Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
were monotonous days, as we guided the trail cattle or the beef herds,
hour after hour, at the slowest of walks; and minutes or hours teeming
with excitement as we stopped stampedes or swam the herds across rivers
treacherous with quicksands or brimmed with running ice. We knew toil
and hardship and hunger and thirst; and we saw men die violent deaths
as they worked among the horses and cattle, or fought in evil feuds with
one another; but we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins, and ours
was the glory of work and the joy of living.
It was right and necessary that this life should pass, for the safety of
our country lies in its being made the country of the small home-maker.
The great unfenced ranches, in the days of "free grass," necessarily
represented a temporary stage in our history. The large migratory flocks
of sheep, each guarded by the hired shepherds of absentee owners, were
the first enemies of the cattlemen; and owing to the way they ate out
the grass and destroyed all other vegetation, these roving sheep
bands represented little of permanent good to the country. But the
homesteaders, the permanent settlers, the men who took up each his own
farm on which he lived and brought up his family, these represented from
the National standpoint the most desirable of all possible users of,
and dwellers on, the soil. Their advent meant the breaking up of the big
ranches; and the change was a National gain, although to some of us an
individual loss.
I first reached the Little Missouri on a Northern Pacific train about
three in the morning of a cool September day in 1883. Aside from the
station, the only building was a ramshackle structure called the Pyramid
Park Hotel. I dragged my duffle-bag thither, and hammered at the door
until the frowsy proprietor appeared, muttering oaths. He ushered me
upstairs, where I was given one of the fourteen beds in the room which
by itself constituted the entire upper floor. Next day I walked over
to the abandoned army post, and, after some hours among the gray log
shacks, a ranchman who had driven into the station agreed to take me
out to his ranch, the Chimney Butte ranch, where he was living with his
brother and their partner.
The ranch was a log structure with a dirt roof, a corral for the horses
near by, and a chicken-house jabbed against the rear of the ranch house.
Inside there was only one room, with a table, three or four chairs, a
cooking-stove, and three bunks. The owners were Sylvane and Joe Ferris
and William J. Merrifield. Later all three of them held my commissions
while I was President. Merrifield was Marshal of Montana, and as
Presidential elector cast the vote of that State for me in 1904; Sylvane
Ferris was Land Officer in North Dakota, and Joe Ferris Postmaster at
Medora. There was a fourth man, George Meyer, who also worked for me
later. That evening we all played old sledge round the table, and at one
period the game was interrupted by a frightful squawking outside which
told us that a bobcat had made a raid on the chicken-house.
After a buffalo hunt with my original friend, Joe Ferris, I entered into
partnership with Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris, and we started a cow
ranch, with the maltese cross brand--always known as "maltee cross," by
the way, as the general impression along the Little Missouri was that
"maltese" must be a plural. Twenty-nine years later my four friends of
that night were delegates to the First Progressive National Convention
at Chicago. They were among my most constant companions for the few
years next succeeding the evening when the bobcat interrupted the game
of old sledge. I lived and worked with them on the ranch, and with them
and many others like them on the round-up; and I brought out from
Maine, in order to start the Elkhorn ranch lower down the river, my two
backwoods friends Sewall and Dow. My brands for the lower ranch were the
elkhorn and triangle.
I do not believe there ever was any life more attractive to a vigorous
young fellow than life on a cattle ranch in those days. It was a fine,
healthy life, too; it taught a man self-reliance, hardihood, and the
value of instant decision--in short, the virtues that ought to come
from life in the open country. I enjoyed the life to the full. After the
first year I built on the Elkhorn ranch a long, low ranch house of
hewn logs, with a veranda, and with, in addition to the other rooms, a
bedroom for myself, and a sitting-room with a big fire-place. I got out
a rocking-chair--I am very fond of rocking-chairs--and enough books to
fill two or three shelves, and a rubber bathtub so that I could get
a bath. And then I do not see how any one could have lived more
comfortably. We had buffalo robes and bearskins of our own killing. We
always kept the house clean--using the word in a rather large sense.
There were at least two rooms that were always warm, even in the
bitterest weather; and we had plenty to eat. Commonly the mainstay
of every meal was game of our own killing, usually antelope or deer,
sometimes grouse or ducks, and occasionally, in the earlier days,
buffalo or elk. We also had flour and bacon, sugar, salt, and canned
tomatoes. And later, when some of the men married and brought out their
wives, we had all kinds of good things, such as jams and jellies made
from the wild plums and the buffalo berries, and potatoes from the
forlorn little garden patch. Moreover, we had milk. Most ranchmen at
that time never had milk. I knew more than one ranch with ten thousand
head of cattle where there was not a cow that could be milked. We made
up our minds that we would be more enterprising. Accordingly, we started
to domesticate some of the cows. Our first effort was not successful,
chiefly because we did not devote the needed time and patience to the
matter. And we found that to race a cow two miles at full speed on
horseback, then rope her, throw her, and turn her upside down to milk
her, while exhilarating as a pastime, was not productive of results.
Gradually we accumulated tame cows, and, after we had thinned out the
bobcats and coyotes, more chickens.
The ranch house stood on the brink of a low bluff overlooking the broad,
shallow bed of the Little Missouri, through which at most seasons there
ran only a trickle of water, while in times of freshet it was filled
brimful with the boiling, foaming, muddy torrent. There was no neighbor
for ten or fifteen miles on either side of me. The river twisted down
in long curves between narrow bottoms bordered by sheer cliff walls,
for the Bad Lands, a chaos of peaks, plateaus, and ridges, rose abruptly
from the edges of the level, tree-clad, or grassy, alluvial meadows.
In front of the ranch-house veranda was a row of cottonwood trees with
gray-green leaves which quivered all day long if there was a breath of
air. From these trees came the far-away, melancholy cooing of mourning
doves, and little owls perched in them and called tremulously at night.
In the long summer afternoons we would sometimes sit on the piazza, when
there was no work to be done, for an hour or two at a time, watching the
cattle on the sand-bars, and the sharply channeled and strangely carved
amphitheater of cliffs across the bottom opposite; while the vultures
wheeled overhead, their black shadows gliding across the glaring white
of the dry river-bed. Sometimes from the ranch we saw deer, and once
when we needed meat I shot one across the river as I stood on the
piazza. In the winter, in the days of iron cold, when everything was
white under the snow, the river lay in its bed fixed and immovable as a
bar of bent steel, and then at night wolves and lynxes traveled up and
down it as if it had been a highway passing in front of the ranch house.
Often in the late fall or early winter, after a hard day's hunting, or
when returning from one of the winter line camps, we did not reach the
ranch until hours after sunset; and after the weary tramping in the
cold it was keen pleasure to catch the first red gleam of the fire-lit
windows across the snowy wastes.
The Elkhorn ranch house was built mainly by Sewall and Dow, who, like
most men from the Maine woods, were mighty with the ax. I could chop
fairly well for an amateur, but I could not do one-third the work they
could. One day when we were cutting down the cottonwood trees, to begin
our building operations, I heard some one ask Dow what the total cut had
been, and Dow not realizing that I was within hearing, answered: "Well,
Bill cut down fifty-three, I cut forty-nine, and the boss he beavered
down seventeen." Those who have seen the stump of a tree which has
been gnawed down by a beaver will understand the exact force of the
comparison.
In those days on a cow ranch the men were apt to be away on the various
round-ups at least half the time. It was interesting and exciting work,
and except for the lack of sleep on the spring and summer round-ups
it was not exhausting work; compared to lumbering or mining or
blacksmithing, to sit in the saddle is an easy form of labor. The ponies
were of course grass-fed and unshod. Each man had his own string of
nine or ten. One pony would be used for the morning work, one for the
afternoon, and neither would again be used for the next three days. A
separate pony was kept for night riding.
The spring and early summer round-ups were especially for the branding
of calves. There was much hard work and some risk on a round-up, but
also much fun. The meeting-place was appointed weeks beforehand, and all
the ranchmen of the territory to be covered by the round-up sent their
representatives. There were no fences in the West that I knew, and their
place was taken by the cowboy and the branding-iron. The cattle wandered
free. Each calf was branded with the brand of the cow it was following.
Sometimes in winter there was what we called line riding; that is, camps
were established and the line riders traveled a definite beat across the
desolate wastes of snow, to and fro from one camp to another, to prevent
the cattle from drifting. But as a rule nothing was done to keep the
cattle in any one place. In the spring there was a general round-up in
each locality. Each outfit took part in its own round-up, and all the
outfits of a given region combined to send representatives to the two or
three round-ups that covered the neighborhoods near by into which their
cattle might drift. For example, our Little Missouri round-up generally
worked down the river from a distance of some fifty or sixty miles above
my ranch toward the Kildeer Mountains, about the same distance below.
In addition we would usually send representatives to the Yellowstone
round-up, and to the round-up along the upper Little Missouri; and,
moreover, if we heard that cattle had drifted, perhaps toward the Indian
reservation southeast of us, we would send a wagon and rider after them.
At the meeting-point, which might be in the valley of a half-dry stream,
or in some broad bottom of the river itself, or perchance by a couple of
ponds under some queerly shaped butte that was a landmark for the region
round about, we would all gather on the appointed day. The chuck-wagons,
containing the bedding and food, each drawn by four horses and driven
by the teamster cook, would come jolting and rattling over the
uneven sward. Accompanying each wagon were eight or ten riders, the
cow-punchers, while their horses, a band of a hundred or so, were driven
by the two herders, one of whom was known as the day wrangler and one
as the night wrangler. The men were lean, sinewy fellows, accustomed
to riding half-broken horses at any speed over any country by day or by
night. They wore flannel shirts, with loose handkerchiefs knotted round
their necks, broad hats, high-heeled boots with jingling spurs, and