Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
bands of marauding young braves were a menace to outlying and lonely
settlements. Many of the white men were themselves lawless and brutal,
and prone to commit outrages on the Indians. Unfortunately, each race
tended to hold all the members of the other race responsible for the
misdeeds of a few, so that the crime of the miscreant, red or white,
who committed the original outrage too often invited retaliation upon
entirely innocent people, and this action would in its turn arouse
bitter feeling which found vent in still more indiscriminate
retaliation. The first year I was on the Little Missouri some Sioux
bucks ran off all the horses of a buffalo-hunter's outfit. One of the
buffalo-hunters tried to get even by stealing the horses of a Cheyenne
hunting party, and when pursued made for a cow camp, with, as a result,
a long-range skirmish between the cowboys and the Cheyennes. One of the
latter was wounded; but this particular wounded man seemed to have
more sense than the other participants in the chain of wrong-doing, and
discriminated among the whites. He came into our camp and had his wound
dressed.
A year later I was at a desolate little mud road ranch on the Deadwood
trail. It was kept by a very capable and very forceful woman, with sound
ideas of justice and abundantly well able to hold her own. Her husband
was a worthless devil, who finally got drunk on some whisky he obtained
from an outfit of Missouri bull-whackers--that is, freighters, driving
ox wagons. Under the stimulus of the whisky he picked a quarrel with his
wife and attempted to beat her. She knocked him down with a stove-lid
lifter, and the admiring bull-whackers bore him off, leaving the lady
in full possession of the ranch. When I visited her she had a man named
Crow Joe working for her, a slab-sided, shifty-eyed person who later,
as I heard my foreman explain, "skipped the country with a bunch of
horses." The mistress of the ranch made first-class buckskin shirts of
great durability. The one she made for me, and which I used for years,
was used by one of my sons in Arizona a couple of winters ago. I had
ridden down into the country after some lost horses, and visited the
ranch to get her to make me the buckskin shirt in question. There
were, at the moment, three Indians there, Sioux, well behaved and
self-respecting, and she explained to me that they had been resting
there waiting for dinner, and that a white man had come along and tried
to run off their horses. The Indians were on the lookout, however, and,
running out, they caught the man; but, after retaking their horses and
depriving him of his gun, they let him go. "I don't see why they let him
go," exclaimed my hostess. "I don't believe in stealing Indians' horses
any more than white folks'; so I told 'em they could go along and hang
him--I'd never cheep. Anyhow, I won't charge them anything for their
dinner," concluded my hostess. She was in advance of the usual morality
of the time and place, which drew a sharp line between stealing
citizens' horses and stealing horses from the Government or the Indians.
A fairly decent citizen, Jap Hunt, who long ago met a violent death,
exemplified this attitude towards Indians in some remarks I once heard
him make. He had started a horse ranch, and had quite honestly purchased
a number of broken-down horses of different brands, with the view of
doctoring them and selling them again. About this time there had been
much horse-stealing and cattle-killing in our Territory and in Montana,
and under the direction of some of the big cattle-growers a committee
of vigilantes had been organized to take action against the rustlers,
as the horse thieves and cattle thieves were called. The vigilantes, or
stranglers, as they were locally known, did their work thoroughly; but,
as always happens with bodies of the kind, toward the end they grew
reckless in their actions, paid off private grudges, and hung men on
slight provocation. Riding into Jap Hunt's ranch, they nearly hung him
because he had so many horses of different brands. He was finally let
off. He was much upset by the incident, and explained again and again,
"The idea of saying that I was a horse thief! Why, I never stole a horse
in my life--leastways from a white man. I don't count Indians nor the
Government, of course." Jap had been reared among men still in the stage
of tribal morality, and while they recognized their obligations to one
another, both the Government and the Indians seemed alien bodies, in
regard to which the laws of morality did not apply.
On the other hand, parties of savage young bucks would treat lonely
settlers just as badly, and in addition sometimes murder them. Such a
party was generally composed of young fellows burning to distinguish
themselves. Some one of their number would have obtained a pass from
the Indian Agent allowing him to travel off the reservation, which pass
would be flourished whenever their action was questioned by bodies of
whites of equal strength. I once had a trifling encounter with such a
band. I was making my way along the edge of the bad lands, northward
from my lower ranch, and was just crossing a plateau when five Indians
rode up over the further rim. The instant they saw me they whipped
out their guns and raced full speed at me, yelling and flogging their
horses. I was on a favorite horse, Manitou, who was a wise old fellow,
with nerves not to be shaken by anything. I at once leaped off him and
stood with my rifle ready.
It was possible that the Indians were merely making a bluff and intended
no mischief. But I did not like their actions, and I thought it likely
that if I allowed them to get hold of me they would at least take my
horse and rifle, and possibly kill me. So I waited until they were a
hundred yards off and then drew a bead on the first. Indians--and, for
the matter of that, white men--do not like to ride in on a man who is
cool and means shooting, and in a twinkling every man was lying over the
side of his horse, and all five had turned and were galloping backwards,
having altered their course as quickly as so many teal ducks.
After this one of them made the peace sign, with his blanket first, and
then, as he rode toward me, with his open hand. I halted him at a fair
distance and asked him what he wanted. He exclaimed, "How! Me good
Injun, me good Injun," and tried to show me the dirty piece of paper on
which his agency pass was written. I told him with sincerity that I was
glad that he was a good Indian, but that he must not come any closer. He
then asked for sugar and tobacco. I told him I had none. Another Indian
began slowly drifting toward me in spite of my calling out to keep back,
so I once more aimed with my rifle, whereupon both Indians slipped to
the other side of their horses and galloped off, with oaths that did
credit to at least one side of their acquaintance with English. I now
mounted and pushed over the plateau on to the open prairie. In those
days an Indian, although not as good a shot as a white man, was
infinitely better at crawling under and taking advantage of cover; and
the worst thing a white man could do was to get into cover, whereas out
in the open if he kept his head he had a good chance of standing off
even half a dozen assailants. The Indians accompanied me for a couple of
miles. Then I reached the open prairie, and resumed my northward ride,
not being further molested.
In the old days in the ranch country we depended upon game for fresh
meat. Nobody liked to kill a beef, and although now and then a maverick
yearling might be killed on the round-up, most of us looked askance at
the deed, because if the practice of beef-killing was ever allowed to
start, the rustlers--the horse thieves and cattle thieves--would be sure
to seize on it as an excuse for general slaughter. Getting meat for the
ranch usually devolved upon me. I almost always carried a rifle when I
rode, either in a scabbard under my thigh, or across the pommel. Often
I would pick up a deer or antelope while about my regular work, when
visiting a line camp or riding after the cattle. At other times I would
make a day's trip after them. In the fall we sometimes took a wagon
and made a week's hunt, returning with eight or ten deer carcasses, and
perhaps an elk or a mountain sheep as well. I never became more than a
fair hunter, and at times I had most exasperating experiences, either
failing to see game which I ought to have seen, or committing some
blunder in the stalk, or failing to kill when I fired. Looking back,
I am inclined to say that if I had any good quality as a hunter it was
that of perseverance. "It is dogged that does it" in hunting as in many
other things. Unless in wholly exceptional cases, when we were very
hungry, I never killed anything but bucks.
Occasionally I made long trips away from the ranch and among the Rocky
Mountains with my ranch foreman Merrifield; or in later years with
Tazewell Woody, John Willis, or John Goff. We hunted bears, both the
black and the grizzly, cougars and wolves, and moose, wapiti, and white
goat. On one of these trips I killed a bison bull, and I also killed a
bison bull on the Little Missouri some fifty miles south of my ranch on
a trip which Joe Ferris and I took together. It was rather a rough trip.
Each of us carried only his slicker behind him on the saddle, with some
flour and bacon done up in it. We met with all kinds of misadventures.
Finally one night, when we were sleeping by a slimy little prairie pool
where there was not a stick of wood, we had to tie the horses to the
horns of our saddles; and then we went to sleep with our heads on the
saddles. In the middle of the night something stampeded the horses, and
away they went, with the saddles after them. As we jumped to our feet
Joe eyed me with an evident suspicion that I was the Jonah of the party,
and said: "O Lord! I've never done anything to deserve this. Did you
ever do anything to deserve this?"
In addition to my private duties, I sometimes served as deputy sheriff
for the northern end of our county. The sheriff and I crisscrossed in
our public and private relations. He often worked for me as a hired hand
at the same time that I was his deputy. His name, or at least the
name he went by, was Bill Jones, and as there were in the neighborhood
several Bill Joneses--Three Seven Bill Jones, Texas Bill Jones, and
the like--the sheriff was known as Hell Roaring Bill Jones. He was a
thorough frontiersman, excellent in all kinds of emergencies, and a
very game man. I became much attached to him. He was a thoroughly good
citizen when sober, but he was a little wild when drunk. Unfortunately,
toward the end of his life he got to drinking very heavily. When, in
1905, John Burroughs and I visited the Yellowstone Park, poor Bill
Jones, very much down in the world, was driving a team in Gardiner
outside the park. I had looked forward to seeing him, and he was equally
anxious to see me. He kept telling his cronies of our intimacy and of
what we were going to do together, and then got drinking; and the result
was that by the time I reached Gardiner he had to be carried out and
left in the sage-brush. When I came out of the park, I sent on in
advance to tell them to be sure to keep him sober, and they did so. But
it was a rather sad interview. The old fellow had gone to pieces, and
soon after I left he got lost in a blizzard and was dead when they found
him.
Bill Jones was a gun-fighter and also a good man with his fists. On one
occasion there was an election in town. There had been many threats that
the party of disorder would import section hands from the neighboring
railway stations to down our side. I did not reach Medora, the forlorn
little cattle town which was our county seat, until the election was