Brian Garfield (58 page)

Joe Ferris joined Theodore Roosevelt's campaign for the Vice Presidency in 1900, and traveled with Roosevelt through North Dakota and Montana. Long before that, Joe had sold his store and moved to Montana. Roosevelt kept in touch with him for many years. In 1912 Joe, like his friend Pack, was a delegate to Roosevelt's Bull Moose convention.

Howard Eaton, the first dude rancher, ran his tourist outfit at Custer Trail until 1904, when with his brothers he moved to the Big Horn country—Wolf, Wyoming, where the famous Eaton Ranch still operates today. Meanwhile the Eaton brothers' original Custer Trail Ranch near Medora has become a Bible camp operated by the Lutheran Church.

A.C. Huidekoper was one of the few ranchers to remain in the Bad Lands and keep faith in the region. As the foregoing story shows, he was still living there when Roosevelt visited in 1903. Huidekoper raised horses there, quite successfully, until he retired in 1906, at which time according to memoirist Lincoln Lang, “his herd numbered … approximately five thousand head of equine blue bloods, constituting perhaps the grandest, most distinctive single herd of horses the world ever knew, … ranging from full-blooded Percherons to polo ponies from a cross between thoroughbred racing stock and the best Indian pony mares obtainable. The latter were, in fact, the pick of Sitting Bull's war ponies.”

Roosevelt wrote dryly in his
Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail
, “One committee of vigilantes in eastern Montana shot or hung nearly sixty—not, however, with the best judgment in all cases.” Ironically the founder of the Montana Stock Growers Association and clandestine leader of the neighboring state's vigilantes, Granville Stuart, according to Roosevelt's
Autobiography
“was afterwards appointed Minister by [President Grover] Cleveland, I think to the Argentine.”

As for Theodore Roosevelt (
magna cum laude
and Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard 1880), by 1886 he was revitalized and as mature as he was going to become. He returned east to marry Edith Carow (she later described her husband the President fondly as “a six-year-old boy”) and to plunge back into the political life. He lost his bid for election to the office of Mayor of New York but that failure did not daunt him. Soon after, he was appointed Police Commissioner of New York City; he went on to higher offices.

He recruited many Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War from amongst the Bad Lands cowboys with whom he had worked during his ranching days.

Throughout his adventurous life as New York Police Commissioner, Colonel of Rough Riders, Governor of New York State, Vice President of the United States, two-term (1901-1908) President of the United States (the twenty-sixth, and the youngest ever to be inaugurated), builder of the Panama Canal, first American winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, candidate in the ill-fated 1912 Bull Moose election campaign, world traveler, hunter, naturalist, author of three dozen books and uncounted articles and essays and at least 150,000 letters—some 20 million words in all (he read as many as three books a day throughout most of his life)—and leader of the gruelling Amazon River explorations: as for Roosevelt, right up to his death at sixty in 1919 he kept up running correspondences and frequent reunions with old friends like Joe Ferris and Bill Sewall. Several of them (particularly Sewall, still a woodsman and guide) were frequent honored guests in the Roosevelt White House.

It was Theodore Roosevelt who—even before he became President—guided, expanded and protected the National Park system in time to preserve the great Yellowstone wilderness. Later, as President and as the leading conservationist of his era, he created the Forest Service and quadrupled the holdings of the National Forests to nearly 200 million acres; and he established numerous wildlife refuges, signed the Act that allowed the President to proclaim National Monuments and National Parks, and created by proclamation 23 such areas.

Today the Marquis De Morès's weighted bamboo stick is in the collection housed in the splendidly preserved De Morès Chateau on the bluff (“Graveyard Butte”) overlooking the town of Medora, North Dakota. The property was given by Louis Vallombrosa (eldest son of the Marquis) to the State of North Dakota, and is administered by the State Historical Society. Its restoration began in 1936; the work was performed by a WPA crew whose labors were fueled and made happy by thousands of intact bottles of wine they found in the cellar beneath the lady Medora's kitchen.

Thanks to contributions made by the De Morès heirs and by other benefactors, the chateau contains a fascinating collection of possessions from the 1880s including quite a few of the couple's hunting trophies, furnishings, decorations, books, clothes, weapons, utensils and art works, the latter including a small watercolor that Madame la Marquise painted of the château—slightly impressionistic, very pleasing; Medora had a good eye for color and design.

In the visitor center near the chateau stands one of the four Concord coaches used by De Morès's ill-fated Deadwood stage line.

The portrait of Madame la Marquise that is the most popular likeness was painted by the artist Charles Jalabert in New York City when she was still Medora Von Hoffman; reproductions are all over the town that was named after her—even on the place-mats of local cafes. The original painting hangs in Bismarck.

Medora town, now restored and developed as a tourist attraction, is much as it was in the 1880s. Harold Schafer, founder of the Gold Seal Company in Bismarck, and his wife were the architects of the town's restoration. Among the revived town's attractions are Joe Ferris's store—still operating as a general store—the rebuilt
Bad Lands Cow Boy
shack, the railroad depot, the little brick church that Madame la Marquise caused to be built, and the onetime De Morès Hotel (now, with wonderful irony, called the “Rough Riders”—De Morès would have shrieked).

The great abattoir-slaughterhouse burned down on March 17, 1907, but the foundations and the awesomely tall chimney remain to mark the site.

The railroad is still in use across the unpredictable Little Missouri, and Riley Luffsey's grave is on the butte; take a walk along the embankments on a certain sort of Bad Lands day and it seems not much of a stretch to imagine the footprints of the Lunatic and those who pursued him.

Among the best preserved and least Disneyfied of the restored “ghost towns” of the Old West, Medora brims over with artifacts and scenery that bring to life the Roosevelt-De Morès era.

The town is gateway to the spectacular Bad Lands of the 70,000-acre Theodore Roosevelt National Park, given federal protection in 1947 and National Park status in 1978. For anyone interested in the real West and its history and its morality fables, a visit is virtually mandatory. (The site of Roosevelt's Elkhorn Ranch is approximately in the middle of the Park.)

Roosevelt actually had two Dakota ranches—the Maltese Cross seven miles south of Medora and the Elkhorn thirty-four miles north of town. The cabin that stands today at the headquarters of the South Unit of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park (just at the edge of Medora town) was Roosevelt's original Maltese Cross ranch house. No buildings from the Elkhorn have survived, although the site of the ranch is still accessible by foot trail from a nearby park road, once the traveler obtains permission from the rancher whose land provides access to it.

*    *    *

It has been suggested, not without justification, that the image of the Wild West that prevailed during a good part of the twentieth century was to a surprising extent due to the activities of three men: Frederic Remington, who painted it; Owen Wister, who wrote about it
(The Virginian);
and Theodore Roosevelt, the American Winston Churchill, who not only wrote about the West in its heyday of adventure but created a good part of The Myth by living it in the Bad Lands.

The three men—all Ivy Leaguers (Harvard and Yale), all contemporaries—were close friends. The portrait of the West in the works of Remington and Wister was based in part on the experiences of their friend Roosevelt. Therefore it may not be too surprising that some of the set-piece conventions that became familiar in pulp fictions and “B” movies are to be found unabashedly in the real life of that astonishing unique American hero, Theodore Roosevelt.

Medora von Hoffman Vallombrosa, Marquise De Morès

Theodore Roosevelt in the Bad Lands, 1884

A.C. Huidekoper

Marquis De Morès in the Bad Lands, 1884

Theodore Roosevelt in his new buckskin coat