Roosevelt reached Medora with Sewall and Dow on July 31st. A reporter of the Pioneer interviewed him while the train was changing engines at Mandan.
Theodore Roosevelt, the New York reformer, was on the west-bound train yesterday, en route to his ranch near Little Missouri [ran the item in the next day's issue]. He was feeling at his best, dressed in the careless style of the country gentleman of leisure, and spoke freely on his pleasant Dakota experience and politics in the East. He purposes spending several weeks on his ranch, after which he will return East.... Mr. Roosevelt believes that the young men of our country should assume a spirit of independence in politics. He would rather be forced to the shades of private life with a short and honorable career than be given a life tenure of political prominence as the slave of a party or its masters.
Roosevelt brought his two backwoodsmen straight to the Maltese Cross. The men from Maine were magnificent specimens of manhood. Sewall, nearing forty, with tremendous shoulders a little stooped as though he were accustomed to passing through doorways that were too low for him; Dow, twenty-eight or twenty-nine, erect and clear-eyed. They looked on the fantastic landscape with quiet wonderment.
"Well, Bill," remarked Roosevelt that night, "what do you think of the country?"
"Why," answered the backwoodsman, "I like the country well enough. But I don't believe that it's much of a cattle country."
"Bill," said Roosevelt vigorously, "you don't know anything about it. Everybody says that it is."
Sewall laughed softly. "It's a fact that I don't know anything about it," he said. "I realize that. But it's the way it looks to me, like not much of a cattle country."
During Roosevelt's absence in the East, Merrifield and Sylvane had returned from Iowa with a thousand head of yearlings and "two-year-olds." A hundred head of the original herd, which had become accustomed to the country, he had already set apart for the lower ranch, and the day after his arrival he sent the two backwoodsmen north with them, under the general and vociferous direction of a certain Captain Robins. The next day, in company with a pleasant Englishman who had accompanied him West, he rode up the river to Lang's.
The ranch of the talkative Scotchman had suffered a joyous change since Roosevelt's last visit. A week or two previous Gregor Lang's wife had arrived from Ireland with her daughter and younger son, and a visit at Yule, as Lang had called his ranch, was a different thing from what it had been when it had been under masculine control. The new ranch-house was completed, and though it was not large it was vastly more homelike than any other cabin on the river with the possible exception of the Eatons'. It stood in an open flat, facing north, with a long butte behind it; and before it, beyond a wide semi-circle of cottonwoods that marked the river's course, low hills, now gray and now green, stretching away to the horizon. It was a curiously Scotch landscape, especially at dusk or in misty weather, which was no doubt a reason why Gregor Lang had chosen it for his home.
Mrs. Lang proved to be a woman of evident character and ability. She was well along in the forties, but in her stately bearing and the magnificent abundance of her golden hair, that had no strand of gray in it, lay more than a hint of the beauty that was said to have been hers in her youth. There was wistfulness in the delicate but firm mouth and chin; there was vigor in the broad forehead and the well-proportioned nose; and humor in the shrewd, quiet eyes set far apart. She belonged to an old Border family, and had lived all her life amid the almost perfect adjustments of well-to-do British society of the middle class, where every cog was greased and every wheel was ball-bearing. But she accepted the grating existence of the frontier with something better than resignation, and set about promptly in a wild and alien country to make a new house into a new home.