Hermann Hagedorn

Some came for lungs, and some for jobs,
And some for booze at Big-mouth Bob's,
Some to punch cattle, some to shoot,
Some for a vision, some for loot;
Some for views and some for vice,
Some for faro, some for dice;
Some for the joy of a galloping hoof,
Some for the prairie's spacious roof,
Some to forget a face, a fan,
Some to plumb the heart of man;
Some to preach and some to blow,
Some to grab and some to grow,
Some in anger, some in pride,
Some to taste, before they died,
Life served hot and a la cartee—
And some to dodge a necktie-party.

From Medora Nights

Roosevelt remained in Little Missouri to wait for news from Merrifield and Sylvane, who had departed for Minnesota a day or two previous. Possibly it occurred to him that a few days in what was said to be the worst "town" on the Northern Pacific might have their charm.

Roosevelt was enough of a boy rather to relish things that were blood-curdling. Years after, a friend of Roosevelt's, who had himself committed almost every crime in the register, remarked; in commenting in a tone of injured morality on Roosevelt's frank regard for a certain desperate character, that "Roosevelt had a weakness for murderers." The reproach has a delightful suggestiveness. Whether it was merited or not is a large question on which Roosevelt himself might have discoursed with emphasis and humor. If he actually did possess such a weakness, Little Missouri and the boom town were fully able to satisfy it.

"Little Missouri was a terrible place," remarked, years after, a man who had had occasion to study it. It was, in fact, "wild and woolly" to an almost grotesque degree, and the boom town was if anything a little cruder than its twin across the river. The men who had drifted into Medora after the news was noised abroad that "a crazy Frenchman" was making ready to scatter millions there, were, many of them, outcasts of society, reckless, greedy, and conscienceless; fugitives from justice with criminal records, and gunmen who lived by crooked gambling and thievery of every sort. The best of those who had come that summer to seek adventure and fortune on the banks of the Little Missouri were men who cared little for their personal safety, courting danger wherever it beckoned, careless of life and limb, reticent of speech and swift of action, light-hearted and altogether human. They were the adventurous and unfettered spirits of hundreds of communities whom the restrictions of respectable society had galled. Here they were, elbowing each other in a little corner of sagebrush country where there was little to do and much whiskey to drink; and the hand of the law was light and far away.

Roosevelt In 1883.

Somewhere, hundreds of miles to the south, there was a United States marshal; somewhere a hundred and fifty miles to the east there was a sheriff. Neither Medora nor Little Missouri had any representative of the law whatsoever, no government or even a shadow of government. The feuds that arose were settled by the parties involved in the ancient manner of Cain.

Of the heterogeneous aggregation of desperate men that made up the population of the frontier settlement, Jake Maunders, the man who had lent Roosevelt a hammer and a buffalo-gun, was, by all odds, the most prominent and the least trustworthy.

He had been one of the first to settle at Little Missouri, and for a while had lived in the open as a hunter. But the influx of tourists and "floaters" had indicated to him a less arduous form of labor. He guided "tenderfeet," charging exorbitant rates; he gambled (cautiously); whenever a hunter left the Bad Lands, abandoning his shack, Maunders claimed it with the surrounding country, and, when a settler took up land near by, demanded five hundred dollars for his rights. A man whom he owed three thousand dollars had been opportunely kicked into oblivion by a horse in a manner that was mysterious to men who knew the ways of horses. He had shot MacNab, the Scotchman, in cold blood, as he came across the sagebrush flat from Bill Williams's saloon, kneeling at the corner of his shack with his rifle on his knee. Another murder was laid directly at his door. But the forces of law were remote from Little Missouri, and Jake Maunders not only lived, but flourished.

His enemies said he was "the sneakiest man in town, always figuring on somebody else doing the dirty work for him, and him reap the benefits"; but his friends said that "once Jake was your friend, he was your friend, and that was all there was to it." The truth remains that the friends Jake chose were all characters only a little less shady than himself.

Most prominent of these were the precious pair who "operated" Bill Williams's saloon. Bill Williams was a Welshman who had drifted into Little Missouri while the railroad was being built, and, recognizing that the men who made money in frontier settlements were the men who sold whiskey, had opened a saloon to serve liquid refreshment in various vicious forms to the grading crews and soldiers.

"He always reminded me of a red fox," said Lincoln Lang long after, "for, besides having a marked carroty complexion, there was a cunning leer in his face which seemed, as it were, to show indistinctly through the transparency of the manufactured grin with which he sought to cover it. When he got mad over something or other and swept the grin aside, I do not think that an uglier countenance ever existed on earth or in hell. He was rather short of stature, bullet-headed and bull-necked, with a sloping forehead and a somewhat underslung chin. His nose was red and bulbous, his eyes narrow-set beneath bushy red eyebrows. He had a heavy red moustache not altogether concealing an abnormally long mouth, and through it at times, when he smiled, his teeth showed like fangs." He was a man of natural shrewdness, a moneymaker, a gambler, and like Maunders (it was rumored) a brander of cattle that were not his. But he was not without a certain attractive quality, and when he was slightly drunk he was brilliant. He was deathly afraid of being alone, and had a habit on those infrequent occasions when his bar was for the moment deserted, of setting the chairs in orderly rows as in a chapel, and then preaching to them solemnly on the relative merits of King Solomon and Hiram, King of Tyre.

His partner, Jess Hogue, was the brains of the nefarious trio, a dark, raw-boned brute with an ugly, square-jawed, domineering face, a bellow like a bull's, and all the crookedness of Bill Williams without his redeeming wit. His record of achievement covered a broader field than that of either of his associates, for it began with a sub-contract on the New York water system, involved him with the United States Government in connection with a certain "phantom mail route" between Bismarck and Miles City, and started him on the road to affluence with the acquisition of twenty-eight army mules which, with the aid of Bill Williams and the skillful use of the peculiar type of intelligence with which they both seemed to be endowed, he had secured at less than cost from Fort Abraham Lincoln at Mandan.

Associated with Williams, Hogue, and Maunders, in their various ventures, was a man of thirty-eight or forty named Paddock, with florid cheeks, and a long, dark moustache and goatee that made him look something like Buffalo Bill and something like Simon Legree. He conducted the local livery-stable with much profit, for his rates were what was known to the trade as "fancy," and shared with Maunders whatever glory there was in being one of the most feared men in Little Missouri. Like Maunders, he had his defenders; and he had a pleasant-faced wife who gave mute tribute to a side of Jerry Paddock which he did not reveal to the world.

The banks of the Little Missouri in those days of September, 1883, were no place for soft hands or faint hearts; and a place for women only who had the tough fiber of the men. There were scarcely a half-dozen of them in all the Bad Lands up and down the river. In Little Missouri there were four—Mrs. Roderick, who was the cook at the Pyramid Park Hotel; Mrs. Paddock, wife of the livery-stable keeper; Mrs. Pete McGeeney who kept a boarding-house next to Johnny Nelson's store; and her neighbor and eternal enemy, Mrs. Fitzgerald. Pete McGeeney was a section-boss on the railroad, but what else he was, except the husband of Mrs. McGeeney, is obscure. He was mildly famous in Little Missouri because he had delirium tremens, and now and then when he went on a rampage had to be lassoed. Mrs. McGeeney's feud with Mrs. Fitzgerald was famous throughout the countryside. They lived within fifty feet of each other, which may have been the cause of the extreme bitterness between them, for they were both Irish and their tongues were sharp. Little Missouri had, until now, known only one child, but that one had fully lived up to the best traditions of the community. It was Archie Maunders, his father's image and proudest achievement. At the age of twelve he held up Fitzgerald, the roadmaster, at the point of a pistol, and more than once delayed the departure of the Overland Express by shooting around the feet of the conductors.

Whether he was still the waiter at the Pyramid Park Hotel when Roosevelt arrived there is dark, for it was sometime that autumn that a merciful God took Archie Maunders to him before he could grow into the fullness of his powers. He was only thirteen or fourteen years old when he died, but even the guidebook of the Northern Pacific had taken notice of him, recounting the retort courteous he had delivered on one occasion when he was serving the guests at the hotel.

"Tea or coffee?" he asked one of the "dudes" who had come in on the Overland.

"I'll take tea, if you please," responded the tenderfoot.

"You blinkety blank son of a blank!" remarked Archie, "you'll take coffee or I'll scald you!"

The "dude" took coffee.

His "lip" was, indeed, phenomenal, and one day when he aimed it at Darius Vine (who was not a difficult mark), that individual bestirred his two hundred and fifty pounds and set about to thrash him. Archie promptly drew his "six-shooter," and as Darius, who was not conspicuous for courage, fled toward the Cantonment, Archie followed, shooting about his ears and his heels. Darius reached his brother's store, nigh dead, just in time to slam the door in Archie's face. Archie shot through the panel and brought Darius down with a bullet in his leg.

Archie's "gayety" with his "six-shooter" seemed to stir no emotion in his father except pride. But when Archie finally began to shoot at his own brother, Jake Maunders mildly protested. "Golly, golly," he exclaimed, "don't shoot at your brother. If you want to shoot at anybody, shoot at somebody outside the family."

Whether or not the boy saw the reasonableness of this paternal injunction is lost in the dust of the years. But the aphorism that the good die young has no significance so far as Archie Maunders is concerned.

The lawless element was altogether in the majority in the Bad Lands and thieving was common up and down the river and in the heart of the settlement itself. Maunders himself was too much of a coward to steal, too politic not to realize the disadvantage in being caught red-handed. Bill Williams was not above picking a purse when a reasonably safe occasion offered, but as a rule, like Maunders, he and his partner Hogue contrived to make some of the floaters and fly-by-nights, fugitives from other communities, do the actual stealing.

Maunders ruled by the law of the bully, and most men took him at the valuation of his "bluff." But his attempt to intimidate Mrs. McGeeney was a rank failure. One of his hogs wandered south across the railroad track and invaded Mrs. McGeeney's vegetable garden; whereupon, to discourage repetition, she promptly scalded it. Maunders, discovering the injury to his property, charged over to Mrs. McGeeney's house with blood in his eyes. She was waiting for him with a butcher-knife in her hand.

"Come on, ye damn bully!" she exclaimed. "Come on! I'm ready for ye!"

Maunders did not accept the invitation, and thereafter gave Mrs. McGeeney a wide berth.

There had been talk early in 1883 of organizing Billings County in which Little Missouri was situated. The stimulus toward this project had come from Jake Maunders, Bill Williams, and Hogue, backed by the unholy aggregation of saloon rats and floaters who customarily gathered around them. Merrifield and the Ferrises, who had taken the first steps in the community toward the reign of law when they had refused to buy stolen horses, were heartily anxious to secure some form of organized government, for they had no sympathy with the lawlessness that made the settlement a perilous place for honest men. But they were wise enough to see that the aim of Jake Maunders and his crew in organizing the county was not the establishment of law and order, but the creation of machinery for taxation on which they could wax fat. The Maltese Cross group therefore objected strenuously to any attempt on the part of the other group to force the organization of the county. Merrifield, Sylvane and Joe, and two or three ranchmen and cowboys who gathered around them, among them Gregor Lang and Bill Dantz (an attractive youngster of eighteen who had a ranch half a dozen miles south of the Maltese Cross), were in the minority, but they were respected and feared, and in the face of their opposition even such high-handed scoundrels as Maunders, Hogue, and Williams developed a vein of caution.

Meanwhile public safety was preserved in ways that were not altogether lawful, but were well known to all who lived in frontier communities.

"Many is the man that's cleared that bend west of Little Missouri with bullets following his heels," said Merrifield, years after. "That's the way we had of getting rid of people we didn't like. There was no court procedure, just a notice to get out of town and a lot of bullets, and, you bet, they got out."

Little Missouri's leading citizens were a wild crew, but with all their violence and their villainy, they were picturesque beings, and were by no means devoid of redeeming traits. Frank Vine, who evidently thought nothing of robbing his employers and was drunk more than half the time, had an equable temper which nothing apparently could ruffle, and a good heart to which no one in trouble ever seemed to appeal in vain. Mrs. McGeeney was a very "Lady of the Lamp" when any one was sick. Even Maunders had his graces. Roosevelt could not have lived among them a week without experiencing a new understanding of the inconsistencies that battle with each other in the making of men's lives.[Back to Contents]