Biography; Frontier and pioneer life -- Dakota Territory; Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
In Medora in those midsummer days of 1885, Hell-Roaring Bill Jones was
the life of every party. Wherever there was deviltry, there was Bill
Jones, profane and obscene beyond description, but irresistibly
comical. He was as lean and muscular as John Falstaff was short and
fat, but the divergences between the genial old reprobate of Eastcheap
and the saturnine, but by no means unlovable, rapscallion of Medora
were less striking than the qualities they had in common. He had good
friends, none better than the gay, infinitely pathetic patrician's
son, Van Zander, who played Prince Hal to him, light-heartedly
flipping a fortune in the air as others, essentially less admirable,
might have flipped a dollar.
"Deacon" Cummins thought Bill Jones dreadful, which naturally incited
Bill Jones always to do the worst that was in him to do whenever the
"Deacon" was within earshot. He found delight in drawing up beside him
on the round-up and pouring forth every evil tale he knew.
"Jones, I don't know why you tell those stories when I'm around," the
"Deacon" would exclaim, not without pathos. "You know I don't like
them."
After his first encounter with Roosevelt in the office of the _Bad
Lands Cowboy_, Bill Jones told him no foul stories. The contrast
between Bill Jones's attitude toward a virtuous man who was strong and
a virtuous man who was weak might furnish a theme for many sermons.
The antics of Saturday nights were many and some of them were
explosive, but on the whole men looked more tolerantly on the shackles
of civilization in Medora in 1885 than they had in 1884. The
vigilantes' raid had undoubtedly chased the fear of God into the
hearts of the evil-doers.
Whatever can be said against the methods adopted by the
"stranglers" who came through here last fall [remarked the
_Bad Lands Cowboy_], it cannot but be acknowledged that the
result of their work has been very wholesome. Not a definite
case of horse-stealing from a cowman has been reported
since, and it seems as though a very thorough clean-up had
been made.
The ranch-owners, evidently, did not find the situation as
satisfactory as Packard found it, for in July the Little Missouri
River Stockmen's Association, of which Roosevelt was chairman,
determined to organize a posse to "clean up" the country north of the
railroad between the Missouri and the Little Missouri rivers.
Osterhaut, captain of the round-up, was appointed leader and half a
dozen ranchmen contributed a cowboy apiece. Roosevelt sent Sewall as
his representative.
The route was through about as wild and unsettled a portion
of the country as can be found now, so the people here say
[Sewall wrote his brother on his return], and the oldest
heads seemed to think thare might be some danger, but we saw
nothing worse than ourselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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