Roosevelt spent the coldest months in New York, working steadily on his new book which was to be called "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman." On the 8th of March he wrote Lodge, "I have just sent my last roll of manuscript to the printers"; adding, "in a fortnight I shall go out West." But he postponed his departure, held possibly by the lure of the hunting-field; for on the 29th he rode with the Meadowbrook hounds and was "in at the death." It was presumably in the first days of April that he arrived at Medora. If tradition may be trusted, he came in all the glory of what were known as "store clothes." The Pittsburgh Despatch, which sent out a reporter to the train to interview him as he passed through that city, westward-bound, refers to "the high expanse of white linen which enclosed his neck to the ears," which sounds like a slight exaggeration. Tradition does insist, however, that he wore a derby hat when he arrived, which was considered highly venturesome. Derby hats as a rule were knocked off on sight and then bombarded with six-shooters beyond recognition. Roosevelt informed his fellow citizens early in his career as a cowpuncher that he intended to wear any hat he pleased. Evidently it was deemed expedient to suspend the rule in his case, for he was not molested.
After a brief sojourn at the Maltese Cross, Roosevelt made his way north to Elkhorn Ranch. The house was nearing completion. It was a one-story log structure, with a covered porch on the side facing the river; a spacious house of many rooms divided by a corridor running straight through from north to south. Roosevelt's bedroom, on the southeast corner, adjoined a large room containing a fireplace, which was to be Roosevelt's study by day and the general living-room by night. The fireplace, which had been built by an itinerant Swedish mason whom Sewall looked upon with disapproval as a dollar-chaser, had been designed under the influence of a Dakota winter and was enormous. Will Dow, who was somewhat of a blacksmith, had made a pair of andirons out of a steel rail, which he had discovered floating down the river loosely attached to a beam of yellow pine.[10]
The cattle, Roosevelt found, were looking well. "Bill," he said to Sewall, remembering the backwoodsman's pessimism, "you were mistaken about those cows. Cows and calves are all looking fine."
But Sewall was not to be convinced. "You wait until next spring," he answered, "and see how they look."
Roosevelt was himself physically in rather bad shape, suffering from that affliction which has, by common consent, been deemed of all of Job's troubles the one hardest to bear with equanimity. Douglas Robinson wrote Sewall telling him that Theodore's sisters were worried about him and asking him for news of Roosevelt's health. Roosevelt heard of the request and was indignant, "flaring up," as Sewall described it.
"They had no business to write to you," he exclaimed. "They should have written to me."
"I guess," remarked Sewall quietly, "they knew you wouldn't write about how you were getting on. You'd just say you were all right."
Roosevelt fumed and said no more about it. But the crisp air of the Bad Lands gradually put all questions of his health out of mind. All day long he lived in the open. He was not an enthusiast over the hammer or the axe, and, while Sewall and Dow were completing the house and building the corrals and the stables a hundred yards or more westward, he renewed his acquaintance with the bizarre but fascinating country. The horses which the men from Maine had missed the previous autumn, and which Roosevelt had feared had been stolen, had been reported "running wild" forty or fifty miles to the west. Sewall and Dow had made one or two trips after them without success, for the animals had come to enjoy their liberty and proved elusive. Roosevelt determined to find them and bring them back. He went on three solitary expeditions, but they proved barren of result. Incidentally, however, they furnished him experiences which were worth many horses.
On one of these expeditions night overtook him not far from Mingusville. That hot little community, under the inspiration of a Frenchman named Pierre Wibaux, was rapidly becoming an important cattle center. As a shipping point it had, by the close of 1884, already attained notable proportions on the freight records of the Northern Pacific. Medora, in all its glory, could not compete with it, for the cattle trails through the Bad Lands were difficult, and space was lacking on the small bottoms near the railroad to hold herds of any size preparatory to shipping. About Mingusville all creation stretched undulating to the hazy horizon. The great southern cattle companies which had recently established themselves on the northern range, Simpson's "Hash-Knife" brand, Towers and Gudgell's O. X. Ranch, and the Berry, Boyce Company's "Three-Seven outfit," all drove their cattle along the Beaver to Mingusville, and even Merrifield and Sylvane preferred shipping their stock from there to driving it to the more accessible, but also more congested, yards at Medora.
Civilization had not kept pace with commerce in the development of the prairie "town." It was a lurid little place. Medora, in comparison to it, might have appeared almost sober and New-Englandish. It had no "steady" residents save a half-dozen railroad employees, the landlord of the terrible hotel south of the tracks, where Roosevelt had had his encounter with the drunken bully, and a certain Mrs. Nolan and her daughters, who kept an eminently respectable boarding-house on the opposite side of the railroad; but its "floating population" was large. Every herd driven into the shipping-yards from one of the great ranches in the upper Little Missouri country brought with it a dozen or more parched cowboys hungering and thirsting for excitement as no saint ever hungered and thirsted for righteousness; and celebrations had a way of lasting for days. The men were Texans, most of them, extraordinary riders, born to the saddle, but reckless, given to heavy drinking, and utterly wild and irresponsible when drunk. It was their particular delight to make life hideous for the station agent and the telegraph operator. For some weeks Mingusville, it was said, had a new telegraph operator every night. About ten o'clock the cowboys, celebrating at the "hotel," would drift over to the board shack which was the railroad station, and "shoot it full of holes." They had no particular reason for doing this; they had no grudge against either the railroad or the particular operator who happened to be in charge. They were children, and it was fun to hear the bullets pop, and excruciating fun to see the operator run out of the shack with a yell and go scampering off into the darkness. One operator entered into negotiations with the enemy. Recognizing their perfect right to shoot up the station if they wanted to, he merely stipulated that they allow him to send off the night's dispatches before they began. This request seemed to the cowboys altogether reasonable. They waited until the operator said that his work was done. Then, as he faded away in the darkness, the night's bombardment began.