Some days he rode as much as a hundred miles. The dust and heat were terrific. On stifling hot evenings the mosquitoes would rise from the river bottoms in great clouds to make the nights “one long torture” for men and horses. One night in early June, when the roundup had reached a point a little south of the Maltese Cross, a lightning storm stampeded the herd. Theodore was among those on night duty and there was nothing a cowboy dreaded more, nothing so dangerous as a stampede at night.
For a minute or two I could make out nothing except the dark forms of the beasts running on every side of me, and I should have been very sorry if my horse had stumbled, for those behind would have trodden me down. Then the herd split, part going to one side, while the other part seemingly kept straight ahead, and I galloped as hard as ever beside them. I was trying to reach the point—the leading animals—in order to turn them, when suddenly there was a tremendous splashing in front. I could dimly make out that the cattle immediately ahead and to one side of me were disappearing, and the next moment the horse and I went off a cut bank into the Little Missouri. I bent away back in the saddle, and though the horse almost went down he just recovered himself, and, plunging and struggling through water and quicksand, we made the other side. . . . I galloped hard through a bottom covered with big cottonwood trees, and stopped the part of the herd that I was with, but very soon they broke on me again, and repeated this twice. Finally toward morning the few I had left came to a halt.
It had been raining hard for some time. I got off my horse and leaned against a tree, but before long the infernal cattle started on again, and I had to ride after them. Dawn came soon after this, and I was able to make out where I was and head the cattle back, collecting other little bunches as I went. After a while I came on a cowboy on foot carrying his saddle on his head. . . . His horse had gone full speed into a tree and killed itself, the man, however, not being hurt. I could not help him, as I had all I could do to handle the cattle. When I got them to the wagon, most of the other men had already come in and the riders were just starting on the long circle. One of the men changed my horse for me while I ate a hasty breakfast and then we were off for the day’s work.
By the time he had finished that “day’s work” he had been in the saddle nearly forty hours and worn out five horses. “I can now do cowboy work pretty well,” he wrote Lodge a day or so later.
In his next book, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, most of which appeared first as a series of articles in Century Magazine, these illustrated by Remington, he wrote of the cowboy with an appreciation not to be found in the work of previous writers. He was, as Wister said, the pioneer in taking the cowboy seriously. He wrote of their courage, their phenomenal physical endurance. He liked their humor, admired the unwritten code that ruled the cow camp. “Meanness, cowardice, and dishonesty are not tolerated,” he observed. “There is a high regard for truthfulness and keeping one’s word, intense contempt for any kind of hypocrisy, and a hearty dislike for a man who shirks his work.” It was, of course, exactly the code he had been raised on. (Recalling his father years later, he would use very nearly the same words: “He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness.”) The cowboy was bold, cared about his work; he was self-reliant and self-confident. Perhaps most important of all, the cowboy seemed to know how to deal with death, death in a dozen different forms being an everyday part of his life.
It was not only to the meadowlark that the plains air gave new voice and spirit. Theodore was looking different, even sounding different from what he had. The change is cited in numerous surviving accounts and appears to have become obvious by the time the roundup ended. He himself was to describe the experience as “superbly health-giving.”
The spectacled dude who appeared on the scene the year before had been “a light little feller.” “I have seen him when you could have spanned his waist with your two thumbs and fingers,” remembered a cowboy named Roberts. From what Bill Sewall wrote, it appears Theodore had suffered from both asthma and stomach trouble that first year, and Bill Merrifield, recalling their hunting trip in the Big Horns, would tell how Theodore “ate heart medicine,” whatever that may have been. But after this Bad Lands spring of 1885—the point, by all signs, that marks the final turn in his lifelong battle for health—no such references are to be found again. He is even called “rugged” in an account in a St. Paul paper written in late June as he headed home again. “Rugged, bronzed, and in the prime of health, Theodore Roosevelt passed through St. Paul yesterday, returning from his Dakota ranch to New York and civilization,” we read in the Pioneer Press. In New York later, in the Tribune, another reporter wrote of “his sturdy walk and firm bearing,” again attributes not to be found in previous accounts.
Theodore, remembered William Roscoe Thayer, had become “physically a very powerful man . . . with broad shoulders and stalwart chest, instead of the city-bred, slight young friend I had known earlier.”
When Theodore passed through Pittsburgh on the Chicago Limited later that summer, on his way back to Medora, another reporter thought he had put on perhaps thirty pounds. “But what a change. . . . The voice which failed to make an echo in the . . . [Albany] capitol when he. . . piped ’Mistah Speakah,’ is now hearty and strong enough to drive oxen.”
4
The summer of 1885 the Marquis was indicted again, taken to court still another time on the old Riley Luffsey murder charge, and again, after a travesty of a trial, he got off. But in the meantime, he was kept in jail at Mandan and the story was splashed across the newspapers east and west. Alone, brooding in his cell, the Marquis saw it all as a conspiracy by his business enemies—the Chicago beef trust—to destroy him, and in this he may have been partly correct. But his notion that Theodore, too, had a hand in his troubles was nonsense.
Rumors of bad blood between Theodore and the Marquis had circulated off and on since the time they both arrived in the Bad Lands and these were now picked up by the papers. Sometime that spring, apparently, Theodore and several of his men had delivered a hundred head of cattle to Medora only to find that the Marquis had decided to disregard the agreed-to price. There had been a moment when they stood face-to-face with a number of others looking on. Theodore had asked the Marquis if he had not quoted a higher price the day before and the Marquis said he had, but that there had since been a drop in the Chicago market. Theodore asked the Marquis if he was not going to stick to his original figure, and when the Marquis said no, Theodore said nothing, then turned and ordered that the animals be driven out of the yards and back to the range. Neither man, however, had since expressed any hard feelings over the episode and they had continued to exchange the usual pleasantries.
Numbers of local people claimed later that a showdown between the two had been inevitable all along and were they two figures in a western we would know it had to come. In what actually took place, however, it is the part played by the Marquis that is particularly fascinating, since it is so at odds with the whole violent pattern of his life.
Four days after he was imprisoned at Mandan, the Marquis sent Theodore a letter that Theodore immediately took to be a challenge to a duel. Conceivably the Marquis meant is as just that, but not likely; the whole tone of the letter suggests otherwise. It was dated September 3 and read as follows:
MY DEAR ROOSEVELT,
My principle is to take the bull by the horns. Joe Ferris [Theodore’s old hunting guide, now a storekeeper in Medora] is very active against me and has been instrumental in getting me indicted by furnishing money to witnesses and hunting them up. The papers also publish very stupid accounts of our quarreling—I sent you the paper to N.Y. Is this done by your orders? I thought you my friend. If you are my enemy I want to know it. I am always on hand as you know, and between gentlemen it is easy to settle matters of that sort directly.
Yours very truly,
Mores
I hear the people want to organize the county. I am opposed to it for one year mo
re at least.
Plainly the Marquis wanted Theodore as a friend. Nor would a formal note designed to provoke a duel close with some offhand postscript about another wholly irrelevant subject. In any event, Theodore answered at once that he was emphatically not the Marquis’s enemy, but that if the Marquis was threatening him, then he, Theodore, stood “ever ready to hold myself accountable . . .”
But there was no duel because the Marquis kept his head and let the matter drop. Theodore was sure he had called the man’s bluff—the Marquis had “backed off,” he would later boast. Others, including several who had no use for the Marquis, were equally sure he had done nothing of the kind. “Whatever else is to be said for or against de Mores,” wrote Lincoln Lang, “even his worst enemy could not accuse him of cowardice . . .” The Marquis, it was argued, made nothing of Theodore’s response because the Marquis had never challenged him in the first place.
Had there been a duel—with rifles, pistols, swords (Theodore wanted Winchester rifles at twelve paces)—almost certainly Theodore would have been killed. So it can be fairly said for the Marquis that his unaccountably cool head in this instance spared Theodore for other things.
Passing through Mandan sometime later, Theodore took time out to go to the jail to see the Marquis and is said to have found him sitting on his bunk calmly smoking a cigarette, but nothing is known of what was said.
Life at the Elkhorn had changed considerably, meantime. Will Dow had gone home to Maine to be married and returned bringing his new bride, as well as Mrs. Sewall and the Sewalls’ small daughter, who was the same age as Baby Lee. “We were all a very happy family,” Sewall wrote. That was in the summer of 1885. The next year Theodore was at work on another book, this a biography of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and seemed, Sewall thought, as happy as he had ever known him.
“I miss both you and darling Baby Lee dreadfully...” he wrote Bamie. “Yet I enjoy my life at present. I have my time fully occupied . . . so have none of my usual restless, caged wolf feeling. I work two days out of three at my book or papers; and I hunt, ride and lead the wild, half adventurous life of a ranchman all through it. The elements are combined well.”
He wished only that Bamie would send on some toys for the Sewall child. He thought a big colored ball, some picture blocks, letter blocks, a little horse and wagon, and a rag doll would be perfect.
But time was running out. The Marquis’s empire had already begun to come apart by then, that is, a whole year before the tragic winter of 1886-87. A stagecoach line from Medora to Deadwood proved a failure. The Marquis’s 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 promoting his 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 Bad Lands beef at three cents a pound below the going price. Good beef at a good price for the workingman was his dream. Stock in his National Consumers Meat Company was listed at $10 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 the bright-red stores, three of which actually opened in New York, was “From Ranch to Table.”
But the stock issue failed. 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 unlikely he could have survived. It is also true that his range-fed beef simply did not taste as good as beef fattened in the Chicago yards.
The packing plant was shut down in the fall of 1886. It is not known what the venture had cost, and estimates on the Marquis’s losses vary from $300,000 to $1.5 million. But it is also 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 at any time. And Theodore too had departed by then. “Overstocking may cause little or no harm for two or three years,” he had written that fall in one of his articles for Century, “but sooner or later there comes a winter which means ruin to the ranches that have too many cattle on them; and in our country, which is even now getting crowded, it is merely a question of time as to when a winter will come that will understock the ranges by the summary process of killing off about half of all the cattle throughout the Northwest.” There had been little or no rain all summer, the growing time for grass. The range was bone-dry and still more cattle were being driven in from the south; one outfit brought in some six thousand head. Prices fell drastically. Sewall and Dow, shipping off to Chicago what was marketable from Theodore’s herd, found the price they received was less than the cattle had cost. So they decided it was time they got out of the cattle business. “Sept. 22, 1886, squared accounts with Theodore Roosevelt,” reads the entry in Sewall’s diary. By early October the Sewalls and the Dows had departed for Maine.
Storm on top of storm, blinding snows, relentless, savage winds, the worst winter on record swept the Great Plains. In the Bad Lands, 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 and temperatures hovered at about 40 below. People locked up in their houses could only wait and hope that elsewhere conditions were not so bad. A few who could not wait blew their brains out.
The losses, when they were tallied up in March, were beyond anyone’s worst estimates. Not a rancher along the Little Missouri had come through with half his herd. The average loss was seventy-five percent. Theodore, when he finally returned to survey the damage, called it a perfect “smashup.” He rode for three days without seeing a live steer.
He would come back as time went on, every other year or so, but only for hunting, never again in the same spirit, and he seldom stayed more than a week or two. All told he had invested $52,500 in cattle, which, added to another $30,000 spent on his cabin, on wages, travel, equipment, made a total of $82,500. Eventually he sold off what little he had left in the Bad Lands, added up his losses and arrived at a figure of $20,292.63. But beyond that, of course, he had lost the interest on the investment—five percent over a period of nearly fifteen years—which figured to about $50,000. So the complete loss was more on the order of $70,000, or in present-day money, about $700,000.
So the glorious Bad Lands days had lasted all of three years, and numbers of other ranchers, like Theodore, gave up and went on to other things. Howard Eaton, for example, resettled in Wyoming, to found one of the best-known dude ranches in the West.
The subsequent career of the Marquis was one most people who had known him preferred to put out of their minds. Following a tiger hunt in India, he went home to France to proclaim himself the victim of a Jewish plot. The Chicago beef trust was now portrayed as the “Jewish beef trust.” He turned to politics, launched a crusade to save France, a blend of socialism and rabid anti-Semitism, and went parading 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 led eventually 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.
Once, on the morning of April 11, 1886, the spring before the disastrous winter, in the little town of Dickinson, forty miles east of Medora on the Northern Pacific, a young physician, a Vermonter named Victor Hugo Stickney, had come out of his office about noon on his way home to lunch when he saw “the most bedraggled figure I’d ever seen come limping down the street.” The man was covered with mud, his clothes in shreds, and he struck Stickney as “the queerest specimen of strangeness that had descended on Dickinson in the three years I had lived there.”
He was all teeth and eyes.... He was scratched, bruised and hungry, but gritty and determined as a bull dog. He was actually a slender young fellow, but I remember that he gave me the impression of being heavy and rather large. As I approached him he stopped me with a gesture asking me whether I could direct him to a doctor’s office. I was struck by the way he bit off his words and showed his teeth. I told him that I was the only practicing physician, not only in Dickinson but in the whole surrounding country.
“By George,” he said emphatically, “then you’re exactly the man I want to see. . . . My feet are blistered so badly that I can hardly walk. I want you to fix me up.”
I took him into my office and while I was bathing and bandaging his feet, which were in pretty bad shape, he told me the story. . .
The story, one Theodore was to tell many times and one that was to be told about him for years after he had left the Bad Lands, was of his last and biggest adventure in the West and may be summarized briefly as follows. It has the ring of the adventure stories he had loved so as a boy, but it also happened just as he said.
Earlier in March, having just returned to the Elkhorn after a winter in New York, Theodore was informed by Sewall one morning that a boat, a light, flat-bottomed scow that they kept on the river, had been stolen in the night by someone who had obviously taken off in it downstream. They suspected the culprit was a man named Finnegan, who lived upriver, toward Medora, with two cronies of equally bad reputation. So in the next few days Sewall and Dow put together a makeshift boat, and after waiting for a blizzard to pass, the three of them took off in pursuit, pushing into the icy current on March 30, Sewall steering.
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