The population of Medora had not relished Finnegan's bombardment, and suggestions concerning a possible "necktie party" began to make themselves heard. Finnegan evidently decided that the time had come for him, and the men who lived with him in his ill-kept shack, to leave the country. Travel by horse or foot was impossible. The boat they owned was a miserable, leaky affair. The Elkhorn skiff had evidently appeared to Finnegan and Company in the nature of a godsend.

Wilmot Dow And Theodore Roosevelt,
(1886).

The Piazza At Elkhorn.
Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt's anger boiled up at the theft of the boat and he ran to saddle Manitou. But Sewall restrained him, pointing out that if the country was impassable for the horses of the thieves, it was no less impassable for the horses of the pursuers. He declared that he and Dow could build a flat-bottomed boat in three days. Roosevelt told him to go ahead. With the saddle band—his forty or fifty cow-ponies—on the farther side of the river, he could not afford to lose the boat. But the determining motive in his mind was neither chagrin nor anxiety to recover his property. In a country where self-reliant hardihood and the ability to hold one's own under all circumstances ranked as the first of the virtues, to submit tamely to theft or to any other injury was, he knew, to invite almost certain repetition of the offense.

A journal which he kept for a month or two that spring gives in laconic terms a vivid picture of those March days.