The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [106]
THE TWO MEN SPENT most of the afternoon loading a buckboard with provisions and hunting equipment. By the time they rolled out of town to the ford just north of the railroad trestle, the sun was already low over Graveyard Butte. Before crossing over to the east bank of the river, they stopped at one of the downrail bungalows to borrow an extra buffalo-gun. Roosevelt had discovered that the hammer of his big Sharps .45-caliber rifle was broken. He had brought a spare Winchester, but Ferris thought the latter was too light to rely on.13
The owner of the bungalow stood tall, cold, and quiet as Ferris asked the favor. He was a grizzled, villainous-looking man with pale eyes, a black goatee, and mandarin mustaches dangling below his chin. A pair of revolvers rode easily on his narrow hips.14 Surprisingly, he agreed to lend the gun without a deposit, and also supplied a new Sharps hammer.
No doubt Roosevelt had plenty of questions to ask about this sinister person as the buckboard splashed across the shallow river. He would have questions, too, about what looked like a rival settlement to Little Missouri, in the process of construction on the sagebrush flats opposite; questions about a giant brick chimney in the midst of the unfinished buildings; questions about a magnificent new ranch house perched on a bluff about half a mile to the southwest, and dominating the entire valley; questions about the crosses on Graveyard Butte (starkly etched now against the setting sun); questions arising out of these questions, and many more besides. It would have taken a harder man than Joe Ferris to withstand the drilling force of Roosevelt’s curiosity. The odds are that by the time the buckboard had swung south across the sagebrush flats, Ferris had begun to answer in detail, and that the full story, linking all Roosevelt’s objects of inquiry, emerged as they rumbled on upstream in the deepening twilight.
THE MAN IN THE BUNGALOW was Eldridge G. Paddock, éminence grise of the Badlands. Long before the Northern Pacific first reached the river in 1880, Paddock had held undisputed sway over the valley’s roving population of hunters, trappers, and traders. He had been one of the first to settle near the Little Missouri depot, and quickly became known as “the sneakiest man in town, always figuring on somebody else doing the dirty work for him, and him reap the benefits.” Although Paddock was a silent, solitary man, rarely seen to engage in open violence, people who annoyed him had a way of being found with their heads caved in, or with bullets in their backs; he was said to be personally responsible for at least three of the crosses on Graveyard Butte. Yet he was capable of surprising generosity (as Roosevelt had just discovered) and was apparently straight with his friends. All in all, he was an enigmatic character against whom nothing had ever been proven.15
Until last winter, Paddock had been content, publicly at least, to flourish as a gambler, guide, and speculator in hunting rights up and down the river. Then, early in the spring, there stepped off the train at Little Missouri a man of unlimited wealth and unlimited gullibility. “I am weary of civilization,” declared the stranger.16 Paddock pounced on him with the sureness of Iago accosting Othello.
The newcomer was a very dark, very handsome young Frenchman, with eagle eyes, waxed mustaches, and military bearing. His name bespoke a lineage both noble and royal, dating back to thirteenth-century Spain: Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent-Amat Manca de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Morès. Local parlance speedily reduced it to “de Moree,” and then, as summer wore on, to “that son of a bitch of a Marquis.”17
De Morès had come to the Badlands to invest in the local beef industry. Although as yet this industry consisted only of six or seven scattered ranches, he seemed sure that he would prosper. “It takes me only a few seconds to understand a situation that other men have to puzzle over for hours,” he boasted.18 Certainly the prospects seemed good, even to the slow-witted. Here, and for thousands