ROOSEVELT IN THE BAD LANDS - Hermann Hagedorn (best novels for students .TXT) 📗

actual fighting was in most cases done by professional "bad men," and the death of either party to the duel, or both, was considered a source of jubilation rather than of regret. He devoted his attention mainly to those "floaters" whom he suspected of being in league with the outlaws, or who, by their recklessness with firearms, made themselves a public nuisance. He seldom, if ever, made an arrest. He merely drew his man aside and told him that "it had been decided" that he should leave town at once and never again appear in the round-up district of the Bad Lands. In no case was his warning disobeyed. On the few occasions when it was necessary for him to interfere publicly, there were always friends of order in the neighborhood to help him seal the exile in a box car and ship him east or west on the next freight. A number of hilarious disciples of justice varied this proceeding one evening by breaking open the car in which one of Packard's prisoners lay confined and tying him to the cowcatcher of a train which had just arrived. Word came back from Glendive at midnight that the prisoner had reached his destination in safety, though somewhat breathless, owing to the fact that the cowcatcher "had picked up a Texas steer on the way."

Packard's activity as chief of police had value in keeping the "floaters" in something resembling order; but it scarcely touched the main problem with which the law-abiding ranchmen had to contend, which was the extinction of the horse and cattle thieves.

To an extraordinary extent these thieves possessed the Bad Lands. They were here, there, and everywhere, sinister, intangible shadows, weaving in and out of the bright-colored fabric of frontier life. They were in every saloon and in almost every ranch-house. They rode on the round-ups, they sat around the camp-fire with the cowpunchers. Some of the most capable ranchmen were in league with them, bankers east and west along the railroad were hand in glove with them. A man scarcely dared denounce the thieves to his best friend for fear his friend might be one of them.

There were countless small bands which operated in western Dakota, eastern Montana, and northwestern Wyoming, each loosely organized as a unit, yet all bound together in the tacit fellowship of outlawry. The most tangible bond among them was that they all bought each other's stolen horses, and were all directors of the same "underground railway." Together they constituted not a band, but a "system," that had its tentacles in every horse and cattle "outfit" in the Bad Lands.

As far as the system had a head at all, that head was a man named Axelby. Other men stole a horse here or there, but Axelby stole whole herds of fifty and a hundred at one daring sweep. He was in appearance a typical robber chieftain, a picturesque devil with piercing black eyes and a genius for organization and leadership. In addition to his immediate band, scores of men whom he never saw, and who were scattered over a territory greater than New England, served him with absolute fidelity. They were most of them saloon-keepers, gamblers, and men who by their prominence in the community would be unsuspected; and there were among them more than a few ranchmen who were not averse to buying horses under the market price. With the aid of these men, Axelby created his smooth-running "underground railway" from the Big Horn Mountains and the Black Hills north through Wyoming, Dakota, and Montana. His agents in the settlements performed the office of spies, keeping him in touch with opportunities to operate on a large scale; and the ranchmen kept open the "underground" route by means of which he was able to spirit his great herds of horses across the Canadian line.

By the spring of 1884, Axelby's fame had reached the East, and even the New York Sun gave him a column:

Mr. Axelby is said to be at the head of a trusty band as fearless and as lawless as himself. The Little Missouri and Powder River districts are the theater of his operations. An Indian is Mr. Axelby's detestation. He kills him at sight if he can. He considers that Indians have no right to own ponies and he takes their ponies whenever he can. Mr. Axelby has repeatedly announced his determination not to be taken alive. The men of the frontier say he bears a charmed life, and the hairbreadth 'scapes of which they have made him the hero are numerous and of the wildest stamp.

During the preceding February, Axelby and his band had had a clash with the Federal authorities, which had created an enormous sensation up and down the Little Missouri, but had settled nothing so far as the horse-thieves were concerned. In the Bad Lands the thieves became daily more pestiferous. Two brothers named Smith and two others called "Big Jack" and "Little Jack" conducted the major operations in Billings County. They had their cabin in a coulee west of the Big Ox Bow, forty miles south of Medora, in the wildest part of the Bad Lands, and "worked the country" from there north and south. They seldom stole from white men, recognizing the advisability of not irritating their neighbors too much, but drove off Indian ponies in herds. Their custom was to steal Sioux horses from one of the reservations, keep them in the Scoria Hills a month or more until all danger of pursuit was over, and then drive them north over the prairie between Belfield and Medora, through the Killdeer Mountains to the northeastern part of the Territory. There they would steal other horses from the Grosventres Indians, and drive them to their cache in the Scoria Hills whence they could emerge with them at their good pleasure and sell them at Pierre. There had been other "underground railways," but this had a charm of its own, for it "carried freight" both ways. Occasionally the thieves succeeded in selling horses to the identical Indians they had originally robbed. The efficiency of it all was in its way magnificent.

Through the record of thievery up and down the river, that spring of 1884, the shadow of Jake Maunders slips in and out, making no noise and leaving no footprints. It was rumored that when a sheriff or a United States marshal from somewhere drifted into Medora, Maunders would ride south in the dead of night to the Big Ox Bow and give the thieves the warning; and ride north again and be back in his own shack before dawn. It was rumored, further, that when the thieves had horses to sell, Maunders had "first pick." His own nephew was said to be a confederate of Big Jack. One day that spring, the Jacks and Maunders's nephew, driving a herd of trail-weary horses, stopped for a night at Lang's Sage Bottom camp. They told Lincoln Lang that they had bought the horses in Wyoming. Maunders sold the herd himself, and the news that came from the south that the herd had been stolen made no perceptible ruffle. The ranchmen had enough difficulty preserving their own property and were not making any altruistic efforts to protect the horses of ranchmen two hundred miles away. Maunders continued to flourish. From Deadwood came rumors that Joe Morrill, the deputy marshal, was carrying on a business not dissimilar to that which was making Maunders rich in Medora.

When even the officers of the law were in league with the thieves or afraid of them, there was little that the individual could do except pocket his losses with as good grace as possible and keep his mouth shut. The "system" tolerated no interference with its mechanism.

Fisher, smarting under the theft of six of the "top" horses from the Marquis de Mores's "outfit" called one of the cowboys one day into his office. His name was Pierce Bolan, and Fisher knew him to be not only absolutely trustworthy, but unusually alert.

"You're out on the range all the time," said Fisher. "Can't you give me a line on the fellows who are getting away with our horses?"

The cowboy hesitated and shook his head. "If I knew," he answered, "I wouldn't dare tell you. My toes would be turned up the first time I showed up on the range."

"What in ---- are we going to do?"

"Why, treat the thieves considerate," said Bolan. "Don't get 'em sore on you. When one of them comes up and wants the loan of a horse, why, let him have it."

Fisher turned to the foreman of one of the largest "outfits" for advice and received a similar answer. The reputable stockmen were very much in the minority, it seemed, and wise men treated the thieves with "consideration" and called it insurance.

There were ranchmen, however, who were too high-spirited to tolerate the payment of such tribute in their behalf, and too interested in the future of the region as a part of the American commonwealth to be willing to temporize with outlaws. Roosevelt was one of them, in the valley of the Little Missouri. Another, across the Montana border in the valley of the Yellowstone, was Granville Stuart.

Stuart was a "forty-niner," who had crossed the continent in a prairie-schooner as a boy and had drifted into Virginia City in the days of its hot youth. He was a man of iron nerve, and when the time came for a law-abiding minority to rise against a horde of thieves and desperadoes, he naturally became one of the leaders. He played an important part in the extermination of the famous Plummer band of outlaws in the early sixties, and was generally regarded as one of the most notable figures in Montana Territory.

At the meeting of the Montana Stockgrowers' Association, at Miles City in April, there had been much discussion of the depredations of the horse and cattle thieves, which were actually threatening to destroy the cattle industry. The officers of the law had been helpless, or worse, in dealing with the situation, and the majority of the cattlemen at the convention were in favor of raising a small army of cowboys and "raiding the country."

Stuart, who was president of the Association, fought the project almost single-handed. He pointed out that the "rustlers" were well organized and strongly fortified, each cabin, in fact, constituting a miniature fortress. There was not one of them who was not a dead shot and all were armed with the latest model firearms and had an abundance of ammunition. No "general clean-up" on a large scale could, Stuart contended, be successfully carried through. The first news of such a project would put the thieves on their guard, many lives would unnecessarily be sacrificed, and the law, in the last analysis, would be on the side of the "rustlers."

The older stockmen growled and the younger stockmen protested, intimating that Stuart was a coward; but his counsel prevailed. A number of them, who "stood in" with the thieves in the hope of thus buying immunity, carried the report of the meeting to the outlaws. The "rustlers" were jubilant and settled down to what promised to be a year of undisturbed "operations."

Stuart himself, however, had long been convinced that drastic action against the thieves must be taken; and had quietly formulated his plan. When the spring round-up was over, late in June, he called a half-dozen representative ranchmen from both sides of the Dakota-Montana border together at his ranch, and presented his project. It was promptly accepted, and Stuart himself was put in charge of its execution.

Less than ten men in the whole Northwest knew of the movement that was gradually taking form under the direction of the patriarchal fighting man from Fergus County; but the Marquis de Mores was one of those men. He told Roosevelt. Stuart's plan, it seems, was to organize the most solid and reputable ranchmen in western Montana into a company of vigilantes similar to the company