Biography; Frontier and pioneer life -- Dakota Territory; Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
It happened, however, that Roosevelt broke the camel's back. Some cows
which had been rounded up with their calves made a sudden bolt out of
the herd. Roosevelt attempted to head them back, but the wily cattle
eluded him.
"Hasten forward quickly there!" Roosevelt shouted to one of his men.
The bounds of formal courtesy could not withstand that. There was a
roar of delight from the cowpunchers, and, instantly, the phrase
became a part of the vocabulary of the Bad Lands. That day, and on
many days thereafter when "Get a git on yuh!" grew stale and "Head off
them cattle!" seemed done to death, he heard a cowpuncher shout, in a
piping voice, "Hasten forward quickly there!"
Roosevelt, in fact, was in those first days considered somewhat of a
joke. Beside Gregor Lang, forty miles to the south, he was the only
man in the Bad Lands who wore glasses. Lang's glasses, moreover, were
small and oval; Roosevelt's were large and round, making him, in the
opinion of the cowpunchers, look very much like a curiously nervous
and emphatic owl. They called him "Four Eyes," and spoke without too
much respect, of "Roosenfelder."
Merrifield rode to town with him one day and stopped at the Marquis's
company store to see a man named Fisher, who had succeeded Edgar Haupt
as local superintendent of the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car
Company, asking Fisher as he was departing whether he did not want to
meet Roosevelt. Fisher had heard of the "four-eyed dude from New York"
and heard something of his political reforming. He went outdoors with
Merrifield, distinctly curious.
Roosevelt was on horseback chatting with a group of cowboys, and the
impression he made on Fisher was not such as to remove the natural
prejudice of youth against "reformers" of any sort. What Fisher saw
was "a slim, anaemic-looking young fellow dressed in the exaggerated
style which new-comers on the frontier affected, and which was
considered indisputable evidence of the rank tenderfoot." If any
further proof of Roosevelt's status was needed, the great round
glasses supplied it. Fisher made up his mind that he knew all he
needed to know about the new owner of the Maltese Cross.
No doubt he expressed his opinions to Merrifield. The taciturn hunter
did not dispute his conclusions, but a day or two after he dropped in
on Fisher again and said, "Get your horse and we'll take the young
fellow over the old Sully Trail and try out his nerve. We'll let on
that we're going for a little hunt."
Fisher agreed with glee in his heart. He knew the Sully Trail. It ran
mainly along the sides of precipitous buttes, southeast of Medora,
and, being old and little used, had almost lost the little semblance
it might originally have had of a path where four-footed creatures
might pick their way with reasonable security. A recent rain had made
the clay as slippery as asphalt in a drizzle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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