David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough,” he declared in one of the most self-revealing lines he ever wrote. Get action! It was the old Roosevelt family cure-all—for illness, grief, self-doubt. Seize the moment! In the agony of an asthmatic childhood, the free and open out-of-doors had meant survival, literally life itself.

  With very few exceptions, the cowboys took to him from the start. They called him Mr. Roosevelt or Theodore, as he wished; or Four-Eyes or Old Four-Eyes out of his hearing. So far as I know, nobody called him Teddy, a name he never cared for.

  He was only an average rider and never much of a roper. He also abhorred foul language and said so, and he did not like to drink. But the cowboys judged him “game to the core.” He ate, lived, worked “the same as any man,” asking no favors. Besides, he was interesting—he had read a lot, he knew a lot. Once, in a hotel bar in present-day Wibaux, Montana, he stood up and in quiet, businesslike fashion flattened an unknown drunken cowboy who, a gun in each hand, had decided to make a laughingstock of him because of his glasses. The man had chosen to stand foolishly close to him and with his heels too close together, Roosevelt later explained.

  He found a beautiful, quiet spot on the Little Missouri some thirty-five miles north of Medora and brought two Maine woodsmen named Sewall and Dow, friends from hunting trips in his college days, to help him establish another ranch, this to be called the Elkhorn. His stake in the Badlands was now up to some $40,000, a fifth of his inheritance.

  Bill Sewall, a big, homespun expounder of common sense, arrived from Maine and after looking things over told Roosevelt it was no country for cattle. Roosevelt told Sewall he didn’t know what he was talking about. In the privacy of a memorable letter to his family back in Maine, Sewall said, “Tell all who wish to know that I think this a good place for a man with plenty of money to make more, but if I had enough money to start here I never would come here.”

  The ranch house Sewall and Dow built is gone now. It was a long, low log cabin with a deep front porch where, in the heat of the day, Roosevelt liked to sit in a rocking chair and read poetry or just gaze at the river and the distant plateaus. But the same line of cottonwoods still shades the spot, and there is not another house or road or sign of civilization anywhere in sight.

  Roosevelt thought he could write there, and it was as a writer, he had concluded, that the world would take him seriously. In his time in the Badlands, along with everything else, he produced magazine articles, a book on ranch life and hunting, a biography of Thomas Hart Benton, and notes for his epic history, The Winning of the West. Most important, he wrote from firsthand experience about the cowboy and the hard realities of the cowboy’s life, and this, with but one or two exceptions, was something no writer had done before. Owen Wister, author of the classic western The Virginian, called him “the pioneer in taking the cowboy seriously”; and indeed, it was Roosevelt, Wister, and the artist Frederic Remington—three Eastern contemporaries of “good background”—who in their efforts to catch the “living breathing end” of the frontier produced what in large measure remains the popular vision of the “real West.”

  For his part, Roosevelt threw a charm over the Badlands in much the way other American writers have over other specific locales. And it was the Badlands cowboy, the rough rider as Roosevelt found him in and around Medora, that he fixed in the public imagination. If he didn’t exactly invent Marlboro Country, he brought it into focus as nobody had before him, and ironically enough, a Badlands location not far from Roosevelt’s Elkhorn ranch site has on occasion served literally as Marlboro Country. The weathered Badlands rancher who can tell you from personal experience what Roosevelt and the others were up against in their time also knows the going rate for commercial modeling.

  To what extent Roosevelt’s faith in his ranching ventures was buoyed by the activities of the Marquis, Roosevelt himself never divulged. But by 1884, when Roosevelt had more than doubled his investment, it was all but impossible not to be impressed. Growing by leaps and bounds, Medora had become one of the wildest cow towns anywhere in the West, the sort of place, as Roosevelt said, where vice and pleasure were considered synonymous. The packing plant was in operation; cattle were actually being slaughtered; dressed Badlands beef was rolling east in the Marquis’s new refrigerator cars. Most important to a young man like Roosevelt, a man with no business experience and some very hardheaded family advisers to face, the big eastern papers, and the New York Times in particular, were now paying respectful attention to the Marquis, the thought being “that the foreigner was not so crazy after all.” The Marquis, said the Times, ran a “wonderful business.”

  The château was completed and Madame de Mores took up residence, which to most of Medora was the surpassing event of the summer. In truth, the château was not much more than an overgrown frame farmhouse. There was nothing very fancy about it inside or out. But it was large—twenty-six rooms—and once the big, square piano arrived from St. Paul and a staff of twenty servants moved in, it became in the minds of the local citizenry as much a château as any on the Loire.

  The Madame played Liszt and Verdi on the big piano. She painted in watercolors. Perched sidesaddle on one of the magnificent horses the Marquis had shipped from the East, her face shielded from the fierce Dakota sun by an oversize black sombrero, she looked no bigger than a child. Her features were delicate, and beneath the hat she had a great abundance of lustrous, dark red hair. On a shooting expedition in the Big Horns in Wyoming, the delicate-appearing Madame shot and killed three bears, including a grizzly. The Marquis boasted that she was a better shot than he—the ultimate compliment—and had a special hunting coach built for her, equipped with folding bunks and kitchen.

  It would be interesting to know Roosevelt’s impressions of her on those occasions when he dined at the château; or when they called on him in New York, for it must also be mentioned here that none of these three, not the Marquis or his Madame or Roosevelt, could ever keep away from New York for more than a few months at a stretch, however fervently or sincerely they espoused life on the frontier. Roosevelt was actually in New York more than half of his famous Badlands years—to be with his infant daughter, Alice, and to keep tabs on the political world he could never willingly abandon, whatever else he felt or said.

  Presumably Roosevelt and the Madame found much in common, but he never said so in writing. In the dining room at the château, her patterned Minton china is set out today as though guests are expected momentarily. The little landscapes she painted hang in the parlor. Her books are there; her sheet music is piled on the piano. Years later, Roosevelt’s sister Anna would say only that “Theodore did not care for the Marquis, but he was sorry for the wife.”

  That there should be an underlying tension between two such men was inevitable. Were they figures in fiction, we would know a confrontation had to come. And so it did. But what is so fascinating is the behavior of the Marquis. It was he, not Roosevelt, who played the deciding card, though not in a way that the whole violent pattern of his life would naturally suggest.

  It happened this way. The summer of 1885, the Marquis was taken to court still another time on the Luffsey murder charge, and again, after another travesty of a trial, he got off. But from the time the issue was revived and splashed across the newspapers east and west, he saw it as a conspiracy by his business enemies, the beef trust, to destroy him. And in this he appears to have been partly right. Convinced also that Roosevelt had had a secret hand in his troubles—which was nonsense—he wrote a letter to Roosevelt asking him just where he stood, a letter Roosevelt took to be a challenge to a duel. Maybe the Marquis meant it as just that, but the whole tone of it suggests otherwise.

  Roosevelt answered that he was emphatically not the Marquis’s enemy, but that if the Marquis was threatening him, then he, Roosevelt, stood “ever ready to hold myself accountable.” Which made it the Marquis’s move.

  There was no duel, however, because the Marquis kept his head and let
the matter drop. Roosevelt was sure he had called the man’s bluff; the Marquis had “backed off,” Roosevelt would boast. Others were equally sure the Marquis had done nothing of the kind. Some were so sure, in fact, that they would insist ever after that no such showdown had ever occurred, that the story was a fiction devised by the Roosevelt cult, and one might be tempted to accept that had the actual letters not survived. The Marquis made nothing of Roosevelt’s response, it seems reasonable to conclude, because he had never challenged him in the first place.

  Had there been a duel—with rifles, pistols, swords (Roosevelt wanted rifles at twelve paces)—almost certainly Roosevelt would have been killed. So if it can be said for the Marquis, as I think it can, that his charismatic presence in the Badlands was partly responsible for Roosevelt’s own continued presence—and thus for what was an immensely important experience for Roosevelt—it can also be said that his almost unaccountably cool head in this instance spared Roosevelt for other things.

  The Marquis’s empire began coming apart a year before the tragic winter of 1886-1887. A stagecoach line he had started proved a failure. His sheep turned out to be the wrong breed for the climate, and more than half died. His powerful father-in-law began questioning expenditures, then withdrew his financial support.

  Yet none of this seemed to faze the young entrepreneur. Like another celebrated Frenchman of the day, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who was then leading a doomed attempt at a Panama canal, the Marquis talked only of success and dazzled reporters with still more innovative schemes to come. He would open his own retail stores in New York and sell his Badlands beef at three cents a pound under the going price. Good beef at a good price for the working man was his dream. Stock in his National Consumers Meat Company was listed at ten dollars a share. His shareholders, he said, were to be the common working people (just as de Lesseps was counting on the common people of France to pay for his canal). The slogan for his bright red stores, three of which actually opened in New York, was “From Ranch to Table.”

  But the stock didn’t sell. Pressures—from the railroad interests, the Chicago packers, the retail butchers—were too strong. Even had the Marquis been a more adroit businessman, it is very unlikely that he could have survived. It is also true that his range-fed beef simply didn’t taste as good as beef fattened in the Chicago yards.

  The packing plant was shut down in the fall of 1886. Nobody knows what the venture had cost, and estimates on the Marquis’s losses vary from $300,000 to $1.5 million. But it is also quite possible that he lost nothing at all, such was the eventual market value of his landholdings.

  He and Madame de Mores were gone before winter came. The château was left exactly as it was, as though they would return any time. Roosevelt, too, had departed by then to run for mayor of New York (unsuccessfully) and to be married again. He was in Italy on his honeymoon when the disaster struck.

  Storm on top of storm, blinding snows, relentless, savage winds, the worst winter on record swept the Great Plains. In the Badlands the temperatures went to 40 below. Children were lost and froze to death within a hundred yards of their own doors. Cattle, desperate for shelter, smashed their heads through ranch house windows. The snow drifted so deep in many places that cattle were buried alive. People locked up in their houses could only wait and hope that elsewhere conditions were not so bad. A few who couldn’t wait blew their brains out.

  The losses, when they were tallied up in March, were beyond anybody’s imagining. Not a rancher along the Little Missouri had come through with more than half his herd. The average loss was about 75 percent. Roosevelt, when he finally returned to survey the damage, called it a “perfect smashup.” He rode for three days without seeing a live steer.

  He kept coming back from year to year but never again in the same spirit, and he seldom stayed more than a week or so. His cowboy time was over. In the mid-nineties, he sold off what little he had left in the Badlands, added up his losses, and arrived at a net figure of $23,556.68, or roughly a quarter of a million dollars in present-day money.

  But by every measure other than financial the venture had been a huge success. Roosevelt’s physical transformation had been astonishing. He came home “bronzed,” “thirty pounds heavier,” “rugged,” as the newspapers noted. “When he got back to the world again,” wrote Bill Sewall, “he was as husky as almost any man I have ever seen…clear bone, muscle and grit.”

  In Medora, Roosevelt had his first direct experience with real democracy, as one Eastern friend observed. In the view of his family he never would have become president had it not been for the Badlands years. They had put him back in shape for life, for politics, for a new marriage and a new family. Out of the experience came the whole Rough Rider idea and, consequently, the TR of San Juan Hill. Of course, some were to find his Wild West enthusiasms just a little tiresome, even questionable in a grown man. On the news that William McKinley was dead, Mark Hanna is said to have exclaimed, “Now look! That damn cowboy is president!”

  The subsequent career of the Marquis is appalling. The fact that nobody much likes to talk about that in Medora today is certainly understandable. It is easier to forget that the cowboy getup figured not only in the heroics in Cuba but also in the dreadful anti-Semitic craze that swept France toward the turn of the century.

  The Marquis went home to France to proclaim himself the victim of a Jewish plot. The beef trust was now portrayed as the “Jewish beef trust.” He, too, turned to politics. He launched his own crusade, a blend of socialism and rabid anti-Semitism, and paraded about Paris at the head of a gang of toughs, all of them dressed in ten-gallon hats and cowboy shirts. With the collapse of the French effort at Panama, he joined with the unsavory Edouard Drumont, a notorious anti-Semite, in an attempt to blame that failure, too, on the Jews. It was this mania that eventually led to the Dreyfus Affair, and the Marquis, before he went storming off to Africa, kept himself in the forefront. His platform rantings set off riots, and in a series of duels with important Jewish army officers he became known as one of the most dangerous duelists in France.

  The Marquis was himself murdered in June 1896 by a band of Tuareg tribesmen in North Africa, where he had set off on a lone, harebrained scheme to unite the Muslims under the French flag in an all-out holy war against the Jews and the English. He seems to have been mourned only by his children and by Madame de Mores, who remained his stout defender until her dying day.

  A statue of the Marquis stands in a little park in Medora beside Harold Schafer’s Chuck Wagon restaurant. The statue and the park were gifts of the de Mores heirs. It was they who turned the chateau over to the State Historical Society of North Dakota, complete with all its furnishings. And like some of the descendants of Theodore Roosevelt, Antoine de Vallombrosa, grandson of the marquis and present holder of the title Marquis de Mores, is a frequent summer visitor to the town.

  I asked him once why he keeps coming back. We were on the road south of town, on our way to see Joe Hild, who owns Roosevelt’s old Maltese Cross ranch. Until then we had been talking about his homes in Geneva and Biarritz. Tony, as he likes to be called, picks his words carefully and speaks in perfect American English, without a trace of an accent. “Oh, I like the people here,” he said. “Where in my normal life would I meet such wonderful people, so different?” He is circumspect, graying; he wears both a belt and suspenders, a watch on each wrist, a red baseball cap and black basketball sneakers.

  I stopped the car to pick up a chunk of scoria from the side of the road, a memento for my writing desk, and he asked me to get one for him also. “Are you interested in geology?” I asked as I got back behind the wheel. “Oh, no,” he said softly. “Unless perhaps in connection with oil! I am very interested in oil. Do you know anything about oil?” And we both laughed. Those small oil pumps that look like nodding grasshoppers have become a ubiquitous part of the Badlands landscape, except within the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

  It is the park that remains Roosevelt’s Badlands memorial
—more than a hundred square miles of natural splendor, camping and picnic areas beside the river, hiking trails, miles of scenic roads. Open year-round, it attracts some 800,000 visitors a year, about 75 percent of them during North Dakota’s brief summer.

  Antelope, whitetail, and mule deer abound. So do squirrels, beaver, rabbits (eastern and mountain cottontail), skunks, prairie dogs, coyotes, and yes, rattlesnakes. The birdwatcher’s checklist issued by the Park Service lists 116 species, but if there is a Badlands bird it is the magpie, with the crow running a close second. Elk, moose, black bear, grizzlies, and the gray wolf have all vanished from the area since Roosevelt’s day, but the buffalo herd that roams the park now surpasses any he ever saw.

  The great days in Medora lasted all of three years, from 1883 to 1886. Nothing much had ever happened there before and nothing much has happened since, as the world judges these things. Though some ranchers survived the Marquis’s collapse and the winter of 1886-1887, Medora did not, and were it not for the château, the park and Harold Schafer’s commercial enterprises, the place today would be a ghost town.

  In 1919, the year of Roosevelt’s death, Sewall set down some of his recollections. Remembering how it had all ended, he wrote, “We were glad to get back home—gladder, I guess, than about anything that had ever happened to us, and yet we were melancholy, for with all the hardships and work it was a very happy life…the happiest time that any of us have known.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Remington

  THE STORY is that young Fred Remington was standing at the corner of Ninth and Main in Kansas City one summer day in 1885 when he saw a man he knew, a housepainter named Shorty Reeson, coming along in a spring wagon pulled by an ill-kept mare that Remington liked the looks of. Remington was then twenty-four and down on his luck. He had come west to make his fortune and in two years had succeeded in losing a sizeable inheritance, about $9,000, roughly half of what it had taken his late father a lifetime to accumulate. The young man’s first Western venture was a sheep ranch in central Kansas. When that failed, he saw his future in “hardware or whiskey—or anything else,” as he said. With the money left, he bought into a Kansas City saloon as a silent partner, but within a year it too had failed. In the meantime, his new wife had left him. She was Eva Caten from back home in upstate New York, where they had been married the previous October. After three short months in Kansas City, she packed her things and headed home—once she found that Remington was not a successful iron broker, as he had led her to believe, but the keeper of a low saloon. The one note of promise since her departure was the sale, through a local art dealer, of some Western scenes he had painted.