Roosevelt in the Bad Lands Part 40

"You'd be a good lawyer," said Bill, "but I think you ought to go into politics. Good men like you ought to go into politics. If you do, and if you live, I think you'll be President."

Roosevelt laughed. "That's looking a long way ahead."

"It may look a long way ahead to you," Sewall declared stoutly, "but it isn't as far ahead as it's been for some of the men who got there."

"I'm going home now," said Roosevelt, "to see about a job my friends want me to take. I don't think I want it. It will get me into a row.

And I want to write."

An Easterner, whose name has slipped from the record, hearing possibly that Roosevelt was making changes in the management of his herds, offered to buy all of Roosevelt's cattle. Roosevelt refused. The man offered to buy Merrifield's share, then Sylvane's. Both rejected the offer. The herd had increased greatly in value since they had established it. The coming spring, they said, they would begin to get great returns....

"September 25, 1886," runs an item in Bill Sewall's account-book, "squared accounts with Theodore Roosevelt." On the same day Roosevelt made a contract with Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris by which he agreed, as the contract runs, "to place all his cattle branded with the Maltese cross and all his she-stock and bulls branded with the elkhorn and triangle, some twenty-odd hundred head in all, valued at sixty thousand dollars," in charge of Ferris and Merrifield on shares for the term of four years; the men of the Maltese Cross agreeing on their part to take charge of the Elkhorn steer brand which was Roosevelt's exclusive property.

Then, knowing that his cattle were in good hands, Roosevelt once more turned his face to the East, conscious in his heart, no doubt, that, however soon he might return, or however often, the Dakota idyl was ended.

XXV

I may not see a hundred Before I see the Styx, But coal or ember, I'll remember Eighteen-eighty-six.

The stiff heaps in the coulee, The dead eyes in the camp, And the wind about, blowing fortunes out As a woman blows out a lamp.

From _Medora Nights_

Roosevelt accepted the Republican nomination for Mayor of New York City, "with the most genuine reluctance," as he wrote Lodge. He recognized that it was "a perfectly hopeless contest; the chance for success being so very small that it may be left out of account." It was a three-cornered fight, with Henry George as the nominee of a United Labor Party on a single-tax platform, and Abram S. Hewitt as the candidate of Tammany Hall.

The nomination gave Dakota an occasion to express its mind concerning its adopted son, and it did so, with gusto.

Theodore is a Dakota cowboy [said the _Press_ of Sioux Falls], and has spent a large share of his time in the Territory for a couple of years. He is one of the finest thoroughbreds you ever met--a whole-souled, clearheaded, high-minded gentleman. When he first went on the range, the cowboys took him for a dude, but soon they realized the stuff of which the youngster was built, and there is no man now who inspires such enthusiastic regard among them as he.

Roosevelt conducted a lively campaign, for it was not in him to make anything but the best fight of which he was capable even with the odds against him. The thoughtful element of the city, on whose support against the radicalism of Henry George on the one hand and the corruption of Tammany on the other, he should have been able to count, became panic-stricken at the possibility of a labor victory, and gave their votes to Hewitt. He was emphatically defeated; in fact he ran third. "But anyway," he remarked cheerfully, "I had a bully time."

He went abroad immediately after election, and in December, at St.

George's, Hanover Square, London, he married Edith Kermit Carow.

Once more, winter descended upon the Bad Lands.

Medora [remarked the Bismarck _Tribune_ in November] has pretty nearly gone into winter quarters. To be sure, the slaughter-house establishment of Marquis de Mores will not formally shut down until the end of the month, but there are many days on which there is no killing done and the workmen have to lay off. The past season has not been of the busiest, and the near approach of winter finds this about the quietest place in western Dakota. The hotel is closed.

There is only one general store and its proprietor declared that the middle of December will find him, stock and all, hundreds of miles from here. The proprietor of the drug store will move early in December, as he cannot make his board in the place.

A. T. Packard, the editor of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_, which now has a circulation of 650, is evidently prospering well, and, with the managers of the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Company and the railroad agents, seems to be about the only person who expresses an intention of spending the season here.

Fortunate were those who spent that season elsewhere. Old-timers, whose wits had been sharpened by long life in the open, had all the autumn been making ominous predictions. They talked of a hard winter ahead, and the canniest of them defied the skeptics by riding into Medora trailing a pack-horse and purchasing six months' supplies of provisions at one time.

Nature, they pointed out, was busier than she had ever been, in the memory of the oldest hunter in that region, in "fixin' up her folks for hard times." The muskrats along the creeks were building their houses to twice their customary height; the walls were thicker than usual, and the muskrats' fur was longer and heavier than any old-timer had ever known it to be. The beavers were working by day as well as by night, cutting the willow brush, and observant eyes noted that they were storing twice their usual winter's supply. The birds were acting strangely. The ducks and geese, which ordinarily flew south in October, that autumn had, a month earlier, already departed. The s...o...b..rds and the cedar birds were bunched in the thickets, fluttering about by the thousands in the cedar brakes, obviously restless and uneasy. The Arctic owls, who came only in hard winters, were about.

There was other evidence that the winds were brewing misery. Not only the deer and the antelope, the wolves and the coyotes, but the older range cattle and the horses were growing unusually long coats.

Other signs of strange disturbances of Nature were not lacking. During October the usual Indian-summer haze seemed to have lifted to a higher alt.i.tude, interposing, as it were, a curtain between earth and sun.

The light became subdued and unnatural. Halos appeared about the sun, with sun-dogs at opposite sides of the circle. The superst.i.tious were startled, in the time of the full moon, at four shafts of light, which could be seen emanating from it, giving an eerie effect as of a cross over the silver disc.

There was usually a wet snowstorm in late October; this year it did not come. A weird, dull stillness was in the air. Then, one evening toward the end of the first week in November, the snow came, falling lightly and noiselessly. As the evening advanced, the wind arose; and even as it increased in violence, the spirit in the thermometer fell.

The wind became a gale, and before midnight a blizzard was howling and sweeping through the Bad Lands such as no one there had ever known before. The snow was like the finest powder, driving through every crack and nail hole, and piling snowdrifts within the houses as well as without.

"Upon getting up in the morning," said Lincoln Lang long afterward, describing that storm, "the house was intensely cold, with everything that could freeze frozen solid. The light was cut off from the windows looking south. As we opened the front door, we were confronted by a solid wall of snow reaching to the eaves of the house. There was no drift over the back door, looking north, but, as I opened it, I was blown almost from my feet by the swirl of the snow, which literally filled the air, so that it was impossible to see any of the surrounding ranch-buildings or even the fence, less than fifty feet distant. It was like a tornado of pure white dust or very fine sand, icy cold, and stinging like a whip-lash."

As fast as the fine dry snow fell, it drifted and packed itself into the coulees, gulches, and depressions, filling them to a depth of a hundred feet or more. The divides and plateaus, and other exposed places, were left almost bare, except where some mound or rock or bit of sagebrush created an obstruction, about which the eddying currents piled snowdrifts which rose week after week to huge proportions. On the river bottoms where the sagebrush was thick, the snow lay level with the top of the brush, then drove on to lodge and pack about the cottonwood trees and beneath the river-banks, forming great drifts, extending here and there from bank to bank.

The blizzard abated, but the icy cold did not; another blizzard came, and another and another. Save as it was whirled by the wind, ultimately to become a part of some great drift, the snow remained where it fell. No momentary thaw came to carry away a portion of the country's icy burden, or to alleviate for a few hours the strain on the s...o...b..und men and women in the lonely ranch-houses. On the bottoms the snow was four feet deep.

November gave way to December, and December to January. The terrible cold persisted, and over the length and breadth of the Bad Lands the drifts grew monstrous, obliterating old landmarks and creating new, to the bewilderment of the occasional wayfarer.

Blizzard followed blizzard. For the men and women on the scattered ranches, it was a period of intense strain and privation; but for the cattle, wandering over the wind-swept world of snow and ice, those terrible months brought an affliction without parallel.

No element was lacking to make the horror of the ranges complete. The country, as Roosevelt had pointed out in July, was over-stocked. Even under favorable conditions there was not enough gra.s.s to feed the cattle grazing in the Bad Lands. And conditions throughout the summer of 1886 had been menacingly unfavorable. The drought had been intense.

A plague of gra.s.shoppers had swept over the hills. Ranchmen, who were accustomed to store large quant.i.ties of hay for use in winter, harvested little or none, and were forced to turn all their cattle out on the range to shift for themselves. The range itself was barren. The stem-cured gra.s.s which generally furnished adequate nutriment had been largely consumed by the gra.s.shoppers. What there was of it was buried deep under successive layers of snow. The new stock, the "yearlings,"

driven into the Bad Lands from Texas or Iowa or Minnesota, succ.u.mbed first of all. In the coulees or the creek-beds, where they sought refuge in droves from the stinging blasts of the driven snow, they stood helpless and were literally snowed under, or imprisoned by the acc.u.mulation of ice about their feet, and frozen to death where they stood. The native stock, in their s.h.a.ggier coats, faced the iron desolation with more endurance, keeping astir and feeding on sagebrush and the twigs of young cottonwoods. Gaunt and bony, they hung about the ranches or drifted into Medora, eating the tar-paper from the sides of the shacks, until at last they dropped and died. There was no help that the most sympathetic humanitarian or the most agonized cattle-owner could give them; for there was no fodder. There was nothing that any one could do, except, with aching and apprehensive heart, to watch them die.

They died by thousands and tens of thousands, piled one on the other in coulees and wash-outs and hidden from sight by the snow which seemed never to cease from falling. Only the wolves and coyotes throve that winter, for the steers, imprisoned in the heavy snow, furnished an easy "kill." Sage chickens were smothered under the drifts, rabbits were smothered in their holes.

It was a winter of continuous and unspeakable tragedy. Men rode out into the storms and never reached their destinations, wandering desperately in circles and sinking down at last, to be covered like the cattle with the merciless snow. Children lost their way between ranch-house and stable and were frozen to death within a hundred yards of their homes. The "partner" of Jack Snyder, a pleasant "Dutchman,"

whom Roosevelt knew well, died and could not be buried, for no pick could break through that iron soil; and Snyder laid him outside the cabin they had shared, to remain there till spring came, covered also by the unremitting snow.

Here and there a woman went off her head. One such instance was productive of a piece of unconscious humor that, in its grimness, was in key with the rest of that terrible winter:

Dear Pierre [wrote a friend to Wibaux, who had gone to France for the winter, leaving his wife in charge of the ranch].--No news, except that Dave Brown killed d.i.c.k Smith and your wife's hired girl blew her brains out in the kitchen. Everything O.K. here.

Yours truly Henry JACKSON

Early in March, after a final burst of icy fury, a quietness came into the air, and the sun, burning away the haze that lay over it, shone down once more out of a blue sky. Slowly the temperature rose, and then one day, never to be forgotten, there came a warm moistness into the atmosphere. Before night fell, the "Chinook" was pouring down from beyond the mountains, releasing the icy tension and softening all things.

Last Sunday [the d.i.c.kinson _Press_ recorded, on March 5th]

the welcome Chinook wind paid us a visit, and before noon the little rills were trickling down the hills and the brown herbage began to appear through the snow in every direction; the soft, balmy wind fanning the cheek brought memories and hopes of spring to the winter-wearied denizens of our community.

"Within a day or so," said Lincoln Lang afterward, "the snow had softened everywhere. Gullies and wash-outs started to run with constantly increasing force, until at length there was a steady roar of running water, with creeks out of bounds everywhere. Then, one day, we suddenly heard a roar above that of the rushing water, coming from the direction of the Little Missouri, and hurrying there saw a sight, once seen, never to be forgotten. The river was out of banks clear up into the cottonwoods and out on to the bottom, going down in a raging, muddy torrent, literally full of huge, grinding ice-cakes, up-ending and rolling over each other as they went, tearing down trees in their paths, ripping, smashing, tearing at each other and everything in their course in the effort to get out and away. The spectacle held us spellbound. None of us had ever seen anything to compare with it, for the spring freshets of other years had been mild affairs as compared to this. But there was something _else_ that had never been seen before, and doubtless never will be seen again, for as we gazed we could see countless carca.s.ses of cattle going down with the ice, rolling over and over as they went, so that at times all four of the stiffened legs of a carca.s.s would point skyward as it turned under the impulsion of the swiftly moving current and the grinding ice-cakes. Now and then a carca.s.s would become pinched between two ice-floes, and either go down entirely or else be forced out on the top of the ice, to be rafted along for a s.p.a.ce until the cake upon which it rested suddenly up-ended or turned completely over in the maelstrom of swirling water and ice. Continuously carca.s.ses seemed to be going down while others kept bobbing up at one point or another to replace them."

And this terrible drama continued, not for an hour or for a few hours, but for days. Only as the weeks went by and the snow retreated was it possible for the cattlemen to make any estimate of their losses. The coulees were packed with dead cattle; the sheltered places in the cottonwood trees in the bottoms along the river were packed with them.

Here and there a carca.s.s was discovered high up in a crotch of a tree where the animal had struggled over the drifts to munch the tender twigs.

"I got a saddle horse and rode over the country," said Merrifield afterward, "and I'm telling you, the first day I rode out I never saw a live animal."

The desolation of the Bad Lands was indescribable. Where hundreds of thousands of cattle had grazed the previous autumn, shambled and stumbled a few emaciated, miserable survivors. Gregor Lang, who had gone into the winter with three thousand head all told, came out of it with less than four hundred. The "Hash-Knife outfit," which had owned a hundred thousand head, lost seventy-five thousand. Not a ranchman up and down the Little Missouri lost less than half his herd.

The halcyon days of Billings County were over. What had been a flourishing cattle country was a boneyard where the agents of fertilizer factories bargained for skeletons.