Sewall states that Roosevelt at the time intended to take up cattle-raising as a permanent business, having heard that there was “money in it.”
“Hell-Roaring Bill Jones,” a citizen of the forlorn little cattle town of Medora, possessed four distinctions: He was sheriff of the county, he was a gun-fighter, he was a handy man with his fists, and he became a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, who had now acquired the two cattle ranches, the Chimney Butte and the Elkhorn.
There was an election in town. A fight was threatened. Roosevelt, fresh from his own political battles in the New York Assembly, heard out on his ranch that one of the parties would import section hands from nearby railroad stations to throw their weight into the conflict. Instantly the place of election became the only spot in the world for him.
The news had been late in reaching him, and when he rode into Medora the election was well under way. Roosevelt inquired if there had been any disorder.
“Disorder, hell!” said a bystander. “Bill Jones just stood there with one hand on his gun and with the other pointing over toward the new jail whenever any man who didn’t have the right to vote came near the polls. The only one of them who tried to vote Bill knocked down! Lord! the way that man fell!”
“Well!” Bill ejaculated, “if he hadn’t fell I’d have walked around behind him to see what was propping him up!”
It was with men like these, in surroundings like these, that young Roosevelt had elected to learn to the full extent the lesson of democracy.
Before his Western trip Roosevelt had already had his manhood and his spirit of brotherhood tested in the hard-waged battles of New York political life. Now was to come a test infinitely greater. The former member of the New York Assembly, the man who had occupied a high place in New York social life, who in his earlier days was noted for his well-tailored figure and his eyeglasses, had turned his back on all this. He told his folks that he was going West to “rough it” and to mix with mankind, and both of these he did to the utmost.
The place he chose for his home ranch was one of the worst of the undeveloped sections of the country. The ranch lay on both sides of the Little Missouri River. In front of the ranch house itself was a long veranda, and in front of that a line of cottonwood trees that shaded it. The bluffs rose from the river valley; stables, sheds and other buildings were near. A circular horse corral lay not far from the house. In winter wolves and lynxes traveled up the river on the ice, directly in front of the ranch house.