Roosevelt in the Bad Lands

by Hermann Hagedorn

Sewall as usual, was less sanguine.

As for hard times [he wrote his brother that April] they are howling that here, and lots are leaving the country. Lots more would if they could. We are all right. Roosevelt is the same good fellow he always has been and though I don't think he expects to make much, his upper lip is stiff and he is all right.

Meanwhile, he was hammering ahead on his Life of Benton. He was a slow and rather laborious writer, but his persistence evidently atoned for his lack of speed in composition, for whereas, on April 29th, he wrote his sister that he had written only one chapter and intended to devote "the next three weeks to getting this work fairly under way," by the 7th of June he announced that the book was "nearly finished."

"Some days," Sewall related afterward, "he would write all day long; some days only a part of the day, just as he felt. He said sometimes he would get so he could not write. Sometimes he could not tell when a thing sounded right. Then he would take his gun and saunter off, sometimes alone, sometimes with me or Dow, if he was around."

Occasionally he would "try out" a passage on Sewall. "Bill," he exclaimed one morning, "I am going to commit the unpardonable sin and make you sit down and listen to something I've written."

Bill was willing. The passage was from the first chapter of the biography of the Tennessee statesman and dealt with the attitude of the frontier toward law and order and the rights of "the other fellow." Bill gave his approval and the passage stood.

Day after day Roosevelt pushed forward into his subject, writing with zest, tempered by cool judgment. He did not permit an occasional trip to Medora to interrupt his work. He had a room over Joe Ferris's store, and after Joe and his wife had gone to bed, he would throw open the doors of the kitchen and the dining-room and walk to and fro hammering out his sentences.

"Every once in a while," said Joe later, "everything would be quiet, then after fifteen minutes or so he would walk again as though he was walkin' for wages."

Mrs. Ferris, who had a maternal regard for his welfare, was always careful to see that a pitcher of milk was in his room before the night's labors commenced; for Roosevelt had a way of working into the small hours. "The eight-hour law," he remarked to Lodge, "does not apply to cowboys"; nor, he might have added, to writers endeavoring to raise the wherewithal to pay for a hunting trip to the Cœur d'Alênes in the autumn.

I wonder if your friendship will stand a very serious strain [he wrote Lodge, early in June]. I have pretty nearly finished Benton, mainly evolving him from my inner consciousness; but when he leaves the Senate in 1850 I have nothing whatever to go by; and, being by nature both a timid, and, on occasions, by choice a truthful, man, I would prefer to have some foundation of fact, no matter how slender, on which to build the airy and arabesque superstructure of my fancy—especially as I am writing a history. Now I hesitate to give him a wholly fictitious date of death and to invent all of the work of his later years. Would it be too infernal a nuisance for you to hire some of your minions on the Advertiser (of course, at my expense) to look up, in a biographical dictionary or elsewhere, his life after he left the Senate in 1850? He was elected once to Congress; who beat him when he ran the second time; what was the issue; who beat him, and why, when he ran for Governor of Missouri; and the date of his death? I hate to trouble you; don't do it if it is any bother; but the Bad Lands have much fewer books than Boston has.