The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [111]
FOR MILE AFTER MILE, hour after hour, the hunters straggled south over increasingly rugged country. No wagon trail now: six times that morning they had to ford the river as it meandered across their path. About noon they mounted a high plateau, whose views extended west to Montana. Dropping down again into the Little Missouri Valley, they forded the river at least seventeen more times. There were bogs and quicksands to negotiate, and banks so steep the buckboard was in danger of toppling over. The sun was already glowing red in their faces when they sighted their destination, a lonely shack in a meadow at the mouth of Little Cannonball Creek. It was dusk by the time they got there. Lamplight shone invitingly out of the shack’s single window.41
LINCOLN LANG, a sixteen-year-old Scots lad sporting his first American suntan, was just sitting down to supper with his father, Gregor, when he heard the sound of hooves and wheels outside. Through the window he recognized the burly shape of Joe Ferris, but the skinny figure on horseback was obviously a stranger.42 Gregor Lang went out to greet his visitors. The boy followed hesitantly, and received one of those photographic impressions which register permanently on the adolescent mind.
Aided by the beam of light showing through the cabin door, I could make out that he was a young man, who wore large conspicuous-looking glasses, through which I was being regarded with interest by a pair of twinkling eyes. Amply supporting them was the expansive grin overspreading his prominent, forceful lower face, plainly revealing a set of larger white teeth. Smiling teeth, yet withal conveying a strong suggestion of hang-and-rattle. The kind of teeth that are made to hold anything they once close upon …
“This is my son, Mr. Roosevelt,” [Father] said. Then somehow or other I found both my hands in the solid double grip of our guest. Heard him saying clearly but forcefully, in a manner conveying the instant impression that he meant what he said …
“Dee-lighted to meet you, Lincoln!”
… Young and all, as I was, the consciousness was instantly borne in upon me of meeting a man different from any I had ever met before. I fell for him strong.43
The Langs had been living in the shack for only three weeks. They had spent the summer in Little Missouri, where their presence was somewhat less than welcome, for Gregor Lang had been sent there in an investigative capacity. His employer, a British financier, had been asked to buy shares in Commander Gorringe’s Little Missouri Land and Stock Company. Before doing so, the financier felt that some close Scots scrutiny was needed.
Lang had viewed with Presbyterian disapproval the hard drinking and dubious bookkeeping of Gorringe’s employees, and his reports back to London were not encouraging. Yet he could see that there was money to be made in the Badlands, and great opportunities to exploit. America had always inspired and challenged this bewhiskered scholarly man. He had named his own son after the Great Emancipator, and here, in “God’s own country,” freedom beckoned them both. With the blessings—and backing—of the British financier, he had come to Little Cannonball Creek to open a new ranch. As yet it was only a log cabin with sod on the floor and rats in the roof, but a herd was ready to be brought in from Minnesota, Mrs. Lang was on her way across the Atlantic, and his ambitions were large.44
Roosevelt, finding Lang to be the first pioneer of intellectual quality that he had met, immediately set about pumping him dry of dreams and practical knowledge. Lang responded readily: his summer among the monosyllabic citizens of Little Missouri had left him starved for good discourse. Long after supper that night, long after Joe Ferris