The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [169]
I trudged steadily the whole time behind the wagon through the ankle-deep mud. It was a gloomy walk. Hour after hour went by always the same, while I plodded along through the dreary landscape—hunger, cold, and fatigue struggling with a sense of dogged, weary resolution. At night, when we put up at the squalid hut of a frontier granger, I did not dare to go to sleep, but … sat up with my back against the cabin door and kept watch over them all night long. So, after thirty-six hours’ sleeplessness, I was most heartily glad when we at last jolted into the long, straggling main street of Dickinson, and I was able to give my unwilling companions into the hands of the sheriff.
Under the laws of Dakota I received my fees as a deputy sheriff for making the arrests, and also mileage for the three hundred miles gone over—a total of some fifty dollars.37
DR. VICTOR H. STICKNEY of Dickinson was just going home to lunch when he met Roosevelt limping out of the sheriff’s office.
This stranger struck me as the queerest specimen of strangeness that had descended on Dickinson in the three years I had lived there … He was all teeth and eyes. His clothes were in rags from forcing his way through the rosebushes that covered the river bottoms. He was scratched, bruised, and hungry, but gritty and determined as a bulldog … I remember he gave me the impression of being heavy and rather large. As I approached him he stopped me with a gesture, asking me whether I could direct him to a doctor’s office. I was struck by the way he bit off his words and showed his teeth. I told him I was the only practicing physician, not only in Dickinson, but in the whole surrounding country.
“By George,” he said emphatically, “then you’re exactly the man I want to see … my feet are blistered so badly that I can hardly walk. I want you to fix me up.”
I took him to my office and while I was bathing and bandaging his feet, which were in pretty bad shape, he told me the story of his capture of the three thieves … We talked of many things that day … He impressed me and he puzzled me, and when I went home to lunch, an hour later, I told my wife that I had met the most peculiar and at the same time the most wonderful man I ever came to know.38
Relaxing next morning in his Dickinson hotel room, Roosevelt wrote to Corinne: “What day does Edith go abroad, and for how long does she intend staying? Could you not send her, when she goes, some flowers from me? I suppose fruit would be more useful, but I think flowers ‘more tenderer’ as Mr. Weller would say.”39
Of course he knew very well when Edith was leaving, and where she was going; but his sisters were not yet in on the secret, and appearances had to be kept up.40
HE RETURNED TO MEDORA on 12 April, just in time to witness Billings County’s first election as an organized community. Under the supervision of one “Hell-Roaring” Bill Jones, who stood over the ballot-box with a brace of pistols, the votes were cast with a minimum of bloodshed, and a county council duly returned to power. While its first edict, promising “to hang, burn, or drown any man that will ask for public improvements at the expense of the County,” could have been worded more diplomatically, it at least voiced sound Republican sentiments, and Roosevelt had every reason to be optimistic about the future of representative government in the Badlands.41
THE FOLLOWING DAY, 13 April, he chaired the spring meeting of his Stockmen’s Association. The Marquis de Morès was present, yet there was no doubt as to who was the dominant force in the room. Roosevelt conducted the proceedings with iron authority, instantly gaveling to order any speaker who strayed from the subject under discussion. Afterward the stockmen were loud in his praise.42
By 18 April, when he arrived in Miles City as a delegate