STORIES OF THE GREAT WEST
Roosevelt, Theodore
Introduction
    
Publishers' Note

	As a youth Theodore Roosevelt was an enthusiastic student of Western history 
and pioneer types.  Later, as ranchman and hunter, he grew to know intimately and to 
love deeply the rough, free life of the Western plains. Mr. Roosevelt's interest in history 
probably was inherited, but his fondness for outdoor life grew out of his grateful love 
for his foster mother - the green earth - who took the delicate youth in her rough, but 
kindly, embrace and gave him a sound body and a clear vision.

	It was during the quiet evenings, and the otherwise idle hours, spent at "Elkhorn," 
his Dakota ranch, that Theodore Roosevelt penned most of the fascinating pictures of 
frontier and ranch life that make up this present volume.

	"The Backwoodsmen of the Alleghanies" and "Lewis and Clark and the 
Exploration of the Far West" are from "The Winning of the West," permission to 
republish here having kindly been granted by G. P. Putnam's Sons.  The other stories 
are from "Hero Tales" and "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail." Some of these stories 
have been condensed from the original version for reasons of space.

The Foreloper 

     The gull shall whistle in his wake, the blind wave break in fire,
     He shall fulfil God's utmost will, unknowing his desire;
     And he shall see old planets pass and alien stars arise,
     And give the gale his reckless sail in shadow of new skies,
     Strong lust of gear shall drive him out and hunger arm his hand
     To wring his food from a desert nude, his foothold from the sand.
     His neighbors' smoke shall vex his eyes, their voices break his rest;
     He shall go forth till South is North, sullen and dispossessed;
     He shall desire loneliness, and his desire shall bring
     Hard on his heels a thousand wheels, a people and a king.
     He shall come back on his own track and by his scarce cool camp,
     There shall he meet the roaring street, the derrick, and the stamp;
     For he must blaze a nation's ways, with hatchet and with brand,
     Till on his last-won wilderness an empire's bulwarks stand.

     Kipling.



STORIES OF THE GREAT WEST
Roosevelt, Theodore
Part I: Stories From History
    
Daniel Boone And The Founding Of Kentucky

	Daniel Boone will always occupy a unique place in our history as the archtype of 
the hunter and wilderness wanderer.  He was a true pioneer, and stood at the head of 
that class of Indian-fighters, game-hunters, forest-fellers, and backwoods farmers who, 
generation after generation, pushed westward the border of civilization from the 
Alleghanies to the Pacific.  As he himself said, he was "an instrument ordained of God 
to settle the wilderness." Born in Pennsylvania, he drifted south into western North 
Carolina, and settled on what was then the extreme frontier.  There he married, built a 
log cabin, and hunted, chopped trees, and tilled the ground like any other frontiersman.  
The Alleghany Mountains still marked a boundary beyond which the settlers dared not 
go; for west of them lay immense reaches of frowning forests, uninhabited save by 
hands of warlike Indians. Occasionally some venturesome hunter or trapper 
penetrated this immense wilderness, and returned with strange stories of what he had 
seen and done.

	In 1769 Boone, excited by these vague and wondrous tales, determined himself 
to cross the mountains and find out what manner of land it was that lay beyond.  With 
a few chosen companions he set out, making his own trail through the gloomy forest.  
After weeks of wandering, he at last emerged into the beautiful and fertile country of 
Kentucky, for which, in after years, the red men and the white strove with such 
obstinate fury that it grew to be called "the dark and bloody ground." But when Boone 
first saw it, it was a fair and smiling land of groves and glades and running waters, 
where the open forest grew tall and beautiful, and where innumerable herds of game 
grazed, roaming ceaselessly to and fro along the trails they had trodden during 
countless generations.  Kentucky was not owned by any Indian tribe, and was visited 
only by wandering war-parties and hunting-parties who came from among the savage 
nations living north of the Ohio or south of the Tennessee.

	A roving war-party stumbled upon one of Boone's companions and killed him, 
and the others then left Boone and journeyed home; but his brother came out to join 
him, and the two spent the winter together.  Self-reliant, fearless, and possessed of 
great bodily strength and hardihood, they cared little for the loneliness.  The teeming 
myriads of game furnished abundant food; the herds of shaggy-maned bison and 
noble-antlered elk, the bands of deer and the numerous black bear, were all ready for 
the rifle, and they were tame and easily slain.  The wolf and the cougar, too, 
sometimes fell victims to the prowess of the two hunters.

	At times they slept in hollow trees, or in some bush lean-to of their own making; 
at other times, when they feared Indians, they changed their resting-place every night, 
and after making a fire would go off a mile or two in the woods to sleep.  Surrounded 
by brute and human foes, they owed their lives to their sleepless vigilance, their keen 
senses, their eagle eyes, and their resolute hearts.

	When the spring came, and the woods were white with the dogwood blossoms, 
and crimsoned with the red-bud, Boone's brother left him, and Daniel remained for 
three months alone in the wilderness.  The brother soon came back again with a party 
of hunters; and other parties likewise came in, to wander for months and years through 
the wilderness; and they wrought huge havoc among the vast herds of game.

	In 1771 Boone returned to his home.  Two years later he started to lead a party 
of settlers to the new country; but while passing through the frowning defiles of 
Cumberland Gap, they were attacked by Indians, and driven back - two of Boone's 
own sons being slain.  In 1775, however, he made another attempt; and this attempt 
was successful.  The Indians attacked the newcomers; but by this time the parties of 
would-be settles were sufficiently numerous to hold their own.  They beat back the 
Indians, and built rough little hamlets, surrounded by log stockades, at Boonesborough 
and Harrodsburg; and the permanent settlement of Kentucky had begun.

	The next few years were passed by Boone amid unending Indian conflicts. He 
was a leader among the settlers, both in peace and in war.  At one time he 
represented them in the House of Burgesses of Virginia; at another time he was a 
member of the first little Kentucky parliament itself; and he became a colonel of the 
frontier militia.  He tilled the land and he chopped the trees himself; he helped to build 
the cabins and stockades with his own hands, wielding the long-handled, light-headed 
frontier ax as skillfully as other frontiersmen.  His main business was that of surveyor, 
for his knowledge of the country, and his ability to travel through it, in spite of the 
danger from Indians, created much demand for his services among people who 
wished to lay off tracts of wild land for their own future use.  But whatever he did, and 
wherever he went, he had to be sleeplessly on the lookout for his Indian foes. When 
he and his fellows tilled the stump-dotted fields of corn, one or more of the party were 
always on guard, with weapon at the ready, for fear of lurking savages.  When he went 
to the House of Burgesses he carried his long rifle, and traversed roads not a mile of 
which was free from the danger of Indian attack.  The settlements in the early years 
depended exclusively upon game for their meat, and Boone was the mightiest of all 
the hunters, so that upon him devolved the task of keeping his people supplied.  He 
killed many buffaloes, and pickled the buffalo beef for use in winter.  He killed great 
numbers of black bear, and made bacon of them, precisely as if they had been hogs.  
The common game were deer and elk. At that time none of the hunters of Kentucky 
would waste a shot on anything so small as a prairie-chicken or wild duck; but they 
sometimes killed geese and swans when they came south in winter and lit on the 
rivers.  But whenever Boone went into the woods after game, he had perpetually to 
keep watch lest he himself might be hunted in turn.  He never lay in wait at a game-
lick, save with ears strained to hear the approach of some crawling red foe.  He never 
crept up to a turkey he heard calling, without exercising the utmost care to see that it 
was not an Indian; for one of the favorite devices of the Indians was to imitate the 
turkey call, and thus allure within range some inexperienced hunter.

	Besides this warfare, which went on in the midst of his usual vocations, Boone 
frequently took the field on set expeditions against the savages.  Once when he and a 
party of other men were making salt at a lick, they were surprised and carried off by 
the Indians.  The old hunter was a prisoner with them for some months, but finally 
made his escape and came home through the trackless woods as straight as the wild 
pigeon flies.  He was ever on the watch to ward off the Indian inroads, and to follow the 
war-parties, and try to rescue the prisoners.  Once his own daughter, and two other 
girls who were with her, were carried off by a band of Indians.  Boone raised some 
friends and followed the trail steadily for two days and a night; then they came to 
where the Indians had killed a buffalo calf and were camped around it. Firing from a 
little distance, the whites shot two of the Indians, and, rushing in, rescued the girls.  On 
anotheroccasion, when Boone had gone to visit a saltlick with his brother, the Indians 
ambushed them and shot the latter. Boone himself escaped, but the Indians followed 
him for three miles by the aid of a tracking dog, until Boone turned, shot the dog, and 
then eluded his pursuers.  In company with Simon Kenton and many other noted 
hunters and wilderness warriors, he once and again took part in expeditions into the 
Indian country, where they killed the braves and drove off the horses.  Twice bands of 
Indians, accompanied by French, Tory, and British partizans from Detroit, bearing the 
flag of Great Britain, attacked Boonesborough.  In each case Boone and his fellow-
settlers beat them off with loss.  At the fatal battle of the Blue Licks, in which two 
hundred of the best riflemen of Kentucky were beaten with terrible slaughter by a great 
force of Indians from the lakes, Boone commanded the left wing.  Leading his men, 
rifle in hand, he pushed back and overthrew the force against him; but meanwhile the 
Indians destroyed the right wing and center, and got round in his rear, so that there 
was nothing left for Boone's men except to flee with all possible speed.

	As Kentucky became settled, Boone grew restless and ill at ease.  He loved the 
wilderness; he loved the great forests and the great prairie-like glades, and the life in 
the little lonely cabin, where from the door he could see the deer come out into the 
clearing at nightfall.  The neighborhood of his own kind made him feel cramped and ill 
at ease.  So he moved ever westward with the frontier; and as Kentucky filled up he 
crossed the Mississippi and settled on the borders of the prairie country of Missouri, 
where the Spaniards, who ruled the territory, made him an alcalde, or judge. He lived 
to a great age, and died out on the border, a backwoods hunter to the last.



STORIES OF THE GREAT WEST
Roosevelt, Theodore
Part I: Stories From History
    
The Backwoodsmen Of The Alleghanies 1769-1774

Who They Were And Where They Settled 
	Along the western frontier of the colonies that were so soon to be the United 
States, among the foothills of the Alleghanies, on the slopes of the wooded mountains, 
and in the long trough-like valleys that lay between the ranges dwelt a peculiar and 
characteristically American people.

	These frontier folk, the people of the up-country, or back-country, who lived near 
and among the forest-clad mountains, far away from the long-settled districts of flat 
coast plain and sluggish tidal river, were known to themselves and to others as 
backwoodsmen.  They all bore a strong likeness to one another in their habits of 
thought and ways of living, and differed markedly from the people of the older and 
more civilized communities to the eastward.  The western border of our country was 
then formed by the great barrier-chains of the Alleghanies, which ran north and south 
from Pennsylvania through Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, the trend of the 
valleys being parallel to the seacoast, and the mountains rising highest to the 
southward. It was difficult to cross the ranges from east to west, but it was both easy 
and natural to follow the valleys between.  From Fort Pitt to the high hill-homes of the 
Cherokees this great tract of wooded and mountainous country possessed nearly the 
same features and characteristics, differing utterly in physical aspect from the alluvial 
plains bordering the ocean.

	The backwoodsmen were Americans by birth and parentage, and of mixed race; 
but the dominant strain in their blood was that of the Presbyterian Irish - the Scotch-
Irish as they were often called.  These Irish representatives of the Covenanters were in 
the west almost what the Puritans were in the northeast, and more than the Cavaliers 
were in the south. Mingled with the descendants of many other races, they 
nevertheless formed the kernel of the distinctively and intensely American stock who 
were the pioneers of our people in their march westward, the vanguard of the army of 
fighting settlers, who with ax and rifle won their way from the Alleghanies to the Rio 
Grande and the Pacific.

	The Presbyterian Irish were themselves already a mixed people.  Though mainly 
descended from Scotch ancestors, many of them were of English, a few of French 
Huguenot, and quite a number of true old Milesian Irish extraction. They were a 
truculent and obstinate people, and gloried in the warlike renown of their forefathers, 
the men who had followed Cromwell, and who had shared in the defence of Derry and 
in the victories of the Boyne and Aughrim.

	They did not begin to come to America in any numbers till after the opening of 
the eighteenth century; by 1730 they were fairly swarming across the ocean, for the 
most part in two streams, the larger going to the port of Philadelphia, the smaller to the 
port of Charleston.  Pushing through the long settled lowlands of the seacoast, they at 
once made their abode at the foot of the mountains, and became the outposts of 
civilization.  From Pennsylvania, whither the great majority had come, they drifted 
south along the foothills and down the long valleys, till they met their brethren from 
Charleston who had pushed up into the Carolina back-country.  In this land of hills, 
covered by unbroken forest, they took root and flourished, stretching in a broad belt 
from north to south, a shield of sinewy men thrust in between the people of the 
seaboard and the red warriors of the wilderness. All through this region they were 
alike; they had as little kinship with the Cavalier as with the Quaker; the west was won 
by those who have been rightly called the Roundheads of the south, the same men 
who, before any others, declared for American independence.

	That these Irish Presbyterians were a bold and hardy race is proved by their at 
once pushing past the settled regions, and plunging into the wilderness as the leaders 
of the white advance.  They were the first and last set of immigrants to do this; all 
others have merely followed in the wake of their predecessors.

	These Presbyterian Irish were, however, far from being the only settlers on the 
border, although more than any others they impressed the stamp of their peculiar 
character on the pioneer civilization of the west and southwest. Great numbers of 
immigrants of English descent came among them from the settled districts on the east; 
and though these later arrivals soon became indistinguishable from the people among 
whom they settled, yet they certainly sometimes added a tone of their own to 
backwoods society, giving it here and there a slight dash of what we are accustomed 
to consider the distinctively southern or cavalier spirit.  There was likewise a large 
German admixture, not only from the Germans of Pennsylvania, but also from those of 
the Carolinas. A good many Huguenots likewise came, giving to the backwoods 
society such families as the Seviers and Lenoirs.  The Huguenots, like the Germans, 
frequently had their names Anglicized.  The best known and most often quoted 
example is that of the Blancpied family, part of whom have become Whitefoots, while 
the others, living on the coast, have suffered a marvellous sea-change, the name 
reappearing as "Blumpy." There were a few Hollanders and even Swedes, from the 
banks of the Delaware, or perhaps from farther off still.

	A single generation, passed under the hard conditions of life in the wilderness, 
was enough to weld together into one people the representatives of these numerous 
and widely different races; and the children of the next generation became 
indistinguishable from one another.  Long before the first Continental Congress 
assembled, the backwoodsmen, whatever their blood, had become Americans, one in 
speech, thought, and character, clutching firmly the land in which their fathers and 
grandfathers had lived before them.  They had lost all remembrance of Europe and all 
sympathy with things European; they had become as emphatically products native to 
the soil as were the tough and supple hickories out of which they fashioned the 
handles of their long, light axes.  Their grim, harsh, narrow lives were yet strangely 
fascinating and full of adventurous toil and danger; none but natures as strong, as 
freedom-loving, and as full of bold defiance as theirs could have endured existence on 
the terms which these men found pleasurable.  Their iron surroundings made a mould 
which turned out all alike in the same shape.  They resembled one another, and they 
differed from the rest of the world - even the world of America, and infinitely more the 
world of Europe - in dress, in customs, and in mode of life.

	Where their lands abutted on the more settled districts to the eastward, the 
population was of course thickest, and their peculiarities least.  Here and there at such 
points they built small backwoods burgs or towns, rude, straggling, unkempt villages, 
with a store or two, a tavern, a small log school-house, and a little church, presided 
over by a hard-featured Presbyterian preacher, gloomy, earnest, and zealous, 
probably bigoted and narrow-minded, but nevertheless a great power for good in the 
community.

	However, the backwoodsmen as a class neither built towns nor loved to dwell 
therein.  They were to be seen at their best in the vast, interminable forests that 
formed their chosen home.  They won and kept their lands by force, and ever lived 
either at war or in dread of war.  Hence they settled always in groups of several 
families each, all banded together for mutual protection.  Their red foes were strong 
and terrible, cunning in council, dreadful in battle, merciless beyond belief in victory.  
The men of the border did not overcome and dispossess cowards and weaklings; they 
marched forth to spoil the stout-hearted and to take for a prey the possessions of the 
men of might.  Every acre, every rood of ground which they claimed had to be cleared 
by the ax and held with the rifle.  Not only was the chopping down of the forests the 
first preliminary to cultivation, but it was also the surest means of subduing the Indians, 
to whom the unending stretches of choked woodlands were an impenetrable cover 
behind which to move unseen, a shield in making assaults, and a strong tower of 
defence in repelling counter-attacks.  In the conquest of the west the backwoods ax, 
shapely, well-poised, with long haft and light head, was a servant hardly standing 
second even to the rifle; the two were the national weapons of the American 
backwoodsman, and in their use he has never been excelled.

Their Habitations 

	When a group of families moved out into the wilderness they built themselves a 
station or stockade fort; a square palisade of upright logs, loop-holed, with strong 
blockhouses as bastions at the corners.  One side at least was generally formed by the 
backs of the cabins themselves, all standing in a row; and there was a great door or 
gate, that could be strongly barred in case of need.  Often no iron whatever was 
employed in any of the buildings. The square inside contained the provision sheds and 
frequently a strong central blockhouse as well.  These forts, of course, could not stand 
against cannon, and they were always in danger when attacked with fire; but save for 
this risk of burning they were very effectual defences against men without artillery, and 
were rarely taken, whether by whites or Indians, except by surprise.  Few other 
buildings have played so important a part in our history as the rough stockade fort of 
the backwoods.

	The families only lived in the fort when there was war with the Indians, and even 
then not in the winter.  At other times they all separated out to their own farms, 
universally called clearings, as they were always made by first cutting off the timber.  
The stumps were left to dot the fields of grain and Indian corn.  The corn in especial 
was the stand-by and invariable resource of the western settler; it was the crop on 
which he relied to feed his family, and when hunting or on a war trail the parched 
grains were carried in his leather wallet to serve often as his only food.  But he planted 
orchards and raised melons, potatoes, and many other fruits and vegetables as well; 
and he had usually a horse or two, cows, and perhaps hogs and sheep, if the wolves 
and bears did not interfere.  If he was poor his cabin was made of unhewn logs, and 
held but a single room; if well-to-do, the logs were neatly hewed, and besides the large 
living and eating-room with its huge stone fireplace, there was also a small bedroom 
and a kitchen, while a ladder led to the loft above, in which the boys slept.  The floor 
was made of puncheons, great slabs of wood hewed carefully out, and the roof of 
clapboards.  Pegs of wood were thrust into the sides of the house, to serve instead of 
a wardrobe; and buck antlers, thrust into joists, held the ever-ready rifles.  The table 
was a great clapboard set on four wooden legs; there were three-legged stools, and in 
the better sort of houses old-fashioned rocking-chairs.  The couch or bed was warmly 
covered with blankets, bear-skins, and deer-hides.

	These clearings lay far apart from one another in the wilderness.  Up to the door-
sills of the log-huts stretched the solemn and mysterious forest. There were no 
openings to break its continuity; nothing but endless leagues on leagues of shadowy, 
wolf-haunted woodland.  The great trees towered aloft till their separate heads were 
lost in the mass of foliage above, and the rank underbrush choked the spaces between 
the trunks.  On the higher peaks and ridge-crests of the mountains there were 
straggling birches and pines, hemlocks and balsam firs; elsewhere, oaks, chestnuts, 
hickories, maples, beeches, walnuts, and great tulip trees grew side by side with many 
other kinds.  The sunlight could not penetrate the roofed archway of murmuring leaves; 
through the gray aisles of the forest men walked always in a kind of mid-day gloaming.  
Those who had lived in the open plains felt when they came to the back-woods as if 
their heads were hooded.  Save on the border of a lake, from a cliff top, or on a bald 
knob - that is, a bare hill-shoulder, - they could not anywhere look out for any distance.

	All the land was shrouded in one vast forest.  It covered the mountains from crest 
to river-bed, filled the plains, and stretched in somber and melancholy wastes towards 
the Mississippi.  All that it contained, all that lay hid within it and beyond it, none could 
tell; men only knew that their boldest hunters, however deeply they had penetrated, 
had not yet gone through it, that it was the home of the game they followed and the 
wild beasts that preyed on their flocks, and that deep in its tangled depths lurked their 
red foes, hawk-eyed and wolf-hearted.

Their Daily Life And Their Dress 

	Backwoods society was simple, and the duties and rights of each member of the 
family were plain and clear.  The man was the armed protector and provider, the 
bread-winner; the woman was the housewife and mother.  They married young and 
their families were large, for they were strong and healthy, and their success in life 
depended on their own stout arms and willing hearts. There was everywhere great 
equality of conditions.  Land was plenty and all else scarce; so courage, thrift, and 
industry were sure of their reward.  All had small farms, with the few stock necessary 
to cultivate them; the farms being generally placed in the hollows, the division lines 
between them, if they were close together, being the tops of the ridges and the water-
courses, especially the former.  The buildings of each farm were usually at its lowest 
point, as if in the center of an amphitheater.  Each was on an average of about 400 
acres, but sometimes more.  Tracts of low, swampy grounds, possibly some miles 
from the cabin, were cleared for meadows, the fodder being stacked, and hauled home 
in winter.

	Each backwoodsman was not only a small farmer but also a hunter; for his wife 
and children depended for their meat upon the venison and bear's flesh procured by 
his rifle.  The people were restless and always on the move. After being a little while in 
a place, some of the men would settle down permanently, while others would again 
drift off, farming and hunting alternately to support their families.  The backwoodsman's 
dress was in great part borrowed from his Indian foes.  He wore a fur cap or felt hat, 
moccasins, and either loose, thin trousers, or else simply leggings of buckskin or elk-
hide, and the Indian breech-clout.  He was always clad in the fringed hunting-shirt, of 
homespun or buckskin, the most picturesque and distinctively national dress ever worn 
in America.  It was a loose smock or tunic, reaching nearly to the knees, and held in at 
the waist by a broad belt, from which hung the tomahawk and scalping-knife.  His 
weapon was the long, small-bore, flint-lock rifle, clumsy, and ill-balanced, but 
exceedingly accurate.  It was very heavy, and when upright, reached to the chin of a 
tall man; for the barrel of thick, soft iron, was four feet in length, while the stock was 
short, and the butt scooped out.  Sometimes it was plain, sometimes ornamented.  It 
was generally bored out - or, as the expression then was, "sawed out" - to carry a ball 
of seventy, more rarely of thirty or forty, to the pound; and was usually of backwoods 
manufacture.  The marksman almost always fired from a rest, and rarely at a very long 
range; and the shooting was marvelously accurate.

	In the backwoods there was very little money; barter was the common form of 
exchange, and peltries were often used as a circulating medium, a beaver, otter, 
fisher, dressed buckskin or large bear-skin being reckoned as equal to two foxes or 
wildcats, four coons, or eight minks.  A young man inherited nothing from his father but 
his strong frame and eager heart; but before him lay a whole continent wherein to pitch 
his farm, and he felt ready to marry as soon as he became of age, even though he had 
nothing but his clothes, his horses, his ax and his rifle.  If a girl was well off, and had 
been careful and industrious, she might herself bring a dowry, of a cow and a calf, a 
brood mare, a bed well stocked with blankets, and a chest containing her clothes - the 
latter not very elaborate, for a woman's dress consisted of a hat or poke bonnet, a 
"bed gown," perhaps a jacket, and a linsey petticoat, while her feet were thrust into 
coarse shoepacks or moccasins.  Fine clothes were rare; a suit of such cost more than 
200 acres of good land.

	The first lesson the backwoodsmen learned was the necessity of self-help; the 
next, that such a community could only thrive if all joined in helping one another.  Log-
rollings, house-raisings, house-warmings, corn-shuckings, quiltings, and the like were 
occasions when all the neighbors came together to do what the family itself could 
hardly accomplish alone.  Every such meeting was the occasion of a frolic and dance 
for the young people, and the host exerting his utmost power to spread the table with 
backwoods delicacies - bear-meat and venison, vegetables from the "truck patch," 
where squashes, melons, beans, and the like were grown, wild fruits, bowls of milk, 
and apple pies, which were the acknowledged standard of luxury.  At the better houses 
there was metheglin or small beer, cider, cheese, and biscuits. Tea was so little known 
that many of the backwoods people were not aware it was a beverage and at first 
attempted to eat the leaves with salt or butter.

	The young men prided themselves on their bodily strength, and were always 
eager to contend against one another in athletic games, such as wrestling, racing, 
jumping, and lifting flour-barrels; and they also sought distinction in vieing with one 
another at their work.  Sometimes they strove against one another singly, sometimes 
they divided into parties, each bending all its energies to be first in shucking a given 
heap of corn or cutting (with sickles) an allotted patch of wheat.  Among the men the 
bravos or bullies often were dandies also in the backwoods fashions, wearing their hair 
long and delighting in the rude finery of hunting-shirts embroidered with porcupine 
quills; they were loud, boastful, and profane, given to coarsely bantering one another.  
Brutally savage fights were frequent; the combatants, who were surrounded by rings of 
interested spectators, striking, kicking, biting, and gouging.  The fall of one of them did 
not stop the fight, for the man who was down was maltreated without mercy until he 
called "enough." The victor always bragged savagely of his prowess, often leaping on 
a stump, crowing and flapping his arms.  This last was a thoroughly American touch; 
but otherwise one of these contests was less a boxing match than a kind of 
backwoods pancratium, no less revolting than its ancient prototype of Olympic fame. 
Yet, if the uncouth borderers were as brutal as the highly polished Greeks, they were 
more manly; defeat was not necessarily considered disgrace, a man often fighting 
when he was certain to be beaten, while the onlookers neither hooted nor pelted the 
conquered.  We first hear of the noted scout and Indian fighter, Simon Kenton, as 
leaving a rival for dead after one of these ferocious duels, and fleeing from his home in 
terror of the punishment that might follow the deed.  Such fights were specially 
frequent when the backwoodsmen went into the little frontier towns to see horse races 
or fairs.

	A wedding was always a time of festival.  If there was a church anywhere near, 
the bride rode thither on horseback behind her father, and after the service her pillion 
was shifted to the bridegroom's steed.  If, as generally happened, there was no church, 
the groom and his friends, all armed, rode to the house of the bride's father, the men 
racing recklessly along the narrow bridle-paths, for there were few roads or wheeled 
vehicles in the backwoods. At the bride's housethe ceremony was performed, and then 
a huge dinner was eaten; after which the fiddling and dancing began, and were 
continued all the afternoon, and most of the night as well.  The fun was hearty and 
coarse, and the toasts always included one to the young couple, with the wish that 
they might have many big children; for as long as they could remember the 
backwoodsmen had lived at war, while looking ahead they saw no chance of its ever 
stopping, and so each son was regarded as a future warrior, a help to the whole 
community.  The neighbors all joined again in chopping and rolling the logs for the 
young couple's future house, then in raising the house itself, and finally in feasting and 
dancing at the house-warming.

	Funerals were simple, the dead body being carried to the grave in a coffin slung 
on poles and borne by four men.

	There was not much schooling, and few boys or girls learned much more than 
reading, writing, and ciphering up to the rule of three.  Where the school-houses 
existed they were only dark, mean log-huts, and if in the southern colonies, were 
generally placed in the so-called "old fields," or abandoned farms grown up with pines.  
The schoolmaster boarded about with the families; his learning was rarely great, nor 
was his discipline good, in spite of the frequency and severity of the canings.  The 
price for such tuition was at the rate of twenty shillings a year, in Pennsylvania 
currency.

	Each family did every thing that could be done for itself.  The father and sons 
worked with ax, hoe, and sickle.  Almost every house contained a loom, and almost 
every woman was a weaver.  Linsey-woolsey, made from flax grown near the cabin, 
and of wool from the backs of the few sheep, was the warmest and most substantial 
cloth; and when the flax crop failed and the flocks were destroyed by wolves, the 
children had but scanty covering to hide their nakedness.  The man tanned the 
buckskin, the woman was tailor and shoemaker, and made the deer-skin sifters to be 
used instead of bolting-cloths.  There were a few pewter spoons in use; but the table 
furniture consisted mainly of hand-made trenchers, platters, noggins, and bowls.  The 
cradle was of peeled hickory bark.  Plow-shares had to be imported, but harrows and 
sleds were made without difficulty; and the cooper work was well done.  Chaff beds 
were thrown on the floor of the loft, if the house-owner was well off.  Each cabin had a 
hand-mill and a hominy block; the last was borrowed from the Indians, and was only a 
large block of wood, with a hole burned in the top, as a mortar, where the pestle was 
worked.  If there were any sugar maples accessible, they were tapped every year.

	But some articles, especially salt and iron, could not be produced in the 
backwoods.  In order to get them each family collected during the year all the furs 
possible, these being valuable and yet easily carried on pack-horses, the sole means 
of transport.  Then, after seeding time, in the fall, the people of a neighborhood 
ordinarily joined in sending down a train of peltry-laden pack-horses to some large 
sea-coast or tidal-river trading town, where their burdens were bartered for the needed 
iron and salt.  The unshod horses all had bells hung round their neck; the clappers 
were stopped during the day, but when the train was halted for the night, and the 
horses were hobbled and turned loose, the bells were once more unstopped.  Several 
men accompanied each little caravan, and sometimes they drove with them steers and 
hogs to sell on the sea-coast.  A bushel of alum salt was worth a good cow and calf, 
and as each of the poorly fed, undersized pack animals could carry but two bushels, 
the mountaineers prized it greatly, and instead of salting or pickling their venison, they 
jerked it, by drying it in the sun or smoking it over a fire.

The Struggle For Existence 

	The life of the backwoodsmen was one long struggle.  The forest had to be 
felled, droughts, deep snows, freshets, cloudbursts, forest fires, and all the other 
dangers of a wilderness life faced.  Swarms of deer-flies, mosquitoes, and midges 
rendered life a torment in the weeks of hot weather. Rattlesnakes and copperheads 
were very plentiful, and the former especially, constant sources of danger and death.  
Wolves and bears were incessant and inveterate foes of the live stock, and the cougar 
or panther occasionally attacked man as well.  More terrible still, the wolves 
sometimes went mad, and the men who then encountered them were almost certain to 
be bitten and to die of hydrophobia.

	Every true backwoodsman was a hunter.  Wild turkeys were plentiful.  The 
pigeons at times filled the woods with clouds that hid the sun and broke down the 
branches on their roosting grounds as if a whirlwind had passed.  The black and gray 
squirrels swarmed, devastating the corn-fields, and at times gathering in immense 
companies and migrating across mountain and river.  The hunters' ordinary game was 
the deer, and after that the bear; the elk was already growing uncommon.  No form of 
labor is harder than the chase, and none is so fascinating nor so excellent as a 
training-school for war.  The successful still-hunter of necessity possessed skill in 
hiding and in creeping noiselessly upon the wary quarry, as well as in imitating the 
notes and calls of the different beasts and birds; skill in the use of the rifle and in 
throwing the tomahawk he already had; and he perforce acquired keenness of eye, 
thorough acquaintance with woodcraft, and the power of standing the severest strains 
of fatigue, hardship and exposure.  He lived out in the woods for many months with no 
food but meat, and no shelter whatever, unless he made a lean-to of brush or crawled 
into a hollow sycamore.

	Such training stood the frontier folk in good stead when they were pitted against 
the Indians; without it they could not even have held their own, and the white advance 
would have been absolutely checked.  Our frontiers were pushed westward by the 
warlike skill and adventurous personal prowess of the individual settlers; regular 
armies by themselves could have done little.  For one square mile the regular armies 
added to our domain, the settlers added ten, - a hundred would probably be nearer the 
truth.  A race of peaceful, unwarlike farmers would have been helpless before such 
foes as the red Indians, and no auxiliary military force would have protected them or 
enabled them to move westward.  Colonists fresh from the old world, no matter how 
thrifty, steady-going, and industrious, could not hold their own on the frontier; they had 
to settle where they were protected from the Indians by a living barrier of bold and self-
reliant American borderers.  The west would never have been settled save for the 
fierce courage and the eager desire to brave danger so characteristic of the stalwart 
backwoodsmen.

	These armed hunters, woodchoppers, and farmers were their own soldiers. They 
built and manned their own forts; they did their own fighting under their own 
commanders.  There were no regiments of regular troops along the frontier. In the 
event of an Indian inroad each borderer had to defend himself until there was time for 
them all to gather together to repel or avenge it.  Every man was accustomed to the 
use of arms from his childhood; when a boy was twelve years old he was given a rifle 
and made a fort-soldier, with a loophole where he was to stand if the station was 
attacked.  The war was never-ending, for even the times of so-called peace were 
broken by forays and murders; a man might grow from babyhood to middle age on the 
border, and yet never remember a year in which some one of his neighbors did not fall 
a victim to the Indians.

	There was everywhere a rude military organization, which included all the able-
bodied men of the community.  Every settlement had its colonels and captains; but 
these officers, both in their training and in the authority they exercised, corresponded 
much more nearly to Indian chiefs than to the regular army men whose titles they bore.  
They had no means whatever of enforcing their orders, and their tumultuous and 
disorderly levies of sinewy riflemen were hardly as well disciplined as the Indians 
themselves.  The superior officer could advise, entreat, lead, and influence his men, 
but he could not command them, or, if he did, the men obeyed him only just so far as it 
suited them.  If an officer planned a scout or campaign, those who thought proper 
accompanied him, and the others stayed at home, and even those who went out came 
back if the fit seized them, or perchance followed the lead of an insubordinate junior 
officer whom they liked better than they did his superior.  There was no compulsion to 
perform military duties beyond dread of being disgraced in the eyes of the neighbors, 
and there was no pecuniary reward for performing them; nevertheless, the moral 
sentiment of a backwoods community was too robust to tolerate habitual remissness in 
military affairs, and the coward and laggard were treated with utter scorn, and were 
generally in the end either laughed out, or "hated out," of the neighborhood, or else got 
rid of in a still more summary manner.  Among a people naturally brave and reckless, 
this public opinion acted fairly effectively, and there was generally but little shrinking 
from military service.

	A backwoods levy was formidable because of the high average courage and 
prowess of the individuals composing it; it was on its own ground much more effective 
than a like force of regular soldiers, but of course it could not be trusted on a long 
campaign.  The backwoodsmen used their rifles better than the Indians, and also 
stood punishment better, but they never matched them in surprises nor in skill in taking 
advantage of cover, and very rarely equaled their discipline in the battle itself.  After all, 
the pioneer was primarily a husbandman; the time spent in chopping trees and tilling 
the soil his foe spent in preparing for or practising forest warfare, and so the former, 
thanks to the exercise of the very qualities which in the end gave him the possession 
of the soil, could not, as a rule, hope to rival his antagonist in the actual conflict itself.  
When large bodies of the red men and white borderers were pitted against each other, 
the former were if anything the more likely to have the advantage.  But the whites soon 
copied from the Indians their system of individual and private warfare, and they 
probably caused their foes far more damage and loss in this way than in the large 
expeditions.  Many noted border scouts and Indian fighters - such men as Boone, 
Kenton, Wetzel, Brady, McCulloch, Mansker - grew to overmatch their Indian foes at 
their own game, and held themselves above the most renowned warriors.  But these 
men carried the spirit of defiant self-reliance to such an extreme that their best work 
was always done when they were alone or in small parties of but four or five. They 
made long forays after scalps and horses, going a wonderful distance, enduring 
extreme hardship, risking the most terrible of deaths, and harrying the hostile tribes 
into a madness of terror and revengeful hatred.

The Law Of The Land 

	As it was in military matters, so it was with the administration of justice by the 
frontiers-men; they had few courts, and knew but little law, and yet they contrived to 
preserve order and morality with rough effectiveness, by combining to frown down on 
the grosser misdeeds, and to punish the more flagrant misdoers.  Perhaps the spirit in 
which they acted can be best shown by the recital of an incident in the career of the 
three McAfee brothers, who were among the pioneer hunters of Kentucky.  Previous to 
trying to move their families out to the new country, they made a cache of clothing, 
implements, and provisions, which in their absence was broken into and plundered.  
They caught the thief, "a little diminutive, red-headed white man," a run-away convict 
servant from one of the tide-water counties of Virginia.  In the first impulse of anger at 
finding that he was the criminal, one of the McAfees rushed at him to kill him with his 
tomahawk; but the weapon turned, the man was only knocked down, and his 
assailant's gusty anger subsided as quickly as it had risen, giving way to a desire to do 
stern but fair justice.  So the three captors formed themselves into a court, examined 
into the case, heard the man in his own defence, and after due consultation decided 
that "according to their opinion of the laws he had forfeited his life, and ought to be 
hung"; but none of them were willing to execute the sentence in cold blood, and they 
ended by taking their prisoner back to his master.

	The incident was characteristic in more thanone way.  The prompt desire of the 
backwoodsman to avenge his own wrong; his momentary furious anger, speedily 
quelled and replaced by a dogged determination to be fair but to exact full retribution; 
the acting entirely without regard to legal forms or legal officials, but yet in a spirit 
which spoke well for the doer's determination to uphold the essentials that make 
honest men law-abiding; together with the good faith of the whole proceeding, and the 
amusing ignorance that it would have been in the least unlawful to execute their own 
rather harsh sentence - all these were typical frontier traits.

	The McAfees themselves and the escaped convict servant whom they captured 
typify the two prominent classes of the backwoods people.  The frontier, in spite of the 
outward uniformity of means and manners, is preeminently the place of sharp 
contrasts.  The two extremes of society, the strongest, best, and most adventurous, 
and the weakest, most shiftless, and vicious, are those which seem naturally to drift to 
the border.  Most of the men who came to the backwoods to hew out homes and rear 
families were stern, manly, and honest; but there was also a large influx of people 
drawn from the worst immigrants that perhaps ever were brought to America - the 
mass of convict servants, redemptioners, and the like, who formed such an 
excessively undesirable substratum to the otherwise excellent population of the tide-
water regions in Virginia and the Carolinas.  Many of the southern crackers or poor 
whites spring from this class, which also in the backwoods gave birth to generations of 
violent and hardened criminals, and to an even greater number of shiftless, lazy, 
cowardly cumberers of the earth's surface.  They had in many places a permanently 
bad effect upon the tone of the whole community.

	In the backwoods the lawless led lives of abandoned wickedness; they hated 
good for good's sake, and did their utmost to destroy it.  Where the bad element was 
large, gangs of horse thieves, highwaymen, and other criminals often united with the 
uncontrollable young men of vicious tastes who were given to gambling, fighting, and 
the like.  They then formed half-secret organizations, often of great extent and with 
wide ramifications; and if they could control a community they established a reign of 
terror, driving out both ministers and magistrates, and killing without scruple those who 
interfered with them.  The good men in such a case banded themselves together as 
regulators and put down the wicked with ruthless severity, by the exercise of lynch law, 
shooting and hanging the worst off-hand.

	Jails were scarce in the wilderness, and often were entirely wanting in a district, 
which, indeed, was quite likely to lack legal officers also.  If punishment was inflicted at 
all it was apt to be severe, and took the form of death or whipping.  An impromptu jury 
of neighbors decided with a rough and ready sense of fair play and justice what 
punishment the crime demanded, and then saw to the execution of their own decree.  
Whipping was the usual reward of theft.  Occasionally torture was resorted to, but not 
often; but to their honor be it said, the backwoodsmen were horrified at the treatment 
accorded both to black slaves and to white convict servants in the lowlands.

	They were superstitious, of course, believing in witchcraft, and signs and omens; 
and it may be noted that their superstition showed a singular mixture of old-world 
survivals and of practices borrowed from the savages or evolved by the very force of 
their strange surroundings.  At the bottom they were deeply religious in their 
tendencies; and although ministers and meeting-houses were rare, yet the backwoods 
cabins often contained Bibles, and the mothers used to instil into the minds of their 
children reverence for Sunday, while many even of the hunters refused to hunt on that 
day.  Those of them who knew the right honestly tried to live up to it, in spite of the 
manifold temptations to backsliding offered by their lives of hard and fierce contention.  
But Calvinism, though more congenial to them than Episcopacy, and infinitely more so 
than Catholicism, was too cold for the fiery hearts of the borderers; they were not 
stirred to the depths of their natures till other creeds, and, above all, Methodism, 
worked their way to the wilderness.

	Thus the backwoodsmen lived on the clearings they had hewed out of the 
everlasting forest; a grim, stern people, strong and simple, powerful for good and evil, 
swayed by gusts of stormy passion, the love of freedom rooted in their very hearts' 
core.  Their lives were harsh and narrow; they gained their bread by their blood and 
sweat, in the unending struggle with the wild ruggedness of nature.  They suffered 
terrible injuries at the hands of the red men, and on their foes they waged a terrible 
warfare in return.  They were relentless, revengeful, suspicious, knowing neither ruth 
nor pity; they were also upright, resolute, and fearless, loyal to their friends, and 
devoted to their country.  In spite of their many failings, they were of all men the best 
fitted to conquer the wilderness and hold it against all comers.



STORIES OF THE GREAT WEST
Roosevelt, Theodore
Part I: Stories From History
    
George Rogers Clark And The Conquest Of The Northwest

	In 1776, when independence was declared, the United States included only the 
thirteen original States on the sea-board.  With the exception of a few hunters there 
were no white men west of the Alleghany Mountains, and there was not even an 
American hunter in the great country out of which we have since made the States of 
Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. All this region north of the Ohio River 
then formed a part of the Province of Quebec. It was a wilderness of forests and 
prairies, teeming with game, and inhabited by many warlike tribes of Indians.

	Here and there through it were dotted quaint little towns of French Creoles, the 
most important being Detroit, Vincennes on the Wabash, and Kaskaskia and Kahokia 
on the Illinois.  These French villages were ruled by British officers commanding small 
bodies of regular soldiers or Tory rangers and Creole partizans.  The towns were 
completely in the power of the British government; none of the American States had 
actual possession of a foot of property in the Northwestern Territory.

	The Northwest was acquired in the midst of the Revolution only by armed 
conquest, and if it had not been so acquired, it would have remained a part of the 
British Dominion of Canada.

	The man to whom this conquest was due was a famous backwoods leader, a 
mighty hunter, a noted Indian-fighter, George Rogers Clark.  He was a very strong 
man, with light hair and blue eyes.  He was of good Virginian family. Early in his youth 
he embarked on the adventurous career of a backwoods surveyor, exactly as 
Washington and so many other young Virginians of spirit did at that period.  He 
traveled out to Kentucky soon after it was founded by Boone, and lived there for a 
year, either at the stations or camping by himself in the woods, surveying, hunting, and 
making war against the Indians like any other settler; but all the time his mind was bent 
on vaster schemes than were dreamed of by the men around him.  He had his spies 
out in the Northwestern Territory, and became convinced that with a small force of 
resolute backwoodsmen he could conquer it for the United States.  When he went 
back to Virginia, Governor Patrick Henry entered heartily into Clark's schemes and 
gave him authority to fit out a force for his purpose.

	In 1778, after encountering endless difficulties and delays, he finally raised a 
hundred and fifty backwoods riflemen.  In May they started down the Ohio in flatboats 
to undertake the allotted task.  They drifted and rowed downstream to the Falls of the 
Ohio, where Clark founded a log-hamlet, which has since become the great city of 
Louisville.

	Here he halted for some days and was joined by fifty or sixty volunteers; but a 
number of the men deserted, and when, after an eclipse of the sun, Clark again 
pushed off to go down with the current, his force was but about one hundred and sixty 
riflemen.  All, however, were men on whom he could depend - men well used to 
frontier warfare.  They were tall, stalwart backwoodsmen, clad in the hunting-shirt and 
leggings that formed the national dress of their kind, and armed with the distinctive 
weapon of the backwoods, the long-barreled, small-bore rifle.

	Before reaching the Mississippi the little flotilla landed, and Clark led his men 
northward against the Illinois towns.  In one of them, Kaskaskia, dwelt the British 
commander of the entire district up to Detroit.  The small garrison and the Creole 
militia taken together outnumbered Clark's force, and they were in close alliance with 
the Indians roundabout.  Clark was anxious to take the town by surprise and avoid 
bloodshed, as he believed he could win over the Creoles to the American side.  
Marching cautiously by night and generally hiding by day, he came to the outskirts of 
the little village on the evening of July 4, and lay in the woods near by until after 
nightfall.

	Fortune favored him.  That evening the officers of the garrison had given a great 
ball to the mirth-loving Creoles, and almost the entire population of the village had 
gathered in the fort, where the dance was held. While the revelry was at its height, 
Clark and his tall backwoodsmen, treading silently through the darkness, came into the 
town, surprised the sentries, and surrounded the fort without causing any alarm.

	All the British and French capable of bearing arms were gathered in the fort to 
take part in or look on at the merrymaking.  When his men were posted Clark walked 
boldly forward through the open door, and leaning against the wall, looked at the 
dancers as they whirled around in the light of the flaring torches.  For some moments 
no one noticed him.  Then an Indian who had been lying with his chin on his hand, 
looking carefully over the gaunt figure of the stranger, sprang to his feet and uttered 
the wild war-whoop. Immediately the dancing ceased and the men ran to and fro in 
confusion; but Clark, stepping forward, bade them be at their ease, but to remember 
that henceforth they danced under the flag of the United States, and not under that of 
Great Britain.

	The surprise was complete and no resistance was attempted.  For twenty-four 
hours the Creoles were in abject terror.  Then Clark summoned their chief men 
together and explained that he came as their ally and not as their foe, and that if they 
would join with him they should be citizens of the American republic and treated in all 
respects on an equality with their comrades.  The Creoles, caring little for the British, 
and rather fickle of nature, accepted the proposition with joy and with the most 
enthusiastic loyalty toward Clark.  Not only that, but sending messengers to their 
kinsmen on the Wabash, they persuaded the people of Vincennes likewise to cast off 
their allegiance to the British king and to hoist the American flag.

	So far, Clark had conquered with greater ease than he had dared to hope. But 
when the news reached the British governor, Hamilton, at Detroit, he at once prepared 
to reconquer the land.  He had much greater forces at his command than Clark had; 
and in the fall of that year he came down to Vincennes by stream and portage, in a 
great fleet of canoes bearing five hundred fighting men - British regulars, French 
partizans and Indians.  The Vincennes Creoles refused to fight against the British, and 
the American officer who had been sent thither by Clark had no alternative but to 
surrender.

	If Hamilton had then pushed on and struck Clark in Illinois, having more than 
treble Clark's force, he could hardly have failed to win the victory; but the season was 
late and the journey so difficult that he did not believe it could be taken.  Accordingly 
he disbanded the Indians and sent some of his troops back to Detroit, announcing that 
when spring came he would march against Clark in Illinois.

	If Clark in turn had awaited the blow he would have surely met defeat; but he was 
a greater man than his antagonist, and he did what the other deemed impossible.

	Finding that Hamilton had sent home some of his troops and dispersed all his 
Indians, Clark realized that his chance was to strike before Hamilton's soldiers 
assembled again in the spring.  Accordingly he gathered together the pick of his men, 
together with a few Creoles, one hundred and seventy all told, and set out for 
Vincennes.  At first the journey was easy enough, for they passed across the snowy 
Illinois prairies, broken by great reaches of lofty woods.  They killed elk, buffalo and 
deer for food, there being no difficulty in getting all they wanted to eat; and at night 
they built huge fires by which to sleep, and feasted "like Indian war-dancers," as Clark 
said in his report.

	But when, in the middle of February, they reached the drowned lands of the 
Wabash, where the ice had just broken up and everything was flooded, the difficulties 
seemed almost insuperable and the march became painful and laborious to a degree.  
All day long the troops waded in the icy water and at night they could with difficulty find 
some little hillock on which to sleep. Only Clark's indomitable courage and 
cheerfulness kept the party in heart and enabled them to persevere.  However, 
persevere they did, and at last, on February 23, they came in sight of the town of 
Vincennes.  They captured a Creole who was out shooting ducks, and from him 
learned that their approach was utterly unsuspected and that there were many Indians 
in town.

	Clark was now in some doubt as to how to make his fight.  The British regulars 
dwelt in a small fort at one end of the town, where they had two light guns; but Clark 
feared lest if he made a sudden night attack the townspeople and Indians would from 
sheer fright turn against him.  He accordingly arranged, just before he himself marched 
in, to send in the captured duck-hunter, conveying a warning to the Indians and the 
Creoles that he was about to attack the town, but that his only quarrel was with the 
British, and that if the other inhabitants would stay in their own homes they would not 
be molested.

	Sending the duck-hunter ahead, Clark took up his march and entered the town 
just after night-fall.  The news conveyed by the released hunter astounded the 
townspeople and they talked it over eagerly and were in doubt what to do.  The 
Indians, not knowing how great might be the force that would assail the town, at once 
took refuge in the neighboring woods, while the Creoles retired to their own houses.  
The British knew nothing of what had happened until the Americans had actually 
entered the streets of the little village.  Rushing forward, Clark's men soon penned the 
regulars within their fort, where they kept them surrounded all night.  The next day a 
party of Indian warriors, who in the British interest had been ravaging the settlements 
of Kentucky, arrived and entered the town, ignorant that the Americans had captured 
it.  Marching boldly forward to the fort, they suddenly found it beleaguered, and before 
they could flee they were seized by the backwoodsmen. In their belts they carried the 
scalps of the slain settlers.  The savages were taken red-handed and the American 
frontiersmen were in no mood to show mercy.  All the Indians were toma-hawked in 
sight of the fort.

	For some time the British defended themselves well; but at length their guns 
were disabled, all of the gunners being picked off by the backwoods marksmen, and 
finally the garrison dared not so much as appear at a port-hole, so deadly was the fire 
from the long rifles.  Under such circumstances Hamilton was forced to surrender.

	No attempt was afterward made to molest the Americans in the land they had 
won, and upon the conclusion of peace the Northwest, which had been conquered by 
Clark, became part of the United States.



STORIES OF THE GREAT WEST
Roosevelt, Theodore
Part I: Stories From History
      
Lewis And Clark And The Exploration Of The Far West

Purpose Of The Exploration 
	The Far West, the West beyond the Mississippi, had been thrust on Jefferson, 
and given to the nation, by the rapid growth of the Old West, the West that lay between 
the Alleghanies and the Mississippi.  The actual title to the new territory had been 
acquired by the United States Government, acting for the whole nation.  It remained to 
explore the territory thus newly added to the national domain.  The Government did not 
yet know exactly what it had acquired, for the land was not only unmapped, but 
unexplored.  Nobody could tell what were the boundary lines which divided it from 
British America on the north and Mexico on the south, for nobody knew much of the 
country through which these lines ran; of most of it, indeed, nobody knew anything. On 
the new maps the country now showed as part of the United States; but the Indians 
who alone inhabited it were as little affected by the transfer as was the game they 
hunted.

	Beyond the Mississippi all that was really well known was the territory in the 
immediate neighborhood of the little French villages near the mouth of the Missouri.  
The Creole traders of these villages, and an occasional venturous American, had gone 
up the Mississippi to the country of the Sioux and the Mandans, where they had 
trapped and hunted and traded for furs with the Indians.  At the northernmost points 
that they reached they occasionally encountered traders who had traveled south or 
southwesterly from the wintry regions where the British fur companies reigned 
supreme.  The headwaters of the Missouri were absolutely unknown; nobody had 
penetrated the great plains, the vast seas of grass through which the Platte, the Little 
Missouri and the Yellowstone ran.  What lay beyond them and between them and the 
Pacific was not even guessed at.  The Rocky Mountains were not known to exist, so 
far as the territory newly acquired by the United States was concerned, although under 
the name of "Stonies" their northern extensions in British America were already down 
on some maps.

	The work of exploring these new lands fell, not to the wild hunters and trappers, 
such as those who had first explored Kentucky and Tennessee, but to officers of the 
United States army, leading parties of United States soldiers, in pursuance of the 
command of the Government or of its representatives.  The earliest and most 
important expeditions of Americans into the unknown country which the nation had just 
purchased were led by young officers of the regular army.

	The first of these expeditions was planned by Jefferson himself and authorized 
by Congress.  Nominally its purpose was in part to find out the most advantageous 
places for the establishment of trading stations with the Indian tribes over which our 
Government had acquired the titular suzerainty; but in reality it was purely a voyage of 
exploration, planned with intent to ascend the Missouri to its head, and thence to cross 
the continent to the Pacific.  The explorers were carefully instructed to report upon the 
geography, physical characteristics and zoology of the region traversed, as well as 
upon its wild human denizens.

	The two officers chosen to carry through the work belonged to families already 
honorably distinguished for service on the Western border.  One was Captain 
Meriwether Lewis, representatives of whose family had served so prominently in 
Dunmore's war; the other was Lieutenant (by courtesy Captain) William Clark, a 
younger brother of George Rogers Clark.  Clark had served with credit through 
Wayne's campaigns, and had taken part in the victory of the Fallen Timbers.  Lewis 
had seen his first service when he enlisted as a private in the forces which were 
marshalled to put down the whisky insurrection.  Later he served under Clark in 
Wayne's army.  He had also been President Jefferson's private secretary.

Start Of The Expedition 

	The young officers started on their trip accompanied by twenty-seven men who 
intended to make the whole journey.  Of this number, one, the interpreter and 
incidentally the best hunter of the party, was a half-breed; two were French voyageurs; 
one was a negro servant of Clark; nine were volunteers from Kentucky; and fourteen 
were regular soldiers.  All, however, except the black slave, were enlisted in the army 
before starting, so that they might be kept under regular discipline.  In addition to these 
twenty-seven men there were seven soldiers and nine voyageurs who started only to 
go to the Mandan villages on the Missouri, where the party intended to spend the first 
winter. They embarked in three large boats, abundantly supplied with arms, powder 
and lead, clothing, gifts for the Indians, and provisions.

	The starting point was St. Louis, which had only just been surrendered to the 
United States Government by the Spaniards, without any French intermediaries.  The 
explorers pushed off in May, 1804, and soon began stemming the strong current of the 
muddy Missouri, to whose unknown sources they intended to ascend.  For two or three 
weeks they occasionally passed farms and hamlets.  The most important of the little 
towns was St. Charles, where the people were all Creoles; the explorers in their 
journal commented upon the good temper and vivacity of these habitants, but dwelt on 
the shiftlessness they displayed and their readiness to sink back towards savagery, 
although they were brave and hardy enough.  The next most considerable town was 
peopled mainly by Americans, who had already begun to make numerous settlements 
in the new land.  The last squalid little village they passed claimed as one of its 
occasional residents old Daniel Boone himself.

	After leaving the final straggling log cabins of the settled country, the explorers, 
with sails and paddles, made their way through what is now the State of Missouri.  
They lived well, for their hunters killed many deer and wild turkey and some black bear 
and beaver, and there was an abundance of breeding water fowl.  Here and there 
were Indian encampments, but not many, for the tribes had gone westward to the 
great plains of what is now Kansas to hunt the buffalo.  Already buffalo and elk were 
scarce in Missouri, and the party did not begin to find them in any numbers until they 
reached the neighborhood of what is now southern Nebraska.

	From there onwards the game was found in vast herds and the party began to 
come upon those characteristic animals of the Great Plains which were as yet 
unknown to white men of our race.  The buffalo and the elk had once ranged eastward 
to the Alleghanies and were familiar to early wanderers through the wooded 
wilderness; but in no part of the east had their numbers ever remotely approached the 
astounding multitudes in which they were found on the Great Plains.  The curious 
prong-buck or prong-horned antelope was unknown east of the Great Plains.  So was 
the blacktail, or mule deer, which our adventurers began to find here and there as they 
gradually worked their way north-westward.  So were the coyotes, whose uncanny 
wailing after nightfall varied the sinister baying of the gray wolves; so were many of the 
smaller animals, notably the prairie dogs, whose populous villages awakened the lively 
curiosity of Lewis and Clark.

	In their note-books the two captains faithfully described all these new animals 
and all the strange sights they saw.  Few explorers who did and saw so much that was 
absolutely new have written of their deeds with such quiet absence of boastfulness, 
and have drawn their descriptions with such complete freedom from exaggeration.

	Moreover, what was of even greater importance, the two young captains 
possessed in perfection the qualities necessary to pilot such an expedition through 
unknown lands and among savage tribes.  They kept good discipline among the men; 
they never hesitated to punish severely any wrong-doer; but they were never over-
severe; and as they did their full part of the work and ran all the risks and suffered all 
the hardship exactly like the other members of the expedition, they were regarded by 
their followers with devoted affection and were served with loyalty and cheerfulness.

Among The Indians 

	In dealing with the Indians they showed good humor and common-sense mingled 
with ceaseless vigilance and unbending resolution.  Only men who possessed their 
tact and daring could have piloted the party safely among the warlike tribes they 
encountered.  Any act of weakness or timidity on the one hand, or of harshness or 
cruelty on the other, would have been fatal to the expedition; but they were careful to 
treat the tribes well and to try to secure their good-will, while at the same time putting 
an immediate stop to any insolence or outrage.  Several times they were in much 
jeopardy when they reached the land of the Dakotas and passed among the various 
ferocious tribes whom they knew, and whom we yet know, as the Sioux.  The French 
traders frequently came up river to the country of the Sioux, who often maltreated and 
robbed them.  In consequence Lewis and Clark found that the Sioux were inclined to 
regard the whites as people whom they could safely oppress.  The resolute bearing of 
the newcomers soon taught them that they were in error, and after a little hesitation the 
various tribes in each case became friendly.

	With all the Indian tribes the two explorers held councils and distributed presents, 
especially medals, among the head chiefs and warriors, informing them of the transfer 
of the territory from Spain to the United States and warning them that henceforth they 
must look to the President as their protector and not to the King, whether of England or 
of Spain.  The Indians all professed much satisfaction at the change, which of course 
they did not in the least understand, and for which they cared nothing.  Their easy 
acquiescence gave much groundless satisfaction to Lewis and Clark, who further, in a 
spirit of philanthropy, strove to make each tribe swear peace with its neighbors.  After 
some hesitation the tribe usually consented to this also, and the explorers, greatly 
gratified, passed on.  It is needless to say that as soon as they had disappeared the 
tribes promptly went to war again; and that in reality the Indians had only the vaguest 
idea as to what was meant by the ceremonies and the hoisting of the American flag.  
The wonder is that Clark, who had already had some experience with Indians, should 
have supposed that the councils, advice and proclamations would have any effect of 
the kind hoped for upon these wild savages.

	As the fall weather grew cold the party reached the Mandan village, where they 
halted and went into camp for the winter, building huts and a stout stockade, which 
they christened Fort Mandan.  Traders from St. Louis and also British traders from the 
North reached these villages, and the inhabitants were accustomed to dealing with the 
whites.  Throughout the winter the party was well treated by the Indians, and kept in 
good health and spirits; the journals frequently mention the fondness the men showed 
for dancing, although without partners of the opposite sex.  Yet they suffered much 
from the extreme cold, and at times from hunger, for it was hard to hunt in the winter 
weather, and the game was thin and poor.  Generally game could be killed in a day's 
hunt from the fort; but occasionally small parties of hunters went off for a trip of several 
days, and returned laden with meat; in one case they killed thirty-two deer, eleven elk 
and a buffalo; in another forty deer, sixteen elk and three buffalo; thirty-six deer and 
fourteen elk, etc., etc.  The buffalo remaining in the neighborhood during the winter 
were mostly old bulls, too lean to eat; and as the snows came on most of the antelope 
left for the rugged country farther west, swimming the Missouri in great bands.  Before 
the bitter weather began the explorers were much interested by the methods of the 
Indians in hunting, especially when they surrounded and slaughtered bands of buffalo 
on horseback; and by the curious pens, with huge V-shaped wings, into which they 
drove antelope.

	In the spring of 1805, Lewis and Clark again started westward, first sending 
down-stream ten of their companions, to carry home the notes of their trip so far, and a 
few valuable specimens.  The party that started westward numbered thirty-two adults, 
all told; for one sergeant had died and two or three persons had volunteered at the 
Mandan villages, including a rather worthless French "squaw-man," with an intelligent 
Indian wife, whose baby was but a few weeks old.

	From this point onwards, when they began to travel west instead of north, the 
explorers were in a country where no white man had ever trod.  It was not the first time 
the continent had been crossed.  The Spaniards had crossed and recrossed it, for two 
centuries, farther south.  In British America Mackenzie had already penetrated to the 
Pacific, while Hearne had made a far more noteworthy and difficult trip than 
Mackenzie, when he wandered over the terrible desolation of the Barren Grounds, 
which lie under the Arctic circle. But no man had ever crossed or explored that part of 
the continent which the United States had just acquired; a part far better fitted to be the 
home of our stock than the regions to the north or south.  It was the explorations of 
Lewis and Clark, and not those of Mackenzie on the north or of the Spaniards in the 
south, which were to bear fruit, because they pointed the way to the tens of thousands 
of settlers who were to come after them, and who were to build thriving 
commonwealths in the lonely wilderness which they had traversed.

In The Game Country 

	From the Little Missouri on to the head of the Missouri proper the explorers 
passed through a region where they saw few traces of Indians.  It literally swarmed 
with game, for it was one of the finest hunting-grounds in all the world.  It so continued 
for three quarters of a century.  Until after 1880 the region around the Little Missouri 
was essentially unchanged from what it was in the days of Lewis and Clark; game 
swarmed, and the few white hunters and trappers who followed the buffalo, the elk and 
the beaver were still at times in conflict with hunting parties from various Indian tribes. 
While ranching in this region I myself killed every kind of game encountered by Lewis 
and Clark.

	Once, on the return voyage, when Clark was descending the Yellowstone River, 
a vast herd of buffalo, swimming and wading, plowed its way across the stream where 
it was a mile broad, in a column so thick that the explorers had to draw up on shore 
and wait for an hour, until it passed by, before continuing their journey.  Two or three 
times the expedition was thus brought to a halt; and as the buffalo were so plentiful 
and so easy to kill, and as their flesh was very good, they were the mainstay for the 
explorers' table. Both going and returning this wonderful hunting country was a place 
of plenty. The party of course lived almost exclusively on meat, and they needed 
much, for, when they could get it, they consumed either a buffalo, or an elk or a deer, 
or four deer, every day.

	There was one kind of game which they at times found altogether too familiar.  
This was the grizzly bear, which they were the first white men to discover.  They called 
it indifferently the grizzly, gray, brown, and even white bear, to distinguish it from its 
smaller, glossy, black-coated brother with which they were familiar in the Eastern 
woods.  They found that the Indians greatly feared these bears, and after their first 
encounters they themselves treated them with much respect.  The grizzly was then the 
burly lord of the Western prairie, dreaded by all other game, and usually shunned even 
by the Indians.  In consequence it was very bold and savage.  Again and again these 
huge bears attacked the explorers of their own accord, when neither molested nor 
threatened.  They galloped after the hunters when they met them on horseback even 
in the open; and they attacked them just as freely when they found them on foot.  To 
go through the brush was dangerous; again and again one or another of the party was 
charged and forced to take to a tree, at the foot of which the bear sometimes mounted 
guard for hours before going off.  When wounded the beasts fought with desperate 
courage, and showed astonishing tenacity of life, charging any number of assailants, 
and succumbing but slowly even to mortal wounds.  In one case a bear that was on 
shore actually plunged into the water and swam out to attack one of the canoes as it 
passed.  However, by this time all of the party had become good hunters, expert in the 
use of their rifles, and they killed great numbers of their ursine foes.

	Nor were the bears their only brute enemies.  The rattlesnakes were often 
troublesome.  Unlike the bears, the wolves were generally timid, and preyed only on 
the swarming game; but one night a wolf crept into camp and seized a sleeper by the 
hand; when driven off he jumped upon another man, and was shot by a third.  A less 
intentional assault was committed by a buffalo bull which one night blundered past the 
fires, narrowly escaped trampling on the sleepers, and had the whole camp in an 
uproar before it rushed off into the darkness.  When hunted the buffalo occasionally 
charged; but there was not much danger in their chase.

	All these larger foes paled into insignificance compared with the mosquitoes.  
There are very few places on earth where these pests are so formidable as in the 
bottom lands of the Missouri, and for weeks and even months they made the lives of 
our explorers a torture.  No other danger, whether from hunger or cold, Indians or wild 
beasts, was so dreaded by the explorers as these tiny scourges.

	In the plains country the life of the explorers was very pleasant save only for the 
mosquitoes and the incessant clouds of driving sand along the river bottoms.  On their 
journey west through these true happy hunting grounds they did not meet with any 
Indians, and their encounters with the bears were only just sufficiently dangerous to 
add excitement to their life. Once or twice they were in peril from cloud-bursts, and 
they were lamed by the cactus spines on the prairie, and by the stones and sand of the 
river bed while dragging the boats against the current; but all these trials, labors and 
risks were only enough to give zest to their exploration of the unknown land.  At the 
Great Falls of the Missouri they halted, and were enraptured with their beauty and 
majesty; and here, as everywhere, they found the game so abundant that they lived in 
plenty.  As they journeyed up-stream through the bright summer weather, though they 
worked hard, it was work of a kind which was but a long holiday.  At nightfall they 
camped by the boats on the river bank.  Each day some of the party spent in hunting, 
either along the river bottoms through the groves of cottonwoods with shimmering, 
rustling leaves, or away from the river where the sunny prairies stretched into seas of 
brown grass, or where groups of rugged hills stood, fantastic in color and outline, and 
with stunted pines growing on the sides of their steep ravines. The only real suffering 
was that which occasionally befell someone who got lost, and was out for days at a 
time, until he exhausted all his powder and lead before finding the party.

	Fall had nearly come when they reached the head-waters of the Missouri. The 
end of the holiday-time was at hand, for they had before them the labor of crossing the 
great mountains so as to strike the head-waters of the Columbia. Their success at this 
point depended somewhat upon the Indian wife of the Frenchman who had joined 
them at Mandan.  She had been captured from one of the Rocky Mountains tribes and 
they relied on her as interpreter. Partly through her aid, and partly by their own 
exertions, they were able to find and make friends with a band of wandering 
Shoshones, from whom they got horses. Having cached their boats and most of their 
goods, they started westward through the forest-clad passes of the Rockies; before 
this they wandered and explored in several directions through the mountains and the 
foot-hills.  The open country had been left behind, and with it the time of plenty.  In the 
mountain forests the game was far less abundant than on the plains and far harder to 
kill.

	They now met many Indians of various tribes, all of them very different from the 
Indians of the Western Plains.  At this time the Indians, both east and west of the 
Rockies, already owned numbers of horses.  Although they had a few guns, they relied 
mainly on the spears and tomahawks, and bows and arrows with which they had 
warred and hunted from time immemorial; for only the tribes on the outer edges had 
come in contact with the whites, whether with occasional French and English traders 
who brought them goods, or with the mixed bloods of the northern Spanish 
settlements, upon which they raided. Around the mouth of the Columbia, however, the 
Indians knew a good deal about the whites; the river had been discovered by Captain 
Gray of Boston thirteen years before, and ships came there continually, while some of 
the Indian tribes were occasionally visited by traders from the British fur companies.

   See--Indian Woman With Water Jar: At this time the Indians, both east and 
west of the Rockies, already owned numbers of horses.  Although they had a few 
guns, they relied mainly on the spears and tomahawks, and bows and arrows with 
which they had warred and hunted from time immemorial; for only the tribes on the 
outer edges had come in contact with the whites, whether with occasional French and 
English traders who brought them goods, or with the mixed bloods of the northern 
Spanish settlements, upon which they raided.


	With one or two of these tribes the explorers had some difficulty, and owed their 
safety to their unceasing vigilance, and to the prompt dtcision with which they gave the 
Indians to understand that they would tolerate no bad treatment; while yet themselves 
refraining carefully from committing any wrong.  By most of the tribes they were well 
received, and obtained from them not only information of the route, but also a welcome 
supply of food.  At first they rather shrank from eating the dogs which formed the 
favorite dish of the Indians; but after a while they grew quite reconciled to dog's flesh; 
and in their journals noted that they preferred it to lean elk or deer meat, and were 
much more healthy while eating it.

	They reached the rain-shrouded forests of the coast before cold weather set in, 
and there they passed the winter, suffering somewhat from the weather, and now and 
then from hunger, though the hunters generally killed plenty of elk, and deer of the new 
kind, the blacktail of the Columbia.

Adventures On The Homeward Journey 

	In March, 1806, they started eastward to retrace their steps.  At first they did not 
live well, for it was before the time when the salmon came up-stream, and game was 
not common.  When they reached the snow-covered mountains there came another 
period of toil and starvation, and they were glad indeed when they emerged once more 
on the happy hunting-grounds of the Great Plains.  They found their caches 
undisturbed.  Early in July they separated for a time, Clark descending the Yellowstone 
and Lewis the Missouri, until they met at the junction of the two rivers.  The party which 
went down the Yellowstone at one time split into two, Clark taking command of one 
division, and a sergeant of the other; they built their own canoes, some of them made 
out of hollowed trees, while the others were bull boats, made of buffalo hides stretched 
on a frame.  As before, they reveled in the abundance of the game. They marveled at 
the incredible numbers of the buffalo whose incessant bellowing at this season filled 
the air with one continuous roar, which terrified their horses; they were astonished at 
the abundance and tameness of the elk; they fought their old enemies, the grizzly 
bears; and they saw and noted many strange and wonderful beasts and birds.

	To Lewis there befell other adventures.  Once, while he was out with three men, 
a party of eight Blackfoot warriors joined them and suddenly made a treacherous 
attack upon them and strove to carry off their guns and horses. But the wilderness 
veterans sprang to arms with a readiness that had become second nature.  One of 
them killed an Indian with a knife-thrust; Lewis himself shot another Indian, and the 
remaining six fled, carrying with them one of Lewis' horses, but losing four of their own, 
which the whites captured. This was the beginning of the long series of bloody 
skirmishes between the Blackfeet and the Rocky Mountain explorers and trappers.  
Clark, at about the same time, suffered at the hands of the Crows, who stole a number 
of his horses.

	None of the party was hurt by the Indians, but some time after the skirmish with 
the Blackfeet Lewis was accidentally shot by one of the Frenchmen of the party and 
suffered much from the wound.  Near the mouth of the Yellowstone Clark joined him, 
and the re-united company floated down the Missouri.  Before they reached the 
Mandan villages they encountered two white men, the first strangers of their own color 
the party had seen for a year and a half.  These were two American hunters named 
Dickson and Hancock, who were going up to trap the headwaters of the Missouri on 
their own account.  They had come from the Illinois country a year before to hunt and 
trap; they had been plundered, and one of them wounded, in an encounter with the 
fierce Sioux, but were undauntedly pushing forwards into the unknown wilderness 
towards the mountains.

	These two hardy and daring adventures formed the little vanguard of the bands 
of hunters and trappers, the famous Rocky Mountain men, who were to roam hither 
and thither across the great West in lawless freedom for the next three quarters of a 
century.  They accompanied the party back to the Mandan village; there one of the 
soldiers joined them, a man named Colter, so fascinated by the life of the wilderness 
that he was not willing to leave it, even for a moment's glimpse of the civilization from 
which he had been so long exiled. The three turned their canoe up-stream, while Lewis 
and Clark and the rest of the party drifted down past the Sioux.

	The further voyage of the explorers was uneventful.  They had difficulties with the 
Sioux of course, but they held them at bay.  They killed game in abundance, and went 
downstream as fast as sails, oars and current could carry them.  In September they 
reached St. Louis and forwarded to Jefferson an account of what they had done.

	They had done a great deed, for they had opened the door into the heart of the 
far West.  Close on their tracks followed the hunters, trappers and fur traders, who 
themselves made ready the way for the settlers whose descendants were to possess 
the land.  As for the two leaders of the explorers, Lewis was made Governor of 
Louisiana Territory, and a couple of years afterwards died, as was supposed, by his 
own hand, in a squalid log cabin on the Chickasaw trace - though it was never certain 
that he had not been murdered.  Clark was afterwards Governor of the territory, when 
its name had been changed to Missouri, and he also served honorably as Indian 
agent. But neither of them did anything further of note; nor indeed was it necessary, for 
they had performed a feat which will always give them a place on the honor roll of 
American worthies.

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STORIES OF THE GREAT WEST
Roosevelt, Theodore
Part I: Stories From History
    
Remember The Alamo

	"Thermopylae had its messengers of death, but the Alamo had none." These 
were the words with which a United States senator referred to one of the most resolute 
and effective fights ever waged by brave men against overwhelming odds in the face 
of certain death.

	Soon after the close of the second war with Great Britain, parties of American 
settlers began to press forward into the rich, sparsely settled territory of Texas, then a 
portion of Mexico.  At first these immigrants were well received, but the Mexicans 
speedily grew jealous of them, and oppressed them in various ways.  In consequence, 
when the settlers felt themselves strong enough, they revolted against Mexican rule, 
and declared Texas to be an independent republic.  Immediately Santa Anna, the 
Dictator of Mexico, gathered a large army and invaded Texas.  The slender forces of 
the settlers were unable to meet his hosts.  They were pressed back by the Mexicans, 
and dreadful atrocities were committed by Santa Anna and his lieutenants.

	In the United States there was great enthusiasm for the struggling Texans, and 
many bold backwoodsmen and Indian-fighters swarmed to their help. Among them the 
two most famous were Sam Houston and David Crockett.  Houston was the younger 
man, and had already led an extraordinary and varied career. When a mere lad he ran 
away from home and joined the Cherokees, living among them for some years; then 
he returned home.  He had fought under Andrew Jackson in his campaigns against the 
Creeks, and had been severely wounded at the battle of the Horse-shoe Bend.  He 
had risen to the highest political honors in his State, becoming Governor of 
Tennessee; and then suddenly, in a fit of moody longing for the life of the wilderness, 
he gave up his Governorship, left the State, and crossed the Mississippi, going to join 
his old comrades, the Cherokees, in their new home along the waters of the Arkansas.  
Here he dressed, lived, fought, hunted and drank precisely like any Indian, becoming 
one of the chiefs.

	David Crockett was born soon after the Revolutionary War.  He, too, had taken 
part under Jackson in the campaigns against the Creeks, and had afterward become a 
man of mark in Tennessee, and gone to Congress as a Whig; but he had quarreled 
with Jackson, and been beaten for Congress, and in his disgust he left the State and 
decided to join the Texans.  He was the most famous rifle-shot in all the United States, 
and the most successful hunter, so that his skill was a proverb all along the border.

	David Crockett journeyed south by boat and horse, making his way steadily 
toward the distant plains where the Texans were waging their life-and-death fight.  
Texas was a wild place in those days, and the old hunter had more than one hair-
breadth escape from Indians, desperadoes, and savage beasts ere he got to the 
neighborhood of San Antonio, and joined another adventurer, a bee-hunter, bent on 
the same errand as himself.  The two had been in ignorance of exactly what the 
situation in Texas was; but they soon found that the Mexican army was marching 
toward San Antonio, whither they were going.  Near the town was an old Spanish fort, 
the Alamo, in which the hundred and fifty American defenders of the place had 
gathered.  Santa Anna had four thousand troops with him.  The Alamo was a mere 
shell, utterly unable to withstand either a bombardment or a regular assault.  It was 
evident, therefore, that those within it would be in the utmost jeopardy if the place were 
seriously assaulted, but old Crockett and his companion never wavered.  They were 
fearless and resolute, and masters of woodcraft, and they managed to slip through the 
Mexican lines and join the defenders within the walls.  The bravest, the hardiest, the 
most reckless men of the border were there; among them were Colonel Travis, the 
commander of the fort, and Bowie, the inventor of the famous bowie-knife.  They were 
a wild and ill-disciplined band, little used to restraint or control, but they were men of 
iron courage and great bodily powers, skilled in the use of their weapons, and ready to 
meet with stern and uncomplaining indifference whatever doom fate might have in 
store for them.

	Soon Santa Anna approached with his army, took possession of the town, and 
besieged the fort.  The defenders knew there was scarcely a chance of rescue, and 
that it was hopeless to expect that one hundred and fifty men, behind defenses so 
weak, could beat off four thousand trained soldiers, well armed and provided with 
heavy artillery; but they had no idea of flinching, and made a desperate defense.  The 
days went by, and no help came, while Santa Anna got ready his lines and began a 
furious cannonade.  His gunners were unskilled, however, and he had to serve the 
guns from a distance; for when they were pushed nearer the American riflemen crept 
forward under cover and picked off the artillerymen.  Old Crockett thus killed five men 
at one gun. But, by degrees, the bombardment told.  The walls of the Alamo were 
battered and riddled; and when they had been breached so as to afford no obstacle to 
the rush of his soldiers, Santa Anna commanded that they be stormed.

	The storming took place on March 6, 1836.  The Mexican troops came on well 
and steadily, breaking through the outer defences at every point, for the lines were too 
long to be manned by the few Americans.  The frontiersmen then retreated to the inner 
building, and a desperate hand-to-hand conflict followed, the Mexicans thronging in, 
shooting the Americans with their muskets and thrusting at them with lance and 
bayonet, while the Americans, after firing their long rifles, clubbed them and fought 
desperately, one against many; and they also used their bowie-knives and revolvers 
with deadly effect. The fight reeled to and fro between the shattered walls, each 
American the center of a group of foes; but, for all their strength and their wild fighting 
courage, the defenders were too few, and the struggle could have but one end. One by 
one the tall riflemen succumbed, after repeated thrusts with bayonet and lance, until 
but three or four were left.  Colonel Travis, the commander, was among them; and so 
was Bowie, who was sick and weak from a wasting disease, but who rallied all his 
strength to die fighting, and who, in the final struggle, slew several Mexicans with his 
revolver, and with his big knife, of the kind to which he had given his name. Then these 
fell, too, and the last man stood at bay.  It was old Davy Crockett.  Wounded in a 
dozen places, he faced his foes with his back to the wall, ringed round by the bodies of 
the men he had slain.  So desperate was the fight he waged that the Mexicans who 
thronged round about him were beaten back for the moment, and no one dared to run 
in upon him.  Accordingly, while the lancers held him where he was, for, weakened by 
wounds and loss of blood, he could not break through them, the musketeers loaded 
their carbines and shot him down.  Santa Anna declined to give him mercy.  Some say 
that when Crockett fell from his wounds, he was taken alive, and was then shot by 
Santa Anna's order; but his fate cannot be told with certainty, for not a single American 
was left alive.  At any rate, after Crockett fell the fight was over.  Every one of the 
hardy men who had held the Alamo lay still in death. Yet they died well avenged, for 
four times their number fell at their hands in the battle.

	Santa Anna had but a short while in which to exult over the bloody and hard-won 
victory.  Already a rider from the rolling Texas plains, going north through the Indian 
Territory, had told Houston that the Texans were up and were striving for their liberty.  
At once in Houston's mind there kindled a longing to return to the men of his race at 
the time of their need.  Mounting his horse, he rode south by night and day, and was 
hailed by the Texans as a heavensent leader.  He took command of their forces, 
eleven hundred stark riflemen, and at the battle of San Jacinto he and his men 
charged the Mexican hosts with the cry of "Remember the Alamo." Almost immediately 
the Mexicans were overthrown with terrible slaughter; Santa Anna himself was 
captured, and the freedom of Texas was won at a blow.



STORIES OF THE GREAT WEST
Roosevelt, Theodore
Part II: Stories Of Adventure
    
The Cattle Country Of The Far West

	The Great grazing lands of the West lie in what is known as the arid belt, which 
stretches from British America on the north to Mexico on the south, through the middle 
of the United States.  It includes New Mexico, part of Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, 
Montana, and the western portion of Texas, Kansas, Nebraska and Dakota.  It must 
not be understood by this that more cattle are to be found here than elsewhere, for the 
contrary is true, it being a fact often lost sight of that the number of cattle raised on the 
small, thick-lying farms of the fertile Eastern States is actually many times greater than 
that of those scattered over the vast, barren ranches of the far West; for stock will 
always be most plentiful in districts where corn and other winter food can be grown.  
But in this arid belt, and in this arid belt only - save in a few similar tracts on the Pacific 
slope - stock-raising is almost the sole industry, except in the mountain districts where 
there is mining. The whole region is one vast stretch of grazing country, with only here 
and there spots of farmland, in most places there being nothing more like agriculture 
than is implied in the cutting of some tons of wild hay or the planting of a garden patch 
for home use.  This is especially true of the northern portion of the region, which 
comprises the basin of the Upper Missouri, and with which alone I am familiar.  Here 
there are no fences to speak of, and all the land north of the Black Hills and the Big 
Horn Mountains and between the Rockies and the Dakota wheat-fields might be 
spoken of as one gigantic, unbroken pasture, where cowboys and branding-irons take 
the place of fences.

	The country throughout this great Upper Missouri basin has a wonderful 
sameness of character; and the rest of the arid belt, lying to the southward, is closely 
akin to it in its main features.  A traveler seeing it for the first time is especially struck 
by its look of parched, barren desolation; he can with difficulty believe that it will 
support cattle at all.  It is a region of light rainfall; the grass is short and comparatively 
scanty; there is no timber except along the beds of the streams, and in many places 
there are alkali deserts where nothing grows but sagebrush and cactus.  Now the land 
stretches out into level, seemingly endless plains or into rolling prairies; again it is 
broken by abrupt hills and deep, winding valleys; or else it is crossed by chains of 
buttes, usually bare, but often clad with a dense growth of dwarfed pines or gnarled, 
stunted cedars.  The muddy rivers run in broad, shallow beds, which after heavy 
rainfalls are filled to the brim by the swollen torrents, while in droughts the larger 
streams dwindle into sluggish trickles of clearer water, and the smaller ones dry up 
entirely, save in occasional deep pools.

	All through the region, except on the great Indian reservations, there has been a 
scanty and sparse settlement, quite peculiar in its character. In the forest the 
woodchopper comes first; on the fertile prairies the granger is the pioneer; but on the 
long, stretching uplands of the far West it is the men who guard and follow the horned 
herds that prepare the way for the settlers who come after.  The high plains of the 
Upper Missouri and its tributary rivers were first opened, and are still held, by the 
stockmen, and the whole civilization of the region has received the stamp of their 
marked and individual characteristics.  They were from the South, not from the East, 
although many men from the latter region came out along the great transcontinental 
railway lines and joined them in their northern migration.

	They were not dwellers in towns, and from the nature of their industry lived as far 
apart from each other as possible.  In choosing new ranges, old cow-hands, who are 
also seasoned plainsmen, are invariably sent ahead, perhaps a year in advance, to 
spy out the land and pick the best places.  One of these may go by himself, or more 
often, especially if they have to penetrate little known or entirely unknown tracts, two or 
three will go together, the owner or manager of the herd himself being one of them. 
Perhaps their herds may already be on the border of the wild and uninhabited country; 
in that case they may have to take but a few days' journey before finding the stretches 
of sheltered long-grass land that they seek.  For instance, when I wished to move my 
own elkhorn steer brand on to a new ranch I had to spend barely a week in traveling 
north among the Little Missouri Bad Lands before finding what was then untrodden 
ground far outside the range of any of my neighbors' cattle. But if a large outfit is going 
to shift its quarters it must go much farther; and both the necessity and the chance for 
long wanderings were especially great when the final overthrow of the northern Horse 
Indians opened the whole Upper Missouri basin at one sweep to the stockmen.  Then 
the advance-guards or explorers, each on one horse and leading another with food 
and bedding, were often absent months at a time, threading their way through the 
trackless wastes of plain, plateau and river-bottom.  If possible they would choose a 
country that would be good for winter and summer alike; but often this could not be 
done, and then they would try to find a well-watered tract on which the cattle could be 
summered, and from which they could be driven in fall to their sheltered winter range - 
for the cattle in winter eat snow, and an entirely waterless region, if broken, and with 
good pasturage, is often the best possible winter ground, as it is sure not to have been 
eaten off at all during the summer; while in the bottoms the grass is always cropped 
down soonest. Many outfits regularly shift their herds every spring and fall; but with us 
in the Bad Lands all we do, when cold weather sets in, is to drive our beasts off the 
scantily grassed river-bottom back ten miles or more among the broken buttes and 
plateaus of the uplands to where the brown hay, cured on the stalk, stands thick in the 
winding coulees.

	These lookouts or forerunners having returned, the herds are set in motion as 
early in the spring as may be, so as to get on the ground in time to let the travel-worn 
beasts rest and gain flesh before winter sets in. Each herd is accompanied by a dozen, 
or a score, or a couple of score, of cowboys, according to its size, and beside it rumble 
and jolt the heavy four-horse wagons that hold the food and bedding of the men and 
the few implements they will need at the end of their journey.  As long as possible they 
follow the trails made by the herds that have already traveled in the same direction, 
and when these end they strike out for themselves.  In the Upper Missouri basin, the 
pioneer herds soon had to scatter out and each find its own way among the great 
dreary solitudes, creeping carefully along so that the cattle should not be overdriven 
and should have water at the halting-places.  An outfit might thus be months on its 
lonely journey, slowly making its way over melancholy, pathless plains, or down the 
valleys of the lonely rivers.  It was tedious, harassing work, as the weary cattle had to 
be driven carefully and quietly during the day and strictly guarded at night, with a 
perpetual watch kept for Indians or white horse-thieves.  Often they would skirt the 
edges of the streams for days at a time, seeking for a ford or a good swimming 
crossing, and if the water was up and the quicksand deep the danger to the riders was 
serious and the risk of loss among the cattle very great.

	At last, after days of excitement and danger and after months of weary, 
monotonous toil, the chosen ground is reached and the final camp pitched. The 
footsore animals are turned loose to shift for themselves, outlying camps of two or 
three men each being established to hem them in.  Meanwhile the primitive ranch-
house, out-buildings and corrals are built, the unhewn cottonwood logs being chinked 
with moss and mud, while the roofs are of branches covered with dirt, spades and 
axes being the only tools needed for the work.  Bunks, chairs and tables are all home-
made, and as rough as the houses they are in.  The supplies of coarse, rude food are 
carried perhaps two or three hundred miles from the nearest town, either in the ranch-
wagons or else by some regular freighting outfit, the huge canvas-topped prairie 
schooners of which are each drawn by several yoke of oxen, or perhaps by six or eight 
mules.  To guard against numerous mishaps of prairie travel, two or three of these 
prairie schooners usually go together, the brawny teamsters, known either as "bull-
whackers" or as "mule-skinners," stalking beside their slow-moving teams.

	The small outlying camps are often tents, or mere dug-outs in the ground. But at 
the main ranch there will be a cluster of log buildings, including a separate cabin for 
the foreman or ranchman; often another in which to cook and eat; a long house for the 
men to sleep in; stables, sheds, a blacksmith's shop, etc., - the whole group forming 
quite a little settlement, with the corrals, the stacks of natural hay, and the patches of 
fenced land for gardens or horse pastures.  This little settlement may be situated right 
out in the treeless, nearly level open, but much more often is placed in the partly 
wooded bottom of a creek or river, sheltered by the usual background of somber 
brown hills.

	When the northern plains began to be settled, such a ranch would at first be 
absolutely alone in the wilderness, but others of the same sort were sure soon to be 
established within twenty or thirty miles on one side or the other. The lives of the men 
in such places were strangely cut off from the outside world, and, indeed, the same is 
true to a hardly less extent at the present day.  Sometimes the wagons are sent for 
provisions, and the beef-steers are at stated times driven off for shipment.  Parties of 
hunters and trappers call now and then.  More rarely small bands of emigrants go by in 
search of new homes, impelled by the restless, aimless craving for change so deeply 
grafted in the breast of the American borderer; the white-topped wagons are loaded 
with domestic goods, with sallow, dispirited-looking women, and with tow-headed 
children; while the gaunt, moody frontiersmen slouch alongside, rifle on shoulder, lank, 
homely, uncouth, and yet with a curious suggestion of grim strength underlying it all.  
Or cowboys from neighboring ranches will ride over, looking for lost horses, or seeing 
if their cattle have strayed off the range.  But this is all.  Civilization seems as remote 
as if we were living in an age long past.  The whole existence is patriarchal in 
character; it is the life of men who live in the open, who tend their herds on horseback, 
who go armed and ready to guard their lives by their own prowess, whose wants are 
very simple, and who call no man master.  Ranching is an occupation like those of 
vigorous, primitive pastoral peoples, having little in common with the humdrum, 
workaday business world of the nineteenth century; and the free ranchman in his 
manner of life shows more kinship to an Arab sheik than to a sleek city merchant or 
tradesman.



STORIES OF THE GREAT WEST
Roosevelt, Theodore
Part II: Stories Of Adventure
    
The Home Ranch

	My home ranch lies on both sides of the Little Missouri, the nearest ranchman 
above me being about twelve, and the nearest below me about ten, miles distant.  The 
general course of the stream here is northerly, but, while flowing through my ranch, it 
takes a great westerly reach of some three miles, walled in, as always, between chains 
of steep, high bluffs half a mile or more apart.  The stream twists down through the 
valley in long sweeps, leaving oval wooded bottoms, first on one side and then on the 
other; and in an open glade among the thick-growing timber stands the long, low 
house of hewn logs.

	Just in front of the ranch veranda is a line of old cottonwoods that shade it during 
the fierce heats of summer, rendering it always cool and pleasant.  But a few feet 
beyond these trees comes the cut-off bank of the river, through whose broad, sandy 
bed the shallow stream winds as if lost, except when a freshet fills it from brim to brim 
with foaming yellow water. The bluffs that wall in the river-valley curve back in semi-
circles, rising from its alluvial bottom generally as abrupt cliffs, but often as steep, 
grassy slopes that lead up to great level plateaus; and the line is broken every mile or 
two by the entrance of a coulee, or dry creek, whose head branches may be twenty 
miles back.  Above us, where the river comes round the bend, the valley is very 
narrow, and the high buttes bounding it rise, sheer and barren, into scalped hill-peaks 
and naked knife-blade ridges.

	The other buildings stand in the same open glade with the ranch house, the 
dense growth of cottonwoods and matted, thorny underbrush making a wall all about, 
through which we have chopped our wagon roads and trodden out our own bridle-
paths.  The cattle have now trampled down this brush a little, but deer still lie in it, only 
a couple of hundred yards from the house; and from the door, door sometimes in the 
evening one can see them peer out into the open, or make their way down, timidly and 
cautiously, to drink at the river. The stable, sheds and other outbuildings, with the 
hayricks and the pens for such cattle as we bring in during the winter, are near the 
house; the patch of fenced garden land is on the edge of the woods; and near the 
middle of the glade stands the high, circular horse-corral, with a snubbing-post in the 
center, and a wing built out from one side of the gate entrance, so that the saddle-
band can be driven in without trouble.  As it is very hard to work cattle where there is 
much brush, the larger cow-corral is some four miles off on an open bottom.

	A ranchman's life is certainly a very pleasant one, albeit generally varied with 
plenty of hardship and anxiety.  Although occasionally he passes days of severe toil - 
for example, if he goes on the round-up he works as hard as any of his men - yet he 
no longer has to undergo the monotonous drudgery attendant upon the tasks of the 
cowboy or of the apprentice in the business. His fare is simple; but, if he chooses, it is 
good enough.  Many ranches are provided with nothing at all but salt pork, canned 
goods and bread; indeed, it is a curious fact that in traveling through the cow country it 
is often impossible to get any milk or butter; but this is only because the owners or 
managers are too lazy to take enough trouble to insure their own comfort.  We 
ourselves always keep up two or three cows, choosing such as are naturally tame, and 
so we invariably have plenty of milk and, when there is time for churning, a good deal 
of butter.  We also keep hens, which, in spite of the damaging inroads of hawks, bob-
cats and foxes, supply us with eggs, and in time of need, when our rifles have failed to 
keep us in game, with stewed, roast or fried chicken also.  From our garden we get 
potatoes, and unless drought, frost, or grasshoppers interfere (which they do about 
every second year) other vegetables as well.  For fresh meat we depend chiefly upon 
our prowess as hunters.

	During much of the time we are away on the different round-ups, that "wheeled 
house," the great four-horse wagon, being then our home; but when at the ranch our 
routine of life is always much the same, save during the excessively bitter weather of 
midwinter, when there is little to do except to hunt, if the days are fine enough.  We 
breakfast early - before dawn when the nights have grown long, and rarely later than 
sunrise, even in midsummer. Perhaps before this meal, certainly the instant it is over, 
the man whose duty it is rides off to hunt up and drive in the saddle-band.  Each of us 
has his own string of horses, eight or ten in number, and the whole band usually split 
up into two or three companies.  In addition to the scattered groups of the saddle-
band, our six or eight mares, with their colts, keep by themselves, and are rarely 
bothered by us, as no cowboy ever rides anything but horses, because mares give 
great trouble where all the animals have to be herded together.  Once every two or 
three days somebody rides round and finds out where each of these smaller bands is, 
but the man who goes out in the morning merely gathers one bunch.  He drives these 
into the corral, the other men (who have been lolling idly about the house or stable, 
fixing their saddles or doing any odd job) coming out with their ropes as soon as they 
hear the patter of the unshod hoofs and the shouts of the cowboy driver. Going into the 
corral, and standing near the center, each of us picks out some one of his own string 
from among the animals that are trotting and running in a compact mass round the 
circle; and after one or more trials, according to his skill, ropes it and leads it out.  
When all have caught their horses the rest are again turned lose, together with those 
that have been kept up overnight.  Some horses soon get tame and do not need to be 
roped; my pet cutting pony, little Muley, and good old Manitou, my companion in so 
many hunting trips, will neither of them stay with the rest of their fellows that are 
jamming and jostling each other as they rush round in the dust of the corral, but they 
very sensibly walk up and stand quietly with the men in the middle, by the snubbing-
post.  Both are great pets, Manitou in particular; the wise old fellow being very fond of 
bread and sometimes coming up of his own accord to the ranch house and even 
putting his head into the door to beg for it.

	Once saddled, the men ride off on their different tasks; for almost everything is 
done in the saddle, except that in winter we cut our firewood and quarry our coal - both 
on the ranch - and in summer attend to the garden and put up what wild hay we need.

	If any horses have strayed, one or two of the men will be sent off to look for 
them; for hunting lost horses is one of the commonest and most irksome of our duties.  
Every outfit always has certain of its horses at large, and if they remain out long 
enough they become as wild and wary as deer and have to be regularly surrounded 
and run down.

	If the men do not go horse-hunting they may ride off over the range; for there is 
generally some work to be done among the cattle, such as driving in and branding 
calves that have been overlooked by the round-up, or getting some animal out of a 
bog-hole.  During the early spring months, before the round-up begins, the chief work 
is in hauling out mired cows and steers; and if we did not keep a sharp lookout the 
losses at this season would be very serious.  As long as everything is frozen solid 
there is, of course, no danger from miring; but when the thaw comes, along towards 
the beginning of March, a period of new danger to the cattle sets in.  When the ice 
breaks up, the streams are left with an edging of deep bog, while the quicksand is at 
its worst.  As the frost goes out of the soil, the ground round every little alkali-spring 
changes into a trembling quagmire, and deep holes of slimy, tenacious mud form in 
the bottom of all the gullies.  The cattle, which have had to live on snow for three or 
four months, are very eager for water, and are weak and in poor condition.  They rush 
heedlessly into any pool and stand there, drinking gallons of the icy water and sinking 
steadily into the mud. When they try to get out they are already too deep down, and 
are too weak to make a prolonged struggle.  After one or two fits of desperate 
floundering they resign themselves to their fate with dumb apathy and are lost, unless 
some one of us riding about discovers and hauls them out.

	When the river is up it is a very common thing for a horseman to have great 
difficulty in crossing, for the swift, brown water runs over a bed of deep quicksand that 
is ever shifting.  An inexperienced horse, or a mule, - for a mule is useless in mud or 
quicksand, - becomes mad with fright in such a crossing, and, after speedily 
exhausting its strength in wild struggles, will throw itself on its side and drown unless 
the rider gets it out.  An old horse used to such work will, on the contrary, take matters 
quietly and often push along through really dangerous quicksand.  Old Manitou never 
loses his head for an instant; but, now resting a few seconds, now feeling his way 
cautiously forward, and now making two or three desperate plunges, will go on 
wherever a horse possibly can.  It is really dangerous crossing some of the creeks, as 
the bottom may give way where it seems hardest; and if one is alone he may work 
hours in vain before getting his horse out, even after taking off both saddle and bridle, 
the only hope being to head it so that every plunge takes it an inch or two in the right 
direction.

	Nor are mud-holes the only danger the horseman has to fear; for in much of the 
Bad Lands the buttes are so steep and broken that it needs genuine mountaineering 
skill to get through them, and no horse but a Western one, bred to the business, could 
accomplish the feat.  In many parts of our country it is impossible for a horseman who 
does not know the land to cross it, and it is difficult enough even for an experienced 
hand.

	Occasionally it is imperatively necessary to cross some of the worst parts of the 
Bad Lands with a wagon, and such a trip is exhausting and laborious beyond belief.  
Often the wagon will have to be taken to pieces every few hundred yards in order to 
get it over a ravine, lower it into a valley, or drag it up a cliff.  One outfit, that a year ago 
tried to take a short cut through some of the Bad Lands of the Powder River, made just 
four miles in three days, and then had to come back to their starting-point after all.  But 
with only saddle-horses we feel that it must be a very extraordinary country indeed if, 
in case of necessity, we cannot go through it.

	The long forenoon's work, with its attendant mishaps to man and beast, being 
over, the men who have been out among the horses and cattle come riding in, to be 
joined by their fellows - if any there be - who have been hunting, or haying, or 
chopping wood.  The midday dinner is variable as to time, for it comes when the men 
have returned from their work; but, whatever be the hour, it is the most substantial 
meal of the day, and we feel that we have little fault to find with a table on the clean 
cloth of which are spread platters of smoked elk meat, loaves of good bread, jugs and 
bowls of milk, saddles of venison or broiled antelope steaks, perhaps roast and fried 
prairie chickens, with eggs, butter, wild plums, and tea or coffee.

	The afternoon's tasks are usually much the same as the morning's, but this time 
is often spent in doing the odds and ends; as, for instance, it may be devoted to 
breaking-in a new horse.  Large outfits generally hire a bronco-buster to do this; but we 
ourselves almost always break our own horses, two or three of my men being pretty 
good riders, although none of them can claim to be anything out of the common.  A 
first-class flash rider or bronco-buster receives high wages, and deserves them, for he 
follows a most dangerous trade, at which no man can hope to grow old; his work being 
infinitely harder than that of an Eastern horse-breaker or rough-rider, because he has 
to do it in such a limited time.  A good rider is a good rider all the world over; but an 
Eastern or English horse-breaker and Western bronco-buster have so little in common 
with each other as regards style or surroundings, and are so totally out of place in 
doing each other's work, that it is almost impossible to get either to admit that the other 
has any merits at all as a horseman, for neither could sit in the saddle of the other or 
could without great difficulty perform his task.  The ordinary Eastern seat, which 
approaches more or less the seat of a cross-country rider or fox-hunter, is nearly as 
different from the cowboy's seat as from that of a man who rides bareback.  The 
stirrups on a stock saddle are much farther back than they are on an ordinary English 
one (a difference far more important than the high horn and cantle of the former), and 
the man stands nearly erect in them, instead of having his legs bent; and he grips with 
the thighs and not with the knees, throwing his feet well out.  Some of the things he 
teaches his horse would be wholly useless to an Eastern equestrian: for example, one 
of the first lessons the newly-caught animal has to learn is not to "run on a rope"; and 
he is taught this by being violently snubbed up, probably turning a somersault, the first 
two or three times that he feels the noose settle round his neck, and makes a mad 
rush for liberty.  The snubbing-post is the usual adjunct in teaching such a lesson; but 
a skillful man can do without any help and throw a horse clean over by holding the 
rope tight against the left haunch, at the same time leaning so far back, with the legs 
straight in front, that the heels dig deep into the ground when the strain comes, and the 
horse, running out with the slack of the rope, is brought up standing, or even turned 
head over heels by the shock.  Cowboys are probably the only working-men in the 
world who invariably wear gloves, buckskin gauntlets being preferred, as otherwise the 
ropes would soon take every particle of skin off their hands.

	A bronco-buster has to work by such violent methods in consequence of the 
short amount of time of his command.  Horses are cheap, each outfit has a great 
many, and the wages for breaking an animal are but five or ten dollars. Three rides, of 
an hour or two each, on as many consecutive days, are the outside number a bronco-
buster deems necessary before turning an animal over as "broken." The average 
bronco-buster, however, handles horses so very rudely that we prefer, aside from 
motives of economy, to break our own; and this is always possible, if we take enough 
time.  The best and quietest horses on the ranch are far from being those broken by 
the best riders; on the contrary, they are those that have been handled most gently, 
although firmly, and that have had the greatest number of days devoted to their 
education.

	Some horses, of course, are almost incurably vicious, and must be conquered by 
main force.  One pleasing brute on my ranch will at times rush at a man open-mouthed 
like a wolf, and this is a regular trick of the range-stallions.

	If not breaking horses, mending saddles or doing something else of the sort, the 
cowboys will often while away their leisure moments by practising with the rope.  A 
forty-foot lariat is the one commonly used, for the ordinary range at which a man can 
throw it is only about twenty-five feet. Few men can throw forty feet; and to do this, 
taking into account the coil, needs a sixty-foot rope.

	When the day's work is over we take supper, and bed-time comes soon 
afterward, for the men who live on ranches sleep well and soundly.  As a rule, the 
nights are cool and bracing, even in midsummer; except when we occasionally have a 
spell of burning weather, with a steady, hot wind that blows in our faces like a furnace 
blast, sending the thermometer far up above a hundred and making us gasp for 
breath, even at night, in the dry-baked heat of the air.  But it is only rarely that we get a 
few days of this sort; generally, no matter how unbearable the heat of the day has 
been, we can at least sleep pleasantly at night.

	A ranchman's work is, of course, free from much of the sameness attendant upon 
that of a mere cowboy.  One day he will ride out with his men among the cattle, or after 
strayed horses; the next day he may hunt, so as to keep the ranch in meat; then he 
can make the tour of his outlying camps; or, again, may join one of the round-ups for a 
week or two, perhaps keeping with it the entire time it is working.  On occasions he will 
have a good deal of spare time on his hands, which, if he chooses, he can spend in 
reading or writing. If he cares for books, there will be many a worn volume in the 
primitive little sitting-room, with its log walls and huge fire-place; but after a hard day's 
work a man will not read much, but will rock to and fro in the flickering firelight, talking 
sleepily over his success in the day's chase and the difficulty he has had with the 
cattle; or else may simply lie stretched at full length on the elk-hides and wolf-skins in 
front of the hearthstone, listening in drowsy silence to the roar and crackle of the 
blazing logs and to the moaning of the wind outside.

	In the sharp fall weather the riding is delicious all day long; but even in the late 
spring, and all through the summer, we try, if we can, to do our work before the heat of 
the day, and if going on a long ride, whether to hunt or for other purposes, leave the 
ranch house by dawn.

	The early rides in the spring mornings have a charm all their own, for they are 
taken when, for the one and only time during the year, the same brown landscape of 
these high plains turns to a vivid green, as the new grass sprouts and the trees and 
bushes thrust forth the young leaves; and at dawn, with the dew glittering everywhere, 
all things show at their best and freshest.  The flowers are out and a man may gallop 
for miles at a stretch with his horse's hoofs sinking at every stride into the carpet of 
prairie roses, whose short stalks lift the beautiful blossoms but a few inches from the 
ground.  Even in the waste places the cactuses are blooming; and one kind in 
particular, a dwarfish, globular plant, with its mass of splendid crimson flowers glows 
against the sides of the gray buttes like a splash of flame.

	The ravines, winding about and splitting into a labyrinth of coulees, with chains of 
rounded hills to separate them, have groves of trees in their bottoms, along the sides 
of the water-courses.  In these are found the blacktail deer, and his cousin, the 
whitetail, too, with his flaunting flag; but in the springtime, when we are after antelope 
only, we must go out farther to the flat prairie land on the divide.  Here, in places, the 
level, grassy plains are strewn with mounds and hillocks of red or gray scoria, that 
stand singly or clustered into little groups, their tops crested, or their sides covered, by 
queer detached masses of volcanic rock, wrought into strange shapes by the dead 
forces whose blind, hidden strength long ago called them into being.  The road our 
wagons take, when the water is too high for us to come down the river bottoms, 
stretches far ahead - two dark, straight, parallel furrows which merge into one in the 
distance.  Quaint little horned frogs crawl sluggishly along in the wheel tracks, and the 
sickle-billed curlews run over the ground or soar above and around the horsemen, 
uttering their mournful, never-ceasing clamor.  The grassland stretches out in the 
sunlight like a sea, every wind bending the blades into a ripple, and flecking the prairie 
with shifting patches of a different green from that around, exactly as the touch of a 
light squall or wind-gust will fleck the smooth surface of the ocean.

	In the spring mornings the rider on the plains will hear bird songs unknown in the 
East.  The Missouri skylark sings while soaring above the great plateaus so high in the 
air that it is impossible to see the bird; and this habit of singing while soaring it shares 
with some sparrow-like birds that are often found in company with it.  The white-
shouldered lark-bunting, in its livery of black, has rich, full notes, and as it sings on the 
wing it reminds one of the bobolink; and the sweet-voiced lark-finch also utters its song 
in the air.  These birds, and most of the sparrows of the plains, are characteristic of 
this region.

	But many of our birds, especially those found in the wooded river bottoms, 
answer to those of the East; only almost each one has some marked point of 
difference from its Eastern representative.  The bluebird out West is very much of a 
blue bird indeed, for it has no "earth tinge" on its breast at all; while the indigo-bird, on 
the contrary, has gained the ruddy markings that the other has lost.  The flicker has the 
shafts of its wing and tail quills colored orange instead of yellow.  The towhee has lost 
all title to its name, for its only cry is a mew like that of a cat-bird; while, most wonderful 
of all, the meadow-lark has found a rich, strong voice, and is one of the sweetest and 
most incessant singers we have.

	Throughout June the thickets and groves about the ranch houses are loud with 
bird music from before dawn till long after sunrise.  The thrashers have sung all the 
night through from among the thorn-bushes if there has been a moon, or even if there 
has been bright starlight; and before the first glimmer of gray the bell-like, silvery songs 
of the shy woodland thrushes chime in; while meadow-lark, robin, bluebird and song 
sparrow, together with many rarer singers, like the grosbeak, join in swelling the 
chorus.  There are some would-be singers whose intention is better than their 
execution. Blackbirds of several kinds are plenty round the house and stables, walking 
about with a knowing air, like so many dwarf crows; and now and then a flock of 
yellow-heads will mix for a few days with their purple or rusty-colored brethren.  The 
males of these yellow-headed grakles are really handsome, their orange and yellow 
heads contrasting finely with the black of the rest of their plumage; but their voices are 
discordant to a degree.  When a flock has done feeding it will often light in straggling 
order among the trees in front of the veranda, and then the males will begin to sing, or 
rather to utter the most extraordinary collection of broken sounds - creakings, 
gurglings, hisses, twitters, and every now and then a liquid note or two. It is like an 
accentuated representation of the noise made by a flock of common blackbirds. At 
nightfall the poor-wills begin to utter their boding call from the wooded ravines back in 
the hills; not "whip-poor-will," as in the East, but with two syllables only.  They often 
come round the ranch house.  Late one evening I had been sitting motionless on the 
veranda, looking out across the water and watching the green and brown of the hill-
tops change to purple and umber and then fade off into shadowy gray as the somber 
darkness deepened.  Suddenly a poor-will lit on the floor beside me and stayed some 
little time; now and then uttering its mournful cries, then ceasing for a few moments as 
it flitted round after insects, and again returning to the same place to begin anew.  The 
little owls, too, call to each other with tremulous, quavering voices throughout the 
livelong night, as they sit in the creaking trees that overhang the roof.  Now and then 
we hear the wilder voices of the wilderness, from animals that in the hours of darkness 
do not fear the neighborhood of man: the coyotes wail like dismal ventriloquists, or the 
silence may be broken by the strident challenge of a lynx, or by the snorting and 
stamping of a deer that has come to the edge of the open.

	In the hot noontide hours of midsummer the broad ranch veranda, always in the 
shade, is almost the only spot where a man can be comfortable; but here he can sit for 
hours at a time, leaning back in his rocking-chair, as he reads or smokes, or with half-
closed, dreamy eyes gazes across the shallow, nearly dry river-bed to the wooded 
bottoms opposite, and to the plateaus lying back of them.  Against the sheer white 
faces of the cliffs, that come down without a break, the dark green tree-tops stand out 
in bold relief.  In the hot, lifeless air all objects that are not nearby seem to sway and 
waver.  There are few sounds to break the stillness.  From the upper branches of the 
cottonwood trees overhead, whose shimmering, tremulous leaves are hardly ever 
quiet, but if the wind stirs at all, rustle and quiver and sigh all day long, comes every 
now and then the soft, melancholy cooing of the mourning dove, whose voice always 
seems far away and expresses more than any other sound in nature the sadness of 
gentle, hopeless, never-ending grief.  The other birds are still; and very few animals 
move about.  Now and then the black shadow of a wheeling vulture falls on the sun-
scorched ground. The cattle, that have strung down in long files from the hills, lie 
quietly on the sandbars, except that some of the bulls keep traveling up and down, 
bellowing and routing or giving vent to long, surly grumblings as they paw the sand 
and toss it up with their horns.  At times the horses, too, will come down to drink, and 
to splash and roll in the water.

	The prairie-dogs alone are not daunted by the heat, but sit at the mouths of their 
burrows with their usual pert curiosity.  They are bothersome little fellows, and most 
prolific, increasing in spite of the perpetual war made on them by every carnivorous 
bird and beast.  One of their worst foes is the black-footed ferret, a handsome, rather 
rare animal, somewhat like a mink, with a yellow-brown body and dark feet and mask.  
It is a most bloodthirsty little brute, feeding on all small animals and ground birds. It will 
readily master a jack-rabbit, will kill very young fawns if it finds them in the mother's 
absence, and works extraordinary havoc in a dog town, as it can follow the wretched 
little beasts down into the burrows.  In one instance, I knew of a black-footed ferret 
making a succession of inroads on a ranchman's poultry, killing and carrying off most 
of them before it was trapped. Coyotes, foxes, swifts, badgers and skunks also like to 
lurk about the dog towns.  Of the skunks, by the way, we had last year altogether too 
much; there was a perfect plague of them all along the river, and they took to trying to 
get into the huts, with the stupid pertinacity of the species. At every ranch house 
dozens were killed, we ourselves bagging thirty-three, all slain near the house, and 
one, to our unspeakable sorrow, in it.

	In making a journey over ground we know, during the hot weather we often prefer 
to ride by moonlight.  The moon shines very brightly through the dry, clear night air, 
turning the gray buttes into glimmering silver; and the horses travel far more readily 
and easily than under the glaring noonday sun. The road between my upper and lower 
ranch houses is about forty miles long, sometimes following the river-bed, and then 
again branching off inland, crossing the great plateaus and winding through the 
ravines of the broken countrye  It is a five-hours' fair ride; and so, in a hot spell, we like 
to take it during the cool of the night, starting at sunset.  After nightfall the face of the 
country seems to alter marvelously, and the clear moonlight only intensifies the 
change.  The river gleams like running quicksilver, and the moonbeams play over the 
grassy stretches of the plateaus and glance off the wind-rippled blades as they would 
from water.  The Bad Lands seem to be stranger and wilder than ever, the silvery rays 
turning the country into a kind of grim fairyland.  The grotesque, fantastic outlines of 
the higher cliffs stand out with startling clearness, while the lower buttes have become 
formless, misshapen masses, and the deep gorges are in black shadow; in the 
darkness there will be no sound but the rhythmic echo of the hoof-beats of the horses 
and the steady, metallic clank of the steel bridle-chains.

	But the fall is the time for riding; for in the keen, frosty air neither man nor beast 
will tire, though out from the dawn until the shadows have again waxed long and the 
daylight has begun to wane, warning all to push straight for home without drawing rein.  
Then deer-saddles and elk-haunches hang from the trees near the house; and one 
can have good sport right on the sand of the river-bed, for we always keep shot-gun or 
rifle at hand, to be ready for any prairie chickens, or for such of the passing water-fowl 
as light in the river near us.  Occasionally we take a shot at a flock of waders, among 
which the pretty avocets are the most striking in looks and manners.  Prairie fowl are 
quite plenty all round us, and occasionally small flocks come fairly down into the yard, 
or perch among the trees near by.  At evening they fly down to the river to drink, and 
as they sit on the sand-bars offer fine marks for the rifles.  So do the geese and ducks 
when they occasionally light on the same places or paddle leisurely downstream in the 
middle of the river; but to make much of a bag of these we have to use the heavy No. 
10, choke-bore shot-gun, while the little 16-bore fowling-piece is much the handiest for 
prairie fowl. A good many different kinds of waterfowl pass, ranging in size from a teal 
duck to a Canada goose, and all of them at times help to eke out our bill of fare.  The 
snow geese and common wild geese are what we usually kill, however.

	Sometimes strings of sandbill cranes fly along the river, their guttural clangor 
being heard very far off.  They usually light on a plateau, where sometimes they form 
rings and go through a series of queer antics, dancing and posturing to each other.  
They are exceedingly wide-awake birds, and more shy and wary than antelope, so that 
they are rarely shot; yet once I succeeded in stalking up to a group in the early 
morning, and firing into them rather at random, my bullet killed a full-grown female.  Its 
breast, when roasted, proved to be very good eating.

	Sometimes we vary our diet with fish - wall-eyed pike, ugly, slimy catfish, and 
other uncouth finny things, looking very fit denizens of the mud-choked water; but they 
are good eating withal, in spite of their uncanny appearance.  We usually catch them 
with set lines, left out over-night in the deeper pools.



STORIES OF THE GREAT WEST
Roosevelt, Theodore
Part II: Stories Of Adventure
    
The Round-Up: Part I

Preparing For The Round-Up 
	During the winter-time there is ordinarily but little work done among the cattle.  
There is some line riding, and a continual lookout is kept for the very weak animals, - 
usually cows and calves, who have to be driven in, fed and housed; but most of the 
stock are left to shift for themselves, undisturbed.  Almost every stock-growers' 
association forbids branding any calves before the spring round-up.  If great bands of 
cattle wander off the range, parties may be fitted out to go after them and bring them 
back; but this is only done when absolutely necessary, as when the drift of the cattle 
has been towards an Indian reservation or a settled granger country, for the weather is 
very severe, and the horses are so poor that their food must be carried along.

	The bulk of the work is done during the summer, including the late spring and 
early fall, and consists mainly in a succession of round-ups, beginning, with us, in May 
and ending towards the last of October.

	But a good deal may be done in the intervals by riding over one's range. 
Frequently, too, herding will be practised on a large scale.

	Still more important is the "trail" work; cattle, while driven from one range to 
another, or to a shipping point for beef, being said to be "on the trail." For years the 
over-supply from the vast breeding ranches to the south, especially in Texas, has been 
driven northward in large herds, either to the shipping towns along the great railroads, 
or else to the fattening ranges of the Northwest; it having been found, so far, that while 
the calf crop is larger in the South, beeves become much heavier in the North.  Such 
cattle, for the most part, went along tolerably well-marked routes or trails, which 
became for the time being of great importance, flourishing - and extremely lawless - 
towns growing up along them; but with the growth of the railroad system, and above all 
with the filling up of the northern ranges, these trails have steadily become of less and 
less consequence, though many herds still travel them on their way to the already 
crowded ranges of western Dakota and Montana, or to the Canadian regions beyond.  
The trail work is something by itself.  The herds may be on the trail several months, 
averaging fifteen miles or less a day.  The cowboys accompanying each have to 
undergo much hard toil, of a peculiarly same and wearisome kind, on account of the 
extreme slowness with which everything must be done, as trail cattle should never be 
hurried. The foreman of a trail outfit must be not only a veteran cowhand, but also a 
miracle of patience and resolution.

	Round-up work is far less irksome, there being an immense amount of dash and 
excitement connected with it; and when once the cattle are on the range, the important 
work is done during the round-up.  On cow ranches, or wherever there is breeding 
stock, the spring round-up is the great event of the season, as it is then that the bulk of 
the calves are branded.  It usually lasts six weeks or thereabouts; but its end by no 
means implies rest for the stockman. On the contrary, as soon as it is over, wagons 
are sent to work out-of-the-way parts of the country that have been passed over, but 
where cattle are supposed to have drifted; and by the time these have come back the 
first beef round-up has begun, and thereafter beeves are steadily gathered and 
shipped, at least from among the larger herds, until cold weather sets in; and in the fall 
there is another round-up, to brand the late calves and see that the stock is got back 
on the range.  As all of these round-ups are of one character, a description of the most 
important, taking place in the spring, will be enough.

	In April we begin to get up the horses.  Throughout the winter very few have 
been kept for use, as they are then poor and weak, and must be given grain and hay if 
they are to be worked.  The men in the line camps need two or three apiece, and each 
man at the home ranch has a couple more; but the rest are left out to shift for 
themselves, which the tough, hardy little fellows are well able to do.  Ponies can pick 
up a living where cattle die; though the scanty feed, which they may have to uncover 
by pawing off the snow, and the bitter weather often make them look very gaunt by 
spring-time. But the first warm rains bring up the green grass, and then all the live-
stock gain flesh with wonderful rapidity.  When the spring round-up begins the horses 
should be as fat and sleek as possible.  After running all winter free, even the most 
sober pony is apt to betray an inclination to buck; and, if possible, we like to ride every 
animal once or twice before we begin to do real work with him.

	Animals that have escaped for any length of time are almost as bad to handle as 
if they had never been broken.  One horse that had been gone for eighteen months 
has, since his return, been suggestively dubbed "Dynamite Jimmy," on account of the 
incessant and eruptive energy with which he bucks. Many of our horses, by the way, 
are thus named from some feat or peculiarity. Wire Fence, when being broken, ran into 
one of the abominations after which he is now called; Hackamore once got away and 
remained out for three weeks with a hackamore, or breaking-halter, on him; Macaulay 
contracted the habit of regularly getting rid of the huge Scotchman to whom he was 
intrusted; Bulberry Johnny spent the hour or two after he was first mounted in a large 
patch of thorny bulberry bushes, his distracted rider unable to get him to do anything 
but move round sidewise in a circle; Fall Back would never get to the front; Water Skip 
always jumps mudpuddles; and there are a dozen others with names as purely 
descriptive.

	The stock-growers of Montana, of the western part of Dakota, and even of 
portions of extreme northern Wyoming, - that is, of all the grazing lands lying in the 
basin of the Upper Missouri, - have united and formed themselves into the great 
Montana Stock-growers' Association.  Among the countless benefits they have derived 
from this course, not the least has been the way in which the various round-ups work 
in with and supplement one another.  At the spring meeting of the association, the 
entire territory mentioned above, including perhaps a hundred thousand square miles, 
is mapped out into round- up districts, which generally are changed but slightly from 
year to year, and the times and places for the round-ups to begin refixed so that those 
of adjacent districts may be run with a view to the best interests of all.

	The captain or foreman of the round-up, upon whom very much of its efficiency 
and success depends, is chosen beforehand.  He is, of course, an expert cowman, 
thoroughly acquainted with the country; and he must also be able to command and 
keep control of the wild rough-riders he has under him - a feat needing both tact and 
firmness.

Riding To The Round-Up 

	At the appointed day all meet at the place from which the round-up is to start.  
Each ranch, of course, has most work to be done in its own round-up district, but it is 
also necessary to have representatives in all those surrounding it.  A large outfit may 
employ a dozen cowboys, or over, in the home district, and yet have nearly as many 
more representing its interests in the various ones adjoining Smaller outfits generally 
club together to run a wagon and send outside representatives, or else go along with 
their stronger neighbors, they paying part of the expenses.  A large outfit, with a herd 
of twenty thousand cattle or more, can, if necessary, run a round-up entirely by itself, 
and is able to act independently of outside help; it is therefore at a great advantage 
compared with those that can take no step effectively without their neighbors' consent 
and assistance.

	If the starting-point is some distance off, it may be necessary to leave home three 
or four days in advance.  Before this we have got everything in readiness; have 
overhauled the wagons, shod any horse whose forefeet are tender, - as a rule, all our 
ponies go barefooted, - and left things in order at the ranch.  Our outfit may be taken 
as a sample of every one else's.  We have a stout four-horse wagon to carry the 
bedding and the food; in its rear a mess-chest is rigged to hold the knives, forks, cans, 
etc.  All our four team-horses are strong, willing animals, though of no great size, being 
originally just "broncos," or unbroken native horses, like the others.  The teamster is 
also cook: a man who is a really first-rate hand at both driving and cooking - and our 
present teamster is both - can always command his price. Besides our own men, some 
cowboys from neighboring ranches and two or three representatives from other round-
up districts are always along, and we generally have at least a dozen "riders," as they 
are termed, - that is, cowboys, or "cow-punchers," who do the actual cattle-work, - with 
the wagon. Each of these has a string of eight or ten ponies; and to take charge of the 
saddle-band, thus consisting of a hundred odd head, there are two herders, always 
known as "horse-wranglers" - one for the day and one for the night. Occasionally there 
will be two wagons, one to carry the bedding and one the food, known, respectively, as 
the bed and the mess wagon; but this is not usual.

	While traveling to the meeting-point the pace is always slow, as it is an object to 
bring the horses on the ground as fresh as possible. Accordingly we keep at a walk 
almost all day, and the riders, having nothing else to do, assist the wranglers in driving 
the saddle-band, three or four going in front, and others on the side, so that the horses 
shall keep on a walk.  There is always some trouble with the animals at the starting 
out, as they are very fresh and are restive under the saddle.  The herd is likely to 
stampede, and any beast that is frisky or vicious is sure to show its worst side.  To do 
really effective cow-work a pony should be well broken; but many even of the old ones 
have vicious traits, and almost every man will have in his string one or two young 
horses, or broncos, hardly broken at all.  Thanks to the rough methods of breaking in 
vogue on the plains many even of the so-called broken animals retain always certain 
bad habits, the most common being that of bucking.  Of the sixty odd horses on my 
ranch all but half a dozen were broken by ourselves; and though my men are all good 
riders, yet a good rider is not necessarily a good horse-breaker, and indeed it was an 
absolute impossibility properly to break so many animals in the short time at our 
command - for we had to use them almost immediately after they were bought. In 
consequence, very many of my horses have to this day traits not likely to set a timid or 
a clumsy rider at his ease.  One or two can run away and cannot be held by even the 
strongest bit; others can hardly be bridled or saddled until they have been thrown; two 
or three have a tendency to fall over backward; and half of them buck more or less, 
some so hard that only an expert can sit them; several I never ride myself, save from 
dire necessity.

	In riding these wild, vicious horses, and in careering over such very bad ground, 
especially at night, accidents are always occurring.  A man who is merely an ordinary 
rider is certain to have a pretty hard time.  On my first round-up I had a string of nine 
horses, four of them broncos, only broken to the extent of having each been saddled 
once or twice.  One of them it was an impossibility to bridle or to saddle single-handed; 
it was very difficult to get on or off him, and he was exceedingly nervous if a man 
moved his hands or feet; but he had no bad tricks.  The second soon became perfectly 
quiet.  The third turned out to be one of the worst buckers on the ranch: once, when he 
bucked me off, I managed to fall on a stone and broke a rib.  The fourth had a still 
worse habit, for he would balk and then throw himself over backward: once, when I 
was not quick enough, he caught me and broke something in the point of my shoulder, 
so that it was some weeks before I could raise my arm freely.  My hurts were far from 
serious, and did not interfere with my riding and working as usual through the round-
up; but I was heartily glad when it ended, and ever since have religiously done my best 
to get none but gentle horses in my own string.  However, every one gets falls from or 
with his horse now and then in the cow country; and even my men, good riders though 
they are, are sometimes injured.  One of them once broke his ankle; another a rib; 
another was on one occasion stunned, remaining unconscious for some hours; and yet 
another had certain of his horses buck under him so hard and long as finally to hurt his 
lungs and make him cough blood.  Fatal accidents occur annually in almost every 
district, especially if there is much work to be done among stampeded cattle at night; 
but on my own ranch none of my men have ever been seriously hurt, though on one 
occasion a cowboy from another ranch, who was with my wagon, was killed, his horse 
falling and pitching him heavily on his head.

	For bedding, each man has two or three pairs of blankets, and a tarpaulin or 
small wagonsheet.  Usually, two or three sleep together.  Even in June the nights are 
generally cool and pleasant, and it is chilly in the early mornings; although this is not 
always so, and when the weather stays hot and mosquitoes are plenty, the hours of 
darkness, even in midsummer, seem painfully long.  In the Bad Lands proper we are 
not often bothered very seriously by these winged pests; but in the low bottoms of the 
Big Missouri, and beside many of the reedy ponds and great sloughs out on the 
prairie, they are a perfect scourge.  During the very hot nights, when they are 
especially active, the bed-clothes make a man feel absolutely smothered, and yet his 
only chance for sleep is to wrap himself tightly up, head and all; and even then some 
of the pests will usually force their way in.  At sunset I have seen the mosquitoes rise 
up from the land like a dense cloud, to make the hot, stifling night one long torture; the 
horses would neither lie down nor graze, traveling restlessly to and fro till daybreak, 
their bodies streaked and bloody, and the insects settling on them so as to make them 
all one color, a uniform gray; while the men, after a few hours' tossing about in the vain 
attempt to sleep, rose, built a little fire of damp sage brush, and thus endured the 
misery as best they could until it was light enough to work.

	But if the weather is fine, a man will never sleep better nor more pleasantly than 
in the open air after a hard day's work on the round-up; nor will an ordinary shower or 
gust of wind disturb him in the least, for he simply draws the tarpaulin over his head 
and goes on sleeping.  But now and then we have a wind-storm that might better be 
called a whirl-wind and has to be met very differently; and two or three days or nights 
of rain insure the wetting of the blankets, and therefore shivering discomfort on the part 
of the would-be sleeper.  For two or three hours all goes well; and it is rather soothing 
to listen to the steady patter of the great raindrops on the canvas. But then it will be 
found that a corner has been left open through which the water can get in, or else the 
tarpaulin will begin to leak somewhere; or perhaps the water will have collected in a 
hollow underneath and have begun to soak through.  Soon a little stream trickles in, 
and every effort to remedy matters merely results in a change for the worse.  To move 
out of the way insures getting wet in a fresh spot; and the best course is to lie still and 
accept the evils that have come with what fortitude one can. Even thus, the first night a 
man can sleep pretty well; but if the rain continues, the second night, when the 
blankets are already damp, and when the water comes through more easily, is apt to 
be most unpleasant.

	Of course, a man can take little spare clothing on a round-up; at the very outside 
two or three clean handkerchiefs, a pair of socks, a change of underclothes, and the 
most primitive kind of washing-apparatus, all wrapped up in a stout jacket which is to 
be worn when night-herding.  The inevitable "slicker," or oil-skin coat, which gives 
complete protection from the wet, is always carried behind the saddle.

The Encampment 

	At the meeting-place there is usually a delay of a day or two to let every one 
come in; and the plain on which the encampment is made becomes a scene of great 
bustle and turmoil.  The heavy four-horse wagons jolt in from different quarters, the 
horse-wranglers rushing madly to and fro in the endeavor to keep the different saddle-
bands from mingling, while the "riders," or cowboys, with each wagon jog along in a 
body.  The representatives from outside districts ride in singly or by twos and threes, 
every man driving before him his own horses, one of them loaded with his bedding.  
Each wagon wheels out of the way into some camping-place not too near the others, 
the bedding is tossed out on the ground, and then every one is left to do what he 
wishes, while the different wagon bosses, or foremen, seek out the captain of the 
round-up to learn what his plans are.

	There is a good deal of rough but effective discipline and method in the way in 
which a round-up is carried on.  The captain of the whole has as lieutenants the 
various wagon foremen, and in making demands for men to do some special service 
he will usually merely designate some foreman to take charge of the work and let him 
parcel it out among his men to suit himself. The captain of the round-up or the foreman 
of a wagon may himself be a ranchman; if such is not the case, and the ranchman 
nevertheless comes along, he works and fares precisely as do the other cowboys.

	While the head men are gathered in a little knot, planning out the work, the 
others are dispersed over the plain in every direction, racing, breaking rough horses, 
or simply larking with one another.  If a man has an especially bad horse, he usually 
takes such an opportunity, when he has plenty of time, to ride him; and while saddling 
he is surrounded by a crowd of most unsympathetic associates who greet with 
uproarious mirth any misadventure. A man on a bucking horse is always considered 
fair game, every squeal and jump of the bronco being hailed with cheers of delighted 
irony for the rider and shouts to "stay with him." The antics of a vicious bronco show 
infinite variety of detail, but are all modeled on one general plan.  When the rope 
settles round his neck the fight begins, and it is only after much plunging and snorting 
that a twist is taken over his nose, or else a hackamore - a species of severe halter, 
usually made of plaited hair - slipped on his head. While being bridled he strikes 
viciously with his fore feet, and perhaps has to be blindfolded or thrown down; and to 
get the saddle on him is quite as difficult.  When saddled, he may get rid of his 
exuberant spirits by bucking under the saddle, or may reserve all his energies for the 
rider.  In the last case, the man keeping tight hold with his left hand of the cheek-strap, 
so as to prevent the horse from getting his head down until he is fairly seated, swings 
himself quickly into the saddle.  Up rises the bronco's back into an arch; his head, the 
ears laid straight back, goes down between his forefeet, and, squealing savagely, he 
makes a succession of rapid, stiff-legged, jarring bounds.  Sometimes he is a 
"plunging" bucker, who runs forward all the time while bucking; or he may buck steadily 
in one place, or "sun-fish" - that is, bring first one shoulder down almost to the ground 
and then the other, - or else he may change ends while in the air.  A first-class rider 
will sit throughout it all without moving from the saddle, quirting^1 his horse all the 
time, though his hat may be jarred off his head and his revolver out of its sheath.  After 
a few jumps, however, the average man grasps hold of the horn of the saddle - the 
delighted on-lookers meanwhile earnestly advising him not to "go to leather" - and is 
contented to get through the affair in any shape provided he can escape without being 
thrown off.  An accident is of necessity borne with a broad grin, as any attempt to 
resent the raillery of the bystanders - which is perfectly good-humored - would be apt 
to result disastrously.

	[Footnote 1: Quirt is the name of the short flexible riding-whip used throughout 
cowboy land.  The term is a Spanish one.]

	On such a day, when there is no regular work, there will often also be horse-
races, as each outfit is pretty sure to have some running pony which it believes can 
outpace any other.  These contests are always short-distance dashes, for but a few 
hundred yards.  Horse-racing is a mania with most plainsmen, white or red.  A man 
with a good racing pony will travel all about with it, often winning large sums, visiting 
alike cow ranches, frontier towns and Indian encampments.  Sometimes the race is 
"pony against pony," the victor taking both steeds.  In racing the men ride bareback, as 
there are hardly any light saddles in the cow country.  There will be intense excitement 
and very heavy betting over a race between two well-known horses, together with a 
good chance of blood being shed in the attendant quarrels. Indians and whites often 
race against each other as well as among themselves. I have seen several such 
contests, and in every case but one the white man happened to win.  A race is usually 
run between two thick rows of spectators, on foot and on horseback, and as the racers 
pass, these rows close in behind them, every man yelling and shouting with all the 
strength of his lungs, and all waving their hats and cloaks to encourage the 
contestants, or firing off their revolvers and saddle guns.  The little horses are fairly 
maddened, as is natural enough, and run as if they were crazy: were the distances 
longer some would be sure to drop in their tracks.

	Besides the horse-races, which are, of course, the main attraction, the men at a 
round-up will often get up wrestling matches or foot-races.  In fact, every one feels that 
he is off for a holiday; for after the monotony of a long winter the cowboys look forward 
eagerly to the round-up, where the work is hard, it is true, but exciting and varied, and 
treated a good deal as a frolic.  There is no eight-hour law in cowboy land: during 
round-up time we often count ourselves lucky if we get off with much less than sixteen 
hours; but the work is done in the saddle, and the men are spurred on all the time by 
the desire to outdo one another in feats of daring and skillful horsemanship. There is 
very little quarreling or fighting; and though the fun often takes the form of rather rough 
horse-play, yet the practice of carrying dangerous weapons makes cowboys show far 
more rough courtesy to each other and far less rudeness to strangers than is the case 
among, for instance, Eastern miners, or even lumbermen.  When a quarrel may very 
probably result fatally a man thinks twice before going into it: warlike people or classes 
always treat one another with a certain amount of consideration and politeness.  The 
moral tone of a cow-camp, indeed, is rather high than otherwise.  Meanness, 
cowardice and dishonesty are not tolerated.  There is a high regard for truthfulness 
and keeping one's word, intense contempt for any kind of hypocrisy, and a hearty 
dislike for a man who shirks his work.



STORIES OF THE GREAT WEST
Roosevelt, Theodore
Part II: Stories Of Adventure
    
The Round-Up: Part II

The Work Of Rounding-Up 
	The method of work is simple.  The mess-wagons and loose horse, after 
breaking camp in the morning, move on in a straight line for some few miles, going into 
camp again before midday; and the day herd, consisting of all the cattle that have 
been found far off their range, and which are to be brought back there, and of any 
others that it is necessary to gather, follows on afterwards.  Meanwhile the cowboys 
scatter out and drive in all the cattle from the country round about, going perhaps ten 
or fifteen miles back from the line of march, and meeting at the place where camp has 
already been pitched. The wagons always keep some little distance from one another, 
and the saddle-bands do the same, so that the horses may not get mixed.  It is rather 
picturesque to see the four-horse teams filing down at a trot through a pass among the 
buttes - the saddle-bands being driven along at a smart pace to one side or behind, 
the teamsters cracking their whips and the horse-wranglers calling and shouting as 
they ride rapidly from side to side behind the horses, urging on the stragglers by 
dexterous touches with the knotted ends of their long lariats that are left trailing from 
the saddle.  The country driven over is very rough and it is often necessary to double 
up teams and put on eight horses to each wagon in going up an unusually steep pitch 
or hauling through a deep mud-hole or over a river crossing where there is quicksand.

	The speed and thoroughness with which a country can be worked depends, of 
course, very largely upon the number of riders.  Ours is probably about an average 
round-up as regards size.  The last spring I was out there were half a dozen wagons 
along; the saddle-bands numbered about a hundred each; and the morning we started, 
sixty men in the saddle splashed across the shallow ford of the river that divided the 
plain where we had camped from the valley of the long winding creek up which we 
were first to work.

	In the morning the cook is preparing breakfast long before the first glimmer of 
dawn.  As soon as it is ready, probably about 3 o'clock, he utters a long-drawn shout, 
and all the sleepers feel it is time to be up on the instant, for they know there can be no 
such thing as delay on the round-up, under penalty of being set afoot.  Accordingly, 
they bundle out, rubbing their eyes and yawning, draw on their boots and trousers, - if 
they have taken the latter off, - roll up and cord their bedding, and usually without any 
attempt at washing crowd over to the little smoldering fire, which is placed in a hole 
dug in the ground, so that there may be no risk of its spreading.  The men are rarely 
very hungry at breakfast, and it is a meal that has to be eaten in shortest order, so it is 
perhaps the least important. Each man, as he comes up, grasps a tin cup and plate 
from the mess-box, pours out his tea or coffee, with sugar, but, of course, no milk, 
helps himself to one or two of the biscuits that have been baked in a Dutch oven, and 
perhaps also to a slice of the fat pork swimming in the grease of the frying-pan, ladles 
himself out some beans, if there are any, and squats down on the ground to eat his 
breakfast. The meal is not an elaborate one; nevertheless a man will have to hurry if 
he wishes to eat it before hearing the foreman sing out, "Come, boys, catch your 
horses"; when he must drop everything and run out to the wagon with his lariat.  The 
night wrangler is now bringing in the saddle-band, which he has been up all night 
guarding.  A rope corral is rigged up by stretching a rope from each wheel of one side 
of the wagon, making a V-shaped space, into which the saddle-horses are driven.  
Certain men stand around to keep them inside, while the others catch the horses: 
many outfits have one man to do all the roping.  As soon as each has caught his horse 
- usually a strong, tough animal, the small, quick ponies being reserved for the work 
round the herd in the afternoon - the band, now in charge of the day wrangler, is 
turned loose, and every one saddles up as fast as possible.  It still lacks some time of 
being sunrise, and the air has in it the peculiar chill of the early morning. When all are 
saddled, many of the horses bucking and dancing about, the riders from the different 
wagons all assemble at the one where the captain is sitting, already mounted.  He 
waits a very short time - for laggards receive but scant mercy - before announcing the 
proposed camping-place and parceling out the work among those present.  If, as is 
usually the case, the line of march is along a river or creek, he appoints some man to 
take a dozen others and drive down (or up) it ahead of the day herd, so that the latter 
will not have to travel through other cattle; the day herd itself being driven and guarded 
by a dozen men detached for that purpose.  The rest of the riders are divided into two 
bands, placed under men who know the country, and start out, one on each side, to 
bring in every head for fifteen miles back.  The captain then himself rides down to the 
new camping-place, so as to be there as soon as any cattle are brought in.

	Meanwhile the two bands, a score of riders in each, separate and make their way 
in opposite directions.  The leader of each tries to get such a "scatter" on his men that 
they will cover completely all the land gone over. This morning work is called circle 
riding, and is peculiarly hard in the Bad Lands on account of the remarkably broken, 
rugged nature of the country.  The men come in on lines that tend to a common center 
- as if the sticks of a fan were curved.  As the band goes out, the leader from time to 
time detaches one or two men to ride down through certain sections of the country, 
making the shorter, or what are called inside, circles, while he keeps on; and finally, 
retaining as companions the two or three whose horses are toughest, makes the 
longest or outside circle himself, going clear back to the divide, or whatever the point 
may be that marks the limit of the round-up work, and then turning and working straight 
to the meeting-place.  Each man, of course, brings in every head of cattle he can see.

	These long, swift rides in the glorious spring mornings are not soon to be 
forgotten.  The sweet, fresh air, with a touch of sharpness thus early in the day, and 
the rapid motion of the fiery little horse combine to make a man's blood thrill and leap 
with sheer buoyant light-heartedness and eager, exultant pleasure in the boldness and 
freedom of the life he is leading.  As we climb the steep sides of the first range of 
buttes, wisps of wavering mist still cling in the hollows of the valley; when we come out 
on the top of the first great plateau the sun flames up over its edge, and in the level, 
red beams the galloping horsemen throw long fantastic shadows.  Black care rarely 
sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough; at any rate, not when he first feels the 
horse move under him.

	Sometimes we trot or pace, and again we lope or gallop; the few who are to take 
the outside circle must needs ride both hard and fast.  Although only grass-fed, the 
horses are tough and wiry; and, moreover, are each used but once in four days, or 
thereabouts, so they stand the work well.  The course out lies across great grassy 
plateaus, along knifelike ridge crests, among winding valleys and ravines, and over 
acres of barren, sun-scorched buttes, that look grimly grotesque and forbidding, while 
in the Bad Lands the riders unhesitatingly go down and over places where it seems 
impossible that a horse should even stand.  The line of horsemen will quarter down the 
side of a butte, where every pony has to drop from ledge to ledge like a goat, and will 
go over the shoulder of a soapstone cliff, when wet and slippery, with a series of 
plunges and scrambles which if unsuccessful would land horses and riders in the 
bottom of the canon-like washout below.  In descending a clay butte after a rain, the 
pony will put all four feet together and slide down to the bottom almost or quite on his 
haunches.  In very wet weather the Bad Lands are absolutely impassable; but if the 
ground is not slippery, it is a remarkable place that can shake the matter-of-course 
confidence felt by the rider in the capacity of his steed to go anywhere.

	When the men on the outside circle have reached the bound set them, - whether 
it is a low divide, a group of jagged hills, the edge of the rolling, limitless prairie, or the 
long, waste reaches of alkali and sage brush, - they turn their horses' heads and begin 
to work down the branches of the creeks, one or two riding down the bottom, while the 
others keep off to the right and the left, a little ahead and fairly high up on the side hills, 
so as to command as much of a view as possible.  On the level or rolling prairies the 
cattle can be seen a long way off, and it is an easy matter to gather and to drive them; 
but in the Bad Lands every little pocket, basin and coulee has to be searched, every 
gorge or ravine entered and the dense patches of brushwood and spindling, wind-
beaten trees closely examined.  All the cattle are carried on ahead down the creek; 
and it is curious to watch the different behavior of the different breeds.  A cowboy 
riding off to one side of the creek, and seeing a number of long-horned Texans grazing 
in the branches of a set of coulees, has merely to ride across the upper ends of these, 
uttering the drawn-out "eikoh-h-h," so familiar to the cattle-men, and the long-horns will 
stop grazing, stare fixedly at him, and then, wheeling, strike off down the coulees at a 
trot, tails in air, to be carried along by the center riders when they reach the main creek 
into which the coulees lead. Our own range cattle are not so wild, but nevertheless are 
easy to drive; while Eastern-raised beasts have little fear of a horseman and merely 
stare stupidly at him until he rides directly towards them.  Every little bunch of stock is 
thus collected and all are driven along together.  At the place where some large fork 
joins the main creek another band may be met, driven by some of the men who have 
left earlier in the day to take one of the shorter circles; and thus, before coming down 
to the bottom where the wagons are camped and where the actual "round-up" itself is 
to take place, this one herd may include a couple of thousand head; or, on the other 
hand, the longest ride may not result in the finding of a dozen animals.  As soon as the 
riders are in, they disperse to their respective wagons to get dinner and change 
horses, leaving the cattle to be held by one or two of their number. If only a small 
number of cattle have been gathered, they will all be run into one herd; if there are 
many of them, however, the different herds will be held separate.

	A plain where a round-up is taking place offers a picturesque sight. I well 
remember one such.  It was on a level bottom in a bend of the river, which here made 
an almost semicircular sweep.  The bottom was in shape of a long oval, hemmed in by 
an unbroken line of steep bluffs so that it looked like an amphitheater.  Across the 
faces of the dazzling white cliffs there were sharp bands of black and red, drawn by 
the coal seams and the layers of burned clay: the leaves of the trees and the grass 
had the vivid green of springtime.  The wagons were camped among the cottonwood 
trees fringing the river, a thin column of smoke rising up from beside each.  The horses 
were grazing round the outskirts, those of each wagon by themselves and kept from 
going too near the others by their watchful guard.  In the great circular corral, towards 
one end, the men were already branding calves, while the whole middle of the bottom 
was covered with lowing herds of cattle and shouting, galloping cowboys.  Apparently 
there was nothing but dust, noise and confusion; but in reality the work was 
proceeding all the while with the utmost rapidity and certainty.

	As soon as, or even before, the last circle riders have come in and have 
snatched a few hasty mouthfuls to serve as their midday meal, we begin to work the 
herd - or herds, if the one herd would be of too unwieldy size.  The animals are held in 
a compact bunch, most of the riders forming a ring outside, while a couple from each 
ranch successively look the herds through and cut out those marked with their own 
brand.  It is difficult, in such a mass of moving beasts, - for they do not stay still, but 
keep weaving in and out among each other, - to find all of one's own animals: a man 
must have natural gifts, as well as great experience, before he becomes a good brand-
reader and is able really to "clean up a herd" - that is, be sure he has left nothing of his 
own in it.

	To do good work in cutting out from a herd, not only should the rider be a good 
horseman, but he should also have a skillful, thoroughly trained horse. A good cutting 
pony is not common and is generally too valuable to be used anywhere but in the herd.  
Such an one enters thoroughly into the spirit of the thing and finds out immediately the 
animal his master is after; he will then follow it closely of his own accord through every 
wheel and double at top speed.  When looking through the herd it is necessary to 
move slowly; and when any animal is found it is taken to the outskirts at a walk, so as 
not to alarm the others.  Once at the outside, however, the cowboy has to ride like 
lightning; for as soon as the beast he is after finds itself separated from its companions 
it endeavors to break back among them, and a young, range-raised steer or heifer 
runs like a deer.  In cutting out a cow and a calf two men have to work together.  As 
the animals of a brand are cut out they are received and held apart by some rider 
detailed for the purpose, who is said to be "holding the cut."

	All this time the men holding the herd have their hands full, for some animal is 
continually trying to break out, when the nearest man flies at it at once and after a 
smart chase brings it back to its fellows.  As soon as all the cows, calves and whatever 
else is being gathered have been cut out, the rest are driven clear off the ground and 
turned loose, being headed in the direction contrary to that in which we travel the 
following day.  Then the riders surround the next herd, the men holding cuts move 
them up near it and the work is begun anew.

	If it is necessary to throw an animal, either to examine a brand or for any other 
reason, half a dozen men will have their ropes down at once; and then it is spur and 
quirt in the rivalry to see which can outdo the other until the beast is roped and thrown.  
A first-class hand will, unaided, rope, throw and tie down a cow or steer in wonderfully 
short time; one of the favorite tests of competitive skill among the cowboys is the 
speed with which this feat can be accomplished.  Usually, however, one man ropes the 
animal by the head and another at the same time gets the loop of his lariat over one or 
both its hind legs, when it is twisted over and stretched out in a second. In following an 
animal on horseback the man keeps steadily swinging the rope round his head, by a 
dexterous motion of the wrist only, until he gets a chance to throw it; when on foot, 
especially if catching horses in a corral, the loop is allowed to drag loosely on the 
ground.  A good roper will hurl out the coil with marvelous accuracy and force; it fairly 
whistles through the air, and settles round the object with almost infallible certainty. 
Mexicans make the best ropers; but some Texans are very little behind them. A good 
horse takes as much interest in the work as does his rider, and the instant the noose 
settles over the victim wheels and braces himself to meet the shock, standing with his 
legs firmly planted, the steer or cow being thrown with a jerk.  An unskillful rider and 
untrained horse will often themselves be thrown when the strain comes.

	Sometimes an animal - usually a cow or steer, but, strangely enough, very rarely 
a bull - will get fighting mad and turn on the men.  If on the drive, such a beast usually 
is simply dropped out; but if they have time nothing delights the cowboys more than an 
encounter of this sort, and the charging brute is roped and tied down in short order.  
Often such an one will make a very vicious fight and is most dangerous.  Once a 
fighting cow kept several of us busy for nearly an hour; she gored two ponies, one of 
them, which was, luckily, hurt but slightly, being my own pet cutting horse.  If a steer is 
hauled out of a mud-hole its first act is usually to charge the rescuer.

Branding And Herding 

	As soon as all the brands of cattle are worked and the animals that are to be 
driven along have been put in the day herd, attention is turned to the cows and calves, 
which are already gathered in different bands, consisting each of all the cows of a 
certain brand and all the calves that are following them.  If there is a corral, each band 
is in turn driven into it; if there is none, a ring of riders does duty in its place.  A fire is 
built, the irons heated and a dozen men dismount to, as it is called, "wrestle" the 
calves. The best two ropers go in on their horses to catch the latter; one man keeps 
tally, a couple put on the brands and the others seize, throw and hold the little 
unfortunates.  A first-class roper invariably catches the calf by both hind feet, and then, 
having taken a twist with his lariat round the horn of the saddle, drags the bawling little 
creature, extended at full-length, up to the fire, where it is held before it can make a 
struggle.  A less skillful roper catches round the neck, and then, if the calf is a large 
one, the man who seizes it has his hands full, as the bleating, bucking animal develops 
astonishing strength, cuts the wildest capers and resists frantically and with all its 
power.  If there are seventy or eighty calves in a corral the scene is one of the greatest 
confusion.  The ropers, spurring and checking the fierce little horses, drag the calves 
up so quickly that a dozen men can hardly hold them; the men with the irons, 
blackened with soot, run to and fro; the calf-wrestlers, grimy with blood, dust and 
sweat, work like beavers; while with the voice of a stentor the tally-man shouts out the 
number and sex of each calf.  The dust rises in clouds, and the shouts, cheers, curses 
and laughter of the men unite with the lowing of the cows and the frantic bleating of the 
roped calves to make a perfect babel.  Now and then an old cow turns vicious and puts 
every one out of the corral.  Or a maverick bull, - that is, an unbranded bull, - a yearling 
or a two-year-old, is caught, thrown and branded; when he is let up there is sure to be 
a fine scatter. Down goes his head and he bolts at the nearest man, who makes out of 
the way at top speed, amidst roars of laughter from all of his companions; while the 
men holding down calves swear savagely as they dodge charging mavericks, 
trampling horses and taut lariats with frantic, plunging little beasts at the farther ends.

	Every morning certain riders are detached to drive and to guard the day herd, 
which is most monotonous work, the men being on from 4 in the morning till 8 in the 
evening, the only rest coming at dinner-time, when they change horses.  When the 
herd has reached the camping-ground there is nothing to do but to loll listlessly over 
the saddle-bow in the blazing sun watching the cattle feed and sleep, and seeing that 
they do not spread out too much. Plodding slowly along on the trail through the 
columns of dust stirred up by the hoofs is not much better.  Cattle travel best and 
fastest strung out in long lines; the swiftest taking the lead in single file, while the weak 
and the lazy, the young calves and the poor cows, crowd together in the rear. Two 
men travel along with the leaders, one on each side, to point them in the right 
direction; one or two others keep by the flanks, and the rest are in the rear to act as 
"drag-drivers" and hurry up the phalanx of reluctant weaklings. If the foremost of the 
string travels too fast, one rider will go along on the trail a few rods ahead and thus 
keep them back so that those in the rear will not be left behind.

	Generally all this is very tame and irksome; but by fits and starts there will be little 
flurries of excitement.  Two or three of the circle riders may unexpectedly come over a 
butte near by with a bunch of cattle, which at once start for the day herd, and then 
there will be a few minutes' furious riding hither and thither to keep them out.  Or the 
cattle may begin to run and then get "milling" - that is, all crowd together into a mass 
like a ball, wherein they move round and round, trying to keep their heads towards the 
center and refusing to leave it.  The only way to start them is to force one's horse in 
among them and cut out some of their number, which then begin to travel off by 
themselves, when the others will probably follow.  But in spite of occasional incidents 
of this kind, day-herding has a dreary sameness about it that makes the men dislike 
and seek to avoid it.

	From 8 in the evening till 4 in the morning the day herd becomes a night herd.  
Each wagon in succession undertakes to guard it for a night, dividing the time into 
watches of two hours apiece, a couple of riders taking each watch.  This is generally 
chilly and tedious; but at times it is accompanied by intense excitement and danger, 
when the cattle become stampeded, whether by storm or otherwise.  The first and the 
last watches are those chosen by preference; the others are disagreeable, the men 
having to turn out cold and sleepy, in the pitchy darkness, the two hours of chilly 
wakefulness completely breaking the night's rest.  The first guards have to bed the 
cattle down, though the day-herders often do this themselves: it simply consists in 
hemming them into as small a space as possible and then riding round them until they 
lie down and fall asleep.  Often, especially at first, this takes some time - the beasts 
will keep rising and lying down again. When at last most become quiet, some perverse 
brute of a steer will deliberately hook them all up they keep moving in and out among 
one another and long strings of animals suddenly start out from the herd at a 
stretching walk and are turned back by the nearest cowboy, only to break forth at a 
new spot.  When finally they have lain down and are chewing their cud or slumbering, 
the two night guards begin riding round them in opposite ways, often, on very dark 
nights, calling or singing to them, as the sound of the human voice on such occasions 
seems to have a tendency to quiet them.  In inky black weather, especially when rainy, 
it is both difficult and unpleasant work; the main trust must be placed in the horse, 
which, if old at the business, will of its own accord keep pacing steadily round the herd 
and head off any animals that, unseen by the rider's eyes in the darkness, are trying to 
break out.  Usually the watch passes off without incident, but on rare occasions the 
cattle become restless and prone to stampede.  Anything may then start them - the 
plunge of a horse, the sudden approach of a coyote or the arrival of some outside 
steers or cows that have smelt them and come up.  Every animal in the herd will be on 
its feet in an instant, as if by an electric shock, and off with a rush, horns and tail up. 
Then, no matter how rough the ground nor how pitchy black the night, the cowboys 
must ride for all there is in them and spare neither their own nor their horses' necks. 
Perhaps their charges break away and are lost altogether; perhaps, by desperate 
galloping, they may head them off, get them running in a circle and finally stop them.  
Once stopped, they may break again and possibly divide up, one cowboy, perhaps, 
following each band.  I have known six such stops and renewed stampedes to take 
place in one night, the cowboy staying with his ever-diminishing herd of steers until 
daybreak, when he managed to get them under control again, and, by careful 
humoring of his jaded, staggering horse, finally brought those that were left back to the 
camp, several miles distant. The riding in these night stampedes is wild and dangerous 
to a degree, especially if the man gets caught in the rush of the beasts.  It also 
frequently necessitates an immense amount of work in collecting the scattered 
animals.  On one such occasion a small party of us were thirty-six hours in the saddle, 
dismounting only to change horses or to eat.  We were almost worn out at the end of 
the time; but it must be kept in mind that for a long spell of such work a stock-saddle is 
far less tiring than the ordinary Eastern or English one, and in every way superior to it.

	By very hard riding such a stampede may sometimes be prevented.  Once we 
were bringing a thousand head of young cattle down to my lower ranch, and as the 
river was high were obliged to take the inland trail.  The third night we were forced to 
make a dry camp, the cattle having had no water since the morning.  Nevertheless, we 
got them bedded down without difficulty, and one of the cowboys and myself stood first 
guard.  But very soon after nightfall, when the darkness had become complete, the 
thirsty brutes of one accord got on their feet and tried to break out.  The only salvation 
was to keep them close together, as, if they once got scattered, we knew they could 
never be gathered; so I kept on one side and the cowboy on the other, and never in 
my life did I ride so hard.  In the darkness I could but dimly see the shadowy outlines of 
the herd, as with whip and spurs I ran the pony along its edge, turning back the beasts 
at one point barely in time to wheel and keep them in at another.  The ground was cut 
up by numerous little gullies, and each of us got several falls, horses and riders turning 
complete somersaults.  We were dripping with sweat and our ponies quivering and 
trembling like quaking aspens, when, after more than an hour of the most violent 
exertion, we finally got the herd quieted again.

	On another occasion while with the round-up we were spared an excessively 
unpleasant night only because there happened to be two or three great corrals not 
more than a mile or so away.  All day long it had been raining heavily and we were well 
drenched; but towards evening it lulled a little and the day herd, a very large one, of 
some two thousand head, was gathered on an open bottom.  We had turned the 
horses loose, and in our oilskin slickers cowered, soaked and comfortless, under the 
lee of the wagon, to take a meal of damp bread and lukewarm tea, the sizzling embers 
of the fire having about given up the ghost after a quite fruitless struggle with the 
steady downpour.  Suddenly the wind began to come in quick, sharp gusts, and soon a 
regular blizzard was blowing, driving the rain in stinging level sheets before it.  Just as 
we were preparing to turn into bed, with the certainty of a night of more or less chilly 
misery ahead of us, one of my men, an iron-faced personage, whom no one would 
ever have dreamed had a weakness for poetry, looked towards the plain where the 
cattle were, and remarked, "I guess there's 'racing and chasing on Cannobie Lea' now, 
sure." Following his gaze, I saw that the cattle had begun to drift before the storm, the 
night guards being evidently unable to cope with them, while at the other wagons 
riders were saddling in hot haste and spurring off to their help through the blinding rain.  
Some of us at once ran out to our own saddle-band.  All of the ponies were standing 
huddled together, with their heads down and their tails to the wind.  They were wild 
and restive enough usually; but the storm had cowed them, and we were able to catch 
them without either rope or halter.  We made quick work of saddling; and the second 
each man was ready, away he loped through the dusk, splashing and slipping in the 
pools of water that studded the muddy plain.  Most of the riders were already out when 
we arrived.  The cattle were gathered in a compact, wedge-shaped, or rather fan-
shaped mass, with their tails to the wind - that is, towards the thin end of the wedge or 
fan.  In front of this fan-shaped mass of frightened, maddened beasts was a long line 
of cowboys, each muffled in his slicker and with his broad hat pulled down over his 
eyes, to shield him from the pelting rain.  When the cattle were quiet for a moment 
every horseman at once turned round with his back to the wind, and the whole line 
stood as motionless as so many sentries.  Then, if the cattle began to spread out and 
overlap at the ends, or made a rush and broke through at one part of the lines, there 
would be a change into wild activity.  The men, shouting and swaying in their saddles, 
darted to and fro with reckless speed, utterly heedless of danger - now racing to the 
threatened point, now checking and wheeling their horses so sharply as to bring them 
square on their haunches, or even throw them flat down, while the hoofs plowed 
furrows in the slippery soil, until, after some minutes of mad galloping hither and 
thither, the herd, having drifted a hundred yards or so, would be once more brought up 
standing. We always had to let them drift a little to prevent their spreading out too 
much.  The din of the thunder was terrific, peal following peal until they mingled in one 
continuous, rumbling roar; and at every thunder-clap louder than its fellows the cattle 
would try to break away. Darkness had set in, but each flash of lightning showed us a 
dense array of tossing horns and staring eyes.  It grew always harder to hold in the 
herd; but the drift took us along to the corrals already spoken of, whose entrances 
were luckily to windward. As soon as we reached the first we cut off part of the herd, 
and turned it within; and after again doing this with the second, we were able to put all 
the remaining animals into the third.  The instant the cattle were housed five-sixths of 
the horsemen started back at full speed for the wagons; the rest of us barely waited to 
put up the bars and make the corrals secure before galloping after them.  We had to 
ride right in the teeth of the driving storm; and once at the wagons we made small 
delay in crawling under our blankets, damp though the latter were, for we were 
ourselves far too wet, stiff and cold not to hail with grateful welcome any kind of shelter 
from the wind and the rain.

	All animals were benumbed by the violence of this gale of cold rain; a prairie 
chicken rose from under my horse's feet so heavily that, thoughtlessly striking at it, I 
cut it down with my whip; while when a jack rabbit got up ahead of us, it was barely 
able to limp clumsily out of our way.

	But though there is much work and hardship, rough fare, monotony and exposure 
connected with the round-up, yet there are few men who do not look forward to it and 
back to it with pleasure.  The only fault to be found is that the hours of work are so long 
that one does not usually have enough time to sleep.  The food, if rough, is good; beef, 
bread, pork, beans, coffee or tea, always canned tomatoes, and often rice, canned 
corn, or sauce made from dried apples.  The men are good-humored, bold and 
thoroughly interested in their business, continually vying with one another in the effort 
to see which can do the work best.  It is superbly health-giving, and is full of 
excitement and adventure, calling for the exhibition of pluck, self-reliance, hardihood, 
and dashing horsemanship; and of all forms of physical labor the easiest and 
pleasantest is to sit in the saddle.



STORIES OF THE GREAT WEST
Roosevelt, Theodore
Part II: Stories Of Adventure
    
Red And White On The Border

	Up to 1880 the country through which the Little Missouri flows remained as wild 
and almost as unknown as it was when the old explorers and fur traders crossed it in 
the early part of the century.  It was the last great Indian hunting-ground, across which 
Grosventres and Mandans, Sioux and Cheyennes, and even Crows and Rees 
wandered in chase of game, and where they fought one another and plundered the 
small parties of white trappers and hunters that occasionally ventured into it.  Once or 
twice generals like Sully and Custer had penetrated it in the course of the long, tedious 
and bloody campaigns that finally broke the strength of the northern Horse Indians; 
indeed, the trail made by Custer's baggage train is to this day one of the well-known 
landmarks, for the deep ruts worn by the wheels of the heavy wagons are in many 
places still as distinctly to be seen as ever.

	In 1883, a regular long-range skirmish took place just south of us between some 
Cheyennes and some cowboys, with bloodshed on both sides, while about the same 
time a band of Sioux plundered a party of buffalo hunters of everything they owned, 
and some Crows who attempted the same feat with another party were driven off with 
the loss of two of their number.  Since then there have been in our neighborhood no 
stand-up fights or regular raids; but the Indians have at different times proved more or 
less troublesome, burning the grass and occasionally killing stock or carrying off 
horses that have wandered some distance away.  They have also themselves suffered 
somewhat at the hands of white horse-thieves.

	Bands of them, accompanied by their squaws and children, often come into the 
ranch country, either to trade or to hunt, and are then, of course, perfectly meek and 
peaceable.  If they stay any time they build themselves quite comfortable tepees 
(wigwams, as they would be styled in the East), and an Indian camp is a rather 
interesting, though very dirty, place to visit. On our ranch we get along particularly well 
with them, as it is a rule that they shall be treated as fairly as if they were whites; we 
neither wrong them ourselves nor allow others to wrong them.  We have always, for 
example, been as keen in putting down horse-stealing from Indians as from whites - 
which indicates rather an advanced stage of frontier morality, as theft from the 
"redskins" or the "Government" is usually held to be a very trivial matter compared with 
the heinous crime of theft from "citizens."

	There is always danger in meeting a band of young bucks in lonely, uninhabited 
country - those that have barely reached manhood being the most truculent, insolent 
and reckless.  A man meeting such a party runs great risk of losing his horse, his rifle 
and all else he has.  This has happened quite frequently during the past few years to 
hunters or cowboys who have wandered into the debatable territory where our country 
borders on the Indian lands; and in at least one such instance, that took place three 
years ago, the unfortunate individual lost his life as well as his belongings.  But a 
frontiersman of any experience can generally "stand off" a small number of such 
assailants, unless he loses his nerve or is taken by surprise.

	My only adventure with Indians was of a very mild kind.  It was in the course of a 
solitary trip to the north and east of our range, to what was then practically unknown 
country, although now containing many herds of cattle. One morning I had been 
traveling along the edge of the prairie, and about noon I rode Manitou up a slight rise 
and came out on a plateau that was perhaps half a mile broad.  When near the middle, 
four or five Indians suddenly came up over the edge, directly in front of me.  The 
second they saw me they whipped their guns out of their slings, started their horses 
into a run, and came on a full tilt, whooping and brandishing their weapons.  I instantly 
reined up and dismounted.  The level plain where we were was of all places the one 
on which such an onslaught could best be met.  In any broken country, or where there 
is much cover, a white man is at a great disadvantage if pitted against such adepts in 
the art of hiding as Indians; while, on the other hand, the latter will rarely rush in on a 
foe who, even if overpowered in the end, will probably inflict severe loss on his 
assailants.  The fury of an Indian charge, and the whoops by which it is accompanied, 
often scare horses so as to stampede them; but in Manitou I had perfect trust, and the 
old fellow stood as steady as a rock, merely cocking his ears and looking round at the 
noise.  I waited until the Indians were a hundred yards off, and then threw up my rifle 
and drew a bead on the foremost.  The effect was like magic.  The whole party 
scattered out as wild pigeons or teal ducks sometimes do when shot at, and doubled 
back on their tracks, the men bending over alongside their horses. When some 
distance off they halted and gathered together to consult, and after a minute one came 
forward alone, ostentatiously dropping his rifle and waving a blanket over his head.  
When he came within fifty yards I stopped him, and he pulled out a piece of paper - all 
Indians, when absent from their reservations, are supposed to carry passes - and 
called out, "How!  Me good Indian!" I answered, "How," and assured him most 
sincerely I was very glad he was a good Indian, but I would not let him come closer, 
and when his companions began to draw near, I covered him with the rifle and made 
him move off, which he did with a sudden lapse into the most uncanonical Anglo-
Saxon profanity.  I then started to lead my horse out to the prairie; and after hovering 
round a short time they rode off, while I followed suit, but in the opposite direction.  It 
had all passed too quickly for me to have time to get frightened; but during the rest of 
my ride I was exceedingly uneasy, and pushed tough, speedy old Manitou along at a 
rapid rate, keeping well out on the level.  However, I never saw the Indians again.  
They may not have intended any mischief beyond giving me a fright, but I did not dare 
to let them come to close quarters, for they would probably have taken my horse and 
rifle, and not impossibly my scalp as well.  Towards nightfall I fell in with two old 
trappers who lived near Killdeer Mountains, and they informed me that my assailants 
were some young Sioux bucks, at whose hands they themselves had just suffered the 
loss of two horses.

	A few cool, resolute whites, well armed, can generally beat back a much larger 
number of Indians if attacked in the open.  One of the first cattle outfits that came to 
the Powder River country, at the very end of the last war with the Sioux and 
Cheyennes, had an experience of this sort.  There were six or eight whites, including 
the foreman, who was part owner, and they had about a thousand head of cattle.  
These they intended to hold just out of the dangerous district until the end of the war, 
which was evidently close at hand.  They would thus get first choice of the new grazing 
grounds.  But they ventured a little too far, and one day while on the trail were 
suddenly charged by fifty or sixty Indians.  The cattle were scattered in every direction, 
and many of them slain in wantonness, though most were subsequently recovered.  All 
the loose horses were driven off.  But the men themselves instantly ran together and 
formed a ring, fighting from behind the pack- and saddle-ponies.  One of their number 
was killed, as well as two or three of the animals composing their living breastwork; but 
being good riflemen, they drove off their foes.  The latter did not charge them directly, 
but circled round, each rider concealed on the outside of his horse; and though their 
firing was very rapid, it was, naturally, very wild. The whites killed a good many ponies, 
and got one scalp, belonging to a young Sioux brave who dashed up too close, and 
whose body in consequence could not be carried off by his comrades, as happened to 
two or three others who were seen to fall.  Both the men who related the incident to me 
had been especially struck by the skill and daring shown by the Indians in thus 
carrying off their dead and wounded the instant they fell.

	The relations between the white borderers and their red-skinned foes and 
neighbors are rarely pleasant.  There are incessant quarrels, and each side has to 
complain of bitter wrongs.  Many of the frontiersmen are brutal, reckless and 
overbearing; most of the Indians are treacherous, revengeful and fiendishly cruel.  
Crime and bloodshed are the only possible results when such men are brought in 
contact.  Writers usually pay heed only to one side of the story; they recite the crimes 
committed by one party, whether whites or Indians, and omit all reference to the 
equally numerous sins of the other. In our dealings with the Indians we have erred 
quite as often through sentimentality as through willful wrong-doing.  Out of my own 
short experience I could recite a dozen instances of white outrages which, if told alone, 
would seem to justify all the outcry raised on behalf of the Indian, and I could also tell 
of as many Indian atrocities which make one almost feel that not a single one of the 
race should be left alive.

	The chief trouble arises from the feeling alluded to in this last sentence - the 
tendency on each side to hold the race, and not the individual, responsible for the 
deeds of the latter.  The skirmish between the cowboys and the Cheyennes, spoken of 
above, offers a case in point.  It was afterwards found out that two horse-thieves had 
stolen some ponies from the Cheyennes. The latter at once sallied out and attempted 
to take some from a cow camp, and a fight resulted.  In exactly the same way I once 
knew a party of buffalo hunters, who had been robbed of their horses by the Sioux, to 
retaliate by stealing an equal number from some perfectly peaceful Grosventres.  A 
white or an Indian who would not himself commit any outrage will yet make no effort to 
prevent his fellows from organizing expeditions against men of the rival race. This is 
natural enough where law is weak, and where, in consequence, every man has as 
much as he can do to protect himself without meddling in the quarrels of his neighbors.  
Thus a white community will often refrain from taking active steps against men who 
steal horses only from the Indians, although I have known a number of instances 
where the ranchmen have themselves stopped such outrages.  The Indians behave in 
the same way.  There is a peaceful tribe not very far from us which harbors two or 
three red horse-thieves, who steal from the whites at every chance. Recently, in our 
country, an expedition was raised to go against these horse-thieves, and it was only 
with the utmost difficulty that it was stopped; had it actually gone, accompanied as it 
would have been by scoundrels bent on plunder, as well as by wronged men who 
thought all redskins pretty much alike, the inevitable result would have been a bloody 
fight with all the Indians, both good and bad.

	Not only do Indians differ individually, but they differ as tribes.  An upper-class 
Cherokee is nowadays as good as a white.  The Nez Perces differ from the Apaches 
as much as a Scotch laird does from a Calabrian bandit.  A Cheyenne warrior is one of 
the most redoubtable foes in the whole world; a "digger" Snake one of the most 
despicable.  The Pueblo is as thrifty, industrious and peaceful as any European 
peasant, and no Arab of the Soudan is a lazier, wilder robber than is the Arapahoe.

	The frontiersmen themselves differ almost as widely from one another. But in the 
event of an Indian outbreak all suffer alike, and so all are obliged to stand together; 
when the reprisals for a deed of guilt are sure to fall on the innocent, the latter have no 
resource save to ally themselves with the guilty. Moreover, even the best Indians are 
very apt to have a good deal of the wild beast in them; when they scent blood they 
wish their share of it, no matter from whose veins it flows.  I once had a German in my 
employ, who, when a young child, had lost all his relations by a fate so terrible that it 
had weighed down his whole after-life.  His family was living out on the extreme border 
at the time of the great Sioux outbreak towards the end of the Civil War.  There were 
many Indians around, seemingly on good terms with them; and to two of these Indians 
they had been able to be of much service, so that they became great friends.  When 
the outbreak occurred, the members of this family were among the first captured.  The 
two friendly Indians then endeavored to save their lives, doing all they could to 
dissuade their comrades from committing violence.  Finally, after an angry discussion, 
the chief, who was present, suddenly ended it by braining the mother.  The two former 
friends, finding their efforts useless, forthwith turned round and joined with the others 
in putting the daughters to death with torture.  The boy alone was allowed to live.  If he 
had been a native-born frontiersman, instead of a peaceful, quiet German, he probably 
would have turned into an inveterate Indian-slayer, resolute to kill any of the hated 
race wherever and whenever met - a type far from unknown on the border, of which I 
have myself seen at least one example.

	With this incident it is only fair to contrast another that I heard related while 
spending the night in a small cow ranch on the Beaver, whither I had ridden on one of 
our many tedious hunts after lost horses.  Being tired, I got into my bunk early, and 
while lying there listened to the conversation of two cowboys - both strangers to me - 
who had also ridden up to the ranch to spend the night.  They were speaking of 
Indians, and mentioned, certainly without any marked disapprobation, a jury that had 
just acquitted a noted horse-thief of the charge of stealing stock from some Piegans, 
though he himself had openly admitted its truth.  One, an unprepossessing, beetle-
browed man, suddenly remarked that he had once met an Indian who was a pretty 
good fellow, and he proceeded to tell the story. A small party of Indians had passed 
the winter near the ranch at which he was employed.  The chief had two particularly 
fine horses, which so excited the cowboy's cupidity that one night he drove them off 
and "cached" - that is, hid - them in a safe place. The chief looked for them high and 
low, but without success.  Soon afterwards one of the cowboy's own horses strayed. 
When spring came the Indians went away; but three days afterwards the chief 
returned, bringing with him the strayed horse, which he had happened to run across.  
"I couldn't stand that," said the narrator, "so I just told him I reckoned I knew where his 
own lost horses were, and I saddled up my bronch' and piloted him to them."

	Indians are excellent fighters, though they do not shoot well - being in this 
respect much inferior not only to the old hunters, but also, nowadays, to the regular 
soldiers, who during the past three or four years have improved wonderfully in 
marksmanship.  They have a very effective discipline of their own, and thus a body of 
them may readily be an overmatch for an equal number of frontiersmen if the latter 
have no leader whom they respect.  If the cowboys have rifles - for the revolver is 
useless in long-range individual fighting - they feel no fear of the Indians, so long as 
there are but half a dozen or so on a side; but, though infinitely quicker in their 
movements than regular cavalry, yet, owing to their heavy saddles, they are not able to 
make quite so wonderful marches as the Indians do, and their unruly spirit often 
renders them ineffective when gathered in any number without a competent captain.  
Under a man like Forrest they would become the most formidable fighting horsemen in 
the world.

	In the summer of 1886, at the time of the war-scare over the "Cutting incident," 
we began the organization of a troop of cavalry in our district, notifying the Secretary of 
War that we were at the service of the Government, and being promised every 
assistance by our excellent chief executive of the Territory, Governor Pierce.  Of 
course the cowboys were all eager for war, they did not much care with whom; they 
were very patriotic, they were fond of adventure, and, to tell the truth, they were by no 
means averse to the prospect of plunder.  News from the outside world came to us 
very irregularly, and often in distorted form, so that we began to think we might get 
involved in a conflict not only with Mexico, but with England also.  One evening at my 
ranch the men began talking over the English soldiers, so I got down "Napier" and 
read them several extracts from his descriptions of the fighting in the Spanish 
peninsula, also recounting as well as I could the great deeds of the British cavalry from 
Waterloo to Balaklava, and finishing up by describing from memory the fine 
appearance, the magnificent equipment and the superb horses of the Household 
cavalry and of a regiment of hussars I had once seen.

	All of this produced much the same effect on my listeners that the sight of 
Marmion's cavalcade produced in the minds of the Scotch moss-troopers on the eve of 
Flodden; and at the end, one of them, who had been looking into the fire and rubbing 
his hands together, said with regretful emphasis, "Oh, how I would like to kill one of 
them!"



STORIES OF THE GREAT WEST
Roosevelt, Theodore
Part II: Stories Of Adventure
    
Sheriff's Work On A Ranch

Finnigan 
	In our own immediate locality we have had more difficulty with white 
desperadoes than with the redskins.  At times there has been a good deal of cattle-
killing and horse-stealing, and occasionally a murder or two.  But as regards the last, a 
man has very little more to fear in the West than in the East, in spite of all the lawless 
acts one reads about.  Undoubtedly a long-standing quarrel sometimes ends in a 
shooting-match; and of course savage affrays occasionally take place in the bar-
rooms; in which, be it remarked, that, inasmuch as the men are generally drunk, and, 
furthermore, as the revolver is at best a rather inaccurate weapon, outsiders are nearly 
as apt to get hurt as are the participants.  But if a man minds his own business and 
does not go into bar-rooms, gambling saloons, and the like, he need have no fear of 
being molested; while a revolver is a mere foolish incumbrance for any but a thorough 
expert, and need never be carried.  Against horse-thieves, cattle-thieves, claim-
jumpers, and the like, however, every ranchman has to be on his guard, and armed 
collisions with these gentry are sometimes inevitable. The fact of such scoundrels 
being able to ply their trade with impunity for any length of time can only be understood 
if the absolute wildness of our land is taken into account.  The country is yet 
unsurveyed and unmapped; the course of the river itself, as put down on the various 
Government and railroad maps, is very much a mere piece of guesswork, its bed being 
in many parts - as by my ranch - ten or fifteen miles or more away from where these 
maps make it. White hunters came into the land by 1880, but the actual settlement 
only began in 1882, when the first cattle-men drove in their herds, all of Northern 
stock, the Texans not passing north of the country around the head-waters of the river 
until the following year, while until 1885 the territory through which it ran for the final 
hundred and fifty miles before entering the Big Missouri remained as little known as 
ever.

	Some of us had always been anxious to run down the river in a boat during the 
time of the spring floods, as we thought we might get good duck and goose shooting, 
and also kill some beaver, while the trip would, in addition, have all the charm of an 
exploring expedition.  Twice, so far as we knew, the feat had been performed, both 
times by hunters, and in one instance with very good luck in shooting and trapping.  A 
third attempt, by two men on a raft, made the spring preceding that on which we made 
ours, had been less successful, for, when a score or so of miles below our ranch, a 
bear killed one of the two adventurers, and the survivor returned.

	We could only go down during a freshet, for the Little Missouri, like most plains' 
rivers, is usually either a dwindling streamlet, a mere slender thread of sluggish water, 
or else a boiling, muddy torrent, running over a bed of shifting quicksand, that neither 
man nor beast can cross.  It rises and falls with extraordinary suddenness and 
intensity, an instance of which has just occurred as this very page is being written.  
Last evening, when the moon rose, from the ranch veranda we could see the river-bed 
almost dry, the stream having shrunk under the drought till it was little but a string of 
shallow pools, with between them a trickle of water that was not ankle deep, and 
hardly wet the fetlocks of the saddle-band when driven across it; yet at daybreak this 
morning, without any rain having fallen near us, but doubtless in consequence of some 
heavy cloudburst near its head, the swift, swollen current was foaming brim high 
between the banks, and even the fords were swimming-deep for the horses.

	Accordingly we had planned to run down the river sometime towards the end of 
April, taking advantage of a rise; but an accident made us start three or four weeks 
sooner than we had intended.

	In 1886 the ice went out of the upper river very early, during the first part of 
February; but it at times almost froze over again, the bottom ice did not break up, and 
a huge gorge, scores of miles in length, formed in and above the bend known as the 
Ox-bow, a long distance up-stream from my ranch. About the middle of March this 
great Ox-bow jam came down past us.  It moved slowly, its front forming a high, 
crumbling wall, and creaming over like an immense breaker on the seashore; we could 
hear the dull roaring and crunching as it plowed down the river-bed long before it came 
in sight round the bend above us.  The ice kept piling and tossing up in the middle, and 
not only heaped itself above the level of the banks, but also in many places spread out 
on each side beyond them, grinding against the cottonwood trees in front of the ranch 
veranda, and at one moment bidding fair to overwhelm the house itself. It did not, 
however, but moved slowly down past us with that look of vast, resistless, relentless 
force that any great body of moving ice, as a glacier, or an iceberg, always conveys to 
the beholder.  The heaviest pressure from the water that was backed up behind being, 
of course, always in the middle, this part kept breaking away, and finally was pushed 
on clear through, leaving the river so changed that it could hardly be known.  On each 
bank, and for a couple of hundred feet out from it into the stream, was a solid mass of 
ice, edging the river along most of its length, at least as far as its course lay through 
lands that we knew; and in the narrow channel between the sheer-ice-walls the water 
ran like a mill-race.

	At night the snowy, glittering masses, tossed up and heaped into fantastic forms, 
shone like crystal in the moonlight; but they soon lost their beauty, becoming fouled 
and blackened, and at the same time melted and settled down until it was possible to 
clamber out across the slippery hummocks.

	We had brought out a clinker-built boat especially to ferry ourselves over the river 
when it was high, and were keeping our ponies on the opposite side, where there was 
a good range shut in by some very broken country that we knew they would not be apt 
to cross.  This boat had already proved very useful and now came in handier than 
ever, as without it we could take no care of our horses.  We kept it on the bank, tied to 
a tree, and every day would carry it or slide it across the hither ice bank, usually with 
not a little tumbling and scrambling on our part, lower it gently into the swift current, 
pole it across to the ice on the farther bank, and then drag it over that, repeating the 
operation when we came back.  One day we crossed and walked off about ten miles to 
a tract of wild and rugged country, cleft in every direction by ravines and cedar canons, 
in the deepest of which we had left four deer hanging a fortnight before, as game thus 
hung up in cold weather keeps indefinitely.  The walking was very bad, especially over 
the clay buttes; for the sun at midday had enough strength to thaw out the soil to the 
depth of a few inches only, and accordingly the steep hillsides were covered by a crust 
of slippery mud, with the frozen ground underneath.  It was hard to keep one's footing, 
and to avoid falling while balancing along the knife-like ridge crests, or while clinging to 
the stunted sage brush as we went down into the valleys.  The deer had been hung in 
a thicket of dwarfed cedars; but when we reached the place we found nothing save 
scattered pieces of their carcasses, and the soft mud was tramped all over with round, 
deeply marked footprints, some of them but a few hours old, showing that the 
plunderers of our cache were a pair of cougars - "mountain lions," as they are called by 
the Westerners.  They had evidently been at work for some time, and had eaten 
almost every scrap of flesh; one of the deer had been carried for some distance to the 
other side of a deep, narrow, chasm-like gully across which the cougar must have 
leaped with the carcass in its mouth.  We followed the fresh trail of the cougars for 
some time, as it was well marked, especially in the snow still remaining in the bottoms 
of the deeper ravines; finally it led into a tangle of rocky hills riven by dark cedar-clad 
gorges, in which we lost it, and we retraced our steps, intending to return on the 
morrow with a good track hound.

	But we never carried out our intentions, for next morning one of my men who was 
out before breakfast came back to the house with the startling news that our boat was 
gone - stolen, for he brought with him the end of the rope with which it had been tied, 
evidently cut off with a sharp knife; and also a red woolen mitten with a leather palm, 
which he had picked up on the ice. We had no doubt as to who had stolen it, for 
whoever had done so had certainly gone down the river in it, and the only other thing 
in the shape of a boat on the Little Missouri was a small flat-bottomed scow in the 
possession of three hard characters who lived in a shack, or hut, some twenty miles 
above us, and whom we had shrewdly suspected for some time of wishing to get out of 
the country, as certain of the cattlemen had begun openly to threaten to lynch them.  
They belonged to a class that always holds sway during the raw youth of a frontier 
community, and the putting down of which is the first step towards decent government.  
Dakota, west of the Missouri, has been settled very recently, and every town within it 
has seen strange antics performed during the past six or seven years.  Medora, in 
particular, has had more than its full share of shooting and stabbing affrays, horse-
stealing and cattle-killing.  But the time for such things was passing away; and during 
the preceding fall the vigilantes - locally known as "stranglers," in happy allusion to 
their summary method of doing justice - had made a clean sweep of the cattle country 
along the Yellow-stone and that part of the Big Missouri around and below its mouth.  
Be it remarked, in passing, that while the outcome of their efforts had been in the main 
wholesome, yet, as is always the case in an extended raid of vigilantes, several of the 
sixty odd victims had been perfectly innocent men who had been hung or shot in 
company with the real scoundrels, either through carelessness and misapprehension 
or on account of some personal spite.

	The three men we suspected had long been accused - justly or unjustly - of being 
implicated both in cattle-killing and in that worst of frontier crimes, horse-stealing; it 
was only by an accident that they had escaped the clutches of the vigilantes the 
preceding fall.  Their leader was a well-built fellow named Finnigan, who had long red 
hair reaching to his shoulders, and always wore a broad hat and a fringed buckskin 
shirt.  He was rather a hard case, and had been chief actor in a number of shooting 
scrapes.  The other two were a half-breed, a stout, muscular man, and an old German, 
whose viciousness was of the weak and shiftless type.

	We knew that these three men were becoming uneasy and were becoming 
uneasy and were anxious to leave the locality; and we also knew that traveling on 
horseback, in the direction in which they would wish to go, was almost impossible, as 
the swollen, ice-fringed rivers could not be crossed at all, and the stretches of broken 
ground would form nearly an impassable barrier. So we had little doubt that it was they 
who had taken our boat; and as they knew there was then no boat left on the river, and 
as the country along its banks was entirely impracticable for horses, we felt sure they 
would be confident that there could be no pursuit.

	Accordingly we at once set to work in our turn to build a flat-bottomed scow, 
wherein to follow them.  Our loss was very annoying, and might prove a serious one if 
we were long prevented from crossing over to look after the saddle-band; but the 
determining motive in our minds was neither chagrin nor anxiety to recover our 
property.  In any wild country where the power of the law is little felt or heeded, and 
where every one has to rely upon himself for protection, men soon get to feel that it is 
in the highest degree unwise to submit to any wrong without making an immediate and 
resolute effort to avenge it upon the wrong-doers, at no matter what cost of risk or 
trouble. To submit tamely and meekly to theft, or to any other injury, is to invite almost 
certain repetition of the offense, in a place where self-reliant hardihood and the ability 
to hold one's own under all circumstances rank as the first virtues.

	Two of my cowboys, Seawall and Dow, were originally from Maine, and were 
mighty men of their hands, skilled in woodcraft and the use of the ax, paddle and rifle.  
They set to work with a will, and, as by good luck there were plenty of boards, in two or 
three days they had turned out a first-class flat-bottom, which was roomy, drew very 
little water, and was dry as a bone; and though, of course, not a handy craft, was 
easily enough managed in going down-stream.  Into this we packed flour, coffee and 
bacon enough to last us a fortnight or so, plenty of warm bedding and the mess kit; 
and early one cold March morning slid it into the icy current, took our seats, and 
shoved off down the river.

	There could have been no better men for a trip of this kind than my two 
companions, Seawall and Dow.  They were tough, hardy, resolute fellows, quick as 
cats, strong as bears, and able to travel like bull moose.  We felt very little uneasiness 
as to the result of a fight with the men we were after, provided we had anything like a 
fair show; moreover, we intended, if possible, to get them at such a disadvantage that 
there would not be any fight at all. The only risk of any consequence that we ran was 
that of being ambushed; for the extraordinary formation of the Bad Lands, with the 
ground cut up into gullies, serried walls, and battlemented hill-tops, makes it the 
country of all others for hiding-places and ambuscades.

	For several days before we started the weather had been bitterly cold, as a 
furious blizzard was blowing; but on the day we left there was a lull, and we hoped a 
thaw had set in.  We all were most warmly and thickly dressed, with woolen socks and 
underclothes, heavy jackets and trousers, and great fur coats, so that we felt we could 
bid defiance to the weather.  Each carried his rifle, and we had in addition a double-
barreled duck gun, for water-fowl and beaver.  To manage the boat, we had paddles, 
heavy oars, and long iron-shod poles, Seawall steering while Dow sat in the bow.  
Altogether we felt as if we were off on a holiday trip, and set to work to have as good 
as time as possible.

	The river twisted in every direction, winding to and fro across the alluvial valley 
bottom, only to be brought up by the rows of great barren buttes that abounded it on 
each edge.  It had worn away the sides of these till they towered up as cliffs of clay, 
marl, or sandstone.  Across their white faces the seams of coal drew sharp black 
bands, and they were elsewhere blotched and varied with brown, yellow, purple and 
red.  This fantastic coloring, together with the jagged irregularity of their crests, 
channeled by the weather into spires, buttresses and battlements, as well as their 
barrenness and the distinctness with which they loomed up through the high, dry air, 
gave them a look that was a singular mixture of the terrible and the grotesque.  The 
bottoms were covered thickly with leafless cottonwood trees, or else with withered 
brown grass and stunted, sprawling sage bushes.  At times the cliffs rose close to us 
on either hand, and again the valley would widen into a sinuous oval a mile or two 
long, bounded on every side, as far as our eyes could see, by a bluff line without a 
break, until, as we floated down close to its other end, there would suddenly appear in 
one corner a cleft through which the stream rushed out.  As it grew dusk the shadowy 
outlines of the buttes lost nothing of their weirdness; the twilight only made their 
uncouth shapelessness more grim and forbidding.  They looked like the crouching 
figures of great goblin beasts.

     Those two hills on the right
     Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight -
     While to the left a tall scalped mountain. . . .
     The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:
     The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
     Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay -

	might well have been written after seeing the strange, desolate lands lying in 
western Dakota.

	All through the early part of the day we drifted swiftly down between the heaped-
up piles of ice, the cakes and slabs now dirty and unattractive looking.  Towards 
evening, however, there came long reaches where the banks on either side were bare, 
though even here there would every now and then be necks where the jam had been 
crowded into too narrow a spot and had risen over the side as it had done up-stream, 
grinding the bark from the big cottonwoods and snapping the smaller ones short off.  In 
such places the ice-walls were sometimes eight or ten feet high, continually undermined 
by the restless current; and every now and then overhanging pieces would break off and 
slide into the stream with a loud sullen splash, like the plunge of some great water beast.  
Nor did we dare to go in too close to the high cliffs, as bowlders and earth masses, freed 
by the thaw from the grip of the frost, kept rolling and leaping down their faces and 
forced us to keep a sharp lookout lest our boat should be swamped.

	At nightfall we landed and made our camp on a point of wood-covered land 
jutting out into the stream.  We had seen very little trace of life until late in the day, for 
the ducks had not yet arrived; but in the afternoon a sharp-tailed prairie fowl flew across 
stream ahead of the boat, lighting on a low branch by the water's edge.  Shooting him, 
we landed and picked off two others that were perched high up in leafless cottonwoods, 
plucking the buds. These three birds served us as supper; and shortly afterward, as the 
cold grew more and more biting, we rolled in under our furs and blankets and were soon 
asleep.

	In the morning it was evident that instead of thawing it had grown decidedly 
colder.  The anchor ice was running thick in the river, and we spent the first hour or two 
after sunrise in hunting over the frozen swamp bottom for white-tail deer, of which there 
were many tracks; but we saw nothing. Then we broke camp and again started down-
stream - a simple operation, as we had no tent, and all we had to do was to cord up our 
bedding and gather the mess kit.  It was colder than before, and for some time we went 
along in chilly silence, nor was it until midday that the sun warmed our blood in the least.  
The crooked bed of the current twisted hither and thither, but whichever way it went the 
icy north wind, blowing stronger all the time, drew steadily up it.  One of us remarking 
that we bade fair to have it in our faces all day, the steersman announced that we 
couldn't, unless it was the crookedest wind in Dakota; and half an hour afterward we 
overheard him muttering to himself that it was the crookedest wind in Dakota.  We 
passed a group of tepees on one bottom, marking the deserted winter camp of some 
Grosventre Indians, which some of my men had visited a few months previously on a 
trading expedition.  It was almost the last point on the river with which we were 
acquainted.  At midday we landed on a sand-bar for lunch - a simple enough meal, the 
tea being boiled over a fire of driftwood, that also fried the bacon, while the bread only 
needed to be baked every other day.  Then we again shoved off.  As the afternoon 
waned the cold grew still more bitter, and the wind increased, blowing in fitful gusts 
against us, until it chilled us to the marrow when we sat still.  But we rarely did sit still, for 
even the rapid current was unable to urge the light-draught scow down in the teeth of the 
strong blasts, and we only got her along by dint of hard work with pole and paddle.  Long 
before the sun went down the ice had begun to freeze on the handles of the poles, and 
we were not sorry to haul on shore for the night. For supper we again had prairie fowl, 
having shot four from a great patch of bulberry bushes late in the afternoon.  A man 
doing hard open-air work in cold weather is always hungry for meat.

	During the night the thermometer went down to zero, and in the morning the 
anchor ice was running so thickly that we did not care to start at once, for it is most 
difficult to handle a boat in the deep frozen slush. Accordingly we took a couple of hours 
for a deer hunt, as there weae evidently many white-tail on the bottom.  We selected one 
long, isolated patch of tangled trees and brushwood, two of us beating through it while 
the other watched one end; but almost before we had begun four deer broke out at one 
side, loped easily off, evidently not much scared, and took refuge in a deep glen or 
gorge, densely wooded with cedars, that made a blind pocket in the steep side of one of 
the great plateaus bounding the bottom.  After a short consultation, one of our number 
crept round to the head of the gorge, making a wide detour, and the other two advanced 
up it on each side, thus completely surrounding the doomed deer.  They attempted to 
break out past the man at the head of the glen, who shot down a couple, a buck and a 
yearling doe.  The other two made their escape by running off over ground so rough that 
it looked fitter to be crossed by their upland-loving cousins, the black-tail.

	This success gladdened our souls, insuring us plenty of fresh meat.  We carried 
pretty much all of both deer back to camp, and, after a hearty breakfast, loaded our scow 
and started merrily off once more.  The cold still continued intense, and as the day wore 
away we became numbed by it, until at last an incident occurred that set our blood 
running freely again.

The Camp Of The Thieves 

	We were, of course, always on the alert, keeping a sharp lookout ahead and 
around us, and making as little noise as possible.  Finally our watchfulness was 
rewarded, for in the middle of the afternoon of this, the third day we had been gone, as 
we came around a bend, we saw in front of us the lost boat, together with a scow, 
moored against the bank, while from among the bushes some little way back the smoke 
of a camp-fire curled up through the frosty air.  We had come on the camp of the thieves.  
As I glanced at the faces of my two followers I was struck by the grim, eager look in their 
eyes. Our overcoats were off in a second, and after exchanging a few muttered words, 
the boat was hastily and silently shoved towards the bank.  As soon as it touched the 
shore ice I leaped out and ran up behind a clump of bushes, so as to cover the landing 
of the others, who had to make the boat fast.  For a moment we felt a thrill of keen 
excitement, and our veins tingled as we crept cautiously towards the fire, for it seemed 
likely that there would be a brush; but, as it turned out, this was almost the only moment 
of much interest, for the capture itself was as tame as possible.

	The men we were after knew they had taken with them the only craft there was 
on the river, and so felt perfectly secure; accordingly, we took them absolutely by 
surprise.  The only one in camp was the German, whose weapons were on the ground, 
and who, of course, gave up at once, his two companions being off hunting.  We made 
him safe, delegating one of our number to look after him particularly and see that he 
made no noise, and then sat down and waited for the others.  The camp was under the 
lee of a cut bank, behind which we crouched, and, after waiting an hour or over, the men 
we were after came in.  We heard them a long way off and made ready, watching them 
for some minutes as they walked towards us, their rifles on their shoulders and the 
sunlight glinting on the steel barrels.  When they were within twenty yards or so we 
straightened up from behind the bank, covering them with our cocked rifles, while I 
shouted to them to hold up their hands - an order that in such a case, in the West, a man 
is not apt to disregard if he thinks the giver is in earnest.  The half-breed obeyed at once, 
his knees trembling as if they had been made of whalebone.  Finnigan hesitated for a 
second, his eyes fairly wolfish; then, as I walked up within a few paces, covering the 
center of his chest so as to avoid overshooting, and repeating the command, he saw that 
he had no show, and, with an oath, let his rifle drop and held his hands up beside his 
head.

	It was nearly dusk, so we camped where we were.  The first thing to be done was 
to collect enough wood to enable us to keep a blazing fire all night long.  While Seawall 
and Dow, thoroughly at home in the use of the axe, chopped down dead cottonwood 
trees and dragged the logs up into a huge pile, I kept guard over the three prisoners, 
who were huddled into a sullen group some twenty yards off, just the right distance for 
the buckshot in the double-barrel.  Having captured our men, we were in a quandary 
how to keep them.  The cold was so intense that to tie them tightly hand and foot meant, 
in all likelihood, freezing both hands and feet off during the night; and it was no use tying 
them at all unless we tied them tightly enough to stop in part the circulation.  So nothing 
was left for us to do but to keep perpetual guard over them.  Of course we had carefully 
searched them and taken away not only their firearms and knives, but everything else 
that could possibly be used as a weapon.  By this time they were pretty well cowed, as 
they found out very quickly that they would be well treated so long as they remained 
quiet, but would receive some rough handling if they attempted any disturbance.

	Our next step was to cord their weapons up in some bedding, which we sat on 
while we took supper.  Immediately afterward we made the men take off their boots - an 
additional safeguard, as it was a cactus country, in which a man could travel barefoot 
only at the risk of almost certainly laming himself for life - and go to bed, all three lying 
on one buffalo robe and being covered by another, in the full light of the blazing fire.  We 
determined to watch in succession a half-night apiece, thus each getting a full rest every 
third night.  I took first watch, my two companions, revolver under head, rolling up in their 
blankets on the side of the fire opposite that on which the three captives lay; while I, in 
fur cap, gauntlets and overcoat, took my station a little way back in the circle of firelight, 
in a position in which I could watch my men with the absolute certainty of being able to 
stop any movement, no matter how sudden.  For this night-watching we always used the 
double-barrel with buckshot, as a rifle is uncertain in the dark; while with a shot-gun at 
such a distance, and with men lying down, a person who is watchful may be sure that 
they cannot get up, no matter how quick they are, without being riddled.  The only 
danger lies in the extreme monotony of sitting still in the dark guarding men who make 
no motion, and the consequent tendency to go to sleep, especially when one has had a 
hard day's work and is feeling really tired.  But neither on the first night nor on any 
subsequent one did we ever abate a jot of our watchfulness.

	Next morning we started downstream, having a well-laden flotilla, for the men we 
had caught had a good deal of plunder in their boats, including some saddles, as they 
evidently intended to get horses as soon as they evidently intended to get horses as 
soon as they reached a part of the country where there were any and where it was 
possible to travel.  Finnigan, who was the ring leader and the man I was especially after, 
I kept by my side in our boat, the other two being put in their own scow, heavily laden 
and rather leaky and with only one paddle.  We kept them just in front of us, a few yards 
distant, the river being so broad that we knew, and they knew also, any attempt at 
escape to be perfectly hopeless.

	For some miles we went swiftly downstream, the cold being bitter and the slushy 
anchor ice choking the space between the boats; then the current grew sluggish, eddies 
forming along the sides.  We paddled on until, coming into a long reach where the water 
was almost backed up, we saw there was a stoppage at the other end.  Working up to 
this, it proved to be a small ice jam, through which we broke our way only to find 
ourselves, after a few hundred yards, stopped by another.  We had hoped that the first 
was merely a jam of anchor ice, caused by the cold of the last few days; but the jam we 
had now come to was black and solid and, running the boats ashore, one of us went off 
down the bank to find out what the matter was.  On climbing a hill that commanded a 
view of the valley for several miles, the explanation became only too evident - as far as 
we could see, the river was choked with black ice. The great Ox-bow jam had stopped, 
and we had come down to its tail.

	We had nothing to do but to pitch camp, after which we held a consultation.  The 
Little Missouri has much too swift a current - when it has any current at all - with too bad 
a bottom, for it to be possible to take a boat upstream; and to walk meant, of course, 
abandoning almost all we had. Moreover, we knew that a thaw would very soon start the 
jam, and so made up our minds that we had best simply stay where we were and work 
downstream as fast as we could, trusting that the spell of bitter weather would pass 
before our food gave out.

Eight Days Of Watching 

	The next eight days were as irksome and monotonous as any I ever spent: there 
is very little amusement in combining the functions of a sheriff with those of an arctic 
explorer.  The weather kept as cold as ever.  During the night the water in the pail would 
freeze solid.  Ice formed all over the river, thickly along the banks; and the clear, frosty 
sun gave us so little warmth that the melting hardly began before noon.  Each day the 
great jam would settle downstream a few miles, only to wedge again, leaving behind it 
several smaller jams, through which we would work our way until we were as close to 
the tail of the large one as we dared to go.  Once we came round a bend and got so 
near that we were in a good deal of danger of being sucked under.  The current ran too 
fast to let us work back against it, and we could not pull the boat up over the steep banks 
of rotten ice, which were breaking off and falling in all the time.  We could only land and 
snub the boats up with ropes, holding them there for two or three hours until the jam 
worked down once more - all the time, of course, having to keep guard over the 
captives, who had caused us so much trouble that we were bound to bring them in, no 
matter what else we lost.

	We had to be additionally cautious on account of being in the Indian country, 
having worked down past Kildeer Mountains, where some of my cowboys had run 
across a band of Sioux - said to be Tetons - the year before.  Very probably the Indians 
would not have harmed us anyhow, but as we were hampered by the prisoners we 
preferred not meeting them; nor did we, though we saw plenty of fresh signs and found, 
to our sorrow, that they had just made a grand hunt all down the river and had killed or 
driven off almost every head of game in the country through which we were passing.

	As our stock of provisions grew scantier and scantier, we tried in vain to eke it 
out by the chase; for we saw no game.  Two of us would go out hunting at a time, while 
the third kept guard over the prisoners.  The latter would be made to sit down together 
on a blanket at one side of the fire, while the guard for the time being stood or sat some 
fifteen or twenty yards off. The prisoners being unarmed and kept close together, there 
was no possibility of their escaping, and the guard kept at such a distance that they 
could not overpower him by springing on him, he having a Winchester or the double-
barreled shot-gun always in his hands cocked and at the ready. So long as we kept 
wide-awake and watchful there was not the least danger, as our three men knew us and 
understood perfectly that the slightest attempt at a break would result in their being shot 
down; but, although there was thus no risk, it was harassing, tedious work, and the 
strain, day in and day out, without any rest or let up, became very tiresome.

	The days were monotonous to a degree.  The endless rows of hills bounding the 
valley, barren and naked, stretched along without a break.  When we rounded a bend, it 
was only to see on each hand the same lines of broken buttes dwindling off into the 
distance ahead of us as they had dwindled off into the distance behind.  If, in hunting, we 
climbed to their tops, as far as our eyes could scan there was nothing but the great 
rolling prairie, bleak and lifeless, reaching off to the horizon.  We broke camp in the 
morning, on a point of land covered with brown, leafless, frozen cottonwoods; and in the 
afternoon we pitched camp on another point in the midst of a grove of the same stiff, 
dreary trees.  The discolored river, whose eddies boiled into yellow foam, flowed always 
between the same banks of frozen mud or of muddy ice.  And what was, from a practical 
standpoint, even worse, our diet began to be as same as the scenery.  Being able to kill 
nothing, we exhausted all our stock of provisions, and got reduced to flour, without yeast 
or baking-powder; and unleavened bread, made with exceedingly muddy water, is not, 
as a steady thing, attractive.

	Finding that they were well treated and were also watched with the closest 
vigilance, our prisoners behaved themselves excellently and gave no trouble, though 
afterward, when out of our hands and shut up in jail, the half-breed got into a stabbing 
affray.  They conversed freely with my two men on a number of indifferent subjects, and 
after the first evening no allusion was made to the theft or anything connected with it; so 
that an outsider overhearing the conversation would never have guessed what our 
relations to each other really were.  Once, and once only, did Finnigan broach the 
subject. Somebody had been speaking of a man whom we all knew, called "Calamity," 
who had been recently taken by the sheriff on a charge of horse-stealing. Calamity had 
escaped once, but was caught at a disadvantage the next time; nevertheless, when 
summoned to hold his hands up, he refused and attempted to draw his own revolver, 
with the result of having two bullets put through him. Finnigan commented on Calamity 
as a fool for "not knowing when a man had the drop on him"; and then, suddenly turning 
to me, said, his weather-beaten face flushing darkly: "If I'd had any show at all, you'd 
have sure had to fight, Mr. Roosevelt; but there wasn't any use making a break when I'd 
only have got shot myself, with no chance of harming any one else." I laughed and 
nodded, and the subject was dropped.

	Indeed, if the time was tedious to us, it must have seemed never-ending to our 
prisoners, who had nothing to do but to lie still and read, or chew the bitter cud of their 
reflections, always conscious that some pair of eyes was watching them every moment, 
and that at least one loaded rifle was ever ready to be used against them.  They had 
quite a stock of books, some of a rather unexpected kind.  Dime novels and the 
inevitable "History of the James Brothers" - a book that, together with the "Police 
Gazette," is to be found in the hands of every professed or putative ruffian in the West - 
seemed perfectly in place; but it was somewhat surprising to find that a large number of 
more or less drearily silly "society" novels, ranging from Ouida's to those of The Duchess 
and Augusta J. Evans, were most greedily devoured. As for me, I had brought with me 
"Anna Karenina," and my surroundings were quite gray enough to harmonize well with 
Tolstoi.

	Our commons grew shorter and shorter; and finally even the flour was nearly 
gone, and we were again forced to think seriously of abandoning the boats.  The Indians 
had driven all the deer out of the country; occasionally we shot prairie fowl, but they 
were not plentiful.  A flock of geese passed us one morning, and afterward an old gander 
settled down on the river near our camp; but he was over two hundred yards off, and a 
rifle-shot missed him. Where he settled down, by the way, the river was covered with 
thick glare ice that would just bear his weight; and it was curious to see him stretch his 
legs out in front and slide forty or fifty feet when he struck, balancing himself with his 
outspread wings.

	But when the day was darkest the dawn appeared.  At last, having worked down 
some thirty miles at the tail of the ice jam, we struck an outlying cow-camp of the C 
Diamond (C Diamond) ranch, and knew that our troubles were almost over.  There was 
but one cowboy in it, but we were certain of his cordial help, for in a stock country all 
make common cause against either horse-thieves or cattle-thieves.  He had no wagon, 
but told us we could get one up at a ranch near Killdeer Mountains, some fifteen miles 
off, and lent me a pony to go up there and see about it - which I accordingly did, after a 
sharp preliminary tussle when I came to mount the wiry bronco (one of my men 
remarking in a loud aside to our cowboy host, "the boss ain't no bronco-buster").  When I 
reached the solitary ranch spoken of, I was able to hire a large prairie schooner and two 
tough little bronco mares, driven by the settler himself, a rugged old plainsman, who 
evidently could hardly understand why I took so much bother with the thieves instead of 
hanging them off-hand. Returning to the river the next day, we walked our men up to the 
Killdeer Mountains.  Seawall and Dow left me the following morning, went back to the 
boats and had no further difficulty, for the weather set in very warm, the ice went through 
with a rush, and they reached Mandan in about ten days, killing four beaver and five 
geese on the way, but lacking time to stop to do any regular hunting.

	Meanwhile I took the three thieves into Dickinson, the nearest town. The going 
was bad and the little mares could only drag the wagon at a walk; so, though we drove 
during the daylight, it took us two days and a night to make the journey.  It was a most 
desolate drive.  The prairie had been burned the fall before and was a mere bleak waste 
of blackened earth, and a cold, rainy mist lasted throughout the two days.  The only 
variety was where the road crossed the shallow headwaters of Knife and Green rivers.  
Here the ice was high along the banks and the wagon had to be taken to pieces to get it 
over. My three captives were unarmed, but as I was alone with them, except for the 
driver, of whom I knew nothing, I had to be doubly on my guard and never let them come 
close to me.  The little mares went so slowly, and the heavy road rendered any hope of 
escape by flogging up the horses so entirely out of the question, that I soon found the 
safest plan was to put the prisoners in the wagon and myself walk behind with the 
inevitable Winchester. Accordingly I trudged steadily the whole time behind the wagon 
through the ankle-deep mud. It was a gloomy walk.  Hour after hour went by always the 
same, while I plodded along through the dreary landscape - hunger, cold and fatigue 
struggling with a sense of dogged, weary resolution.  At night, when we put up at the 
squalid hut of a frontier granger, the only habitation on our road, it was even worse.  I did 
not dare to go to sleep, but making my three men get into the upper bunk, from which 
they could get out only with difficulty, I sat up with my back against the cabin-door and 
kept watch over them all night long.  So, after thirty-six hours' sleeplessness, I was most 
heartily glad when we at last jolted into the long, straggling main street of Dickinson, and 
I was able to give my unwilling companions into the hands of the sheriff.

	Under the laws of Dakota I received my fees as a deputy sheriff for making the 
three arrests, and also mileage for the three hundred odd miles gone over - a total of 
some fifty dollars.
