aking.

Packard remarked that evidently the Marquis did not understand. If he
started a paper it would be an organ for nobody. He intended to
finance it himself and run it to please himself. All he wanted was a
building.

The Marquis, a little miffed, agreed to rent him a building north of
his general store in return for a weekly advertisement for the
Company. Packard ordered his type and his presses and betook himself
to the solitude of the wintry buttes to think of a name for his paper.
His battle was half won when he came back with the name of _The Bad
Lands Cowboy_.

His first issue came out early in February, 1884. It was greeted with
interest even by so mighty a contemporary as the New York _Herald_.

[Illustration: Marquis de Mores.]

We hail with pleasure the birth of a new Dakota paper, _The
Bad Lands Cowboy_ [runs the note of welcome]. The _Cowboy_
is really a neat little journal, with lots to read in it,
and the American press has every reason to be proud of
its new baby. We are quite sure it will live to be a credit
to the family. The _Cowboy_ evidently means business. It
says in the introductory notice to its first number that it
intends to be the leading cattle paper of the Northwest, and
adds that it is not published for fun, but for $2 a year.

All the autumn and winter Medora and her rival across the river had
been feverishly competing for supremacy. But Little Missouri, though
she built ever so busily, in such a contest had not a chance in the
world. For the Little Missouri Land and Stock Company, which was its
only hope, was moribund, and the Marquis was playing, in a sense, with
loaded dice. He spoke persuasively to the officials of the Northern
Pacific and before the winter was well advanced the stop for express
trains was on the eastern side of the river, and Little Missouri,
protest as she would, belonged to the past. When the _Cowboy_ appeared
for the first time, Medora was in the full blaze of national fame,
having "broken into the front page" of the New York _Sun_. For the
Marquis was bubbling over with pride and confidence, and the tales he
told a credulous interviewer filled a column. A few were based on
fact, a few were builded on the nebulous foundation of hope, and a few
were sheer romance. The most conspicuous case of romance was a story
of the stage-line from Medora to the prosperous and wild little mining
town of Deadwood, two hundred