The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (26 page)

Although the distinctive landscape made the Badlands difficult to travel through—that was why French trappers had originally applied the designation “bad”—there were two reasons it was prime cattle country: an abundance of nourishing stem-cured grasses, and the buttes themselves, which offered heifers decent shelter during winter storms. Owing in part to Brisbin’s book (its subtitle was
How to Get Rich on the Plains
), cowboys and others who believed that beef was the new cash cow stampeded to the area. “Montana has undoubtedly the best grazing-grounds in America,” Brisbin wrote, “and the parts of Dakota stand next.”
²³

Theodore Roosevelt himself had been caught up in this cowboy uproar. Even before he read Brisbin or set foot in the Badlands, he gambled on the cattle business. Along with a Harvard classmate, Richard Trimble, he had ponied up $10,000 to be part owner of a ranch north of Cheyenne, Wyoming, called the Teschmaker and Debillion Cattle Company.
²⁴
Many Wyoming ranchers of the early 1880s preferred the label “drover” to “ranching cowboy” (a term that originated in Ireland around AD 1000), but Roosevelt preferred the latter. Somewhat naively he predicted that the spools of barbed wire would never overtake Wyoming as it had overtaken Texas. His romantic vision of himself was quite specific: a hunting cowboy on the open range. Quite correctly Roosevelt understood that cowboy culture was based on three principles: mobility, custom, and survival of the fittest. As a side project he hoped to document cowboy life for magazines such as
Scribner’s
and
Collier’s
. “It was a frontier institution,” the historian David Dary noted of the first generation of cowboys, “and it died when the frontier died.”
²⁵

By 1883, Texan grangers—merchants of fresh beef for military forts, Indian agencies, immigrant communities, and mining outfits—had discovered that longhorns loved the northern range grasses and could survive the blue winters.
²⁶
That year saw the first great Texan cattle drive to the Little Missouri; and as cowboys swarmed up north, the great Western Trail that went from Bandera through Dodge City to Ogallala was bringing cowboys from Texas to the Dakota Territory in search of open-range opportunities. Down in Pecos, Texas, the world’s first rodeo had been held (although in 1989 the
New York Times
noted that two Arizona communities—Prescott and Payson—also claimed bragging rights in
this regard.)
²⁷
In Omaha, Nebraska, an Iowa showman, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, premiered his first Wild West Show; the rage for cowboys and Indians was at full throttle. Meanwhile, the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad provided owners of livestock in the Dakota Territory relatively easy market access to both coasts. It gave outdoors enthusiasts like Roosevelt the opportunity for a quick western trip between boring sessions of the New York state legislature filled with mundane sheaves of legalese, bills, and charts.

As he recuperated from the summer bouts of asthma and cholera, Roosevelt kept focused on the buffalo trophy he wanted for his library wall. He set his sights on shooting an older buffalo, one past its prime. Too old and exhausted from the commotion of rutting to stay in the herd and unable to court cows anymore, these bulls, known as lonesome Georges, straggled hundreds of yards from the rest of the herd, providing an easier target. The sullen, sick lonesome Georges might symbolize a vanishing West, but Roosevelt would be ecstatic to find any. Their mature heads made ideal trophies.

After an initial hike around Little Missouri to get his bearings, impressed by the solemnity of it all, Roosevelt hired Joe Ferris as his Badlands guide. It was said that if anybody could track down a lonesome George it was Ferris, a Canadian (a New Brunswickian, to be exact) who had moved to the region just a year earlier. There were still, in fact, Acadian inflections in his speech. Virtually everybody said that this onetime lumberjack was a self-starter but never arrogant, an individual who always kept his wits about him—and also, most importantly, a puritan of sorts with Spartan instincts, who never bragged. Still, as Louis L’Amour once wrote of a character, if you stepped on one of Joe Ferris’s toes, the other nine would light out after you.

Ferris told Roosevelt that finding either a nimble or a dying buffalo was unlikely. The days when George Catlin could recline in a canvas chair and paint great buffalo hunts were over. From the Osage Hills of Oklahoma to the Flint Hills of Kansas all the way north to the billowing grasslands along the Canadian border, a buffalo was hard to find. Earlier that summer the U.S. government had hired a band of Sioux to slaughter around 5,000 buffalo along the Northern Pacific line, so that the grazing beasts would not cause a train wreck. If you followed the tracks across the Badlands in 1883, in fact, you would have found the bleached bones of buffalo scattered and piled high in mounds. Then, as a follow-up to the “golden spike” ceremony in Montana, the federal government—specifically James McLaughlin, superintendent of the Standing Rock
Indian Agency—again dispatched the Sioux (Lakota) tribe to butcher an additional 10,000 bison. A barbarous bloodbath took place on the Great Plains, and back east the newspapers cheered. “Again, the slaughter was carried out with full federal approval,” the historian Edmund Morris later observed, offering an additional reason for the extermination of the buffalo. “Washington knew that plains bare of buffalo would soon be bare of Indians too.”
²⁸

Another pernicious enemy of the buffalo was the telegraph companies. Because buffalo were constantly being attacked by flies—black, snipe, and horse—their backs constantly itched. Regularly, buffalo looked for trees to lean into and scratch against, rubbing so hard that they frequently knocked the trees over. After the Civil War, as telegraph lines were strung across the continent, the buffalo took to the poles as scratch posts, causing them to topple. One telegraph company wizard decided that fastening bradawls to the poles might solve the problem, but the opposite happened.
²⁹
“For the first time [buffalo] came to scratch sure of a sensation in their thick hides that thrilled them from horn to tail,” the
Kansas Daily Commercial
lamented. “They would go fifteen miles to find a bradawl. They fought huge battles around the poles containing them, and the victor would proudly climb the mountainous heap of rump and hump of the fallen, and scratch himself into bliss until the bradawl broke or the pole came down.” With the failure of the bradawl strategy, the telegraph industry also started slaughtering the animals.
³⁰

Even though Ferris was reluctant to take Roosevelt buffalo hunting, the rich New Yorker’s money was enticing. Eyeing Roosevelt with suspicion, Ferris reluctantly agreed to be his guide. He later mocked the chore as “trundling a tenderfoot.”
³¹

The first service Ferris rendered Roosevelt was to borrow a proper buffalo hunting gun from crotchety old Eldridge Paddock, a local trapper who also dabbled in real estate. Then the pair saddled up and headed seven miles south in a buckboard to the Maltese Cross Ranch (often referred to as the Chimney Butte Ranch), where they planned on meeting up with two other Canadians, William Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris (Joe’s brother). For the first time, Roosevelt saw black-tailed prairie dog towns like those Washington Irving had written about in
A Tour on the Prairies
(1835). These burrowing, yellowish-tan ground squirrels were racing about from hole to hole each yip-yip-yipping the “all-clear” sign to others in the colony, popping in and out of multichambered burrows.
³²

Nothing had prepared Roosevelt for the awesome rugged reaches of the Badlands that he encountered on his horse ride with Ferris in the
noontime September heat.
³³
With delighted murmurs of awe, Roosevelt was essentially following the so-called Custer’s Trail he had read about back in New York. The geography was forbiddingly different, a memorial to stark erosion and sculptured sandstone. There was a prehistoric quality to the outcroppings and battlements, and fierce wind had shaped clay in a helter-skelter fashion unique in the world. (The closest geological counterparts to the Badlands were the arroyos of the Gobi and Namib deserts.
³⁴
) General Alfred Sully, an old Indian fighter, had famously called the arid Badlands “hell with the fires out.” The Sioux—like the French—called the terrain Mako Shika (“land bad”). Writing in an 1876 edition of the esteemed journal
The American Naturalist
, to which Theodore Roosevelt subscribed, J. A. Allen described the area as a “boundless expanse” that reminded him of a “fierce sea.”
³⁵

More than any other landscape that Roosevelt would ever encounter, the Badlands had an inspiring resilience that swept him away into an almost spiritual state of appreciation. To him the desolate stretch of ridges and bluffs seemed “hardly proper to belong to this earth.”
³⁶
The towering buttes and scarred escarpments told geological stories of the prehistoric upheavals, the deposits, the erosion of forgotten times.
³⁷
There was, he said, a sacredness to the Badlands silhouette against the oceanic sky that exuded a cosmic sense of God’s Creation as described in Genesis. A cowboy could disappear into the Badlands and never be heard from again. Everything to Roosevelt, in fact, seemed magically contorted. Famously, he joked that the Badlands reminded him of the way Edgar Allan Poe wrote tales and poems.
³⁸
These buff buttes and towering sandstone pinnacles seemed to change shades by the hour, from heliotrope red to horizon blue to nickel gray to a blaze of different oranges. Everywhere bands of brownish yellow formed by shale exposed heavily cut Badlands ravines. “In coloring they are as bizarre as in form,” Roosevelt would write. “Among the level, parallel strata which make up the land are some of coal. When a coal vein gets on fire it makes what is called a burning mine, and the clay above it is turned into brick; so that where water wears away the side of a hill sharp streaks of black and red are seen across it, mingled with the grays, purples, and browns.”
³⁹

When Roosevelt and Ferris finally arrived at the Maltese Cross Ranch, they were met with reserve. Roosevelt wore spectacles; he spoke in a falsetto voice, which to the uninitiated could be as irritating as a whistle; and his talk was peppered with “by Joves” and “my boys,” dead giveaways that he was an aristocratic swell who never before had been west of the Yellowstone divide. “When I went among strangers I always had to spend
twenty-four hours in living down the fact that I wore spectacles,” Roosevelt recalled, “remaining as long as I could judiciously deaf to any side remarks about ‘four eyes’ unless it became evident that my being quiet was misconstrued and that it was better to bring matters to a head at once.”
⁴⁰

Day after day fanciful hunters like Roosevelt came to kill game in the Dakotas, and enthusiastic comparisons were made to the bush country of British East Africa, where everything was wild. As advertised, wild-life truly did prolifically flourish in the Badlands region. Tree-rich bottomlands, for example, created an ideal habitat for browser animals of all shapes and sizes. Hunters often marveled at the swelling, verdureless red surface extending as far as the eye could see. But then autumn ended and the hunters fled, and the long winter of the Badlands, routinely colder than the bluest days in Maine, hammered down with a numbing thud and all locals were left to eat venison jerky, stay warm, and wait for the springtime thaw.

Although both Ferris and Merrifield—Roosevelt’s ranching partners—were cordial, they were clearly lukewarm about hunting down a tired old buffalo with an aristocratic swell. The two of them wore identical expressions, which read, “Not likely.” In any event, they were busy raising 150 cattle, hoping for a big payday when heifers were sold.

Luckily for Roosevelt, shortly after their arrival at the Maltese Cross Ranch, a hungry bobcat (weighing approximately twenty-five pounds) got loose in the chicken coop, creating havoc and sending feathers flying. All four men raced out of the ranch cabin—an edifice of a story and a half with a high-pitched shingled roof—to ambush the agile predator. The bobcat got away, but the attendant laughing and cursing broke the ice. The initially cold attitude toward Roosevelt dissipated in favor of cowboy camaraderie.
⁴¹
Still, only when Roosevelt offered to pay did Sylvane and Merrifield grudgingly lend him a mare for his buffalo quest.

Although lonesome Georges were more easily hunted than other Great Plains game like antelope or white-tailed deer, the chase still presented a serious challenge. Far from being a “tame amusement,”
⁴²
as Roosevelt put it, a buffalo could turn mean and with a belching snort charge like a mad bull in an unexpected flash. The novelist Thomas Berger accurately noted the inherent danger when he wrote in
Little Big Man
that “buffalo run a mile in one minute and will stampede on a change of wind.”
⁴³
Roosevelt, in his conservation-tinged hunting essays, was somewhat defensive about his compulsion for shooting an endangered species. “It is genuine sport,” he insisted; “it needs skill, marksmanship, and hardihood in the man who follows it, and if he hunts on horseback, it needs also
pluck and good riding. It is in no way akin to various forms of so-called sport in vogue in parts of the East, such as killing deer in a lake or by fire hunting, or even by watching at a runaway.”
⁴⁴

III

Roosevelt took a real shine to William Merrifield, later writing in his diary that Merrifield was “a good-looking fellow who shoots and rides beautifully, a reckless, self-confident man.”
⁴⁵
The evening of the bobcat’s attack, Roosevelt slept on the hard clay floor at the one-room Maltese Cross Ranch cabin, insisting on high-minded principle that he’d never stoop so low as to take another man’s bed. Perhaps he wanted to replicate that evening of the buffalo robe three Septembers earlier in the Red River valley. At any rate the gesture was keenly noted by Joe Ferris and Bill Merrifield. Rising at dawn, Roosevelt saddled up his horse (named “Nell” after his brother Elliott), grasped the reins, and trotted south to hunt his buffalo trophy. Jouncing beside him was Joe Ferris, whose horse pulled a wagon full of outback supplies.