Roosevelt in the Bad Lands Part 33

There has been an ice gorge right in front of the house [he wrote "Bamie"], the swelling ma.s.s of broken fragments having been pushed almost up to our doorstep. The current then broke through the middle, leaving on each side of the stream, for some miles, a bank of huge ice-floes, tumbled over each other in the wildest confusion. No horse could by any chance get across; we men have a boat, and even thus it is most laborious carrying it out to the water; we work like arctic explorers.

Early in the spring, Sewall and Dow had crossed the river to hunt for a few days in the rough hills to the east, and had killed four deer which they had hung in a tree to keep them from the coyotes. Roosevelt determined to go with his men to bring home the deer, but when, after infinite difficulty, they reached the thicket of dwarf cedars where the deer had been hung, they found nothing save scattered pieces of their carca.s.ses, and roundabout the deeply marked footprints of a pair of cougars, or "mountain lions." The beasts had evidently been at work for some time and had eaten almost every sc.r.a.p of flesh. Roosevelt and his men followed their tracks into a tangle of rocky hills, but, before they had come in sight of the quarry, dusk obscured the footprints and they returned home resolved to renew the pursuit at dawn. They tied their boat securely to a tree high up on the bank.

The next day Roosevelt made arrangements with a companion of many hunts, "old man" Tompkins, who was living in the shack which Captain Robins had occupied, to make a determined pursuit of the cougars; but when, the following morning, he was ready to start once more for the farther sh.o.r.e, his boat was gone. It was Bill Sewall who made the discovery. He was not a man easily excited, and he took a certain quiet satisfaction in sitting down to breakfast and saying nothing while Roosevelt held forth concerning the fate which was awaiting the mountain lions.

"I guess we won't go to-day," said Sewall, at length, munching the last of his breakfast.

"Why not?" Roosevelt demanded.

Sewall showed him a red woolen mitten with a leather palm which he had picked up on the ice, and the end of the rope by which the boat had been tied. It had been cut with a sharp knife. "Some one has gone off with the boat," he said.

Roosevelt had no doubt who had stolen the boat, for the thief or thieves could scarcely have come by land without being detected. There was only one other boat on the Little Missouri, and that was a small flat-bottom scow owned by three hard characters who lived in a shack twenty miles above Elkhorn. They were considered suspicious persons, and Roosevelt and his men had shrewdly surmised for some time that they were considering the advisability of "skipping the country"

before the vigilantes got after them. On inquiry they found that the shack which the men had occupied was deserted.

The leader of the three was a stocky, ill-looking individual named Finnegan, with fiery red hair which fell to his shoulders, gaining for him the nickname "Redhead" Finnegan; a brick-red complexion, and an evil reputation. He was a surly, quarrelsome, unkempt creature, and when he came into a saloon with his stumbling gait (as he frequently did), self-respecting cowboys had a way of leaving him in full possession of the field, not because they feared him, but because they did not care to be seen in his presence. He boasted that he was "from Bitter Creek, where the farther up you went the worse people got," and he lived "at the fountain head." He had blown into Medora early in March and had promptly gone to Bill Williams's saloon and filled up on Bill Williams's peculiarly wicked brand of "conversation juice."

"Well, it laid him out all right enough," remarked Lincoln Lang, telling about it in after years. "I can testify to that, since I was right there and saw the whole thing. Johnny Goodall, who was some practical joker at that time, went into the bar and saw Finnegan lying on the floor. He got some help and moved him to the billiard table.

Then Goodall sent to the barber shop for a hair clipper, and proceeded to operate in the following manner: first he clipped off one side of Finnegan's beard and moustache, and after that removed his long curls on one side, being careful to leave a stair pattern all up the side of his head. He concluded operations by removing the fringes upon one side of his buckskin shirt. Next morning Finnegan sobered up and when he saw himself in the looking-gla.s.s he went bersark."

"His heart got bad," Bill Dantz remarked, taking up the narrative. "He laid down in a fringe of brush near the Marquis's store, where he could command a clear view of the town, and began to pump lead into everything in sight."

The first shot was aimed at the office of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_.

Whether or not "Redhead" Finnegan had it in for the stern moralist who insisted that drunken criminals should be punished, not only for their crimes, but also for their drunkenness, is a question on which the records are dark. Fisher was shaving in Packard's office and the shot broke the mirror in front of him. Packard, who was on horseback on the bluff behind Medora, saw Fisher dash out of the shack, and rushed to the scene of conflict. His horse had knocked Finnegan senseless before the desperado knew that the Chief of Police was on his trail.

When Finnegan came to he was in a box-car, under lock and seal. But a friend released him, and the man from Bitter Creek made his way down the river to his cabin.

The population of Medora had not relished Finnegan's bombardment, and suggestions concerning a possible "necktie party" began to make themselves heard. Finnegan evidently decided that the time had come for him, and the men who lived with him in his ill-kept shack, to leave the country. Travel by horse or foot was impossible. The boat they owned was a miserable, leaky affair. The Elkhorn skiff had evidently appeared to Finnegan and Company in the nature of a G.o.dsend.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Wilmot Dow and Theodore Roosevelt (1886).]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The piazza at Elkhorn. Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt.]

Roosevelt's anger boiled up at the theft of the boat and he ran to saddle Manitou. But Sewall restrained him, pointing out that if the country was impa.s.sable for the horses of the thieves, it was no less impa.s.sable for the horses of the pursuers. He declared that he and Dow could build a flat-bottomed boat in three days. Roosevelt told him to go ahead. With the saddle band--his forty or fifty cow-ponies--on the farther side of the river, he could not afford to lose the boat. But the determining motive in his mind was neither chagrin nor anxiety to recover his property. In a country where self-reliant hardihood and the ability to hold one's own under all circ.u.mstances ranked as the first of the virtues, to submit tamely to theft or to any other injury was, he knew, to invite almost certain repet.i.tion of the offense.

A journal which he kept for a month or two that spring gives in laconic terms a vivid picture of those March days.

March 22. Tramped over to get deer; mountain lions had got them.

March 23. Shot 4 prairie chickens.

March 24. Thieves stole boat; started to build another to go after them.

March 25. Went out after deer; saw nothing. Boat being built. River very high; ice piled upon banks several feet.

March 26. Boat building.

March 27. Boat built. Too cold to start. Shot 4 chickens.

March 28. Bitter cold.

March 29. Furious blizzard.

While Sewall and Dow, who were mighty men with their hands, were building the boat, and his other cowpuncher, Rowe, was hurrying to Medora to bring out a wagon-load of supplies for their contemplated journey, Roosevelt himself was by no means idle. He had agreed to write a life of Thomas Hart Benton for the _American Statesmen Series_, and, after two or three months' work in the East gathering his material, had begun the actual writing of the book immediately after his return to the Bad Lands.

I have written the first chapter of the Benton [he wrote to Lodge on March 27th], so at any rate I have made a start.

Writing is horribly hard work to me; and I make slow progress. I have got some good ideas in the first chapter, but I am not sure they are worked up rightly; my style is very rough, and I do not like a certain lack of _sequitur_ that I do not seem able to get rid of.

I thought the article on Morris admirable in every way; one of your crack pieces. Some of the sentences were so thoroughly characteristic of you that I laughed aloud when I read them. One of my men, Sewall (a descendant of the Judge's, by the way), read it with as much interest as I did, and talked it over afterwards as intelligently as any one could.

At present we are all snowed up by a blizzard; as soon as it lightens up I shall start down the river with two of my men in a boat we have built while indoors, after some horse-thieves who took our boat the other night to get out of the country with; but they have such a start we have very little chance of catching them. I shall take Matthew Arnold along; I have had no chance at all to read it as yet.

The next day he was writing to his sister "Bamie." He was evidently convinced that she would worry about him if she knew the nature of the adventure on which he was about to embark, for in his letter he protests almost too much concerning the utterly unexciting nature of his activities:

Since I wrote you life has settled down into its usual monotonous course here. It is not as rough as I had expected; I have clean sheets, the cooking is pretty good, and above all I have a sitting-room with a great fireplace and a rocking-chair, which I use as my study.

The walking is horrible; all slippery ice or else deep, sticky mud; but as we are very short of meat I generally spend three or four hours a day tramping round after prairie chickens, and one day last week I shot a deer. The rest of the time I read or else work at Benton, which is making very slow progress; writing is to me intensely irksome work.

In a day or two, when the weather gets a little milder, I expect to start down the river in a boat, to go to Mandan; the trip ought to take a week or ten days, more or less. It will be good fun. My life on the ranch this summer is not going to be an especially adventurous or exciting one; and my work will be mainly one of supervision so that there will be no especial hardship or labor.

I really enjoy being with the men out here; they could be more exactly described as my retainers than as anything else; and I am able to keep on admirable terms with them and yet avoid the familiarity which would a.s.suredly breed contempt.

On the 30th of March the blizzard which had been raging a day or two moderated, and Roosevelt, hoping a thaw had set in, determined to set off after the thieves. They left Rowe as guard over the ranch and "the womenfolks," and with their unwieldy but water-tight craft, laden with two weeks' provision of flour, coffee, and bacon, started to drift down the river.

The region through which they pa.s.sed was bare and bleak and terrible.

On either side, beyond the heaped-up piles of ice, rose the scarred b.u.t.tes, weather-worn into fantastic shapes and strangely blotched with spots of brown and yellow, purple and red. Here and there the black coal-veins that ran through them were aflame, gleaming weirdly through the dusk as the three men made their camp that night.

The weather was cold and an icy wind blew in their faces.

"We're like to have it in our faces all day," remarked Will Dow cheerfully, paddling at the bow.

"We can't, unless it's the crookedest wind in Dakota," answered Sewall, who was steering.

They followed the river's course hither and thither in and out among the crags, east and west, north and south.

"It _is_ the crookedest wind in Dakota," muttered Sewall to himself.

The thermometer dropped to zero, but there was firewood in plenty, and they found prairie fowl and deer for their evening meals. Late the third day, rounding a bend, they saw their boat moored against the bank. Out of the bushes, a little way back, the smoke of a camp-fire curled up through the frosty air.

"There's your boat!" cried Sewall, who had, in his own phrase, been "looking sharp." "Get your guns ready. I'll handle the boat."

They flung off their heavy coats. Sewall was in the stern, steering the boat toward sh.o.r.e. Dow was at Roosevelt's side in the bow.

Roosevelt saw the grim, eager look in their eyes, and his own eyes gleamed.

He was the first ash.o.r.e, leaping out of the boat as it touched the sh.o.r.e ice and running up behind a clump of bushes, so as to cover the landing of the others. Dow was beside him in an instant. Sewall was fastening the boat.

It was rather funny business [Sewall wrote his brother subsequently] for one of the men was called a pretty hard ticket. He was also a shooting man. If he was in the bushes and saw us first he was liable to make it very unhealthy for us.

Roosevelt and Dow peered through the bushes. Beside a fire in a grove of young cottonwoods a solitary figure was sitting; his guns were on the ground at his side.