THE COWBOY PRESIDENT

by Michael F. Blake

  Unlike others who grieved with emotions, Theodore did just the opposite. He went out in search of a physical challenge to combat his grief. After his father’s death, he had hunted endlessly in the Maine woods with Bill Sewall. Hunting was an escape for him, testing his skills against those of wild animals. Who was better? Who would make the kill? He also rode his horses hard, as if to outrun the grief that was constantly dogging his trail. In suffering a loss, he tempted fate; he pushed himself to the edge as if daring death to take him. By conquering his physical obstacle, Theodore gained the strength to vanquish his grief, burying it so deeply that it could not return. Now he would further test himself by living in the West, by living a free but hard life, pushing himself against the elements, the wild animals, and, most importantly, himself. Theodore would now match himself against the likes of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, as well as those around him—the Ferris brothers, Merrifield, Sewall, and Dow. He would also, with his romantic nature, become the cowboy found in the dime novels of the time. In some respects, heading west allowed him to indulge in a fantasy, to escape the harsh realities life had recently dealt him.

  He was once asked if he had been afraid when he went out west. “There were all kinds of things I was afraid of at first, ranging from grizzly bears to ‘mean’ horses and gun-fighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid,” he replied.18

  Like those who had gone west before him, seeking to escape a broken heart, the horrors of the Civil War, a failed business, or just answering the itch for adventure, Theodore Roosevelt boarded a train for the Badlands.

  The ensuing three years would solidify the beliefs and character of the man whose likeness eventually was carved into the side of a South Dakota mountain.

  Headin’ West

  Nowhere, not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains.

  “LITTLE MISSOURI AND MEDORA ARE BOTH DESTINED TO HAVE A LARGE and legitimate boom this year. The writer personally knows of three young and energetic business men who will start here, and many others are waiting till spring opens.”1 This optimistic comment was found on page four of the premiere edition of Medora’s only newspaper, the Bad Lands Cow Boy.

  Indeed, Medora was growing, while the hamlet of Little Missouri vainly attempted to maintain its several businesses. It had already seen the train depot moved to Medora, and by the end of 1884, Little Missouri was nothing but a faded memory.2 At the time of Theodore’s arrival in September 1883, Little Missouri boasted four buildings, while a few tents had sprung up in Medora. By the end of the spring of 1884, Medora claimed eighty-four buildings, which included a grocery store, newspaper office, blacksmith shop, photograph gallery, and barbershop. Little Tom’s Saloon offered “everything from Cow-boy bitters to Dude Soda.” The Marquis built the Hotel De Mores, charging $2.00 daily, or $6.00 for the week, noting that it had “First Class Accommodations for All.” Barber H. Lyle advertised “fine work guaranteed,” while contractor J. A. Freeze offered carpentry services “done with neatness and dispatch.”3

  Almost all Western towns, despite their size, had a newspaper. Depending on the population—and the news—newspapers were published daily or weekly. The man behind the press could be as itinerant as the gamblers and saloon owners, moving from one boomtown to another, while others put down roots if the town showed promise. These newsmen, while maintaining the lofty principle of being a voice for the truth, nevertheless had to earn a living. Not only did they report on the happenings within the town, but many also served as typesetter, clerk, and printer, not to mention selling subscriptions and ads. Some newspapers became the mouthpiece, or at least a strong supporter, for certain town factions or a political party. Many newspapers tried to maintain a balance in their reporting, but it was rare when an editor did not allow their personal opinions to spill onto the pages.

  Arthur T. Packard was no different from any other newspaper publisher in the West. At twenty-two, Packard, a University of Michigan graduate, had already served as an editor and writer for the Bismarck Tribune and the Mandan Pioneer before arriving in Medora. The Marquis helped fund the paper, supplying Packard with a building—his former blacksmith shop, which stood under a crooked cottonwood tree. It was a long, twenty-by-thirty-foot, single-story building constructed from perpendicular boards, with two-inch strips covering the joints in a vain attempt to keep out the Dakota winters. A small area inside was cordoned off for living space, while the rest of the building was given over to cranking out a weekly edition.4 Packard, a Republican “clear through to the backbone,” was not beholden to the Marquis, or anyone else. He made that abundantly clear in the first editorial of the Bad Lands Cow Boy.

  We do not come as an agent or tool of any man or any set of men. There is a wide field for us to cover, and we intend to cover it. We do come, however, to make some almighty dollars. There is nothing like honesty, and now that we have come out thus plainly our motives cannot be impeached. But to fulfill our mission we must publish a good paper.5

  Editorials in the Bad Lands Cow Boy were reprinted in other periodicals, including the St. Paul Pioneer Press, New York Sun, and New York Herald, which called the paper “a neat little journal, with lots to read in it, and the American press has every reason to be proud of its new baby . . . It says in its introductory notice to its first number that it intends to be the leading cattle paper of the Northwest, and adds that it is not published for fun, but for $2 a year.”6

  The Bismarck Tribune, while noting the newspaper was “bright and newsy,” took exception to the “ill-sounding, horrible name chosen for it. The editor cannot be so stupidly blind as to be unaware of the fact that throughout the East the name ‘cowboy’ is looked upon as a synopsis for lawlessness and cussedness in its most active form, and the ‘bad lands’ have ever been regarded as barren in the extreme . . . in eastern eyes it means all that is bad, lawless and desperate.”7 Packard quickly responded, stating, “We adopted the name in the first place to attract attention, which it certainly does . . . First, that cow boys in the west are, as a rule, one of the most peaceful and law-abiding classes of citizens that we have . . . The second reason is that cow boys represent cattle . . . This is the reason why we have completed our name into THE BAD LANDS COW BOY.”8

  Packard was extremely supportive of the Badlands cattle industry, stating that his weekly would “preach King Cattle to all men.” He noted that the area had an “abundance of unoccupied land,” and that any increase “in the number of cattle and cattle raisers will work to the advantage of all concerned. If the Bad Lands were full of cattle it would not decrease the price, as the demand is far in advance of the supply. Word comes from Kansas that the cattle sections there are overstocked and the cattle men there are looking to the Northwest for relief. To all these we would say, come. There is plenty of room and you will be made welcome.”9 Two weeks later, Packard said the land was an excellent winter range. Despite the fact that a few calves suffered from the winter cold, “We have yet to hear of a solitary head ever having died in the Bad Lands from exposure or lack of grass . . . No matter which way the wind is from, there is always a ravine or coulee near, into which the cattle can be entirely beyond its reach. These cross coulees and ravines feel almost warm on the coldest day, and here you will find the cattle as contented as if in a barn.”10

  Packard, like many other new arrivals, had yet to experience a Badlands dry summer or brutal winter.

  Medora, similar to other small towns, had few venues by which to entertain the large male population aside from gambling, drinking, and the sporting ladies. The arrival of the train was a major event for those in town; Dutch Wannegan noted that “seeing the trains come in was all the scenery we had.”11 Cowboys, who probably had imbibed too much of Bob Robert’s “bug juice,” would watch anyone who disembarked from the train. If a man was wearing a derby or top hat—called “pot hat” and “plug,” respectively, by the cowboys—that person bec
ame fair game. One cowboy would knock the offender’s hat off with a rock, and then display his proficiency with his pistol on the chapeau. This provided great amusement for the cowboys, while the hatless victim could do little but mourn the passing of his headgear. Theodore once stated that he would wear any hat he pleased in town, and, in fact, no cowboy ever attempted to display their shooting skills against him.

  Another favorite act of cowboy horseplay was to wait for an arriving train, then let loose with a burst of gunfire inside a nearby saloon. Passengers on the train, hearing the shots, would see two men carrying a dead body out to the rear of the establishment. Within a minute, another volley of gunfire was discharged and, once again, two men carried out another body. As the train left the station, the passengers were aghast at witnessing the violence of the Wild West. Little did they realize that the “dead bodies” were the same very-much-alive cowboy carried out by his colleagues in a revolving circle.12

  Medora’s growth was due solely to the result of the plans and pocketbook of the Marquis de Morès, who was becoming known for ignoring the rights of others, especially when it came to land ownership. He held the opinion that the only enforceable rights belonged to himself, and in the spring of 1884, he sought to challenge Theodore’s land holdings. The Marquis placed 1,500 head of cattle on rich bottomland located across the river from Theodore’s ranch, which, under the laws of the range, belonged to his Maltese Cross outfit. Bill Merrifield confronted the Marquis’s foreman, who said he had his orders, and refused to move the cattle. Riding to Medora, with another cowboy to serve as their witness, Merrifield and Sylvane found the Marquis in his office. It was nearly midnight.

  The Marquis demanded to know what the men wanted at such a late hour, and Merrifield related the situation. He asked the Marquis to write an order notifying his foreman to move the cattle off the land. Asking what they would do if he refused to comply, Merrifield curtly responded that they would move the cattle themselves. Attempting to work out a compromise, the Marquis offered to pay $1,500 to graze his cattle in the area for three weeks. The two men flatly refused the offer, adding that either he write the order or they would move the cattle. Returning to the ranch, Merrifield and Sylvane handed a letter to the foreman who moved the cattle that morning. Merrifield later stated, “We knew there’d be no living with a man like the Marquis if you made statements and then backed down for any price.”13

  Theodore arrived in Medora late in the evening of June 9. He stepped off the train into the crisp, cold night air, greeted by the Ferris brothers and Merrifield. They walked over to Packard’s newspaper office, where the editor and a few other men were sitting around a stove, talking. With Theodore’s arrival, the conversation quickly turned to the Chicago convention and the nomination of Blaine.

  The following day, Theodore, Sylvane, and Merrifield rode to Maltese Cross Ranch. It was the first time Theodore saw the new cabin and learned how his cattle had fared during the winter. Thanks to a relatively mild winter, a light snowfall, and early chinook winds, the cattle had had easy access to grass. Because of the favorable conditions, Theodore had lost only twenty-five head of cattle from a total of 440. The even brighter news was that he had gained 155 calves. Encouraged by this report, he increased his investment with an additional thousand head of cattle. His total investment now came to $40,000, nearly 20 percent of his total resources.14 Roosevelt instructed Merrifield and Sylvane to purchase Eastern cattle instead of the Texas longhorns. Eastern cattle had shorter horns, which meant more of them could be placed in a stock car, and they were heftier compared to the leaner longhorn breed. One major drawback for this breed was that unlike the longhorns, they did not endure the harsh winter weather as well.

  Theodore now turned his attention to obtaining a buckskin suit and to shooting a pronghorn.* Lincoln Lang jumped at the chance to help him fulfill both requests. Theodore felt the buckskin suit was “the most picturesque and distinctively national dress ever worn in America. It was the dress in which Daniel Boone was clad when he first passed through the trackless forests of the Alleghenies . . . it was the dress worn by grim old Davy Crockett when he fell at the Alamo.”15 The clothing appealed to his romantic nature, allowing him, in a small way, to emulate his heroes and live out the role of frontiersman. This feeling was evident when it came to his other Western attire. The Bowie knife he carried was made by Tiffany’s in New York. His 1873 Colt pistol, with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel, was intricately engraved and sported ivory grips, with his initials on one side and the head of a buffalo on the other. On the sides of his spurs, he displayed his initials and the Maltese Cross brand. Theodore wore his chaps in the traditional shotgun style (also called “stovepipes”), in which the legs are straight and narrow.16 Chaps were a necessity in the Southwest to protect a cowboy’s legs from the prickly brush, but their use was more of a personal choice for cowboys in the Badlands. Some cowboys in Medora felt that Theodore’s choice of clothing was hardly authentic. J. L. Fisher, the Marquis’s new superintendent of the refrigerator car company, held the opinion that the young fellow was “dressed in the exaggerated style” of the West, which only a rank tenderfoot would dare to wear.17

  Lincoln knew that the only person who could make a buckskin suit in the area was a Widow Maddox. Some folks called her a terror, one to steer clear of. One of the first women to settle in the area, Widow Maddox was a true pioneer. Her husband, while on a drunk one night, attempted to beat her and soon found himself on the losing end of a poker. Soon after that incident, he quickly left her and the ranch. Lincoln Lang described the woman as “heavy set, muscular, rather short of stature, with strong regular features.”18

  Making their way to the Maddox ranch, the two riders heard a commotion in the brush, followed by a loud squeak from an animal in trouble. A large bull snake had a jackrabbit tightly held in its coils and was slowly crushing it to death. Both Theodore and Lincoln quickly dismounted, “basting the life out” of the snake with their quirts. Theodore picked up the panting rabbit and held it in the crook of his arm, gently checking it. After a few moments in the safety of his arms, the rabbit was turned loose. “There goes a sore but wiser rabbit,” Theodore noted.19

  While others may have found Widow Maddox a terror, she took an immediate liking to Theodore, and, as Lincoln stated, was “quite chatty, which was unusual for her with strangers.” Theodore described her, without using her name in his autobiography, as “a very capable and very forceful woman, with sound ideas of justice and abundantly well able to hold her own.”20 The two men had a friendly lunch with their hostess before she measured Theodore for his suit. Of his buckskin shirt, Theodore later said it was “first-class,” and he used it for many years before one of his sons borrowed it for a winter in Arizona in the early 1910s.21

  On their return to the Lang ranch, Theodore spotted some prong-horns in the distance. Luckily, the animals neither spotted nor smelled the men as they left their horses and began to stalk their targets. Topping a hill, Theodore and Lincoln saw that the grazing animals were oblivious to the hunters. Lincoln noted that Theodore coolly raised his rifle to his shoulder and shot one of the pronghorns, dropping it in its tracks. “He might have been an old seasoned hunter for any indication of excitement that I could see, although this was his first antelope,” he wrote years later. “As the animal dropped, however, his self-possession promptly took wings, wild enthusiasm held the stage, and he was executing a species of war dance around the top of the hill, with his rifle in one hand while waving his hat with the other.”22

  Shouting “I got him!” over and over, Theodore failed to take a shot at the other pronghorns before they ran off to safety. Overjoyed at his success in bagging one of his desired targets, Theodore promptly gave Lincoln “the surprise of my life” when he handed the young man the shotgun that brought down the pronghorn. “But that was Roosevelt, as we had come to know him even then,” Lincoln recounted. “Deeply I appreciated his kindness and said no.” The young man also knew that Theodor
e, in the moment of complete euphoria, may have regretted the gesture once the thrill wore off. “It seemed proper for me to decline,” he said.23

  The two rode fifty miles in that one day. Since the pronghorn is so spare, the only real meat on the body is the hams, which they cut out, as well as the head, which became another trophy mount. A few days later, Theodore wrote to Bamie, detailing his feelings about the area and his cattle business:

  Well, I have been having a glorious time here, and am well hardened now (I have just come in from spending thirteen hours in the saddle). For every day I have been here I have had my hands full. First and foremost, the cattle have done well, and I regard the outlook for making the business a success as being very hopeful. This winter I lost about 25 head, from wolves, cold, etc.; the others are in admirable shape, and I have about a hundred and fifty-five calves. I shall put on a thousand more cattle and shall make it my regular business. In the autumn I shall bring out Seawall [sic] and Dow and put them on a ranch with very few cattle to start with, and in the course of a couple of years, give them quite a little herd also.

  I have never been in better health than on this trip. I am in the saddle all day long either taking part in the round up of the cattle, or else hunting antelope (I got one the other day; another good head for our famous hall at Leeholm). I am really attached to my two “factors,” Ferris and Merrifield; they are very fine men.

  The country is growing on me, more and more; it has a curious, fantastic beauty of its own; and as I own six or eight horses I have a fresh one every day and ride on a lope all day long. How sound I sleep at night now! There is not much game, however; the cattlemen have crowded it out and only a few antelope and deer remain . . . I will start out alone to try my hand at finding my way over the prairie by myself.24