The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [190]
THE SPRING AIR WAS WARM, and blades of grass had begun to stipple the bare hills, when Roosevelt left Medora a few days later. But an air of wintry lifelessness still hung over the little cow-town. Already most of its citizens had departed to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Arthur Packard had abandoned the Bad Lands Cowboy, and his office was now a fire-blackened ruin. E. G. Paddock had moved to Dickinson, taking the old Pyramid Park Hotel with him on a flat-car. “Blood-Raw John” Warns offered no more “choice Western cuisine” in his Oyster Grotto, and Genial Jim’s Billiard Bar had run dry of Conversation Juice. Sad clouds of steam still floated out of Yach Wah’s Chinese Laundry, but he, too, would soon pack up his washboards and go.23
Most symbolic of all was the shuttered-up bulk of the Marquis de Morès’s slaughterhouse. Its doors had closed in November 1886, never to reopen. Even when Medora was booming, the Marquis had been unable to run his giant scheme at a profit. The supply of local steers was simply insufficient, and rangy, refrigerated beef had never appealed to the Eastern consumer.24 Impatiently shrugging off an estimated loss of $1 million, de Morès had gone off to dig a goldmine in Montana. When last seen—heading East as Roosevelt came West—he had been planning to build a railroad across China.25
In less than two years, Medora would become a ghost town, while Dickinson flourished, and a checkerboard of small, fenced-in ranches spread west across the prairie.26 Roosevelt had foreseen the destruction of Dakota’s open-range cattle industry in Hunting Trips of a Ranchman,27 but he had not expected it to come so soon, nor that Nature would conspire to accelerate the process.
Although his Dakota venture had impoverished him, he was nevertheless rich in nonmonetary dividends. He had gone West sickly, foppish, and racked with personal despair; during his time there he had built a massive body, repaired his soul, and learned to live on equal terms with men poorer and rougher than himself. He had broken horses with Hashknife Simpson, joined in discordant choruses to the accompaniment of Fiddlin’ Joe’s violin, discussed homicidal techniques with Bat Masterson, shared greasy blankets with Modesty Carter, shown Bronco Charlie Miller how to “gentle” a horse, and told Hell-Roaring Bill Jones to shut his foul mouth.28 These men, in turn, had found him to be the leader they craved in that lawless land, a superior being, who, paradoxically, did not make them feel inferior.29 They loved him so much they would follow him anywhere, to death if necessary—as some eventually did.30 They and their kind, multiplied seven millionfold across the country, became his natural constituency.31 “If it had not been for my years in North Dakota,” he said long afterward, “I never would have become President of the United States.”32
ROOSEVELT’S ASSERTION, on stepping off the S.S. Etruria, that he had no political plans “at present” impressed nobody. Yet for once the protestation was true. With a Democratic President in Washington, a Democratic Governor in Albany, and a Democratic Mayor in New York, his prospects for any kind of office were nil, at least through the election of 1888. And there was no guarantee that the Republican