Bill Sewall's story of T.R.

Front matter

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BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

I

Chapter I

HE came to my house accidentally, in the first place; it was an accident, but a very good one for me. Two of his cousins, Emlen Roosevelt and James West Roosevelt, were coming up North from New York with Arthur Cutler and Frederick Weeks, and in the station at Boston they happened to run into an old acquaintance of Cutler's, named Andrews.

Cutler, who was a school-teacher and the leader of the party, being the eldest, was asked where they were going. Cutler said that they were going up to the woods of

Maine. 2 I

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

"All right," said Andrews, "but if you go up there the place for you to go is to Bill Sewall's at Island Falls." You see, I kept an open house for hunters there, just as my father before me.

Cutler and his party decided that they would take that advice. In those days it was quite an undertaking to get to Island Falls. There was no railroad up our way then and they had to come thirty or forty miles by team. But they found me and told me what they wanted, and I went with them. They were there about three weeks. I had the whole party to take care of, not to speak of the camp, and altogether I had a pretty busy time and wasn't able to give them as much attention as I wanted, but they got plenty of trout and went home satisfied.

The next fall they came again and brought a thin, pale youngster with bad eyes and a weak heart. That was Theodore Roosevelt.

They had come by way of Lake Mattawamkeag, and it was about dark when they got there. Cutler took me off to one side. He said: "I want you to take that young fellow, Theodore, I brought down, under your

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

special care. Be careful of him, see that he don't take too hard jaunts and does not do too much. He is not very strong and he has got a great deal of ambition and grit, and if you should take such a tramp as you are in the habit of taking sometimes, and take him with you, you never would know that anything ailed him. If you should ask him if he was having a good time he would tell you he was having a very good time; and even if he was tired he would not tell you so. The first thing you knew he would be down, because he would go until he fell."

I took him and I found that that was his disposition right away, but he wasn't such a weakling as Cutler tried to make out. We traveled twenty-five miles afoot one day on that first visit of his, which I maintain was a good fair walk for any common man. We hitched well, somehow or other, from the start. He was different from anybody that I had ever met; especially, he was fairminded. He and I agreed in our ideas of fair play and right and wrong. Besides, he was always good-natured and full of fun. 1 do not think I ever remember him being 3

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

"out of sorts." He did not feel well sometimes, but he never would admit it.

I could see not a single thing that wasn't fine in Theodore, no qualities that I didn't like. Some folks said that he was headstrong and aggressive, but I never found him so except when necessary; and I've always thought being headstrong and aggressive, on occasion, was a pretty good thing. He wasn't a bit cocky as far as I could see, though others thought so. I will say that he was not remarkably cautious about expressing his opinion. I found that he was willing at any time to give every man a fair hearing, but he insisted even then on making his own conclusions. He had strong convictions and was willing to stand up for them. He wasn't conservative, but this conservative business is something that I haven't much patience with; it's timidity. I don't believe in diplomacy. I believe in talking things straight . It is about time for that word diplomacy to be wiped out. I call it hypocrisy. Talleyrand was great in diplomacy, as I read of him, but there could be nothing more deceitful and hypocritical than he was. 4

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

Theodore was about eighteen when he first came to Maine. He had an idea that he was going to be a naturaHst and used to carry with him a Httle bottle of arsenic and go around picking up bugs. He didn't shoot any big game, just ducks and partridges. We did a bit of trout-fishing. Theodore was never very fond of that. Somehow he didn't Hke to sit still so long.

That fall I had engaged another guide, so that the party would be a little better provided for. Wilmot Dow was his name. He was a nephew of mine, a better guide than I was, better hunter, better fisherman, and the best shot of any man in the country. He took care of the rest of the party himself mostly. I was with Theodore all of the time. At the end of the week I told Dow that I had got a different fellow to guide from what I had ever seen before. I had never seen anybody that was like him, and I have held that opinion ever since.

Of course he did not understand the woods,

but on every other subject he was posted.

The reason that he knew so much about

everything, I found, was that wherever he

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

went he got right in with the people. Once we stayed in a lumber-camp with quite a large crew of men, some of them older men than generally worked in the woods; old woodsmen, they were, who did not know anything but the woods. I doubt if they could have written their names, but they knew the woods, the whole of them, and they knew all of the hardships connected with pioneer life. They had gone in up to Ox Bow on the Aroostook River, and it was a long ways from the road. The river was their road, and they had made their way along it and had managed to live there, mostly by hunting. Theodore enjoyed them immensely. He told me after he left the camp how glad he was that he had met them. He said that he could read about such things, but here he had got first-hand accounts of backwoods life from the men who had lived it and knew what they were talking about. Even then he was quick to find the real man in very simple men He didn't look for a brilliant man when he found me; he valued me for what I was worth.

The next fall he was up again. We went 6 i

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WILMOT DOW IN 1884

WILLIAM WINGATE SEWALL IN 1884

THEODORE ROOSEVELT AT TWENTY-ONE WITH DOW AND SEWALL IN MAINE

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

up to the Munsungun Lakes at the head of the Aroostook River and into the east branch of the Penobscot, that they called Trout Brook. On the way we had to ford the rough - bottomed Catasacoka stream which comes down from the mountains and is very rapid. We did not want to get our feet wet, so we all took off our shoes and stockings. His feet were pretty tender and the stones hurt him. He crippled himself some way, and in trying to favor his feet he dropped one of his shoes. The rapid current took it into white water and it got in among the stones some way, so that he could not find it. He had a pair of thin Indian moccasins with him that he had taken for slippers, and said that he thought he would wear them, and he did wear them and went up into the mountains. He might just as well have gone in his stocking feet, only the stockings would have worn off and the moccasins did not entirely; but the protection would have been about the same. It must have been pretty tedious going, but he made no complaint about that.

On this trip Theodore and I had a pirogue, 7

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

a sort of dugout. I had to drag it a good deal and Theodore had a great respect for my strength. One morning it was raining and I said that I was sorry. Theodore could not see what difference it made, since we got wet, anyway. But by the end of the day he saw the difference, not being able to see where the treading was good.

Theodore was feeling spry that night and wanted to chop. I told him that he must not. He didn't quite like that.

"Why?" he asked.

"Because if you do use that ax," I told him, ' ' first thing you know you will be cutting yourself. Then I will have to not only pull the dugout, but the dugout and you in it."

He didn't use the ax.

Theodore enjoyed that trip. I have a letter still that I got from Cutler after he got back home. "It takes Theodore two hours to tell the story of the Munsungun Lakes trip," he wrote. "And then, after all, it doesn't seem to have amounted to much, except a good hard time."

Theodore Roosevelt was up again next fall and we took a trip up to Mt. Katahdin. The

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

following spring he graduated from college and shortly afterward he married and went to Europe. I had several letters from him while he was there. One of them I prize especially. He said that he was having a good time and was treated very nicely everywhere, but the more he saw of foreign lands the more thankful he was that he was an American citizen, free-born, where he acknowledged no man his superior, unless it was by merit, and no man his inferior, unless by his demerit.

He also wrote that he met some EngHshmen who had climbed the Matterhorn. They talked as though nobody else could climb mountains, he wrote, so he climbed it himself just to show them that Americans can climb, too.

I had a letter from Cutler the next spring saying that Theodore was busy studying law and was getting into politics. He was elected to the New York Legislature shortly after. He was twice re-elected, I believe.

He was still frail in those days, suffering with asthma, and one fall, I think it was in 1883, his family persuaded him to take a trip 9

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

out to Dakota. I do not know who had told him about the Bad Lands along the Little Missoiiri River, but it was there that he went, getting off the train at Medora. He ran into some ranchmen named Ferris and after three weeks with them he found he liked the country so much that he bought them out.

Chapter II

IT was during Theodore's third term in the Legislature, in February, 1884, that his daughter AHce was born. That very night his mother, who had been an invaUd for years, died suddenly, and twelve hours later his wife died. Cutler wrote me about it and I have got his letter still :

Theodore's mother died on Thursday morning at 3 A.M. His wife died the same day at 10 a.m., about twenty -four hours after the birth of his daughter.

Of course, the family are utterly demoralized and Theodore is in a dazed, stunned state. He does not know what he does or says. The funeral of both Mrs. Roosevelts took place this morning. A very sad sight. The legislature has adjourned for three days out of respect for Theodore's loss.

Three weeks later I had a letter from Theodore himself. Here it is :

6 West 57TH Street, New York.

March g, 1884.

Dear Will,— I was glad to hear from you, and I know you feel for me. It was a grim and evil fate, but II

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

I have never believed it did any good to flinch or yield for any blow, nor does it lighten the blow to cease from working.

I have thought often of you. I hope my Western venture turns out well. If it does, and I feel sure you will do well for yourself by coming out with me, I shall take you and Will Dow out next August. Of course, it depends upon how the cattle have gotten through the winter. The weather has been very hard and I am afraid they have suffered somewhat; if the loss has been very heavy I will have to wait a year longer before going into it on a more extended scale. So, as yet, the plan is doubtful. If you went out, the first year you could not expect to do very well, but after that, I think, from what I know of you, you would have a very good future before you.

Good-by, dear friend, may God bless you and yours. Yours always,

Theodore Roosevelt.

I went down to New York that spring to see him and to talk things over. He said he would guarantee us a share of anything made in the cattle business, and if anything was lost, he said he would lose it and pay our wages. He asked me what I thought of the proposition. I told him that I thought it was very one-sided, but if he thought he could stand it, I thought we could. Whatever happened, he said, we should not lose by it. That was all the bargain there was and all

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

the bargain we needed from him. We knew

that we were just as safe as if we had had a

contract.

I went back to Maine and didn't hear any

more from him for a while. Then suddenly

he wrote to me wanting me to come at once.

I wasn't in shape to come at once, so I wrote

back and asked him how much time he could

give me. He wrote, saying that I might have

what was left of that week and all of the

next. That was something like ten days to

get my affairs fixed up, to settle my wife and

little girl, and get everything in shape to go

to Dakota. Early in July I got this letter

from him.

I enclose you the check of three thousand, for yourself and Will Dow, to pay off the mortgage, etc., etc.

I have arranged matters in the West, have found a good place for a ranch, and have purchased a hundred head of cattle, for you to start with.

Now a Uttle plain talk, though I think it unnecessary, for I know you too well. If you are afraid of hard work and privation, don't come out west. If you expect to make a fortune in a year or two, don't come west. If you will give up under temporary discouragements, don't come out west. If, on the other hand, you are willing to work hard, especially the first year; if you 13

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

realize that for a couple of years you cannot expect to make much more than you are now making; if you also know at the end of that time you will be in the receipt of about a thousand dollars for the third year, with an unlimited field ahead of you and a future as bright as you yourself choose to make it, then come.

Now, I take it for granted that you will not hesitate at this time. So fix up your affairs at once, and be ready to start before the end of this week.

Dow and I met Theodore in New York. We all started for Dakota together on July 28th. We reached Chimney Butte Ranch, eight miles south of Medora, which Roosevelt had bought of Sylvane and Joe Ferris and WilHam Merrifield, on the ist of August.

It struck me that the man who first called that part of the world the "Bad Lands" had hit it about right. He was a man named Boneval, one of Astor's old fur men. As the story was told to me, he had charge of an expedition of trappers who had been furring up in the Northwest and had intended to go down the Big Missouri and get back to the point they had started from. But the Indians were on the war-path and it was dangerous along the Big Missouri. Boneval thought that by leaving the Big Missouri somewhere 14

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

below the mouth of the Yellowstone they could go on to the Little Missouri and follow that far enough to strike back on the Big Missouri below the Indians.

When they got to the Little Missouri they found that the country was so barren and desolate that there was no game of any kind, and the weather so dry and hot that their wagons came to pieces. Their provisions ran short and they had a very hard, difficult time getting through. For that reason he named the country the "Bad Lands." I don't imagine they could have a better name. It is only a comparatively short time, they say, since it was the bottom of an ocean, as all of the tops of nearly all the high hills have clamshells and snail-shells on them and the country is cut into deep wash-outs and gulches and the hills are very steep. The country looked as though it had been thrown up by some volcanic power.

I have heard that General Sully, who took an expedition into the region and gave the first regular report of the country, was asked to describe what the "Bad Lands" were like, and he said he "didn't know they were like 15

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

anything, unless it was hell with the fire gone out."

But there were times that I remember when you wouldn't exactly agree that the fire had really gone out. I recall one Fourth of July, especially, when the temperature was 125 degrees in the shade with a strong hot wind which killed almost every green thing in the country. Some willows and cottonwoods, that grew in the most moist places, showed a sickly green after that day, but the grass was all killed.

To me it was a strange and interesting country. Some of the hills had been worn by the water in such a way that, from a distance, they looked like the ruins of old castles. In the fall when the leaves turned it was very beautiful. The hills there are not very high, but often very steep, and as there is nothing higher to compare them with they look higher than they actually are. From the top of these hills you looked at a great circle as far as the eye could reach; the only thing that I could compare it to would be a great rag rug such as the women make down in Maine, of all kinds and colors of rags. It was a country 16

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

pleasant to look at and always very interesting. Everything that grows there is dwarfed, except the cottonwoods, which grow to a fair height in places near the river. On the steep, rough hills the red cedar grows, and in the fall, when the leaves turn, the stunted bushes and shrubs make a variety of color. Some of the clay hills which have veins of soft coal, get on fire and in cold weather they steam and smoke like small volcanoes.

The first night we were at Chimney Butte Roosevelt asked me what I thought of the country. I told him that I liked the country well enough, but that I didn't believe that it was much of a cattle country.

"Well," he said, "Bill, you don't know anything about it." He said, "Everybody that's here says that it is." I said that it was a fact that I did not know anything.- about it. I realized that. But it was the way it looked to me, like not much of a cattle country.

Roosevelt had decided to build a comfortable ranch-house at a bend in the river some thirty-five or forty miles north of Chimney Butte. Dow and I were to build the 17

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

house, so the day after we arrived we moved up the river, driving the cattle before us. It was all unclaimed land along there, belonging either to the government or to the Northern Pacific Railroad. We were simply squatters, as nearly all of the other men were in those days.

We were busy watching cattle until near the end of August. It was new work to Dow and myself and we liked it. It was interesting. Besides, the wild, desolate grandeur of the country had a kind of charm. Back in some of the ravines where the cedars grew thick you could easily imagine that no one had ever been before ; but you were generally wrong when you thought that. Many times I had almost made up my mind that I was where no human being had been before when I would run on a tobacco-tag or a beer-bottle.

We started building the ranch-house in a clump of large cottonwood-trees near the bank of the Little Missouri River. West from the house it was smooth and grassy for about a hundred yards, then there was a belt of cottonwoods which went back for some two hundred yards. They were the largest trees i8

ELKHORN RANCH FROM ACROSS THE LITTLE MISSOURI

THE RANCH-HOUSE

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

I ever saw in Dakota and it was from them that we got most of the timber for the house. Back of them the steep clay hills rose to the height of two or three hundred feet and looked like miniature mountains. A little to the northwest was a hill with coal veins in it which burned red in the dark. To the east we looked across the river about two hundred yards, then across a wide bottom covered with grass, sage-brush, and some small trees, to the steep clay hills which rose almost perpendicular from the river bottom. Beyond that was the Bad Lands for perhaps twenty miles.

Early in October we began hewing timber for the house and we were at work getting material almost all of the time until New- Year's. I designed the house myself and it was a sizable place, sixty feet long, thirty feet wide, and seven feet high, with a flat roof and a porch where after the day's work Theodore used to sit in a rocking-chair, reading poetry.

While we were cutting the timber Theodore went to the Big Horn Mountains for an elk-hunt. He wanted me to go with him, but I 19

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

disliked to leave Dow alone, knowing, if I went, one man would not be much of a crew to work on the house; so I prevailed on Roosevelt to get a man who was familiar with the country to go with him. I never wanted to go on a hunt so much as that one. In one of his books he tells about it:

The finest bull with the best head that I got was killed in the midst of very beautiful and grand surroundings. We had been hunting through a great pine wood which ran up to the edge of a broad canyonlike valley bounded by sheer walls of rock. There were fresh tracks of elk about, and we had been advancing upward with even more than our usual caution when, on stepping out into a patch of open ground near the edge of the cliff, we came upon a great bull, beating and thrashing his antlers against a young tree eighty yards off. He stopped and faced us for a second, high, mighty antlers thrown into the air as he held his head aloft. Behind him towered the tall and somber pines, while at his feet the jutting crags overhung the deep chasm below, that stretched off between high walls of barren and snow-streaked rocks, the evergreen clinging to their sides, while along the bottom the rapid torrent gathered in places into black and sullen mountain lakes. As the bull turned to run, I struck him just behind the shoulder; he reeled to the deathblow, but staggered gamely on a few rods into the forest before sinking to the ground with my second bullet through his lungs.

Chapter III

\X7"H.1LE he was away on this huntlng- ^ ^ trip we heard that a man who was known as a trouble-maker and who worked on the ranch of a Frenchman named de Mores, a marquis who laid claim to the large piece of country on which our ranch was situated, had threatened to shoot Roosevelt. I told Theodore about it when he came back.

He said, "Is that so?"

Then he saddled his horse and rode straight to where the man lived. Theodore found him in his shack and told him that he had heard that a man had said he wanted to shoot him, and, said Theodore, he wanted to know why.

The man was flabbergasted, I guess, by Roosevelt's directness. He denied that he had ever said anything like it. He had been misquoted, he said.

The affair passed off very pleasantly and Roosevelt and he were good friends after that,

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

Later in the fall, while Roosevelt was away on another trip and Dow and I were getting material for the house, we heard that the same man who had threatened Roosevelt was threatening us. Dow happened to overhear two men talking about us. They were not unfriendly to us, but they had evidently heard the threats. One remarked to the other there would be dead men around that old shack where we were, some day.

Of course, Dow told me of this and right there we decided if there were any dead men there, it would not be us.

We went on with our work, preparing for an attack. Our guns were where we could pick them up in an instant. We were working at the edge of a piece of timber and there was quite a thicket behind us. We knew that if anybody came, he would come by the trail and we intended to make for the timber, and if he wanted to hunt us there, why, we would see who was best at the business.

One Sunday morning I was writing home and Dow had gone out for a walk. Suddenly I heard a great fusillade; something over twenty guns were fired as fast as I could

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

count. Very soon afterward a half-dozen men rode up to the shack. They were cowboys. I knew one of them as the right-hand man of the Marquis de Mores, and decided that they had come down to look us over.

I asked them in a friendly manner to dismount and come in, which they did. As it was getting near noon, I asked them if they wouldn't like to have something to eat. They said they would. I told them the cook was out, but I would do my best. We had a good pot of beans that we had baked in the ground, woods fashion. I dug them out and got what bread we had on hand. We had plenty of hard bread. I made them some coffee and got out all the best things we had in the shack. I had decided to treat them just as nicely as I knew how. Then if they started any trouble I intended to make sure of the leader first thing. I think he had had a little whisky, as he certainly had a very sharp appetite.

I helped him to the beans and he began to

praise them. He said he never saw such good

baked beans and he didn't know when he had

had anything as good as they were. I had

BILL SEWALL'S STORY OF T. R.

plenty of beans and kept urging him to have more. I knew that that was a good way to make a man feel good-natured. After dinner we went out and looked the place over. They thought we had a very nice place, fixed up very nice, and didn't find any fault with anything. The party rode off and I didn't hear any more shooting.

Dow didn't come back until after they had gone. He had heard the shooting and I reported the visit. We decided if there had been any danger it had passed, which proved to be true. However, we carried our guns for a while, just the same. I was always treated very nicely by that man afterward and he seemed very friendly.

He was a man who didn't bear a very good name. He had killed one man that they were sure of and they thought he had killed another.

When Theodore came back we reported to him what had happened. We all concluded that if there were any dead men around the shack they would be men that would die a natural death.