Roosevelt in the Bad Lands Part 29

The reason, of course, was that the missionaries were fundamentally less honest and virtuous than the gay-hearted argonauts to whom they attempted to bring the gospel; and their patient listeners, who had no illusions concerning their own piety, nevertheless knew it. The preachers, moreover, were less than human. They preached interminable sermons. Discourses lasting an hour and a half were common, and even lengthier ones were not unusual. The parsons were hopelessly thick-skinned, moreover, and impervious to hints. When on one occasion, at which Sylvane was present, the congregation began to consult their watches, the preacher, instead of bringing his sermon to a close, exclaimed, "See here, you don't want to be lookin' at your watches. You don't hear a sermon often."

One missionary, the representative of a certain Home Mission Society, came to Packard, saying that he wanted to start a church in Medora, and asking Packard for his moral support. Packard agreed that a church might be useful and secured the baggage-room at the "depot" for an auditorium. The man held his first services, preaching an hour and a half.

"See here," said Packard when the performance was over, "this won't do. You preach altogether too long."

"Well," asked the preacher, "how long shall it be?"

"Your whole service oughtn't to be longer than your sermon was."

The missionary it appeared, was eager to please. The following Sunday he preached three quarters of an hour.

But Packard was still dissatisfied. "Cut it to fifteen minutes," he insisted. "You can say all you have to say in that time."

The third Sunday the missionary did not appear. He had found it necessary to make a swift exit from his domicile, departing by one door as a sheriff entered by another. He had, it seems, knocked in the head of one of his paris.h.i.+oners with a hatchet.

Experiences of this sort were not calculated to inspire respect for the clergy in the minds of the cowpunchers.

"Them preachers," Sylvane subsequently remarked, "broke us fellows from going to church."

But though religion did not flourish in the alkaline soil of the Bad Lands, the fundamental American principle of orderly government, based on the consent of the governed, slowly and with many setbacks took root. The town of Medora itself began to sober down. Joe Ferris was a rock of defense for law and order. In disputes, instead of clutching at the six-shooter, men began to turn to Joe as an arbitrator, knowing that he was honest and fair and had a sense of humor. Packard, moreover, had established himself firmly in the respect and affection of his neighbors, and his reiterations, week after week and month after month, of certain notions of order and decency, gradually began to have their effect. The _Cowboy_ became the dominant factor in Medora's struggle toward maturity.

From out of the blue ether and the whimsical generosity of Fate, meanwhile, had come an a.s.sistant for Packard who gave new zest to his adventure. His name was Johnny O'Hara, and Packard always insisted that he came as a gift from the G.o.ds.

"In all literature there was only one like him," said Packard in after days, "and that was Kim. And Kim's name was O'Hara. As chela to Teshoo Lama, Kim acquired merit. As devil in the _Bad Lands Cowboy_ office, Johnny acquired a place in my estimation only to be described in the beat.i.tudes of an inspired writer. Kim went out with his begging-bowl and he and his Lama feasted bounteously. Johnny boarded pa.s.senger trains with an armful of the _Cowboy_ and returned with enough money to pay current expenses. Kim played the great game with Strickland Sahib and attained rupees sufficient for a ride on the tee-rain.

Johnny took the remains of a bunch of bananas I had ordered by express from St. Paul and sold them for enough to pay for the first and even a second one. Two banana feasts for nothing, plus a profit! Kim came from the top of Zam-Zanneh to his chelas.h.i.+p with Teshoo Lama. Johnny came from the top of Mount Olympus or the biggest b.u.t.te in the Bad Lands to become my right hand. Blessed be the name of O'Hara, be it Kim or Johnny."

They worked together, with Joe Ferris and Sylvane and Merrifield and Gregor Lang and Howard Eaton, the solid citizens, and Roosevelt, the aggressive champion of order, to establish America in a patch of sagebrush wilderness.

XX

Bill's head was full o' fire An' his gizzard full o' rum, An' the things he said wuz rich an' red An' rattled as they come.

Dave wuz on his stummick, Readin' the news at his ease-like, When Bill comes, brave, sayin' what he'll do to Dave In words what could walk away, cheese-like.

Ol' Bill's fist wuz man-size Sure as any alive-- But Dave, never squintin', turns over the printin'

An' there wuz his Forty-five.

Bill he chokes an' swallers, But Dave he's gentle an' mild, An' they talks together o' cows an' the weather, An' allows they is re-con-ciled.

From _Medora Nights_

Where, meanwhile, was the Marquis de Mores?

A casual observer, during the spring of 1885, might have remarked that physically he was never long at any one place; but that metaphorically he was on the crest of the wave. The erection of the great abattoir, which had replaced the more primitive structure built in 1883, gave an impression of great prosperity. Actually, however, it was a symptom of failure. It had, in fact, been erected only because of the irremediable inefficiency of the original smaller structure. By the end of 1884 the Marquis had discovered that the slaughtering of twenty-five head of cattle a day could not, by the most painstaking application of "business methods," be made profitable. It took more than butchers, the Marquis found, to operate a slaughter-house. An engine was needed and an engineer, a foreman, a bookkeeper, a hide-man, a tallow-man, a blood-man, a cooper, and a night-watchman.

These men could easily take care of three or four hundred head a day, and they were required to take care only of twenty-five.

The Marquis was not without executive ability. He had, since the preceding autumn, sought competent advisers, moreover, and followed their suggestions. Among other things, these advisers had told him that, owing to the unusual quality of the stem-cured gra.s.s in the Bad Lands, beef fit for market could be slaughtered as early as the first of June when beef commanded a high price.

Accordingly, on June 1st the new abattoir was opened. Every precaution against waste had, it seemed, been taken, and for fear lest the branch houses in Kansas City, Bismarck, and elsewhere should be unable to absorb the output of the slaughter-house and interrupt its steady operation, the Marquis secured a building on West Jackson Street, Chicago, where the wholesale dealers in dressed beef had their stalls, with the purpose of there disposing of his surplus.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Hotel de Mores.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The abattoir of the Marquis de Mores.]

A hundred head of cattle were slaughtered daily at the new abattoir.

At last the plant was efficient. The Marquis had a right to congratulate himself. But unexpectedly a fresh obstacle to success obtruded itself. The experts had been wrong; the beef proved of poor quality. The branch houses disposed of it with difficulty, and the retail dealers in Chicago refused to buy. Although dressed beef was produced there in enormous quant.i.ties for Eastern markets, the local consumer had a prejudice against cold-storage meat. He did not like gra.s.s-fed beef, moreover. It was as good or better than corn-fed beef, but he was not accustomed to it, and would not change his habits even at a saving.

It was a staggering blow, but the Marquis was a fighting man and he took it without wincing. Packard, discussing the situation with him one day, pointed out to him that the cattle could not possibly be stall-fed before they were slaughtered as no cattle feed was raised short of the corn country, hundreds of miles to the south.

The Marquis was not noticeably perturbed by this recital of an obvious fact. "I am arranging to buy up the hop crop of the Pacific coast," he answered calmly. "This I will sell to the Milwaukee and St. Louis brewers on an agreement that they shall return to me all the resultant malt after their beer is made. This I will bring to Medora in tank cars. It is the most concentrated and fattening food to be bought. I will cover the town site south of the track with individual feeding-pens; thousands of them. Not only can I hold fat cattle as long as I wish, but I will feed cattle all the year round and always have enough to keep the abattoir running."

There was something gorgeous in the Marquis's inability to know when he was beaten. His power of self-hypnotism was in fact, amazing, and the persistence with which he pursued new bubbles, in his efforts to escape from the devils which the old ones had hatched as they burst, had its attractive side.

"The Medora Stage and Forwarding Company," the d.i.c.kinson _Press_ announced on May 16th, "is a total wreck." It was; and shortly after, Van Driesche, most admirable of valets and now the Marquis's private secretary, went with "Johnny" Goodall, foreman of the Marquis's ranch, to Deadwood to salvage what they could from the rocks.

But two weeks later the Marquis had a new dream. The _Press_ announced it; "The Marquis de Mores believes he has discovered kaoline, a clay from which the finest pottery is made, near the town of Medora." The inference is clear. If Medora could not rival Chicago, it might easily rival Sevres or Copenhagen.

For all the Marquis's endeavors to outface fortune, however, and to win success somewhere, somehow, beyond this valley of a hundred failures, the Nemesis which every man creates out of his limitations was drawing her net slowly and irresistibly about him. He had no friends in Medora. His foreign ways and his alien att.i.tude of mind kept him, no doubt against his own desires, outside the warm circle of that very human society. He was an aristocrat, and he did not understand the democratic individualism of the men about him. "The Marquis," as one of his a.s.sociates later explained, "always had the idea of being the head of something or other, and tried to run everything he had anything to do with."

The Marquis loved the Bad Lands; there was no question about that. "I like this country," he said to J. W. Foley, who became his superintendent about this time, "because there is room to turn around without stepping on the feet of others." The trouble was, however, that with a man of the Marquis's qualities and limitations, the Desert of Sahara would scarcely have been wide enough and unsettled enough to keep him content with his own corner of it. He seemed fated to step on other people's toes, possibly because at bottom he did not greatly care if he did step on them when they got in the way.

"De Mores," said Lincoln Lang, "seemed to think that some sort of divine right reposed in him to absorb the entire Little Missouri country and everything in it."

He had king's blood in him, in fact, and the genealogy which he solemnly revealed to Foley reached into an antiquity staggeringly remote, and made Bourbons and Guelphs, Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs appear by comparison as very shoddy parvenus. He claimed descent on the maternal side from Caius Mucius, who, as Livy relates, crossed the Tiber to slay King Porsena and killed the King's secretary by mistake, a piece of business so similar to certain actions of the man who claimed him for an ancestor as to lend some color to the claim. De Mores was related more or less nearly to the Orleans family which had never renounced what it regarded as its t.i.tle to the throne of France; and he himself had his eye on a crown. Behind all his activities in the Bad Lands loomed a grandiose purpose. To one or two of his a.s.sociates he revealed it. He would make a great fortune in America, he declared, then return to France and, with the glitter of his dollars about him, gain control of the French army and by a _coup d'etat_ make himself King of France.

It was a gorgeous piece of day-dreaming; but its fulfillment was, in those middle eighties, not beyond the border of the possible.

As the only rival for leaders.h.i.+p in the Bad Lands of this aspirant for a throne stood, by one of Fate's queerest whimsies, a man who also had his eye on one of the high places of this world. The Marquis de Mores was the leader, or if not the leader at least the protector, of the forces of reaction; Theodore Roosevelt was the leader of the forces of progress. They were both in the middle twenties, both aristocrats by birth, both fearless and adventurous; but one believed in privilege and the other believed in equality of opportunity.

"When it came to a show-down, the Marquis was always there," said Dr.

Stickney, who watched the quiet struggle for supremacy with a philosophic eye, "but he had no judgment. You couldn't expect it. He was brought up in the army. He was brought up in social circles that didn't develop judgment. He didn't know how to mix with the cowboys.

When he did mix with any of them, it was always with the worst element. Now, when Roosevelt came to the Bad Lands he naturally attracted the better element among the cowboys, such men as the Ferrises and Merrifield, men of high character whose principles were good."

And Packard said: "Roosevelt was the embodiment of the belief of obedience to the law and the right of the majority to change it. The Marquis was equally honest in his belief that he himself was the law and that he had a divine right to change the law as he wished."

The conflict between the two forces in the community was quiet but persistent. Roosevelt dined on occasion with the Marquis and the Marquis dined on occasion with Roosevelt; they discussed horsemans.h.i.+p and hunting and books; at the meeting of the Montana Stockgrowers'

a.s.sociation at Miles City in April, that year, the Marquis proposed Roosevelt for members.h.i.+p; on the surface, in fact, they got along together most amicably. But under the surface fires were burning.

On one occasion, when Roosevelt and the Marquis were both in the East, Roosevelt sent a message to his sister "Bamie," with whom he was living, telling her that he had invited the Marquis and his wife to dinner that evening. The message that came back from "Bamie" was, in substance, as follows: "By all means bring them. But please let me know beforehand whether you and the Marquis are on friendly terms at the moment or are likely to spring at each other's throat."

"Theodore did not care for the Marquis," said "Bamie" in later years, "but he was sorry for his wife and was constantly helping the Marquis out of the sc.r.a.pes he was forever getting into with the other cattlemen."

There were many reasons why the relations between the two men should not have been noticeably cordial. Roosevelt had from the start thrown in his lot with the men who had been most emphatic in their denunciation of the Marquis's part in the killing of Riley Luffsey.

Gregor Lang, who was the Marquis's most caustic critic, was Roosevelt's warm friend. "Dutch Wannigan," moreover, who had been saved only by a miracle in the memorable ambuscade, was one of Roosevelt's cow-hands. That summer of 1885 he was night-herder for the Maltese Cross "outfit." He was a genial soul and Roosevelt liked him.

No doubt he was fascinated also by his remarkable memory, for "Wannigan," who was unable to read or write, could be sent to town with a verbal order for fifty items, and could be counted on not only to bring every article he had been sent for, but to give an exact accounting, item by item, of every penny he had spent. For the Marquis the presence of "Dutch Wannigan" in Roosevelt's "outfit" was, no doubt, convincing evidence of Roosevelt's own att.i.tude in regard to the memorable affray of June 26th, 1883. Whatever irritation he may have felt toward Roosevelt because of it could scarcely have been mollified by the fact that "Dutch Wannigan," in his quiet way, was moving heaven and earth to bring about the indictment of the Marquis for murder.