but I guess I will get my grub
downtown at the hashery where I'm bunking."

That was all there was to it. John Willis could not be persuaded.

Once more, for the last time, Roosevelt in 1903 went back to Medora.
As they came into the Bad Lands, he stood on the rear platform of his
car, gazing wistfully over the forbidding-looking landscape.

"I know all this country like a book," he said to John Burroughs, who
was beside him. "I have ridden over it and hunted in it and tramped
over it in all seasons and weather, and it looks like home to me."

As soon as I got west of the Missouri I came into my own
former stamping-ground [he wrote to John Hay, describing
that visit]. At every station there was somebody who
remembered my riding in there when the Little Missouri
round-up went down to the Indian reservation and then worked
north across the Cannon Ball and up Knife and Green Rivers;
or who had been an interested and possibly malevolent
spectator when I had ridden east with other representatives
of the cowmen to hold a solemn council with the leading
grangers on the vexed subject of mavericks; or who had been
hired as a train-hand when I had been taking a load of
cattle to Chicago, and who remembered well how he and I at
the stoppages had run frantically down the line of the cars
and with our poles jabbed the unfortunate cattle who had
lain down until they again stood up, and thereby gave
themselves a chance for their lives; and who remembered how
when the train started we had to clamber hurriedly aboard
and make our way back to the caboose along the tops of the
cattle cars.

At Mandan two of my old cow-hands, Sylvane and Joe Ferris,
joined me. At Dickinson all of the older people had known me
and the whole town turned out with wild and not entirely
sober enthusiasm. It was difficult to make them much of a
speech, as there were dozens of men each earnestly desirous
of recalling to my mind some special incident. One man, how
he helped me bring in my cattle to ship, and how a blue roan
steer broke away leading a bunch which it took him and me
three hours to round up and bring back; another, how
seventeen years before I had come in a freight train from
Medora to deliver the Fourth of July oration; another, a
gray-eyed individual named [Maunders], who during my early