“A slim, anemic-looking young fellow”
People in those parts, other ranchers, their cowhands, folks in what passed for towns, thought of him as something of a dude, and he was. His boots were made of alligator hide, his chaps of seal skin. His spurs were real silver. The six-shooters in his holsters were ivory-handled and etched with his initials, TR. His big hunting knife had been custom-made for him back in New York City at Tiffany’s. He favored fringed buckskin shirts and jackets that were impractical in wet weather but which he thought appropriate because they made him look like the frontiersmen heroes of the boys adventure stories he’d loved when he was a boy himself, which wasn’t that long ago---he was in his mid-twenties and still very boyish in looks and outlook and behavior.
Later in life he would grow a little stout and decidedly barrel-chested, but at the time he was slender and frail---“a slim, anemic-looking young fellow” is how one cowboy described him---not all that surprising considering he was asthmatic and suffered from chronic indigestion. He was near-sighted too and wore big round glasses that didn’t always help. Once out hunting, he sighted his rifle on what he thought was an antelope in the distance. It turned out to be a dead sunflower not all that far off.
He talked funny, too, in a high, squeaky rush, and when he was excited, riled, or thrilled, he would shout out things like, “By Godfrey!” and “By golly!” which were interchangeable as curses and whoops of delight.
It was hard to take the dude seriously, except that he was so good-natured, outgoing, hard-working, and rich---and he spread his money around.
Really, though, no one expected him to last a month as a rancher in the Badlands, never mind three and a half years!
Then one night:
He had been riding the range all day when he stopped in Mingusville, Montana, about thirty-five miles west of Medora. As he approached Nolan’s Hotel, where he hoped to find a bed for the night, he heard shots from the saloon on the hotel’s first floor. He was reluctant to enter, but he had nowhere else to go on a cold night.
Almost as soon as he stepped inside he was confronted by a bully with a six-gun in each hand who just put two or three bullet holes in the face of a wall clock. He called Roosevelt “Four Eyes” and ordered him to buy drinks for everyone in the bar. Roosevelt tried to laugh it off and found a seat behind the stove, hoping to avoid further notice.
The armed man followed and again ordered Roosevelt to buy drinks. “My assailant was neither a cowboy nor a bond fide ‘bad man,’ but a broad-hatted ruffian of cheap and commonplace type who had for the moment terrorized the other men in the bar-room, these being mostly sheep-herders and small grangers. The fact that I wore glasses, together with my evident desire to avoid a fight, apparently gave him the impression---a mistaken one---that I would not resent an injury.” Concluding that he had been pushed as far as he could reasonably allow, Roosevelt said, “Well, if I’ve got to, I’ve got,” stood up, and delivered his fists right, left, right to the man’s jaw. The guns went off, and the man fell, hitting his head on the bar and sprawling senseless on the floor. Roosevelt collected the guns, and the other patrons dumped the unconscious man in a shed outside. The following morning, Roosevelt was pleased to hear that the bully had fled town on a freight train.
Word got around, and that was the end of anyone’s thinking of Theodore Roosevelt as just some funny little tenderfoot from the East.
In Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands: A Young Politician's Quest for Recovery in the American West
Roosevelt set out to make his life one long hero’s journey and his time in the Badlands is a large and important and thrilling part of that story.
He chased down outlaws, squared off against wild Indians---well, he thought they were wild. They probably thought they’d encountered a wild white man---broke broncos, branded cattle, hunted grizzly bears, and prepared to fight a duel with a colorful transplanted Frenchman, a rival rancher named Antoine-Amedee-Marie-Vincent-Amat Manca de Vallobrosa, known better by his title, the Marquis de Mores. He endured long days in the saddle in the hellacious heat and murderous cold of the Badlands, a region of breathtaking but primitive beauty that offered humans and animals little in the way of shade, shelter, and, at times, water. The land itself regularly seemed to turn on him.
A rattlesnake nearly bit [his guide Joe Ferris’s] horse; a bluff along which they were riding crumbled under them and sent men and horses falling in a tangled mass; [Roosevelt’s horse] Nell somersaulted after plunging her front hooves into a hole, and Roosevelt catapulted a good ten feet beyond her; and then, when crossing an apparently dry creek, the ground gave way, and Nell was up to her withers in sticky mud, though Roosevelt was able to scramble free to the bank; with a lariat they dragged the mired horse to solid ground, nearly strangling her in the process.
He roped, rode, and shot with the best of them, although when it came to roping and shooting, not nearly as well as the best of them. He often got in the way of the cowboys and by his own admission he was not a crack-shot.
He wasn’t bad on a horse though.
Roosevelt was pulled from his blankets the night of Tuesday, June 2, near Chimney Butte to help control a herd in the storm. He rode out to find the animals stirring. “After a while there was a terrific peal of thunder, the lightning struck by the herd, and away all the beasts went, heads and horns and tails in the air. 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.” At that moment the herd split into two, part of it veering to one side and the other going straight. Roosevelt stayed beside the latter, galloping at top sped to try to get ahead of the lead cattle and turn them, “when suddenly there was a tremendous splashing in front. I could dimly make out that the cattle immediately ahead and to the one side of me were disappearing, and the next moment the horse and I went off a cut bank into the Little Missouri.” The horse stayed upright despite its plunge into the river and made it to the other side. There Roosevelt met another cowboy, from whom he was immediately separated. Galloping hard, he stopped the part of the herd with which he was riding, but it stampeded again; he had to stop it two more times…
When Roosevelt reached camp he found that only about half the night herd had been recovered. He changed horses and set out again after a quick breakfast. He did not return for ten hours. He then changed horses and rode with the cattle until after dark before coming back to camp. He had spent nearly forty hours in the saddle---his longest stint on horseback---changing mounts five times. His clothes, soaked in the rain, had dried, and he rolled into his blankets and fell instantly asleep…
The Badlands lie in the northwestern corner of what is now North Dakota, not far from the Montana Border. The Maltese Cross operated along the eastern bank of the Little Missouri River, south of the town of Medora. Roosevelt’s second and larger spread, the Elkhorn, was to the north, on the western side of the river. He lived out there on and off for three and a half years, from the summer of 1884 until the spring of 1887. Starkly beautiful and infernally ugly, it’s a difficult country to love---
Sometimes they rattled along a valley a mile or more wide, and other times buttes rose abruptly from the riverbanks; surrounding hills were capped with tawny grass, ravines were dark with cedars, and the river bottoms were shadowed by cottonwoods. When the trail snaked over the buttes, they could see the Badlands spreading out in a maze of hills and ravines where seams of coal burned for years when struck by lightning, sending up clouds of smoke by day and glowing red in the night, overhung with the smell of sulfur. Left in the ground, the burning coal heated the stretches of earth into a red, brick-like substance called scoria. Roosevelt concluded that “when one is in the Bad Lands he feels as if they somehow look just exactly as Poe’s tales and poems sound.” In one of his books he would the Badlands the “devil’s wilderness.”
But Roosevelt loved it, at first sight for itself, later and forever afterwards, because it saved his life.
It’s a terrific story and a key chapter in Roosevelt’s legend, how, devastated by the deaths of his beautiful young wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, and his beloved mother Mamie on the same day in the same house, the up and coming young politician walked away from his rising career in New York State politics and went west to escape his grief and how out there riding the range and chasing after mountain lions and outlaws he restored himself to emotional and physical health. It’s not only a good story, it’s a true story, except that the double blow of his wife’s and mother’s deaths is the reason he went back and went back when he did.
Alice and Mamie Roosevelt died in February 1884, five months after he returned from his first trip to the Badlands in September of 1883, and the reason he’d gone out there that first time was to hunt buffalo. He fell in love with Dakota Territory and established his first ranch, the Maltese Cross, while he was out there, but he was out there to shoot a bison and bring back its head as a trophy before the buffalo were all gone.
Roosevelt knew they were on the brink of extinction but not only did that make him more determined to hunt them, he thought it would be a good thing to wipe them out. Ridding the west of bison would force the Plains Indians who depended on the buffalo to abandon their way of life and settle down and get themselves civilized. By killing a bison, he would be taking part in killing off a culture and he was happy to help in that.
“From the standpoint of humanity at large,” he wrote, “the extermination of the buffalo has been a blessing.”
And when he returned to the Badlands to live, he did far more hunting than he did cow-punching. He left the ranch regularly for days and weeks on end to go off to shoot whatever game took his fancy or had the bad luck to wander into rifle range. On one trip to the Bighorn Mountains to hunt grizzly bears, he and his companions shot dozens of animals of various other kinds---elk, mule deer, pronghorn antelopes, jackrabbits, sharp-tailed grouse, and ducks---eating very little of what they killed. Roosevelt was out for sport and trophies and after he’d taken horns or head or hide to send back to adorn the hallways of his Long Island home, the rest of the animal was left where it lay to feed vultures, wolves, coyotes, and worms. His casual and callous attitude towards the waste, his out and out blood lust and the joy he took in killing---he amused or annoyed his companions, depending on their temperaments and moods, by doing little war dances, whooping and hollering, after each kill---are almost as appalling as his racism, which, along with his warmongering and imperialism, makes him a problematic figure for contemporary liberals for whom he would otherwise be a great hero.
His was a Take Up the White Man’s Burden form of racism. (Kipling probably didn’t write his poem with Roosevelt in mind as his audience, but TR read it and admired its sentiments, although to his credit as a judge of literature he did not think highly of its merits as poetry---Roosevelt loved to read, could recite from his favorite poems at length, and, among other books, he carried a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in his saddle bag.) He believed that it was the job of the white race to improve the lot of the lesser orders who, conveniently, were a long way from being improved to the point of being ready to share power, status, and liberty with their white superiors.
As was the case with a lot of what he said and wrote on every subject, many of Roosevelt’s pronouncements on race have the sound of a man yelling at himself to shout down his own doubts and conscience. He thought and felt things deeply, and by Godfrey, he believed those things to be right and true, but at the same time, he seemed, at some level, to suspect he was wrong. But that’s probably just wishful thinking. Roosevelt was a racist and his racism can’t be excused on the grounds that he was a product of his times. Other whites of his time and place did know better. Friends of his in the Badlands knew better. He had the education and the experience to know better. Roosevelt understood that injustices were being done to the Indians but he had little sympathy. He thought the Indians needed to be forced to live like the white settlers or get out of their way and whatever happened to them if they didn’t they brought on themselves. “I don’t go so far as to think the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
His stand-off with a party of “hostiles” may have been a figment of his imagination colored by his prejudices. Roosevelt thought the Indians were up to no good. His friend, neighbor, and fellow rancher Lincoln Lang thought Roosevelt had mistaken the intentions of a peaceful hunting party.
The Lang range bordered the west side of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, so Lang though, “we must have found out something about [Indian depredations] from our twenty-odd years of residence there.” What the Langs found was that “from ‘85 on, we saw a good deal of them at the ranch. And they were always hungry. Hungry because they had no food with them, that we ever saw; because game was steadily growing scarcer, and because such rifles as they were permitted to carry were more or less antiquated and inadequate. When Indians showed up at the Lang ranch waving travel permits […] the Langs fed them and made friends with them. Lang called the permits “a passport of the invading White Man---symbol of Reservation slavery---beneficently entitling them to hunt for a couple of weeks in their own country. In their beloved Bad Lands---their stolen hunting grounds---where for aeons the race had hunted before he came; title to that which they held from God Almighty Himself.”
Di Silvestro notes that Roosevelt’s views and his heart softened over time and that as on most subjects his thinking was complex and self-contradictory, but he isn’t interested in writing either an apology or an indictment. He doesn’t ignore Roosevelt’s politics, which at that point in his life were both elitist and reformist. Roosevelt’s attitudes towards most white Americans weren’t much more egalitarian than his attitudes towards people of other colors, although his time out west opened his eyes about a lot of things. He was able to make several trips back east and kept his hand in enough that when he finally returned home to stay he was able to jump right back into the thick of things and pick up practically where he left off, only this time as something of a folk hero, the cowboy from New York by way of the Dakota badlands. It wasn’t his reason for going west, but being out there gave him an excuse not to take an active part in the 1884 Presidential campaign. The Republicans had nominated James G. Blaine of Maine, a man Roosevelt regarded with good reason as utterly corrupt. Roosevelt was a good government man but he was also a good and loyal Republican. From his ranch he could “support” Blaine but there was no way he could be expected to lend much of a hand to help get the man elected. And he wasn’t around for anyone to point fingers at when when Blaine lost to Grover Cleveland and party regulars and sachems were looking to place the blame.
But Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands isn’t a political biography. It’s a depiction of life in the Dakota territory in the 1880s as seen through the eyes of a particular young man who happened to have an amazing career in politics ahead of him. Di Silvestro observes qualities of Roosevelt’s character and details about his politics and prejudices with the same clear-eyed journalistic detachment as he observes the features of the landscape of the territory and the living arrangements and natural history of its inhabitants, two and four-footed. He’s wise to keep things low key, because his primary source is Theodore Roosevelt himself, and TR was as excitable in print as he was in person.
Roosevelt wasn’t the best writer ever to be President. That would be Lincoln, with Thomas Jefferson a close second, then John Adams. Grant gets an honorable mention. But Roosevelt is the only President who could claim to be a professional author when he got to the White House. (Of all the things Jimmy Carter listed on his resume when he was running for President, author wasn’t one of them. He started his writing career after he left office.) Roosevelt wrote and co-authored over forty books, twenty or so---it depends on how you count the multiple volumes of The Naval War of 1812 and The Winning of the West---by the time he became President, at the ripe old age of 42, three of them about his time in the Badlands. Di Silvestro knows a gift when he’s been given one and he quotes extensively from TR’s writing. But he doesn’t let Roosevelt hog the page.
Di Silvestro’s own more even-tempered but still elegant and descriptive prose complements Roosevelt’s, lowering the pitch, slowing the tempo, underscoring Roosevelt’s general accuracy and reliability, toning things down when Roosevelt gets carried away, providing doses of naturalism where TR grows fanciful.
And Di Silvestro is good at filling in, adding facts and background and bits of history that Roosevelt couldn’t have known at the time, providing details that Roosevelt was too busy to notice or that he saw only peripherally as he galloped along hell-bent for leather on whatever enthusiasm had taken hold of him at the moment. Since Di Silvestro is a nature writer, a senior editor for National Wildlife and the author of several award-winning nature books, much of what he adds is descriptive, of the landscape, the weather, and the flora and fauna of the Badlands. Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands includes a a barely hidden field guide to that area of North Dakota, then and now.
The valley flats and the slopes of the surrounding hills were grassy, but the domed faces of the bordering buttes were rutted and torn by wind and water, pale in color, bleaching almost to white when the sun stood high, warming almost to gold when the sun lay low, and marked with with horizontal bands of black, blue, and red earth.
_____
The sun shone brightly as the duo rode up the river valley, flanked by sheer bluffs. The greening grass was dappled with spring blossoms, the river valley thick with fodder, the air scented with the fragrance of silvery sage brush. Cattle fed peacefully, stopping to watch the riders pass by. Birds called from all directions. Overhead, western kingbirds, about the size of robins, with gray backs and yellow breasts, dive-bombed hawks that ducked and swooped to avoid the attacks.
_____
They soon came to a gulch that allowed them to ride out of the river valley and on to the broken plains above, where travel was easier. There they began to see pronghorn antelope---tan and white animals with black markings that are not really antelope; their closest living relatives are goats, and they themselves are the lone species in a family all their own. They are unique among horned animals in that their forked horns, usually found only on the males, or bucks, shed the black outer layer each year. Pronghorn are the fastest mammals on the continent and one of the fastest in the world, capable of hitting sixty miles per hour. Prior to European settlement in the West, pronghorn mingled with bison and elk on western grasslands and may have numbered forty million as late as the 1870s. By 1908, the U.S. Biological Survey estimated that only about seventeen thousand remained after years of uncontrolled hunting. At the time Roosevelt came to the Badlands, pronghorn had become wary; on that first morning he decided not to stalk them , because the wind was to his back, making it easier for the animals to scent him.
_____
Lang noticed that hunters had killed off most of the beaver native to the Badlands, the largest rodent in North America and builder of dams on streams. These dams created pools of water that lasted year-round. As beaver vanished, so did their dams, and by 1886 streams were beginning to run dry part of the year. The myriad cattle crowding the Badlands had to search farther for water, cutting a spiderweb of trails across the fragile prairie, trails that eroded in the heavy rains and evolved into washouts…
As useful and informative as it is this way, Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands is still an adventure story. The book is packed with so many exciting incidents and encounters with colorful characters that by the time we reach the chapter about the outlaws who stole a boat from his ranch and we read how Roosevelt set out in pursuit and captured them, we think, “Well, of course he did. That’s what heroes of Westerns do.”
And where would the hero of an adventure yarn be without a romance?
Alice Roosevelt died of kidney failure, probably from an undiagnosed case of Bright’s Disease, shortly after giving birth to the couple’s only child, a daughter also known as Alice, soon to be notorious as the roller-skater in the halls of the White House and then as the doyenne and terror of the Washington social scene, Alice Roosevelt Longworth. As soon as he could arrange it, Roosevelt packed up and went west, leaving baby Alice in the care of his sister. Strangely, almost perversely, it was a long time before Roosevelt mentioned his daughter or asked about her in his letters home. Convinced that without Alice his life was over, he seemed determined to act as if he’d had no life with her as well, and his infant child was about to pay for that through his indifference and benign neglect.
Then, something changed. He began to show an interest in Alice and on trips back home he doted on her. It was the first real sign he was getting over his grief and was readying himself to move on.
Before he met and married Alice, family and friends had expected him to marry his best friend from childhood and eventually his sweetheart, Edith Kermit Carow, and in fact Roosevelt proposed to her several times. But they had a falling out, over what neither ever said. They drifted apart and after he married Alice, they avoided each other as much as was possible within their narrow social set. But on his visits home from the Badlands, they kept bumping into each other. Slowly, then swiftly, one thing led to another and…well, you can guess the rest.
So Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands is an exciting adventure yarn and a lyrical and lively natural and social history of that part of the still wild West. But it’s also the story of a young man’s journey towards maturity and wisdom.
Theodore Roosevelt was a natural leader, intensely charismatic, charming and seductive without hardly trying or noticing. People just liked him. More than that, they trusted him. He couldn’t enter a room without people in it wanting him to put him in charge of something. If he said, Let’s go this way, they went, if he said, let’s do it like this, they did it, even when they felt they were acting against their own better judgment. Much of his appeal was due to the delight he took in the company of others. He liked people, he enjoyed being around them, and he was interested in them. As prone as he was to letting his mouth run away with him, he also knew how to listen. The story of Theodore Roosevelt out west is a story of healing. But it’s also a story about learning.
In later years Roosevelt would write of the Badlands, “I owe more than I can ever express to the West, which of course means to the men and women I met in the west. There were a few people of bad type in my neighborhood---that would be true of every group of men, even in a theological seminary---but I could not speak with too great affection and respect of the great majority of my friends, the hard-working men and women who dwelt for a space of a hundred and fifty miles along the Little Missouri.”
Di Silvestro doesn’t moralize or do much in the way of political analysis, but he has a theme that has political implications. He sees Roosevelt’s sojourn in the Badlands as a democratizing experience. It brought him into contact with and forced him to rely on people of all classes, backgrounds, social standing, race, and gender. It’s easy to infer how later the President known as the Trust Buster, comparing the rich men and their political flunkeys in Congress to the men and women he’d known out west, the hard-working, practical, and self-reliant ranchers and cowboys and farmers and sheepherders and trappers and small businessmen and women, would have had little patience and less sympathy for their self-interested ideas of what government is for, the aggrandizement of the already rich, how he’d have seen the self-satisfied and self-congratulatory inheritors of great wealth and self-made millionaires who were essentially skimmers wringing their fortunes out of the sweat and idea of others for the parasites and thieves they were.
As I said, Di Silvestro doesn’t moralize. That lesson’s there if you want to draw it. More explicit, however, is the theme of Roosevelt’s habit of treating life as an infinite series of lessons to be learned. He appears never to have met a man or woman he didn’t expect to teach him something.
One of his most famous teachers was the photographer, muckraking journalist, and social reformer Jacob Riis, who when Roosevelt was New York City’s commissioner of police, guided the future President on a long explore of the city’s slums and underworld, an exploration that helped shift TR’s views on crime, poverty, immigration, labor, and the role of government farther to what we would now call the left.
But another teacher who ought to loom as large in the legend of Theodore Roosevelt as Jacob Riis is someone he met as a consequence of his time in the Badlands.
Of course it’s ironic that our most ardent conservationist President, the founder of our National Parks system, was such a relentless, reckless, and indiscriminate slaughterer of animals with an especial interest in hunting down species on the brink of extinction. When he heard that elk were all but gone from the Badlands, he set out to shoot the last one. And he was proud to think he had done it.
But as it happened the first book he wrote about his life out west, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, was given a critical review by the editor of Forest and Stream magazine, George Bird Grinnell.
A snippet of Grinnell’s resume:
In summer 1870 he accompanied paleontologist O.C. Marsh on a six-month fossil-hunting expedition across Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Utah. He made annual trips west after that one---more time in the West than Roosevelt ever spent---and in 1874 served as naturalist on a Black Hills expedition led by George Armstrong Custer. Also in the mid-1870s, Grinnell explored the area then recently set aside as Yellowstone National Park and hunted bison when the herds were still vast. Custer invited him to join a military foray in pursuit of Indians in Montana Territory in 1876, but Grinnell’s work as the assistant in osteology at Yale’s Peabody Museum kept him from going; he might otherwise have sown the earth of the Little Bighorn with his own bones. In 1880 he received a doctorate in osteology and vertebrate paleontology.
Grinnell took a leading role in a movement then in its infancy---wildlife conservation. In the mid-1880s he founded the National Audubon Society…
Roosevelt was on a trip back east when the review came out, and he went to see Grinnell in his office at Field and Stream.
Not to complain.
To learn something.
He wanted Grinnell to give him a more detailed criticism of the book so that he’d know where he went wrong and where he went right so and be able to make his next book better. Something else, something grander came out of that meeting.
While discussing the book, the two wildlife enthusiasts segued into talk of hunting in the West. Grinnell: “I told him something about game destruction in Montana for the hides, which, so far as small game was concerned had begun in the west only a few years before that, though the slaughter of the buffalo for their skins was going on much longer and by this time their extermination had been substantially completed.” Grinnell did not record Roosevelt’s response. They continued their discussion when Roosevelt made repeat visits to see Grinnell, giving Roosevelt “his first direct and detailed information about this slaughter of elk, deer, antelope, and mountain sheep. No doubt it had some influence in making him the ardent game protector he later became.”
No doubt. Still:
However much conservation loomed in Theodore Roosevelt’s mind, that issue alone would not have ushered him into the White House. A complex of factors saw him through that door, but Roosevelt rated his Badlands experiences high among them. His friend John Burroughs, the naturalist, recalled that when the two traveled together in the West in 1903, Roosevelt---then in his first term as president---said that “his ranch life had been the making of him. It had built him up and hardened him physically, and it had opened his eyes to the wealth of manly character among the plainsmen and cattlemen. Had he not gone West, he said, he never would have raised the Rough Riders regiment; and had he not raised that regiment and gone to the Cuban War, he would not have been made governor of New York; and had not this happened, the politicians would not have unwittingly made his rise to the Presidency so inevitable.”
_____________________
One minor note of disappointment for me: Di Silvestro makes no mention of Roosevelt’s friend, the real life version of Deadwood’s Seth Bullock. Di Silvestro lists letters TR wrote to Bullock among his sources, but he doesn’t bring him into the narrative proper.
I still wish the TV show had lasted long enough for Roosevelt to become a character, as I wrote in my post All trails lead to Deadwood.
Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands: A Young Politician's Quest for Recovery in the American West
Photo of Edith Roosevelt courtesy of the Almanac of Theodore Roosevelt. All other photos courtesy of the National Park Service.
Excerpt. TR accepts a challenge to a duel that was never given.
Two days later Roosevelt chaired the Badlands livestock association meeting. the members set the date and place for the fall roundup and unanimously reelected Roosevelt chairman, over his objection that they should install someone who lived locally year-round. The real drama occurred behind the scenes. Either the evening of September or the following morning, Roosevelt received a terse letter from [the Marquis] de Mores, then [under indictment for murder and] cooling his heels in a Bismarck jail after a change in venue from Mandan. Dated September 3 and written on the Marquis’ Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company letterhead, the note read:
My Dear Roosevelt
My principle is to take the bull by the horns. Joe Ferris 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 quarrelling---I set 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 pople want organize the county. I am opposed to it for one year more at least.
Apparently de Mores had misinterpreted, or been misinformed about, certain activities in Medora. Sixteen witnesses had been subpoenaed for his trial, probably all Medora men. They had needed money for train fare and other expenses, and they got the money from Joe Ferris, who acted as an unofficial banker among cowboys who trusted him. Two key prosecution witnesses, Dutch Wannegan himself and “Dynamite Jimmie” McShane, were among those who withdrew money from Ferris before the trial. The Marquis had concluded that Ferris was paying these men to testify against him, perhaps on behalf of Theodore Roosevelt, who had invested in Ferris’ store and had a room on the store’s second floor.
With his penchant for melodrama, Roosevelt concluded that the Marquis was challenging him to a duel---the de Mores’ postscript hardly seems the kind of amendment a duelist would add to a challenge. Roosevelt told Sewll that he was opposed to dueling, but if challenged he would accept. As the challenged party, he would have the choice of weapons, and, in deference to his poor shooting ability, he thought he would choose Winchester rifles at twelve paces---near enough that he might be able to hit a Frenchman renowned for shooting birds on the wing with a rifle. They would fire and advance until one of them was satisfied. He asked Sewell to be his second, and Sewall agreed skeptically, saying that a man who would lay in ambush and shoot at unsuspecting men [the trumped up charge against the Marquis] would not fight such a duel as that. Sewell apparently did not know that the Marquis had already killed at least two men in duels in France.
Roosevelt drafted a response to the Marquis on the back of the note de Mores had sent him:
Most emphatically I am not your enemy; if I were you would know it, for I would be an open one, and would not have asked you to my house nor gone to yours. As your final words, however, seem to imply a threat is due to myself to say that the statement is not made through any fear of possible consequences to me; I, too, as you know, am always on hand, and ever ready to hold myself accountable in any way for anything I have said or done.
Yours very truly,
Theodore Roosevelt.
---from Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands by Roger L. Di Silvestro.
Howard Blum's "The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the American West and the Yukon Gold Rush" is a very good book too.
http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2011/05/01/floor_of_heaven
Posted by: Steve | Saturday, August 06, 2011 at 05:03 PM
Steve, thanks for the link to Laura Miller's review. I agree. Floor of Heaven is a good book. Did you see my review? A rip-roaring tale of high adventure featuring cowboys, Indians, outlaws, gunfights, robbery, murder, and million-dollar gold strikes that all happen to be true.
Posted by: Lance Mannion | Monday, August 08, 2011 at 07:45 AM
I missed it. Thanks. Well done.
I've lived all over the Yukon and been to Carmacks, Dawson City and the Skookum Jim Centre in Whitehorse.
Posted by: Steve | Monday, August 08, 2011 at 09:55 AM