MerrifieldandSylvane Ferris.
MerrifieldandSylvane Ferris.
The Maltese Cross Ranch-house As It Was When Roosevelt Lived In It.
The Maltese Cross Ranch-house As It Was When Roosevelt Lived In It.
The cattle, Roosevelt found, were looking sleekand well-fed. He had lost about twenty-five head during the winter, partly from the cold, partly from the attacks of wolves. There were, he discovered, a hundred and fifty fine calves.
A new cowpuncher had been added to the Maltese Cross outfit, he found, since the preceding autumn. It was George Myers, whom he had met on the ride down the river from Lang's. Roosevelt had purchased five hundred dollars' worth of barbed wire and George was digging post-holes. He was a boyish and attractive individual whom thewanderlusthad driven westward from his home in Wisconsin. His honesty fairly leaped at you out of his direct, clear eyes.
Roosevelt spent two days contemplating his new possessions. At the end of the second he had reached a decision, and he announced it promptly. He told Sylvane and Merrifield to get ready to ride to Lang's with him the next day for the purpose of drawing up a new contract. He had determined to make cattle-raising his "regular business" and intended, at once (in riotous defiance of Uncle James!), to put a thousand head more on the range.
The Langs were situated seven miles nearer civilization than they had been on Roosevelt's previous visit, and were living in a dugout built against a square elevation that looked like a low fortress or the "barrow" of some dead Viking chief. They were building a ranch-house in anticipation of the coming of Mrs. Lang and two children, a girl of eighteen or nineteen and a son a half-dozenyears younger than Lincoln. The dugout was already overcrowded with three or four carpenters who were at work on the house, and Gregor Lang suggested that they ride five miles up the river to a cabin of his on what was known as "Sagebrush Bottom," where he and Lincoln had spent the winter. They had moved out of the shack on the Little Cannonball for two reasons. One was that a large cattle outfit from New Mexico, named the Berry-Boyce Cattle Company, had started a ranch, known as the "Three Seven," not half a mile down the river; the other was that Gregor Lang was by disposition not one who was able to learn from the experience of others. For it happened that, a few weeks after Roosevelt's departure in September, a skunk had invaded the cabin and made itself comfortable under one of the bunks. Lincoln and the Highlander were in favor of diplomacy in dealing with the invader. But Gregor Lang reached for a pitchfork. They pleaded with him, without effect. The skunk retaliated in his own fashion; and shortly after, they moved forever out of the cabin on the Little Cannonball.
Roosevelt, who recognized Gregor Lang's limitations, recognized also that the Scotchman was a good business man. He set him to work next morning drawing up a new contract. It called for further investment on his part of twenty-six thousand dollars to cover the purchase of a thousand head or more of cattle. Merrifield and Sylvane signed it and returned promptly to the Maltese Cross.
Roosevelt remained behind. "Lincoln," he said, "there are two things I want to do. I want to get an antelope, and I want to get a buckskin suit."
Lincoln thought that he could help him to both. Some twenty miles to the east lived a woman named Mrs. Maddox who had acquired some fame in the region by the vigorous way in which she had handled the old reprobate who was her husband; and by her skill in making buckskin shirts. She was a dead shot, and it was said of her that even "Calamity Jane," Deadwood's "first lady," was forced "to yield the palm to Mrs. Maddox when it came to the use of a vocabulary which adequately searched every nook and cranny of a man's life from birth to ultimate damnation."
They found her in her desolate, little mud-roofed hut on Sand Creek, a mile south of the old Keogh trail. She was living alone, having recently dismissed her husband in summary fashion. It seems that he was a worthless devil, who, under the stimulus of some whiskey he had obtained from an outfit of Missouri "bull-whackers" who were driving freight to Deadwood, had picked a quarrel with his wife and attempted to beat her. She knocked him down with a stove-lid lifter and the "bull-whackers" bore him off, leaving the lady in full possession of the ranch. She now had a man named Crow Joe working for her, a slab-sided, shifty-eyed ne'er-do-well, who was suspected of stealing horses on occasion.
She measured Roosevelt for his suit[5]and gave him and Lincoln a dinner that they remembered. A vigorous personality spoke out of her every action. Roosevelt regarded her with mingled amusement and awe.
They found their antelope on the way home. They found two antelopes, in fact, but Roosevelt, who had been as cool as an Indian an instant before, was so elated when he saw the first drop to his rifle that he was totally incapacitated from aiming at the second when that animal, evidently bewildered, began to run in circles scarcely twenty-five yards away. He had dropped his gun with a whoop, waving his arms over his head and crying, "I got him! I got him!"
"Shoot the other one!" Lincoln called.
Roosevelt burst into a laugh. "I can't," he called back. "Not to save my life."
They met at the side of the antelope. "This would not have seemed nearly so good if somebody had not been here to see it," Roosevelt exclaimed. "Do you know what I am going to do? I am going to make you a present of my shot-gun."
Lincoln, being only sixteen, did not know exactly what to make of the generosity of this jubilant young man. It struck him that Roosevelt, in the excitement of the moment, was giving away a thing of great value and might regret it on sobersecond thought. Lincoln replied that he could not accept the gift. It struck him that Roosevelt looked hurt for an instant.
They dressed the antelope together, Roosevelt taking the position of humble pupil. The next day he returned alone to the Maltese Cross.
He now entered with vigor into the life of a Dakota ranchman. The country was at its best in the clear June weather. The landscape in which the ranch-house was set had none of the forbidding desolateness of sharp bluff and scarred ravine that characterized the region surrounding Little Missouri. The door of the cabin looked out on a wide, semi-circular clearing covered with sagebrush, bordered on the east by a ring of buttes and grassy slopes, restful in their gray and green for eyes to gaze upon. Westward, not a quarter of a mile from the house, behind a hedge of cottonwoods, the river swung in a long circle at the foot of steep buttes crested with scoria. At the ends of the valley were glades of cottonwoods with grassy floors where deer hid among the buckbrush by day, or at dusk fed silently or, at the sound of a step, bounded, erect and beautiful, off into deeper shelter. In an almost impenetrable tangle of bullberry bushes, whose hither edge was barely one hundred yards from the ranch-house, two fawns spent their days. They were extraordinarily tame, and in the evenings Roosevelt could frequently see them from the door as they came out to feed. Walking on the flat after sunset, or riding home when night had fallen, hewould run across them when it was too dark to make out anything but their flaunting white tails as they cantered out of the way.
Roosevelt, who never did things by halves, took up his new activities as though they constituted the goal of a lifetime spent in a search for the ultimate good. Ranch-life was altogether novel to him; at no point had his work or his play touched any phase of it. He had ridden to hounds and was a fair but by no means a "fancy" rider. His experience in the Meadowbrook Hunt, however, had scarcely prepared him adequately for combat with the four-legged children of Satan that "mewed their mighty youth" on the wild ranges of the Bad Lands.
"I have a perfect dread of bucking," he confided to an unseen public in a book which he began that summer, "and if I can help it I never get on a confirmed bucker." He could not always help it. Sylvane, who could ride anything in the Bad Lands, was wedded to the idea that any animal which by main force had been saddled and ridden was a "broke horse," and when Roosevelt would protest mildly concerning this or that particularly vicious animal, Sylvane would look at him in a grieved and altogether captivating way, saying, "Why, I call that a plumb gentle horse."
"When Sylvane says that a horse is 'plumb gentle,'" remarked Roosevelt, on one occasion, "then you want to look out."
Sylvane and Merrifield were to start for the Eastto purchase the additional cattle on the 18th of June, and Roosevelt had determined to set forth on the same day for a solitary camping-trip on the prairie. Into the three or four intervening days he crowded all the experiences they would hold.
He managed to persuade Sylvane, somewhat against that individual's personal judgment (for Sylvane was suspicious of "dudes"), that he actually intended "to carry his own pack." Sylvane found, to his surprise, that the "dude" learnt quickly. He showed Roosevelt once how to saddle his horse, and thereafter Roosevelt saddled his horses himself. Sylvane was relieved in spirit, and began to look with new eyes on the "four-eyed tenderfoot" who was entrusting a fortune to his care.
There was no general round-up in the valley of the Little Missouri that spring of 1884, for the cattle had not had the opportunity to wander to any great distance, having been on the range, most of them, only a few months. The different "outfits," however, held their own round-ups, at each of which a few hundred cattle might be gathered from the immediate vicinity, the calves "cut out" and roped and branded, and turned loose again to wander undisturbed until the "beef round-up" in the fall.
At each of these round-ups, which might take place on any of a dozen bottoms up or down the river, the Maltese Cross "outfit" had to be represented, and Sylvane and Merrifield and GeorgeMyers were kept busy picking up their "strays." Roosevelt rode with them, as "boss" and at the same time as apprentice. It gave him an opportunity to get acquainted with his own men and with the cowpunchers of half a dozen other "outfits." He found the work stirring and the men singularly human and attractive. They were free and reckless spirits, who did not much care, it seemed, whether they lived or died; profane youngsters, who treated him with respect in spite of his appearance because they respected the men with whom he had associated himself. They came from all parts of the Union and spoke a language all their own.
"We'll throw over an' camp to-night at the mouth o' Knutson Creek," might run the round-up captain's orders. "Nighthawk'll be corralin' the cavvy in the mornin' 'fore the white crow squeals, so we kin be cuttin' the day-herd on the bed-groun'. We'll make a side-cut o' the mavericks an' auction 'em off pronto soon's we git through."
All that was ordinary conversation. When an occasion arose which seemed to demand a special effort, the talk around the "chuck-wagon" was so riddled with slang from all corners of the earth, so full of startling imagery, that a stranger might stare, bewildered, unable to extract a particle of meaning. And through it blazed such a continual shower of oaths, that were themselves sparks of satanic poetry, that, in the phrase of one contemplative cowpuncher, "absodarnnlutely had to be parted in the middle to hold an extra one."
It was to ears attuned to this rich and racy music that Roosevelt came with the soft accents of his Harvard English. The cowboys bore up, showing the tenderfoot the frigid courtesy they kept for "dudes" who happened to be in company, which made it impolite or inexpedient to attempt "to make the sucker dance."
It happened, however, that Roosevelt broke the camel's back. Some cows which had been rounded up with their calves made a sudden bolt out of the herd. Roosevelt attempted to head them back, but the wily cattle eluded him.
"Hasten forward quickly there!" Roosevelt shouted to one of his men.
The bounds of formal courtesy could not withstand that. There was a roar of delight from the cowpunchers, and, instantly, the phrase became a part of the vocabulary of the Bad Lands. That day, and on many days thereafter when "Get a git on yuh!" grew stale and "Head off them cattle!" seemed done to death, he heard a cowpuncher shout, in a piping voice, "Hasten forward quickly there!"
Roosevelt, in fact, was in those first days considered somewhat of a joke. Beside Gregor Lang, forty miles to the south, he was the only man in the Bad Lands who wore glasses. Lang's glasses, moreover, were small and oval; Roosevelt's were large and round, making him, in the opinion of the cowpunchers, look very much like a curiously nervous and emphatic owl. They called him "Four Eyes,"and spoke without too much respect, of "Roosenfelder."
Merrifield rode to town with him one day and stopped at the Marquis's company store to see a man named Fisher, who had succeeded Edgar Haupt as local superintendent of the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, asking Fisher as he was departing whether he did not want to meet Roosevelt. Fisher had heard of the "four-eyed dude from New York" and heard something of his political reforming. He went outdoors with Merrifield, distinctly curious.
Roosevelt was on horseback chatting with a group of cowboys, and the impression he made on Fisher was not such as to remove the natural prejudice of youth against "reformers" of any sort. What Fisher saw was "a slim, anæmic-looking young fellow dressed in the exaggerated style which new-comers on the frontier affected, and which was considered indisputable evidence of the rank tenderfoot." If any further proof of Roosevelt's status was needed, the great round glasses supplied it. Fisher made up his mind that he knew all he needed to know about the new owner of the Maltese Cross.
No doubt he expressed his opinions to Merrifield. The taciturn hunter did not dispute his conclusions, but a day or two after he dropped in on Fisher again and said, "Get your horse and we'll take the young fellow over the old Sully Trail and try out his nerve. We'll let on that we're going for a little hunt."
Fisher agreed with glee in his heart. He knew the Sully Trail. It ran mainly along the sides of precipitous buttes, southeast of Medora, and, being old and little used, had almost lost the little semblance it might originally have had of a path where four-footed creatures might pick their way with reasonable security. A recent rain had made the clay as slippery as asphalt in a drizzle.
It occurred to Fisher that it was as truly wicked a trail as he had ever seen. Merrifield led the way; Fisher maneuvered for last place and secured it. In the most perilous places there was always something about his saddle which needed adjustment, and he took care not to remount until the danger was behind them. Roosevelt did not dismount for any reason. He followed where Merrifield led, without comment.
They came at last to a grassy slope that dipped at an angle of forty-five degrees to a dry creek-bed. "There goes a deer!" shouted Merrifield suddenly and started down the slope as fast as his horse could go. Roosevelt followed at the same speed. He and Merrifield arrived at the bottom at the identical moment; but with a difference. Roosevelt was still on his horse, but Merrifield and his pony had parted company about a hundred yards above the creek-bed and rolled the rest of the way. Fisher, who was conservative by nature, arrived in due course.
Roosevelt pretended to be greatly annoyed. "Now see what you've done, Merrifield," heexclaimed as that individual, none the worse for his tumble, drew himself to his feet. "That deer is in Montana by this time." Then he burst into laughter.
A suspicion took root in Fisher's mind that Merrifield had intended the hazardous performance as much for Fisher's education as for Roosevelt's. He was quite ready to admit that his first impression had been imperfect. Meanwhile, he wondered whether the joke was on himself or on Merrifield. Certainly it was not on the tenderfoot.
Roosevelt enjoyed it all with the relish of a gourmand at a feast cooked by the gods.
Theodore Roosevelt, the young New York reformer [remarked theBad Lands Cowboy], made us a very pleasant call Monday in full cowboy regalia. New York will certainly lose him for a time at least, as he is perfectly charmed with our free Western life and is now figuring on a trip into the Big Horn country.
In a letter to his sister Anna, written from Medora, the middle of June, we have Roosevelt's own record of his reactions to his first experiences as an actual ranchman. "Bamie" or "Bye," as he affectionately called her, was living in New York. She had taken his motherless little Alice under her protecting wing, and, since the disasters of February, had been half a mother to him also.
Well, I have been having a glorious time here [he writes], and am well hardened now (I have just come in from spending thirteen hours in the saddle). For every day I have been here I have had my hands full. Firstand foremost, the cattle have done well, and I regard the outlook for making the business a success as beingveryhopeful. I shall buy a thousand more cattle and shall make it my regular business. In the autumn I shall bring out Sewall and Dow and put them on a ranch with very few cattle to start with, and in the course of a couple of years give them quite a little herd also.I have never been in better health than on this trip. I am in the saddle all day long either taking part in the round-up of the cattle, or else hunting antelope (I got one the other day; another good head for our famous hall). I am really attached to my two "factors," Ferris and Merrifield, they are very fine men.The country is growing on me, more and more; it has a curious, fantastic beauty of its own; and as I own six or eight horses I have a fresh one every day and ride on a lope all day long. How sound I do sleep at night now! There is not much game, however; the cattlemen have crowded it out and only a few antelope and deer remain. I have shot a few jackrabbits and curlews, with the rifle; and I also killed eight rattlesnakes.To-morrow my two men go East for the cattle; and I will start out alone to try my hand at finding my way over the prairie by myself. I intend to take a two months' trip in the fall, for hunting; and may, as politics look now, stay away over Election day; so I shall return now very soon, probably leaving here in a week.
Well, I have been having a glorious time here [he writes], and am well hardened now (I have just come in from spending thirteen hours in the saddle). For every day I have been here I have had my hands full. Firstand foremost, the cattle have done well, and I regard the outlook for making the business a success as beingveryhopeful. I shall buy a thousand more cattle and shall make it my regular business. In the autumn I shall bring out Sewall and Dow and put them on a ranch with very few cattle to start with, and in the course of a couple of years give them quite a little herd also.
I have never been in better health than on this trip. I am in the saddle all day long either taking part in the round-up of the cattle, or else hunting antelope (I got one the other day; another good head for our famous hall). I am really attached to my two "factors," Ferris and Merrifield, they are very fine men.
The country is growing on me, more and more; it has a curious, fantastic beauty of its own; and as I own six or eight horses I have a fresh one every day and ride on a lope all day long. How sound I do sleep at night now! There is not much game, however; the cattlemen have crowded it out and only a few antelope and deer remain. I have shot a few jackrabbits and curlews, with the rifle; and I also killed eight rattlesnakes.
To-morrow my two men go East for the cattle; and I will start out alone to try my hand at finding my way over the prairie by myself. I intend to take a two months' trip in the fall, for hunting; and may, as politics look now, stay away over Election day; so I shall return now very soon, probably leaving here in a week.
On the following day Ferris and Merrifield started for the East, and Roosevelt set out on his solitary hunting trip, half to test out his own qualities as a frontiersman and half to replenish the larder.
For the last week I have been fulfilling a boyish ambition of mine [he wrote to "Bamie" after his returnto the Maltese Cross]; that is, I have been playing at frontier hunter in good earnest, having been off entirely alone, with my horse and rifle, on the prairie. I wanted to see if I could not do perfectly well without a guide, and I succeeded beyond my expectations. I shot a couple of antelope and a deer—and missed a great many more. I felt as absolutely free as a man could feel; as you know, I do not mind loneliness; and I enjoyed the trip to the utmost. The only disagreeable incident was one day when it rained. Otherwise the weather was lovely, and every night I would lie wrapped up in my blanket looking at the stars till I fell asleep, in the cool air. The country has widely different aspects in different places; one day I could canter hour after hour over the level green grass, or through miles of wild-rose thickets, all in bloom; on the next I would be amidst the savage desolation of the Bad Lands, with their dreary plateaus, fantastically shaped buttes, and deep, winding canyons. I enjoyed the trip greatly, and have never been in better health.
George Myers was holding the fort at the Maltese Cross, building his four-mile fence, keeping an eye on the horses and cattle and acting as general factotum and cook. He was successful in everything except his cooking. Even that was excellent, except for an occasional and unaccountable lapse; but those lapses were dire.
It happened that, on the day of his return to the semi-civilization of the Maltese Cross, Roosevelt intimated to George Myers that baking-powder biscuits would be altogether welcome. George was rather proud of his biscuits and set to work with energy, adding an extra bit of baking powder fromthe can on the shelf beside the stove to be sure that they would be light. The biscuits went into the oven looking as perfect as any biscuits which George had ever created. They came out a rich, emerald green.
Roosevelt and George Myers stared at them, wondering what imp in the oven had worked a diabolical transformation. But investigation proved that there was no imp involved. It was merely that Sylvane or Merrifield, before departing, had casually dumped soda into the baking-powder can.
Evidently Roosevelt thereupon decided that if accidents of that sort were liable to happen to George, he had better take charge of the culinary department himself. George was off on the range the following morning, and Roosevelt, who had stayed home to write letters, filled a kettle with dry rice, poured on what looked like a reasonable amount of water, and set it on the oven to cook. Somewhat to his surprise, the rice began to swell, brimming over on the stove. He dipped out what seemed to him a sufficient quantity, and returned to his work. The smell of burning rice informed him that there was trouble in the wind. The kettle, he found, was brimming over again. He dipped out more rice. All morning long he was dipping out rice. By the time George returned, every bowl in the cabin, including the wash-basin, was filled with half-cooked rice.
Roosevelt handed the control of the kitchen back to George Myers.[Back to Contents]
Once long ago an ocean lapped this hill,And where those vultures sail, ships sailed at will;Queer fishes cruised about without a harbor—I will maintain there's queer fish round here still.
The Bad Lands Rubáiyat
Through the long days of that soft, green June, Roosevelt was making himself at home in his new and strange surroundings. A carpenter, whose name was the same as his trade, built him a bookcase out of scraps of lumber, and on the shelves of it he assembled old friends—Parkman and Irving and Hawthorne and Cooper and Lowell, "Ike Marvel's breezy pages and the quaint, pathetic character-sketches of the Southern writers—Cable, Craddock, Macon, Joel Chandler Harris, and sweet Sherwood Bonner." Wherever he went he carried some book or other about him, solid books as a rule, though he was not averse on occasion to what one cowpuncher, who later became superintendent of education in Medora, and is therefore to be regarded as an authority, reproachfully described as "trash." He consumed the "trash," it seems, after a session of composition, which was laborious to him, and which set him to stalking to and fro over the floor of the cabin and up and down through the sagebrush behind it.
The Ford Of The Little Missouri Near The Maltese Cross.
The Ford Of The Little Missouri Near The Maltese Cross.
He read and wrote in odd minutes, as his body required now and then a respite from the outdooractivities that filled his days; but in that first deep quaffing of the new life, the intervals out of the saddle were brief and given mainly to meals and sleep. As he plunged into books to extract from them whatever facts or philosophy they might hold which he needed to enrich his personality and his usefulness, so he plunged into the life of the Bad Lands seeking to comprehend the emotions and the mental processes, the personalities and the social conditions that made it what it was. With a warm humanity on which the shackles of social prejudice already hung loose, he moved with open eyes and an open heart among the men and women whom the winds of chance had blown together in the valley of the Little Missouri.
They were an interesting and a diverse lot. Closest to the Maltese Cross, in point of situation, were the Eatons, who had established themselves two years previously at an old stage station, five miles south of Little Missouri, on what had been the first mail route between Fort Abraham Lincoln and Fort Keogh. Custer had passed that way on his last, ill-fated expedition, and the ranch bore the name of the Custer Trail in memory of the little army that had camped beside it one night on the way to the Little Big Horn. The two-room shack of cottonwood logs and a dirt roof, which had been the station, was inhabited by calves and chickens who were kept in bounds by the stockade which only a little while before had served to keep the Indians at a distance.
The four Eaton brothers were men of educationand family, who had suffered financial reverses and migrated from Pittsburgh, where they lived, to "make their fortunes," as the phrase went, in the Northwest. A wealthy Pennsylvanian named Huidekoper, a lover of good horses, backed Howard at the Custer Trail and another Easterner named Van Brunt started a second ranch with him, known as the "V-Eye," forty miles down the river at the mouth of Beaver Creek; a third, named "Chris" McGee, who was a somewhat smoky light in the murk of Pennsylvania politics, went into partnership with Charles, at another ranch six miles up Beaver. The Custer Trail was headquarters for them all, and at the same time for an endless procession of Eastern friends who came for the hunting. The Eatons kept open house. Travelers wrote about the hospitality that even strangers were certain to find there, and carried away with them the picture of Howard Eaton, "who sat his horse as though he were a centaur and looked a picturesque and noble figure with his clean-shaven cheeks, heavy drooping moustache, sombrero, blue shirt, and neckerchief with flaming ends." About the time Roosevelt arrived, friends who had availed themselves of the Eaton hospitality until they were in danger of losing their self-respect, had prevailed on the reluctant brothers to make "dude-ranching" a business. "Eaton's dudes" became a notable factor in the Bad Lands. You could raise a laugh about them at Bill Williams's saloon when nothing else could wake a smile.
One of the few women up or down the river was living that June at the Custer Trail. She was Margaret Roberts, the wife of the Eatons' foreman, a jovial, garrulous woman, still under thirty, with hair that curled attractively and had a shimmer of gold in it. She was utterly fearless, and was bringing up numerous children, all girls, with a cool disregard of wild animals and wilder men, which, it was rumored shocked her relatives "back East." She had been brought up in Iowa, but ten horses could not have dragged her back.
Four or five miles above the Maltese Cross lived a woman of a different sort who was greatly agitating the countryside, especially Mrs. Roberts. She had come to the Bad Lands with her husband and daughter since Roosevelt's previous visit, and established a ranch on what was known as "Tepee Bottom." Her husband, whose name, for the purposes of this narrative, shall be Cummins, had been sent to Dakota as ranch manager for a syndicate of Pittsburgh men, why, no one exactly knew, since he was a designer of stoves, and, so far as any one could find out, had never had the remotest experience with cattle. He was an excellent but ineffective little man, religiously inclined, and consequently dubbed "the Deacon." Nobody paid very much attention to him, least of all his wife. That lady had drawn the fire of Mrs. Roberts before she had been in the Bad Lands a week. She was a good woman, but captious, critical, complaining, pretentious. She had in her youth had social aspirationswhich her husband and a little town in Pennsylvania had been unable to gratify. She brought into her life in Dakota these vague, unsatisfied longings, and immediately set to work to remould the manners, customs, and characters of the community a little nearer to her heart's desire. To such an attitude there was, of course, only one reaction possible; and she got it promptly.
Mrs. Roberts, energetic, simple-hearted, vigorous, plain-spoken, was the only woman within a dozen miles, and it was not long before Mrs. Roberts hated Mrs. Cummins as Jeremiah hated Babylon. For Mrs. Cummins was bent on spreading "culture," and Mrs. Roberts was determined that by no seeming acquiescence should it be spread over her.
"Roosevelt was a great visitor," said Howard Eaton in after time. "When he first came out there, he was a quiet sort of a fellow, with not much to say to anybody, but the best kind of a mixer I ever saw."
The Bad Lands no doubt required the ability to mix with all manner of men, for it was all manner of men that congregated there. Roosevelt evaded the saloons but established friendly relations with the men who did not. When he rode to town for his mail or to make purchases at Joe Ferris's new store, he contracted the habit of stopping at the office of theBad Lands Cowboy, where those who loved conversation more than whiskey had a way of foregathering.
It was there that he came to know Hell-Roaring Bill Jones.
Bill Jones was a personage in the Bad Lands. He was, in fact, more than that. He was (like Roosevelt himself) one of those rare beings who attain mythical proportions even in their lifetime and draw about themselves the legendry of their generation. Bill Jones was the type and symbol of the care-free negation of moral standards in the wild little towns of the frontier, and men talked of him with an awe which they scarcely exhibited toward any symbol of virtue and sobriety. He said things and he did things which even a tolerant observer, hardened to the aspect of life's seamy side, might have felt impelled to call depraved, and yet Bill Jones himself was not depraved. He was, like the community in which he lived, "free an' easy." Morality meant no more to him than grammar. He outraged the one as he outraged the other, without malice and without any sense of fundamental difference between himself and those who preferred to do neither.
The air was full of tales of his extraordinary doings, for he was a fighter with pistols and with fists and had an ability as a "butter" which was all his own and which he used with deadly effect. What his history had been was a secret which he illuminated only fitfully. It was rumored that he had been born in Ireland of rather good stock, and in the course of an argument with an uncle of his with whom he lived had knocked the uncle down. Whether hehad killed him the rumors failed to tell, but the fact that Bill Jones had found it necessary "to dust" to America, under an assumed name, suggested several things. Being inclined to violence, he naturally drifted to that part of the country where violence seemed to be least likely to have serious consequences. By a comic paradox, he joined the police force of Bismarck. He casually mentioned the fact one day to Roosevelt, remarking that he had left the force because he "beat the Mayor over the head with his gun one day."
"The Mayor, he didn't mind it," he added, "but the Superintendent of Police guessed I'd better resign."
He was a striking-looking creature, a man who could turn dreams into nightmares, merely by his presence in them. He was rather short of stature, but stocky and powerfully built, with a tremendous chest and long, apelike arms, hung on a giant's shoulders. The neck was a brute's, and the square protruding jaw was in keeping with it. His lips were thin, his nose was hooked like a pirate's, and his keen black eyes gleamed from under the bushy black eyebrows like a grizzly's from a cave. He was not a thing of beauty, but, at the back of his unflinching gaze, humor in some spritely and satanic shape was always disporting itself, and there was, as Lincoln Lang described it, "a certain built-in look of drollery in his face," which made one forget its hardness.
He was feared and, strange to say, he was lovedby the very men who feared him. For he was genial, and he could build a yarn that had the architectural completeness of a turreted castle, created out of smoke by some imaginative minstrel of hell. His language on all occasions was so fresh and startling that men had a way of following him about just to gather up the poppies and the nightshade of his exuberant conversation.
As Will Dow later remarked about him, he was "an awfully good man to have on your side if there was any sassing to be done."
Roosevelt was not one of those who fed on the malodorous stories which had gained for their author the further sobriquet of "Foul-mouthed Bill"; but he rather liked Bill Jones.[6]It happened one day, in theCowboyoffice that June, that the genial reprobate was holding forth in his best vein to an admiring group of cowpunchers.
Roosevelt, who was inclined to be reserved in the company of his new associates, endured the flow of indescribable English as long as he could. Then, suddenly, in a pause, when the approving laughter had subsided, he began slowly to "skin his teeth."
"Bill Jones," he said, looking straight into the saturnine face, and speaking in a low, quiet voice, "I can't tell why in the world I like you, for you're the nastiest-talking man I ever heard."
Bill Jones's hand fell on his "six-shooter." The cowpunchers, knowing their man, expected shooting. But Bill Jones did not shoot. For an instant the silence in the room was absolute. Gradually a sheepish look crept around the enormous and altogether hideous mouth of Bill Jones. "I don't belong to your outfit, Mr. Roosevelt," he said, "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 became friends from that day.
If Roosevelt had tried to avoid the Marquis de Mores on his trips to the Marquis's budding metropolis in those June days, he would scarcely have succeeded. The Marquis was the most vivid feature of the landscape in and about Medora. His personal appearance would have attracted attention in any crowd. The black, curly hair, the upturned moustaches, waxed to needle-points, the heavy eyelids, the cool, arrogant eyes, made an impression which, against that primitive background, was not easily forgotten. His costume, moreover, was extraordinary to the point of the fantastic. It was the Marquis who always seemed to wear the widest sombrero, the loudest neckerchief. He went armed like a battleship. A correspondent of the MandanPioneermet him one afternoon returning from thepursuit of a band of cattle which had stampeded. "He was armed to the teeth," ran his report. "A formidable-looking belt encircled his waist, in which was stuck a murderous-looking knife, a large navy revolver, and two rows of cartridges, and in his hand he carried a repeating rifle."
A man who appeared thus dressed and accoutered would either be a master or a joke in a community like Medora. There were several reasons why he was never a joke. His money had something to do with it, but the real reason was, in the words of a contemporary, that "when it came to a show-down, the Marquis was always there." He completely dominated the life of Medora. His hand was on everything, and everything, it seemed, belonged to him. It was quite like "Puss in Boots." His town was really booming and was crowding its rival on the west bank completely out of the picture. The clatter of hammers on new buildings sounded, in the words of the editor of theCowboy, "like a riveting machine." The slaughter-house had already been expanded. From Chicago came a score or more of butchers, from the range came herds of cattle to be slaughtered. The side-track was filled with empty cars of the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, which, as they were loaded with dressed beef, were coupled on fast east-bound trains. The Marquis, talking to newspaper correspondents, was glowing in his accounts of the blooming of his desert rose. He announced that it already had six hundred inhabitants. Another, calmer witnessestimated fifty. The truth was probably a hundred, including the fly-by-nights. Unquestionably, they made noise enough for six hundred.
The Marquis, pending the completion of his house, was living sumptuously in his private car, somewhat, it was rumored, to the annoyance of his father-in-law, who was said to see no connection between the rough life of a ranchman, in which the Marquis appeared to exult, and the palace on wheels in which he made his abode. But he was never snobbish. He had a friendly word for whoever drifted into his office, next to the company store, and generally "something for the snake-bite," as he called it, that was enough to bring benedictions to the lips of a cowpuncher whose dependence for stimulants was on Bill Williams's "Forty-Mile Red-Eye." To the men who worked for him he was extraordinarily generous, and he was without vindictiveness toward those who, since the killing of Luffsey, had openly or tacitly opposed him. He had a grudge against Gregor Lang,[7]whose aversion to titles and all that went with them had not remained unexpressed during the year that had intervened since that fatal June 26th, but if he held any rancor toward Merrifield or the Ferrises, he did not reveal it. He was learning a great deal incidentally.
Shortly before Roosevelt's arrival from the Chicago convention, the Marquis had stopped at the Maltese Cross one day for a chat with Sylvane. He was dilating on his projects, "spreading himself" on his dreams, but in his glowing vision of the future, he turned, for once, a momentary glance of calm analysis on the past.
"If I had known a year ago what I know now," he said rather sadly, "Riley Luffsey would never have been killed."
It was constantly being said of the Marquis that he was self-willed and incapable of taking advice. The charge was untrue. The difficulty was rather that he sought advice in the wrong quarters and lacked the judgment to weigh the counsel he received against the characters and aims of the men who gave it. He was constantly pouring out the tale of his grandiose plans to Tom and Dick and Abraham, asking for guidance in affairs of business and finance from men whose knowledge of business was limited to frontier barter and whose acquaintance with finance was of an altogether dubious and uneconomic nature. He was possessed, moreover, by the dangerous notion that those who spoke bluntly were, therefore, of necessity opposed to him and not worth regarding, while those who flattered him were his friends whose counsel he could trust.
It was this attitude of mind which encumbered his project for a stage-line to the Black Hills with difficulties from the very start. The project itselfwas feasible. Deadwood could be reached only by stage from Pierre, a matter of three hundred miles. The distance to Medora was a hundred miles shorter. Millions of pounds of freight were accumulating for lack of proper transportation facilities to Deadwood. That hot little mining town, moreover, needed contact with the great transcontinental system, especially in view of the migratory movement, which had begun early in the year, of the miners from Deadwood and Lead to the new gold-fields in theCœur d'Alênesin Idaho.
Bill Williams and Jess Hogue, with the aid of the twenty-eight army mules which they had acquired in ways that invited research, had started a freight-line from Medora to Deadwood, but its service turned out to be spasmodic, depending somewhat on the state of Medora's thirst, on the number of "suckers" in town who had to be fleeced, and on the difficulty under which both Williams and Hogue seemed to suffer of keeping sober when they were released from their obvious duties in the saloon. There appeared to be every reason, therefore, why a stage-line connecting Deadwood with the Northern Pacific, carrying passengers, mail, and freight, and organized with sufficient capital, should succeed.
Dickinson, forty miles east, was wildly agitating for such a line to run from that prosperous little community to the Black Hills. The DickinsonPressand theBad Lands Cowboycompeted in deriding each other's claims touching "the only feasibleroute." TheCowboysaid that the Medora line would be more direct. ThePressagreed, but replied that the country through which it would have to go was impassable even for an Indian on a pony. TheCowboydeclared that "the Dickinson road strikes gumbo from the start"; and thePresswith fine scorn answered, "This causes a smile to percolate our features. From our experience in the Bad Lands we know that after a slight rain a man can carry a whole quarter-section off on his boots, and we don't wear number twelves either." TheCowboyinsisted that the Dickinson route "is at best a poor one and at certain seasons impassable." ThePressscorned to reply to this charge, remarking merely from the heights of its own eight months' seniority, "TheCowboyis young, and like a boy, going through a graveyard at night, is whistling to keep up courage."
There the debate for the moment rested. But Dickinson, which unquestionably had the better route, lacked a Marquis. While thePresswas printing the statements of army experts in support of its claims, de Mores was sending surveyors south to lay out his route. From Sully Creek they led it across the headwaters of the Heart River and the countless affluents of the Grand and the Cannonball, past Slim Buttes and the Cave Hills, across the valleys of the Bellefourche and the Moreau, two hundred and twenty-five miles into the Black Hills and Deadwood. Deadwood gave the Marquis a public reception, hailing him as a benefactor of therace, and the Marquis, flushed and seeing visions, took a flying trip to New York and presented a petition to the directors of the Northern Pacific for a railroad from Medora to the Black Hills.
The dream was perfect, and everybody (except the DickinsonPress) was happy. Nothing remained but to organize the stage company, buy the coaches, the horses and the freight outfits, improve the highway, establish sixteen relay stations, and get started. And there, the real difficulties commenced.
The Marquis, possibly feeling that it was the part of statesmanship to conciliate a rival, forgot apparently all other considerations and asked Bill Williams, the saloon-keeper, to undertake the organization of the stage-line. Williams assiduously disposed of the money which the Marquis put in his hands, but attained no perceptible results. The Marquis turned next to Bill Williams's partner in freighting and faro and asked Jess Hogue to take charge. Hogue, who was versatile and was as willing to cheat a man in one way as in another, consented and for a time neglected the card-tables of Williams's "liquor-parlor" to enter into negotiations for the construction of the line. He was a clever man and had had business experience of a sort, but his interest in the Deadwood stage-line did not reach beyond the immediate opportunity it offered of acquiring a substantial amount of the Marquis's money. He made a trip or two to Bismarck and Deadwood; he looked busy; he promised great things; but nothing happened. The Marquis,considerably poorer in pocket, deposed his second manager as he had deposed the first, and looked about for an honest man.
One day Packard, setting up theCowboy, was amazed to see the Marquis come dashing into his office.
"I want you to put on the stage-line for me," he ejaculated.
Packard looked at him. "But Marquis," he answered, "I never saw a stage or a stage-line. I don't know anything about it."
"It makes no difference," cried the Frenchman. "You will not rob me."
Packard admitted the probability of the last statement. They talked matters over. To Packard, who was not quite twenty-four, the prospect of running a stage-line began to look rather romantic. He set about to find out what stage-lines were made of, and went to Bismarck to study the legal document the Marquis's lawyers had drawn up. It specified, in brief, that A. T. Packard was to be sole owner of the Medora and Black Hills Stage and Forwarding Company when it should have paid for itself from its net earnings, which left nothing to be desired, especially as the total receipts from sales of building lots in Medora and elsewhere were to be considered part of the earnings. It was understood that the Marquis was to secure a mail contract from the Post-Office Department effective with the running of the first stage sometime in June. Packard attached his name to the document, andwaited for the money which the Marquis had agreed to underwrite to set the organization in motion.
Day after day he waited in vain. Weeks passed. In June began an exodus from the Black Hills to theCœur d'Alênesthat soon became a stampede. With an exasperation that he found it difficult to control, Packard heard of the thousands that were taking the roundabout journey by way of Pierre or Miles City. He might, he knew, be running every north-bound coach full from front to hind boot and from thorough-brace to roof-rail; and for once the Marquis might make some money. He pleaded for funds in person and by wire. But the Marquis, for the moment, did not have any funds to give him.
Roosevelt and the Marquis were inevitably thrown together, for they were men whose tastes in many respects were similar. They were both fond of hunting, and fond also of books, and the Marquis, who was rather solitary in his grandeur and possibly a bit lonely, jumped at the opportunity Roosevelt's presence in Medora offered for companionship with his own kind. Roosevelt did not like him. He recognized, no doubt, that if any cleavage should come in the community to which they both belonged, they would, in all probability, not be found on the same side.[Back to Contents]