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meadows populated by an amazing array of raptors. Accounts of the mountain men who first saw Cloud Peak and Black Tooth Peak abruptly rising out of the rolling prairie were legendary. Jim Bridger had floated through the lofty Bighorns on a raft, and Jedediah Smith had been mauled by a grizzly bear not too far away. When escaping General Crook’s Army in 1876 the Sioux had taken refuge in the lodgepole pine and spruce forests of the Bighorns as if these were the last haven on earth.84 The exaggerated reports of wild animals trappers said this eastern front range of the Rockies had more game animals than the human eye had ever seen—and particularly the thought of hunting a grizzly bear inspired Roosevelt to undertake the most arduous expedition of his life so far.

Most of the Bighorn peaks were rounded on top, with flanks that gently sloped. The glacial lakes throughout the range were as bright blue as those in Alberta or the Yukon. Temperatures during the winter months could unexpectedly drop to forty degrees below zero in a few hours. Yet, compared with other Rocky Mountain zones, the Bighorns received little snow. All the spring rains emanated from general weather systems. Vegetation encountered in the Bighorns depended completely on whether one was below or above the timberline. Lumber companies were eyeing the area as a prime source of timber.85

To ride horseback and hike into the Bighorns, Roosevelt took with him Merrifield and Norman Lebo, an old Union soldier and blacksmith from Ohio. Sewall and Dow stayed at the Maltese Cross and Elkhorn ranches to tend the cattle. While Roosevelt and Merrifield rode horses, Lebo followed with the “prairie schooner” supply wagon.86 From Medora to the foothills of the Bighorns was nearly 300 miles across the chilly flatlands toward the town of Buffalo, Wyoming. With no map to guide them the trio simply mounted and started heading toward the Montana line as if nomadic characters in a Zane Grey novel. “We had no directions as to where the Big Horns were,” Merrifield recalled, “except that they lay to the southwest.” 87

No sooner did the trio reach Montana than a storm appeared. Horrific cloudbursts filled the big sky as lightning bolts popped and boomed. Day turned to night. Heavy raindrops fell, and their horses tried to run away. The odor of ozone, stronger than in the East, was almost intoxicating. “The storm rolled down toward us at furious speed and the wind shrieked and moaned as it swept over the prairie,” Roosevelt recalled in Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. “We spurred hard to get out of the open, riding with loose reins for the creek…. The first gust caught us a few hundred yards from the creek, almost taking us from the saddle, and driving the rain and hail in stinging level sheets against us.”88

The detailed diaries Roosevelt kept of the trek to the Bighorns tell exciting stories of shooting duck at Lake Stanton (filled with cutthroat trout) and hearing coyotes wail all night when the men camped along the Powder River. Nearly every Wild West cliché happened to Roosevelt on the trail: a non-injurious shooting powwow with the Cheyenne; the near-loss of their wagon to quicksand; the hunting of enough grouse to feed a village; magnificent herds of white-tailed deer. At one point Roosevelt miraculously shot two deer with a single bullet. “I elevated the sights (a thing I hardly ever do) to four hundred yards,” he wrote, “and waited for the second buck to come out further, which he did immediately and stood still just alongside of the first. I aimed above his shoulder and pulled the trigger. Over went the two bucks!…This was much the best shot I ever made.”

A full three days before reaching them, Roosevelt could see the Bighorns rise in the distance over the plateau. He couldn’t wait to hike up into them—after all, he had climbed both the Matterhorn and Mount Katahdin. But his enthusiasm was dangerously naive. Already the September nights in the Wyoming mountains were bitter cold. The weather was known to be freaky; it didn’t snow much, but that didn’t mean three or four feet