The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [160]
MEDORA, DAKOTA,
September 6, 1885
Most emphatically I am not your enemy; if I were you would know it, for I would be an open one, and would not have asked you to my house nor gone to yours. As your final words, however, seem to imply a threat, it is due to myself to say that the statement is not made through any fear of possible consequences to me; I too, as you know, am always on hand, and ever ready to hold myself accountable in any way for anything I have said or done. Yours very truly
THEODORE ROOSEVELT61
Sewall agreed to act as second, while doubting that the duel would ever take place. “He’ll find some way out of it.”62
A few days later a courier arrived with another message from the Marquis. Roosevelt showed it to Sewall. “You were right, Bill.” De Morès protested that he had implied no threat in his previous letter. He meant, simply, that “there was always a way to settle misunderstandings between gentlemen—without trouble.” The tone of this letter was sufficiently conciliatory for Roosevelt to boast later that the Marquis had “apologized.”63
And so the epic confrontation fizzled out—disappointingly, for those like E. G. Paddock, who had hoped for violence, but decisively in Roosevelt’s favor nonetheless. From then on, progress toward organization was rapid in Billings County. Newspapers began to speak of Roosevelt as the likely first Senator from Dakota, when the territory was elevated to statehood.64
AUTUMN CAME EARLY to the Badlands, but the cooling air did not prevent the sun from burning every last drop of green juice out of the grass. The prairie became a brittle carpet underfoot, wanting only the spark of a horseshoe on stone—or a tumbling ember of lignite—to erupt into flame.65 Several times that September, Roosevelt found himself fighting fires on his own range.66 Similar fires were reported all over Billings County. Stockmen plotted their various locations and grew increasingly suspicious. All the outbreaks were in the “drive” country—a broad strip of grassland lying between the Northern Pacific Railroad and the cattle ranches on either side. This strip, fifty miles wide and hundreds of miles long, had to be crossed by any herd en route to shipping points like Mingusville and Medora. Cattle driven over the blackened wastes shed tons of weight; on delivery they could be sold only as low-grade beef. Clearly it was not nature that so shrewdly sabotaged the profits of stockmen. The fires were being set by Indians, in protest against being deprived of their ancient hunting grounds in the Badlands.67
Roosevelt’s attitude toward the red man in 1885 was no more tolerant than that of any cowboy. He had publicly explained it in Hunting Trips of a Ranchman:
During the past century a good deal of sentimental nonsense has been talked about our taking the Indians’ land. Now, I do not mean to say for a moment that gross wrong has not been done the Indians, both by government and individuals, again and again … where brutal and reckless frontiersmen are brought into contact with a set of treacherous, vengeful, and fiendishly cruel savages a long series of outrages by both sides is sure to follow. But as regards taking the land, at least from the Western Indians, the simple truth is that the latter never had any real ownership in it at all. Where the game was plenty, there they hunted; they followed it when they moved away to new hunting grounds, unless they were prevented by stronger rivals, and to most of the land on which we found them they had no stronger claim than that of having a few years previously butchered the original occupants. When my cattle