es, but there were regions where for miles only sagebrush
and stunted cedars lived a starved existence. Bad lands they were, for
man or beast, and Bad Lands they remained.

The "town" of Little Missouri consisted of a group of primitive
buildings scattered about the shack which did duty as a railroad
station. The Pyramid Park Hotel stood immediately north of the tracks;
beside it stood the one-story palace of sin of which one, who shall,
for the purposes of this story, be known as Bill Williams, was the
owner, and one who shall be known as Jess Hogue, the evil genius.
South of the track a comical, naive Swede named Johnny Nelson kept a
store when he was not courting Katie, the hired girl in Mrs.
McGeeney's boarding-house next door, or gambling away his receipts
under Hogue's crafty guidance. Directly to the east, on the brink of
the river, the railroad section-foreman, Fitzgerald, had a shack and a
wife who quarreled unceasingly with her neighbor, Mrs. McGeeney. At a
corresponding place on the other side of the track, a villainous
gun-fighter named Maunders lived (as far as possible) by his
neighbors' toil. A quarter of a mile west of him, in a grove of
cottonwood trees, stood a group of gray, log buildings known as the
"cantonment," where a handful of soldiers had been quartered under a
major named Coomba, to guard the construction crews on the railroad
from the attacks of predatory Indians seeking game in their ancient
hunting-grounds. A few huts in the sagebrush, a half-dozen miners'
shacks under the butte to the south, and one or two rather pretentious
frame houses in process of construction completed what was Little
Missouri; but Little Missouri was not the only outpost of civilization
at this junction of the railroad and the winding, treacherous river.
On the eastern bank, on the flat under the bluff that six months
previous had been a paradise for jackrabbits, a few houses and a few
men were attempting to prove to the world, amid a chorus of hammers,
that they constituted a town and had a future. The settlement called
itself Medora. The air was full of vague but wonderful stories of a
French marquis who was building it and who owned it, body and soul.

Roosevelt had originally been turned in the direction of the Bad Lands
by a letter in one of the New York papers by a man from Pittsburgh
named Howard Eaton and the corroborative enthusiasm of a high-spirited
naval officer named Gorringe, whose appeals for an adeq