f it
with less than four hundred. The "Hash-Knife outfit," which had owned
a hundred thousand head, lost seventy-five thousand. Not a ranchman up
and down the Little Missouri lost less than half his herd.

The halcyon days of Billings County were over. What had been a
flourishing cattle country was a boneyard where the agents of
fertilizer factories bargained for skeletons.

XXVI

Some towns go out in a night,
And some are swept bare in a day,
But our town like a phantom island,
Just faded away.

Some towns die, and are dead,
But ours, though it perished, breathes;
And, in old men and in young dreamers
Still, glows and seethes.

From _Medora Nights_

Roosevelt returned from Europe on March 28th.

The loss among the cattle has been terrible [he wrote Sewall
from New York early in April]. About the only comfort I have
out of it is that, at any rate, you and Wilmot are all
right; I would not mind the loss of a few hundred if it was
the only way to benefit you and Will--but it will be much
more than that.

I am going out West in a few days to look at things for
myself.

Well, I must now try to worry through as best I may.
Sometime I hope to get a chance to go up and see you all.
Then I shall forget my troubles when we go off into the
woods after caribou or moose.

There was no merriment this time when Roosevelt arrived in Medora.
With Sylvane he rode over the ranges.

You cannot imagine anything more dreary than the look of the
Bad Lands [he wrote Sewall]. Everything was cropped as bare
as a bone. The sagebrush was just fed out by the starving
cattle. The snow lay so deep that nobody could get around;
it was almost impossible to get a horse a mile.

In almost every coulee there were dead cattle. There were
nearly three hundred on Wadsworth bottom. Annie came through
all right; Angus died. Only one or two of our horses died;
but the O K lost sixty head. In one of Munro's draws I
counted in a single patch of brushwood twenty-three dead
cows and calves.

You boys were lucky to get out when you did; if you had
waited until spring, I guess it would have been a case of
walking.

"I don't know how many thousand we owned at Elkhorn and the Maltese
Cross in the autumn of 1886," said Merrifield afterward. "But a