ROOSEVELT IN THE BAD LANDS, Hermann Hagedorn [ebook reader with highlight function .TXT] 📗

of them years after that, if he had been allowed to serve, he would have "hung up the jury until some one had passed him ten thousand." It was a close shave.

Two items in the testimony were notably significant. One was contributed by the Marquis: "O'Donald and Luffsey discharged all the barrels of their revolvers," he said, "and then began to shoot with their rifles." The other item was contributed by Sheriff Harmon, who arrested O'Donald and "Dutch Wannigan" immediately after the affray. He testified "that the guns and pistols of the hunters were loaded when handed to him."

The jury made no attempt to pick its way through contradictions such as this, and returned to the court room after an absence of ten minutes with a verdict of "not guilty."

[Illustration: The Bad Lands near Medora. Showing the house of the Marquis de Mores.]

The Marquis's acquittal did not, it seems, mollify his bitterness toward Roosevelt. He prided himself on his judgment, as he had once informed Howard Eaton, but his judgment had a habit of basing its conclusions on somewhat nebulous premises. Two or three bits of circumstantial evidence had served to convince the Marquis definitely that Roosevelt had been the impelling force behind the prosecution. The fact that "Dutch Wannigan" was an employee of Roosevelt's, in itself, not unnaturally, perhaps, stirred the Marquis's ire. When he was told, however, that "Dutch Wannigan," before departing for the trial at Mandan, had received money from Joe Ferris, his suspicions appeared confirmed, for Joe was known to be Roosevelt's close friend, and it was an open secret that Roosevelt was financing Joe's venture in storekeeping. If his suspicions needed further confirmation, they seemed to get it when a little, black-haired Irishman, named Jimmie McShane, otherwise known as "Dynamite Jimmie," received a sum of money from Joe Ferris and appeared at the trial as the first witness for the prosecution. On the surface the case against Roosevelt was convincing, and the Marquis evidently did not dip beneath it. If he had, he would have realized that Joe Ferris was the acknowledged banker of the Bad Lands to whom practically all the thrifty souls among the cowpunchers brought a portion of their wages for safe-keeping. When "Dutch Wannigan" and "Dynamite Jimmie," therefore, received money from Joe Ferris, they received only what was their own, and what they needed for their expenses at the trial.

But the Marquis, whose mind liked to jump goat-like from crag to crag, did not stop to examine the evidence against Roosevelt. He accepted it at its face value, and wrote Roosevelt a stinging letter, telling him that he had heard that Roosevelt had influenced witnesses against him in the murder trial. He had supposed, he said, that there was, nothing but friendly feeling between himself and Roosevelt, but since it was otherwise there was always "a way of settling differences between gentlemen."

Roosevelt, who had returned from the East early in October, received the letter at Elkhorn Ranch and read it aloud to Bill Sewall. "That's a threat," he exclaimed. "He is trying to bully me. He can't bully me. I am going to write him a letter myself. Bill," he went on, "I don't want to disgrace my family by fighting a duel. I don't believe in fighting duels. My friends don't any of them believe in it. They would be very much opposed to anything of the kind, but I won't be bullied by a Frenchman. Now, as I am the challenged party, I have the privilege of naming the weapons. I am no swordsman, and pistols are too uncertain and Frenchy for me. So what do you say if I make it rifles?"

Roosevelt sat down on a log and then and there drafted his reply. He had no unfriendly feeling for the Marquis, he wrote, "but, as the closing sentence of your letter implies a threat, I feel it my duty to say that I am ready at all times and at all places to answer for my actions."

Then he added that if the Marquis's letter was meant as a challenge, and he insisted upon having satisfaction, he would meet him with rifles at twelve paces, the adversaries to shoot and advance until one or the other dropped.

"Now," said Roosevelt, "I expect he'll challenge me. If he does, I want you for my second."

Sewall grunted. "You will never have to fight any duel of that kind with that man," he said. "He won't challenge you. He will find some way out of it."

Roosevelt was not at all sure of this. The Marquis was a bully, but he was no coward.

A day or so later the answer came by special messenger. Roosevelt brought it over to Sewall. "You were right, Bill, about the Marquis," he said.

Sewall read the Marquis's letter. The Marquis declared that Roosevelt had completely misunderstood the meaning of his message. The idea that he had meant to convey was that there was always a way of settling affairs of that sort between gentlemen--without trouble. And would not Mr. Roosevelt do him the honor of dining with him, and so forth and so on?

"The Marquis," as Roosevelt remarked long afterward, "had a streak of intelligent acceptance of facts, and as long as he did not publicly lose caste or incur ridicule by backing down, he did not intend to run risk without adequate object. He did not expect his bluff to be called; and when it was, he had to make up his mind to withdraw it."

There was no more trouble after that between Theodore Roosevelt and the Marquis de Mores.

 

Chapater XXI

 

I'd rather hear a rattler rattle, I'd rather buck stampeding cattle, I'd rather go to a greaser battle, Than-- Than to-- Than to fight-- Than to fight the bloody In-ji-ans.

I'd rather eat a pan of dope, I'd rather ride without a rope, I'd rather from this country lope, Than-- Than to-- Than to fight-- Than to fight the bloody In-ji-ans.

Cowboy song

All through that autumn of 1885, Roosevelt remained in the Bad Lands. With his whole being he reveled in the wild and care-free life; but the newspapers did not seem to be able to rise above the notion that he was in Dakota for political purposes:

Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, it is rumored [remarked the Chicago Tribune] has an eye on politics in Dakota, and is making himself popular with the natives. He is bright, certainly, but Mr. Roosevelt will find the methods in Dakota quite different from those which gave him sudden prominence in New York. There is a great deal of breeziness in a Dakota convention, but it is not the breeziness of innocence. It is high art. The number of gentlemen who are in training for United States senatorships, when Dakota shall have acquired admission, is not limited, and each and every aspirant can pull a wire with a silent grace which is fascinating. If Mr. Roosevelt really likes politics, he will enjoy himself in Dakota.

If Roosevelt had any notion of entering the race for the senatorship in Dakota, he has left no record of it. Howard Eaton spoke to him once about it. He was interested and even a little stirred, it appeared, at the possibility of representing the frontier in the United States Senate as, half a century previous, Thomas H. Benton, of Tennessee, whom he greatly admired, had represented it. But the thought failed to take permanent hold of him. He was, moreover, thinking of himself in those days more as a writer than as a politician.

The autumn was not without excitement. A small band of Indians began here and there to set fire to the prairie grass, and before the cattlemen realized what was happening, thousands of acres of winter feed lay blackened and desolate.

This act of ruthless destruction was the climax of a war of reprisals which had been carried on relentlessly between the Indians and the white men since the first bold pioneer had entered the West Missouri country. There was endless trouble and bad blood between the races, which at intervals flared up in an outrage, the details of which were never told in print because they were as a rule unprintable. In the region between the Little Missouri and the Yellowstone, in the years 1884 and 1885, the wounds left by the wars, which had culminated in the death of Custer at the Little Big Horn, were still open and sore. In the conflict between white and red, the Indians were not always the ones who were most at fault. In many cases the robberies and other crimes which were committed were the acts of men maddened by starvation, for the ranges where they had hunted had been taken from them, and the reservations in many cases offered insufficient food. The agents of the Great White Father, moreover, were not always over-careful to give them all the cattle and the ponies which the Government was by treaty supposed to grant them. In consequence they "lifted" a cow or a calf where they could. The cattlemen, on their part, thoroughly imbued with the doctrine of might is right, regarded the Indians as a public enemy, and were disposed to treat their ponies and any other property which they might possess as legitimate prize of war. There was, in fact, during the middle eighties, open and undisguised warfare between red and white throughout the region whose eastern border was the Bad Lands. It was, moreover, a peculiarly atrocious warfare. Many white men shot whatever Indians they came upon like coyotes, on sight; others captured them, when they could, and, stripping off their clothes, whipped them till they bled. The Indians retaliated horribly, delivering their white captives to their squaws, who tortured them in every conceivable fashion, driving slivers up under their nails, burning them alive, and feeding them with flesh cut from their own bodies. Along the banks of the Little Missouri there were no outrages, for the Indians had been driven out of the country at the end of the seventies, and, save for occasional raids in the early eighties, had made little trouble; but at the edge of the Bad Lands there was a skirmish now and then, and in the winter of 1884 Schuyler Lebo, son of that odd Ulysses who had guided Roosevelt to the Big Horn Mountains, was shot in the leg by an Indian while he was hunting on Bullion Butte.

Roosevelt had a little adventure of his own with Indians that summer. He was traveling along the edge of the prairie on a solitary journey to the unexplored country north and east of the range on which his cattle grazed, and was crossing a narrow plateau when he suddenly saw a group of four or five Indians come up over the edge directly in front. As they saw him, they whipped their guns out of their slings, started their horses into a run, and came toward him at full speed.

He reined up instantly and dismounted.

The Indians came on, whooping and brandishing their weapons.

Roosevelt laid his gun across the saddle and waited.

It was possible [Roosevelt wrote subsequently] that the Indians were merely making a bluff and intended no mischief. But I did not like their actions, and I thought it