The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  By 1883, Texan grangers—merchants of fresh beef for military forts, Indian agencies, immigrant communities, and mining outfits—had discovered that longhorns loved the northern range grasses and could survive the blue winters.26 That year saw the first great Texan cattle drive to the Little Missouri; and as cowboys swarmed up north, the great Western Trail that went from Bandera through Dodge City to Ogallala was bringing cowboys from Texas to the Dakota Territory in search of open-range opportunities. Down in Pecos, Texas, the world’s first rodeo had been held (although in 1989 the New York Times noted that two Arizona communities—Prescott and Payson—also claimed bragging rights in this regard.) 27 In Omaha, Nebraska, an Iowa showman, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, premiered his first Wild West Show; the rage for cowboys and Indians was at full throttle. Meanwhile, the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad provided owners of livestock in the Dakota Territory relatively easy market access to both coasts. It gave outdoors enthusiasts like Roosevelt the opportunity for a quick western trip between boring sessions of the New York state legislature filled with mundane sheaves of legalese, bills, and charts.

  As he recuperated from the summer bouts of asthma and cholera, Roosevelt kept focused on the buffalo trophy he wanted for his library wall. He set his sights on shooting an older buffalo, one past its prime. Too old and exhausted from the commotion of rutting to stay in the herd and unable to court cows anymore, these bulls, known as lonesome Georges, straggled hundreds of yards from the rest of the herd, providing an easier target. The sullen, sick lonesome Georges might symbolize a vanishing West, but Roosevelt would be ecstatic to find any. Their mature heads made ideal trophies.

  After an initial hike around Little Missouri to get his bearings, impressed by the solemnity of it all, Roosevelt hired Joe Ferris as his Badlands guide. It was said that if anybody could track down a lonesome George it was Ferris, a Canadian (a New Brunswickian, to be exact) who had moved to the region just a year earlier. There were still, in fact, Acadian inflections in his speech. Virtually everybody said that this onetime lumberjack was a self-starter but never arrogant, an individual who always kept his wits about him—and also, most importantly, a puritan of sorts with Spartan instincts, who never bragged. Still, as Louis L’Amour once wrote of a character, if you stepped on one of Joe Ferris’s toes, the other nine would light out after you.

  Ferris told Roosevelt that finding either a nimble or a dying buffalo was unlikely. The days when George Catlin could recline in a canvas chair and paint great buffalo hunts were over. From the Osage Hills of Oklahoma to the Flint Hills of Kansas all the way north to the billowing grasslands along the Canadian border, a buffalo was hard to find. Earlier that summer the U.S. government had hired a band of Sioux to slaughter around 5,000 buffalo along the Northern Pacific line, so that the grazing beasts would not cause a train wreck. If you followed the tracks across the Badlands in 1883, in fact, you would have found the bleached bones of buffalo scattered and piled high in mounds. Then, as a follow-up to the “golden spike” ceremony in Montana, the federal government—specifically James McLaughlin, superintendent of the Standing Rock Indian Agency—again dispatched the Sioux (Lakota) tribe to butcher an additional 10,000 bison. A barbarous bloodbath took place on the Great Plains, and back east the newspapers cheered. “Again, the slaughter was carried out with full federal approval,” the historian Edmund Morris later observed, offering an additional reason for the extermination of the buffalo. “Washington knew that plains bare of buffalo would soon be bare of Indians too.”28

  Another pernicious enemy of the buffalo was the telegraph companies. Because buffalo were constantly being attacked by flies—black, snipe, and horse—their backs constantly itched. Regularly, buffalo looked for trees to lean into and scratch against, rubbing so hard that they frequently knocked the trees over. After the Civil War, as telegraph lines were strung across the continent, the buffalo took to the poles as scratch posts, causing them to topple. One telegraph company wizard decided that fastening bradawls to the poles might solve the problem, but the opposite happened.29 “For the first time [buffalo] came to scratch sure of a sensation in their thick hides that thrilled them from horn to tail,” the Kansas Daily Commercial lamented. “They would go fifteen miles to find a bradawl. They fought huge battles around the poles containing them, and the victor would proudly climb the mountainous heap of rump and hump of the fallen, and scratch himself into bliss until the bradawl broke or the pole came down.” With the failure of the bradawl strategy, the telegraph industry also started slaughtering the animals.30

  Even though Ferris was reluctant to take Roosevelt buffalo hunting, the rich New Yorker’s money was enticing. Eyeing Roosevelt with suspicion, Ferris reluctantly agreed to be his guide. He later mocked the chore as “trundling a tenderfoot.”31

  The first service Ferris rendered Roosevelt was to borrow a proper buffalo hunting gun from crotchety old Eldridge Paddock, a local trapper who also dabbled in real estate. Then the pair saddled up and headed seven miles south in a buckboard to the Maltese Cross Ranch (often referred to as the Chimney Butte Ranch), where they planned on meeting up with two other Canadians, William Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris (Joe’s brother). For the first time, Roosevelt saw black-tailed prairie dog towns like those Washington Irving had written about in A Tour on the Prairies (1835). These burrowing, yellowish-tan ground squirrels were racing about from hole to hole each yip-yip-yipping the “all-clear” sign to others in the colony, popping in and out of multichambered burrows.32

  Nothing had prepared Roosevelt for the awesome rugged reaches of the Badlands that he encountered on his horse ride with Ferris in the noontime September heat.33 With delighted murmurs of awe, Roosevelt was essentially following the so-called Custer’s Trail he had read about back in New York. The geography was forbiddingly different, a memorial to stark erosion and sculptured sandstone. There was a prehistoric quality to the outcroppings and battlements, and fierce wind had shaped clay in a helter-skelter fashion unique in the world. (The closest geological counterparts to the Badlands were the arroyos of the Gobi and Namib deserts.34) General Alfred Sully, an old Indian fighter, had famously called the arid Badlands “hell with the fires out.” The Sioux—like the French—called the terrain Mako Shika (“land bad”). Writing in an 1876 edition of the esteemed journal The American Naturalist, to which Theodore Roosevelt subscribed, J. A. Allen described the area as a “boundless expanse” that reminded him of a “fierce sea.”35

  More than any other landscape that Roosevelt would ever encounter, the Badlands had an inspiring resilience that swept him away into an almost spiritual state of appreciation. To him the desolate stretch of ridges and bluffs seemed “hardly proper to belong to this earth.”36 The towering buttes and scarred escarpments told geological stories of the prehistoric upheavals, the deposits, the erosion of forgotten times.37 There was, he said, a sacredness to the Badlands silhouette against the oceanic sky that exuded a cosmic sense of God’s Creation as described in Genesis. A cowboy could disappear into the Badlands and never be heard from again. Everything to Roosevelt, in fact, seemed magically contorted. Famously, he joked that the Badlands reminded him of the way Edgar Allan Poe wrote tales and poems.38 These buff buttes and towering sandstone pinnacles seemed to change shades by the hour, from heliotrope red to horizon blue to nickel gray to a blaze of different oranges. Everywhere bands of brownish yellow formed by shale exposed heavily cut Badlands ravines. “In coloring they are as bizarre as in form,” Roosevelt would write. “Among the level, parallel strata which make up the land are some of coal. When a coal vein gets on fire it makes what is called a burning mine, and the clay above it is turned into brick; so that where water wears away the side of a hill sharp streaks of black and red are seen across it, mingled with the grays, purples, and browns.”39

  When Roosevelt and Ferris finally arrived at the Maltese Cross Ranch, they were met with reserve. Roosevelt wore spectacles; he spoke in a falsetto voice, which to the uninitiated c
ould be as irritating as a whistle; and his talk was peppered with “by Joves” and “my boys,” dead giveaways that he was an aristocratic swell who never before had been west of the Yellowstone divide. “When I went among strangers I always had to spend twenty-four hours in living down the fact that I wore spectacles,” Roosevelt recalled, “remaining as long as I could judiciously deaf to any side remarks about ‘four eyes’ unless it became evident that my being quiet was misconstrued and that it was better to bring matters to a head at once.”40

  Day after day fanciful hunters like Roosevelt came to kill game in the Dakotas, and enthusiastic comparisons were made to the bush country of British East Africa, where everything was wild. As advertised, wild-life truly did prolifically flourish in the Badlands region. Tree-rich bottomlands, for example, created an ideal habitat for browser animals of all shapes and sizes. Hunters often marveled at the swelling, verdureless red surface extending as far as the eye could see. But then autumn ended and the hunters fled, and the long winter of the Badlands, routinely colder than the bluest days in Maine, hammered down with a numbing thud and all locals were left to eat venison jerky, stay warm, and wait for the springtime thaw.

  Although both Ferris and Merrifield—Roosevelt’s ranching partners—were cordial, they were clearly lukewarm about hunting down a tired old buffalo with an aristocratic swell. The two of them wore identical expressions, which read, “Not likely.” In any event, they were busy raising 150 cattle, hoping for a big payday when heifers were sold.

  Luckily for Roosevelt, shortly after their arrival at the Maltese Cross Ranch, a hungry bobcat (weighing approximately twenty-five pounds) got loose in the chicken coop, creating havoc and sending feathers flying. All four men raced out of the ranch cabin—an edifice of a story and a half with a high-pitched shingled roof—to ambush the agile predator. The bobcat got away, but the attendant laughing and cursing broke the ice. The initially cold attitude toward Roosevelt dissipated in favor of cowboy camaraderie.41 Still, only when Roosevelt offered to pay did Sylvane and Merrifield grudgingly lend him a mare for his buffalo quest.

  Although lonesome Georges were more easily hunted than other Great Plains game like antelope or white-tailed deer, the chase still presented a serious challenge. Far from being a “tame amusement,”42 as Roosevelt put it, a buffalo could turn mean and with a belching snort charge like a mad bull in an unexpected flash. The novelist Thomas Berger accurately noted the inherent danger when he wrote in Little Big Man that “buffalo run a mile in one minute and will stampede on a change of wind.”43 Roosevelt, in his conservation-tinged hunting essays, was somewhat defensive about his compulsion for shooting an endangered species. “It is genuine sport,” he insisted; “it needs skill, marksmanship, and hardihood in the man who follows it, and if he hunts on horseback, it needs also pluck and good riding. It is in no way akin to various forms of so-called sport in vogue in parts of the East, such as killing deer in a lake or by fire hunting, or even by watching at a runaway.”44

  III

  Roosevelt took a real shine to William Merrifield, later writing in his diary that Merrifield was “a good-looking fellow who shoots and rides beautifully, a reckless, self-confident man.”45 The evening of the bobcat’s attack, Roosevelt slept on the hard clay floor at the one-room Maltese Cross Ranch cabin, insisting on high-minded principle that he’d never stoop so low as to take another man’s bed. Perhaps he wanted to replicate that evening of the buffalo robe three Septembers earlier in the Red River valley. At any rate the gesture was keenly noted by Joe Ferris and Bill Merrifield. Rising at dawn, Roosevelt saddled up his horse (named “Nell” after his brother Elliott), grasped the reins, and trotted south to hunt his buffalo trophy. Jouncing beside him was Joe Ferris, whose horse pulled a wagon full of outback supplies.

  For once Roosevelt seemed to be at a loss for words as they followed a creek meandering across a valley tucked between skyscraper rock and curtain wall. The hypnotic landscape was the promised land for anybody afflicted with even a touch of claustrophobia. Nobody has ever visited North Dakota and felt hemmed in. Like all creeks in the Badlands this one ran into the Little Missouri River. If you studied an aerial photograph, the topography looked like random lines on a hand palm or leaf veins squiggling in all directions. There was a trickling creek, it seemed, around every bend. As if living out the dream of an “old regular” or half-breed trapper, Roosevelt experienced in the Badlands the freedom to live without the shackles of the urban world. Windswept plains, unmapped wilds, the howls of hungry coyotes—all this was part of the Badlands experience for Roosevelt.

  What Roosevelt had to offer Joe Ferris—and every Dakotan he rode with—was his encyclopedic knowledge of Badlands birds. A particular favorite of his were the nocturnal thrashers. Ferris was no doubt impressed that his hunting partner could identify sparrow species or melodic songsters just by tilting his ear. “One of our sweetest, loudest songsters is the meadow-lark,” Roosevelt wrote. “This I could hardly get use to at first, for it looks exactly like the eastern meadow-lark, which utters nothing but a harsh, disagreeable chatter. But the plains air seems to give it a voice, and it will perch on the top of a bush or tree and sing for hours in rich, bubbling tones.”46

  Map of the Little Missouri River in the Dakota Badlands with all its creeks and offshoots.

  Map of the Little Missouri River. (Courtesy of T.R. Medora Foundation)

  Roosevelt and Ferris made it by dusk to their destination—a ramshackle, rat-infested cabin in a field situated at the mouth of Little Cannonball Creek. Out to greet them with extended hands were Gregor Lang and his sixteen-year-old son, Lincoln, who were operating the Neimmela Ranch for the rich London capitalist Sir John Pender.47 According to Lincoln, Roosevelt was full of hearty cheer, saying, “Dee-lighted to meet you!” In his memoir, Ranching with Roosevelt, Lincoln recalled the wild-eyed “radio-active” enthusiasm of the future president. “I could make out that he was a young man, who wore large conspicuous-looking glasses, through which I was being regarded with a pair of twinkling eyes,” Lang wrote. “Amply supporting them was the expansive grin overspreading his prominent, forceful lower face, plainly revealing a set of larger white teeth. Smiling teeth, yet withal conveying a strong suggestion of hang-and-rattle.”48

  After supper Roosevelt held court, telling the Langs his stories about the world at large. Even after the others fell asleep, Gregor, a sharp-whiskered Scotsman, and Theodore kept going at the big issues of the day, locking horns over literature and politics. This was the beginning of a lifelong friendship Roosevelt would have with the Langs. As fellow plainsmen on the prowl for buffalo during the next week, Roosevelt and his new hired friends grew closer. What Roosevelt relished about buffalo hunting, it seemed, was that social class was temporarily suspended. A man’s skill and courage were the criteria for acceptance.

  The next morning, Roosevelt’s hunt party traveled together in a heavy rain, between conical buttes, anxious to find a single lonesome George or a small band of younger bulls. The soaking made it impossible to track any buffalo, and it made the Badlands clay (often called gumbo) slimy and slippery; this was very dangerous for their horses, who could easily break a leg trying to climb hillocks.49 With creeks rising quickly and rain pounding down on their backs, Roosevelt’s party spent most of the time avoiding ooze holes and slow sand. At the rate they were going Roosevelt would have been lucky to bag a turkey vulture or common skunk. When a mule deer finally appeared, Roosevelt took aim and missed. It was an embarrassingly bad shot. Quickly Joe Ferris took a try and got his kill. Deeply impressed by the Canadian’s marksmanship, Roosevelt shouted, “By Godfrey I’d give anything in the world if I could shoot like that.”50

  That smallish deer was the high-water mark of the hunt for the first four days. Ferris hinted that it might be wise to venture back to Little Missouri and dry off for a spell; but Roosevelt insisted they grind on. Lincoln Lang was surprised at how calm Roosevelt seemed to be in the teeth of a downpour. He positively glowed in
the deluge. At one point, wallowing in the flash-flood puddles, he applied mud to his face as an emollient, almost like a Lakota Sioux putting on war paint. The other men watched in shocked silence, but Lincoln dubbed him the Great White Chief.51

  Despite the unrelenting bad weather, Roosevelt continued to be entranced by his surroundings. The winds were as fierce as those along any seashore. The light—when it got a chance to break through the clouds—was often an amazing chartreuse. Like the ocean floor, much of the region was still unknown to cartographers. Every day in the Badlands he encountered some new revelatory feature of intense geological interest. Here he felt like a French-Canadian voyageur far away from the stresses of civilization. This, of course, wasn’t the first time Roosevelt had succumbed to the lure of a wild place; he had similar bouts of euphoria in the Adirondacks and the North Woods. But this was somewhat different; and he began to entertain the romantic notion of becoming a Dakotan rancher. Even the clumps of box elder and prickly plants appealed to him. “Clearly I recall his wild enthusiasm over the Badlands,” Lincoln Lang later wrote. “It had taken root in the congenial soil of his consciousness, like an ineradicable, creeping plant, as it were, to thrive and permeate it thereafter, causing him more and more and more to think in the broad gauge terms of nature—of the real earth.”52