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Badger CLARK

This, then, is the story of Roosevelt in the Bad Lands. What remains
is epilogue.

In the autumn of 1887, Roosevelt was again with the Merrifields at
Elkhorn and with Sylvane at the Maltese Cross, to assist in the
round-up of a train-load of cattle which he subsequently sold at
Chicago (again at a loss, for the prices for beef were even lower than
the previous year). He went on a brief hunt after antelope in the
broken country between the Little Missouri and the Beaver; he fought a
raging prairie fire with the split and bleeding carcass of a steer; he
went on another hunt late in December with a new friend named Fred
Herrig, and was nearly frozen to death in a blizzard, attempting (not
without success) to shoot mountain sheep; whereupon, feeling very fit,
he returned East to his family and his books.

He was now increasingly busy with his writing, completing that winter
a volume of vigorous sketches of the frontier, called "Ranch Life and
the Hunting Trail," beside his "Life of Gouverneur Morris," and a
book of "Essays on Practical Politics." In the autumn of 1888, he was
again at Elkhorn and again on the chase, this time in the Selkirks in
northern Idaho, camping on Kootenai Lake, and from there on foot with
a pack on his back, ranging among the high peaks with his old guide
John Willis and an Indian named Ammal, who was pigeon-toed and
mortally afraid of hobgoblins.

In 1889 he became a member of the Civil Service Commission in
Washington, and thereafter he saw the Bad Lands only once a year,
fleeing from his desk to the open country every autumn for a touch of
the old wild life and a glimpse of the old friends who yet lingered in
that forsaken country.

Medora had all the desolation of "a busted cowtown" whose inhabitants,
as one cowpuncher remarked in answer to a tenderfoot's inquiry, were
"eleven, including the chickens, when they were all in town." All of
the wicked men and most of the virtuous ones, who had lent
picturesqueness to Medora in the old days, were gone. Sylvane Ferris
still lingered as foreman of the cattle which Roosevelt still retained
in the Bad Lands, and Joe Ferris still ran his store, officiated as
postmaster, and kept a room for Roosevelt on his infrequent visits.
Bill Williams shot a man and went to jail, and with him went the glory
of his famous saloon. Of his old cronies, Hell-Roaring Bill Jones only
remained. He was a m