The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [98]
Although the distinctive landscape made the Badlands difficult to travel through—that was why French trappers had originally applied the designation “bad”—there were two reasons it was prime cattle country: an abundance of nourishing stem-cured grasses, and the buttes themselves, which offered heifers decent shelter during winter storms. Owing in part to Brisbin’s book (its subtitle was How to Get Rich on the Plains), cowboys and others who believed that beef was the new cash cow stampeded to the area. “Montana has undoubtedly the best grazing-grounds in America,” Brisbin wrote, “and the parts of Dakota stand next.”23
Theodore Roosevelt himself had been caught up in this cowboy uproar. Even before he read Brisbin or set foot in the Badlands, he gambled on the cattle business. Along with a Harvard classmate, Richard Trimble, he had ponied up $10,000 to be part owner of a ranch north of Cheyenne, Wyoming, called the Teschmaker and Debillion Cattle Company.24 Many Wyoming ranchers of the early 1880s preferred the label “drover” to “ranching cowboy” (a term that originated in Ireland around AD 1000), but Roosevelt preferred the latter. Somewhat naively he predicted that the spools of barbed wire would never overtake Wyoming as it had overtaken Texas. His romantic vision of himself was quite specific: a hunting cowboy on the open range. Quite correctly Roosevelt understood that cowboy culture was based on three principles: mobility, custom, and survival of the fittest. As a side project he hoped to document cowboy life for magazines such as Scribner’s and Collier’s. “It was a frontier institution,” the historian David Dary noted of the first generation of cowboys, “and it died when the frontier died.”25
By 1883, Texan grangers—merchants of fresh beef for military forts, Indian agencies, immigrant communities, and mining outfits—had discovered that longhorns loved the northern range grasses and could survive the blue winters.26 That year saw the first great Texan cattle drive to the Little Missouri; and as cowboys swarmed up north, the great Western Trail that went from Bandera through Dodge City to Ogallala was bringing cowboys from Texas to the Dakota Territory in search of open-range opportunities. Down in Pecos, Texas, the world’s first rodeo had been held (although in 1989 the New York Times noted that two Arizona communities—Prescott and Payson—also claimed bragging rights in this regard.) 27 In Omaha, Nebraska, an Iowa showman, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, premiered his first Wild West Show; the rage for cowboys and Indians was at full throttle. Meanwhile, the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad provided owners of livestock in the Dakota Territory relatively easy market access to both coasts. It gave outdoors enthusiasts like Roosevelt the opportunity for a quick western trip between boring sessions of the New York state legislature filled with mundane sheaves of legalese, bills, and charts.
As he recuperated from the summer bouts of asthma and cholera, Roosevelt kept focused on the buffalo trophy he wanted for his library wall. He set his sights on shooting an older buffalo, one past its prime. Too old and exhausted from the commotion of rutting to stay in the herd and unable to court cows anymore, these bulls, known as lonesome Georges, straggled hundreds of yards from the