The population of Medora had not relished Finnegan's bombardment, and suggestions concerning a possible "necktie party" began to make themselves heard. Finnegan evidently decided that the time had come for him, and the men who lived with him in his ill-kept shack, to leave the country. Travel by horse or foot was impossible. The boat they owned was a miserable, leaky affair. The Elkhorn skiff had evidently appeared to Finnegan and Company in the nature of a godsend. [Illustration: Wilmot Dow and Theodore Roosevelt (1886).] [Illustration: The piazza at Elkhorn. Photograph by Theodore Roosevelt.] Roosevelt's anger boiled up at the theft of the boat and he ran to saddle Manitou. But Sewall restrained him, pointing out that if the country was impassable for the horses of the thieves, it was no less impassable for the horses of the pursuers. He declared that he and Dow could build a flat-bottomed boat in three days. Roosevelt told him to go ahead. With the saddle band--his forty or fifty cow-ponies--on the farther side of the river, he could not afford to lose the boat. But the determining motive in his mind was neither chagrin nor anxiety to recover his property. In a country where self-reliant hardihood and the ability to hold one's own under all circumstances ranked as the first of the virtues, to submit tamely to theft or to any other injury was, he knew, to invite almost certain repetition of the offense. A journal which he kept for a month or two that spring gives in laconic terms a vivid picture of those March days. March 22. Tramped over to get deer; mountain lions had got them. March 23. Shot 4 prairie chickens. March 24. Thieves stole boat; started to build another to go after them. March 25. Went out after deer; saw nothing. Boat being built. River very high; ice piled upon banks several feet. March 26. Boat building. March 27. Boat built. Too cold to start. Shot 4 chickens. March 28. Bitter cold. March 29. Furious blizzard. While Sewall and Dow, who were mighty men with their hands, were building the boat, and his other cowpuncher, Rowe, was hurrying to Medora to bring out a wagon-load of supplies for their contemplated journey, Roosevelt himself was by no means idle. He had agreed to write a life of Thomas Hart Benton for the _American Statesmen Series_, and, after two or three months' work in the East gathering his material, had begun the actual writing of the book immediately after his return to the Bad Lands. I have written the first chapter of the Benton [he wrote to Lodge on March 27th], so at any rate I have made a start. Writing is horribly hard work to me; and I make slow progress. I have got some good ideas in the first chapter, but I am not sure they are worked up rightly; my style is very rough, and I do not like a certain lack of _sequitur_ that I do not seem able to get rid of.