XXII.

Joseph A. Ferris.

Joe Ferris's Store.

The "boys" took the greatest interest in the wife whom Joe (who was popular in town) had taken to himself out in New Brunswick, and there was real trepidation lest Joe's wife might be the wrongsort. Other men, who had been good fellows and had run with the boys, had married and been weaned from their old companions, bringing out women who did not "fit in," who felt superior to the cowboys and did not take the trouble to hide their feelings. The great test was, whether Joe's wife would or would not like Mrs. Cummins. For Mrs. Cummins, in the minds of the cowpunchers, stood for everything that was reprehensible in the way of snobbery and lack of the human touch. If Mrs. Ferris liked Mrs. Cummins, it was all over; if she properly disliked her, she would do.

Mrs. Cummins called in due course. Merrifield was on the porch of the store when she came and in his excited way carried the news to the boys. As soon as she left by the front steps, Merrifield bounded up by the back. His eyes were gleaming.

"Well, now, Mrs. Ferris," he cried, "how did you like her?"

Mrs. Ferris laughed.

"Well, what did she say?" Merrifield pursued impatiently.

"Why," remarked Mrs. Joe, "for one thing she says I mustn't trust any of you cowboys."

Merrifield burst into a hearty laugh. "That's her!" he cried. "That's her! What else did she say?"

"She told me how I ought to ride, and the kind of horse I ought to get, and—"

"Go on, Mrs. Ferris," cried Merrifield.

"Why, she says I never want to ride any horsethat any of you cowboys give me, for you're all bad, and you haven't any consideration for a woman and you'd as lief see a woman throwed off and killed as not."

Merrifield's eyes sparkled in the attractive way they had when he was in a hilarious mood. "Say, did you ever hear the like of that? You'd think, to hear that woman talk, that we was nothing but murderers. What else did she say?"

"Well," remarked the new bride, "she said a good many things."

"You tell me, Mrs. Ferris," Merrifield urged.

"For one thing she said the cowboys was vulgar and didn't have any manners. And—oh, yes—she said that refined folks who knew the better things of life ought to stick together and not sink to the level of common people."

"Now, Mrs. Ferris," remarked Merrifield indignantly, "ain't that a ree-di-culous woman? Ain't she now?"

Mrs. Ferris laughed until the tears came to her eyes. "I think she is," she admitted.

Merrifield carried the news triumphantly to the "boys," and the new bride's standing was established. She became a sort of "honorary member-once-removed" of the friendly order of cowpunchers, associated with them by a dozen ties of human understanding, yet, by her sex, removed to a special niche apart, where the most irresponsible did not fail, drunk or sober, to do her deference. For her ears language was washed and scrubbed.Men who appeared to have forgotten what shame was, were ashamed to have Mrs. Ferris know how unashamed they could be. Poor old Van Zander, whom every one in Billings County had seen "stewed to the gills," pleaded with Joe not to tell Mrs. Ferris that Joe had seen him drunk.

It became a custom, in anticipation of a "shivaree," to send round word to Mrs. Ferris not to be afraid, the shooting was all in fun.

A woman would have been less than human who had failed to feel at home in the midst of such evidences of warmth and friendly consideration. Joe Ferris's store became more than ever the center of life in Medora, as the wife whom Joe had brought from New Brunswick made his friends her friends and made her home theirs also.

She had been in Medora less than a month when news came from Roosevelt that he was getting ready to start West and would arrive on the Little Missouri sometime about the middle of March. Joe's wife knew how to get along with "boys" who were Joe's kind, but here was a different sort of proposition confronting her. Here was a wealthy, and, in a modest way, a noted, man coming to sleep under her roof and eat at her table. The prospect appalled her. Possibly she had visions, for all that Joe could say, of a sort of male Mrs. Cummins. "I was scairt to death," she admitted later.

Roosevelt arrived on March 18th. His "city get-up" was slightly distracting, for it had a perfection of style that Mrs. Joe was not accustomedto; but his delight at his return to the Bad Lands was so frank and so expressive that her anxiety began to dissolve in her wonder at this vehement and attractive being who treated her like a queen. He jumped in the air, clicking his heels together like a boy let unexpectedly out of school, and at odd moments clapped Joe on the back, crying, "By George! By George!" with the relish of a cannibal reaching into the pot for a second joint.

She tried to treat him like the city man that he looked, but he promptly put a stop to that.

"Just use me like one of the boys, Mrs. Ferris," he said decisively. His words sounded sincere; but, being a shrewd-minded lady, she wondered, nevertheless.

She did not know him when he came down to breakfast next morning. Vanished was the "dude," and in his place stood a typical cowpuncher in shaps and flannel shirt and knotted handkerchief. And his clothes revealed that they had not been worn only indoors.

He gave an exclamation of delight as he entered the dining-room. "A white tablecloth in the Bad Lands! Joe, did you ever expect to see it?"

There was no more ice to break after that.[Back to Contents]

"Listen, gentle stranger, I'll read my pedigree:I'm known on handling tenderfeet and worser men than thee;The lions on the mountains, I've drove them to their lairs;The wild-cats are my playmates, and I've wrestled grizzly bears;"The centipedes have tried and failed to mar my tough old hide,And rattlesnakes have bit me, and crawled away and died.I'm as wild as the wild horse that roams the boundless plains,The moss grows on my teeth and wild blood flows through my veins."I'm wild and woolly and full of fleas,And never been curried below the knees.Now, little stranger, if you'll give me your address,—How would you like to go, by fast mail or express?"

"The centipedes have tried and failed to mar my tough old hide,And rattlesnakes have bit me, and crawled away and died.I'm as wild as the wild horse that roams the boundless plains,The moss grows on my teeth and wild blood flows through my veins.

"I'm wild and woolly and full of fleas,And never been curried below the knees.Now, little stranger, if you'll give me your address,—How would you like to go, by fast mail or express?"

Buckskin Joe

That spring of 1886 Roosevelt had a notable adventure. He arrived at Elkhorn on March 19th.

I got out here all right [he wrote his sister "Bamie" the following day] and was met at the station by my men; I was really heartily glad to see the great, stalwart, bearded fellows again, and they were as honestly pleased to see me. Joe Ferris is married, and his wife made me most comfortable the night I spent in town. Next morning snow covered the ground; we pushed down, in a rough four-in-hand (how our rig would have made the estimable Mrs. Blank open her eyes!) to this ranch which we reached long after sunset, the full moon flooding the landscape with light.

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 the Maltese Cross. He hadgood 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 "womenfolks" recounted the happenings of the season of his absence.

Spring came early that year and about the 20th 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.

There has been an ice gorge right in front of the house [he wrote "Bamie"], the swelling mass of broken fragments having been pushed almost up to our doorstep. The current then broke through the middle, leaving on each side of the stream, for some miles, a bank of huge ice-floes, tumbled over each other in the wildest confusion. No horse could by any chance get across; we men have a boat, and even thus it is most laborious carrying it out to the water; we work like arctic explorers.

Early in the spring, Sewall and Dow had crossed the river to hunt for a few days in the rough hills to the east, and had killed four deer which they had hung in a tree to keep them from the coyotes. Roosevelt determined to go with his men to bring home the deer, but when, after infinite difficulty, they reached the thicket of dwarf cedars wherethe deer had been hung, they found nothing save scattered pieces of their carcasses, and roundabout the deeply marked footprints of a pair of cougars, or "mountain lions." The beasts had evidently been at work for some time and had eaten almost every scrap of flesh. Roosevelt and his men followed their tracks into a tangle of rocky hills, but, before they had come in sight of the quarry, dusk obscured the footprints and they returned home resolved to renew the pursuit at dawn. They tied their boat securely to a tree high up on the bank.

The next day Roosevelt made arrangements with a companion of many hunts, "old man" Tompkins, who was living in the shack which Captain Robins had occupied, to make a determined pursuit of the cougars; but when, the following morning, he was ready to start once more for the farther shore, his 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 held forth concerning the fate which was awaiting 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.

Sewall showed him a red woolen mitten with a leather palm which he had picked up on the ice, and the end of the rope by which the boat had been tied. It had been cut with a sharp knife. "Some one has gone off with the boat," he said.

Roosevelt had no doubt who had stolen the boat, for the thief or thieves could scarcely have come by land without being detected. There was only one other boat on the Little Missouri, and that was a small flat-bottom scow owned by three hard characters who lived in a shack twenty miles above Elkhorn. They were considered suspicious persons, and Roosevelt and his men had shrewdly surmised for some time that they were considering the advisability of "skipping the country" before the vigilantes got after them. On inquiry they found that the shack which the men had occupied was deserted.

The leader of the three was a stocky, ill-looking individual named Finnegan, with fiery red hair which fell to his shoulders, gaining for him the nickname "Redhead" Finnegan; a brick-red complexion, and an evil reputation. He was a surly, quarrelsome, unkempt creature, and when he came into a saloon with his stumbling gait (as he frequently did), self-respecting cowboys had a way of leaving him in full possession of the field, not because they feared him, but because they did not care to be seen in his presence. He boasted that he was "from Bitter Creek, where the farther up you went the worse people got," and he lived "at the fountain head." He had blown into Medora early in March and had promptly gone to Bill Williams's saloon and filled up on Bill Williams's peculiarly wicked brand of "conversation juice."

"Well, it laid him out all right enough," remarkedLincoln Lang, telling about it in after years. "I can testify to that, since I was right there and saw the whole thing. Johnny Goodall, who was some practical joker at that time, went into the bar and saw Finnegan lying on the floor. He got some help and moved him to the billiard table. Then Goodall sent to the barber shop for a hair clipper, and proceeded to operate in the following manner: first he clipped off one side of Finnegan's beard and moustache, and after that removed his long curls on one side, being careful to leave a stair pattern all up the side of his head. He concluded operations by removing the fringes upon one side of his buckskin shirt. Next morning Finnegan sobered up and when he saw himself in the looking-glass he went bersark."

"His heart got bad," Bill Dantz remarked, taking up the narrative. "He laid down in a fringe of brush near the Marquis's store, where he could command a clear view of the town, and began to pump lead into everything in sight."

The first shot was aimed at the office of theBad Lands Cowboy. Whether or not "Redhead" Finnegan had it in for the stern moralist who insisted that drunken criminals should be punished, not only for their crimes, but also for their drunkenness, is a question on which the records are dark. Fisher was shaving in Packard's office and the shot broke the mirror in front of him. Packard, who was on horseback on the bluff behind Medora, saw Fisher dash out of the shack, and rushed to the scene of conflict.His horse had knocked Finnegan senseless before the desperado knew that the Chief of Police was on his trail. When Finnegan came to he was in a box-car, under lock and seal. But a friend released him, and the man from Bitter Creek made his way down the river to his cabin.

The population of Medora had not relished Finnegan's bombardment, and suggestions concerning a possible "necktie party" began to make themselves heard. Finnegan evidently decided that the time had come for him, and the men who lived with him in his ill-kept shack, to leave the country. Travel by horse or foot was impossible. The boat they owned was a miserable, leaky affair. The Elkhorn skiff had evidently appeared to Finnegan and Company in the nature of a godsend.

Wilmot Dow And Theodore Roosevelt,(1886).

The Piazza At Elkhorn.Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt's anger boiled up at the theft of the boat and he ran to saddle Manitou. 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 horses of 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. But the determining motive in his mind was neither chagrin nor anxiety to recover his property. In a country where self-reliant hardihood and the ability to hold one's own under all circumstances ranked as the first of the virtues, to submit tamely to theft or toany other injury was, he knew, to invite almost certain repetition of the offense.

A journal which he kept for a month or two that spring gives in laconic terms a vivid picture of those March days.

While Sewall and Dow, who were mighty men with their hands, were building the boat, and his other cowpuncher, Rowe, was hurrying to Medora to bring out a wagon-load of supplies for their contemplated journey, Roosevelt himself was by no means idle. He had agreed to write a life of Thomas Hart Benton for theAmerican Statesmen Series, and, after two or three months' work in the East gathering his material, had begun the actual writing of the book immediately after his return to the Bad Lands.

I have written the first chapter of the Benton [he wrote to Lodge on March 27th], so at any rate I have made a start. Writing is horribly hard work to me;and I make slow progress. I have got some good ideas in the first chapter, but I am not sure they are worked up rightly; my style is very rough, and I do not like a certain lack ofsequiturthat I do not seem able to get rid of.I thought the article on Morris admirable in every way; one of your crack pieces. Some of the sentences were so thoroughly characteristic of you that I laughed aloud when I read them. One of my men, Sewall (a descendant of the Judge's, by the way), read it with as much interest as I did, and talked it over afterwards as intelligently as any one could.At present we are all snowed up by a blizzard; as soon as it lightens up I shall start down the river with two of my men in a boat we have built while indoors, after some horse-thieves who took our boat the other night to get out of the country with; but they have such a start we have very little chance of catching them. I shall take Matthew Arnold along; I have had no chance at all to read it as yet.

I thought the article on Morris admirable in every way; one of your crack pieces. Some of the sentences were so thoroughly characteristic of you that I laughed aloud when I read them. One of my men, Sewall (a descendant of the Judge's, by the way), read it with as much interest as I did, and talked it over afterwards as intelligently as any one could.

At present we are all snowed up by a blizzard; as soon as it lightens up I shall start down the river with two of my men in a boat we have built while indoors, after some horse-thieves who took our boat the other night to get out of the country with; but they have such a start we have very little chance of catching them. I shall take Matthew Arnold along; I have had no chance at all to read it as yet.

The next day he was writing to his sister "Bamie." He was evidently convinced that she would worry about him if she knew the nature of the adventure on which he was about to embark, for in his letter he protests almost too much concerning the utterly unexciting nature of his activities:

Since I wrote you life has settled down into its usual monotonous course here. It is not as rough as I had expected; I have clean sheets, the cooking is pretty good, and above all I have a sitting-room with a great fireplace and a rocking-chair, which I use as my study.The walking is horrible; all slippery ice or else deep, sticky mud; but as we are very short of meat I generally spend three or four hours a day tramping round afterprairie chickens, and one day last week I shot a deer. The rest of the time I read or else work at Benton, which is making very slow progress; writing is to me intensely irksome work.In a day or two, when the weather gets a little milder, I expect to start down the river in a boat, to go to Mandan; the trip ought to take a week or ten days, more or less. It will be good fun. My life on the ranch this summer is not going to be an especially adventurous or exciting one; and my work will be mainly one of supervision so that there will be no especial hardship or labor.I really enjoy being with the men out here; they could be more exactly described as my retainers than as anything else; and I am able to keep on admirable terms with them and yet avoid the familiarity which would assuredly breed contempt.

The walking is horrible; all slippery ice or else deep, sticky mud; but as we are very short of meat I generally spend three or four hours a day tramping round afterprairie chickens, and one day last week I shot a deer. The rest of the time I read or else work at Benton, which is making very slow progress; writing is to me intensely irksome work.

In a day or two, when the weather gets a little milder, I expect to start down the river in a boat, to go to Mandan; the trip ought to take a week or ten days, more or less. It will be good fun. My life on the ranch this summer is not going to be an especially adventurous or exciting one; and my work will be mainly one of supervision so that there will be no especial hardship or labor.

I really enjoy being with the men out here; they could be more exactly described as my retainers than as anything else; and I am able to keep on admirable terms with them and yet avoid the familiarity which would assuredly breed contempt.

On the 30th of March the blizzard which had been raging a day or two moderated, and Roosevelt, hoping a thaw had set in, determined to set off after the thieves. They left Rowe as guard over the ranch and "the womenfolks," and with their unwieldy but water-tight craft, laden with two weeks' provision of flour, coffee, and bacon, started 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.

"Itisthe 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.

"There's your boat!" cried Sewall, who had, in his own phrase, been "looking sharp." "Get your guns ready. I'll handle the boat."

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.

It was rather funny business [Sewall wrote his brother subsequently] for one of the men was called a pretty hard ticket. He was also a shooting man. If he was in the bushes and saw us first he was liable to make it very unhealthy for us.

Roosevelt and Dow peered through the bushes. Beside a fire in a grove of young cottonwoods 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 named Wharfenberger, a tool of rogues more keen than he, whom Sewall later described as "an oldish man who drank so much poor whiskey that he had lost most of the manhood he ever possessed."

They searched the old man, taking his gun and his knives from him, and telling him that if he did exactly as he was told they would use him well; but if he disobeyed or tried to signal the other men, they would kill him instantly. Knowing something of the frontier, he was ready to believe that he would be given short shrift, and was thoroughly submissive.

Finnegan and the third man, a half-breed named Bernstead, had, it seems, gone hunting, believing themselves safe. Sewall guarded the German, while Roosevelt and Dow, crouching under the lee of a cutbank, prepared to greet the others.

The ground before them was as level as a floor,with no growth on it of any sort beside the short dead grass which would not have given cover to a rabbit. Beyond, to the east lay a wide stretch of level bottom covered with sagebrush as high as a man's waist, and beyond that was a fringe of bushes bordering a stretch of broken butte country. The wind had fallen. Save for the rush of the river, there was no sound.

Will and I [Sewall wrote his brother] kept watch and listened—our eyes are better than Roosevelt's, Will on the right and I on the left. R. was to rise up and tell them to hands up, Will and I both with double barrel guns loaded with Buck shot, and we were all going to shoot if they offered to raise a gun. It is rather savage work but it don't do to fool with such fellows. If there was any killing to be done we meant to do it ourselves.

About an hour before sunset they heard Finnegan and his companion crawling through the stunted bushes at the foot of the clay hill. The men started to go upstream.

"We are going to lose them," Roosevelt whispered; "they are not coming to camp."

"I think," answered Sewall, "they are looking for the camp smoke."

He was evidently right, for suddenly they saw it and came straight through the sagebrush toward the watchers. Roosevelt and his men watched them for some minutes as they came nonchalantly toward them, the barrels of their rifles glinting in the sunlight. Now they were 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 him.

"You thief, put up your hands!"

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

They searched the thieves and took away their weapons. "If you'll keep quiet," said Roosevelt, "and not try to get away, you'll be all right. If you try anything we'll shoot you."

This was language which the thieves understood, and they accepted the situation. Sewall took an old double-barrel ten-gauge Parker shot-gun and stood guard.

Dow was a little uneasy about the gun.

"The right-hand barrel goes off very easily," he warned Sewall. "It's gone off with me several times when I did not mean it to, and if you are going to cover the men with it you better be careful."

"I'll be careful," remarked Sewall in his deliberate fashion, "but if it happens to go off, it will make more difference to them than it will to me."

They camped that night where they were. Having captured their men, they were somewhat in a quandary how to keep them. The cold was so intense that to tie them tightly hand and foot meant in all likelihood freezing both hands and feetoff during the night; there was no use tying them at all, moreover, unless they tied them tightly enough to stop in part the circulation. Roosevelt took away everything from the thieves that might have done service as a weapon, and corded his harvest in some bedding well out of reach of the thieves.

"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 downstream 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 upstream 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 morningon 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.

Roosevelt's journal for those days tells the story:

Their provisions ran short. They went after game, but there was none to be seen, no beast or bird, in that barren region. The addition to their company had made severe inroads on their larder and it was not long before they were all reduced to unleavened bread made with muddy water. The days were utterly tedious, and were made only slightly more bearable for Roosevelt by Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and Matthew Arnold, interlarded with "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 to the bone.

Roosevelt thought that it might be pleasantunder 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'll 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 Killdeer 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 withthe 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.

Roosevelt's journal gives the stages of his progress.

"What I can't make out," said the ranchmanfrom the Killdeers, with a puzzled expression on his deeply wrinkled, tough old face, which Sewall said "looked like the instep of an old boot that had lain out in the weather for years,"—"what I can't make out 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.

He was not a vision of beauty as he emerged from the jail to find a place to scrape off two weeks' accumulation of Dakota mud. His feet were in bad shape from the long march through the gumbo, and he asked the first man he met where he could find a physician. By a curious coincidence the man he addressed happened to be the only physician within a hundred and fifty miles in any direction. It was Dr. Stickney.

They had heard of each other, and Roosevelt was glad, for more reasons than one, to follow him to his office. For the quiet man with the twinkling eyes, who combined the courage and the humanness of a cowpuncher with the unselfish devotion of a saint, was a great figure in the Bad Lands. Like Roosevelt he was under thirty.

The doctor, in after years, told of that morning's visit. "He did not seem worn out or unduly tired," he said. "He had just come from the jail, having deposited his prisoners at last, and had had no sleep for forty-eight hours, and he was all teeth and eyes;but even so he seemed a man unusually wide awake. You could see he was thrilled by the adventures he had been through. He did not seem to think he had done anything particularly commendable, but he was, in his own phrase, 'pleased as Punch' at the idea of having participated in a real adventure. He was just like a boy.

"We talked of many things that day while I was repairing his blistered feet. He impressed me and he puzzled me, and when I went home to lunch, an hour later, I told my wife that I had met the most peculiar, and at the same time the most wonderful, man I had ever come to know. I could see that he was a man of brilliant ability and I could not understand why he was out there on the frontier. I had heard his name and I had read something of his work in the New York Legislature and in the Republican Convention, two years previous, and it seemed to me that he belonged, not here on the frontier, but in the East, in the turmoil of large affairs."

I got the three horse-thieves in fine style [Roosevelt wrote to Lodge]. My two Maine men and I ran down the river three days in our boat, and then came on their camp by surprise. As they knew there was no other boat on the river but the one they had taken, and as they had not thought of our building another, they were completely taken unawares, one with his rifle on the ground, and the others with theirs on their shoulders; so there was no fight, nor any need of pluck on our part. We simply crept noiselessly up and rising, when only a few yards distant, covered them with the cocked rifleswhile I told them to throw up their hands. They saw that we had the drop on them completely, and I guess they also saw that we surely meant shooting if they hesitated, and so their hands went up at once. We kept them with us nearly a week, being caught in an ice-jam; then we came to a ranch where I got a wagon, and I sent my two men on downstream with the boat, while I took the three captives overland a two days' journey to a town where I could give them to the sheriff. I was pretty sleepy when I got there, as I had to keep awake at night a good deal in guarding; and we had gotten out of food and the cold had been intense.

To his sister Corinne he admitted that he was well satisfied to part from his prisoners.

I was really glad to give them up to the sheriff this morning [he writes from Dickinson], for I was pretty well done out with the work, the lack of sleep, and the constant watchfulness, but I am as brown and as tough as a pine knot and feel equal to anything.

It happened that the editor of theHeraldof Newburyport, Massachusetts, had a friend in Dickinson who occasionally sent him news of the frontier which he printed as the "Dickinson (Dakota) Letter to the Newburyport Herald."

Dow And Sewall In The Boat They Made Themselves, Laden With The Loot Of The Thieves.

To illustrate what manner of men we need [he wrote during the week following the successful conclusion of Roosevelt's adventure], I will relate an incident which is to the point. I presume you are all acquainted, through the newspapers, with the Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, who is quite prominent in New York politics and society. He owns a ranch on the Little Missouri, about eighty miles northwest from here, and created quite a stir lastSunday by bringing to town three horse-thieves whom he had captured with the help of two of his "cow men."

Thereupon follows the story of the capture and jailing of Finnegan and Company.

When I saw him [the correspondent continues], Mr. Roosevelt had been on the "trail" for three weeks, and wore a cowboy's hat, corduroy jacket, flannel shirt, and heavy shoes, but was in excellent health and spirits.Said he, "I don't know how I look, but I feel first-rate!"The next morning he appeared in the justice's court, saw the outlaws indicted, and a little later took the train bound west, for his "cow camp." I had never seen Mr. Roosevelt before, although I had read many articles from his pen; and when I left home I had no idea of meeting a gentleman of his standing on the frontier masquerading in the character of an impromptu sheriff. But, only such men of courage and energy can hope to succeed in this new, beautiful, but undeveloped country.

Said he, "I don't know how I look, but I feel first-rate!"

The next morning he appeared in the justice's court, saw the outlaws indicted, and a little later took the train bound west, for his "cow camp." I had never seen Mr. Roosevelt before, although I had read many articles from his pen; and when I left home I had no idea of meeting a gentleman of his standing on the frontier masquerading in the character of an impromptu sheriff. But, only such men of courage and energy can hope to succeed in this new, beautiful, but undeveloped country.

The justice of the peace who indicted the thieves was Western Starr. He turned out to be an old acquaintance of Roosevelt's, a classmate in the Columbia Law School. The coincidence gave an added flavor to the proceeding.

In Medora there seemed to be only one opinion concerning Roosevelt's adventure, though it was variously expressed.

"Roosevelt," said his friend, John Simpson, a Texan, who was owner of the "Hash-knife" brand and one of the greatest cattlemen in the region, "no one but you would have followed those men with just a couple of cow-hands. You are the only real damn fool in the county."

The rest of the population echoed the bewildered query of the teamster from the Killdeers. "Why didn't youkillthem?" every one asked. "They would have killed you."

"I didn't come out here to kill anybody," Roosevelt answered. "All I wanted to do was to defend myself and my property. There wasn't any one around to defend them for me, so I had to do it myself."

And there the matter rested. But the people of Medora began to see a little more clearly than they had ever seen before the meaning of government by law.[21][Back to Contents]

Oh, I am a Texas cowboy, light-hearted, brave, and free,To roam the wide, wide prairie, 'tis always joy to me.My trusty little pony is my companion true,O'er creeks and hills and rivers he's sure to pull me through.When threatening clouds do gather and herded lightnings flash,And heavy rain drops splatter, and rolling thunders crash;What keeps the herds from running, stampeding far and wide?The cowboy's long, low whistle and singing by their side.

When threatening clouds do gather and herded lightnings flash,And heavy rain drops splatter, and rolling thunders crash;What keeps the herds from running, stampeding far and wide?The cowboy's long, low whistle and singing by their side.

Cowboy song

By a curious coincidence the culmination of Roosevelt's dramatic exposition of the meaning of government by law coincided in point of time precisely with the passing of the Bad Lands out of a state of primeval lawlessness into a condition resembling organized government.

Since the preceding summer, Packard had, in the columns of theCowboy, once more been agitating for the organization of Billings County. The conditions, which in the past had militated against the proposal, were no longer potent. The lawless element was still large, but it was no longer in the majority. For a time a new and naïve objection made itself widely heard. The stock-growers protested that if the county were organized, they would be taxed! The MandanPioneerexplained that, according to the laws of Dakota Territory, the nearest organized county was authorized to tax all the cattle and other stock in Billings County, and that "the only possible difference that could resultin organization would be to keep the taxes at home and allow them to be expended for home improvements such as roads, bridges, schoolhouses, and public buildings." The cattlemen were not in a position to explain publicly what they probably meant, namely, that a board of county commissioners and a tax assessor sitting in Medora would have far less difficulty than a similar group sitting a hundred and fifty miles east in Mandan in following the mysterious movements of their cattle during the season when assessments were made. An active agent of the county might conceivably note that when Billings County, Dakota, was making its assessments, the herds could generally be found in Fallon County, Montana, and that when Fallon County was making its assessments, the cattle were all grazing in Billings. But even in the Bad Lands it was no longer politic to protest openly against what was palpably the public welfare, and the petition for the organization of the county received the necessary signatures, and was sent to the governor. "This is a step in the right direction," patronizingly remarked the MandanPioneer. "Billings County is rich enough and strong enough to run its own affairs."

Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris had been active in the work of organization, and were eager to "run" Bill Sewall for County commissioner. But that shrewd individual pleaded unfitness and lack of time and refused to be cajoled into becoming a candidate.

There is some doubt concerning the exact dateof the first election. Roosevelt's diary would indicate that it was held on April 12th, but the paragraph printed in the MinneapolisTribuneof April 15th would indicate that it was held on the 14th. Both statements are probably wrong, and the election in all likelihood was held on the 13th.

Roosevelt, having testified against the three thieves, returned to Medora late on the afternoon of election. There had been many threats that the party of disorder would import section hands from the neighboring railway stations to down the legions of the righteous. An especial watcher had been set at the polling-places. It was none other than Hell-Roaring Bill Jones. He was still on most cordial terms with his old intimates, the ruffians who congregated at Bill Williams's saloon, but he liked Roosevelt and the men who surrounded the young Easterner, and had cast in his lot with them. The effectiveness, as a guardian of the peace, of the man who had at the beginning of his career in the Bad Lands been saloon "bouncer" for Bill Williams was notable.

Roosevelt found a group of his friends at the polling-place.

"Has there been any disorder?" he asked.

"Disorder, hell!" said one of the men in the group. "Bill Jones just stood there with one hand on his gun and the other pointin' over toward the new jail whenever any man who didn't have the right to vote come near the polls. There was only one of them tried to vote, and Bill knocked himdown. Lord!" he concluded meditatively, "the way that man fell!"

"Well," struck in Bill Jones, "if he hadn't fell, I'd of walked round behind him to see what was proppin' him up!"

The candidates for the various offices had been selected in a spirit of compromise between the two elements in the town, the forces of order securing every office except one. The county commissioners elected were "Johnny" Goodall, a blacksmith named Dan Mackenzie, and J. L. Truscott, who owned a large ranch south of the Big Ox Bow. Van Driesche, the best of all valets, was elected treasurer, and Bill Dantz superintendent of schools; but the forces of disorder could afford to regard the result without apprehension, for they had been allowed to elect the sheriff; and they had elected Joe Morrill.

Election night was lurid. Morrill, evidently desiring to make a good impression without serious inconvenience to his friends, served notice immediately after his election that there must be no "shooting up" of the town, but "the boys" did not take Morrill very seriously. Fisher, who had a room in Mrs. McGeeney's hotel next to Joe Ferris's store, found the place too noisy for comfort, and adjourned to the office of theBad Lands Cowboy. The little shack was unoccupied, for Packard, having recently married, had moved his residence into one of the deserted cantonment buildings on the western side of the river. Truscott had neglected to secure aroom in the hotel and Fisher invited him to join him in theCowboyoffice.

The day had been strenuous, and the two men were soon sound asleep. Fisher was awakened by a sharp object striking him in the face. An instant later he heard a round of shots, followed instantly by another shower of broken glass. He discovered that one of the windows, which faced the Tamblyn Saloon, was completely shattered. He shook Truscott.

"I guess," he said, "we'd better look for some place not quite so convenient for a target."

They adjourned to Fisher's room in Mrs. McGeeney's hotel. After all, noise was preferable to bullets.

"The boys" were full of apologies the next morning, declaring that they had not realized that the place was occupied. Packard, it seemed, had been publishing certain editorials shortly before dealing with the criminal responsibility of drunkards, and they just thought they would give theCowboya "touching up."

Medora's new régime began with a call which Howard Eaton made upon Merrifield.

"Now that we're organized, we'll have some fun with Deacon Cummins," said Eaton, with a chuckle.

Eaton had apprehensions that the "Deacon" would ask for improvements, a road to his ranch, for instance, or possibly a bridge or two, so he suggested to Merrifield that they draw up a statement calculated to discourage any such aspirations. Thiswas the statement as they finally submitted it to their fellow citizens:

We the undersigned do hereby solemnly covenant and agree to hang, burn, or drown any man that will ask for public improvements made at the expense of the County.

Eaton and Merrifield signed it, together with a dozen others; then they laid it before Mrs. Cummins's husband for his signature. "The Deacon" took it with extreme seriousness, and signed his name to it; and there was no call for improvements from the solemn couple at Tepee Bottom.

The day after the election, the Little Missouri Stock Association held its semi-annual meeting. Roosevelt presided, "preserving," as he wrote to Lodge a day or so later, "the most rigid parliamentary decorum." He was elected a representative of the Association at the meeting of the Montana Stock growers' Association in Miles City, to be held a day or two later, and, after a hurried trip to Elkhorn Ranch with Merrifield, started west for Miles City, taking Sylvane with him.

Miles City was a feverish little cowtown under ordinary circumstances, but in April of every year, when the cattlemen of Montana and western Dakota gathered there for the annual meeting of the Montana Stockgrowers' Association, it was jubilant and noisy beyond description. For a week before the convention was called to order, stockmen from near and far began to arrive, bringing in their train thirsty and hilarious cowboys who lookedupon the occasion mainly as a golden opportunity for a spree. They galloped madly up and down the wide, dusty streets at every hour of the day and night, knowing no sober moment as long as the convention lasted.

Roosevelt and Sylvane arrived on April 18th, taking what quarters they could get in the Macqueen House which was crowded to the doors and was granting nobody more than half a bed. The ceremonies began early next morning with a blast from the Fifth Infantry band from Fort Keogh, the army post two miles to the west.

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