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for.50 Best of all, they fed him—not as elaborately as Bamie on the polished boards of Sagamore Hill, but from the nutritional point of view probably better. After a dusty morning’s work on the range or in the corral he would return ravenous to the Elkhorn 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.”51 Sometimes there were potatoes coaxed from the harsh alkaline soil, jars of buffalo-berry jam, dishes of jelly and cake. Roosevelt’s appetite had grown prodigious since his physical transformation in the spring, and he gobbled everything greedily. No doubt he continued to put on weight, but the hard exercise of ranch life kept him, in Bill Sewall’s words, “clear bone, muscle, and grit.”52

GRIT OF ANOTHER SORT was called for on 5 September, when Roosevelt, who had gone to Medora to chair the Stockmen’s Association meeting, received the following letter from a jail cell in Bismarck:

My dear Roosevelt My principle is to take the bull by the horns. Joe Ferris is very active against me and has been instrumental in getting me indicted by furnishing money to witnesses and hunting them up. The papers also published very stupid accounts of our quarreling … Is this done by your order? I thought you my friend. If you are my enemy I want to know it. I am always on hand as you know, and between gentlemen it is easy to settle matters of that sort directly.

Yours very truly

MORÈS

Sept. 3, 188553

Roosevelt’s first reaction must have been bewilderment. Despite their little skirmishes over beef prices and grazing rights, he and the Marquis got on fairly well. They had entertained each other at lunch, exchanged books and newspapers, and there had even been an occasion, during a square dance in honor of the spring roundup, when they solemnly took the floor together, and “do-si-do’d” with cowgirls.54 Yet there was no mistaking the threatening tone of this letter. He could not have read it without a pang of real fear. The Marquis was known to have killed at least two men in duels, and his feats of marksmanship, such as picking off prairie chickens on the wing with a 20–30 Winchester, were legendary.55 If his letter was, as it seemed, a challenge to arms, Roosevelt would have the choice of weapons; but that was of small comfort to a myopic individual who claimed to be “not more than an ordinary shot.”56 The Marquis’s trial was already under way, and if acquitted he might demand satisfaction at once.

Before replying it was necessary to clarify the Frenchman’s cloudy umbrage. He obviously believed that Joe Ferris, Roosevelt’s old buffalo guide, was bribing witnesses, and with Roosevelt’s money. Joe was now a storekeeper in Medora, but he also acted as the unofficial banker of the Badlands. Cowboys would deposit their earnings with him for safekeeping, and withdraw cash from time to time—when they had to go to Bismarck to testify at a murder trial, for instance.57 The Marquis must be unaware of this. All he did know was that Roosevelt had financed Joe’s store,58 and therefore suspected that the same person might well be financing his prosecution.

De Morès also complained about articles publicizing the so-called “tilt.” These rumors had been put out by reporters who regularly interviewed Roosevelt at railroad stations farther east: conceivably he could have leaked the stories on his latest trip to New York, knowing that by the time he returned to deny them they would be accepted as fact.

The last and most damaging proof of ill will, as far as de Morès was concerned, was that one of the men to receive money from Joe Ferris before the trial was Dutch Wannegan, a victim of the original ambush, a key prosecution witness, and—for the past year or more—an employee of Theodore Roosevelt.59

All these misconceptions might surely be explained away, but how could de Morès ever have imagined that the most decent man in the Badlands was