Roosevelt in the Bad Lands Part 11

d.i.c.kinson, forty miles east, was wildly agitating for such a line to run from that prosperous little community to the Black Hills. The d.i.c.kinson _Press_ and the _Bad Lands Cowboy_ competed in deriding each other's claims touching "the only feasible route." The _Cowboy_ said that the Medora line would be more direct. The _Press_ agreed, but replied that the country through which it would have to go was impa.s.sable even for an Indian on a pony. The _Cowboy_ declared that "the d.i.c.kinson road strikes gumbo from the start"; and the _Press_ with fine scorn answered, "This causes a smile to percolate our features. From our experience in the Bad Lands we know that after a slight rain a man can carry a whole quarter-section off on his boots, and we don't wear number twelves either." The _Cowboy_ insisted that the d.i.c.kinson route "is at best a poor one and at certain seasons impa.s.sable." The _Press_ scorned to reply to this charge, remarking merely from the heights of its own eight months' seniority, "The _Cowboy_ is young, and like a boy, going through a graveyard at night, is whistling to keep up courage."

There the debate for the moment rested. But d.i.c.kinson, which unquestionably had the better route, lacked a Marquis. While the _Press_ was printing the statements of army experts in support of its claims, de Mores was sending surveyors south to lay out his route.

From Sully Creek they led it across the headwaters of the Heart River and the countless affluents of the Grand and the Cannonball, past Slim b.u.t.tes and the Cave Hills, across the valleys of the Bellefourche and the Moreau, two hundred and twenty-five miles into the Black Hills and Deadwood. Deadwood gave the Marquis a public reception, hailing him as a benefactor of the race, and the Marquis, flushed and seeing visions, took a flying trip to New York and presented a pet.i.tion to the directors of the Northern Pacific for a railroad from Medora to the Black Hills.

The dream was perfect, and everybody (except the d.i.c.kinson _Press_) was happy. Nothing remained but to organize the stage company, buy the coaches, the horses and the freight outfits, improve the highway, establish sixteen relay stations, and get started. And there, the real difficulties commenced.

The Marquis, possibly feeling that it was the part of statesmanship to conciliate a rival, forgot apparently all other considerations and asked Bill Williams, the saloon-keeper, to undertake the organization of the stage-line. Williams a.s.siduously disposed of the money which the Marquis put in his hands, but attained no perceptible results. The Marquis turned next to Bill Williams's partner in freighting and faro and asked Jess Hogue to take charge. Hogue, who was versatile and was as willing to cheat a man in one way as in another, consented and for a time neglected the card-tables of Williams's "liquor-parlor" to enter into negotiations for the construction of the line. He was a clever man and had had business experience of a sort, but his interest in the Deadwood stage-line did not reach beyond the immediate opportunity it offered of acquiring a substantial amount of the Marquis's money. He made a trip or two to Bismarck and Deadwood; he looked busy; he promised great things; but nothing happened. The Marquis, considerably poorer in pocket, deposed his second manager as he had deposed the first, and looked about for an honest man.

One day Packard, setting up the _Cowboy_, was amazed to see the Marquis come dashing into his office.

"I want you to put on the stage-line for me," he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed.

Packard looked at him. "But Marquis," he answered, "I never saw a stage or a stage-line. I don't know anything about it."

"It makes no difference," cried the Frenchman. "You will not rob me."

Packard admitted the probability of the last statement. They talked matters over. To Packard, who was not quite twenty-four, the prospect of running a stage-line began to look rather romantic. He set about to find out what stage-lines were made of, and went to Bismarck to study the legal doc.u.ment the Marquis's lawyers had drawn up. It specified, in brief, that A. T. Packard was to be sole owner of the Medora and Black Hills Stage and Forwarding Company when it should have paid for itself from its net earnings, which left nothing to be desired, especially as the total receipts from sales of building lots in Medora and elsewhere were to be considered part of the earnings. It was understood that the Marquis was to secure a mail contract from the Post-Office Department effective with the running of the first stage sometime in June. Packard attached his name to the doc.u.ment, and waited for the money which the Marquis had agreed to underwrite to set the organization in motion.

Day after day he waited in vain. Weeks pa.s.sed. In June began an exodus from the Black Hills to the Coeur d'Alenes that soon became a stampede. With an exasperation that he found it difficult to control, Packard heard of the thousands that were taking the roundabout journey by way of Pierre or Miles City. He might, he knew, be running every north-bound coach full from front to hind boot and from thorough-brace to roof-rail; and for once the Marquis might make some money. He pleaded for funds in person and by wire. But the Marquis, for the moment, did not have any funds to give him.

Roosevelt and the Marquis were inevitably thrown together, for they were men whose tastes in many respects were similar. They were both fond of hunting, and fond also of books, and the Marquis, who was rather solitary in his grandeur and possibly a bit lonely, jumped at the opportunity Roosevelt's presence in Medora offered for companionship with his own kind. Roosevelt did not like him. He recognized, no doubt, that if any cleavage should come in the community to which they both belonged, they would, in all probability, not be found on the same side.

VII

An oath had come between us--I was paid by Law and Order; He was outlaw, rustler, killer--so the border whisper ran; Left his word in Caliente that he'd cross the Rio border-- Call me coward? But I hailed him--"Riding close to daylight, Dan!"

Just a hair and he'd have got me, but my voice, and not the warning, Caught his hand and held him steady; then he nodded, spoke my name, Reined his pony round and fanned it in the bright and silent morning, Back across the sunlit Rio up the trail on which he came.

Henry Herbert KNIBBS

It was already plain that there were in fact two distinct groups along the valley of the Little Missouri. There are always two groups in any community (short of heaven); and the fact that in the Bad Lands there was a law-abiding element, and another element whose main interest in law was in the contemplation of its fragments, would not be worth remarking if it had not happened that the Marquis had allowed himself to be maneuvered into a position in which he appeared, and in which in fact he was, the protector of the disciples of violence. This was due partly to Maunders's astute manipulations, but largely also to the obsession by which apparently he was seized that he was the lord of the manor in the style of the _ancien regime_, not to be bothered in his beneficent despotism with the restrictions that kept the common man in his place. As a foreigner he naturally cared little for the political development of the region; as long as his own possessions, therefore, were not tampered with, he was not greatly disturbed by any depredations which his neighbors might suffer. He employed hands without number; he seemed to believe any "fool lie" a man felt inclined to tell him; he distributed blankets, saddles and spurs.

Naturally, Maunders clung to him like a leech with his train of lawbreakers about him.

The immunity which Maunders enjoyed and radiated over his followers was only one factor of many in perpetuating the lawlessness for which the Bad Lands had for years been famous. Geography favored the criminal along the Little Missouri. Montana was a step or two to the west, Wyoming was a haven of refuge to the southwest, Canada was within easy reach to the north. A needle in a haystack, moreover, was less difficult to lay one's finger upon than a "two-gun man" tucked away in one of a thousand ravines, scarred with wash-outs and filled with buckbrush, in the broken country west of Bullion b.u.t.te.

Western Dakota was sanctuary, and from every direction of the compa.s.s knaves of varying degrees of iniquity and misguided ability came to enjoy it. There was no law in the Bad Lands but "six-shooter law." The days were reasonably orderly, for there were "jobs" for every one; but the nights were wild. There was not much diversion of an uplifting sort in Medora that June of 1884. There was not even an "op'ry house."

Butchers and cowboys, carpenters and laborers, adventurous young college graduates and younger sons of English n.o.blemen, drank and gambled and shouted and "shot up the town together" with "horse-rustlers" and faro-dealers and "bad men" with notches on their guns. "Two-gun men" appeared from G.o.d-knows-whence, generally well supplied with money, and disappeared, the Lord knew whither, appearing elsewhere, possibly, with a band of horses whose brands had melted away under the application of a red-hot frying-pan, or suffered a sea-change at the touch of a "running iron." Again they came to Medora, and again they disappeared. The horse-market was brisk at Medora, though only the elect knew where it was or who bought and sold or from what frantic owner, two hundred miles to the north or south, the horses had been spirited away.

It was a gay life, as Packard remarked.

The "gayety" was obvious even to the most casual traveler whose train stopped for three noisy minutes at the Medora "depot." "Dutch Wannigan," when he remarked that "seeing the trains come in was all the scenery we had," plumbed the depths of Medora's hunger "for something to happen." A train (even a freight) came to stand for excitement, not because of any diversion it brought of itself out of a world of "dudes" and police-officers, but because of the deviltry it never failed to inspire in certain leading citizens of Medora.

For Medora had a regular reception committee, whose membership varied, but included always the most intoxicated cowpunchers who happened to be in town. Its leading spirits were Bill Williams, the saloon-keeper, Van Zander, the wayward but attractive son of a Dutch patrician, and his bosom friend, h.e.l.l-Roaring Bill Jones; and if they were fertile in invention, they were no less energetic in carrying their inventions into execution. To shoot over the roofs of the cars was a regular pastime, to shoot through the windows was not unusual, but it was a genius who thought of the notion of crawling under the dining-car and shooting through the floor. He scattered the scrambled eggs which the negro waiter was carrying, but did no other damage. These general salvos of greeting, Bill Jones, Bill Williams, and the millionaire's son from Rotterdam were accustomed to vary by specific attention to pa.s.sengers walking up and down the platform.

It happened one day that an old man in a derby hat stepped off the train for a bit of an airing while the engine was taking water. Bill Jones, spying the hat, gave an indignant exclamation and promptly shot it off the man's head. The terrified owner hurried into the train, leaving the brim behind.

"Come back, come back!" shouted Bill Jones, "we don't want the blinkety-blank thing in Medora."

The old man, terrified, looked into Bill Jones's sinister face. He found no relenting there. Deeply humiliated, he walked over to where the battered brim lay, picked it up, and reentered the train.

Medora, meanwhile, was acquiring a reputation for iniquity with overland tourists which the cowboys felt in duty bound to live up to.

For a time the trains stopped both at Medora and Little Missouri. On one occasion, as the engine was taking water at the wicked little hamlet on the west bank, the pa.s.sengers in the sleeping-car, which was standing opposite the Pyramid Park Hotel, heard shots, evidently fired in the hotel. They were horrified a minute later to see a man, apparently dead, being carried out of the front door and around the side of the hotel to the rear. A minute later another volley was heard, and another "dead" man was seen being carried out. It was a holocaust before the train finally drew out of the station, bearing away a car-full of gasping "dudes."

They did not know that it was the same man who was being carried round and round, and only the wise ones surmised that the shooting was a volley fired over the "corpse" every time the "procession" pa.s.sed the bar.

All this was very diverting and did harm to n.o.body. Roosevelt himself, no doubt, took huge satisfaction in it. But there were aspects of Medora's disregard for the conventions which were rather more serious.

If you possessed anything of value, you carried it about with you if you expected to find it when you wanted it. You studied the ways of itinerant butchers with much attention, and if you had any cattle of your own, you kept an eye on the comings and goings of everybody who sold beef or veal. The annoying element in all this vigilance, however, was that, even if you could point your finger at the man who had robbed you, it did not profit you much unless you were ready to shoot him. A traveling salesman, whose baggage had been looted in Medora, swore out a warrant in Morton County, a hundred and fifty miles to the east. The Morton County sheriff came to serve the warrant, but the warrant remained in his pocket. He was "close-herded"

in the sagebrush across the track from the "depot" by the greater part of the male population, on the general principle that an officer of the law was out of place in Medora whatever his mission might be; and put on board the next train going east.

In all the turmoil, the Marquis was in his element. He was never a partic.i.p.ant in the hilarity and he was never known to "take a drink"

except the wine he drank with his meals. He kept his distance and his dignity. But he regarded the lawlessness merely as part of frontier life, and took no steps to stop it. Roosevelt was too young and untested a member of the community to exert any open influence during those first weeks of his active life in the Bad Lands. It remained for the ex-baseball player, the putative owner of a stage-line that refused to materialize, to give the tempestuous little community its first faint notion of the benefits of order.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A. T. Packard.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Office of the "Bad Lands Cowboy".]

Packard, as editor of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_, had, in a manner entirely out of proportion to his personal force, or the personal force that any other man except the most notable might have brought to bear, been a civilizing influence from the beginning. The train that brought his presses from the East brought civilization with it, a somewhat shy and wraithlike civilization, but yet a thing made in the image and containing in itself the germ of that spirit which is the ant.i.thesis of barbarism, based on force, being itself the visible expression of the potency of ideas. The _Bad Lands Cowboy_ brought the first tenuous foreshadowing of democratic government to the banks of the Little Missouri, inasmuch as it was an organ which could mould public opinion and through which public opinion might find articulation. It was thus that a youngster, not a year out of college, became, in a sense, the first representative of the American idea in the Marquis de Mores's feudal appanage.

Packard was extraordinarily well fitted not only to be a frontier editor, but to be a frontier editor in Medora. His college education gave him a point of contact with the Marquis which most of the other citizens of the Bad Lands lacked; his independence of spirit, on the other hand, kept him from becoming the Frenchman's tool. He was altogether fearless, he was a crack shot and a good rider, and he was not without effectiveness with his fists. But he was also tactful and tolerant; and he shared, and the cowboys knew he shared, their love of the open country and the untrammeled ways of the frontier. Besides, he had a sense of humor, which in Medora in the spring of 1884, was better than great riches.

The _Cowboy_ was Packard and Packard was the _Cowboy_. He printed what he pleased, dictating his editorials, as it were, "to the machine," he himself being the machine translating ideas into type as they came.

His personal responsibility was absolute. There was no one behind whom he could hide. If any one objected to any statement in Medora's weekly newspaper, he knew whom to reproach. "Every printed word," said Packard, a long time after, "bore my brand. There were no mavericks in the _Bad Lands Cowboy_ articles. There was no libel law; no law of any kind except six-shooter rights. And I was the only man who never carried a six-shooter."

To a courageous man, editing a frontier paper was an adventure which had thrills which editors in civilized communities never knew. Packard spoke his mind freely. Medora gasped a little. Packard expressed his belief that a drunken man who kills, or commits any other crime, should be punished for the crime and also for getting drunk, and then there was trouble; for the theory of the frontier was that a man who was drunk was not responsible for what he did, and accidents which happened while he was in that condition, though unfortunate, were to be cla.s.sed, not with crimes, but with tornadoes and hailstorms and thunder bolts, rather as "acts of G.o.d." The general expression of the editor's opposition to this amiable theory brought only rumblings, but the specific applications brought indignant citizens with six-shooters. Packard had occasion to note the merits as a lethal weapon of the iron "side-stick" with which he locked his type forms.

It revealed itself as more potent than a six-shooter, and a carving-knife was not in a cla.s.s with it; as he proved to the satisfaction of all concerned when a drunken butcher, who attempted to cut a Chinaman into fragments, came to the _Cowboy_ office, "to forestall adverse comment in the next issue."

Packard was amused to note how much his ability to defend himself simplified the problem of moulding public opinion in Medora.

The law-abiding ranchmen along the Little Missouri, who found a spokesman in the editor of the _Cowboy_, recognized that what the Bad Lands needed was government, government with a club if possible, but in any event something from which a club could be developed. But the elements of disorder, which had been repulsed when they had suggested the organization of Billings County a year previous, now vigorously resisted organization when the impetus came from the men who had blocked their efforts. But the _Cowboy_ fought valiantly, and the d.i.c.kinson _Press_ in its own way did what it could to help.

Medora is clamoring for a county organization in Billings County [the editor reported.] We hope they will get it. If there is any place along the line that needs a criminal court and a jail it is Medora. Four-fifths of the business before our justice of the peace comes from Billings County.

A week later, the _Press_ reported that the county was about to be organized and that John C. Fisher and A. T. Packard were to be two out of the three county commissioners. Then something happened. What it was is shrouded in mystery. Possibly the Marquis, who had never been acquitted by a jury of the killing of Riley Luffsey, decided at the last minute that, in case the indictment, which was hovering over him like an evil bird, should suddenly plunge and strike, he would stand a better chance away from Medora than in it. A word from him to Maunders and from Maunders to his "gang" would unquestionably have served to bring about the organization of the county; a word spoken against the move would also have served effectually to block it. There was, however, a certain opposition to the movement for organization on the part of the most sober elements of the population. Some of the older ranchmen suggested to Packard and to Fisher that they count noses.

They did so, and the result was not encouraging. Doubtless they might organize the county, but the control of it would pa.s.s into the hands of the crooked. Whatever causes lay behind the sudden evaporation of the project, the fact stands that for the time being the Bad Lands remained under the easy-going despotism of the Marquis de Mores and his prime minister, Jake Maunders, unhampered and unillumined by the impertinences of democracy.

The d.i.c.kinson _Press_ had truth on its side when it uttered its wail that Medora needed housing facilities for the unruly. Medora had never had a jail. Little Missouri had had an eight by ten shack which one man, who knew some history, christened "the Bastile," and which was used as a sort of convalescent hospital for men who were too drunk to distinguish between their friends and other citizens when they started shooting. But a sudden disaster had overtaken the Bastile one day when a man called Black Jack had come into Little Missouri on a wrecking train. He had a reputation that extended from Mandan to Miles City for his ability to carry untold quant.i.ties of whiskey without showing signs of intoxication; but Little Missouri proved his undoing.

The "jag" he developed was something phenomenal, and he was finally locked up in the Bastile by common consent. The train crew, looking for Black Jack at three in the morning, located him after much searching. But the Bastile had been built by the soldiers and resisted their efforts to break in. Thereupon they threw a line about the shack and with the engine hauled it to the side of a flatcar attached to the train. Then with a derrick they hoisted Little Missouri's only depository for the helpless inebriate on the flatcar and departed westward. At their leisure they chopped Black Jack out of his confinement. They dumped the Bastile over the embankment somewhere a mile west of town.

The collapse of the efforts of the champions of order to organize the county left the problem of dealing with the lawlessness that was rampant, as before, entirely to the impulse of outraged individuals.

There was no court, no officer of the law. Each man was a law unto himself, and settled his own quarrels. The wonder, under such circ.u.mstances, is not that there was so much bloodshed, but that there was so little. There was, after all, virtue in the anarchy of the frontier. Personal responsibility was a powerful curb-bit.

In the Bad Lands, in June, 1884, there was a solid minority of law-abiding citizens who could be depended on in any crisis. There was a larger number who could be expected as a rule to stand with the angels, but who had friendly dealings with the outlaws and were open to suspicion. Then there was the indeterminate and increasing number of men whose sources of revenue were secret, who toiled not, but were known to make sudden journeys from which they returned with fat "rolls" in their pockets. It was to curb this sinister third group that Packard had attempted to organize the county. Failing in that project, he issued a call for a "ma.s.s meeting."

The meeting was duly held, and, if it resembled the conference of a committee more than a popular uprising, that was due mainly to the fact that a careful census taken by the editor of the _Cowboy_ revealed that in the whole of Billings County, which included in its limits at that time a territory the size of Ma.s.sachusetts, there lived exactly one hundred and twenty-two males and twenty-seven females.