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By Root 3938 0

Keeping bloodlines alive mattered to him a great deal. Although he could live comfortably on his trust fund, he needed book advances to feel financially secure. At Henry Cabot Lodge’s suggestion Roosevelt signed a contract with Houghton Mifflin to write a biography of Thomas Hart Benton, the senator from Missouri who from 1821 to 1851 had fervently encouraged westward expansion.56 It would be part of a new series called American Statesmen. During January and February 1886 Roosevelt started writing Thomas Hart Benton in earnest, taking advantage of New York’s fine research libraries. Edith’s company was welcome, too, but still he kept thinking about the Badlands. A conscientious businessman, he knew, always checked up on his investment. Imagining Sewall and Dow suffering in the cold, worried that his dogies and yearlings wouldn’t make it through the winter, he returned to Medora at the end of the winter planning to write Benton there while collecting new material for a sequel to Hunting Trips. “I got out here all right, and was met at the station by my men,” he wrote to Bamie on March 20 from the Elkhorn. “I was really heartily glad to see the great, stalwart, bearded fellows again, and they were honestly pleased to see me. Joe Ferris is married, and his wife made me most comfortable the night I spent in town. Next morning snow covered the ground; but we pushed to this ranch, which we reached long after sunset, the full moon flooding the landscape with light. There has been an ice gorge right in front of the house, the swelling mass of broken fragments having been pushed almost up to our doorstep…. No horse could by any chance get across; we men have a boat, and even then it is most laborious carrying it out to the water; we work like Arctic explorers.”57

Four days later thieves stole Roosevelt’s boat (an unusual object in the semiarid Badlands) by using a knife to cut the towline tied to the piazza. As chairman of the Little Missouri Stockmen’s Association of Dakota-Montana, Roosevelt had been given the position of deputy sheriff of what is today Billings County.* He felt it was his duty to catch the scoundrels, so once he calmed down he hatched a plan. They would construct another scow and then light out after the thieves. (You could almost hear the wheels turning: what a good article or essay the catching of the crooks would make in Century magazine.) So the new boat was built, and off they went in hot pursuit, like Pat Garrett. Disconcertingly, Roosevelt, always bent on self-improvement, brought along copies of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Matthew Arnold’s collected poetry with him so as not to be bored.

Theodore Roosevelt guarding the thieves who stole his boat. The staged photo was taken in September 1884.

T.R. guarding the boat thieves. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)

For a few days Roosevelt—with the help of a wagon driver—tracked the thieves in this new boat, sleuthing for clues along the riverbank. Occasionally he found fortuitous footprints as clear as if sealed in wax. Most of his daytime hours, however, were spent navigating around ice floes. For supper he killed deer and rabbits. After pursuing his prey more than eighty miles he captured the three thieves (Burnsted, Pfannenbach, and Finnegan) at Cherry Creek in McKenzie County. By the time he marched back to Dickinson, all six men had blistered feet and frostbitten toes. Typically Roosevelt boasted that the man-hunt was a “bully affair” (and he got his whopping good story to write about for Century). If he felt exhausted he moaned in silence. He even finished Anna Karenina along the way for good measure. Typically vainglorious, Roosevelt later had reenactment photographs taken of himself, his rifle keeping his three weary prisoners at bay. Nevertheless everybody in Dickinson was abuzz about their daring new deputy sheriff. “He was all teeth and eyes,” the town doctor, Victor Stickney, wrote of first encountering T.R. “His clothes were in rags from forcing his way through the rosebushes that covered the river bottoms.