Roosevelt in the Bad Lands

by Hermann Hagedorn

He found the cabin at last, but it was empty and chill. He lit a fire and hunted about among the stores of the old seafaring man for something of which to make supper. The place was stripped bare. He went down to the river with an axe and a pail and brought up some water; in his pocket he had a paper of tea. It was not an altogether satisfying supper for a tired and hungry man.

He was out with his rifle at break of day. Outside the hut the prairie fowl were crowing and calling to one another in the tall trees, evidently attracted by the thick growth of choke-cherries and wild plums. As the dawn deepened, the sharp-tails began to fly down from their roosts to the berry bushes. Up among the bare limbs of the trees, sharply outlined against the sky, they offered as good a target as any hungry man might ask. He shot off the necks of five in succession, and it was not long before two of the birds, plucked and cleaned, were split open and roasting before the fire.

He found that Sewall and Dow had cut all the timber for the house, and were beginning work on the walls. It was a roomy place they were building, a palace as houses went in the Bad Lands. Roosevelt worked with them for two days. Both men were excellent company, Dow a delightful spinner of yarns, witty and imaginative, Sewall full of horse sense and quiet philosophizing. Roosevelt himself was much depressed. His virtual elimination from politics, together with the tragic breaking-up of his home life, had left him for the moment aimless and without ambition. There is a wistful note in a letter he wrote, that week to Lodge. "The statesman (?) of the past has been merged, alas, I fear for good, in the cowboy of the present." He was not in the habit of talking of himself or of asking others to share his negations; but there was something avuncular about Sewall that impelled confidences. He told the backwoodsman that he did not care what became of himself; he had nothing to live for, he said. Sewall "went for him bow-legged," as he himself described it in later years.

"You ought not to allow yourself to feel that way," he insisted. "You have your child to live for."

"Her aunt can take care of her a good deal better than I can," Roosevelt responded. "She never would know anything about me, anyway. She would be just as well off without me."

"You won't always feel that way," said Sewall. "You will get over this after a while. I know how such things are; but time heals them over. You won't always feel as you do now, and you won't always be willing to stay here and drive cattle, because, when you get to feeling differently, you will want to get back among your friends where you can do more and be more benefit to the world than you can driving cattle. If you can't think of anything else to do, you can go home and start a reform. You would make a good reformer. You always want to make things better instead of worse."

Roosevelt laughed at that, and said no more concerning the uselessness of his existence. An amusing angle of the whole matter was that "starting a reform" was actually in the back of his head at the time.

The reform in question was fundamental. It concerned the creation of an organization, ostensibly, in the absence of constituted government, for the purpose of making and enforcing certain sorely needed laws for the regulation of the cattle industry; but actually with the higher aim in view of furnishing a rallying point for the scattered forces of law and order. Montana had such an organization in the Montana Live Stock Association and more than one ranchman with large interests in the valley of the Little Missouri had appealed to that body for help. But the Montana Association found that it had no authority in Dakota. Roosevelt determined, therefore, to form a separate organization.

The need unquestionably was great. To an unusual extent the cattle industry depended upon coöperation. Each ranchman "claimed" a certain range, but no mark showed the boundaries of that range and no fence held the cattle and horses within it. On every "claim" the brands of twenty different herds might have been found. No ranchman by himself, or with the aid only of his own employees, would ever have been able to collect his widely scattered property. It was only by the coöperative effort known as "the round-up" that it was possible once or twice a year for every man to gather his own. The very persistence of the range as a feeding-ground and the vitality and very life of the cattle depended upon the honest coöperation of the stock-owners. If one man over-stocked his range, it was not only his cattle which suffered, but in an equal measure the cattle of every other ranchman along the river.

Regulating this industry, which depended so largely on a self-interest looking beyond the immediate gain, was a body of tradition brought from the cattle ranges of the South, but no code of regulations. There were certain unwritten laws which you were supposed to obey; but if you were personally formidable and your "outfit" was impressive, there was nothing in heaven or earth to force you to obey them. It was comparatively simple, moreover, to conduct a private round-up and ship to Chicago cattle whose brands were not your own. If ever an industry needed "regulation" for the benefit of the honest men engaged in it, it was the cattle industry in Dakota in 1884.