Great Heart The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt 3

Great Heart The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt 3

Roosevelt gladly accepted this opportunity to know ranch life at first

hand. After a drive of twelve miles, Ferris led him up to a crude ranch

house. When Roosevelt entered its door he found its furniture quite as

primitive as was the building.

 

The place was owned by Joe Ferris and his brother, Sylvane, who were

in partnership with one Joe Merrifield. The young Easterner handled

himself in a way that won the esteem of these hardy, keen-eyed

“cow-punchers.” They took him on a trying trip through the desolate

“Bad Lands” in search of bison, but Roosevelt endured the hardships

without flinching and in the end got what he went after--a bull buffalo.

 

When the trip was over Roosevelt found himself in love not only with

his comrades, but also with their cattle and ponies and crude outfit.

He bought the ranch; left Merrifield in charge as his foreman; and came

East to enter upon another vigorous term in the Legislature.

 

Two years later, Roosevelt found himself sick of politics, and at odds

with life itself. His adored mother had died, and, a few hours after

her passing, his wife had also died in giving birth to his daughter

Alice. Leaving the child in the best of care in New York, he went back

to Dakota, resolved to devote himself to ranching.

 

He selected a site for his new ranch house at Elkhorn, and his favorite

companions, Sewall and Wilmot Dow, Sewall’s nephew, who came West to

join him, had a great deal to do with the building of this house.

 

Sewall states that Roosevelt at the time intended to take up

cattle-raising as a permanent business, having heard that there was

“money in it.”

 

 

 

 

II

 

Roosevelt in the Bad Lands

 

 

“Hell-Roaring Bill Jones,” a citizen of the forlorn little cattle town

of Medora, possessed four distinctions: He was sheriff of the county,

he was a gun-fighter, he was a handy man with his fists, and he became

a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, who had now acquired the two cattle

ranches, the Chimney Butte and the Elkhorn.

 

There was an election in town. A fight was threatened. Roosevelt,

fresh from his own political battles in the New York Assembly, heard

out on his ranch that one of the parties would import section hands

from nearby railroad stations to throw their weight into the conflict.

Instantly the place of election became the only spot in the world for

him.

 

The news had been late in reaching him, and when he rode into Medora

the election was well under way. Roosevelt inquired if there had been

any disorder.

 

“Disorder, hell!” said a bystander. “Bill Jones just stood there with

one hand on his gun and with the other pointing over toward the new

jail whenever any man who didn’t have the right to vote came near the

polls. The only one of them who tried to vote Bill knocked down! Lord!

the way that man fell!”

 

“Well!” Bill ejaculated, “if he hadn’t fell I’d have walked around

behind him to see what was propping him up!”

 

It was with men like these, in surroundings like these, that young

Roosevelt had elected to learn to the full extent the lesson of

democracy.

 

Before his Western trip Roosevelt had already had his manhood and his

spirit of brotherhood tested in the hard-waged battles of New York

political life. Now was to come a test infinitely greater. The former

member of the New York Assembly, the man who had occupied a high place

in New York social life, who in his earlier days was noted for his

well-tailored figure and his eyeglasses, had turned his back on all

this. He told his folks that he was going West to “rough it” and to mix

with mankind, and both of these he did to the utmost.

 

 

LIFE ON THE RANCH

 

The place he chose for his home ranch was one of the worst of the

undeveloped sections of the country. The ranch lay on both sides of

the Little Missouri River. In front of the ranch house itself was a

long veranda, and in front of that a line of cottonwood trees that

shaded it. The bluffs rose from the river valley; stables, sheds and

other buildings were near. A circular horse corral lay not far from the

house. In winter wolves and lynxes traveled up the river on the ice,

directly in front of the ranch house.

 

Life at the ranch house was of the most primitive nature. Though they

had a couple of cows and some chickens, which supplied them with milk

and eggs, they lived for the most part on canned fare.

 

At the roundups and during his long rides over the range, and on many

hunting trips, Roosevelt had his favorite horse as companion--Manitou.

This horse was so fond of him that it used to come up of its own accord

to the ranch house and put its head into the door to beg for bread and

sugar.

 

When it was not a question of roundup or herding cattle, or driving

them to new grazing lands, the men at the ranch house broke in horses,

mended their saddles and practised with the rope. Hunting trips

broke into regular ranch life. The primitive little sitting-room of

the Elkhorn Ranch was adorned with buffalo robes and bearskins of

Roosevelt’s own killing; and in winter there was always to be found

good reading and a cheery fire.

 

 

A MAN AMONG MEN

 

Roosevelt brushed elbows in Medora with newly arrived hunters from the

plains and mountains, clad in buckskin shirts and fur caps--greasy

and unkempt, yet strong and resolute men. Then there were teamsters,

in slouch hats and great cowhide boots; stage-drivers with faces

like leather; Indians wrapped in blankets; cowboys galloping through

the streets. These men had all come to town to obtain relief from

the monotony of their occupations or from long periods of peril and

hardship, and the only entertainment that awaited them were “flaunting

saloons and gawdy hells of all kinds,” to borrow Roosevelt’s own

description. Among them moved the “bad men,” professional thieves

and man-killers, who owed their lives to their ability to draw their

weapons before other men could draw theirs.

 

Roosevelt was deeply interested in these unusual characters and scenes.

Indeed, it was to drink in this frank, self-reliant spirit that he had

come West. He met these men on their own ground, fearlessly. They saw

that, in spite of his eyeglasses, he was a man after their own kind.

Often he found himself in places of danger and saw men killed beside

him in drunken brawls, yet there was something about him that made bad

men pause before they challenged him.

 

Among Roosevelt’s cowboys was a Pueblo Indian who was a bad lot, a

Sioux who was faithful and a mulatto who was one of his best men. The

men would carry the “brand” of their ranch even in their own nicknames.

Thus it would be said that “Bar Y” Harry had married the “Seven Open A”

girl.

 

It was when he was thrown into contact day after day with the men of

his own ranch that the most severe test of Roosevelt as a “good fellow”

came.

 

[Illustration: COPYRIGHT, UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD

 

ROOSEVELT IN THE BEAR COUNTRY]

 

He came through his initiation into ranch life the idol of his men,

though they never got to the stage where they would neglect a chance

to poke sly fun at him. He relates how once, when on a wood-chopping

expedition, he overheard someone ask Dow, a ranchman bred in the Maine

woods, what the total cut had been. Dow, unconscious that he was within

hearing, said:

 

“Well, Bill cut down fifty-three, I cut forty-nine and the boss he

beavered seventeen.”

 

The force of the jest, Roosevelt explains, lies not in the small number

of trees his ax felled, but in the comparison of his chopping with the

gnawing of the beaver.

 

At another time Roosevelt, struggling desperately to mount an unwilling

horse, heard behind him a cowboy remark to the effect that he would

find it hard to qualify for the job of “bronco buster.”

 

Roosevelt enjoyed these jokes as much as those who made them. The West

was a bad place for a coward or a shirker, and the man who permitted

himself to be bullied and made a butt was in for an uncomfortable

existence. On the other hand, the man who did his work and gave and

took jests in the spirit in which they were intended quickly made

lasting friends.

 

One of the stories “Bill” Sewall tells of Roosevelt’s ranch life is

this:

 

“Once on the cattle ranch in North Dakota during a roundup, his

horse reared, threw him and then fell on top of him. The spill broke

Theodore’s shoulder-blade. But he was afraid the cow-punchers might

think he was a quitter. So he stayed out on the roundup for three days,

suffering the intensest pain all the while, but never saying a word

about it to anyone.”

 

The men usually carried revolvers, and now and then an ill temper or

an excess of drinking led to a shooting affray. Roosevelt was witness

to or had first-hand knowledge of several of these. In his book “Ranch

Life and the Hunting Trail” he tells how a desperado, a man from

Arkansas, had a quarrel with two Irish desperadoes who were partners.

For several days the three lurked about the streets of the town, each

trying to get the drop on the other. Finally one of the Irishmen crept

up behind the Arkansan as he was walking into a gambling hall and

shot him in the back. Mortally wounded, the man fell; yet, with the

dauntless spirit found in so many of this class, he twisted around as

he dropped and shot his slayer dead. Knowing that he had but a few

minutes more to live and expecting that his other foe would run up

on hearing the shooting, he dragged himself on his arms out into the

street and waited. The second partner came up at once, to be slain

instantly by a bullet from the revolver of the wounded man. The victor

of this gruesome combat lived just twenty minutes after his victory.