The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [166]
Early on the morning of 24 March, however, he went out onto the piazza and found the boat gone. It had been cut loose with a knife; nearby, at the edge of the water, somebody had dropped a red woolen mitten.15
Roosevelt reacted so angrily on hearing this news that he had to be dissuaded from saddling Manitou and thundering off in instant pursuit of the thieves.16 A horse, Sewall pointed out, was of little use when the river was walled off on both sides with ice. Roosevelt would never get within a mile of the men in his boat: all they had to do was keep floating downstream (the current was such they could not possibly have gone upstream) until he gave up, or galloped to his death across the gorge. There was only one thing to do: build a makeshift scow and follow them. The thieves probably felt secure in the knowledge that they had stolen the only serviceable boat on the Little Missouri, and would therefore be in no hurry. He had at least an even chance of catching them. Roosevelt agreed, and sent to Medora for a bag of nails.17
It was not the value of his loss that annoyed him: the Elkhorn boat was worth a mere thirty dollars. But he was, by virtue of his chairmanship of the Stockmen’s Association, a deputy sheriff of Billings County, and bound (at least by his own stern moral code) to pursue any lawbreakers. Besides, he had been intending to use the boat on a cougar hunt that very day, and his soul thirsted for revenge. He knew very well who the thieves were: “three hard characters who lived in a shack, or hut, some twenty miles above us, and whom we had shrewdly suspected for some time of wishing to get out of the country, as certain of the cattlemen had begun openly to threaten to lynch them.”18 Charges of horse-stealing had been leveled against their leader, “Redhead” Finnegan, a long-haired gunman of vicious reputation. (During the previous summer he had blasted half the buildings in Medora with his buffalo-gun, in consequence of a practical joke played on him while drunk.)19 Finnegan’s associates were a half-breed named Burnsted, and a half-wit named Pfaffenbach. All three men must be desperate, or they would never have made a break in such weather; if chased, they would certainly shoot for their lives.
While Sewall and Dow labored with hammers and chisels, Roosevelt, ever the schismatic, began to write Thomas Hart Benton. He completed Chapter 1 on 27 March, by which time the boat, a flat-bottomed scow, was ready.20 But a furious blizzard delayed their departure for three more days. Roosevelt soothed his impatience with a literary letter to Cabot Lodge. “I have got some good ideas in the first chapter, but I am not sure they are worked up rightly; my style is rough, and I do not like a certain lack of sequitur that I do not seem able to get rid of.” Casually mentioning that he was about to start downriver “after some horse thieves,” he added, “I shall take Matthew Arnold along.”21 He also took Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and a camera to record his capture of the thieves. Already he was thinking what a good illustrated article this would make for Century magazine.22
The story of the ensuing boat-chase was to become, with that of the Mingusville bully, one of Roosevelt’s favorite after-dinner yarns.
EARLY ON THE MORNING of 30 March the three pursuers pushed their scow into the icy water.23 Mrs. Sewall and Mrs. Dow, who were both five months pregnant, worriedly watched them go. The fact that Redhead Finnegan already had six days’ start was no reassurance that they would see their menfolk again, for the north country was known to be bleak, and full of hostile Indians.
The boat picked up speed as the river current took it. With Sewall steering, and Dow keeping watch at the bow, there was nothing much for Roosevelt to do. He snuggled down amidships with his books and buffalo robes, determined to have “as good a time as possible.”24 From time to time he would look up from Matthew Arnold and watch the high, barren buttes slide