This town, situated in Pyramid Park on the banks of the Little Missouri River and surrounded by the Bad Lands with their fine scenery, is, at the present time, one of the most prosperous and rapidly growing towns along the line of the Northern Pacific. New buildings of every description are going up as fast as a large force of carpenters can do the work and an air of business and enterprise is apparent that would do honor to many an older town.
The "personals" that follow give a glimpse into the Little Missouri of which Roosevelt was a part during that third week of September, 1883.
NOTES
- Business booms.
- J. H. Butler is right on sight.
- [MCGeeney] and Walker are doing a good business.
- Geo. Fitzpatrick is doing a rushing business.
- J. B. Walker takes a good share of trade.
- Anderson's restaurant refreshes the inner man.
- Frank [Vine] rents the soldiers' quarters to tourists.
- [P. McGeeney] will have a fine hotel when it is completed.
- We found the Marquis de Mores a pleasant gentleman.
- Little Missouri will double her population before spring.
- The new depot will be soon completed and will be a good one.
It is worth remarking that Butler, McGeeney, Walker, Fitzpatrick, Anderson, and Frank Vine all conducted bars of one description or another. The "business" which is "booming" in the first line, therefore, seems to have been exclusively the business of selling and consuming liquor.
There is one further item in those "Notes":
L. D. Rumsey, of Buffalo, N.Y., recently returned from a hunting expedition with Frank O'Donald. Frank is a good hunter and thoroughly posted about the country.
For the bloodthirsty desperado, by whose unconscious aid Maunders had contrived to get the Marquis into his power, was back in the Bad Lands, earning his living by hunting as he had earned it before the fatal June 26th when the Marquis lost his head. There had been a "reconciliation." When O'Donald had returned to Little Missouri from his sojourn in the Mandan jail, he had been without money, and, as the Mandan Pioneer explained, "the Marquis helped him out by buying the hay on his ranch 'in stubble.'" He bought the hay, it was rumored, for the sum of one thousand dollars, which was high for hay which would not begin growing for another eight months. But the "reconciliation" was complete.
If Roosevelt met the Marquis during the week he spent in Little Missouri, that September, there is no record of that meeting. The Marquis was here, there, and everywhere, for the stately house he was building, on a grassy hill southward and across the river from his new "town," was not yet completed, and he was, moreover, never inclined to stay long on one spot, rushing to Miles City or St. Paul, to Helena or to Chicago, at a moment's notice, in pursuit of one or the other of his expensive dreams.
The Haupt brothers, it was said, were finding their senior partner somewhat of a care. He bought steers, and found, when he came to sell them as beef, that he had bought them at too high a price; he bought cows and found that the market would not take cow-meat at all. Thereupon (lest the cold facts which he had acquired concerning cattle should rob him of the luxury of spacious expectations) he bought five thousand dollars worth of broncos. He would raise horses, he declared, on an unprecedented scale.