He was on the frontier he had dreamed of and imagined for as long as he could remember, living a life free of more than just fences. More even than Harvard or politics it was a world without women. Background, family, all the conventions of polite society, counted for nothing. Nobody knew him; nobody knew his family or cared particularly. “Everybody in New York has always known everybody,” wrote Edith Wharton, describing “the tight little citadel” of the New York they both knew so well. Here everybody was a stranger and liked it that way. It was customary not to ask too many questions about a man’s past. “What was your name in the States?” another old song began. In Medora alone there were three men who went by the name Bill Jones. Antecedents counted for nothing and Theodore felt himself a new man. “You would be amused to see me . . .” he had written to Lodge, which was another way of saying, “You would hardly know me.” He felt, he wrote, “as absolutely free as a man could feel.”
Life here was elemental, he said. He was constantly in the midst of birds and animals. The letters and literary efforts alike are filled with deer, antelope, buffalo, bighorn sheep, pack rats and mice, the howling of wolves at night, birds on the wing, birds stalking the mud flats of the river, a great golden eagle, the gaudy black-and-white magpies that are so common to the Bad Lands, meadowlarks that sang like no meadowlarks he had ever heard: “this I could hardly get used to at first, for it looks exactly like the Eastern meadowlark, which utters nothing but a harsh disagreeable chatter. But the plains air seems to give it a voice . . .”
Most marvelous of all was his horse, Manitou. Manitou was the “best and most valuable animal on the ranch,” “a treasure,” “as fast as any horse on the river,” “very enduring and very hardy,” “perfectly sure-footed,” “willing and spirited.” There was never such a horse as “good old Manitou” and there were never such mornings as those of the “long, swift rides” over the prairie with his men, when Manitou carried him on and on endlessly in the “sweet, fresh air,” under a crystal sky . . .
and the rapid motion of the fiery little horse combine to make a man’s blood thrill and leap with sheer buoyant lightheartedness and eager, exultant pleasure in the boldness and freedom of the life he is leading. As we climb the steep sides of the first range of buttes, wisps of wavering mist still cling in the hollows of the valley; when we come out on the top of the first great plateau, the sun flames up over its edge, and in the level, red beams the galloping horsemen throw long, fantastic shadows. Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough . . .
From the Elkhorn to the Maltese Cross Ranch was a distance of forty miles. And it was all extremely “rough riding.” To get from the Elkhorn to Medora, following the river, meant crossing and recrossing the river more than twenty times. One day, as he told Bamie proudly, he covered seventy-two miles between dawn and darkness.
“I have been fulfilling a boyish ambition of mine,” he tells her at another point. “We are so very rarely able to, actually and in real life, dwell in our ideal ’hero land,’” he tells Corinne.
What with the wild gallops by day, and the wilder tales by the night watch-fires, I became intoxicated with the romance of my new life [Captain Mayne Reid had written]. . . . It grew upon me apace. The dreams of home began to die within me; and with these, the illusory ideas of many a young and foolish ambition. Died away, too—dead out of my heart—the allurements of the great city—the memory of soft eyes and silken tresses . . . all died away, as if they had never been, or I had never felt them!
My strength increased both physically and intellectually. I experienced a buoyancy of spirits and a vigor of body I had never known before. I felt a pleasure in action. My blood seemed to rush warmer and swifter through my veins; and I fancied that my eyes reached to a more distant vision. I could look boldly upon the sun, without quivering in my glance.
With his horse and his Winchester rifle, he felt like a figure from other days; and the rifle, like the horse, was the finest thing of its kind and of greatest importance to him. It was a lever-action 45-75 Winchester (Model 1876) that had been custom made to his specifications—”stocked and sighted to suit myself.” It was engraved with deer and buffalo and antelope, but more than that, “the best weapon I ever had . . . handy to carry, whether on foot or on horseback . . . comes up to the shoulder as readily as a shotgun . . . deadly, accurate . . . unapproachable for the rapidity of its fire and the facility with which it is loaded.” Not since his father presented him with his first gun had anything pleased him so much and not since the winter on the Nile had he known such shooting.
On August 18 he set out on an expedition to the Big Horns in Wyoming three hundred miles to the southwest. “How long I will be gone I cannot say,” he wrote Bamie. He took Bill Merrifield with him and a man named Lebo, who did the cooking and drove the team, and who at one point made the mistake of calling him Theodore, instead of Mr. Roosevelt, and was told not to do it again. They traveled by what Theodore described as a light prairie schooner drawn by two horses.
Days later, seeing a chance rider who agreed to serve as a mail carrier, Theodore wrote again to Bamie.
I am writing this on an upturned water keg, by our canvas-covered wagon, while the men are making tea, and the solemn old ponies are grazing round about me. I am going to trust it to the tender mercies of a stray cowboy whom we have just met, and who may or may not post it when he gets to “Powderville,” a delectable log hamlet some seventy miles north of us.
We left the Little Missouri a week ago, and have been traveling steadily some twenty or thirty miles a day ever since, through a desolate, barren-looking and yet picturesque country, part of the time rolling prairie and part of the time broken, jagged Bad Lands. We have fared sumptuously, as I have shot a number of prairie chickens, sage hens and ducks, and a couple of fine bucks—besides missing several of the latter that I ought to have killed.
Every morning we get up at dawn, and start off by six o’clock or thereabouts, Merrifield and I riding off among the hills or ravines after game, while the battered “prairie schooner,” with the two spare ponies led behind, is driven slowly along by old Lebo, who is a perfect character. He is a wizened, wiry old fellow, very garrulous, brought up on the frontier, and a man who is never put out or disconcerted by any possible combination of accidents. Of course we have had the usual incidents of prairie travel happen to us. One day we rode through a driving rainstorm, at one time developing into a regular hurricane of hail and wind, which nearly upset the wagon, drove the ponies almost frantic, and forced us to huddle into a gully for protection. The rain lasted all night and we all slept in the wagon, pretty wet and not very comfortable. Another time a sharp gale of wind or rain struck us in the middle of the night, as we were lying out in the open (we have no tent), and we shivered under our wet blankets till morning. We got into camp a little before sunset, tethering two or three of the horses, and letting the others range. One night we camped in a most beautiful natural park; it was a large, grassy hill, studded thickly with small, pine-crowned chalk buttes, with very steep sides, worn into the most outlandish and fantastic shapes. All that night the wolves kept up a weird concert around our camp—they are most harmless beasts.
As it turned out, they were gone nearly two months. They did not return until October 5. In that time Theodore shot and killed quantities of duck, grouse, prairie chickens, sage hens, doves, rabbits—more than a hundred birds and small game—as well as elk, deer, and bear. On August 29 he killed two blacktail bucks with a single shot and at a distance of more than four hundred yards. (“I went back and paced off the distance. . . . This was the best shot I ever made.”) He killed a blacktail doe, several elk, including a yearling calf, because, he later said, the party was in need of meat.
The blacktail buck, he wrote, was one of the most noble-looking of all deer. “Every movement is full of alert, fiery life and grace, and he steps as lightly as though he hardly trod the earth.” The bugling of the elk seemed such a beautiful, musical
cry, he wrote, it was “almost impossible to believe that it is the call of an animal.” Yet he would kill either at any chance, he would drive himself to his physical limits to kill such animals, and to no one who was a hunter need he ever explain why. He was in the Big Horns when he shot his “best” elk of the trip, “killing him very neatly” at a distance of about seventy-five yards.
That was on September 12, somewhere along a branch of Ten Sleep Creek, at about nine thousand feet, the nearest sign of civilization being the army post at Buffalo, Wyoming. They had left their wagon behind twelve days earlier, packed into the mountains with supplies enough for two weeks. He shot the elk in the late afternoon, removed the head, and then, just before dark, crossing a patch of burned-over forest, he saw the “huge, half-human footprints” of a grizzly. The next day, September 13, he confronted “the great bear” and killed it.
“I was very proud over my first bear,” he would write in his Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. His brother, he said, had killed tigers in India, but never a grizzly, and though it would be “hard to say” which was the more savage, he himself was sure a grizzly, with its size and strength, its teeth as large as a tiger’s, its tremendous claws, could “make short work” of any tiger. And his, he stressed, was a “monstrous” bear, nearly nine feet in height, weighing about twelve hundred pounds. Until then neither he nor Merrifield had ever seen a grizzly, dead or alive.
Everything had happened very suddenly. It was all over in a matter of seconds. They had returned to where the elk was shot and found the bear had been feeding on the carcass during the night. From the size of the tracks they knew the bear was enormous. The tracks strayed off and they followed, moving noiselessly over a pine-needle forest floor, on and on in the half-light beneath tremendous pines. Presently, they picked up very distinct prints in the dust of a game trail that led across a hillside, where the terrain was broken by hollows and boulders. Then at a windfall, the trail veered off into a thicket. They could still follow the tracks, by claw-marks on the fallen trees and by bent and broken twigs.
They started slowly into the thicket and all at once there was the bear. Merrifield saw it first and Theodore, his rifle cocked, stepped forward. The bear was not more than twenty feet off, in among some young spruces. It turned and reared up on its haunches, then, seeing Theodore, dropped down again on all fours.
“I found myself face to face with the great bear,” he was to tell Bamie, “. . . doubtless my face was pretty white, but the blue barrel was as steady as a rock. . . I could see the top of the bead fairly between his two sinister-looking eyes; as I pulled the trigger I jumped aside out of the smoke, to be ready if he charged, but it was needless . . . as you will see when I bring home his skin, the bullet hole in his skull was as exactly between his eyes as if I had measured the distance with a carpenter’s rule.”
Between them, in the next few days, he and Merrifield killed three more grizzlies, including a cub that Theodore shot, as he noted, “clean through him from end to end.” And then, their horses loaded down with elk heads, antlers, bearskins, they started down out of the mountains and by September 19, having reached their wagon and repacked, set off on the three-hundred-mile trek back to the Bad Lands.
Three of the elk heads were magnificent, exactly the thing for the house at Oyster Bay, as he told Bamie.
So I have had good sport; and enough excitement and fatigue to prevent over much thought; and moreover I have at last been able to sleep well at night. But unless I was bear hunting all the time I am afraid I should soon get as restless with this life [as I] was with life at home.
I shall be very, very glad to see you all again. . . .
Long afterward he was to write, “There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears to ’mean’ horses and gunfighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.”
3
In autumn in the Bad Lands the light is luminous, the immeasurable sky something to take the breath away. Cottonwoods along the Little Missouri are a blaze of gold. Then, in no time at all, autumn is over and winter descends, the Bad Lands are the end of the world.
A fierce north wind was blowing the sand so hard one could hardly see, Bill Sewall wrote as early as October 19,1884. In December the temperature hit 26 below, then one night it got down to 65 below. In February he was writing his brother in Maine, “I never saw cold weather till this winter.” He and Dow had the cabin finished and “my grit is good,” Sewall said, “but I believe it is a better country to live in at home than here . . .”
Theodore had gone East the first week in October, immediately upon returning from the Big Horns, to see his Baby Lee, as he called her, and to take a part in the Blaine campaign as he had promised Lodge he would. In November he was back again—Blaine had lost, Grover Cleveland had won, and Theodore, convinced his own political career was finished, had decided that it was definitely as a writer that the world would hear from him. This made his fourth trip to the Bad Lands in little more than a year and his first taste of a Dakota winter. But then he departed again before Christmas, not to return until spring.
In describing the ranchman’s “very pleasant” life, Theodore would stress that the ranchman, though bound on occasion to experience hard work and hardship, need not “undergo the monotonous drudgery attendant upon the tasks of the cowboy.” A ranchman had time for hunting expeditions of a month or more, for reading or writing. But some ranchmen had also—as he did not say—the choice of not being there at all, which is what he chose more often than not. His own Bad Lands years, as they were to be known, lasted from 1883 to 1886, but in that time he was unable to keep away from New York for more than a few months at a stretch. He crossed the continent on the Northern Pacific time after time, Pullman porters came to know him by name. He never “disappeared into the West,” as Wister put it. His time in the Bad Lands, taken altogether, added up to little more than a year and most of his best writing about his home on the range was written at home in the East. As Wister was to write The Virginian in Charleston, South Carolina, and Remington to do much of his best work in a studio in suburban New Rochelle, New York, so Theodore was to write of raging Dakota blizzards and spring roundups in his “house on the hill” at Oyster Bay. As it was for Wister and Remington, the West for Theodore was a fountain of inspiration, and it was not the length of time he spent there that mattered, but the intensity of the experience.
The most immediate and important benefit of his time in the Bad Lands was what it did to restore him in body and spirit. But he had also found a subject and, with it, found he could write as he had not before—not certainly in his naval history—with life and feeling. Some of his writing on the West was to be repetitious and overly sentimental. Still the scenes and events he pictures were drawn from direct experience, from real people, real places, all closely observed. If he was never really a cowboy, but (as he stressed) a ranchman, and largely an absentee ranchman at that, he did take what he saw greatly to heart, recognizing also that he had arrived at the very last hour, that the “great free ranches,” “the pleasantest, healthiest, and most exciting kind of life an American could live,” were about to vanish forever.
Returning in mid-April for a stay of two months, he “put on” another thousand head of cattle (at a cost of another $12,500), lunched with the Marquis at the château (they discussed the rigors of the Meadow Brook hunt), and then in mid-May he started south with his “outfit” to take part in his first spring roundup, as rugged a physical test as he had ever been put through in his life and the best chance he had thus far to see cowboys in action.
“Invariably he was right on the job holding his own with the best of them . . . with all his natural intensiveness,” Lincoln Lang remembered. “Riding circle twice a day, often taking the outer swing, taking his turn on day-herd or night-guard duty, helping with the cutting-out operations, branding calves . . . he was in the saddle all of eighteen hours per day . . . like the rest of us .
. .” After a time, as he himself recalled, “all strangeness . . . passed off, the attitude of my fellow cowpunchers being one of friendly forgiveness even toward my spectacles.”
The roundup involved the Langs, the Eatons, the Huidekoper outfit, the “Three-Sevens,” and the “OX,” every ranch big or small in the Little Missouri basin, a hundred men or more, nearly a thousand horses, thousands upon thousands of cattle, taking in a territory of perhaps ten thousand square miles. It was, as A. C. Huidekoper remembered, “a very vivid affair . . . like a reunion . . . There is a great deal of life. . . . The ponies are fresh and some buck hard, the men shout, ’Stay by him,’ ‘Go to him,’ and if a man is thrown they shout with glee.” Breakfast was at three in the morning, dinner about ten o’clock in the morning.
By custom, the men drew straws for their horses at the start of the day and the morning Theodore drew a mean, bucking horse he climbed on and, as Lincoln Lang said, “gave us all an exhibition of the stuff he was made of . . . he had his grip and like grim death he hung on. . . . Hat, glasses, six-shooter, everything unanchored about him took the count. But there was no breaking his grip . . . he stuck ...”
“I rode him all the way from the tip of his ear to the end of his tail,” Theodore later remarked.
Thrown by another horse, he landed on a stone and broke a rib. Still another horse pitched over backward on him and broke something in the point of his shoulder, “so that it was some weeks before I could raise the arm freely.” Still he kept on, saying nothing of the pain. He appears never to have excused himself for any reason from any part of the work. He was “very thorough in whatever work was assigned to him [and]... game to the core,” remembered John Goodall, one of the Marquis’s men, who was foreman of the roundup. “He would grab a calf or a cow and help drag it right into the fire to be branded,” Bill Merrifield recalled. “He could rassle a calf just as good as anybody. He used to be all over dirt from head to foot.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 315