The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  THE MAN IN THE BUNGALOW was Eldridge G. Paddock, éminence grise of the Badlands. Long before the Northern Pacific first reached the river in 1880, Paddock had held undisputed sway over the valley’s roving population of hunters, trappers, and traders. He had been one of the first to settle near the Little Missouri depot, and quickly became known as “the sneakiest man in town, always figuring on somebody else doing the dirty work for him, and him reap the benefits.” Although Paddock was a silent, solitary man, rarely seen to engage in open violence, people who annoyed him had a way of being found with their heads caved in, or with bullets in their backs; he was said to be personally responsible for at least three of the crosses on Graveyard Butte. Yet he was capable of surprising generosity (as Roosevelt had just discovered) and was apparently straight with his friends. All in all, he was an enigmatic character against whom nothing had ever been proven.15

  Until last winter, Paddock had been content, publicly at least, to flourish as a gambler, guide, and speculator in hunting rights up and down the river. Then, early in the spring, there stepped off the train at Little Missouri a man of unlimited wealth and unlimited gullibility. “I am weary of civilization,” declared the stranger.16 Paddock pounced on him with the sureness of Iago accosting Othello.

  The newcomer was a very dark, very handsome young Frenchman, with eagle eyes, waxed mustaches, and military bearing. His name bespoke a lineage both noble and royal, dating back to thirteenth-century Spain: Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent-Amat Manca de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Morès. Local parlance speedily reduced it to “de Moree,” and then, as summer wore on, to “that son of a bitch of a Marquis.”17

  De Morès had come to the Badlands to invest in the local beef industry. Although as yet this industry consisted only of six or seven scattered ranches, he seemed sure that he would prosper. “It takes me only a few seconds to understand a situation that other men have to puzzle over for hours,” he boasted.18 Certainly the prospects seemed good, even to the slow-witted. Here, and for thousands of square miles around, were juicy pastures, sheltered bottoms, and open stretches of range whose ability to support countless thousands of bovine animals had been demonstrated over the centuries. Now that the buffalo and red men were on their way out, cattle and white men could move in. The Marquis proceeded to unfold a series of ambitions so grandiose as to stun his buckskinned audience. He would buy up as many steers as the Badlands could produce, plus as many more as the Northern Pacific could bring in from points farther west. He would build a gigantic slaughterhouse in the valley, process his beeves on the spot, and ship the meat East in refrigerated railroad cars. This would save the trouble, expense, and quality loss of transporting cattle on the hoof, resulting in lower prices for the Eastern consumer, higher profits for the Western producer, and untold riches for himself. “I shall become the richest financier in the world!”19 He was so sure of the scheme’s success that he would spend millions—tens of millions, if necessary. With the resultant billions, he would buy control of the French Army, and mount a coup d’état for what he believed (apparently with some justification) was his birthright—the crown of France.20

  The shabby citizens of Little Missouri listened to de Morès with understandable skepticism. All except E. G. Paddock decided they would have nothing to do with the “crazy Frenchman.” So, on 1 April 1883, the Marquis crossed over the river, erected a tent on the sagebrush flats, cracked a bottle of champagne over it, and announced that he was founding his own rival town. It would be named Medora, after his wife.21

  (Roosevelt probably knew, at least indirectly, the lady in question; for that matter, he may even have heard of de Morès before. Medora von Hoffman was, like himself, a wealthy young New York socialite; her father, Louis von Hoffman, was one of the richest bankers on Wall Street. De Morès had wooed the redheaded heiress in Paris, married her in Cannes, and come to live with her in New York in the summer of 1882. For a while, the Marquis had worked at the family bank, but he was of restless disposition, and decided to go West in search of wider horizons. The person who prompted him to visit Little Missouri was none other than that ubiquitous entrepreneur, Commander Gorringe.22)

  Local cynics noted with delight that the date de Morès chose to smash his champagne bottle was April Fools’ Day. But the foam had scarcely soaked into the sagebrush before the sounds of construction disturbed the peace of the valley. Gangs of workers began to arrive from St. Paul, and the new town arose with astonishing speed. Higher and faster than anything else soared the Marquis’s slaughterhouse chimney, until the citizens of Little Missouri, glancing across the river, could not help but see it. Huge and phallic against the eastern buttes, it stood as a symbol of future glory and the unlimited power of money.23 When Roosevelt and Ferris rolled past on their buckboard, on 8 September 1883, the slaughterhouse was only two weeks from completion.24

  Another, more ominous symbol was the Marquis’s hilltop ranch house, which he grandiloquently called “Château de Morès.” It, too, was nearing completion when Roosevelt drove by. Gray and forbidding, the Château commanded a panorama of both Little Missouri and Medora which could only be described as lordly. This was plainly the home of an aristocrat who regarded himself as far above the vassals in the valley. Roosevelt, if he was not reminded of his own pretensions at Leeholm, may have compared it to the “robber knight” castles he and Alice had seen while cruising down the Rhine, two summers before. “The Age of Chivalry was lovely for the knights,” he had mused then, “but it must have at times been inexpressively gloomy for the gentlemen who had to occasionally act in the capacity of daily bread for their betters.”25

  Some inhabitants of the Little Missouri Valley, at any rate, did not intend to become daily bread for the Marquis. Among them were three frontiersmen, Frank O’Donald, Riley Luffsey, and “Dutch” Wannegan. O’Donald had been offered work by de Morès sometime in the spring, but he had refused, saying that he preferred to live on the proceeds of hunting and trapping. Besides, he was an old enemy of E. G. Paddock—and Paddock was already the Marquis’s right-hand man. De Morès shrugged and forgot about him. Then one day O’Donald rode home to the hunting-shack he shared with Luffsey and Wannegan, ten miles downriver, and discovered a fence across his path. Inquiries revealed that it had been erected by the Marquis, who was buying up large tracts of public land with Valentine script. O’Donald angrily hacked the fence down. De Morès coolly put it up again. Every time O’Donald and his friends rode up and down the valley, they destroyed the fence, only to find it blocking their path on the way back. Tempers began to rise; threats were shouted across the river. Then, in mid-June, came the final straw. O’Donald heard a rumor—allegedly bruited about by E. G. Paddock—that the Marquis was about to “jump claim” to his hunting-shack. “Whoever jumps us,” O’Donald announced publicly, “jumps from there right into his grave.”26

  On Thursday, 21 June, the three frontiersmen arrived in Little Missouri for a long weekend of drinking and shooting. One witness described it as “a perfect reign of terror.” The air was thick with promiscuous bullets, and O’Donald, primed with Forty-Mile Red Eye, repeated his threats to shoot de Morès “like a dog on sight.” After two days of this, Paddock felt constrained to ride over to Medora and warn the Marquis that his life was in danger. De Morès promptly took the next train east to Mandan, 150 miles away, and reported the situation to a justice of the peace. “What shall I do?” he asked. “Why, shoot,” replied the J.P.27

  The Marquis, who was an expert marksman and no coward (he had already killed two Frenchmen in affaires d’honneur),28 returned nonchalantly to the valley on Monday, 25 June. Waiting for him at the Little Missouri depot were his three rather hung-over enemies. Possibly de Morès stared them down; at all events they allowed him to pass. But later that afternoon, as he stood talking to Paddock outside the latter’s bungalow, a bullet cracked past him, missing by less than a yard.29

  Even then, de Morès somehow retained his European reverence for the law. He telegraphed to
Mandan for a sheriff, and retired to Medora to await the next train. It was not due to arrive until Tuesday afternoon. To make sure that his antagonists did not leave town before then, the Marquis posted aides on all the trails leading out of Little Missouri. On Tuesday morning he himself staked out a bluff west of town, overlooking the most likely escape route the frontiersmen would take if they sought to avoid the sheriff. Tension gathered as the hour of the train’s arrival approached. Presently the puffing of a locomotive was heard in the east. O’Donald, Luffsey, and Wannegan mounted their horses and rode over to the depot.

  As expected, the sheriff was on board the train. Stepping down into the sagebrush, he found himself staring into the barrels of three rifles. When he told the trio he had a warrant for their arrest, O’Donald replied, in classic Western fashion, “I’ve done nothing to be arrested for, and I won’t be taken.” With that, they turned and rode out of town. While the sheriff watched indecisively, the frontiersmen headed straight into the ambush de Morès had prepared for them. There were two, apparently simultaneous explosions of gunfire; the three horses collapsed and died; the firing continued; then, with a scream of “Wannegan, oh Wannegan!” Riley Luffsey fell dead, a bullet through his neck. Another bullet smashed into O’Donald’s thigh, and Wannegan’s clothes were shot to ribbons. They surrendered instantly.

  When the dust and smoke cleared, de Morès, Paddock, and two other aides were seen emerging from various hiding-points in the sage. The sheriff arrested all except Paddock, who, having taken care not to be seen participating in the ambush, insisted that the frontiersmen had started the shooting anyway.

  At a noticeably sympathetic hearing in Mandan at the end of July, murder charges against the Marquis and his men were dismissed for lack of evidence. There was talk in Little Missouri of lynching de Morès if he ever dared to return to Medora. With characteristic courage he did so immediately; not a hand was laid on him. Construction at Medora went on, and more fences went up in the valley. By the time Roosevelt arrived in the Badlands, a month later, uneasy calm had been restored. But a new cross stood out white and clean on Graveyard Butte, as if in silent protest that Riley Luffsey’s death had not been avenged.

  This, then, was the story, an authentic tale of the Wild West, that Roosevelt soon came to know by heart, for it was told over and over again in the Badlands, that fall of 1883. Events which the New Yorker could not foresee would one day involve him with all its major characters.

  NO SOONER HAD ROOSEVELT and Ferris crested the butte south of Medora and rolled down the far side than a wall of rock screened off the puny outpost of civilization behind them.30 All memory of the Marquis’s grand chimney was obliterated by the craggy immensity opening out ahead. As far as Roosevelt’s eye could see, the landscape was a wild montage of cliffs and ravines, tree-filled bottoms and grassy divides. Here and there a particularly lofty butte caught the last rays of the sun, and glowed with phosphorescent brilliance before fading to ashen gray.31 Nowhere was there any sign of human life, save for an almost invisible wagon trail zigzagging from side to side of the crazily meandering river. Sometimes the trail disappeared completely in meadows of lush, three-foot grass (here, presumably, buffalo once fed); sometimes it ran in straight furrows across beds of dried mud that gave off choking clouds of alkali dust under the horses’ hooves.

  They had been traveling south steadily for almost an hour before Roosevelt saw the first settler’s log house, near the mouth of Davis Creek. Joe Ferris told him it was named Custer Trail Ranch, after the doomed colonel who had camped there in 1876. Another, even earlier expedition had taken this trail in 1864, led by the old Sioux-baiter, General Alfred Sully. It was he who coined the classic description of the Badlands: “hell with the fires out.”32 Seen by Roosevelt in the gloom of early evening, it must indeed have seemed like a landscape of death. There were pillars of corpse-blue clay, carved by wind and water into threatening shapes; spectral groves where mist curled around the roots of naked trees; logs of what looked like red, rotting cedar, but which to the touch felt petrified, cold, and hard as marble; drifts of sterile sand, littered with buffalo skulls; bogs which could swallow up the unwary traveler—and his wagon; caves full of Stygian shadow; and, weirdest of all, exposed veins of lignite glowing with the heat of underground fires, lit thousands of years ago by stray bolts of lightning. The smoke seeping out of these veins hung wraithlike in the air, adding a final touch of ghostliness to the scene. Roosevelt could understand why the superstitious Sioux called such territory Mako Shika, “land bad.”33

  Early French trappers had expanded the term to mauvaises terres à traverser, “bad lands to travel over.” That usage, too, Roosevelt could understand; he and Ferris had to ford the river twice more, and hack through a thicket of cottonwood trees, before arriving at their night stop, a small log hut in a mile-wide valley. This, announced Joe, was the Maltese Cross Ranch, home of his brother Sylvane, and another Canadian, Bill Merrifield.

  THE TWO RANCHERS greeted Roosevelt coldly. They did not care for Eastern dudes, particularly the four-eyed variety. (Spectacles, he found out, “were regarded in the Bad Lands as a sign of defective moral character.”)34 Quiet, ill-lettered, humorless, and whipcord-tough, the pair were just beginning to prosper after two years of hunting and ranching on the Dakota frontier. Their herd of 150 head had been supplied by two Minnesota investors on the shares basis customary in those days of “free grass” and absentee owners. In exchange for their management on the range, Sylvane and Merrifield were paid a portion of the profits arising from beef sales. Roosevelt was probably curious about operations at Maltese Cross (the name derived from the shape of the ranch brand), since he himself had some time ago invested five thousand dollars in a Cheyenne, Wyoming, beef company; but his hosts were not the kind to discuss business with a stranger.35

  The atmosphere in the one-room cabin continued awkward through supper. Even a game of old sledge, played by lamplight after the table had been wiped over, failed to break the ice. Suddenly some frightful squawks through the log walls distracted them. A bobcat had gotten into the chicken-house, which was jabbed against the side of the cabin. Rushing outside, the four cardplayers joined in a futile chase, and when they returned they were laughing and talking freely at last.36

  Despite this new friendliness, Sylvane and Merrifield were reluctant to lend Roosevelt a saddle horse for his buffalo hunt. He and Joe had decided to base their operations around Little Cannonball Creek, forty-five miles to the south, in the hope that some stray buffalo might still be found there. Roosevelt did not relish the prospect of having to spend the whole next day jouncing around on the buckboard. He pleaded for a horse, but in vain: the ranchers “didn’t know but what he’d ride away with it.” Only when he took out his wallet, and offered to buy the horse for cash, did their resistance magically melt.37

  Noblesse oblige prevented Roosevelt from taking one of the three bunks available in the cabin that night. He simply rolled up in his blankets on the dirt floor, under the dirt roof.38 Had he known what privations he was to suffer during the next two weeks, even this would have seemed like luxury.

  AT DAWN THE NEXT DAY Roosevelt mounted his new buckskin mare, Nell, and turned south up the valley, with Joe Ferris’s wagon rumbling behind. In the clear light of early morning he could see that the Badlands were neither hellish nor threatening, but simply and memorably beautiful. The little ranch house, alone in its bottomland, commanded a magnificent view of westward rolling buttes. Their sandstone caps broke level: flat bits of flotsam on a tossing sea of clay.39 The nearer buttes, facing the river, were slashed with layers of blue, yellow, and white. In the middle distance these tints blended into lavender, then the hills rippled paler and more transparent until they dissolved along the horizon, like overlapping lines of watercolor. Random splashes of bright red showed where burning coal seams had baked adjoining layers of clay into porcelain-smooth “scoria.” Thick black ribs of lignite stuck out of the riverside cliffs, as if awaiting the kiss of mor
e lightning. Their proximity to the Little Missouri told the whole geological story of the Badlands. Here two of the four medieval elements—fire and water—had met in titanic conflict. So chaotic was the disorder, wherever Roosevelt looked, that the earth’s crust appeared to have cracked under the pressure of volcanic heat. Millions of years of rain had carved the cracks into creeks, the creeks into streams, the streams into branchlets, the branchlets into veinlets. Each watercourse multiplied by fours and eights and sixteens, until it seemed impossible for the pattern to grow more crazy. Even so, as he rode south, he could see strange dribbles of mud in dry places, and puffs of smoke curling out of split rocks, which signified that water and fire were still dividing the earth between them.

  Apart from dense groves of willow and cottonwood by the river, and clumps of dark juniper on the northern-facing slopes, the Badlands were largely bare of trees. A blanket of grass, worn through in places but much of it rich and green, softened the harsh topography. Wild flowers and sagebrush spiced the clean dry breeze—blowing ever hotter as the sun climbed high. Surely Roosevelt’s asthmatic lungs rejoiced in this air, as did his soul in the sheer size and emptiness of the landscape. No greater contrast could be imagined to the “cosy little sitting room” on West Forty-fifth Street. Here was masculine country; here the West was truly wild; “here,” he confessed many years later, “the romance of my life began.”40

  FOR MILE AFTER MILE, hour after hour, the hunters straggled south over increasingly rugged country. No wagon trail now: six times that morning they had to ford the river as it meandered across their path. About noon they mounted a high plateau, whose views extended west to Montana. Dropping down again into the Little Missouri Valley, they forded the river at least seventeen more times. There were bogs and quicksands to negotiate, and banks so steep the buckboard was in danger of toppling over. The sun was already glowing red in their faces when they sighted their destination, a lonely shack in a meadow at the mouth of Little Cannonball Creek. It was dusk by the time they got there. Lamplight shone invitingly out of the shack’s single window.41