me will steal from me.   You're fired."

The man rode away.   A day or so later the story was all over the Bad Lands.

Roosevelt was scarcely more tolerant of ineffectiveness than he was of dishonesty.   When a man was sent to do a piece of work, he was expected to do it promptly and thoroughly.   He brooked no slack work and he had no ear for what were known as "hard-luck stories." He gave his orders, knowing why he gave them; and expected results.   If, on the other hand, a man "did his turn" without complaint or default, Roosevelt showed himself eager and prompt to reward him.

His companions saw these things, and other things.   They saw that "the boss" was quick-tempered and impatient of restraint; but they saw also that in times of stress the hot-headed boy seemed instantly to grow into a cautious and level-headed man, dependable in hardship and cool in the face of danger.   He was, as one of them put it, "courageous without recklessness, firm without being stubborn, resolute without being obstinate.   There was no element of the spectacular in his make-up, but an honest naturalness that won him friends instantly."

"Roosevelt out in Dakota was full of life and spirit, always pleasant," said Bill Sewall in after years.   "He was hot-tempered and quick, but he kept his temper in good control.   As a rule, when he had anything to say, he'd spit it out.   His temper would show itself in the first flash in some exclamation.   In connection with Roosevelt I always think of that verse in the Bible, 'He that ruleth his spirit is greater than he that taketh a city.'"

 "He struck me like a sort of rough-an'-ready, all-around frontiersman," said "Dutch Wannigan." "Wasn't a bit stuck up—just the same as one of the rest of us."

Joe Ferris, who frankly adored Roosevelt, declared to a crowd at his store one day, "I wouldn't be surprised if Roosevelt would be President."

His hearers scoffed at him.   "That fool Joe Ferris," remarked one of them at his own ranch that night, "says that Roosevelt will be President some day."

But Joe held his ground.   [Footnote 12: Joe Ferris was made aware of this scornful reference to his judgment through a cowboy, Carl Hollenberg, who overheard it, and sixteen years later came into Joe's store one September day shouting, "That fool, Joe Ferris, says that Roosevelt will be President some day!" The point was that Roosevelt had that week succeeded McKinley in the White House.   .   End Footnote]

The neighbors up and down the river were warm-hearted and friendly.   Mrs. Roberts had decided that she wanted a home of her own, and had persuaded her husband to build her a cabin some three miles north of the Maltese Cross, where a long green slope met a huge semi-circle of gray buttes.   The cabin was primitive, being built of logs stuck, stockade-fashion, in the ground, and the roof was only dirt until Mrs. Roberts planted sunflowers there and made it a garden; but for Mrs. Roberts, with her flock of babies, it was "home," and for many a cowboy, passing the time of day with the genial Irishwoman, it was the nearest approach to "home" that he knew from one year's end to another.

Shortly after Mrs. Roberts had moved to her new house, Roosevelt and Merrifield paid her a call.   Mrs. Roberts, who had the only milch cow in the Bad Lands, had been churning, and offered Roosevelt a glass of buttermilk.   He drank it with an appreciation worthy of a rare occasion.   But as he rode off again, he turned to Merrifield with his teeth set.

"Heavens, Merrifield!" he exclaimed, "don't you ever do that again!"

Merrifield was amazed.   "Do what?"

"Put me in a position where I have to drink buttermilk.   I loathe the stuff!"

"But why did you drink it?"

"She brought it out!" he exclaimed, "And it would have hurt her feelings if I hadn't.   But look out! I don't want to have to do it again!"

Mrs. Roberts spared him thenceforward, and there was nothing, therefore, to spoil for Roosevelt the merriment of the Irishwoman's talk and the stimulus of her determination and courage.   There were frequent occasions consequently when "the boys from the Maltese Cross" foregathered in the Roberts cabin, and other occasions, notably Sundays (when Sylvane and Merrifield and George Myers had picked up partners in Medora) when they all called for "Lady Roberts" as chaperon and rode up the valley together.   They used to take peculiar delight in descending upon Mrs. Cummins and making her miserable.

It was not difficult to make that poor lady unhappy.   She had a fixed notion of what life should be for people who were "nice" and "refined," and her days were a succession of regrets at the shortcomings of her neighbors.   She was in many ways an admirable woman, but she seemed incapable of extending the conception of gentility which a little Pennsylvania town had given her, and she never caught a gleam of the real meaning of the life of which she was a part.   She wanted everything in the Bad Lands exactly as she had had it at home.   "Well," as Mrs. Roberts subsequently remarked, "she had one time of it, I'm telling you, in those old rough days."

Mrs. Cummins was not the only neighbor who furnished amusement during those spring days of 1885 to the boys at the Maltese Cross.   The Eatons' "dude ranch" had developed in a totally unexpected direction.   From being a headquarters for Easterners who wanted to hunt in a wild country, it had become a kind of refuge to which wealthy and distracted parents sent such of their offspring as were over-addicted to strong drink.   Why any parent should send a son to the Bad Lands with the idea of putting him out of reach of temptation is beyond comprehension.   The Eatons did their part nobly and withheld intoxicating drinks from their guests, but Bill Williams and the dozen or more other saloon-keepers in Medora were under no compulsion to follow their example.   The "dudes" regularly came "back from town" with all they could carry without and within; and the cowboys round about swore solemnly that you couldn't put your hand in the crotch of any tree within a hundred yards of the Eatons' ranch-house without coming upon a bottle concealed by a dude being cured of "the drink."

The neighbors who were most remote from Roosevelt in point of space continued to be closest in point of intimacy.   The Langs were now well established and Roosevelt missed no opportunity to visit with them for an hour or a day, thinking nothing apparently of the eighty-mile ride there and back in comparison with the prospect of an evening in good company.   The Langs were, in fact, excellent company.   They knew books and they knew also the graces of cultivated society.   To visit with them was to live for an hour or two in the quietude of an Old World home, with all the Old World's refinements and the added tang of bizarre surroundings; and even to one who was exuberantly glad to be a cowboy, this had its moments of comfort after weeks of the rough frontier existence.   Cultivated Englishmen were constantly appearing at the Langs', sent over by their fathers, for reasons sometimes mysterious, to stay for a week or a year.   Some of them proved very bad cowboys, but all of them were delightful conversationalists.   Their efforts to enter into the life of the Bad Lands were not always successful, and Hell-Roaring Bill Jones on one notable occasion, when the son of a Scotch baronet undertook to criticize him for misconduct, expressed his opinion of the scions of British aristocracy that drifted into Medora, in terms that hovered and poised and struck like birds of prey.   Lincoln Lang, who was present, described Bill Jones's discourse as "outside the pale of the worst I have ever heard uttered by human mouth," which meant something in that particular place.   But Bill Jones was an Irishman, and he was not naturally tolerant of idiosyncrasies of speech and manner.   Roosevelt, on the whole, liked the "younger sons," and they in turn regarded him with a kind of awe.   He was of their own class, and yet there was something in him which stretched beyond the barriers which confined them, into regions where they were lost and bewildered, but he was completely at home.

They all had delightful evenings together at Yule, with charades and punning contests, and music on the piano which Lincoln Lang had brought out through the gumbo against all the protests of nature.   Mrs. Lang was an admirable cook and a liberal and hospitable hostess, which was an added reason for riding eighty miles.

To the Scotch family, exiled far up the Little Missouri, Roosevelt's visits were notable events.   "We enjoyed having him," said Lincoln Lang long afterward, "more than anything else in the world."

 To Gregor Lang, Roosevelt's visits brought an opportunity for an argument with an opponent worthy of his steel.   The Scotchman's alert intelligence pined sometimes, in those intellectually desolate wastes, for exercise in the keen give-and-take of debate.   The average cowboy was not noted for his conversational powers, and Gregor Lang clutched avidly at every possibility of talk.   It was said of him that he loved a good argument so much that it did not always make much difference to him which side of the argument he took.   On one occasion he was spending the night at the Eatons', when the father of the four "Eaton boys" was visiting his sons.   "Old man" Eaton was a Republican; Lang was a Democrat.   They began arguing at supper, and they argued all night long.   To Eaton, his Republicanism was a religion (as it was to many in those middle eighties), and he wrestled with the error in Lang's soul as a saint wrestles with a devil.   As the day dawned, Gregor Lang gave an exclamation of satisfaction.   "It's been a fine talk we've had, Mistur-r Eaton," he cried.   "Now suppose you tak' my side and I tak' yours?" What Eaton said thereupon has not been recorded; but Gregor Lang went home happy.

With all his love for forensics as such, Lang had solid convictions.   They were a Democrat's, and in consequence many of them were not Roosevelt's.   Roosevelt attacked them with energy and Lang defended them with skill.   Roosevelt, who loved rocking-chairs, had a way of rocking all over the room in his excitement.   The debates were long, but always friendly; and neither party ever admitted defeat.   The best that Gregor Lang would say was, "Well, Mr. Roosevelt, when you ar-re Pr-resident of the United States, you may r-run the gover-rnment the way you mind to." He did admit in the bosom of his family, however, that Roosevelt made "the best ar-rgument for the other side" he had ever heard.

Lang's love of an argument, which to unfriendly ears might have sounded like contentiousness, did not serve to make the excellent Scotchman popular with his neighbors.   He had a habit, moreover, of saying exactly what he thought, regardless of whom he might hit.   He was not politic at all.   He had, in fact, come to America and to Dakota too late in life altogether to adapt a mind, steeped in the manners and customs of the Old World, to the new conditions of a country in almost every way alien to his own.   He was dogmatic in his theories of popular government and a little stubborn in his conviction that there was nothing which the uneducated range-rider of the Bad Lands could teach a thinking man like him.   But his courage was fine.   Against the protests of his Southern neighbors, he insisted on treating a negro cowboy in his outfit as on complete equality with his white employees; and bore the storm of criticism with equanimity.   Such a spirit was bound to appeal to Roosevelt.

At the Maltese Cross there was a steady stream of callers.   One of them, a hawk-eyed, hawk-nosed cowpuncher named "Nitch" Kendley, who was one of the first settlers in the region, arrived one day when Roosevelt was alone.

"Come on in," said Roosevelt, "and we'll have some dinner.   I can't bake biscuits, but I can cook meat.   If you can make the biscuits, go ahead, and I will see what I can do for the rest of the dinner."

So "Nitch" made the biscuits and put them in the oven, and Roosevelt cut what was left of a saddle of venison and put it in a pan to fry.   Then the two cooks went outdoors, for the cabin was small, and the weather was hot.

Roosevelt began to talk, whereupon "Nitch," who had ideas of his own, began to talk also with a fluency which was not customary, for he was naturally a taciturn man.   They both forgot the dinner.   "Nitch" never knew how long they talked.

They were brought back to the world of facts by a smell of burning.   The cabin was filled with smoke, and "you could not," as "Nitch" subsequently remarked, "have told your wife from your mother-in-law three feet away." On investigation it proved that "Nitch's" biscuits and Roosevelt's meat were burnt to cinders.

Merrifield and Sylvane were out after deer, and Roosevelt and his companion waited all afternoon in vain for the two men to return.   At last, toward evening, Roosevelt made some coffee, which, as "Nitch" remarked, "took the rough spots off the biscuits."

"If we'd talked less," reflected "Nitch," "we'd have had more dinner."

Roosevelt laughed.   He did not seem to mind the loss of a meal.   "Nitch" was quite positive that he was well repaid.   They went on talking as before.