From Medora Nights

The inhabitants of "Little Misery" who regarded law as a potential ball-and-chain were doing a thriving business by one crooked means or another and looked with uneasiness upon the coming of the cattlemen. There were wails and threats that autumn in Bill Williams's saloon over "stuck-up tenderfeet, shassayin' 'round, drivin' in cattle and chasin' out game."

"Maunders disliked Roosevelt from the first," said Bill Dantz. "He had no personal grudge against him, but he disliked him for what he represented. Maunders had prospered under the loose and lawless customs of the Northwest, and he shied at any man who he thought might try to interfere with them."

The coming of the Marquis de Mores six months previous had served greatly to heighten Maunders's personal prestige and to strengthen the lawless elements. For the Marquis was attracted by Jake's evident power, and, while he drew the crafty schemer into his inner counsels, was himself drawn into a subtle net that was yet to entangle both men in forces stronger than either.

When one day in March, 1883, a striking young Frenchman, who said he was a nobleman, came to Little Missouri with a plan ready-made to build a community there to rival Omaha, and a business that would startle America's foremost financiers, the citizens of the wicked little frontier settlement, who thought that they knew all the possibilities of "tenderfeet" and "pilgrims" and "how-do-you-do-boys," admitted in some bewilderment that they had been mistaken. The Frenchman's name was Antoine de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Mores. He was a member of the Orleans family, son of a duke, a "white lily of France," remotely in line for the throne; an unusually handsome man, tall and straight, black of hair and moustache, twenty-five or twenty-six years old, athletic, vigorous, and commanding. He had been a French officer, a graduate of the French military school of Saint Cyr, and had come to America following his marriage abroad with Medora von Hoffman, the daughter of a wealthy New York banker of German blood. His cousin, Count Fitz James, a descendant of the Jacobin exiles, had hunted in the Bad Lands the year previous, returning to France with stories of the new cattle country that stirred the Marquis's imagination. He was an adventurous spirit. "He had no judgment," said Merrifield, "but he was a fighter from hell." The stories of life on the frontier lured him as they had lured others, but the dreams that came to him were more complex and expensive dreams than those which came to the other young men who turned toward Dakota in those early eighties.

The Marquis arrived in Little Missouri with his father-in-law's millions at his back and a letter of introduction to Howard Eaton in his pocket. The letter, from a prominent business man in the East, ended, it seemed to Eaton, rather vaguely: "I don't know what experience he has had in business or anything of that kind, but he has some large views."

The Marquis enthusiastically unfolded these views. "I am going to build an abattoir. I am going to buy all the beef, sheep, and hogs that come over the Northern Pacific, and I am going to slaughter them here and then ship them to Chicago and the East."

"I don't think you have any idea how much stock comes over the Northern Pacific," Eaton remarked.

"It doesn't matter!" cried the Marquis. "My father-in-law has ten million dollars and can borrow ten million dollars more. I've got old Armour and the rest of them matched dollar for dollar."

Eaton said to himself that unquestionably the Marquis's views were "large." "Do you think I am impractical?" the Marquis went on. "I am not impractical. My plan is altogether feasible. I do not merely think this. I know. My intuition tells me so. I pride myself on having a natural intuition. It takes me only a few seconds to understand a situation that other men have to puzzle over for hours. I seem to see every side of a question at once. I assure you, I am gifted in this way. I have wonderful insight."

But Eaton said to himself, "I wonder if the Marquis isn't raising his sights too high?"

The Marquis formed the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company with two brothers named Haupt as his partners and guides; and plunged into his dream as a boy into a woodland pool. But it did not take him long to discover that the water was cold. Frank Vine offered to sell out the Little Missouri Land and Cattle Company to him for twenty-five thousand dollars, and when the Marquis, discovering that Frank had nothing to sell except a hazy title to a group of ramshackle buildings, refused to buy, Frank's employers intimated to the Marquis that there was no room for the de Mores enterprises in Little Missouri. The Marquis responded by buying what was known as Valentine scrip, or soldiers' rights, to the flat on the other side of the river and six square miles around it, with the determination of literally wiping Little Missouri off the map. On April Fool's Day, 1883—auspicious date!—he pitched his tent in the sagebrush and founded the town of Medora. The population of Little Missouri did not exhibit any noticeable warmth toward him or his dream. The hunters did not like "dudes" of any sort, but foreign "dudes" were particularly objectionable to them. His plans, moreover, struck at the heart of their free and untrammeled existence. As long as they could live by what their guns brought down, they were independent of the machinery of civilization. The coming of cattle and sheep meant the flight of antelope and deer. Hunters, to live, would have to buy and sell like common folk. That meant stores and banks, and these in time meant laws and police-officers; and police-officers meant the collapse of Paradise. It was all wrong.

The Marquis recognized that he had stepped in where, previously, angels had feared to tread. It occurred to him that it would be the part of wisdom to conciliate Little Missouri's hostile population. He began with the only man who, in that unstable community, looked solid, and appealed to Gregor Lang, suggesting a union of forces. Lang, who did not like the grandiose Frenchman, bluntly refused to entertain the idea.

"I am sorry," said the Marquis with a sincerity which was attractive and disarming. "I desire to be friends with every man."

The Marquis's efforts to win supporters were not altogether without success, for the liveryman, Jerry Paddock, became his foreman, and Jake Maunders, evidently seeing in the noble Frenchman one of those gifts from the patron saint of crooked men which come to a knave only once in a lifetime, attached himself to him and became his closest adviser. Maunders, as one who had known him well remarked long afterwards, "was too crooked to sleep in a roundhouse." Whether he set about deliberately to secure a hold on the Marquis, which the Marquis could never shake off, is a secret locked away with Maunders underground. If he did, he was more successful than wiser men have been in their endeavors. Insidiously he drew the Marquis into a quarrel, in which he himself was involved, with a hunter named Frank O'Donald and his two friends, John Reuter, known as "Dutch Wannigan," and Riley Luffsey. He was a crafty Iago, and the Marquis, born in a rose-garden and brought up in a hot-house, was guileless and trusting. Incidentally, the Marquis was "land hungry" and not altogether tactful in regarding the rights of others. Maunders carried blood-curdling tales from the Marquis to O'Donald and back again, until, as Howard Eaton remarked, "every one got nervous."

"What shall I do?" the Marquis asked Maunders, unhappily, when Maunders reported that O'Donald was preparing for hostilities.

"Look out," answered Maunders, "and have the first shot."

The Marquis went to Mandan to ask the local magistrate for advice. "There is the situation," he said. "What shall I do?"

"Why, shoot," was the judicial reply.

He started to return to the center of hostilities. A friend protested. "You'll get shot if you go down there," he declared.

The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. "But I have got to go."

"Now, why do you have to go?"

"Why," replied the Marquis, "William is there. He is my valet. His father was my father's valet, and his grandfather was my grandfather's valet. I cannot leave William in the lurch."

Whereupon, smiling his engaging smile, he boarded the west-bound express.

What followed is dead ashes, that need not be raked over. Just west of the town where the trail ran along the railroad track, the Marquis and his men fired at the hunters from cover. O'Donald and "Wannigan" were wounded, Riley was killed. Maunders, claiming that the hunters had started the shooting, charged them with manslaughter, and had them arrested.

The excitement in the little settlement was intense. Gregor Lang was outspoken in his indignation against the Marquis, and the few law-abiding citizens rallied around him. The Marquis was arrested and acquitted, but O'Donald and "Dutch Wannigan" were kept under lock and key. The better element in Little Missouri snorted in indignation and disgust, but for the moment there was nothing to be done about it. The excitement subsided. Riley Luffsey slept undisturbed on Graveyard Butte; the Marquis took up again the amazing activities which the episode of the quarrel had interrupted; and Maunders, his mentor, flourished like the green bay tree. It was said that "after the murder, Maunders could get anything he wanted out of the Marquis"; so, from his point of view, the whole affair had been eminently successful.

All this was in the summer of 1883.

For all their violence and lawlessness there was no denying, meanwhile, that the settlements on both sides of the river, roughly known as Little Missouri, were beginning to flourish, and to catch the attention of a curious world.

The Mandan Pioneer spoke of surprising improvements; and even the Dickinson Press, which was published forty miles to the east and which as a rule regarded Little Missouri as an outrageous but interesting blot on the map of Dakota, was betrayed into momentary enthusiasm.

This town, situated in Pyramid Park on the banks of the Little Missouri River and surrounded by the Bad Lands with their fine scenery, is, at the present time, one of the most prosperous and rapidly growing towns along the line of the Northern Pacific. New buildings of every description are going up as fast as a large force of carpenters can do the work and an air of business and enterprise is apparent that would do honor to many an older town.

The "personals" that follow give a glimpse into the Little Missouri of which Roosevelt was a part during that third week of September, 1883.

NOTES

• Business booms.
• J. H. Butler is right on sight.
• [MCGeeney] and Walker are doing a good business.
• Geo. Fitzpatrick is doing a rushing business.
• J. B. Walker takes a good share of trade.
• Anderson's restaurant refreshes the inner man.
• Frank [Vine] rents the soldiers' quarters to tourists.
• [P. McGeeney] will have a fine hotel when it is completed.
• We found the Marquis de Mores a pleasant gentleman.
• Little Missouri will double her population before spring.
• The new depot will be soon completed and will be a good one.

It is worth remarking that Butler, McGeeney, Walker, Fitzpatrick, Anderson, and Frank Vine all conducted bars of one description or another. The "business" which is "booming" in the first line, therefore, seems to have been exclusively the business of selling and consuming liquor.

There is one further item in those "Notes":

L. D. Rumsey, of Buffalo, N.Y., recently returned from a hunting expedition with Frank O'Donald. Frank is a good hunter and thoroughly posted about the country.

For the bloodthirsty desperado, by whose unconscious aid Maunders had contrived to get the Marquis into his power, was back in the Bad Lands, earning his living by hunting as he had earned it before the fatal June 26th when the Marquis lost his head. There had been a "reconciliation." When O'Donald had returned to Little Missouri from his sojourn in the Mandan jail, he had been without money, and, as the Mandan Pioneer explained, "the Marquis helped him out by buying the hay on his ranch 'in stubble.'" He bought the hay, it was rumored, for the sum of one thousand dollars, which was high for hay which would not begin growing for another eight months. But the "reconciliation" was complete.

If Roosevelt met the Marquis during the week he spent in Little Missouri, that September, there is no record of that meeting. The Marquis was here, there, and everywhere, for the stately house he was building, on a grassy hill southward and across the river from his new "town," was not yet completed, and he was, moreover, never inclined to stay long on one spot, rushing to Miles City or St. Paul, to Helena or to Chicago, at a moment's notice, in pursuit of one or the other of his expensive dreams.

The Haupt brothers, it was said, were finding their senior partner somewhat of a care. He bought steers, and found, when he came to sell them as beef, that he had bought them at too high a price; he bought cows and found that the market would not take cow-meat at all. Thereupon (lest the cold facts which he had acquired concerning cattle should rob him of the luxury of spacious expectations) he bought five thousand dollars worth of broncos. He would raise horses, he declared, on an unprecedented scale. The horses had barely arrived when the Marquis announced that he intended to raise sheep also. The Haupt brothers protested, but the Marquis was not to be diverted.

The hunters and cattlemen looked on in anger and disgust as sheep and ever more sheep began to pour into the Bad Lands. They knew, what the Marquis did not know, that sheep nibble the grass so closely that they kill the roots, and ruin the pasture for cattle and game. He tempered their indignation somewhat by offering a number of them a form of partnership in his enterprise. "His plan," says the guidebook of the Northern Pacific, published that summer of 1883, "is to engage experienced herders to the number of twenty-four, supply them with as many sheep as they may desire, and provide all necessary buildings and funds to carry on operations for a period of seven years. At the end of this time a division of the increase of the flocks is to be made, from which alone the Marquis is to derive his profits."

There was no one in the Bad Lands, that summer of 1883, who, if asked whether he knew anything about business or live stock or the laws of sidereal space, would not have claimed that he knew all that it was necessary for any man to know. The Marquis had no difficulty in finding the desired twenty-four. Each signed a solemn contract with him and let the sheep wander where they listed, eating mutton with relish and complaining to the Marquis of the depredations of the coyotes. One who was more honest than the rest went to Herman Haupt at the end of August and drew his attention to the fact that many of the wethers and ewes were so old that they had no teeth to nibble with and were bound to die of starvation. Haupt rode from ranch to ranch examining the herds and came to the conclusion that six thousand out of twelve were too old to survive under the best conditions, and telegraphed the Marquis to that effect, advising that they be slaughtered at once.

The answer of the Marquis was prompt. "Don't kill any sheep," it ran. Haupt shrugged his shoulders. By the time Roosevelt left Little Missouri the end of September, the sheep were already beginning, one by one, to perish. But by this time the Marquis was absorbed in a new undertaking and was making arrangements to ship untold quantities of buffalo-meat and other game on his refrigerator cars to Eastern markets, unaware that a certain young man with spectacles had just shot one of the last buffalo that the inhabitants of Little Missouri were ever destined to see.

Roosevelt, learning a great deal about the ways of men who are civilized too little and men who are civilized too much, spent a week waiting in Little Missouri and roundabout for word from Merrifield and Sylvane. It came at last in a telegram saying that Wadsworth and Halley had given them a release and that they were prepared to enter into a new partnership. Roosevelt started promptly for St. Paul, and on September 27th signed a contract[3] with the two Canadians. Sylvane and Merrifield thereupon went East to Iowa, to purchase three hundred head of cattle in addition to the hundred and fifty which they had taken over from Wadsworth and Halley; while Roosevelt, who a little less than three weeks previous had dropped off the train at Little Missouri for a hunt and nothing more, took up again the sober threads of life.

He returned East to his lovely young wife and a campaign for a third term in the New York Legislature, stronger in body than he had ever felt before. If he expected that his family would think as highly of his cattle venture as he did himself, he was doomed to disappointment. Those members of it whom he could count on most for sincere solicitude for his welfare were most emphatic in their disapproval. They considered his investment foolhardy, and said so. Uncle James and the other business men of the family simply threw up their hands in despair. His sisters, who admired him enormously and had confidence in his judgment, were frankly worried. Pessimists assured him that his cattle would die like flies during the winter.

He lost no sleep for apprehensions.

Little Missouri, meanwhile, was cultivating the air of one who is conscious of imminent greatness. The Marquis was extending his business in a way to stir the imagination of any community. In Miles City he built a slaughter-house, in Billings he built another. He established offices in St. Paul, in Brainerd, in Duluth. He built refrigerator plants and storehouses in Mandan and Bismarck and Vedalles and Portland.

His plan, on the surface, was practical. It was to slaughter on the range the beef that was consumed along the Northern Pacific Railway, west of St. Paul. The Marquis argued that to send a steer on the hoof from Medora to Chicago and then to send it back in the form of beef to Helena or Portland was sheer waste of the consumer's money in freight rates. A steer, traveling for days in a crowded cattle-car, moreover, had a way of shrinking ten per cent in weight. It was more expensive, furthermore, to ship a live steer than a dead one. Altogether, the scheme appeared to the Marquis as a heaven-sent inspiration; and cooler-headed business men than he accepted it as practical. The cities along the Northern Pacific acclaimed it enthusiastically, hoping that it meant cheaper beef; and presented the company that was exploiting it with all the land it wanted.

The Marquis might have been forgiven if, in the midst of the cheering, he had strutted a bit. But he did not strut. The newspapers spoke of his "modest bearing" as he appeared in hotel corridors in Washington and St. Paul and New York, with a lady whose hair was "Titan-red," as the Pioneer Press of St. Paul had it, and who, it was rumored, was a better shot than the Marquis. He had great charm, and there was something engaging in the perfection with which he played the grand seigneur.

"How did you happen to go into this sort of business?" he was asked. "I wanted something to do," he answered.

In view of the fact that before his first abattoir was in operation he had spent upwards of three hundred thousand dollars, an impartial observer might have remarked that his desire for activity was expensive.

Unquestionably the Marquis had made an impression on the Northwest country. The hints he threw out concerning friends in Paris who were eager to invest five million dollars in Billings County were sufficient to cause palpitation in more than one Dakota bosom. The Marquis promised telephone lines up and down the river and other civic improvements that were dazzling to the imagination and stimulating to the price of building lots; and implanted firmly in the minds of the inhabitants of Medora the idea that in ten years their city would rival Omaha. Meanwhile, Little Missouri and the "boomtown" were leading an existence which seemed to ricochet back and forth between Acadian simplicity and the livid sophistication of a mining-camp.

"Sheriff Cuskelly made a business trip to Little Missouri," is the gist of countless "Notes" in the Dickinson Press, "and reports everything as lively at the town on the Little Muddy."

Lively it was; but its liveliness was not all thievery and violence. "On November 5th," the Dickinson Press announces, "the citizens of Little Missouri opened a school." Whom they opened it for is dark as the ancestry of Melchizedek. But from somewhere some one procured a teacher, and in the saloons the cowboys and the hunters, the horse-thieves and gamblers and fly-by-nights and painted ladies "chipped in" to pay his "board and keep." The charm of this outpouring of dollars in the cause of education is not dimmed by the fact that the school-teacher, in the middle of the first term, discovered a more profitable form of activity and deserted his charges to open a saloon.

Late in November a man of a different sort blew into town. His name was A. T. Packard. He was joyously young, like almost every one else in Little Missouri, except Maunders and Paddock and Captain Vine, having graduated from the University of Michigan only a year before. He drifted westward, and, having a taste for things literary, became managing editor of the Bismarck Tribune. Bismarck was lurid in those days, and editing a newspaper there meant not only writing practically everything in it, including the advertisements, but also persuading the leading citizens by main force that the editor had a right to say what he pleased. Packard had been an athlete in college, and his eyes gave out before his rule had been seriously disputed. After throwing sundry protesting malefactors downstairs, he resigned and undertook work a trifle less exacting across the Missouri River, on the Mandan Pioneer.

Packard became fascinated with the tales he heard of Little Missouri and Medora and, being foot loose, drifted thither late in November. It happened that Frank Vine, who had by that time been deposed as agent of the Gorringe syndicate, was running the Pyramid Park Hotel. He had met Packard in Mandan and greeted him like a long-lost brother. As the newcomer was sitting in a corner of the bar-room after supper, writing home, Frank came up and bent over him.

"You told me down in Mandan that you'd never seen an honest-to-goodness cowboy," he whispered. "See that fellow at the farther end of the bar? Well, that's a real cowboy."

Packard looked up. The man was standing with his back toward the wall, and it struck the tenderfoot that there was something in his attitude and in the look in his eye that suggested that he was on the watch and kept his back to the wall with a purpose. He wore the paraphernalia of the cowboy with ease and grace.

Packard started to describe him to his "folks" in distant Indiana. He described his hat, his face, his clothes, his shaps, his loosely hanging belt with the protruding gun. He looked up and studied the man; he looked down and wrote. The man finally became conscious that he was the subject of study. Packard observed Frank Vine whisper a word of explanation.

He finished his letter and decided to take it to the "depot" and ask the telegraph operator to mail it on the east-bound train that passed through Little Missouri at three. He opened the door. The night was black, and a blast of icy wind greeted him. He changed his mind. The next afternoon he was riding up the river to the Maltese Cross when he heard hoofs behind him. A minute later the object of his artistic efforts of the night before joined him and for an hour loped along at his side. He was not slow in discovering that the man was pumping him. It occurred to him that turn-about was fair play, and he told him all the man wanted to know.

"So you're a newspaper feller," remarked the man at length. "That's damn funny. But I guess it's so if you say so. You see," he added, "Frank Vine he said you was a deputy-sheriff on the lookout for a horse-thief."

Packard felt his hair rise under his hat.

"Where was you going last night when you started to go out?"

"To the telegraph-office."

"I made up my mind you was going to telegraph."

"I was just going to mail a letter."

"Well, if you'd gone I'd have killed you."

Packard gasped a little. Frank Vine was a joker with a vengeance. They rode on, talking of lighter matters.[4]

Packard had come to the Bad Lands with the idea of spending the winter in the open, hunting, but he was a newspaper man from top to toe and in the back of his mind there was a notion that it would be a good deal of a lark, and possibly a not unprofitable venture, to start a weekly newspaper in the Marquis de Mores's budding metropolis. He had, at the tender age of thirteen, been managing editor of a country newspaper, owned by his father, and ever since had been drawn again and again back into the "game" by that lure which few men who yield to it are ever after able to resist.

He broached the matter to the Marquis. That gentleman was patronizing, but agreed that a special organ might prove of value to his Company. He offered to finance the undertaking.

Packard remarked that evidently the Marquis did not understand. If he started a paper it would be an organ for nobody. He intended to finance it himself and run it to please himself. All he wanted was a building.

The Marquis, a little miffed, agreed to rent him a building north of his general store in return for a weekly advertisement for the Company. Packard ordered his type and his presses and betook himself to the solitude of the wintry buttes to think of a name for his paper. His battle was half won when he came back with the name of The Bad Lands Cowboy.

His first issue came out early in February, 1884. It was greeted with interest even by so mighty a contemporary as the New York Herald.

We hail with pleasure the birth of a new Dakota paper, The Bad Lands Cowboy [runs the note of welcome]. The Cowboy is really a neat little journal, with lots to read in it, and the American press has every reason to be proud of its new baby. We are quite sure it will live to be a credit to the family. The Cowboy evidently means business. It says in the introductory notice to its first number that it intends to be the leading cattle paper of the Northwest, and adds that it is not published for fun, but for $2 a year.

All the autumn and winter Medora and her rival across the river had been feverishly competing for supremacy. But Little Missouri, though she built ever so busily, in such a contest had not a chance in the world. For the Little Missouri Land and Stock Company, which was its only hope, was moribund, and the Marquis was playing, in a sense, with loaded dice. He spoke persuasively to the officials of the Northern Pacific and before the winter was well advanced the stop for express trains was on the eastern side of the river, and Little Missouri, protest as she would, belonged to the past. When the Cowboy appeared for the first time, Medora was in the full blaze of national fame, having "broken into the front page" of the New York Sun. For the Marquis was bubbling over with pride and confidence, and the tales he told a credulous interviewer filled a column. A few were based on fact, a few were builded on the nebulous foundation of hope, and a few were sheer romance. The most conspicuous case of romance was a story of the stage-line from Medora to the prosperous and wild little mining town of Deadwood, two hundred miles or more to the south.

"The Marquis had observed," narrates the interviewer, "that the divide on the top of the ridge between the Little Missouri and the Missouri Rivers was almost a natural roadway that led directly toward Deadwood. He gave this roadway needed artificial improvements, and started the Deadwood and Medora stage-line. This is now diverting the Deadwood trade to Medora, to the great advantage of both places."

Who, reading that sober piece of information, would have dreamed that the stage-line in question was at the time nothing but a pious hope?

The Dickinson Press was blunt in its comment. "Stages are not running from Medora to Deadwood," it remarked editorially, "nor has the roadway ever been improved. The Marquis should put a curb on his too vivid imagination and confine himself a little more strictly to facts."

But facts were not the things on which a nature like de Mores's fed.

His sheep meanwhile, were dying by hundreds every week. Of the twelve thousand he had turned loose on the range during the preceding summer, half were dead by the middle of January. There were rumors that rivals of the Marquis had used poison.

The loss [declared a dispatch to the Minneapolis Journal] can be accounted for on no other ground. It is supposed that malicious motives prompted the deed, as the Marquis is known to have had enemies since the killing of Luffsey.

If the Marquis took any stock in these suspicions, his partners, the Haupt brothers, did not. They knew that it was a physical impossibility to poison six thousand sheep scattered over ten thousand square miles of snowbound landscape.

The Haupts were by this time thoroughly out of patience with de Mores. There was a stormy meeting of the directors of the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company in St. Paul, in the course of which the Haupt brothers told their distinguished senior partner exactly what they thought of his business ability; and suggested that the Company go into liquidation.

The Marquis jumped to his feet in a rage. "I won't let it go into liquidation," he cried. "My honor is at stake. I have told my friends in France that I would do so and so and so, that I would make money, a great deal of money. I must do it. Or where am I?"

The Haupts did not exactly know. They compromised with the Marquis by taking the bonds of the Company in exchange for their stock, and retired with inner jubilation at having been able to withdraw from a perilous situation with skins more or less intact.

The Marquis, as usual, secreted himself from the stern eyes of Experience, in the radiant emanations of a new dream. The Dickinson Press announced it promptly:

The Marquis de Mores has a novel enterprise under way, which he is confident will prove a success, it being a plan to raise 50,000 cabbages on his ranch at the Little Missouri, and have them ready for the market April 1. They will be raised under glass in some peculiar French manner, and when they have attained a certain size, will be transplanted into individual pots and forced rapidly by rich fertilizers, made from the offal of the slaughter-houses and for which preparation he owns the patent. Should the cabbages come out on time, he will try his hand on other kinds of vegetables, and should he succeed the citizens along the line will have an opportunity to get as early vegetables as those who live in the sunny South.

The cabbages were a dream which seems never to have materialized even to the point of being a source of expense, and history speaks no more of it.

The boys at the Chimney Butte, meanwhile, were hibernating, hunting as the spirit moved them and keeping a general eye on the stock. Of Roosevelt's three friends, Joe was the only one who was really busy. Joe, it happened, was no longer working for Frank Vine. He was now a storekeeper. It was all due to the fateful hundred dollars which he had loaned the unstable Johnny Nelson.

For Johnny Nelson, so far as Little Missouri was concerned, was no more. He had bought all his goods on credit from some commission house in St. Paul; but his payments, due mainly to the fact that his receipts all drifted sooner or later into the guileful hands of Jess Hogue, were infrequent and finally stopped altogether. Johnny received word that his creditor in St. Paul was coming to investigate him. He became frantic and confided the awful news to every one he met. Hogue, Bill Williams, Jake Maunders, and a group of their satellites, hearing the doleful recital in Bill Williams's saloon, told Johnny that the sheriff would unquestionably close up his store and take everything away from him.

"You give me the keys," said Jake Maunders, "and I'll see that the sheriff don't get your stuff."

Johnny in his innocence gave up the keys. That night Jake Maunders and his "gang" entered the store and completely cleaned it out. They did not leave a button or a shoestring. It was said afterwards that Jake Maunders did not have to buy a new suit of clothes for seven years, and even Williams's two tame bears wore ready-made coats from St. Paul.

Johnny Nelson went wailing to Katie, his betrothed.

"I've lost everything!" he cried. "I've lost all my goods and I can't get more. I've lost my reputation. I can't marry you. I've lost my reputation."

Katie was philosophic about it. "That's all right, Johnny," she said comfortingly, "I lost mine long ago."

At that, Johnny "skipped the country." And so it was that Joe Ferris, to save his hundred dollars attached Johnny's building and became storekeeper.

For Roosevelt, two thousand miles to the east, the winter was proving exciting. He had won his reËlection to the Assembly with ease and had plunged into his work with a new vigor and a more solid self-reliance. He became the acknowledged leader of the progressive elements in the Legislature, the "cyclone member" at whom the reactionaries who were known as the "Black Horse Cavalry" sneered, but of whom, nevertheless, they were heartily afraid.

He "figured in the news," day in, day out, for the public, it seemed, was interested in this vigorous and emphatic young man from the "Silkstocking District" of New York. Roosevelt took his publicity with zest, for he was human and enjoyed the sensation of being counted with those who made the wheels go around. Meanwhile he worked all day and conversed half the night on a thousand topics which his ardor made thrilling. In society he was already somewhat of a lion; and he was only twenty-five years old.

Life was running, on the whole, very smoothly for Theodore Roosevelt when in January, 1884, he entered upon his third term in the Legislature. He was happily married, he had wealth, he had a notable book on the War of 1812 to his credit; he had, it seemed, a smooth course ahead of him, down pleasant roads to fame.

On February 12th, at ten o'clock in the morning, his wife gave birth to a daughter. At five o'clock the following morning his mother died. Six hours later his wife died.

He was stunned and dazed, but within a week after the infinitely pathetic double funeral he was back at his desk in the Assembly, ready to fling himself with every fiber of energy at his command into the fight for clean government. He supported civil service reform; he was chairman of a committee which investigated certain phases of New York City official life, and carried through the Legislature a bill taking from the Board of Aldermen the power to reject the Mayor's appointments. He was chairman and practically the only active member of another committee to investigate living conditions in the tenements of New York, and as spokesman of the worn and sad-looking foreigners who constituted the Cigar-Makers' Union, argued before Governor Cleveland for the passage of a bill to prohibit the manufacture of cigars in tenement-houses. His energy was boundless, it seemed, but the heart had gone out of him. He was restless, and thought longingly of the valley of the Little Missouri.

The news that came from the boys at Chimney Butte was favorable. The three hundred head of young cattle which Sylvane and Merrifield had bought in Iowa, were doing well in spite of a hard winter. Roosevelt, struck by Sylvane's enthusiastic report, backed by a painstaking account-sheet, wrote Sylvane telling him to buy a thousand or twelve hundred head more.

Sylvane's reply was characteristic and would have gratified Uncle James. "Don't put in any more money until you're sure we've scattered the other dollars right," he said in effect. "Better come out first and look around." That struck Roosevelt as good advice, and he accepted it.

While Roosevelt was winning clear, meanwhile, of the tangles and snares in Albany, he was unconsciously being enmeshed in the web that was spinning at Medora.

It came about this way. The Marquis, who had many likable qualities, did not possess among them any strict regard for the rights of others. He had a curious obsession, in fact, that in the Bad Lands there were no rights but his; and with that point of view had directed his superintendent, a man named Matthews, to drive fifteen hundred head of cattle over on an unusually fine piece of bottom-land northwestward across the river from the Maltese Cross, which, by all the laws of the range, belonged to the "Roosevelt outfit." Matthews declared that the Marquis intended to hold the bottom permanently for fattening beef-cattle, and to build a cabin there.

"You'll have to move those cattle by daylight," said Merrifield, "or we'll move them for you. You can take your choice."

"I've got my orders from the Marquis to keep the cattle here," answered Matthews. "That's all there is to it. They'll stay here."

It was late at night, but Sylvane and Merrifield rode to Medora taking a neighboring cowboy named Pete Marlow along as witness, "for the Marquis is a hard man to deal with," remarked Merrifield. To Pete it was all the gayest sort of adventure. He confided the object of the nocturnal expedition to the first man he came upon.

The Marquis was not at his home. The boys were told that he might still be at his office, though the time was nearing midnight.

Meanwhile Pete's news had spread. From the base of Graveyard Butte, Jake Hainsley, the superintendent of the coal mine, who dearly loved a fight, came running with a rifle in his hand. "I've got forty men myself," he cried, "and I've Winchesters for every mother's son of 'em, and if you need help you just let me know and we'll back you all right, we will."

The Marquis was in his office in Medora next to the new Company store, working with Van Driesche, his valet and secretary. He asked what the three men wanted of him at that hour in the night. Merrifield explained the situation.

They told him: "We want you to write an order to move those cattle at daylight."

"If I refuse?"

Sylvane and Merrifield had thoroughly discussed the question what they would do in case the Marquis refused. They would take tin pans and stampede the herd. They were under no illusions concerning the probabilities in case they took that means of ridding themselves of the unwelcome herd. There would be shooting, of course.

"Why, Marquis," said Merrifield, "if Matthews don't move those cattle, I guess there's nothing to it but what we'll have to move them ourselves." The Marquis had not lived a year in the Bad Lands without learning something. In a more conciliatory mood he endeavored to find ground for a compromise. But "the boys" were not inclined to compromise with a man who was patently in the wrong. Finally, the Marquis offered them fifteen hundred dollars on the condition that they would allow him to use the piece of bottom-land for three weeks.

It was on its face a munificent offer; but Merrifield and Sylvane knew that the Marquis's "three weeks" might not terminate after twenty-one days. They knew something else. "After we had made our statement," Merrifield explained later, "no matter how much he had offered us we would not have accepted it. We knew there'd be no living with a man like the Marquis if you made statements and then backed down for any price."

Never draw your gun, ran a saying of the frontier, unless you mean to shoot.

"Marquis," said Merrifield, "we've made our statement once for all. If you don't see fit to write that order there won't be any more talk. We will move the cattle ourselves."

The Marquis was courteous and even friendly. "I am sorry you cannot do this for me," he said; but he issued the order. Merrifield and Sylvane themselves carried it to the offending superintendent. Matthews was furious; but he moved the cattle at dawn. The whole affair did not serve to improve the relations between the groups which the killing of Riley Luffsey had originally crystallized. Roosevelt probably remained unaware of the interesting complications that were being woven for him in the hot-hearted frontier community of which he was now a part; for Merrifield and Sylvane, as correspondents, were laconic, not being given to spreading themselves out on paper. His work in the Assembly and the pre-convention campaign for presidential candidates completely absorbed his energies. He was eager that a reform candidate should be named by the Republicans, vigorously opposing both Blaine and Arthur, himself preferring Senator Edmunds of Vermont. He fought hard and up to a certain point successfully, for at the State Republican Convention held in Utica in April he thoroughly trounced the Old Guard, who were seeking to send a delegation to Chicago favorable to Arthur, and was himself elected head of the delegates at large, popularly known as the "Big Four."

He had, meanwhile, made up his mind that, however the dice might fall at the convention, he would henceforth make his home, for a part of the year at least, in the Bad Lands. He had two friends in Maine, backwoodsmen mighty with the axe, and born to the privations of the frontier, whom he decided to take with him if he could. One was "Bill" Sewall, a stalwart viking at the end of his thirties, who had been his guide on frequent occasions when as a boy in college he had sought health and good hunting on the waters of Lake Mattawamkeag; the other was Sewall's nephew, Wilmot Dow. He flung out the suggestion to them, and they rose to it like hungry trout; for they had adventurous spirits.

The Republican National Convention met in Chicago in the first days of June. Roosevelt, supported by his friend Henry Cabot Lodge and a group of civil service reformers that included George William Curtis and Carl Schurz, led the fight for Edmunds. But the convention wanted Blaine, the "Plumed Knight"; and the convention got Blaine.

Roosevelt raged, but refused to follow Curtis and Schurz, who hinted darkly at "bolting the ticket." He took the first train to Dakota, sick at heart, to think things over.[Back to Contents]