he solitude of the prairies, that have the vastness without the
malignancy of the sea. I have come to know the thrill and the dust and
the cattle-odors of the round-up; the warm companionship of the
ranchman's dinner-table; such profanity as I never expect to hear
again; singing and yarns and hints of the tragedy of prairie women;
and, at the height of a barbecue, the appalling intrusion of death. I
have felt in all its potency the spell which the "short-grass
country" cast over Theodore Roosevelt; and I cannot hear the word
Dakota without feeling a stirring in my blood.

It was Mr. Roosevelt himself who gave me the impulse to write this
book, and it was the letters of introduction which he wrote early in
1918 which made it possible for me to secure the friendly interest of
the men who knew most about his life on the ranch and the range. "If
you want to know what I was like when I had bark on," he said, "you
ought to talk to Bill Sewall and Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris and his
brother Joe." I was writing a book about him for boys at the time, and
again and again he said, "I want you to go out to Dakota!" On one
occasion I referred to his life in the Bad Lands as "a kind of idyl."
"That's it!" he exclaimed. "That's it! That's exactly what it was!"

The wish he had expressed, living, became in a sense a command after
he was dead. The letters he had given me unsealed the lips of the men
who, for thirty-five years, had steadily refused to reveal to
"newspaper fellers" the intimate story of the romantic life they had
shared with the man who became President of the United States. From
Dickinson, North Dakota, came Sylvane Ferris; from Terry, Montana,
came "Joe" Ferris; from Somers, Montana, came "Bill" Merrifield, and,
on their old stamping-ground along the Little Missouri, unfolded, bit
by bit, the story of the four years of Roosevelt's active ranching
life. In the deserted bar-room of the old "Metropolitan Hotel" at
Medora (rechristened the "Rough Riders"); on the ruins of the Maltese
Cross cabin and under the murmuring cottonwoods at Elkhorn, they spun
their joyous yarns. Apart from what they had to tell, it was worth
traveling two thirds across the Continent to come to know these
figures of an heroic age; and to sit at Sylvane Ferris's side as he
drove his Overland along the trails of the Bad Lands and through the
quicksands of the Little Missouri, was in itself not an insignificant
adventure. Mrs. Margaret Roberts, at