For several days we trailed forest fires. The whole state was so tindery that a lighted match might sweep it clear. Puffs of blue-white smoke blurred the sharp outlines of the mountains and the air was warm with an acrid, smoky haze. Sometimes we passed newly charred forests with little tongues of flame still leaping at their edges, and once we barely crossed before a smouldering fire swept down a hillside and crossed the road where we had been a moment earlier. The people we met were in a state of passive depression after the ruin of the wheat at this last blow to their bank accounts. Some blamed the I. W. W. for the fires, but most of them spoke of this possibility with the caution one pins a scandal to an ugly neighbor in a small town.
Montana’s cities were also at the mercy of the I. W. W. The usual strikes were agitating at Butte, and at the two leading hotels of Great Falls, both perfectly appointed, every waiter had gone on strike, and the cafeterias were doing a rushing business. The chambermaids followed suit next day. Yet we liked Great Falls, and the kindred cities of Montana, sharp-edged, clearly focussed little towns, brisk and new, frankly ashamed of their un-Rexalled past, and making plans to build a skyscraper a week—in the future.
Miles City and Roundup,—what visions of frontier life they conjured up! And how little they fulfilled these visions! The former used to be and still is the scene of great horse fairs and the center of horse-trading Montana, a fact brought home to us by the manifold horseshoe nails that punctured our tires in this district. But as we saw no chaparraled rough-riders swaggering in the streets of Round-up, so we saw no horses in Miles City. It may be that once or twice yearly these towns revert to old customs, and their streets glow with the color of former years, but otherwise they are more concerned with their future than their past, and are trying as fast as possible to wipe out all traits that distinguish them from every other thriving city.
Of this very section we drove through, back in the eighties Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “In its present form stock-raising on the plains is doomed and can hardly outlast the century. The great free ranches with their barbarous, picturesque and curiously fascinating surroundings, mark a primitive stage of existence as surely as do the great tracts of primeval forests, and like the latter must pass away before the onward march of our people; and we who have felt the charm of the life, and have exulted in its abounding vigor and its bold, restless freedom, will not only regret its passing for our own sakes, but must also feel real sorrow that those who come after us are not to see, as we have seen, what is perhaps the pleasantest, healthiest, and most exciting phase of American existence.”
We came into the town of Medora on the Little Missouri, after the hills had flattened out into the endless plains of North Dakota. On a cutbank dominating the river at its bend a great gloomy house frowns. Here the French Marquis de Mores once lived like a seigneur of the glorious Louis, in crude, patriarchal magnificence. Even in his lifetime he was a legend in this simple Dakotan village. But a greater legend centres in a large signboard opposite which tells that Roosevelt once ranched near by,—a matter of pride to all Medorans. Of this town in the eighties he wrote, “Medora has more than its full share of shooting and stabbing affrays, horse stealing and cattle-lifting. But the time for such things is passing away.”
As we read the sign, a lanky Dakotan hovered near, and volunteered much information in a sing-song voice which seemed characteristic of the locality. “Right here at this bend,” he said, “they’re talking about putting up one of these here equesterian statutes of Teddy, mounted on horseback.”
Being averse to stopping, we suggested that he ride to the village and tell us what he had to tell.
“Yes’m,” he continued swinging to the running board without ceasing to talk. “In this here town interesting things has happened. But as interesting as ever happened is coming off tomorrow, and if you was a writer of books,”—a hit in the dark on his part—“I could tell you something to write down. For there’s some of the richest men in this town, prominent men with good businesses,”—his voice took on an edge of strong feeling and I sensed something personal in his excitement,—“who has been found out to be part of a gang that has been stealing cattle wholesale, and shipping them to K. C. There’s a fat, fleshy, portly man that’s said to have stole 1200 head himself. And they’ve been getting rich on it for years, and would ’a kept on years more only one of the gang, an outsider, got caught, and is turning state’s evidence. There’ll be some excitement when they begin to make arrests. You’d better stay over, and see some doings aint been seen in a long time.”
But we could not stay,—the Drang nach Osten was too strong for us. And a half-finished story sometimes is more alluring than one with the edges nicely bound. Yet I should like to have heard the reason for the note of personal grievance that shook the lanky stranger’s voice when he spoke of the righteous vengeance about to fall on the cattle thieves.
We were not tempted to linger in North Dakota. No shade, no variety, no charm, nothing but wheat, wheat, wheat;—ruined crops left to bake in the glaring sun. Great grain elevators, community-owned, made the only vertical lines in the landscape. The rest was flat, and to us stale and unprofitable; colorless save for the faintly rainbow-tinted Bad Lands. What little individuality the state had was crude and dreary, reeking of Townleyism. With its wheat, its per capita wealth, and its beyond-the-minute legislation I have been told it is one of the most prosperous states of the Union. It may be. I know some people like South Dakota,—virtuous, prosperous, solid, yet with no shade trees, no bosky nooks, no charm. I leave their presence as quickly as we left Dakota to the companionship of its galvanized iron elevators. We sympathized with an old man who chatted with us when one of our frequent punctures halted us in a forsaken little hamlet. In fact, it was hardly a hamlet; it was more like a hamlet with the hamlet left out. We commented on the drought.