The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [105]
For all its sleepy aspect, Little Missouri was unofficially rated by the Northern Pacific as “the toughest town on the line,”7 a place where questions of honor—or, more frequently, dishonor—were settled with six-shooters. The nearest sheriff was 150 miles to the east; the nearest U.S. marshal, over 200 miles to the south. The presence of a military detachment, assigned to guard railroad construction gangs from attacks by predatory Sioux, had until recently established some semblance of law and order in the community, but now the soldiers were gone. Only the day before Roosevelt’s arrival, a “Golden Spike Special” had passed through town, carrying dignitaries west to Montana for ceremonies marking completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad corridor.8 Ex-President Grant had been on board, and the glimpse of his profile speeding by was symbolic to Little Missouri’s fifty or sixty residents. Uncle Sam had withdrawn his protection from yet another frontier outpost; now the settlement lay open to the conflicting interests of white man and Indian, greed and conservation, law and anarchy, money and guns. A few months would determine whether Little Missouri would survive as a hunting resort, or whether, like so many obsolete railroad towns, it would become a few crumbling sticks in the wilderness.
ROOSEVELT, THAT SUNNY Saturday morning, could not have cared less about Little Missouri’s economic future. He had come West to kill buffalo; he was impatient to get out of town and into the Badlands, whose violet ravines beckoned excitingly in all directions. But first a guide must be found. The saloon was not yet open, and the Captain, grouchy from lack of sleep, would not say where else Roosevelt might recruit help. His son, a fat youth with whiskey-red cheeks, apparently inherited, was more helpful. He suggested that Joe Ferris, down at the cantonment, might be willing.9
About this time, perhaps, Roosevelt began to realize that hiring a professional guide would not necessarily guarantee him a buffalo. Commander Gorringe, anxious for clients, had doubtless intimated that buffalo were still plentiful in the Badlands, when Roosevelt first met him in May. Actually there had been several thousand animals left to shoot then, but the situation soon changed dramatically for the worse. In mid-June a band of excited Sioux, encouraged by the U.S. Government, had slaughtered five thousand buffalo on the plains just east of the Badlands. Throughout the summer, passengers on the Northern Pacific had blazed away at whatever beasts wandered near the tracks, leaving their carcasses to the successive depredations of skin hunters, coyotes, buzzards, and “bone merchants.” Less than a week before Roosevelt’s arrival in the Badlands, the Sioux had returned to kill off a herd of ten thousand survivors. Again, the slaughter was carried out with full federal approval; Washington knew that plains bare of buffalo would soon be bare of Indians too.10
Joe Ferris’s first reaction to Roosevelt’s proposal was negative. He was a short, husky young Canadian, built like “the power end of a pile driver.” Although his mustache was sad, his eyes were friendly—or was the gloom of the cantonment post store delusive?11 In his twenty-five-odd years, Ferris had laid railroads, jacked lumber, managed stables, and guided a succession of buffalo hunters through the Badlands, before accepting the job of barn superintendent for Commander Gorringe. For all his out-of-doors background, he was of sedentary disposition; the prospect of another expedition in pursuit of a vanishing species did not appeal to him. Neither, for that matter, did this new dude, with his owlish spectacles and frenzied grin.12 But the dude proved remarkably persuasive. There was about him the intoxicating smell of money—and Joe Ferris, whose private ambition was to become the first banker in Little Missouri, found himself agreeing to be Roosevelt’s guide for the next two weeks.