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interest. Here he felt like a French-Canadian voyageur far away from the stresses of civilization. This, of course, wasn’t the first time Roosevelt had succumbed to the lure of a wild place; he had similar bouts of euphoria in the Adirondacks and the North Woods. But this was somewhat different; and he began to entertain the romantic notion of becoming a Dakotan rancher. Even the clumps of box elder and prickly plants appealed to him. “Clearly I recall his wild enthusiasm over the Badlands,” Lincoln Lang later wrote. “It had taken root in the congenial soil of his consciousness, like an ineradicable, creeping plant, as it were, to thrive and permeate it thereafter, causing him more and more and more to think in the broad gauge terms of nature—of the real earth.”52

After days of striking out the Roosevelt party caught a break. They discovered fresh spoor, and off they went in pursuit. Suddenly, there was a buffalo in sight, but upon hearing their clamor it galloped off. For several miles Roosevelt chased the bull through a rough patch of prickly shrubs and eroded gullies, to no avail. Later that afternoon, the men came across three buffalo grazing within fairly easy firing distance. Roosevelt quickly dismounted, took aim, and fired. The bullet penetrated the flesh of one, but the wounded buffalo ran off. Desperate for his big game trophy, Roosevelt chased the buffalo for seven or eight miles, only to miss with his next shot. Once again the buffalo got away. Once again Roosevelt was embarrassed.

Even though Roosevelt loved hunting, he was not a great shot; his poor eyesight prevented that. “Whatever success I have had in game-hunting,” Roosevelt later wrote, “has been due, as well as I can make it out, to three causes: first, common sense and good judgment; second, perseverance, which is the only way of allowing one to make good one’s own blunders; third the fact that I shoot as well at game as at a target. This did not make me hit difficult shots, but it prevented my missing easy shots, which a good target shot will often do in the field.”53 What he brought to hunting was instead a bookish knowledge of the species’ habits and coloration. But Roosevelt was so excited by the windswept panoramas that he didn’t comprehend his own clumsiness with a rifle. That evening by the campfire, he remained optimistic about bagging his trophy. It was raining again the next morning when the Roosevelt party stumbled upon a couple of grazing buffalo. Theodore fired and missed his mark again. This time, at least, he could blame the weather.

The hardships Roosevelt endured in pursuit of the buffalo were many. Ants had built huge communities eight or nine feet deep. On one occasion, crawling in the sage to get closer to a bull, Roosevelt stumbled right into a cactus patch, and his hands were suddenly filled with needles as if they were pincushions; they stayed swollen for days. When the hunt party decided to charge at a couple of buffalo, Nell got spooked and tossed its head dramatically backward, causing Roosevelt’s rifle to smack against his forehead. According to Roosevelt the blood literally “poured” into his eyes from the stitchable gash.54 As the blood congealed, however, he spoke excitedly about the prospect of returning home with a purple scar. That evening, his face bruised, forced to sleep in the cold rain, with nothing but dry biscuit in his stomach, Roosevelt glowed with enthusiasm, refusing to engage in tremulous self-pity. It was the experience of freezing while skating at Cambridge all over again. A miserable Joe Ferris, shivering under a wet blanket, marooned in the backcountry darkness, was baffled that evening to hear Roosevelt exclaim, “By Godfrey, but this is fun!”55

Doggedly Roosevelt kept hunting through the broken plains and pony paths along Little Cannonball Creek for his buffalo trophy. All a frustrated Joe Ferris could remember thinking was that “bad luck” was following them “like a yellow dog follows a drunkard.”56 On the morning of September 20 Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris left the hunt for an entirely unanticipated