Theodore seemed immensely relieved, once the step had been taken. “Most of my friends seem surprised to find that I have not developed hoofs and horns,” he wrote Lodge jauntily from New York before leaving again for the West. Next, he was writing from his ranch. “You would be amused to see me, in my broad sombrero hat, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horsehide chaparajos or riding trousers, and cowhide boots, with braided bridle and silver spurs.” He had changed his mind about the fall campaign, he said. Lodge could count on his help.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Glory Days
1
The cowboy as folk hero was still an emerging phenomenon in the 1880s, at the time Theodore went west. The mythic figure of present understanding had yet to take shape in the popular mind—the success of the dime novel and the new Wild West shows notwithstanding—largely because Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian, the first true “western,” was still in the future, as were the magazine illustrations and paintings of Frederic Remington and Theodore’s own books and articles. For it was these three upper-class “Ivy League” easterners, Wister and Roosevelt of Harvard, Remington of Yale, in their efforts to catch “the living, breathing end” of the frontier, who produced what in most respects remains the popular version of the “real West” and its leading player, the cowboy. In New York, meantime, as Clarence Day relates in Life with Father, a small boy of proper upbringing could still be informed by an all-knowing parent that cowboys were no better than tramps, wild fellows who put up with dreadful food and the worst possible accommodations.
But a ranchman (also called cattleman or stockman) was quite another matter, as Theodore was to stress in the first of two books on his time in the West, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, which was to be published in a limited, exceedingly elegant quarto-sized edition priced at an unheard-of $15, and dedicated “To that keenest of sportsmen and truest of friends, my brother Elliott Roosevelt.”
Part of the mark of the ranchman was his attire, which, though similar to that of a cowboy, was of considerably finer materials, as Theodore explained. A ranchman’s saddle, bridle, spurs, revolver, and the like were all of the first quality. A ranchman spoke (or wrote) of his men, his herds, and the quantity of horses he maintained (”on my own ranch there are eighty”). A ranchman had ample time for hunting and good books. (”No ranchman who loves sport can afford to be without Van Dyke’s Still Hunter, Dodge’s Plains of the Great West, or Caton’s Deer and Antelope of America . . .” Theodore wrote. “As for Irving, Hawthorne, Cooper, Lowell, and the other standbys, I suppose no man, East or West, would willingly be long without them.”) It was a life, he said, closely akin to that of the old southern planters.
The great appeal, of course, was the freedom and “vigorous open-air existence.” It could do wonders for the spirit, wonders for one’s health. It was also quite fashionable at the moment, a point he need not stress to those who would pay the $15 for his book, and it could be extremely profitable, which he did mention in the second and far better book, though with a cautionary reminder that financial disaster, too, was possible. The danger was a severe winter, he wrote prophetically, in advance of the winter of 1886.
Theodore’s interest in the Dakota Bad Lands probably began with Commander Henry Honeychurch Gorringe, the former naval officer and audacious entrepreneur who in 1880 masterminded the transporting of Cleopatra’s Needle (a 69-foot monolith weighing 220 tons) from Egypt to Central Park, a daring, difficult, and justly celebrated feat. Gorringe had bought up an abandoned government cantonment located on the Northern Pacific Railroad where the railroad crossed the Little Missouri in upper Dakota Territory, just east of the Montana line, in the heart of the northern Dakota Bad Lands. The idea had been to establish a hunting camp for eastern sportsmen, along the lines of Paul Smith’s in the Adirondacks. And when Theodore made his initial trip to the Bad lands in 1883, to get his buffalo, he was to have gone with Gorringe, who for some unknown reason backed out at the last moment.
But it could have also been his publishing partner George Haven Putnam who first told Theodore about the Bad Lands and/or about Gorringe, since it was Putnam who put out The Great Northwest for the Northern Pacific Railroad, the book containing the first glowing account of the Bad Lands and their charms. Or if not Putnam, it could have been any of a number of others with an interest in cattle and the West, including his own father-in-law, George C. Lee, since Lee, Higginson and Company, like many eastern banks and investment firms, was much involved in the “beef bonanza.” Eastern and European money was going into cattle in a grand way and among those jumping in were numerous Roosevelt family friends and fellow Harvard men. The Wyoming ranch Theodore invested in earlier was known as the Teschemacher & DeBillier Cattle Company. Hubert E. Teschemacher and Frederic DeBillier were in the Class of ’82 at Harvard, Owen Wister’s class, and their partner Richard Trimble, a classmate of Theodore’s and fellow New Yorker, was probably the one who enticed Theodore into that venture and schooled him on the potential profits involved. Teschemacher had decided to become a ranchman after reading a newspaper article in Paris. Trimble was to be long remembered in Wyoming strolling among his cattle with a pet poodle.
A classmate named Sanford Morison was also “pioneering” in Dakota Territory near Edmunds. Robert Bacon, now employed at Lee, Higginson, had put money in the Teschemacher & DeBillier venture, as well as in another Wyoming outfit called Riverside Land and Cattle, which was currently paying dividends of nine and a half percent. Henry L. Higginson himself was involved with the great Union Cattle Company, as was Alexander Agassiz. In New York the Seligmans were major backers of the immensely profitable Pioneer Cattle Company, and Poultney Bigelow’s father, the diplomat John Bigelow, was another of those tied into Teschemacher & DeBillier. Abram Hewitt was involved in the Gorringe venture and the biggest and most publicized splash of all in the Bad Lands was being made by a young French aristocrat, one Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, the Marquis de Mores, recently of the French cavalry, who was the husband of Medora von Hoffman, daughter of the Wall Street banker Louis A. (“Baron”) von Hoffman.
To be off to one’s ranch in the Wild West, or the ranch one had taken a “flier” in, or better still, to be just back from one’s ranch full of stories, looking brown and fit, was all the rage. Ranching was in the aristocratic tradition—requiring courage, horsemanship, offering deliverance from the tedium and pettiness of trade. It was adventurous. It was romantic. Ranching, wrote Theodore, had “little in common with the humdrum, workaday business world of the nineteenth century. . . the free ranchman in his manner of life shows more kinship to an Arab sheik than to a sleek city merchant or tradesman.” The cowboys happened also to be much better fellows and pleasanter companions than, say, farmers or farm workers; “nor are the mechanics and workmen of a great city to be mentioned in the same breath.” Cowboys, “except while on . . . sprees,” were “quiet, rather self-contained men, perfectly frank and simple, and on their own ground treat a stranger with the most whole-souled hospitality . . .”
Hundreds, possibly as many as a thousand, “dudes” were scattered over the West and more would follow, drawn often by what Theodore was to write of the life and by his warning that it was a life soon to vanish. He wrote of the adversities to be prepared for (broiling heat, hailstorms, rattlesnakes), the kinds of horses to expect (very different from eastern mounts), of the stars at night and endless reaches of prairie, of the guns to bring.
Of course every ranchman carries a revolver, a long .45 Colt or Smith & Wesson, by preference the former. When after game a hunting knife is stuck in the girdle. This should be stout and sharp, but not too long, with a round handle. I have two double-barreled shotguns: a No. 10 chokebore for ducks and geese made by Thomas of Chicago; and a No. 16 hammerless built for me by Kennedy of St. Paul, for grouse and plover. On regular hunting trips I always carry the Winchester rifle, but in riding round near home, where a man may see a deer and is sure to come across ducks and grouse,
it is best to take the little ranch gun, a double-barrel No. 16, with a 40-70 rifle underneath the shotgun barrels.
His description of his own ranch “home” on the Little Missouri was every man’s dream of a place in the West.
In the hot noontide hours of midsummer the broad ranch veranda, always in the shade, is almost the only spot where a man can be comfortable; but here he can sit for hours at a time, leaning back in his rocking chair, as he reads or smokes, or with half-closed, dreamy eyes gazes across the shallow, nearly dry riverbed to the wooded bottoms opposite, and to the plateaus lying back of them. Against the sheer white faces of the cliffs, that come down without a break, the dark-green treetops stand out in bold relief. In the hot, lifeless air all objects that are not nearby seem to sway and waiver. There are few sounds to break the stillness. From the upper branches of the cottonwood trees overhead—whose shimmering, tremulous leaves are hardly ever quiet, but if the wind stirs at all, rustle and quiver and sigh all day long—comes every now and then the soft, melancholy cooing of the mourning dove, whose voice always seems far away . . .
Wister called it a “perfect picture.” Wister himself would be on his way in 1885, in search of health and big game in Wyoming, as guest of Teschemacher, DeBillier, and Trimble. “This life has a psychological effect on you,” Wister would write to his mother. “. . . You begin to wonder if there is such a place as Philadelphia anywhere.” His impression of cowboys at that time was that they were “a queer episode in the history of the country” and “without any moral sense whatsoever.”
The picture Theodore had given Lodge of his own ranchman’s costume was understated. He had spent a small fortune to look the part. Besides the big hat, the buckskin shirt, chaps, bridle, and silver spurs, he had fancy alligator boots, a silver belt buckle, beautifully tooled leather belt and holster, a silver-mounted bowie knife by Tiffany. His silver belt buckle was engraved with the head of a bear; the silver spurs had his initials on them. His Colt revolver was engraved with scrolls and geometric patterns and plated with silver and gold. On one side of its ivory handle were his initials; on the other side, the head of a buffalo to commemorate the one he shot in 1883. The buckskin shirt, all beautifully patterned and fringed, had been made to order by a woman in the Bad Lands and was part of a complete buckskin suit. He gloried in dressing up in his regalia and posing for pictures. He was in the saddle all day, he had told Bamie in June, “having a glorious time here.”
Returning from the East in midsummer he brought Bill Sewall along and Sewall’s nephew, Wilmot Dow, a rugged and resourceful man in his twenties, who, like Sewall, was an old companion from past hunting trips in Maine. They were to help out, now that he was expanding his operations. Looking the Bad Lands over, the large, homespun Sewall told Theodore it was no country for cattle. Theodore told him he was wrong and knew nothing about it. Sewall, in the privacy of a memorable letter to his family in Maine, described it as “queer country,” “a dirty country and very dirty people on an average” (so much for his impression of cowboys). “Tell the boys,” he continued, “they are better off there than here unless they could get hold with some rich man as we have and that is hard to do . . . tell all who wish to know that I think this [is] 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.”
2
The Bad Lands cattle boom had begun in 1883, the year Theodore made his first visit and his initial $14,000 investment there. Several big Texas cattle companies, pushing their herds farther and farther north in search of new range lands, had discovered the Bad Lands, and because the Northern Pacific Railroad had also penetrated the area just then, and was eager to see it developed, the buildup of cattle and money came quickly. Experienced cattlemen and eastern and European money people alike saw at once that the Bad Lands were not all the name implied.
To French-Canadian fur trappers exploring the area a hundred years before, it had been les mauvaises terres à traverser—bad lands to travel through. It was as if the rolling prairie land suddenly gave way to a weird other world of bizarrely shaped cliffs and hummocks and tablelands, these sectioned and sliced every which way by countless little ravines and draws and by the broad, looping valley of the Little Missouri River, which, unlike the Big Missouri, flowed north and in summer was not much more than a good-sized stream. It was a region of “startling appearance,” “of strange confusion,” extending some two hundred miles along the river, 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, were juxtaposed against brick-red bands of scoria or sinuous dark seams of lignite. Some formations had the overpowering presence of ancient ruins. The leader of an early military expedition against the Sioux described the landscape as hell with the fires out—though in some places, where seams of lignite had caught fire, the ground literally smoldered.
George Armstrong Custer, who spent several days snowbound in the Bad Lands en route to the Little Big Horn in 1876, called it worthless country, and Frederic Remington, when he arrived for a first look some years after Theodore, saw it as “a place for stratagem and murder, with nothing to witness its mysteries but the cold blue winter sky.”
In an effort to make it a tourist attraction, the Northern Pacific tried renaming it Pyramid Park and described the geological curiosities to be found, along with the bracing air, the good shooting, and opportunity for some real “rough riding.”
But the cattlemen saw it differently from everyone. Unlike the other Bad Lands to the south (those of present-day South Dakota, which are geologically quite different), these were green along the river bottoms and green above, on the tops of the tablelands. “What a wondrous country it was for grass!” remembered the veteran cattleman John Clay of his first visit in the summer of ’83. There was “grass and more grass” in the bottom lands and up along sweeping valleys: little blue-stem grass, “good as corn for fattening,” and curly buffalo grass, “making unexcelled winter feed.” Men like Clay and greenhorn money people alike were “dazzled by the prospects.” The land was all public domain. The grass was 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 first summer alone.
The big Texas outfits included the Berry-Boice Cattle Company (the “Three-Sevens” brand), Towers & Gudgell (the “OX”), and the still larger Continental Land and Cattle Company (the “Hashknife”). These were “the real cattlemen.” The smaller ranchers were nearly all from the East or from Canada and Europe. They were primed on such newly published authoritative works as The Beef Bonanza: or How to Get Rich on the Plains, and they were mostly all young (Bill Sewall, who was not yet forty when he arrived, would be known as “the old Mennonite”). There were the four Eaton brothers from Pittsburgh, who had been among the earliest arrivals; A. C. Huidekoper was from Meadville, Pennsylvania, and was a kinsman of a Harvard classmate of Theodore’s, Frank Huidekoper. Gregor Lang and his teenage son, Lincoln, were from Scotland and had the financial backing of Sir John Pender of London. Lloyd Roberts was from Wales; Alfred Benson was an Englishman; Laval Nugent was the son of an Irish baronet; J. A. Van Eeghan, son of a prominent Dutch family, was “wayward but attractive,” a fine musician, and could supposedly wire New York for money anytime he wished.
It was at Gregor Lang’s ranch that Theodore had put up during his initial visit in ’83, and it was from conversations with Lang, Howard Eaton, and two young Canadians named Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield that he had decided to join forces with the Canadians, whose rude cabin beside the Little Missouri was known as the Chimney Butte or, alternatively, the Maltese Cross Ranch. Theodore had handed over a check for $14,000 to buy 450 head of cattle, a small start, but the direct, trusting way he did it made an impression. “All the security he had for his money,” remembered Sylvane Ferris, “was our honesty.�
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He bought no land, then or later. Like everybody in the area but the young Marquis de Mores, he was a squatter. And then, after just two weeks, he had been on his way home, having killed his buffalo and all but killed his guide, Joe Ferris, a brother of Sylvane. The chase had carried them pell-mell for seven days over some of the wildest, most difficult terrain in the Bad Lands. Twice they found a buffalo and each time Theodore had shot and missed. Exhausted by the pace Theodore set, Ferris kept praying things would get so bad they would have to give up. It rained incessantly, but Theodore’s joy was not to be extinguished; every new adversity seemed a refreshment. It was Fresh Pond all over again, Theodore exclaiming, “By Godfrey, but this is fun!” For two days they had nothing to live on but biscuits and rainwater. Remembering the expedition long afterward, Ferris would be no less 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 he shot his buffalo, just over the Montana line, Theodore broke into a wild facsimile of an Indian war dance and handed Ferris a hundred dollars. “I never saw anyone so pleased in all my life,” remembered Ferris.
The dominant figure, the dominant force and center of attention in the Bad Lands, however, was the Marquis de Mores, who on April Fools’ Day in 1883, or six months before Theodore first appeared on the scene, cracked a bottle of Mumm’s champagne over a tent peg to found the town of Medora, named in honor of his wife. He had plans far more ambitious than mere cattle ranching, as he announced; he had come 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,” said the deadly serious Frenchman in his nearly perfect English.
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