Dickinson, had her own stories to
tell; and in the wilderness forty miles west of Lake McDonald, on the
Idaho border, John Reuter, known to Roosevelt as "Dutch Wannigan,"
told, as no one else could, of the time he was nearly killed by the
Marquis de Mores. A year later it was Schuyler Lebo who guided me in a
further search for material, fifty miles south from Medora by
buckboard through the wild, fantastic beauty of the Bad Lands. I doubt
if there is any one I missed who had anything to tell of Roosevelt.

So far as any facts relating to Roosevelt or to the Western frontier
can ever be described as "cold," it is a narrative of cold facts which
I have attempted to tell in this book. The truth, in this case, is
romantic enough and needs no embellishment. I have made every effort
to verify my narrative, but, to some extent, I have had to depend,
inevitably, on the character of the men and women who gave me my data,
as every historical writer must who deals not with documents (which
may, of course, themselves be mendacious), but with what is, in a
sense, "raw material." One highly dramatic story, dealing with
Roosevelt's defiance of a certain desperate character, which has at
different times during the past twenty-five years been printed in
leading newspapers and periodicals, told always by the same writer, I
have had to reject because I could find no verification of it, though
I think it may well be true.

In weaving my material into a connected narrative I have consciously
departed from fact in only one respect. Certain names--a half-dozen
or so in all--are fictitious. In certain cases, in which the story I
had to tell might give needless offense to the actors in it still
surviving, or to their children, and in which I was consequently
confronted by the alternative of rejecting the story in question or
changing the names, I chose the latter course without hesitation. It
is quite unessential, for instance, what the real name was of the lady
known in this book as "Mrs. Cummins"; but her story is an important
element in the narrative. To those who may recognize themselves under
the light veil I have thrown over their portraits, and may feel
grieved, I can only say that, inasmuch as they were inhabitants of the
Bad Lands when Theodore Roosevelt and the Marquis de Mores shaped
their destinies there for good or ill, they became historical figures
and must take their chances at the judgment seat of posterity with
Nebuchadnezza