The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (55 page)

He learned, too, that fleeing antelope have a quasi-military tendency to gallop in straight lines, even when intercepted at an angle. Taking advantage of this, he succeeded eventually in rolling over one fine buck “like a rabbit.” Cutting off the hams and head, and stringing them to his saddle, he rode on in search of a campsite. Around sunset he found a wooded creek with fresh pools and succulent grass. Turning Manitou loose to browse, Roosevelt lit a fire “for cheerfulness,” cut himself an antelope steak, and roasted it on a
forked stick. Later he lay on his blanket under a wide-branching cottonwood tree, “looking up at the stars until I fell asleep, in the cool air.”
⁹

T
HE SHRILL YIPPING
of prairie dogs awoke him shortly before dawn. It was now very chill, and wreaths of light mist hung over the water. Roosevelt reached for his rifle and strolled through the dark trees out onto the prairie.

On returning to the camp at sunrise, Roosevelt caught sight of a doe going down to the water, “her great, sensitive ears thrown forward as she peered anxiously and timidly around.” Gun forgotten, he watched enchanted while she drank her fill. She snatched some hasty mouthfuls of wet grass; presently a spotted fawn joined her. When they left, the pond was taken over by a mallard and her ducklings, “balls of fuzzy yellow down, that bobbed off into the reeds as I walked by.”
¹¹

R
OOSEVELT WAS BACK
at the Maltese Cross Ranch on 22 June, having spent five days in the wilderness, feeling “as absolutely free as any man could feel.”
¹²
He might have stayed away longer, but he did not wish his venison to spoil in the hot sun. The little log cabin was deserted. Ferris and Merrifield had left for St. Paul, with $26,000 of his money, to purchase a thousand new head of cattle;
¹³
they would not be back for another month. He felt too restless to
settle down and begin the writing he had vaguely planned for summer. Next day he was in the saddle again, riding downriver.
¹⁴

En route he stopped at Medora to pick up some mail, and was able to take his first good look around since returning to the Badlands.
¹⁵
The hamlet of last fall, with its giant chimney and scattered, half-finished houses, was now a bustling town of eighty-four buildings, including a hotel which the Marquis de Morès had modestly named after himself. Little Missouri, meanwhile, was already slipping into ghosthood on the other side of the river. Trains no longer stopped there. Medora, clearly, was the future capital of the Badlands.
¹⁶

A spirit of lusty optimism pervaded the place. Roosevelt, tethering Manitou and gazing about him, could not help but respond to it. The beef business was prospering; it had been a mild winter, and plenty of fat steers were ambling to their doom in the slaughterhouse. A record number of calves had been born to replace them—155 at Maltese Cross alone.
¹⁷
Daily consignments of dressed meat were being shipped East by the Marquis’s Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company. Meanwhile, de Morès was spawning new business ideas with codfish-like fertility. He would plant fifty thousand cabbages in the Little Missouri Valley, and force-feed them with his own patented fertilizer, made from offal; he would run a stagecoach line along the eastern rim of the Badlands; he would invest $10,000 in a huge blood-drying machine; he would extend a chain of icehouses as far west as Oregon, so that Columbia River salmon could be whisked, cold and fresh, to New York in seven days; he would open a pottery in Medora to process the fine local clay; he would string a telegraph line all the way south to the Black Hills; he would supply the French Army with a delicious new soup he had invented.… As fast as these schemes flourished or failed, the Marquis would think of others.
¹⁸

It is not definitely known whether Roosevelt met the Marquis in Medora that Monday, but they would have had difficulty avoiding each other. De Morès was the most ubiquitous person in town, given to riding up and down the street in a large white sombrero, his blue shirt laced with yellow silk cord, his mustaches prickling haughtily. Tall, wiry, and muscular, he sat his horse more gracefully than any cowboy.
¹⁹
Gunmen treated him with scared respect: his
reputation as a sharpshooter was exceeded only by the vivacious and redheaded Madame de Morès.
²⁰

Almost certainly the couple entertained Roosevelt with iced champagne, this being their invariable custom whenever a distinguished stranger came to town. The atmosphere may have been a little stiff at first, for there had been a dispute over grazing rights between the Marquis and Roosevelt’s cattlemen during the winter.
²¹
But it is a matter of record that Roosevelt and de Morès were soon conferring on subjects of mutual interest, and planning a visit to Montana together.
²²

Before continuing his expedition downriver, Roosevelt dropped in at the office of Medora’s weekly newspaper, the
Bad Lands Cowboy
. Its editor, a bearded, flap-eared, engaging youth named Arthur Packard, had disquieting news. According to Eastern dispatches, much political vituperation was being lavished on the names Roosevelt and Lodge. The former’s railroad interview at St. Paul, stating that he had “no personal objections” to James G. Blaine, and the latter’s announcement, on returning to Boston, that he, too, would support the Chicago convention’s choice, had enraged the reform press.
²³
Clearly they had been expected to follow George William Curtis, and a host of other prominent Independents, out of the Republican party.

Roosevelt showed little interest, merely saying that the St. Paul reporter had misquoted him out of “asininity.”
²⁴
Politics must have seemed impossibly remote and irrelevant in Packard’s whitewashed, inky-smelling office, with its slugs of type spelling out news of more immediate interest, to do with horse-thievery and the price of fresh manure.
²⁵

Remounting Manitou, Roosevelt rode out of Medora and headed north into the green bottomlands of the Little Missouri.

T
HE NEXT ISSUE OF
the
Bad Lands Cowboy
briefly reported that a new dude had arrived in town.

W
HEN
P
ACKARD’S NEWS ITEM
appeared, Roosevelt was at least thirty miles north, well beyond the farthest reach of ranch settlement. He was looking for “untrodden ground” on which to build a ranch house. The Maltese Cross log cabin, situated only eight miles south of Medora, did not satisy his present hunger for solitude. A popular pony-trail passed within a few yards of the front door; ten or twelve cowpunchers galloping by every week amounted, as far as he was concerned, to an intolerable amount of traffic noise. Worse still, at least half of them wanted to stop off and pass the time of day.
²⁷
How could a man write with so many interruptions? He wanted to live where the peace of nature was total.

Acting on a tip from a friendly cattleman, Roosevelt kept splashing across the meandering river, heading directly north until he reached a magnificent stretch of bottomland on the left bank. Grass spread smoothly back from the water’s edge for a hundred yards, merging into a belt of immense cottonwood trees. This bird-loud grove extended a farther two hundred yards west. Then a range of clay hills, which seemed to have been sculpted by a giant hand as preparatory studies for mountains, loomed steeply into the sky. A distant plume of lignite smoke, glowing pink as evening came on, hinted at the surrounding savagery of the Badlands. No place could be more remote from the world, yet more insulated from the wilderness.
²⁸
Roosevelt knew he had found his “hold” in Dakota.

Here he would build “a long, low ranch house of hewn logs, with a verandah, and with in addition to the other rooms, a bedroom for myself, and a sitting-room with a big fireplace.” There would be a rough desk, well stocked with ink and paper, two or three shelves full of books, and a rubber tub to bathe in. Out front, on a piazza overlooking the river, there would be the inevitable Rooseveltian rocking-chair, in which he could sit reading poetry on summer afternoons, or watching his cattle plod across the sandbars. At night, when he came back tired and bloody from hunting, there would be a welcoming flicker of firelight through the cottonwood
trees, plenty of fresh meat to eat, and beds spread with buffalo robes.…
²⁹

Of course several practical things had to be done before these dreams were realized. He must first claim the site (the presence of a hunting shack nearby meant he would probably have to buy squatter’s rights);
³⁰
he must order many more cattle; he must hire men to build the house and run the ranch for him. As it happened, he already had two recruits for the latter job: his two old friends from the backwoods of Maine, Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow.