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

lured others, but the dreams that came to him were more complex and expensive dreams than those which came to the other young men who turned toward Dakota in those early eighties.

The Marquis arrived in Little Missouri with his father-in-law's millions at his back and a letter of introduction to Howard Eaton in his pocket. The letter, from a prominent business man in the East, ended, it seemed to Eaton, rather vaguely: "I don't know what experience he has had in business or anything of that kind, but he has some large views."

The Marquis enthusiastically unfolded these views. "I am going to build an abattoir. I am going to buy all the beef, sheep, and hogs that come over the Northern Pacific, and I am going to slaughter them here and then ship them to Chicago and the East."

"I don't think you have any idea how much stock comes over the Northern Pacific," Eaton remarked.

"It doesn't matter!" cried the Marquis. "My father-in-law has ten million dollars and can borrow ten million dollars more. I've got old Armour and the rest of them matched dollar for dollar."

Eaton said to himself that unquestionably the Marquis's views were "large."

"Do you think I am impractical?" the Marquis went on. "I am not impractical. My plan is altogether feasible. I do not merely think this. I know. My intuition tells me so. I pride myself on having a natural intuition. It takes me only a few seconds to understand a situation that other men have to puzzle over for hours. I seem to see every side of a question at once. I assure you, I am gifted in this way. I have wonderful insight."

But Eaton said to himself, "I wonder if the Marquis isn't raising his sights too high?"

The Marquis formed the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company with two brothers named Haupt as his partners and guides; and plunged into his dream as a boy into a woodland pool. But it did not take him long to discover that the water was cold. Frank Vine offered to sell out the Little Missouri Land and Cattle Company to him for twenty-five thousand dollars, and when the Marquis, discovering that Frank had nothing to sell except a hazy title to a group of ramshackle buildings, refused to buy, Frank's employers intimated to the Marquis that there was no room for the de Mores enterprises in Little Missouri. The Marquis responded by buying what was known as Valentine scrip, or soldiers' rights, to the flat on the other side of the river and six square miles around it, with the determination of literally wiping Little Missouri off the map. On April Fool's Day, 1883--auspicious date!--he pitched his tent in the sagebrush and founded the town of Medora.

The population of Little Missouri did not exhibit any noticeable warmth toward him or his dream. The hunters did not like "dudes" of any sort, but foreign "dudes" were particularly objectionable to them. His plans, moreover, struck at the heart of their free and untrammeled existence. As long as they could live by what their guns brought down, they were independent of the machinery of civilization. The coming of cattle and sheep meant the flight of antelope and deer. Hunters, to live, would have to buy and sell like common folk. That meant stores and banks, and these in time meant laws and police-officers; and police-officers meant the collapse of Paradise. It was all wrong.

The Marquis recognized that he had stepped in where, previously, angels had feared to tread. It occurred to him that it would be the part of wisdom to conciliate Little Missouri's hostile population. He began with the only man who, in that unstable community, looked solid, and appealed to Gregor Lang, suggesting a union of forces. Lang, who did not like the grandiose Frenchman, bluntly refused to entertain the idea.

"I am sorry," said the Marquis with a sincerity which was attractive and disarming. "I desire to be friends with every man."

The Marquis's efforts to win supporters were not altogether without success, for the liveryman, Jerry Paddock, became his foreman, and Jake Maunders, evidently seeing in the noble Frenchman one of those gifts from the patron saint of crooked men which come to a knave only once in a lifetime, attached himself to him and became his closest adviser. Maunders, as one who had known him well remarked long afterwards, "was too crooked to sleep in a roundhouse." Whether he set about deliberately to secure a hold on the Marquis, which the Marquis could never shake off, is a secret locked away with Maunders underground. If he did, he was more successful than wiser men have been in their endeavors. Insidiously he drew the Marquis into a quarrel, in which he himself was involved, with a hunter named Frank O'Donald and his two friends, John Reuter, known as "Dutch Wannigan," and Riley Luffsey. He was a crafty Iago, and the Marquis, born in a rose-garden and brought up in a hot-house, was guileless and trusting. Incidentally, the Marquis was "land hungry" and not altogether tactful in regarding the rights of others. Maunders carried blood-curdling tales from the Marquis to O'Donald and back again, until, as Howard Eaton remarked, "every one got nervous."

"What shall I do?" the Marquis asked Maunders, unhappily, when Maunders reported that O'Donald was preparing for hostilities.

"Look out," answered Maunders, "and have the first shot."

The Marquis went to Mandan to ask the local magistrate for advice. "There is the situation," he said. "What shall I do?"

"Why, shoot," was the judicial reply.

He started to return to the center of hostilities. A friend protested. "You'll get shot if you go down there," he declared.

The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. "But I have got to go."

"Now, why do you have to go?"

"Why," replied the Marquis, "William is there. He is my valet. His father was my father's valet, and his grandfather was my grandfather's valet. I cannot leave William in the lurch."

Whereupon, smiling his engaging smile, he boarded the west-bound express.

What followed is dead ashes, that need not be raked over. Just west of the town where the trail ran along the railroad track, the Marquis and his men fired at the hunters from cover. O'Donald and "Wannigan" were wounded, Riley was killed. Maunders, claiming that the hunters had started the shooting, charged them with manslaughter, and had them arrested.

[Illustration: "Dutch Wannigan" (Left) and Frank O'Donald.]

[Illustration: Scene of the killing of Riley Luffsey, June 26, 1883.]

The excitement in the little settlement was intense. Gregor Lang was outspoken in his indignation against the Marquis, and the few law-abiding citizens rallied around him. The Marquis was arrested and acquitted, but O'Donald and "Dutch Wannigan" were kept under lock and key. The better element in Little Missouri snorted in indignation and disgust, but for the moment there was nothing to be done about it. The excitement subsided. Riley Luffsey slept undisturbed on Graveyard Butte; the Marquis took up again the amazing activities which the episode of the quarrel had interrupted; and Maunders, his mentor, flourished like the green bay tree. It was said that "after the murder, Maunders could get anything he wanted out of the Marquis"; so, from his point of view, the whole affair had been eminently successful.

All this was in the summer of 1883.

* * * * *

For all their violence and lawlessness there was no denying, meanwhile, that the settlements on both sides of the river, roughly known as Little Missouri, were beginning to flourish, and to catch the attention of a curious world.

The Mandan Pioneer spoke of surprising improvements; and even the Dickinson Press, which was published forty miles to the east and which as a rule regarded Little Missouri as an outrageous but interesting blot on the map of Dakota, was betrayed into momentary enthusiasm.

This town, situated in Pyramid Park on the banks of the Little Missouri River and surrounded by the Bad Lands with their fine scenery, is, at the present time, one of the most prosperous and rapidly growing towns along the line of the Northern Pacific. New buildings of every description are going up as fast as a large force of carpenters can do the work and an air of business and enterprise is apparent that would do honor to many an older town.

The "personals" that follow give a glimpse into the Little Missouri of which Roosevelt was a part during that third week of September, 1883.

NOTES

Business booms. J. H. Butler is right on sight. [MCGeeney] and Walker are doing a good business. Geo. Fitzpatrick is doing a rushing business. J. B. Walker takes a good share of trade. Anderson's restaurant refreshes the inner man. Frank [Vine] rents the soldiers' quarters to tourists. [P. McGeeney] will have a fine hotel when it is completed. We found the Marquis de Mores a pleasant gentleman. Little Missouri will double her population before spring. The new depot will be soon completed and will be a good one.

It is worth remarking that Butler, McGeeney, Walker, Fitzpatrick, Anderson, and Frank Vine all conducted bars of one description or another. The "business" which is "booming" in the first line, therefore, seems to have been exclusively the business of selling and consuming liquor.

There is one further item in those "Notes":

D. Rumsey, of Buffalo, N.Y., recently returned from a hunting expedition with Frank O'Donald. Frank is a good hunter and thoroughly posted about the country.

For the bloodthirsty desperado, by whose unconscious aid Maunders had contrived to get the Marquis into his power, was back in the Bad Lands, earning his living by hunting as he had earned it before the fatal June 26th when the Marquis lost his head. There had been a "reconciliation." When O'Donald had returned to Little Missouri from his sojourn in the Mandan jail, he had been without money, and, as the Mandan Pioneer explained, "the Marquis helped him out by buying the hay on his ranch 'in stubble.'" He bought the hay, it was rumored, for the sum of one thousand dollars, which was high for hay which would not begin growing for another eight months. But the "reconciliation" was complete.

If Roosevelt met the Marquis during the week he spent in Little Missouri, that September, there is no record of that meeting. The Marquis was here, there, and everywhere, for the stately house he was building, on a grassy hill southward and across the river from his new "town," was not yet completed, and he was, moreover, never inclined to stay long on one spot, rushing to Miles City or St. Paul, to Helena or to Chicago, at a moment's notice, in pursuit of one or the other of his expensive dreams.

The Haupt brothers, it was said, were finding their senior partner somewhat of a care. He bought steers, and found, when he came to sell them as beef, that he had bought them at too high a price; he bought cows and found that the market would not take cow-meat at all. Thereupon (lest the cold facts which he had acquired concerning cattle should rob him of the luxury of spacious expectations) he bought five thousand dollars worth of broncos. He would raise horses, he declared, on an unprecedented scale.

The horses had barely arrived when the Marquis announced that he intended to raise sheep also. The Haupt brothers protested, but the Marquis was not to be diverted.

The hunters and cattlemen looked on in anger and disgust as sheep and ever more sheep began to pour into the Bad Lands. They knew, what the Marquis did not know, that sheep nibble the grass so closely that they kill the roots, and ruin the pasture for cattle and game. He tempered their indignation somewhat by offering a number of them a form of partnership in his enterprise. "His plan," says the guidebook of the Northern Pacific, published that summer of 1883, "is to engage experienced herders to the number of twenty-four, supply them with as many sheep as they may desire, and provide all necessary buildings and funds to