le of taking advice. The charge was untrue. The difficulty
was rather that he sought advice in the wrong quarters and lacked the
judgment to weigh the counsel he received against the characters and
aims of the men who gave it. He was constantly pouring out the tale of
his grandiose plans to Tom and Dick and Abraham, asking for guidance
in affairs of business and finance from men whose knowledge of
business was limited to frontier barter and whose acquaintance with
finance was of an altogether dubious and uneconomic nature. He was
possessed, moreover, by the dangerous notion that those who spoke
bluntly were, therefore, of necessity opposed to him and not worth
regarding, while those who flattered him were his friends whose
counsel he could trust.

It was this attitude of mind which encumbered his project for a
stage-line to the Black Hills with difficulties from the very start.
The project itself was feasible. Deadwood could be reached only by
stage from Pierre, a matter of three hundred miles. The distance to
Medora was a hundred miles shorter. Millions of pounds of freight were
accumulating for lack of proper transportation facilities to Deadwood.
That hot little mining town, moreover, needed contact with the great
transcontinental system, especially in view of the migratory movement,
which had begun early in the year, of the miners from Deadwood and
Lead to the new gold-fields in the Coeur d'Alenes in Idaho.

Bill Williams and Jess Hogue, with the aid of the twenty-eight army
mules which they had acquired in ways that invited research, had
started a freight-line from Medora to Deadwood, but its service turned
out to be spasmodic, depending somewhat on the state of Medora's
thirst, on the number of "suckers" in town who had to be fleeced, and
on the difficulty under which both Williams and Hogue seemed to suffer
of keeping sober when they were released from their obvious duties in
the saloon. There appeared to be every reason, therefore, why a
stage-line connecting Deadwood with the Northern Pacific, carrying
passengers, mail, and freight, and organized with sufficient capital,
should succeed.

Dickinson, forty miles east, was wildly agitating for such a line to
run from that prosperous little community to the Black Hills. The
Dickinson _Press_ and the _Bad Lands Cowboy_ competed in deriding each
other's claims touching "the only feasible route." The _Cowboy_ said
that the Medora line would be more direct. The _Pre