LOOKING FOR ADVENTURES1

HERMANN HAGEDORN

THEODORE ROOSEVELT, at the age of twenty-five, went to Dakota straight from the Chicago presidential convention of 1884, arriving at Chimney Butte Ranch about the eighth of June. The country was at its best, with the bright young grass in one unbroken carpet over the prairie, and here and there in daubs of vivid green on the dark red and purple of the buttes.

man.

TEDDY MAKES A REPUTATION

Roosevelt entered with heart and soul on the work of a ranchThere was plenty to do, for the spring was the ranchman's busy season and matters which were merely chores to the expert cowpuncher had to be studied with solemn care by the tenderfoot. For he was on trial, and he knew it. The few inhabitants which the Bad Lands possessed were ready to scorn him and reject him at the first sign of weakness or cowardice, and he knew that only by sharing the cowboy's joys and hardships to the full could he achieve the respect of his hardy companions. He was in the saddle from morning until night, riding among the cattle, hunting stray horses (and they were always straying), breaking ponies, assisting on the round-up. Now and then he was a source of merriment to the experienced hands, for his skill was not always equal to his earnestness; but the various tricks they played upon him to test his temper or his nerve generally ended in the discomfiture of their authors. The fact that one such test which included a breakneck gallop down a sharp and muddy slope resulted in the downfall of the expert while he himself kept his seat, proved discouraging to the devisers of mischief.

1 From Hermann Hagedorn's The Boys' Life of Theodore Roosevelt, copyrighted by Harper and Brothers. Used by permission.

One event, which occurred at a wild little town called Mingusville, some thirty miles west of the Little Missouri, furnished the kind of talking material the Bad Lands liked to hear, and gave Roosevelt a reputation.

Mingusville boasted only one hotel, and that was a wicked little place which Roosevelt would not have dreamed of entering if night had not overtaken him far from the ranch and left him no other choice. As he was stabling his horse he heard two shots, fired, evidently, in the barroom. He entered the place with misgivings.

A shabby-looking individual in a broad-brimmed hat was walking up and down the floor, talking and swearing. He was in full possession of the situation, for he had a cocked gun in each hand, and the half dozen other men in the room, who were evidently sheep herders, seemed to be in no way inclined to dispute his authority. The clock had two holes in its face, which accounted for the shots Roosevelt had heard.

"Four-eyes!" shouted the bully as he spied Roosevelt with his offensive spectacles. There was a nervous laugh from the sheep herders, in which Roosevelt joined. "Four-eyes is going to treat!"

There was another laugh. Under cover of it, Roosevelt walked quietly to a chair behind the stove and sat down, hoping to escape further notice.

But the bully had had everything his own way and evidently had no intenton of being thwarted now. He crossed the room to where Roosevelt was sitting and repeated his command.

Roosevelt passed the man's shout off as a joke. But the bully leaned over Roosevelt, swinging his guns, and ordered him in foul and offensive language to "set up the drinks for the crowd."

It occurred to Roosevelt like a flash that he was facing a crisis and that he must make good or quit. It occurred to him that the man was foolish to stand so near, with his heels together. "Well, if I must, I must, I suppose," he said, and rose to his feet.

The bully felt vainglorious and expected no retaliation. Roosevelt struck him quick and hard with his right just to one side of the point of the jaw, hitting with his left as he straightened out, and then again with his right.

The ruffian fired both guns, but the bullets went wide as he fell like a tree, striking the corner of the bar with his head. He was senseless as Roosevelt bent over him, and the sheep herders, with courage revived, carried him into a shed.

Roosevelt took his dinner in a corner of the dining room, away from the windows, and went to bed without a light. But the would-be desperado made no move to recover his shattered prestige. He departed next morning on a passing freight train, and was seen no more.

The news of the encounter spread like the proverbial wildfire. "Four-eyes" became overnight "Old Four-eyes," which was another matter, and the Bad Lands ceased to regard "Teddy Roosenfelder" as a joke.

Roosevelt had an experience of a somewhat similar sort that spring in the new and flourishing town called Medora, which a French adventurer, the Marquis de Mores, had established across the river from Little Missouri. Medora was as raw as beef in a butcher shop and the language that was spoken there was obscene beyond description. The worst offender, by common consent, was a burly reprobate who went by the name of Hell-roaring Bill Jones. He had had a checkered career but was not without excellent qualities, which Roosevelt had promptly recognized.

It happened one day that Roosevelt was sitting in the office of the only other "literary gent" in the neighborhood, a young Michigan graduate named Packard, who was editor of the local weekly, the Bad Lands Cowboy. There were a number of cowpunchers in the room and the language was more than picturesque. The most foul-mouthed of the lot, as usual, was Hellroaring Bill.

Roosevelt had no taste for foul stories. Men who really knew him somehow failed to think of foul stories when he was about, or, if they thought of them, instinctively left them untold. Evidently Bill Jones did not know him very well.

Roosevelt stood the foul stuff as long as he could. Then he looked Bill Jones straight in the eye and "skinned his teeth" and said, "I can't tell why in the world I like you, for you're the nastiest talking man I ever heard."

The cow-punchers gasped. Bill Jones was notoriously lighttriggered and they expected his hand to fly to his gun.

But Bill's hand did nothing of the sort. There was deep silence in the room. Then a sheepish look crept over the "bad man's" face as he said apologetically: "I don't belong to your outfit, Mr. Roosevelt, and I'm not beholden to you for anything. All the same, I don't mind saying that mebbe I've been a little too free with my mouth."

They were friends from that day; they remained friends until Bill Jones died, a pathetic wreck, thirty years later.

It did not take many incidents of this sort to fix Roosevelt's reputation in the Bad Lands. In a community in which the oldest inhabitant had resided only a year or two, it did not take a man long to establish himself. In Medora there was a small law-abiding element, completely surrounded by a vast sea of iniquity. Rascals of every degree of wickedness came and went, gamblers and game butchers, horse thieves and cattle thieves, boyish adventurers and fugitives from justice. Roosevelt associated himself with the small group, including the editor of the Cowboy, which was endeavoring to bring law and order into the untamed region. His power was instantly recognized, and before the summer was well advanced one of the leading newspapers of western Dakota was speaking of him as a possible candidate for Congress.

"DEAD MEN AT ELKHORN SHACK"

Roosevelt opened up his own ranch at Elkhorn and brought two men from Maine, Sewall and Dow, to help him run it.

One day, on a round-up in the neighborhood, Dow overheard one of the Marquis de Mores's men remarking to another that "there'd be some dead men round that Elkhorn shack some day.” Dow told Sewall.

"Well," drawled Bill, "if there's going to be any dead men hereabouts I cal'late we can fix it so it won't be us."

A day or two afterward one of the Marquis's men rode to where they were cutting timber. "There's a vigilance committee around, I hear," he remarked casually. "They got a young fellow recently what was on foot, and reckoning that he was probably getting ready to steal a horse, they strung him up so his feet just touched the ground. They wanted him to confess. But he said he didn't have nothing he could confess. It was too bad about him. You haven't seen the vigilance committee about, have you? I hear they're considering making a call on you folks.”

The men from Maine said to each other that the thing began to look "smoky." They carried rifles and revolvers after that when they went to cut timber.

The vigilantes did not come, but six of the Marquis's men did, heralding their arrival with revolver shots in the air. It was Sunday morning. Sewall was alone. Unostentatiously his hand fell on his gun and remained there. He invited them into the shack to have some beans.

"The boss of the gang had been drinking," said Sewall, telling Roosevelt about it later. "He had a good appetite, so I got all the beans into him I could, to make him feel good. I guess he finally decided I wasn't worth shooting."

Sewall and Dow gave Roosevelt a full account of their adventures. "People are breathing out slaughter against us folk," said Sewall.