She was eighty-two. She spent hours looking at picture books, bothering no one, or went out gathering flowers, “a tiny withered figure in a garden hat,” as one writer described her. On occasion she took long walks beside the river, an Irish nurse generally keeping her company. Sometimes, Mark Twain would recall, she “would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes.”
And every now and then, during moments of astonishing clarity, she would talk again about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book that had just “come” to her in visions. Once, years earlier, when she was having trouble writing, she had said: “If there had been a grand preparatory blast of trumpets or had it been announced that Mrs. Stowe would do this or that, I think it likely I could not have written; but nobody expected anything…and so I wrote freely.”
She died near midnight on July 1, 1896.
II
THE REAL WEST
CHAPTER FOUR
Glory Days in Medora
PART OF what is enshrined in our collective memory as the “real West” had its origins in a little town in the Badlands of North Dakota—a place called Medora, which by all rights ought to be as celebrated as Dodge City or Tombstone. And the fact that Medora was founded by a “crazy Frenchman” only serves to make it quite as authentic a bit of Western Americana as does the fact that young Theodore Roosevelt once rode high, wide, and handsome down the main street. It’s the “Heart of Rough Rider Country” the truck drivers read as they roar by on 1-94, resplendent in their $150 Tony Lama boots.
The setting is best seen from Graveyard Butte, out on the windy point on the west side of the river, where they buried Riley Luffsey. The river and the railroad and the little town are spread below. There is a steep gray cliff behind the town that turns pink in the late afternoon light, and in front of town, in a grassy picnic ground, a brick smokestack, prominent as the point on a sundial, marks the spot where the packing plant stood.
The château, as everyone in Medora still calls it, is nearer at hand, on a bare, high bluff this side of the river, just back from the railroad bridge. Except for the big box elder beside the back door, the house looks no different today from the way it does in the old photographs.
Whether Theodore Roosevelt ever stood here, I can’t say. But his friends the Langs did—it was they who “planted Riley” the day after the shooting—and so doubtless did the Marquis de Mores, if only to enjoy the panorama, nearly all of which he owned.
The view has suffered scarcely at all in the intervening years. The light on the landscape is no less extraordinary, the immeasurable North Dakota sky is something to take your breath away. In early fall the cottonwoods are a blaze of gold beside the mudbrown river, and with the disappearance of the summer tourist traffic, Medora might still be the end of the world.
Come winter, it is the end of the world. Only about one hundred and thirty people, including the staff of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and their families, hang on in the town itself, while on outlying ranches, as snowbanks grow and temperatures drop to 20 below and worse, the isolation and hardships of daily life are compounded a hundredfold.
Winter is what ended the cowboy dream for Roosevelt, as for so many others along the Little Missouri River. When the thaw came in the spring of 1887, the carcasses of dead cattle surged downstream past Medora like cordwood. But I am ahead of my story, and it is the story, the odd little history that goes with the place, that makes it something considerably more than just scenery. Harold Schafer, who owns the Badlands Motel, the Rough Riders Hotel, and much else in Medora, likes to tell visitors that the charm of the Badlands is their scaled-down grandeur. “These aren’t faraway mountains you can’t get to, that you can’t feel under your own feet,” he says, pointing to the surrounding hills. “This is scenery you can reach out and touch.” And then he adds, “Teddy’s here, too, of course…and so is the Marquis.”
The beginning was in 1883, when the cattle boom had hit its peak on the Great Plains. The Northern Pacific had also pushed on through the Badlands by then, and this coming of the railroad coincided with the discovery by the Texans and the Eastern and European money people that the Badlands themselves were not all the name implied. To French-Canadian fur trappers penetrating the area a hundred years before, it had been les mauvaises terres à traverser—bad lands to travel across. It is as if the rolling prairie land has suddenly given way to a weird otherworld of bizarrely shaped cliffs and hummocks and tablelands, these sectioned off every which way by countless little ravines and draws and by the broad, looping valley of the Little Missouri, which, unlike the big Missouri, flows north and in summer is not much more than a good-size stream.
Extending along the Little Missouri for nearly two hundred miles, the area is a kind of Grand Canyon in miniature, the work of millions of years of erosion on ancient, preglacial sediments. Stratified layers of clay, clays as pale as beach sand, are juxtaposed against brick-red bands of scoria or sinuous, dark seams of lignite. Some formations have the overpowering presence of ancient ruins, of things remembered from unpleasant dreams. The leader of an early military expedition against the Sioux described the landscape as hell with the fires out. George Armstrong Custer, who spent several days snowbound in the Badlands on his way to the Little Bighorn in 1876, called it worthless country.
The cattlemen knew differently. Unlike the other Badlands to the south (those of present-day South Dakota, which are geologically quite different), these of the uppermost reaches of what was then the Dakota Territory were green along the river bottoms and green above, on the tops of the tablelands. It was “wondrous country” for grass, wrote one veteran cattleman, remembering that summer of 1883. There was “grass and more grass” in the bottomlands and up along sweeping valleys: little bluestem grass, “good as corn for fattening,” and curly buffalo grass, “making unexcelled winter feed.” Veteran cattlemen and greenhorn money people alike were “dazzled by the prospects.” The grass was all free for the taking; there was water; and the very outlandishness of the terrain promised shelter from winter storms. Possibly fifty thousand cattle were driven into the Little Missouri basin that summer alone.
The Texas outfits included the big Berry-Boice Cattle Company (the “Three-Sevens” brand) and the Continental Land and Cattle Company (the “Hashknife”). The smaller ranchers were nearly all from the East or from Canada or Europe, young men primed on such newly published, authoritative works as The Beef Bonanza; or How to Get Rich on the Plains.
The main attraction, however—the man of the hour—was one Antoine Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Mores, recently of the French cavalry, who planned, he said, not just to raise cattle but to found an enterprise unlike any in the West. “It takes me only a few seconds to understand a situation that other men have to puzzle over for hours,” declared this altogether humorless young aristocrat in his nearly perfect English. Roosevelt’s arrival on the scene, several months later, was by contrast a minor occurrence.
De Mores was Roosevelt’s age—twenty-five—and like Roosevelt he was a passionate lover of the hunt and the kill and of the great outdoors. But beyond that, the two had little in common. About six feet tall, spare and wonderfully fit, the Marquis was inordinately handsome, with black eyes and a tremendous black mustache that he kept waxed to perfection. It was the handsomeness of a Victorian stage villain, to judge by the few photographs we have. There is something vaguely unpleasant in the face, not arrogance only, something more threatening than that—but possibly I am influenced by the knowledge of what he became later in life.
Included with his baggage as he got off the train at the Badlands was a silver-headed bamboo walking stick filled with ten pounds of lead—to exercise his dueling arm. One was supposed to hold the stick straight out at arm’s length for several slow counts, a trick I myself have tried unsuccessfully at the château, where the stick still stands in a corner of his bedroom.
In duels
in France the Marquis had already killed two men, and on his forays along the Little Missouri he looked like a mounted arsenal—weighted down as he was with two huge Colt revolvers, two cartridge belts, a heavy-caliber French rifle cradled in one arm, a bowie knife strapped to one leg. A Roman Catholic of vigorous piety, a royalist, and an anti-Semite, the Marquis liked to tell his new neighbors of his aspirations to the French throne and how the fortunes he would make in the Badlands were to be applied to that specific purpose.
His plan was to revolutionize the beef industry by butchering cattle on the range, there in the Badlands beside the railroad, and thus eliminate the whole costly process of shipping live animals all the way to Chicago. That dressed meat could be shipped almost any distance in the new refrigerator cars without spoilage had already been demonstrated. So why not put the packing plant where the cattle were? It would do away with the Chicago middlemen, which would mean lower prices for the consumer, which in turn would produce an ever-greater demand for beef.
On April Fools’ Day, 1883, the Marquis cracked a bottle of champagne over a tent peg to found Medora, which was to be the center of his operations. He had picked the eastern side of the river for his site. The name Medora was in honor of his American wife, the former Medora von Hoffman, whose father, a Wall Street banker, had provided her with an income of about $90,000 a year (which would be roughly a million in present-day dollars). This plus his own family backing gave the Marquis, as he said, little worry over finances. He would spend whatever was needed. He himself would be president and general manager of the new Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, while his father-in-law, Louis von Hoffman, was listed as treasurer.
The young Frenchman was suddenly everywhere at once, seeing to plans, hiring carpenters, masons, ordering equipment for the packing plant, issuing statements to reporters. He bought up all the land he could lay his hands on, twenty-one thousand acres before he was through. He bought cattle; he brought in twelve thousand sheep. He announced plans to raise cabbages, these to be fertilized with offal from the packing plant and shipped east in his refrigerator cars.
There was nothing slack about his imagination. Another idea was to produce pottery from Badlands clays. Yet another was to ship Columbia River salmon from Portland to New York (at a profit of $1,000 a carload, he figured). As for living quarters, he had originally intended to make do with a tent, pending completion of his own Château de Mores, on the bluff across the river, and the arrival of Madame de Mores. But finding tent life a bit more inconvenient than he expected, he had a private railroad car brought in and placed on a siding. “I like this country,” he wrote to his wife, “for there is room to move about without stepping on the feet of others.”
Yet since arriving, he had done little else but step on feet and sensibilities. The West, for all its aura of freedom, its apparent absence of rules and regulations, was a place—an economy, a way of life—founded on very definite rules and regulations, most of them unwritten. If there was nothing illegal or even illogical about bringing in sheep or buying up land in country where nobody else owned any or believed in owning any, it was all contrary to local tradition and thus, by the prevailing ethic, highly dangerous. Worst of all, the Marquis began fencing his land, and when the fences were promptly cut, as he had been warned they would be, he as quickly replaced them. When three drunken cowboys named O’Donnell, Wannegan, and Luffsey shot up the town and vowed to kill him on sight, he prudently left town for nearby Mandan to ask the territorial justice of the peace what he ought to do. “Why, shoot!” he was told.
So the next time the three cowboys went on a rampage, the Marquis and his men were waiting for them by a bend in the river outside of town. It may have been an ambush, pure and simple—cold-blooded murder, as the Langs insisted—or the Marquis may have been acting in self-defense, as he said. Either way, Riley Luffsey was dead, one slug in the neck, another in the chest.
There were two formal hearings at Mandan, during which witnesses had free run of the saloons, and as things wound to a close, the prosecuting attorney let fly with a scathing burst of frontier oratory, a speech so offensive to the Marquis that he pulled a revolver on the attorney that night at the hotel, aimed, fired, and would have had another killing to answer for had not a bystander struck his arm.
The outcome was an acquittal, and so back to Medora the young Frenchman went, to resume his business in the manner of a man who considered the issue closed and who assumed others did too. Probably he never knew how close he came to being lynched—which is how things stood in early September, when Roosevelt arrived.
Roosevelt got off the train about three in the morning, when it was still cold and dark. He was alone and he looked very little like the man he was to become. At most he weighed 135 pounds, “a little feller” with a wispy mustache and large, metal-rimmed eyeglasses. That he was the classic child of privilege, the very essence of the era’s gilded youth by all appearances, escaped no one once day came and he made his presence known. There was something faintly comic about him. He talked in a thin, piping voice and with the swallowed broad a’s of an upper-class New Yorker. Later, in an effort to head off some stray calves, he would immortalize himself along the Little Missouri by calling out to one of his cowboys, “Hasten forward quickly there!”
He had come, he said, to shoot a buffalo while there were still one or two left to shoot. He had also come for his health, but of this he said nothing. His vocation was politics. He was an assemblyman from New York’s safely Republican Twenty-first District.
He put up at the Langs’ ranch south of town, and in a matter of days—having talked to the Langs, having talked to Howard Eaton and a couple of young Canadians named Ferris and Merrifield—he decided to join forces with the Canadians, whose rude cabin, also south of town, was known as the Chimney Butte or, alternatively, the Maltese Cross ranch. What this meant for the moment was money only. He gave Ferris and Merrifield a check for $14,000 to buy some 450 head of cattle, which represented a small start (the Marquis was running something over three thousand head by then), but the direct, trusting manner in which he did it made an impression. He bought no land. Like nearly everybody except the Marquis, he would remain a squatter.
In two weeks Roosevelt was heading home again to West 57th Street and the lovely young wife who was pregnant with their first child. He had killed his buffalo, but only after seven days that had all but killed his guide, Joe Ferris, brother of one of his new partners in the cattle business. The chase had carried them pell-mell over some of the wildest, most difficult terrain in the Badlands. Twice they found a buffalo for Roosevelt to shoot, and each time Roosevelt shot and missed. Exhausted by the pace set by the little Easterner, Ferris kept praying things would get so bad they would have to give up. It rained incessantly, but Roosevelt’s joy was not to be extinguished; every new adversity seemed a refreshment. Awaking one morning to find himself lying in several inches of water, Roosevelt exclaimed, “By Godfrey, but this is fun!” For two days he and Ferris had nothing to subsist on but biscuits and rainwater.
Remembering the expedition a lifetime afterward, Ferris was still incredulous. “You just couldn’t knock him out of sorts…and he had books with him and would read at odd times.” When at last Roosevelt shot his buffalo, just across the Montana line, he broke into a wild facsimile of an Indian war dance and handed Ferris a hundred dollars.
He returned in June a changed man. He would stake his future on the Badlands, he said; he would become a cattle baron. There would be time as well to think and to write and to make himself whole again. For by then he had suffered the worst tragedy of his life. Three and a half months earlier, his wife had died of complications resulting from the birth of their daughter, and his mother—the same day, in the same house—had died of typhoid. He saw his political career leading nowhere. He was plagued by stomach trouble, insomnia, and asthma, the torture of his childhood. Added to that was what he called his “caged wolf” feeling. Craving change, craving release from
everything in the East, everything in his past, the conventions, the confinement, he was bent on a new life in the open air. New clothes, new work, new companions. Had he been able to change his name as well, as so many others did—there were three men named Bill Jones in Medora alone—he might have done that too, one suspects, given his frame of mind.
The very haunted, often foreboding spirit of the Badlands appealed to him powerfully now. The light in his life had gone out forever, he wrote in a tribute to his dead wife. The Badlands, he said, looked like Poe sounds.
Still…something within him refused to be subdued. His depression was serious, but it was also highly sporadic and never, so far as we know, was it immobilizing. He had spent a small fortune on his cowboy getup—big sombrero, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horsehide chaps, cowhide boots, silver belt buckle, fancy tooled-leather belt and holster, custom-engraved Colt revolver, fancy monogrammed silver spurs. The works. He gloried in dressing up and having his picture taken. “You would be amused to see me,” he wrote to his stuffy Boston friend Henry Cabot Lodge. Truth was, he himself was amused—and unabashedly proud. “I shall put on a thousand more cattle and make it my regular business,” he informed his sister Anna. He was in the saddle all day, “having a glorious time here.”
Spring mornings were the best, with the mist on the river. He loved the presence of so many birds and animals, the wild roses, the sweet scent of sage and ground juniper. He went off on long early-morning rides on a fiery little horse called Manitou. The dry air and open space and the speed of the horse made “a man’s blood thrill and leap with sheer buoyant lightheartedness.”
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