Part 14

In view of the fact that before his first abattoir was in operation he had spent upwards of three hundred thousand dollars, an impartial observer might have remarked that his desire for activity was expensive.

Unquestionably the Marquis had made an impression on the Northwest country. The hints he threw out concerning friends in Paris who were eager to invest five million dollars in Billings County were sufficient to cause palpitation in more than one Dakota bosom. The Marquis promised telephone lines up and down the river and other civic improvements that were dazzling to the imagination and stimulating to the price of building lots; and implanted firmly in the minds of the inhabitants of Medora the idea that in ten years their city would rival Omaha. Meanwhile, Little Missouri and the "boomtown" were leading an existence which seemed to ricochet back and forth between Acadian simplicity and the livid sophistication of a mining-camp.

"Sheriff Cuskelly made a business trip to Little Missouri," is the gist of countless "Notes" in the Dickinson Press, "and reports everything as lively at the town on the Little Muddy."

Lively it was; but its liveliness was not all thievery and violence. "On November 5th," the Dickinson Press announces, "the citizens of Little Missouri opened a school." Whom they opened it for is dark as the ancestry of Melchizedek. But from somewhere some one procured a teacher, and in the saloons the cowboys and the hunters, the horse-thieves and gamblers and fly-by-nights and painted ladies "chipped in" to pay his "board and keep." The charm of this outpouring of dollars in the cause of education is not dimmed by the fact that the school-teacher, in the middle of the first term, discovered a more profitable form of activity and deserted his charges to open a saloon.

Late in November a man of a different sort blew into town. His name was A. T. Packard. He was joyously young, like almost every one else in Little Missouri, except Maunders and Paddock and Captain Vine, having graduated from the University of Michigan only a year before. He drifted westward, and, having a taste for things literary, became managing editor of the Bismarck Tribune. Bismarck was lurid in those days, and editing a newspaper there meant not only writing practically everything in it, including the advertisements, but also persuading the leading citizens by main force that the editor had a right to say what he pleased. Packard had been an athlete in college, and his eyes gave out before his rule had been seriously disputed. After throwing sundry protesting malefactors downstairs, he resigned and undertook work a trifle less exacting across the Missouri River, on the Mandan Pioneer.

Packard became fascinated with the tales he heard of Little Missouri and Medora and, being foot loose, drifted thither late in November. It happened that Frank Vine, who had by that time been deposed as agent of the Gorringe syndicate, was running the Pyramid Park Hotel. He had met Packard in Mandan and greeted him like a long-lost brother. As the newcomer was sitting in a corner of the bar-room after supper, writing home, Frank came up and bent over him.

"You told me down in Mandan that you'd never seen an honest-to-goodness cowboy," he whispered. "See that fellow at the farther end of the bar? Well, that's a real cowboy."

Packard looked up. The man was standing with his back toward the wall, and it struck the tenderfoot that there was something in his attitude and in the look in his eye that suggested that he was on the watch and kept his back to the wall with a purpose. He wore the paraphernalia of the cowboy with ease and grace.

Packard started to describe him to his "folks" in distant Indiana. He described his hat, his face, his clothes, his shaps, his loosely hanging belt with the protruding gun. He looked up and studied the man; he looked down and wrote. The man finally became conscious that he was the subject of study. Packard observed Frank Vine whisper a word of explanation.

He finished his letter and decided to take it to the "depot" and ask the telegraph operator to mail it on the east-bound train that passed through Little Missouri at three. He opened the door. The night was black, and a blast of icy wind greeted him. He changed his mind.

The next afternoon he was riding up the river to the Maltese Cross when he heard hoofs behind him. A minute later the object of his artistic efforts of the night before joined him and for an hour loped along at his side. He was not slow in discovering that the man was pumping him. It occurred to him that turn-about was fair play, and he told him all the man wanted to know.

"So you're a newspaper feller," remarked the man at length. "That's damn funny. But I guess it's so if you say so. You see," he added, "Frank Vine he said you was a deputy-sheriff on the lookout for a horse-thief."

Packard felt his hair rise under his hat.

"Where was you going last night when you started to go out?"

"To the telegraph-office."

"I made up my mind you was going to telegraph."

"I was just going to mail a letter."

"Well, if you'd gone I'd have killed you."

Packard gasped a little. Frank Vine was a joker with a vengeance. They rode on, talking of lighter matters.

Packard had come to the Bad Lands with the idea of spending the winter in the open, hunting, but he was a newspaper man from top to toe and in the back of his mind there was a notion that it would be a good deal of a lark, and possibly a not unprofitable venture, to start a weekly newspaper in the Marquis de Mores's budding metropolis. He had, at the tender age of thirteen, been managing editor of a country newspaper, owned by his father, and ever since had been drawn again and again back into the "game" by that lure which few men who yield to it are ever after able to resist.

He broached the matter to the Marquis. That gentleman was patronizing, but agreed that a special organ might prove of value to his Company. He offered to finance the undertaking.

Packard remarked that evidently the Marquis did not understand. If he started a paper it would be an organ for nobody. He intended to finance it himself and run it to please himself. All he wanted was a building.

The Marquis, a little miffed, agreed to rent him a building north of his general store in return for a weekly advertisement for the Company. Packard ordered his type and his presses and betook himself to the solitude of the wintry buttes to think of a name for his paper. His battle was half won when he came back with the name of The Bad Lands Cowboy.

His first issue came out early in February, 1884. It was greeted with interest even by so mighty a contemporary as the New York Herald.

We hail with pleasure the birth of a new Dakota paper, The Bad Lands Cowboy [runs the note of welcome]. The Cowboy is really a neat little journal, with lots to read in it, and the American press has every reason to be proud of its new baby. We are quite sure it will live to be a credit to the family. The Cowboy evidently means business. It says in the introductory notice to its first number that it intends to be the leading cattle paper of the Northwest, and adds that it is not published for fun, but for $2 a year.

All the autumn and winter Medora and her rival across the river had been feverishly competing for supremacy. But Little Missouri, though she built ever so busily, in such a contest had not a chance in the world. For the Little Missouri Land and Stock Company, which was its only hope, was moribund, and the Marquis was playing, in a sense, with loaded dice. He spoke persuasively to the officials of the Northern Pacific and before the winter was well advanced the stop for express trains was on the eastern side of the river, and Little Missouri, protest as she would, belonged to the past. When the Cowboy appeared for the first time, Medora was in the full blaze of national fame, having "broken into the front page" of the New York Sun. For the Marquis was bubbling over with pride and confidence, and the tales he told a credulous interviewer filled a column. A few were based on fact, a few were builded on the nebulous foundation of hope, and a few were sheer romance. The most conspicuous case of romance was a story of the stage-line from Medora to the prosperous and wild little mining town of Deadwood, two hundred miles or more to the south.

"The Marquis had observed," narrates the interviewer, "that the divide on the top of the ridge between the Little Missouri and the Missouri Rivers was almost a natural roadway that led directly toward Deadwood. He gave this roadway needed artificial improvements, and started the Deadwood and Medora stage-line. This is now diverting the Deadwood trade to Medora, to the great advantage of both places."

Who, reading that sober piece of information, would have dreamed that the stage-line in question was at the time nothing but a pious hope?