Roosevelt in the Bad Lands

XXVII.

The range is empty and the trails are blind,
And I don't seem but half myself to-day.
I wait to hear him ridin' up behind
And feel his knee rub mine the good old way.
He's dead—and what that means no man kin tell.
Some call it "gone before."
Where? I don't know, but, God! I know so well
That he ain't here no more!

Badger Clark

This, then, is the story of Roosevelt in the Bad Lands. What remains is epilogue.

In the autumn of 1887, Roosevelt was again with the Merrifields at Elkhorn and with Sylvane at the Maltese Cross, to assist in the round-up of a train-load of cattle which he subsequently sold at Chicago (again at a loss, for the prices for beef were even lower than the previous year). He went on a brief hunt after antelope in the broken country between the Little Missouri and the Beaver; he fought a raging prairie fire with the split and bleeding carcass of a steer; he went on another hunt late in December with a new friend named Fred Herrig, and was nearly frozen to death in a blizzard, attempting (not without success) to shoot mountain sheep; whereupon, feeling very fit, he returned East to his family and his books.

He was now increasingly busy with his writing, completing that winter a volume of vigorous sketches of the frontier, called "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," beside his "Life of Gouverneur Morris," and a book of "Essays on Practical Politics." In the autumn of 1888, he was again at Elkhorn and again on the chase, this time in the Selkirks in northern Idaho, camping on Kootenai Lake, and from there on foot with a pack on his back, ranging among the high peaks with his old guide John Willis and an Indian named Ammal, who was pigeon-toed and mortally afraid of hobgoblins.

In 1889 he became a member of the Civil Service Commission in Washington, and thereafter he saw the Bad Lands only once a year, fleeing from his desk to the open country every autumn for a touch of the old wild life and a glimpse of the old friends who yet lingered in that forsaken country.

Medora had all the desolation of "a busted cowtown" whose inhabitants, as one cowpuncher remarked in answer to a tenderfoot's inquiry, were "eleven, including the chickens, when they were all in town." All of the wicked men and most of the virtuous ones, who had lent picturesqueness to Medora in the old days, were gone. Sylvane Ferris still lingered as foreman of the cattle which Roosevelt still retained in the Bad Lands, and Joe Ferris still ran his store, officiated as postmaster, and kept a room for Roosevelt on his infrequent visits. Bill Williams shot a man and went to jail, and with him went the glory of his famous saloon. Of his old cronies, Hell-Roaring Bill Jones only remained. He was a man of authority now, for he had been elected sheriff when Joe Morrill moved his lares et penates to Dickinson. His relations with Roosevelt criss-crossed, for, as sheriff, Roosevelt was his deputy, but whenever Roosevelt went on an extended hunting trip, Hell-Roaring Bill Jones was his teamster. He was, incidentally, an extraordinarily efficient teamster. He had certain profane rituals which he repeated on suitable occasions, word for word, but with an emphasis and sincerity that made them sound each time as though he had invented them under the inspiration of the immediate necessity. He had a special torrent of obscenity for his team when they were making a difficult crossing somewhere on the Little Missouri. It was always the same succession of terrifying expletives, and it always had the desired effect. It worked better than a whip.

Meanwhile, the devotion of Bill Jones to Theodore Roosevelt was a matter of common report throughout the countryside, and it was said that he once stayed sober all summer in order to be fit to go on a hunting trip with Roosevelt in the fall.

Sylvane married, like his "partners" going for his bride to New Brunswick, whose supply of delightful young ladies seemed to be inexhaustible. They went to live in a "martin's cage," as they called it, under the bluff at Medora, and there Roosevelt visited them, after Joe moved to Montana and his store passed into other hands. The Langs remained at Yule. After the evil winter, Sir James Pender threw them upon their own resources, and the years that followed were hard. Lang had long recognized the mistake he had made in not accepting Roosevelt's offer that September of 1883, and the matter remained a sore subject for Mrs. Lang, who never ceased regretting the lapse of judgment which had made her otherwise excellent husband miss what she knew, as soon as she met Roosevelt, had been the greatest opportunity which Gregor Lang would ever have placed in his hands. Lang, as county commissioner, became an important factor in the development of the county, and his ranch flourished. Lincoln Lang turned to engineering and became an inventor. He went East to live, but his heart remained among the buttes where he had spent his adventurous boyhood.

Lincoln Lang and William T. Dantz.

Margaret Roberts and "Dutch Wannigan".

The Eatons forsook the punching of cattle, and engaged in "dude" ranching on a grand scale, and the "Eaton Ranch" began to be famous from coast to coast even before they moved to Wolf, Wyoming, in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. Mrs. Cummins drifted away with her family, carrying, no doubt, her discontent with her. Lloyd Roberts disappeared, as though the earth had swallowed him, murdered, it was supposed, in Cheyenne, after he had loaned Bill Williams seven hundred dollars. Mrs. Roberts was not daunted. She kept the little ranch on Sloping Bottom and fed and clothed and educated her five daughters by her own unaided efforts. The Vines, father and son, drifted eastward. Packard and Dantz took to editing newspapers, Packard in Montana, Dantz in Pennsylvania. Edgar Haupt became a preacher, and Herman Haupt a physician. Fisher grew prosperous in the State of Washington; Maunders throve mightily in Dickinson; Wilmot Dow died young; Bill Sewall resumed his life in Maine as a backwoodsman and guide; Foley remained custodian of the deserted de Mores property at Medora; "Redhead" Finnegan was hanged.

Poor "Dutch" Van Zander drank up his last remittance. "There," he cried, "I have blown in a hundred and twenty thousand dollars, but I've given the boys a whale of a good time!" He gave up drinking thereafter and went to work for the "Three Seven" outfit as an ordinary cowhand. He became a good worker, but when the call of gold in Alaska sounded, he responded and was seen no more in his old haunts. A few years later he appeared again for a day, saying that he was on his way to his old home in Holland. A month or two later news filtered into Medora that the brilliant and most lovable Dutch patrician's son had been found, dead by his own hand, in a cemetery in Amsterdam, lying across his mother's grave.

Twice Roosevelt's path crossed Joe Morrill's, and each time there was conflict. Morrill opened a butcher-shop in a town not far from Medora, and it devolved on Roosevelt, as chairman of the Stockmen's Association, to inform him that, unless he changed his manner of acquiring the beef he sold, he would promptly go to jail. The shifty swashbuckler closed his shop, and not long after, Roosevelt, who was at the time serving on the Civil Service Commission in Washington, heard that Morrill was endeavoring to have himself made marshal of one of the Northwestern States. The "reference" Roosevelt gave him on that occasion was effective. Morrill was not appointed; and what happened to him thereafter is lost to history.

In 1890, Roosevelt was at the ranch at Elkhorn with Mrs. Roosevelt; a year later he hunted elk with an English friend, R. H. M. Ferguson, at Two Ocean Pass in the Shoshones, in northwestern Wyoming. That autumn the Merrifields moved to the Flathead country in northwestern Montana, and Roosevelt closed the ranch-house. A year later he returned to Elkhorn for a week's hunting. The wild forces of nature had already taken possession. The bunch-grass grew tall in the yard and on the sodded roofs of the stables and sheds; the weather-beaten log walls of the house itself were one in tint with the trunks of the gnarled cottonwoods by which it was shaded. "The ranch-house is in good repair," he wrote to Bill Sewall, "but it is melancholy to see it deserted."

Early the next spring Roosevelt took Archibald D. Russell, R. H. M. Ferguson, and his brother-in-law Douglas Robinson into partnership with him and formed the Elkhorn Stock Company, transferring his equity in the Elkhorn Ranch to the new corporation.[24]

It was at the end of a wagon-trip to the Black Hills, which Roosevelt took with Sylvane and Hell-Roaring Bill Jones in 1893, that Roosevelt met Seth Bullock.

Seth was at that time sheriff in the Black Hills district [wrote Roosevelt in his "Autobiography"], and a man he had wanted—a horse-thief—I finally got, I being at the time deputy sheriff two or three hundred miles to the north. The man went by a nickname which I will call "Crazy Steve." It was some time after "Steve's" capture that I went down to Deadwood on business, Sylvane Ferris and I on horseback, while Bill Jones drove the wagon. At a little town, Spearfish, I think, after crossing the last eighty or ninety miles of gumbo prairie, we met Seth Bullock. We had had rather a rough trip, and had lain out for a fortnight, so I suppose we looked somewhat unkempt. Seth received us with rather distant courtesy at first, but unbent when he found out who we were, remarking, "You see, by your looks I thought you were some kind of a tin-horn gambling outfit, and that I might have to keep an eye on you!" He then inquired after the capture of "Steve"—with a little of the air of one sportsman when another has shot a quail that either might have claimed—"My bird, I believe?"

In a letter to John Hay, Roosevelt described that meeting.

When somebody asked Seth Bullock to meet us, he at first expressed disinclination. Then he was told that I was the Civil Service Commissioner, upon which he remarked genially, "Well, anything civil goes with me," and strolled over to be introduced.

During these years, while Roosevelt was working on the Civil Service Commission, fighting the spoilsmen and rousing the conscience of the American people with a new ideal of public service, even while he stimulated their national pride with a fresh expression of the American spirit, his old rival, the Marquis de Mores, was noticeably stirring the Old World. A year in India had been succeeded by a long stay in China, where the Marquis had conceived a scheme to secure concessions for France, which somehow went the way of all the Marquis's schemes; nothing came of it.

He returned to France. The French people were in a restless, unhappy state. More than once, war with Germany seemed imminent. The Government was shot through with intrigue and corruption. The Marquis, with all the faults of his temperament, was an idealist, with a noble vision for his country. He saw that it had fallen into the hands of base, self-seeking men, and he grasped at every means that presented itself to overthrow the powers that seemed to him to be corrupting and enfeebling France. He became an enthusiastic follower of Boulanger; when Boulanger fell, he became a violent anti-Semite, and shortly after, a radical Socialist. Meanwhile, he fought one duel after another, on one occasion killing his man. More than once he came into conflict with the law, and once was imprisoned for three months, accused of inciting the populace to violence against the army. There were rumors of plots with the royalists and plots with the anarchists. It did not apparently seem of particular importance to the Marquis by whom the Government was overthrown, so it was overthrown. His plans did not prosper. Anti-Semitism grew beyond his control. The Dreyfus affair broke, and set the very foundations of France quivering. What the Marquis's part in it was, is obscure, but it was said that he was deeply involved.

His attention was turning in another direction. France and England were struggling for the possession of Central Africa, and the Marquis conceived the grandiose dream of uniting all the Mohammedans of the world against England. He went to Tunis in the spring of 1896, commissioned, it was said, by the French Government to lead an expedition into the Soudan to incite the Arabs to resist the English advance in Africa.

Whether the Marquis actually had the support of the Government is more than dubious. When he set out on his expedition to the wild tribes of the Tunisian desert, he set out practically alone. At the last moment, the Marquis changed his Arab escort for a number of Touaregs, who offered him their services. They were a wild, untrustworthy race, and men who knew the country pleaded with him not to trust himself to them. But the Marquis, who had prided himself on his judgment in Little Missouri in 1883, had not changed his spots in 1896. His camel-drivers led him into an ambush near the well of El Ouatia. He carried himself like the game fighting man that he had always been, and there was a ring of dead men around him when he himself finally succumbed.

Nineteen days later an Arab official, sent out by the French military commander of the district, found his body riddled with wounds and buried in the sand near a clump of bushes close to where he had fallen. His funeral in Paris was a public event.

It was a tragic but a fitting close to a dreamer's romantic career. But the end was not yet, and the romance connected with the Marquis de Mores was not yet complete. The investigation into his death which the French Government ordered was abandoned without explanation. The Marquis's widow protested, accusing the Government of complicity in her husband's death, and charging that those who had murdered the Marquis were native agents of the French authorities and had been acting under orders.

The Marquise herself went to Tunis, determined that the assassins of her husband should be brought to justice. There is a ring in her proclamation to the Arabs which might well have made the stripped bones of the Marquis stir in their leaden coffin.

In behalf of the illustrious, distinguished, and noble lady, the Marquise of Mores, wife of the deceased object of God's pity, the Marquis of Mores, who was betrayed and murdered at El Ouatia, in the country of Ghadames, salutations, penitence, and the benediction of God!

Let it herewith be known to all faithful ones that I place myself in the hands of God and of you, because I know you to be manly, energetic, and courageous. I appeal to you to help me avenge the death of my husband by punishing his assassins. I am a woman. Vengeance cannot be wreaked by my own hand. For this reason I inform you, and swear to you, by the one Almighty God, that to whosoever shall capture and deliver to the authorities at El-Qued, at Ouargia, or at El-Goleah one of my husband's assassins I will give 1000 douros ($750), 2000 douros for two assassins, 3000 douros for three assassins. As to the principal assassins, Bechaoui and Sheik Ben Abdel Kader, I will give 2000 douros for each of them. And now, understand, make yourselves ready, and may God give you success.

Marquise de Mores

The murderers were captured, convicted, and executed. Then the little American woman, with her hair of Titian red, whom the cowboys of Little Missouri had christened "The Queen of the West," quietly withdrew from the public gaze; and the curtain fell on a great romantic drama.

Theodore Roosevelt was just coming into national eminence as Police Commissioner of New York City when the Marquis de Mores died beside the well of El Ouatia. As a member of the Civil Service Commission in Washington he had caught the imagination of the American people, and a growing number of patriotic men and women, scattered over the country, began to look upon him as the leader they had been longing for. He came to Medora no more for the round-up or the chase.

In May, 1897, Roosevelt became Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Less than a year later the Spanish War broke out. The dream he had dreamed in 1886 of a regiment recruited from the wild horsemen of the plains became a reality. From the Canadian border to the Rio Grande, the men he had lived and worked with on the round-up, and thousands of others whose imaginations had been seized by the stories of his courage and endurance, which had passed from mouth to mouth and from camp-fire to camp-fire through the cattle country, offered their services. The Rough Riders were organized, and what they accomplished is history. There were unquestionably more weighty reasons why he should become Governor of New York State than that he had been the successful leader of an aggregation of untamed gunmen in Cuba. But it was that fact in his career which caught the fancy of the voters, and by a narrow margin elected him a Republican Governor of his State in what, as everybody knew, was a "Democratic year."

The men and women of the Bad Lands, scattered far and wide over the Northwest, watched his progress with a glowing feeling in their hearts that was akin to the pride that a father feels at the greatness of a son whom he himself has guided in the way that he should go. There was none of them but felt that he had had a personal share in the making of this man who was beginning to loom larger and larger on the national horizon. They had been his mentors, and inasmuch as they had shown him how to tighten a saddle cinch or quiet a restless herd, they felt that they had had a part in the building of his character. They had a great pride, moreover, in the bit of country where they had spent their ardent youth, and they felt assured that the experiences which had thrilled and deepened them, had thrilled and deepened him also. In their hearts they felt that they knew something of what had made him—"the smell, the singing prairies, the spirit that thrilled the senses there, the intoxicating exhilaration, the awful silences, the mysterious hazes, the entrancing sunsets, the great storms and blizzards, the quiet, enduring people, the great, unnoted tragedies, the cheer, the humor, the hospitality, the lure of fortunes at the end of rainbows"—all those things they felt had joined to build America's great new leader; and they, who had experienced these things with him, felt that they were forever closer to him than his other countrymen could ever possibly be.

Roosevelt was nominated for the vice-presidency in June, 1900, and in July he began a campaign tour over the country which eclipsed even Bryan's prodigious journeyings of 1896. Early in September he came to Dakota.

Joe Ferris was the first to greet him after he crossed the border at a way-station at six o'clock in the morning.[25]

"Joe, old boy," cried Roosevelt exuberantly, "will you ever forget the first time we met?"

Joe admitted that he would not.

"You nearly murdered me. It seemed as if all the ill-luck in the world pursued us."

Joe grinned.

"Do you remember too, Joe," exclaimed Roosevelt, "how I swam the swollen stream and you stood on the bank and kept your eyes on me? The stream was very badly flooded when I came to it," said the Governor, turning to the group that had gathered about them. "I forced my horse into it and we swam for the other bank. Joe was very much distressed for fear we would not get across."

"I wouldn't have taken that swim for all of Dakota," said Joe.

At Dickinson, a gray-faced, lean man pushed his way through the crowd. It was Maunders, who had prospered, in spite of his evil ways. "Why," exclaimed Roosevelt, "it does me good to see you. You remember when I needed a hammer so badly and you loaned it to me? You loaned me a rifle also. I never shall forget how badly I needed that hammer just then."

Maunders, who had always been affable, grinned with delight and joined the Governor's party.

The train moved on to Medora. Roosevelt and Joe Ferris sat by the window, and it seemed that every twisted crag and butte reminded them of the days when they had ridden over that wild country together.

As the train neared Medora, Roosevelt was palpably moved. "The romance of my life began here," he said.

There were forty or fifty people at the station in Medora. They hung back bashfully, but he was among them in an instant.

"Why, this is Mrs. Roberts!" he exclaimed. "You have not changed a bit, have you?" She drew his attention to George Myers, who was all smiles.

"My, my, George Myers!" exclaimed Roosevelt, "I did not even hope to see you." Roosevelt turned to the crowd. "George used to cook for me," he said, with a wry expression.

"Do you remember the time I made green biscuits for you?" asked George, with a grin.

"I do," said Roosevelt emphatically, "I do, George. And I remember the time you fried the beans with rosin instead of lard. The best proof in the world, George, that I have a good constitution is that I ate your cooking and survived."

"Well, now, Governor," exclaimed George, "I was thinking it would be a good idea to get that man Bryan up here and see what that kind of biscuit would do for him."

Roosevelt looked about him, where the familiar buttes stretched gray and bleak in every direction. "It does not seem right," he exclaimed, "that I should come here and not stay."

Some one brought a bronco for Roosevelt. A minute later he was galloping eastward toward the trail leading up to the bluff that rose a thousand feet behind Medora. "Over there is Square Butte," he cried eagerly, "and over there is Sentinel Butte. My ranch was at Chimney Butte. Just this side of it is the trail where Custer marched westward to the Yellowstone and the Rosebud to his death. There is the church especially erected for the use of the wife of the Marquis de Mores. His old house is beyond. You can see it." For a minute he sat silent. "Looking back to my old days here," he said, "I can paraphrase Kipling and say, 'Whatever may happen, I can thank God I have lived and toiled with men.'"

Roosevelt was inaugurated as Vice-President in March, 1901. Six months later he was President of the United States. From a venturesome cowpuncher who made his way shyly into the White House, the glad tidings were spread to the Bad Lands and through the whole Northwest that Roosevelt was the same Roosevelt, and that everybody had better take a trip to Washington as soon as he could, for orders had gone forth that "the cowboy bunch can come in whenever they want to."

Occasionally one or the other had difficulty in getting past the guards. It took Sylvane two days, once, to convince the doorkeeper that the President wanted to see him. Roosevelt was indignant. "The next time they don't let you in, Sylvane," he exclaimed, "you just shoot through the windows."

No one shot through the windows. It was never necessary. The cowboys dined at the President's table with Cabinet ministers and ambassadors.

"Remember, Jim, that if you shot at the feet of the British Ambassador to make him dance," Roosevelt whispered to one of his cowboy guests on one occasion, "it would be likely to cause international complications."

"Why, Colonel, I shouldn't think of it," exclaimed Jim. "I shouldn't think of it!"

The cowpunchers were the only ones who refused to take altogether seriously the tradition that an invitation to the White House was equivalent to a command. John Willis on one occasion came down from Montana to discuss reclamation with the President, and Roosevelt asked him to take dinner at the White House that night. Willis murmured that he did not have a dress-suit, and it would not do to dine with the President of the United States "unless he were togged out proper."

"Oh, that needn't bother you," exclaimed the President.

"It makes a heap of difference," said Willis. "I may not always do the right thing, but I know what's proper."

"You would be just as welcome at my table if you came in buckskin trousers."

"I know that's true," Willis replied, "but I guess I will have to side-step this trip. If you are taking any horseback rides out on the trail here to-morrow, I'm your man, but I guess I will get my grub downtown at the hashery where I'm bunking."

That was all there was to it. John Willis could not be persuaded.

Once more, for the last time, Roosevelt in 1903 went back to Medora. As they came into the Bad Lands, he stood on the rear platform of his car, gazing wistfully over the forbidding-looking landscape.

"I know all this country like a book," he said to John Burroughs, who was beside him. "I have ridden over it and hunted in it and tramped over it in all seasons and weather, and it looks like home to me."

As soon as I got west of the Missouri I came into my own former stamping-ground [he wrote to John Hay, describing that visit]. At every station there was somebody who remembered my riding in there when the Little Missouri round-up went down to the Indian reservation and then worked north across the Cannon Ball and up Knife and Green Rivers; or who had been an interested and possibly malevolent spectator when I had ridden east with other representatives of the cowmen to hold a solemn council with the leading grangers on the vexed subject of mavericks; or who had been hired as a train-hand when I had been taking a load of cattle to Chicago, and who remembered well how he and I at the stoppages had run frantically down the line of the cars and with our poles jabbed the unfortunate cattle who had lain down until they again stood up, and thereby gave themselves a chance for their lives; and who remembered how when the train started we had to clamber hurriedly aboard and make our way back to the caboose along the tops of the cattle cars.

At Mandan two of my old cow-hands, Sylvane and Joe Ferris, joined me. At Dickinson all of the older people had known me and the whole town turned out with wild and not entirely sober enthusiasm. It was difficult to make them much of a speech, as there were dozens of men each earnestly desirous of recalling to my mind some special incident. One man, how he helped me bring in my cattle to ship, and how a blue roan steer broke away leading a bunch which it took him and me three hours to round up and bring back; another, how seventeen years before I had come in a freight train from Medora to deliver the Fourth of July oration; another, a gray-eyed individual named [Maunders], who during my early years at Medora had shot and killed an equally objectionable individual, reminded me how, just twenty years before, when I was on my first buffalo hunt, he loaned me the hammer off his Sharp's rifle to replace the broken hammer of mine; another recalled the time when he and I worked on the round-up as partners, going with the Little Missouri "outfit" from the head of the Box Alder to the mouth of the Big Beaver, and then striking over to represent the Little Missouri brands on the Yellowstone round-up; yet another recalled the time when I, as deputy sheriff of Billings County, had brought in three cattle-thieves named Red Finnegan, Dutch Chris, and the half-breed to his keeping, he being then sheriff in Dickinson, etc., etc., etc.

At Medora, which we reached after dark, the entire population of the Bad Lands down to the smallest baby had gathered to meet me. This was formerly my home station. The older men and women I knew well; the younger ones had been wild tow-headed children when I lived and worked along the Little Missouri. I had spent nights in their ranches. I still remembered meals which the women had given me when I had come from some hard expedition, half famished and sharp-set as a wolf. I had killed buffalo and elk, deer and antelope with some of the men. With others I had worked on the trail, on the calf round-up, on the beef round-up. We had been together on occasions which we still remembered when some bold rider met his death in trying to stop a stampede, in riding a mean horse, or in the quicksands of some swollen river which he sought to swim. They all felt I was their man, their old friend; and even if they had been hostile to me in the old days, when we were divided by the sinister bickering and jealousies and hatreds of all frontier communities, they now firmly believed they had always been my staunch friends and admirers. They had all gathered in the town hall, which was draped for a dance—young children, babies, everybody being present. I shook hands with them all, and almost each one had some memory of special association with me he or she wished to discuss. I only regretted that I could not spend three hours with them.

Hell-Roaring Bill Jones was supposed to be at Gardiner, Wyoming, and Roosevelt, arriving there a few days later for a camping trip through the Yellowstone, asked eagerly for his old friend. Bill Jones was down in the world. He had had to give up his work as sheriff in Medora because he began to lose his nerve and would break down and weep like a child when he was called upon to make an arrest. He was driving a team in Gardiner outside the Park, and during the days preceding Roosevelt's arrival took so many drinks while he was telling of his intimacy with the man who had become President of the United States, that he had to be carried into the sagebrush before Roosevelt actually arrived. Roosevelt left word to keep Bill Jones sober against his return, and when Roosevelt emerged from the Park, they met for the last time. It was a sad interview, for what was left of Hell-Roaring Bill Jones was only a sodden, evil-looking shell.

Joe And Sylvane Ferris And Merrifield.
Overlooking the site of the Maltese Cross Ranch (1919).

Rough Riders Hotel,
1919 Known as the "Metropolitan" during the Eighties.

"Bill Jones did not live long after that," said Howard Eaton. "The last I saw of him was two or three miles from Old Faithful. He said, 'I'm going to the trees.' We went out to look for him, but couldn't find a trace. This was in March. He wandered way up one of those ravines and the supposition is that he froze to death. Some fellow found him up there in June, lying at the edge of a creek. The coyotes had carried off one of his arms, and they planted him right there. And that was the end of old Bill Jones."

Years passed, and bitter days came to Roosevelt, but though other friends failed him, the men of the Bad Lands remained faithful.

In 1912, four of them were delegates to the Progressive Convention—Sylvane Ferris from North Dakota, where he was president of a bank; Joe Ferris, George Myers, and Merrifield from Montana. Even "Dutch Wannigan," living as a hermit in the wilderness forty miles west of Lake MacDonald, became an ardent Progressive. "I can't afford to go to Helena," he wrote in answer to an appeal from Merrifield to attend the State Progressive Convention, "but if you think there'll be a row, I'll try to make it." Packard and Dantz gave their pens to the cause.

George Myers was the last of the "cowboy bunch" to see him. They met in Billings in October, 1918. The town was filled with the crowds who had come from near and far to see the man who, everybody said, was sure again to be President of the United States.

"Have you got a room, George?" cried Roosevelt, as they met.

Myers shook his head cheerfully.

"Share mine with me," said Roosevelt, "and we'll talk about old times." Three months later to a day, the man who had been Little Missouri's "four-eyed tenderfoot" was dead.

The Bad Lands are still the Bad Lands, except that the unfenced prairies are fenced now and on each bit of parched bottom-land a "nester" has his cabin and is struggling, generally in vain, to dig a living out of the soil in a region which God never made for farming. The treacherous Little Missouri is treacherous still; here and there a burning mine still sends a tenuous wisp toward the blue sky; the buttes have lost none of their wild magnificence; and dawn and dusk, casting long shadows across the coulees, reveal the old heart-rending loveliness.

Medora sleeps through the years and dreams of other days. Schuyler Lebo, who was shot by the Indians, delivers the mail; "Nitch" Kendley operates the pump for the water-tank at the railroad station; a nonogenarian called "Frenchy," who hunted with Roosevelt and has lost his wits, plays cribbage all day long at the "Rough Riders Hotel." These three are all that remain of the gay aggregation that made life a revel at the "depot" and at Bill Williams's saloon. And yet, even in its desolation, as the cook of the "Rough Riders Hotel" remarked, "There's something fascinating about the blinkety-blank place. I don't know why I stay here, but I do."

The ranch-house of the Maltese Cross has been moved to Bismarck, where it stands, wind-beaten and neglected, in the shadow of the capitol. The Elkhorn ranch-house is gone, used for lumber, but the great foundation stones that Bill Sewall and Will Dow laid under it remain, and the row of cottonwoods that shaded it still stand, without a gap. Near by are the ruins of the shack which Maunders claimed and Roosevelt held, in spite of threats. The river flows silently beneath a grassy bank. There is no lovelier spot in the Bad Lands.[Back to Contents]

THE END

APPENDIX.

ROOSEVELT'S FIRST CONTRACT WITH SYLVANE FERRIS AND A. W. MERRIFIELD.

(A copy of this contract, in Mr. Roosevelt's handwriting, is in the ranch-ledger, kept, somewhat fitfully, by Mr. Roosevelt and his foremen. This ledger, which contains also the minutes of the first meeting of the Little Missouri River Stockmen's Association, held in Medora on December 19, 1884, is now in the possession of Mr. Joseph A. Ferris, of Terry, Montana.)

We the undersigned, Theodore Roosevelt, party of the first part, and William Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris, parties of the second part, do agree and contract as follows:

1. The party of the first part, Theodore Roosevelt, agrees and contracts with the parties of the second part, William Merrifield and Sylvanus Ferris, to put in on their ranch on the Little Missouri River, Dakota, four hundred head of cattle or thereabouts, the cost not to exceed twelve thousand dollars ($12,000) and the parties of the second part do agree to take charge of said cattle for the party of the first part; said cattle to be thus placed and taken charge of for the term of seven years.

2. At the end of said seven years the equivalent in value of said four hundred head of cattle, as originally put in, is to be returned to the party of the first part; provided that the parties of the second part are to have the privilege of paying off at any time or times prior to the expiration of said seven years, in sums of not less than one thousand dollars at any one time, said claim of the party of the first part to the equivalent in value of the original herd of cattle.

3. Any additional cattle put into the herd by said party of the first part are to be put in on the same terms as the original herd, and are to remain in the herd for as much of the seven years mentioned in this contract as is unexpired at the time they are put in. 4. One half of the increase of value of said herd is to belong to the party of the first part and one-half to the parties of the second part.

5. The parties of the second part are to have the power from time to time to make such sales as they in the exercise of their best judgment shall deem wisest, provided that no sale shall be made sufficient in amount to decrease the herd below its original value except by the consent of all parties in writing.

6. All monies obtained by such sales of cattle from the herd shall be divided equally between said party of the first part and said parties of the second part.

7. During the continuance of said contract the parties of the second part agree not to take charge of nor have interest in any other stock than that of said party of the first part without his consent in writing.

8. Said parties of the second part are to keep accurate and complete accounts in writing of the purchases and sales of stock and of the expenditures of all monies entrusted to their care, which accounts are to be submitted to said party of the first part whenever he may desire it.

9. Any taxes upon said cattle are to be paid half by the party of the first part, half by the parties of the second part.

10. Said cattle are to be branded with the maltese cross on the left hip and are to have the cut dewlap, these brands to be the property of the owner of the cattle; the vent mark to be the letter R under the maltese cross.

Witness:	Signed:
Roger S. Kennedy	Theodore Roosevelt (party of the first part)
M. Hanley	William Merrifield
	Sylvanus Ferris (parties of the second part)

St. Paul, Minn., September 27th, 1883.[Back to Contents]

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