David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  He was just Theodore’s age and like Theodore a passionate lover of hunting and the outdoors. Other than that, they had little in common. The Marquis was tall, spare, and supremely fit, a product of St. Cyr and of Saumur, regarded as the finest cavalry school in the world. He was a superb horseman, a crack shot. Included with his baggage the day he arrived on the Northern Pacific was a silver-headed bamboo walking stick filled with ten pounds of lead—to exercise his dueling arm, it was explained. One held the stick straight out at arm’s length for several slow counts, “thusly.” He was black-haired, dark-eyed, his handsomeness the most obvious thing about him, but it was a handsomeness of the Victorian stage-villain variety, to judge by the pictures we have. His tremendous black mustache was waxed to perfection.

  In duels in France, he had already killed two men. Seen heading off on one of his forays along the Little Missouri, he looked like a mounted arsenal—weighed down with two huge Colt revolvers, two cartridge belts, a heavy-caliber rifle cradled in one arm, a bowie knife strapped to one leg. He was as well a professed anti-Semite, a devout Roman Catholic, and a royalist who liked to tell his new neighbors of his aspirations to the French throne and how the fortunes he would pile up in the Bad Lands were to be applied to that purpose.

  Theodore seems not to have encountered the Marquis in person until his return in 1884, by which time the Marquis’s town and enterprise were much in evidence.

  His plan was to revolutionize the beef industry by butchering cattle on the range, there in the Bad Lands beside the railroad, and thus eliminate the cost of shipping live animals all the way to Chicago. That dressed meat could be transported almost any distance in the new refrigerator cars without spoilage had already been demonstrated. So, the Marquis reasoned, 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.

  He had picked the eastern side of the river for his site, just back from the Northern Pacific’s bridge, and directly across from the old cantonment. His wife, it appears, had been provided by her father with an income of $90,000 a year, and this plus backing from his own family gave him, as he said, little worry over finances. He himself would head the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, while his father-in-law, Baron von Hoffman, was listed as treasurer.

  He brought in hundreds of carpenters and masons to build his town and packing plant. He drew up plans, ordered equipment. Within a year or less he had bought up twenty-one thousand acres of land. He bought cattle, brought in twelve thousand sheep, and announced plans to raise cabbages, these to be fertilized with offal from the packing plant and shipped east in his refrigerator cars. He was not wanting in imagination. Another idea was to produce pottery from Bad Lands clays. Yet another was to ship Columbia River salmon from Portland to New York, at a profit of $1,000 a carload according to his estimates.

  He had intended originally to make do in a tent until his own house was ready, but finding the tent a bit more inconvenient than expected, he had a private railroad car delivered and put on a siding. “I like this country,” he remarked to one of his employees, “because there is room to turn around without stepping on the feet of others.”

  But in fact he seemed incapable of doing anything without stepping on feet or sensibilities. The West, despite its aura of freedom, its apparent absence of rules and regulations, was a place—an economy, a way of life—based on very definite rules, mostly all 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 conflicted with local custom and was thus, by the prevailing ethic, extremely dangerous. Worst of all, he had begun fencing his land, and when fences were cut, as he had been warned they would be, he as quickly replaced them. When three drunken cowboys shot up the town and vowed to kill him on sight, he prudently took a train back to Mandan to ask the territorial justice of the peace what he ought to do. “Why, shoot,” he was told.

  The next time the same threesome went on a rampage, the Marquis and his men were waiting by a bend in the river outside of town. It may have been an ambush—cold-blooded murder as Theodore’s friends the Langs said—or it may have been self-defense as the Marquis pleaded in court. Either way, one of the three cowboys, a skinny, long-legged nineteen-year-old named Riley Luffsey, was dead with a bullet in his neck. The Marquis was acquitted after two highly publicized hearings in Mandan and resumed his projects as before, acting as though he were unaware of how many now despised him. Medora grew by leaps and bounds, becoming overnight one of the wildest cow towns in the West, the sort of place, as Theodore once remarked, where pleasure and vice were considered synonymous. But it also had a hotel and a brick chapel built for Madame de Mores, a brick house with a picket fence to accommodate father-in-law von Hoffman during his visits, and a breezy little newspaper, The Bad Lands Cow Boy, the mission of which was “to preach King Cattle to all men.”

  “Again and again is the fitness of the Bad Lands for a cattle country brought to our notice [declared the paper in an early issue]. . . . We have yet to hear of a solitary head ever having died in the Bad Lands from exposure.”

  There are now in the Bad Lands many cattle men who have had experience in every cattle country in the United States [read another item]. . . . We have questioned many of them and the invariable answer has been that nowhere in the United States is there a better cattle country than the Bad Lands.

  And what was good for beast was good for man, claimed the editor-publisher, twenty-two-year-old Arthur T. Packard, who was newly graduated from the University of Michigan. “There is a wonderful amount of electricity in this atmosphere,” he explained. “... This prevalence of electricity is doubtless one cause of the great vitality of anyone who lives in this climate. It takes hard and continued labor to tire a man in this country, and then a rest of a few minutes is sufficient to completely restore his energies. No one feels that lassitude so common in the East.”

  Most important of all, by the summer of 1884, a gigantic, up-to-date packing plant was in operation. Cattle were being slaughtered; dressed Bad Lands beef was rolling east in the Marquis’s new refrigerator cars. It was all but impossible not to be impressed. In New York, in an article about the Marquis and his efforts, the Times described Medora as a “thriving, bustling” town with nearly one thousand people and a big future. It had become obvious to everyone “that the foreigner was not so crazy after all.” The Marquis, said the Times, was a man of “good sense” who ran a “wonderful business,” and in time would become “one of the great millionaires of the country.”

  “Before long some of my wealthy friends in France will come over to build tanneries, glue factories and horn works, and so establish interests that will tend toward a speedy development of the country,” a reporter for the World was told by the Marquis, who when not in the Bad Lands lived at the fashionable Brunswick Hotel on Fifth Avenue. “My neighbors are all wealthy American ranchers. . . . We all work together and are on the best of terms.”

  He had completed his own house, “the château,” as everyone in Medora called it, and Madame de Mores was in residence much of that summer. In truth, the château was an oversized frame farmhouse. There was nothing especially grand about it, except that it was large (twenty-six rooms), and since it stood in full view of town on top of a bare promontory across the river, it looked even larger. It was painted a light gray, with red shutters and a red roof. A deep porch stretched around two sides. And once the Madame’s big square piano had arrived by train from St. Paul and a staff of twenty servants had taken up their duties, it became in the minds of the local citizenry as much a château as any on the Loire.

  The Madame was small and pretty, with fine features and an abundance of dark-red hair. In country almost devoid of women, she would have been talked about endlessly and regarded as a great lady however modest her attainments. But she was a superb
horsewoman, spoke several languages (seven, allegedly), painted in watercolors, played Liszt and Verdi on the big piano. A local woman remembered her as “one of the most dignified, stately, and aristocratic women I ever met.” Perched sidesaddle on one of the magnificent mounts the Marquis had also had shipped from the East, with her face shielded from the fierce Dakota sun by a huge black “sugar loaf” sombrero, the Madame looked not much bigger than a child. Yet she was reputedly a better shot than her husband (he insisted she was), and on a hunting expedition with him in the Big Horns, she killed three bears, including a grizzly. He had a special hunting coach built for her, equipped with folding bunks, kitchen, china, silver, and linens.

  Gregor Lang and his son, who detested the Marquis—it was they who buried Riley Luffsey the day after the killing—had warned Theodore about him, but Theodore maintained a cordial, if somewhat formal, relation, as was befitting two gentlemen. They had attended a meeting of the local stockmen’s association held at the railroad depot that June and later took a few days out to go by train together to Miles City, Montana, to volunteer for a vigilante campaign against rustlers and horse thieves, but were turned down because their faces were too well known. Theodore was a dinner guest at the château on several occasions as time passed, and the Marquis and Madame de Mores, we also know, dined with Theodore and Bamie at Bamie’s house in New York. Meals at the château were prepared by a French chef, served on the Madame’s blue Minton china, and accompanied by selections from her husband’s wine cellar. With her travels (she had met the Marquis in Cannes) and culture, not to mention her love of shooting, she must have been a very refreshing note for Theodore. Bamie, years later, would remark that “Theodore did not care for the Marquis, but he was sorry for his wife . . .”

  Theodore had told Bamie in June that the outlook for making a business success of ranching was ”very” hopeful. “This winter I lost about 25 head, from wolves, cold, etc.; the others are in admirable shape, and I have about a hundred and fifty-five calves. I shall put on a thousand more cattle and shall make it my regular business.” With such confidence and excitement in the air at Medora, with the buildup the Marquis was getting in the eastern papers, one could hardly blame him. Like his sisters and brother, he had also by now come into his share of Mittie’s trust fund, some $62,500. So at a stroke he more than doubled his investment in cattle, sinking an additional $26,000 into another one thousand head. But while this represented a very serious commitment on his part—a full $40,000, or roughly twenty percent of his total resources—his was still a small operation compared to some others. According to the county census of the following year, he was running some forty-five hundred head of his own, while such outfits as Berry-Boice and Towers & Gudgell were running four to six times that number.

  In August, with Sewall and Dow on hand, he established a second ranch, known as the Elkhorn, where he and they could live to themselves, rather than with Merrifield and Ferris at the Maltese Cross. Like the Eaton brothers’ Custer Trail Ranch and the Langs’ ranch, the Maltese Cross was south of Medora and only seven miles out. The new spot he had found was in the opposite direction, north, or downstream on the river, and more than thirty miles from town, the packing plant, and the railroad. His nearest neighbors would be ten to fifteen miles away. He wanted to be off to himself where he could write, and it was the ranch house Sewall and Dow built for him there, in a clump of cottonwoods by a bend in the river, that he was to describe at length in such passages as the one quoted earlier. It was begun in October, after Theodore had left again for the East, and by Bad Lands standards it was sumptuous, with eight rooms, numerous windows, a stone fireplace, and a cellar that Theodore was to use as a darkroom for processing his photographs. “I designed the house myself,” Bill Sewall would remember proudly, “and it was a sizable place, sixty feet long, thirty feet wide, and seven feet high, with a flat roof and a porch where after the day’s work Theodore used to sit in a rocking chair, reading poetry.”

  The other ranchers called him Theodore or Roosevelt; the cowboys, Mr. Roosevelt, as he wished, or Four-Eyes or Old Four-Eyes out of hearing, and their initial impressions were about what one would have expected. Once, in an effort to head off some stray calves, he immortalized himself along the Little Missouri by calling to one of his cowboys, “Hasten forward quickly there!”

  He was only an average rider and never learned to handle a rope very well, as he would readily admit. But there came a moment one night in a bar across the Montana line in what was then known as Mingusville (present-day Wibaux) when 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. Theodore knocked him cold with one punch. As Theodore later explained, the man had made the mistake of standing too close to him and with his heels close together.

  After the “saloon incident,” he was looked on with new respect—it “gained him some reputation,” as Bill Sewall said. But more important as time went on, he “did all the regular work of the cowboy,” “worked the same as any man,” asking no favors and never complaining. Sewall, who had known him since he was eighteen, spoke of him in letters home as “a very fair fellow” and “as good a fellow as ever.” “He worked like the rest of us,” Sewall would recall, “and occasionally he worked longer than any of the rest of us, for often when we were through with the day’s work he would go to his room and write.”

  Once, seeing one of his ablest cowboys about to put the Maltese brand on an unbranded stray found on Gregor Lang’s range, Theodore dismissed him on the spot. The cowboy could not understand. “A man who will steal for me will steal from me,” Theodore said. “You’re fired.”

  Sometimes that first year, as Bill Sewall also remembered, Theodore could become “very melancholy... very much down in spirits.” It made no difference what became of him, he told Sewall; he had nothing to live for.

  “‘You have your child to live for,’ I said. ’Her aunt can take care of her a good deal better than I can,’ he said. ’She never would know anything about me, anyway. She would be just as well off without me.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ’... you won’t always feel that way... you won’t always feel as you do now and you won’t always be willing to stay here and drive cattle . . .”

  Whatever it was Theodore felt for the Bad Lands was quite beyond Sewall. Anybody who preferred such a place to the East, Sewall wrote his brother, “must have a depraved idea of life or hate himself or both.”

  Theodore saw grandeur and mystery. The Bad Lands were “dreary and forbidding,” they were “as grim and desolate and forbidding as any spot on earth could be,” and he felt he belonged. “The country is growing on me, more and more,” he had written Bamie in June, “it has a curious, fantastic beauty of its own . . .” The Bad Lands looked, he decided, the way Poe sounds.

  The words “loneliness” and “solitude” appear repeatedly in what he wrote. He writes again and again of “great dreary solitude” and “melancholy pathless plains,” “the deathlike stillness.” “Nowhere,” he writes in 1884, “not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains; and after a man has lived a little while on or near them, their very vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him. . . . Nowhere else does one seem so far off from all mankind ...”

  Loneliness and desolation, a sense of exile, were old themes in the literature of the West, literature he knew and loved. Parkman, to whom he would dedicate one of his own later works, wrote in The Oregon Trail of “something impressive and awful” about the prairie. Parkman, the first Harvard man to venture beyond the Mississippi and go home to write about it, had found “something exciting in the wild solitude of the place.” Parkman, before Theodore was born, had written of “green undulations like motionless swells of the ocean”; Theodore writes that “the grassland stretches out in the sunlight like a sea.” “The very shadow of civilization l
ies a hundred leagues behind,” wrote Parkman. “Civilization seems as remote as if we were living in an age long past,” Theodore says.

  “Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie!” was the cowboys’ song.

  But in some of what he wrote it is as if Theodore has found a way at last to unburden what he could never talk about. The voice of a mourning dove in his own cottonwoods seems ever “far away and expresses more than any other sound in nature the sadness of gentle, hopeless, never-ending grief.” And later, having seen winter there, he would write:

  When the days have dwindled to their shortest, and the nights seem never-ending, then all the great northern plains are changing into an abode of iron desolation. Sometimes furious gales blow out of the north, driving before them the clouds of blinding snow-dust, wrapping the mantle of death round every unsheltered being that faces their unshackled anger. They roar in a thunderous bass as they sweep across the prairie or whirl through the naked canyons; they shiver the great brittle cottonwoods, and beneath their rough touch the icy limbs of the pines that cluster in the gorges sing like the chords of an Aeolian harp. Again, in the coldest midwinter weather, not a breath of wind may stir; and then the still, merciless, terrible cold that broods over the earth like the shadow of silent death seems even more dreadful in its gloomy rigor than is the lawless madness of the storms. All the land is like granite; the great rivers stand still in their beds, as if turned to frosted steel. In the long nights there is no sound to break the lifeless silence. . . .

  But as in the summer following his father’s death, this in the West also had its flights of exhilaration, of pure soaring exuberance more than matching the depths of his other moods. Again he is incapable of holding himself down. Something within refuses to be subdued. In the West, in his gaudy regalia, on his horse, he can be something entirely different from the man he had been.