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 The original of this book is in 
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CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Susan H. Douglass 
 
'•1 
 
 (X^'^-t -n.-^-t) 
 
 C-- 
 
 THE ROOSEVELT BOOK 
 
Copyright, 1904, by Artluir Hewitt. 
 
 From a photograph taken by Arthur Hewitt in the Green Room of the 
 White House, March 19, 1904. 
 
THE ROOSEVELT BOOK 
 
 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF 
 
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 ROBERT BRIDGES 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1914 
 
COFYSIGBT* X904, 1909, BY 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 '^0> 
 
 
PUBLISHER'S NOTE 
 
 The extracts published in this volume are 
 made with the kind permission of the publish- 
 ers of the various books. The selections en- 
 titled " The American Boy," " The Strenuous 
 Life," "Grant," and "The Big-Horn Sheep" 
 are taken from " The Strenuous Life " and 
 ** Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail " by per- 
 mission of The Century Co. ; " The Heritage of 
 Noble Deeds," " Frontier Character," " Daniel 
 Boone," and "The Grisly Bear" are from 
 "American Ideals," "The Winning of the 
 West," and " Hunting the Grisly " by permis- 
 sion of G. P. Putnam's Sons. The other ex- 
 tracts are from " The Rough Riders " (Charles 
 Scribner's Sons), from Scribner*s Magazine, 
 from President Roosevelt's public addresses, 
 and from one of the volumes of the Boone 
 and Crockett Club. 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 President Roosevelt ...,»... Frontispiece 
 
 FACING 
 PAGE 
 
 Daniel Boone 58 
 
 General U. S. Grant at Headquarters in the 
 
 Wilderness, May, 1864 — Aged 42 ... 80 
 
 Wounded Rough Riders Coming Over the Hill 
 
 AT SiBONEY 102 
 
 General Wheeler and Group of Rough Rider 
 
 Officers no 
 
 The Fight at the Kettles — San Juan . . . .118 
 Theodore Roosevelt in Hunting Costume — 
 
 About 1886 136 
 
 A Grisly Bear in the Wilds of Wyoming . .142 
 
 Heads of Two Big-Horn Sheep 156 
 
 A Bobcat in a Tree — Colorado 172 
 
 A Cougar Treed 188 
 
 The First Cougar Killed 194 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 SAGS 
 
 Introduction xi 
 
 The Good Citizen .••••••• i 
 
 The American Boy j 
 
 The Heritage of Noble Deeds . • • . II 
 
 The Strenuous Life • • 21 
 
 "Doers of the Word" 30 
 
 The Pioneer 35 
 
 The Pioneer 37 
 
 Frontier Character 44 
 
 Daniel Boone 57 
 
 The Hero .••••• 67 
 
 The True Basis of Heroism • • • • 69 
 
 Abraham Lincoln 72 
 
 Grant 80 
 
 Some Rough Rider Heroes 94 
 
 The Battle of San Juan Hill .... 107 
 
 vii 
 
viii Contents 
 
 FAGS 
 
 Hunting Wild Animals ...,••• i35 
 
 Old Ephraim, the Grisly Bear . • . • i37 
 
 The Big-Horn Sheep 15^ 
 
 The Bobcat 171 
 
 The Cougar i77 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 It Is a good thing for Young Americans to 
 be familiar with the books written by Theodore 
 Roosevelt, not because he is President of the 
 United States, but because, whether cowboy, 
 Assemblyman, Police or Civil Service Commis- 
 sioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Colonel 
 of the Rough-Riders, Governor of New York, 
 Vice-President, or President of the United 
 States, he has always been the right kind of an 
 American citizen. He has loved this country 
 from his youth with a fervor inherited from 
 generations of patriotic men. He has always 
 been a man who has had no use for an emotion 
 that does not lead to action. It was impossible 
 for him to be patriotic and not do something to 
 show it. He was proud of the history of this 
 country, and he was hardly out of college when 
 he began the preparation of a work on "The 
 
 9 
 
 XX 
 
xii Introduction 
 
 Naval War of 1812" — a field that had been to 
 that time almost neglected. It was published 
 when he was only twenty-four years of age. I 
 once asked a competent historian of the navy 
 who had been studying the period, whether he 
 had found it a useful book. He replied that, 
 with all his special study, he had found only two 
 bad errors in it. I told this to Mr. Roosevelt, 
 and he replied that he thought he could point 
 out more than that. But, at any rate, here is 
 the work of a very young man, which has stood 
 the test for its thoroughness. With his vigor- 
 ous ideas about the duty of every citizen to da 
 things, it was natural for him to plunge into po- 
 litical life as soon as the opportunity offered. 
 He went into the New York Assembly with a 
 dash, energy, and directness that won for him 
 prompt recognition. That kind of young man 
 was new in the New York Legislature in the 
 early eighties. But he compelled attention by 
 his honesty of purpose and fervent efforts to 
 make that purpose real by deeds. From then 
 till now he has been a conspicuous figure in 
 public life. 
 
Introduction xiii 
 
 To do things, and do them persistently and 
 well, he found out early in life that it was neces- 
 sary to have a body capable of endurance. He 
 knew that flabby muscles helped to make flabby 
 thought and inefficient action. So all his life he 
 has striven after a clean, well-trained, healthy 
 body. He read the lives of great men and 
 learned that good blood that had sunshine in it 
 helped them to do great deeds. His buying a 
 ranch and living the life of a cowboy was not 
 the idle freak of a young man. He knew that 
 States in the raw were being made out there 
 in the West by the kind of men who had 
 pushed the frontier of this country, through a 
 hundred years, from the Alleghanies to the Pa- 
 cific. He wanted to be a part of it, to have for 
 his own the body of a pioneer and the thoughts 
 of a pioneer. For that reason all over the West 
 to-day they say, "We like that man. He speaks 
 our language." He can't do anything by halves. 
 He might have been an idle **gentleman ranch- 
 er," as so many were, but he lived the life for all 
 that was in it, and became a good cowboy, an 
 expert hunter, a zealous deputy sheriff, and a 
 
xiv Introduction 
 
 good deal of a naturalist besides. All these 
 things he learned by frankly going to men who 
 knew more about them at first hand than he did, 
 and watching how they did it, and talking with 
 them about it. 
 
 Half a dozen books have grown out of this 
 side of his life, and they are full of instances 
 which show his capacity for learning things 
 from the men who really knew them. His gen- 
 erous praise and enthusiasm for the expert 
 plainsman, the wily trapper, the fearless cow- 
 boy, the tireless hunter, are expressed in every 
 chapter. He learned things by intelligent ap- 
 preciation of others and not by jealous rivalry. 
 That is one of his most attractive traits. 
 
 It is "playing the game fair" that appeals to 
 him first, and then ^'hitting the line hard." 
 Even opponents and rivals like that kind of a 
 man. Cow-punchers, foot-ball heroes, and po- 
 litical bosses have yielded admiration to it. And 
 no boy can read what he has written and not 
 feel the charm of it. 
 
 All his hunting stories are full of this spirit 
 of fair play. That is why he is always called 
 
Introduction xv 
 
 "a good sportsman." When he is hunting big 
 game he gives the animal a fair chance. He is 
 scornful of a pot-hunter and a game butcher. 
 To him the pleasure of the sport lies in pitting 
 his wit and endurance against the wiliness and 
 strength of the wild animal in its native region. 
 There are just as many stories in his books of 
 the wild animals that outwitted him as of those 
 that he killed. It was the chase that stirred his 
 blood. One of his old guides in Wyoming once 
 told me with pride, "Mr. Roosevelt always 
 picked his head." He would let a whole drove 
 of elk escape rather than shoot an inferior head. 
 Out of this fine free life on the plains grew 
 his keen interest in the history of that region. 
 With his accustomed energy he was not satisfied 
 with skimming the surface from books already 
 published, but he went to the sources of history. 
 The result is his most ambitious historical work, 
 "The Winning of the West." Nearly every 
 page of it shows in the foot-notes how indus- 
 triously he investigated letters, journals, docu- 
 ments, oral tradition, and State archives. He 
 blazed the trail for the future historian. The 
 
xvi Introduction 
 
 heroes of this book are the Pioneers. To him 
 they are the real "makers of America." 
 
 It was the brave conquest of nature which 
 they made that appealed to him, for above all 
 things he likes a square, upstanding contest, 
 whether it is against a wilderness, a mountain, 
 wild animals, or men. His joy in these things is 
 infectious. That explains the power and fasci- 
 nation of his leadership. Boys and men like to 
 follow a man who gets joy out of his life; and 
 that is why the men in his regiment idolized 
 him. He played the game fair, and he played it 
 on exactly the same terms as the humblest pri- 
 vate in the ranks. Moreover, he expected ju»t 
 that spirit in all of them and he lifted them up 
 to it by the force of his enthusiasm. 
 
 There was never a man who was on the look- 
 out for what was good in other men who failed 
 to have a sense of humor. This very apprecia- 
 tion of all kinds of people reveals the amusing 
 differences between them. It illuminates the 
 motives which control other people. A frank, 
 direct, sincere man like Mr. Roosevelt is for 
 that reason not an easy man to fool. Politicians 
 
Introduction xvii 
 
 have misinterpreted his simple frankness, and 
 have suddenly found themselves thoroughly 
 seen through. 
 
 The books which have grown out of his pub- 
 lic life — "The Strenuous Life," "American 
 Ideals,'* "Administration and Civil Service," 
 and "Presidential Addresses" — are just the ex- 
 pression of this direct, vigorous, healthy, and 
 joyous nature when it applied itself to the tasks 
 which came to him as Police and Civil Service 
 Commissioner, Governor or President. There 
 is no portentous solemnity of meaningless 
 phrases in his speeches and addresses. He 
 knows every kind of American, East and West, 
 and he speaks to him in the language of sim- 
 plicity and sincerity. "The good citizen is the 
 man who, whatever his wealth or his poverty, 
 strives manfully to do his duty to himself, to 
 his family, to his neighbor, to the State; who is 
 incapable of the baseness which manifests itself 
 either In arrogance or in envy, but who, while 
 demanding justice for himself, is no less scru- 
 pulous to do justice to others. // u because the 
 average American citizen^ rich or poor, is of 
 
xviii Introduction 
 
 just this type that we have cause for our pro* 
 found faith in the future of the Republic,'^ 
 
 This is the kind of man who is, I believe, re- 
 vealed in the extracts from his books here print- 
 ed. The Young American who reads them will 
 not only be interested in them, but will be in- 
 spirited by them and touched with admiration 
 for the pioneers and heroes of our Country, and 
 will earnestly believe in its people and its des- 
 tiny. 
 
 Robert Bridges. 
 
THE GOOD CITIZEN 
 
THE AMERICAN BOY 
 
 Of course what we have a right to expect of 
 the American boy is that he shall turn out to be 
 a good American man. Now, the chances are 
 strong that he won't be much of a man unless 
 he is a good deal of a boy. He must not be a 
 coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. 
 He must work hard and play hard. He must be 
 clean-minded and clean-lived, and able to hold 
 his own under all circumstances and against all 
 comers. It is only on these conditions that he 
 will grow into the kind of American man of 
 whom America can be really proud. 
 
 There are always in life countless tendencies 
 for good and for evil, and each succeeding gen- 
 eration sees some of these tendencies strength- 
 ened and some weakened ; nor is it by any means 
 always, alasl that the tendencies for evil are 
 weakened and those for good strengthened. But 
 during the last few decades there certainly have 
 been some notable changes for good in boy life. 
 The great growth in the love of athletic sports,, 
 for instance, while fraught with danger if it be- 
 
 3 
 
4 The Good Citizen 
 
 comes one-sided and unhealthy, has beyond all 
 question had an excellent effect In increased man- 
 liness. Forty or fifty years ago the writer on 
 American morals was sure to deplore the effemi- 
 nacy and luxury of young Americans who were 
 born of rich parents. The boy who was well off 
 then, especially in the big Eastern cities, lived 
 too luxuriously, took to billiards as his chief in- 
 nocent recreation, and felt small shame in his in- 
 ability to take part in rough pastimes and field- 
 sports. Nowadays, whatever other faults the 
 son of rich parents may tend to develop, he is at 
 least forced by the opinion of all his associates 
 of his own age to bear himself well in manly ex- 
 ercises and to develop his body — and therefore, 
 to a certain extent, his character — in the rough 
 sports which call for pluck, endurance, and phys- 
 ical address. • "^> • ' ^ 
 
 Of course boys who live under such fortu- 
 nate conditions that they have to do either a 
 good deal of outdoor work or a good deal of 
 what might b6 called natural outdoor play do 
 not need this athletic development. In the Civil 
 War the soldiers who came from the prairie and 
 the backwoods and the rugged farms where 
 stumps still dotted the clearings, and who had 
 learned to ride in their infancy, to shoot as soon 
 as they could handle a rifle, and to camp out 
 
The American Boy 5 
 
 whenever they got the chance, were better fitted 
 for military work than any set of mere school or 
 college athletes could possibly be. Moreover, to 
 mis-estimate athletics is equally bad whether 
 their importance is magnified or minimized. 
 The Greeks were famous athletes, and as long as 
 their athletic training had a normal place in their 
 lives, it was a good thing. But it was a very bad 
 thing when they kept up their athletic games 
 while letting the stern qualities of soldiership 
 and statesmanship sink into disuse. Some of the 
 younger readers of this book will certainly 
 sometime read the famous letters of the younger 
 Pliny, a Roman who wrote, with what seems to 
 us a curiously modern touch, in the first century 
 of the present era. His correspondence with the 
 Emperor Trajan is particularly interesting; and 
 not the least noteworthy thing in it is the tone of 
 contempt with which he speaks of the Greek ath- 
 letic sports, treating them as the diversions of an 
 unwarlike people which it was safe to encourage 
 In order to keep the Greeks from turning into 
 anything formidable. So at one time the Per- 
 sian kings had to forbid polo, because soldiers 
 neglected their proper duties for the fascinations 
 of the game. We cannot expect the best work 
 from soldiers who have carried to an unhealthy 
 extreme the sports and pastimes which would be 
 
6 The Good Citizen 
 
 healthy if indulged in with moderation, and 
 have neglected to learn as they should the busi- 
 ness of their profession. A soldier needs to 
 know how to shoot and take cover and shift for 
 himself — not to box or play foot-ball. There is, 
 of course, always the risk of thus mistaking 
 means for ends. 
 
 When a man so far confuses ends and means 
 as to think that fox-hunting, or polo, or foot- 
 ball, or whatever else the sport may be, is to be 
 itself taken as the end, instead of as the mere 
 means of preparation to do work that counts 
 when the time arises, when the occasion calls — 
 why, that man had better abandon sport alto- 
 gether. 
 
 No boy can afford to neglect his work, and 
 with a boy work, as a rule, means study. Of 
 course there are occasionally brilliant successes 
 in life where the man has been worthless as a 
 student when a boy. To take these exceptions 
 as examples would be as unsafe as it would be to 
 advocate blindness because some blind men have 
 won undying honor by triumphing over their 
 physical infirmity and accomplishing great re- 
 sults in the world. I am no advocate of sense- 
 less and excessive cramming in studies, but a boy 
 should work, and should work hard, at his les- 
 sons — in the first place, for the sake of what he 
 
The American Boy 7 
 
 will learn, and in the next place, for the sake of 
 the effect upon his own character of resolutely 
 settling down to learn it. Shiftlessness, slack- 
 ness, Indifference in studying, are almost certain 
 to mean inability to get on in other walks of life. 
 Of course, as a boy grows older it is a good thing 
 if he can shape his studies in the direction toward 
 which he has a natural bent ; but whether he can 
 do this or not^ he must put his whole heart into 
 them. I do not believe in mischief-doing in 
 school hours, or in the kind of animal spirits that 
 results in making bad scholars; and I believe 
 that those boys who take part in rough, hard 
 play outside of school will not find any need for 
 horse-play in school. While they study they 
 should study just as hard as they play foot-ball 
 in a match game. It is wise to obey the homely 
 old adage, "Work while you work; play while 
 you play." 
 
 A boy needs both physical and moral courage. 
 Neither can take the place of the other. When 
 boys become men they will find out that there are 
 some soldiers very brave in the field who have 
 proved timid and worthless as politicians, and 
 some politicians who show an entire readiness to 
 take chances and assume responsibilities in civil 
 affairs, but who lack the fighting edge when op- 
 posed to physical danger. In each case, with 
 
8 The Good Citizen 
 
 soldiers and politicians alike, there is but half a 
 virtue. The possession of the courage of the 
 soldier does not excuse the lack of courage in the 
 statesman, and, even less does the possession of 
 the courage of the statesman excuse shrinking on 
 the field of battle. Now, this is all just as true 
 of boys. A coward who will take a blow with- 
 out returning it is a contemptible creature ; but, 
 after all, he is hardly as contemptible as the boy 
 who dares not stand up for what he deems right 
 against the sneers of his companions who are 
 themselves wrong. Ridicule is one of the favor- 
 ite weapons of wickedness, and it is sometimes 
 incomprehensible how good and brave boys will 
 be influenced for evil by the jeers of associates 
 who have no one quality that calls for respect, 
 but who affect to laugh at the very traits which 
 ought to be peculiarly the cause for pride. 
 
 There is no need to be a prig. There is no 
 need for a boy to preach about his own good 
 conduct and virtue. If he does he will make 
 himself offensive and ridiculous. But there is ur- 
 gent need that he should practise decency; that 
 he should be clean and straight, honest and 
 truthful, gentle and tender, as well as brave. If 
 he can once get to a proper understanding of 
 things, he will have a far more hearty contempt 
 for the boy who has begun a course of feeble dis- 
 
The American Boy 9 
 
 sipation, or who Is untruthful, or mean, or dis- 
 honest, or cruel, than this boy and his fellows 
 can possibly, in return, feel for him. The very 
 fact that the boy should be manly and able to 
 hold his own, that he should be ashamed to sub- 
 mit to bullying without instant retaliation, 
 should, in return, make him abhor any form of 
 bullying, cruelty, or brutality. 
 
 The boy can best become a good man by be- 
 ing a good boy — not a goody-goody boy, but 
 just a plain good boy. I do not mean that he 
 must love only the negative virtues; I mean he 
 must love the positive virtues also. "Good," in 
 the largest sense, should Include whatever is fine, 
 straightforward, clean, brave, and manly. The 
 best boys I know — the best men I know — are 
 good at their studies or their business, fearless 
 and stalwart, hated and feared by all that is 
 wicked and depraved, incapable of submitting 
 to wrong-doing, and equally Incapable of being 
 aught but tender to the weak and helpless. A 
 healthy-minded boy should feel hearty contempt 
 for the coward, and even more hearty indigna- 
 tion for the boy who bullies girls or small boys, 
 or tortures animals. One prime reason for ab- 
 horring cowards is because every good boy 
 should have It In him to thrash the objectionable 
 boy as the need arises. 
 
lO The Good Citizen 
 
 Of course the effect that a thoroughly manly, 
 thoroughly straight and upright boy can have 
 upon the companions of his own age, and upon 
 those who are younger, is incalculable. If he is 
 not thoroughly manly, then they will not respect 
 him, and his good qualities will count for but 
 little; while, of course, if he is mean, cruel, or 
 wicked, then his physical strength and force of 
 mind merely make him so much the more ob- 
 jectionable a member of society. He cannot do 
 good work if he is not strong and does not try 
 with his whole heart and soul to count in any 
 contest; and his strength will be a curse to him- 
 self and to everyone else if he does not have 
 thorough command over himself and over his 
 own evil passions, and if he does not use his 
 strength on the side of decency, justice, and fair 
 dealing. 
 
 In short, in life, as in a foot-ball game, the 
 principle to follow is : 
 
 Hit the line hard ; don't foul and don't shirk, 
 but hit the line hard ! 
 
THE HERITAGE OF NOBLE DEEDS 
 
 Every American is richer by the heritage of 
 the noble deeds and noble words of Washington 
 and of Lincoln. Each of us who reads the Get- 
 tysburg speech or the second inaugural address 
 of the greatest American of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, or who studies the long campaigns and 
 lofty statesmanship of that other American who 
 was even greater, cannot but feel within him 
 that lift toward things higher and nobler which 
 can never be bestowed by the enjoyment of mere 
 material prosperity. 
 
 It is not only the country which these men 
 
 helped to make and helped to save that is ours 
 
 by inheritance; we inherit also all that is best 
 
 and highest in their characters and in their lives. 
 
 We inherit from Lincoln and from the might of 
 
 Lincoln's generation not merely the freedom of 
 
 those who once were slaves ; for we inherit also 
 
 the fact of the freeing of them, we inherit the 
 
 glory and the honor and the wonder of the deed 
 
 that was done, no less than the actual results of 
 
 the deed when done. The bells that rang at the 
 
 II 
 
12 The Good Citizen 
 
 passage of the Emancipation Proclamation still 
 ring In Whittler's ode; and as men think over 
 the real nature of the triumph then scored for 
 humankind their hearts shall ever throb as they 
 cannot over the greatest industrial success or 
 over any victory won at a less cost than ours. 
 
 The captains and the armies who, after long 
 years of dreary campaigning and bloody, stub- 
 born fighting, brought to a close the Civil War 
 have likewise left us even more than a reunited 
 realm. The material effect of what they did is 
 shown In the fact that the same flag flies from 
 the Great Lakes to the Rio Grande, and all the 
 people of the United States are richer because 
 they are one people and not many, because they 
 belong to one great nation and not to a contemp- 
 tible knot of struggling nationalities. But be- 
 sides this, besides the material results of the 
 Civil War, we are all, North and South, Incal- 
 culably richer for Its memories. We are the 
 richer for each grim campaign, for each hard- 
 fought battle. We are the richer for valor dis- 
 played alike by those who fought so valiantly 
 for the right and by those who, no less valiantly, 
 fought for what they deemed the right. We 
 have in us nobler capacities for what is great and 
 good because of the infinite woe and suffering, 
 and because of the splendid ultimate triumph. 
 
The Heritage of Noble Deeds 13 
 
 In the same way that we are the better for the 
 deeds of our mighty men who have served the 
 nation well, so we are the worse for the deeds 
 and the words of those who have striven to 
 bring evil on the land. Most fortunately we 
 have been free from the peril of the most dan- 
 gerous of all examples. We have not had to 
 fight the influence exerted over the minds of ea- 
 ger and ambitious men by the career of the mili- 
 tary adventurer who heads some successful rev- 
 olutionary or separatist movement. No man 
 works such incalculable woe to a free country 
 as he who teaches young men that one of the 
 paths to glory, renown, and temporal success lies 
 along the line of armed resistance to the Gov- 
 ernment, of its attempted overthrow. 
 
 Yet if we are free from the peril of this exam- 
 ple, there are other perils from which we are not 
 free. All through our career we have had to 
 war against a tendency to regard, in the individ- 
 ual and the nation alike, as most important, 
 things that are of comparatively little impor- 
 tance. We rightfully value success, but some- 
 times we overvalue it, for we tend to forget that 
 success may be obtained by means which should 
 make it abhorred and despised by every honora- 
 ble man. One section of the community deifies 
 as "smartness" the kind of trickery which en- 
 
14 The Good Citizen 
 
 ables a man without conscience to succeed in the 
 financial or political world. Another section of 
 the community deifies violent homicidal lawless- 
 ness. If ever our people as a whole adopt these 
 views, then we shall have proved that we are un- 
 worthy of the heritage our forefathers left us; 
 and our country will go down in ruin. 
 
 The people that do harm in the end are not 
 the wrong-doers whom all execrate ; they are the 
 men who do not do quite as much wrong, but 
 who are applauded instead of being execrated. 
 The career of Benedict Arnold has done us no 
 harm as a nation because of the universal horror 
 It inspired. The men who have done us harm 
 are those who have advocated disunion, but have 
 done it so that they have been enabled to keep 
 their political position ; who have advocated re- 
 pudiation of debts, or other financial dishonesty, 
 but have kept their standing in the community; 
 who preach the doctrines of anarchy, but refrain 
 from action that will bring them within the pale 
 of the law ; for these men lead thousands astray 
 by the fact that they go unpunished or even re- 
 warded for their misdeeds. 
 
 It Is unhappily true that we Inherit the evil as 
 well as the good done by those who have gone 
 before us, and in the one case as in the other the 
 influence extends far beyond the mere material 
 
The Heritage of Noble Deeds 15 
 
 effects. The foes of order harm quite as much 
 by example as by what they actually accomplish. 
 So it is with the equally dangerous criminals of 
 the wealthy classes. The conscienceless stock 
 speculator who acquires wealth by swindling his 
 fellows, by debauching judges and corrupting 
 legislatures, and who ends his days with the rep- 
 utation of being among the richest men in Amer- 
 ica, exerts over the minds of the rising genera- 
 tion an influence worse than that of the average 
 murderer or bandit, because his career is even 
 more dazzling in its success, and even more dan- 
 gerous in its effects upon the community. Any 
 one who reads the essays of Charles Francis 
 Adams and Henry Adams, entitled "A Chapter 
 of Erie," and "The Gold Conspiracy in New 
 York," will read about the doings of men whose 
 influence for evil upon the community is more 
 potent than that of any band of anarchists or 
 train robbers. 
 
 There are other members of our mercantile 
 community who, being perfectly honest them- 
 selves, nevertheless do almost as much damage 
 as the dishonest. The professional labor agita- 
 tor, with all his reckless incendiarism of speech, 
 can do no more harm than the narrow, hard, sel- 
 fish merchant or manufacturer who deliberately 
 sets himself to keep the laborers he employs in 
 
1 6 The Good Citizen 
 
 2l condition of dependence which will render 
 them helpless to combine against him ; and every 
 such merchant or manufacturer who rises to suf- 
 ficient eminence leaves the record of his name 
 and deeds as a legacy of evil to all who come 
 after him. 
 
 But of course the worst foes of America are 
 the foes to that orderly liberty without which our 
 Republic must speedily perish. The reckless la- 
 bor agitator who arouses the mob to riot and 
 bloodshed is in the last analysis the most danger- 
 ous of the workingman's enemies. This man is 
 a real peril ; and so is his sympathizer, the legis- 
 lator, who to catch votes denounces the judiciary 
 and the military because they put down mobs. 
 We Americans have, on the whole, a right to be 
 optimists ; but it is mere folly to blind ourselves 
 to the fact that there are some black clouds on 
 the horizon of our future. 
 
 There are, however, plenty of wrong-doers 
 besides those who commit the overt act. Too 
 much cannot be said against the men of wealth 
 who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. 
 There is not in the world a more ignoble char- 
 acter than the mere money-getting American, 
 insensible to every duty, regardless of every prin- 
 ciple, bent only on amassing a fortune, and put- 
 ting his fortune only to the basest uses — ^whether 
 
The Heritage of Noble Deeds 1 7 
 
 these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck 
 railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a 
 life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross 
 debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of 
 high social position, foreign or native, for his 
 daughter. Such a man is only the more danger- 
 ous if he occasionally does some deed like found- 
 ing a college or endowing a church, which makes 
 those good people who are also foolish forget 
 his real iniquity. These men are equally care- 
 less of the workingmen, whom they oppress, and 
 of the state, whose existence they imperil. There 
 are not very many of them, but there is a very 
 great number of men who approach more or less 
 closely to the type, and, just in so far as they do 
 so approach, they are curses to the country. The 
 man who is content to let politics go from bad 
 to worse, jesting at the corruption of politicians, 
 the man who is content to see the maladministra- 
 tion of justice without an immediate and resolute 
 effort to reform it, is shirking his duty and is pre- 
 paring the way for infinite woe in the future. 
 Hard, brutal indifference to the right, and an 
 equally brutal shortsightedness as to the inevita- 
 ble results of corruption and injustice, are bale- 
 ful beyond measure ; and yet they are characteris- 
 tic of a great many Americans who think them- 
 selves perfectly respectable, and who are consid- 
 
1 8 The Good Citizen 
 
 ered thriving, prosperous men by their easy-go- 
 ing fellow-citizens. 
 
 Another class, merging into this, and only less 
 dangerous, is that of the men whose ideals are 
 purely material. These are the men who are 
 willing to go for good government when the)^ 
 think it will pay, but who measure everything 
 by the shop-till, the people who are unable to ap- 
 preciate any quality that is not a mercantile com- 
 modity, who do not understand that a poet may 
 do far more for a country than the owner of a 
 nail factory, who do not realize that no amount 
 of commercial prosperity can supply the lack of 
 the heroic virtues, or can in itself solve the ter- 
 rible social problems which all the civilized 
 world is now facing. 
 
 The merely material, the merely commercial 
 ideal, the ideal of the men "whose fatherland is 
 the till," is in its very essence debasing and low- 
 ering. It is as true now as ever it was that no 
 man and no nation shall live by bread alone. 
 Thrift and industry are indispensable virtues; 
 but they are not all-sufficient. We must base 
 our appeals for civic and national betterment on 
 nobler grounds than those of mere business ex- 
 pediency. 
 
 We have examples enough and to spare that 
 tend to evil ; nevertheless, for our good fortune, 
 
The Heritage of Noble Deeds 19 
 
 the men who have most impressed themselves 
 upon the thought of the nation have left behind 
 them careers the influence of which must tell for 
 good. The unscrupulous speculator who rises 
 to enormous wealth by swindling his neighbor; 
 the capitalist who oppresses the workingman; 
 the agitator who wrongs the workingman yet 
 more deeply by trying to teach him to rely not 
 upon himself, but partly upon the charity of in- 
 dividuals or of the state and partly upon mob 
 violence; the man in public life who is a dema- 
 gogue or corrupt, and the newspaper writer who 
 fails to attack him because of his corruption, or 
 who slanderously assails him when he is honest ; 
 the political leader who, cursed by some obliq- 
 uity of moral or of mental vision, seeks to pro- 
 duce sectional or social strife — all these, though 
 important in their day, have hitherto failed to 
 leave any lasting impress upon the life of the 
 nation. The men who have profoundly influ- 
 enced the growth of our national character have 
 been In most cases precisely those men whose In- 
 fluence was for the best and was strongly felt as 
 antagonistic to the worst tendency of the age. 
 The great writers, who have written in prose or 
 verse, have done much for us. The great ora- 
 tors whose burning words on behalf of liberty, 
 of union, of honest government, have rung 
 
20 The Good Citizen 
 
 through our legislative halls, have done even 
 more. Most of all has been done by the men 
 who have spoken to us through deeds and not 
 words, or whose words have gathered their es- 
 pecial charm and significance because they came 
 from men who did speak in deeds. A nation's 
 greatness lies in its possibility of achievement in 
 the present, and nothing helps it more than the 
 consciousness of achievement in the past. 
 
THE STRENUOUS LIFE 
 
 I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble 
 ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the 
 life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to 
 preach that highest form of success which comes, 
 not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but 
 to the man who does not shrink from danger, 
 from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out 
 of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. 
 
 A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace 
 which springs merely from lack either of desire 
 or of power to strive after great things, is as lit- 
 tle worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask 
 only that what every self-respecting American 
 demands from himself and from his sons shall 
 be demanded of the American nation as a whole. 
 Who among you would teach your boys that ease, 
 that peace, is to be the first consideration in their 
 eyes — to be the ultimate goal after which they 
 strive? You men of Chicago have made this 
 city great, you men of Illinois have done your 
 share, and more than your share, in making 
 America great, because you neither preach nor 
 
 21 
 
22 The Good Citizen 
 
 practise such a doctrine. You work yourselvi 
 and you bring up your sons to work. If you a 
 rich and are worth your salt, you will teach yo 
 sons that though they may have leisure, it is n 
 to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisu 
 merely means that those who possess it, beii 
 free from the necessity of working for their li^ 
 lihood, are all the more bound to carry on sor 
 kind of non-remunerative work in science, In L 
 ters, in art, in exploration, in historical resear 
 ■ — work of the type we most need in this counti 
 the successful carrying out of which reflects mc 
 honor upon the nation* We do not admire t 
 man of timid peace. We admire the man w^ 
 embodies victorious effort; the man who nev 
 -wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help 
 friend, but who has those virile qualities neci 
 sary to win in the stern strife of actual life, 
 is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tri 
 to succeed. In this life we get nothing save 
 effort. Freedom from effort in the prese 
 merely means that there has been stored up ( 
 fort in the past. A man can be freed from t 
 necessity of work only by the fact that he or ] 
 fathers before him have worked to good pi 
 pose. If the freedom thus purchased is us 
 aright, and the man still does actual woi 
 though of a different kind, whether as a writer 
 
The Strenuous Life 23 
 
 a general, whether in the field of politics or in 
 the field of exploration and adventure, he shows 
 he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats 
 this period of freedom from the need of actual 
 labor as a period, not of preparation, but of 
 mere enjoyment, even though perhaps not of 
 vicious enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a 
 cumberer of the earth's surface, and he surely 
 unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if 
 the need to do so should again arise. A mere 
 life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory 
 life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately 
 unfits those who follow it for serious work in 
 the world. 
 
 In the last analysis a healthy state can exist 
 only when the men and women who make it up 
 lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the 
 children are so trained that they shall endeav- 
 or, not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome 
 them J not to seek ease, but to know how to 
 wrest triumph from toil and risk. The man 
 must be glad to do a man's work, to dare and en- 
 dure and to labor; to keep himself, and to keep 
 those dependent upon him. The woman must 
 be the housewife, the helpmeet of the home- 
 maker, the wise and fearless mother of many 
 healthy children. 
 
 As it is with the individual, so it is with the 
 
24 The Good Citizen 
 
 nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy 
 is the nation that has no history. Thrice happy 
 is the nation that has a glorious history. Far 
 better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious 
 triumphs, even though checkered by failure, 
 than to take rank with those poor spirits who 
 neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they 
 live in the gray twilight that knows not victory 
 nor defeat. If in 1861 the men who loved the 
 Union had believed that peace was the end of 
 all things, and war and strife the worst of all 
 things, and had acted up to their belief, we 
 would have saved hundreds of thousands of 
 lives, we would have saved hundreds of millions 
 of dollars. Moreover, besides saving all the 
 blood and treasure we then lavished, we would 
 have prevented the heartbreak of many women, 
 the dissolution of many homes, and we would 
 have spared the country those months of gloom 
 and shame when it seemed as if our armies 
 marched only to defeat. We could have avoided 
 all this suffering simply by shrinking from strife. 
 And If we had thus avoided it, we would have 
 shown that we were weaklings, and that we were 
 unfit to stand among the great nations of the 
 earth. Thank God for the iron in the blood of 
 our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of 
 Lincoln, and bore sword or rifle in the armies of 
 
The Strenuous Life 25 
 
 Grant! Let us, the children of the men who 
 proved themselves equal to the mighty days, let 
 us, the children of the men who carried the great 
 Civil War to a triumphant conclusion, praise the 
 God of our fathers that the ignoble counsels of 
 peace were rejected; that the suffering and loss, 
 the blackness of sorrow and despair, were un* 
 flinchingly faced, and the years of strife en- 
 dured; for in the end the slave was freed, the 
 Union restored, and the mighty American re- 
 public placed once more as a helmeted queen 
 among nations. 
 
 We of this generation do not have to face a 
 task such as that our fathers faced, but we have 
 our tasks, and woe to us if we fail to perform 
 them ! We cannot, if we would, play the part 
 of China, and be content to rot by inches in igno- 
 ble ease within our borders, taking no interest In 
 what goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling 
 commercialism; heedless of the higher life, the 
 life of aspiration, of toil and risk, busying our- 
 selves only with the wants of our bodies for the 
 day, until suddenly we should find, beyond a 
 shadow of question, what China has already 
 found, that in this world the nation that has 
 trained itself to a career of unwarlike and iso- 
 lated ease is bound, in the end, to go down be- 
 fore other nations which have not lost the manly 
 
26 The Good Citizen 
 
 and adventurous qualities. If we are to be a 
 really great people, we must strive in good faith 
 to play a great part In the world. We cannot 
 avoid meeting great issues. All that we can de- 
 termine for ourselves Is whether we shall meet 
 them well or ill. In 1898 we could not help be- 
 ing brought face to face with the problem of war 
 with Spain. All we could decide was whether we 
 should shrink like cowards from the contest, or 
 enter into it as beseemed a brave and high-spir- 
 ited people ; and, once In, whether failure or suc- 
 cess should crown our banners. So it is now. We 
 cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront us 
 In Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philip- 
 pines. All we can decide is whether we shall 
 meet them In a way that will redound to the na- 
 tional credit, or whether we shall make of our 
 dealings with these new problems a dark and 
 shameful page In our history. To refuse to deal 
 with them at all merely amounts to dealing with 
 them badly. We have a given problem to solve. 
 If we undertake the solution, there is, of course, 
 always danger that we may not solve it aright ; 
 but to refuse to undertake the solution simply 
 renders It certain that we cannot possibly solve It 
 aright. The timid man, the lazy man, the 
 man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized 
 man, who has lost the great fighting, masterft*! 
 
The Strenuous Life 27 
 
 virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull 
 mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the 
 mighty lift that thrills "stern men with empires 
 in their brains" — all these, of course, shrink 
 from seeing the nation undertake its new duties ; 
 shrink from seeing us build a navy and an army 
 adequate to our needs ; shrink from seeing us do 
 our share of the world's work, by bringing order 
 out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands 
 from which the valor of our soldiers and sailors 
 has driven the Spanish flag. These are the men 
 who fear the strenuous life, who fear the only 
 national life which is really worth leading. 
 They believe in that cloistered life which saps 
 the hardy virtues in a nation, as it saps them in 
 the individual; or else they are wedded to that 
 base spirit of gain and greed which recognizes 
 in commercialism the be-all and end-all of na- 
 tional life, instead of realizing that, though an 
 indispensable element, it is, after all, but one of 
 the many elements that go to make up true na- 
 tional greatness. No country can long endure 
 if its foundations are not laid deep in the mate- 
 rial prosperity which comes from thrift, from 
 business energy and enterprise, from hard, un- 
 sparing effort in the fields of industrial activity; 
 but neither was any nation ever yet truly great 
 if it relied upon material prosperity alone. All 
 
28 The Good Citizen 
 
 honor must be paid to the architects of our ma- 
 terial prosperity, to the great captains of indus- 
 try who have built our factories and our rail- 
 roads, to the strong men who toil for wealth 
 with brain or hand; for great is the debt of the 
 nation to these and their kind. But our debt is 
 yet greater to the men whose highest type is to 
 be found in a statesman like Lincoln, a soldier 
 like Grant. They showed by their lives that 
 they recognized the law of work, the law of 
 strife ; they tolled to win a competence for them- 
 selves and those dependent upon them ; but they 
 recognized that there were yet other and even 
 loftier duties — duties to the nation and duties to 
 the race. 
 
 We cannot sit huddled within our own bor- 
 ders and avow ourselves merely an assemblage 
 of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for 
 what happens beyond. Such a policy would de- 
 feat even its own end ; for as the nations grow to 
 have ever wider and wider interests, and are 
 brought Into closer and closer contact, if we are 
 to hold our own in the struggle for naval and 
 commercial supremacy, we must build up our 
 power without our own borders. We must 
 build the isthmian canal, and we must grasp the 
 points of vantage which will enable us to have 
 
The Strenuous Life 29 
 
 our say in deciding the destiny of the oceans of 
 the East and the West. 
 
 I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that 
 our country calls not for the life of ease but for 
 the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth 
 century looms before us big with the fate of 
 many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek 
 merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, 
 if we shrink from the hard contests where men 
 must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk 
 of all they hold dear, then the bolder and strong- 
 er peoples will pass us by, and will win for them- 
 selves the domination of the world. Let us 
 therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute 
 to do our duty well and manfully ; resi5lute to up- 
 hold righteousness by deed and by word; reso- 
 lute to be both honest and brave, to serve high 
 ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, 
 let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, 
 within or without the nation, provided we are 
 certain that the strife is justified, for it is only 
 through strife, through hard and dangerous en- 
 deavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of 
 true national greatness. 
 
"DOERS OF THE WORD" 
 
 Here near the seat of the summer school for 
 young men founded by Dwight L. Moody, I 
 naturally speak on a subject suggested to me by 
 the life of Mr. Moody and by the aims sought 
 for through the establishment of the summer 
 school. 
 
 In such a school — a school which is to equip 
 young men to do good in the world — to show 
 both the desire for the rule of righteousness and 
 the practical power to give actual effect to that 
 desire — it seems to me there are two texts spe- 
 cially worthy of emphasis : One is, "Be ye doers 
 of the word and not hearers only" ; and the other 
 is, "Not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, 
 serving the Lord." A republic of freemen is 
 pre-eminently a community in which there is 
 need for the actual exercise and practical appli- 
 cation of both the milder and the stronger Virt- 
 ues. Every good quality — every virtue and 
 every grace — has its place and is of use in the 
 great scheme of creation; but it is of course a 
 mere truism to say that at certain times and in 
 
 30 
 
The Good Citizen 31 
 
 certain places there is pre-eminent need for a 
 given set of virtues. In our own country, with 
 its many-sided, hurrying, practical life, the place 
 for cloistered virtue is far smaller than is the 
 place for that essential manliness which, without 
 losing its fine and lofty side, can yet hold its own 
 in the rough struggle with the forces of the 
 world round about us. It would be a very bad 
 thing for this country if it happened that the 
 men of righteous living tended to lose the ro- 
 bust, virile qualities of heart, mind, and body, 
 and if, on the other hand, the men best fitted 
 practically to achieve results lost the guidance of 
 the moral law. No one-sided development can 
 produce really good citizenship — as good citi- 
 zenship is needed in the America of to-day. 
 If a man has not in him the root of righteousness 
 — if he does not believe in, and practise, honesty 
 — if he is not truthful and upright, clean and 
 high-minded, fair in his dealings both at home 
 and abroad — then the stronger he is, the abler 
 and more energetic he is, the more dangerous he 
 is to the body politic. Wisdom untempered by 
 devotion to an ideal usually means only that dan- 
 gerous cunning which is far more fatal in its ulti- 
 mate effects to the community than open violence 
 itself. It is inexcusable in an honest people to 
 deify mere success without regard to the quali- 
 
32 ''Doers of the Word*' 
 
 ties by which that success is achieved. Indeed 
 there is a revolting injustice, intolerable to just 
 minds, in punishing the weak scoundrel who 
 fails, and bowing down to and making life easy 
 for the far more dangerous scoundrel who suc- 
 ceeds. A wicked man who is wicked on a large 
 scale, whether in business or in politics, of 
 course does many times more evil to the com- 
 munity than the man who only ventures to be 
 wicked furtively and in lesser ways. If possible, 
 the success of such a man should be prevented 
 by law, and in any event he ought to be made to 
 feel that there is no condonation of his offences 
 by the public. There is no more unpleasant 
 manifestation of public feeling than the deifica- 
 tion of mere "smartness," as it is termed — of 
 mere successful cunning unhampered by scruple 
 or generosity or right feeling. If a man is not 
 decent, is not square and honest, then the posses- 
 sion of ability only serves to render him more 
 dangerous to the community; as a wild beast 
 grows more dangerous the stronger and fiercer 
 he is. 
 
 But virtue by itself Is not enough, or anything 
 like enough. Strength must be added to it, and 
 the determination to use thai strength. The 
 good man who is ineffective is not able to make 
 his goodness of much account to the people as a 
 
The Good Citizen 33 
 
 whole. No matter how much a man hears the 
 word, small is the credit attached to him if he 
 fails to be a doer also ; and in serving the Lord 
 he must remember that he needs to avoid sloth 
 in his business as well as to cultivate fervency of 
 spirit. All around us there are great evils to 
 combat, and they are not to be combated with 
 success by men who pride themselves on their su- 
 periority in taste and in virtue, and draw aside 
 from the world's life. It matters not whether 
 they thus draw aside because they fear their fel- 
 lows or because they despise them. Each feeling 
 — the fear no less than the contempt — is shame- 
 ful and unworthy. A man to be a good Ameri- 
 can must be straight, and he must also be strong. 
 He must have in him the conscience which will 
 teach him to see the right, and he must also have 
 the vigor, the courage, and the practical, hard- 
 headed common-sense which will enable him to 
 make his seeing right result in some benefit to 
 his fellows. — Speech at N.orthfieldf Mass., Sep' 
 temher i, 1902. 
 
THE PIONEER 
 
THE PIONEER 
 
 For a century after the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence the greatest work of our people, with 
 the exception only of the work of self-preserva- 
 tion under Lincoln, was the work of the pioneers 
 as they took possession of this continent. Dur- 
 ing that century we pushed westward from the 
 Alleghanies to the Pacific, southward to the 
 Gulf and the Rio Grande, and also took posses- 
 sion of Alaska. The work of advancing our 
 boundary, of pushing the frontier across forest 
 and desert and mountain chain, was the great 
 typical work of our nation ; and the men who did 
 It — the frontiersmen, the pioneers, the back- 
 woodsmen, plainsmen, mountain men — formed 
 a class by themselves. It was an iron task, 
 which none but men of iron soul and iron body 
 could do. The men who carried it to a success- 
 ful conclusion had characters strong alike for 
 good and for evil. Their rugged natures made 
 them powers who served light or darkness with 
 fierce intensity; and together with heroic traits 
 they had those evil and dreadful tendencies 
 
 37 
 
38 The Pioneer 
 
 which are but too apt to be found in characters 
 of heroic possibilities. Such men make the most 
 efficient servants of the Lord if their abounding 
 vitality and energy are directed aright; and if 
 misdirected their influence is equally potent 
 against the cause of Christianity and true civili- 
 zation. In the hard and cruel life of the border, 
 with its grim struggle against the forbidding 
 forces of wild nature and wilder men, there was 
 much to pull the frontiersman down. If left to 
 himself, without moral teaching and moral 
 guidance, without any of the influences that tend 
 toward the uplifting of man and the subduing of 
 the brute within him, sad would have been his, 
 and therefore our, fate. From this fate we have 
 been largely rescued by the fact that together 
 with the rest of the pioneers went the pioneer 
 preachers ; and all honor be given to the Metho- 
 dists for the great proportion of these pioneer 
 preachers whom they furnished. 
 
 These preachers were of the stamp of old 
 Peter Cartwright — ^men who suffered and over- 
 came every hardship in common with their flock, 
 and who in addition tamed the wild and fierce 
 spirits of their fellow-pioneers. It was not a 
 task that could have been accomplished by men 
 desirous to live in the soft places of the earth 
 and to walk easily on life's journey. They had 
 
The Pioneer 39 
 
 to possess the spirit of the martyrs; but not of 
 martyrs who could merely suffer, not of martyrs 
 who could oppose only passive endurance to 
 wrong. The pioneer preachers warred against 
 the forces of spiritual evil with the same fiery 
 zeal and energy that they and their fellows 
 showed in the conquest of the rugged continent. 
 They had in them the heroic spirit, the spirit 
 that scorns ease if it must be purchased by fail- 
 ure to do duty, the spirit that courts risk and a 
 life of hard endeavor if the goal to be reached 
 is really worth attaining. Great is our debt to 
 these men and scant the patience we need show 
 toward their critics. At times they seemed hard 
 and narrow to those whose training and sur- 
 roundings had saved them from similar tempta- 
 tions ; and they have been criticised, as all men, 
 whether missionaries, soldiers, explorers, or 
 frontier settlers, are criticised when they go 
 forth to do the rough work that must inevitably 
 be done by those who act as the first harbingers, 
 the first heralds, of civilization in the world's 
 dark places. It is easy for those who stay at 
 home in comfort, who never have to see human- 
 ity in the raw, or to strive against the dreadful 
 naked forces which appear clothed, hidden, and 
 subdued in civilized life — it is easy for such to 
 criticise the men who, in rough fashion, and 
 
40 The Pioneer 
 
 amid grim surroundings, make ready the way 
 for the higher life that is to come afterward ; but 
 let us all remember that the untempted and the 
 effortless should be cautious in passing too heavy 
 judgment upon their brethren who may show 
 hardness, who may be guilty of shortcomings, 
 but who nevertheless do the great deeds by 
 which mankind advances. These pioneers of 
 Methodism had the strong, militant virtues 
 which go to the accomplishment of such great 
 deeds. Now and then they betrayed the short- 
 comings natural to men of their type ; but their 
 shortcomings seem small indeed when we place 
 beside them the magnitude of the work they 
 achieved. 
 
 And now, friends, in celebrating the wonder- 
 ful growth of Methodism, in rejoicing at the 
 good it has done to the country and to mankind, 
 I need hardly ask a body like this to remember 
 that the greatness of the fathers becomes to the 
 children a shameful thing if they use it only as 
 an excuse for inaction instead of as a spur to ef- 
 fort for noble aims. I speak to you not only as 
 Methodists — I speak to you as American citi- 
 zens. The pioneer days are over. We now all 
 of us form parts of a great civilized nation, with 
 a complex industrial and social life and infinite 
 possibilities both for good and for evil. The 
 
The Pioneer 41 
 
 instruments with which, and the surroundings in 
 which, we work, have changed immeasurably 
 from what they were in the days when the rough 
 backwoods preachers ministered to the moral 
 and spiritual needs of their rough backwoods 
 congregations. But if we are to succeed, the 
 spirit in which we do our work must be the same 
 as the spirit in which they did theirs. These 
 men drove forward, and fought their way up- 
 ward, to success, because their sense of duty was 
 in their hearts, in the very marrow of their 
 bones. It was not with them something to be 
 considered as a mere adjunct to their theology, 
 standing separate and apart from their daily 
 life. They had it with them week days as well 
 as Sundays. They did not divorce the spiritual 
 from the secular. They did not have one kind 
 of conscience for one side of their lives and an- 
 other for another. 
 
 If we are to succeed as a nation we must have 
 the same spirit in us. We must be absolutely 
 practical, of course, and must face facts as they 
 are. The pioneer preachers of Methodism 
 could not have held their own for a fortnight if 
 they had not shown an intense practicability of 
 spirit, if they had not possessed the broadest and 
 deepest sympathy for, and understanding of, 
 their fellow-men. But in addition to the hard, 
 
42 The Pioneer 
 
 practical common-sense needed by each of us in 
 life, we must have a lift toward lofty things or 
 we shall be lost^ individually and collectively, as 
 a nation. Life is not easy, and least of all is it 
 easy for either the man or the nation that aspires 
 to do great deeds. In the century opening, the 
 play of the infinitely far-reaching forces and 
 tendencies which go to make up our social system 
 bids fair to be even fiercer in its activity than in 
 the century which has just closed. If during this 
 century the men of high and fine moral sense 
 show themselves weaklings ; if they possess only 
 that cloistered virtue which shrinks shuddering 
 from contact with the raw facts of actual life ; if 
 they dare not go down into the hurly-burly where 
 the men of might contend for the mastery; if 
 they stand aside from the pressure and conflict; 
 then as surely as the sun rises and sets all of our 
 great material progress, all the multiplication of 
 the physical agencies which tend for our comfort 
 and enjo3mient, will go for naught and our civili- 
 zation will become a brutal sham and mockery. 
 If we are to do as I believe we shall and will do, 
 if we are to advance in broad humanity, in kind- 
 liness, in the spirit of brotherhood, exactly as we 
 advance in our conquest over the hidden forces 
 of nature, it must be by developing strength in 
 virtue and virtue in strength, by breeding and 
 
The Pioneer 43 
 
 training men who shall be both good and 
 strong, both gentle and valiant — men who 
 scorn wrong-doing, and who at the same time 
 have both the courage and the strength to 
 strive mightily for the right. Wesley ac- 
 complished so much for mankind because he 
 refused to leave the stronger, manlier qualities 
 to be availed of only in the interest of evil. 
 The Church he founded has through its career 
 been a Church for the poor as well as for the 
 rich, and has known no distinction of persons. 
 It has been a Church whose members, if true to 
 the teachings of its founder, have sought for no 
 greater privilege than to spend and be spent in 
 the interest of the higher life, who have prided 
 themselves, not on shirking rough duty, but on 
 undertaking it and carrying it to a successful con- 
 clusion. — Speech at the Bi-Centennial Celehra' 
 tion of the Birth of John Wesley, New York, 
 February 26, 1903. 
 
/ 
 
 i- 
 
 FRONTIER CHARACTER 
 
 In the strongly marked frontier character no 
 traits were more pronounced than the dislike of 
 crowding and the tendency to roam to and fro, 
 hither and thither, always with a westward trend. 
 Boone, the typical frontiersman, embodied in his 
 own person the spirit of loneliness and restless- 
 ness which marked the first venturers into the 
 wilderness. He had wandered in his youth from 
 Pennsylvania to Carolina, and, in the prime of 
 his strength, from North Carolina to Kentucky. 
 When Kentucky became well settled in the clos- 
 ing years of the century, he crossed into Mis- 
 souri, that he might once more take up his life 
 where he could see the game come out of the 
 woods at nightfall, and could wander among 
 trees untouched by the axe of the pioneer. An 
 English traveller of note who happened to en- 
 counter him about this time has left an interest- 
 ing account of the meeting. It was on the Ohio, 
 and Boone was in a canoe, alone with his dog 
 and gun, setting forth on a solitary trip into the 
 wilderness to trap, beaver. He would not even 
 
 44 
 
Frontier Character 45 
 
 join himself to the other travellers for a night, 
 preferring to plunge at once into the wild, lonely 
 life he so loved. His strong character and keen 
 mind struck the Englishman, who yet saw that 
 the old hunter belonged to the class of pioneers 
 who could never themselves civilize the land, be- 
 cause they ever fled from the face of the very civ- 
 ilization for which they had made ready the 
 land. In Boone's soul the fierce impatience of all 
 restraint burned like a fire. He told the English- 
 man that he no longer cared for Kentucky, be- 
 cause its people had grown too easy of life ; and 
 that he wished to move to some place where men 
 still lived untrammelled and unshackled and en- 
 joyed uncontrolled the free blessings of nature. 
 The isolation of his life and the frequency with 
 which he changed his abode brought out the 
 frontiersman's wonderful capacity to shift for 
 himself, but it hindered the development of his 
 power of acting in combination with others of 
 his kind. The first comers to the new country 
 were so restless and so intolerant of the presence 
 of their kind, that as neighbors came in they 
 moved ever westward. They could not act with 
 their fellows. 
 
 Of course in the men who succeeded the first 
 pioneers, and who were the first permanent set- 
 tlers, the restlessness and the desire for a lonely 
 
46 The Pioneer 
 
 life were much less developed. These men 
 wandered only until they found a good piece of 
 land, and took up claims on this land, not 
 because the country was lonely, but because 
 it was fertile. They hailed with joy the 
 advent of new settlers and the upbuilding of a 
 little market town in the neighborhood. They 
 joined together eagerly in the effort to ob- 
 tain schools for their children. As yet there 
 were no public schools supported by govern- 
 ment in any part of the West, but all the set- 
 tlers of any pretension to respectability were 
 anxious to give their children a decent education. 
 Even the poorer people, who were still engaged 
 in the hardest and roughest struggle for a liveli- 
 hood, showed appreciation of the need of school- 
 ing for their children; and wherever the clear- 
 ings of the settlers were within reasonable dis- 
 tance of one another a log school-house was sure 
 to spring up. The school-teacher boarded 
 around among the different families, and was 
 quite as apt to be paid in produce as in cash. 
 Sometimes he was a teacher by profession ; more 
 often he took up teaching simply as an interlude 
 to some of his other occupations. School-books 
 were more common than any others in the scanty 
 libraries of the pioneers. 
 
 The settlers who became firmly established in 
 
Frontier Character 47 
 
 the land gave definite shape to its political ca- 
 reer. The county was throughout the West the 
 unit of division, though in the North it became 
 somewhat mixed with the township system. It 
 is a pity that the township could not have been 
 the unit, as it would have rendered the social and 
 political development in many respects easier, 
 by giving to each little community responsibility 
 for, and power in, matters concerning its own 
 welfare; but the backwoodsmen lived so scat- 
 tered out, and the thinly settled regions covered 
 so large an extent of territory, that the county 
 was at first in some ways more suited to their 
 needs. Moreover, it was the unit of organiza- 
 tion in Virginia, to which State more than to 
 any other the pioneers owed their social and 
 governmental system. The people were ordi- 
 narily brought but little in contact with the gov- 
 ernment. They were exceedingly jealous of 
 their individual liberty, and wished to be inter- 
 fered with as little as possible. Nevertheless, 
 they were fond of litigation. One observer re- 
 marks that horses and lawsuits were their great 
 subjects of conversation. 
 
 The vast extent of the territory and the scan- 
 tiness of the population forced the men of law, 
 like the religious leaders, to travel about rather 
 than stay permanently fixed in any one place. 
 
48 The Piofieer 
 
 In the few towns there were lawyers and clergy- 
 men who had permanent homes; but as a rule 
 both rode circuits. The judges and the lawyers 
 travelled together on the circuits to hold court. 
 At the Shire-town all might sleep In one room, 
 or at least under one roof ; and it was far from 
 an unusual thing to see both the grand and petty 
 juries sitting under trees in the open. 
 
 The fact that the government did so little for 
 the individual and left so much to be done by 
 him rendered it necessary for the individuals 
 voluntarily to combine. Huskings and iiouse- 
 raisings were times when all joined freely to 
 work for the man whose corn was to be shucked 
 or whose log-cabin was to be built, and turned 
 their labor into a frolic and merry-making, 
 where the men drank much whiskey and the 
 young people danced vigorously to the sound of 
 the fiddle. Such merry-makings were attended 
 from far and near, offering a most welcome 
 break to the dreariness of life on the lonely 
 clearings In the midst of the forest. Ordinarily 
 the frontiersman at his home only drank milk 
 or water; but at the taverns and social gather- 
 ings there was much drunkenness, for the men 
 •craved whiskey, drinking the fiery liquor in huge 
 draughts. Often the orgies ended with brutal 
 brawls. To outsiders the craving of the back- 
 
Frontier Character 49 
 
 woodsman for whiskey was one of his least at- 
 tractive traits. It must always be remembered, 
 however, that even the most friendly outsider is 
 apt to apply to others his own standards In mat- 
 ters of judgment. The average traveller over- 
 stated the drunkenness of the backwoodsman^ 
 exactly as he overstated his misery. 
 
 The frontiersman was very poor. He 
 worked hard and lived roughly, and he and his 
 family had little beyond coarse food, coarse 
 clothing, and a rude shelter. In the severe win- 
 ters they suffered both from cold and hunger. In 
 the summers there was sickness everywhere, fe- 
 vers of various kinds scourging all the new set- 
 tlements. The difficulty of communication was 
 so great that it took three months for the emi- 
 grants to travel from Connecticut to the West- 
 em Reserve near Cleveland, and a journey from 
 a clearing, over the forest roads, to a little town 
 not fifty miles off, was an affair of moment to be 
 undertaken but once a year. Yet to the fron- 
 tiersmen themselves the life was far from unat- 
 tractive. It gratified their Intense love of inde- 
 pendence; the lack of refinement did not grate 
 on their rough, bold natures; and they prized 
 the entire equality of a life where there were no 
 social distinctions, and few social restraints. 
 •Game was still a staple, being sought after for 
 
50 The Pioneer 
 
 the flesh and the hide, and of course all the men 
 and boys were enthralled by the delights of the 
 chase. The life was as free as it was rude, and 
 it possessed great fascinations, not only for the 
 wilder spirits, but even for many men who, 
 when they had the chance, showed that they pos- 
 sessed ability to acquire cultivation. 
 
 One old pioneer has left a pleasant account 
 of the beginning of an ordinary day's work in a 
 log cabin [Drake's ''Pioneer Life in Ken- 
 tucky"] : "I know of no scene in civilized life 
 more primitive than such a cabin hearth as that 
 of my mother. In the morning, a buckeye back- 
 log, a hickory forestick, resting on stone and 
 irons, with a johnny-cake, on a clean ash board, 
 set before the fire to bake; a frying pan, with its 
 long handle resting on a split-bottom turner's 
 chair, sending out its peculiar music, and the tea- 
 kettle swung from a wooden lug pole, with my- 
 self setting the table or turning the meat, or 
 watching the johnny-cake, while she sat nursing 
 the baby in the corner and telling the little ones 
 to hold still and let their sister Lizzie dress 
 them. Then came blowing the conch-shell for 
 father in the field, the howling of old Lion, the 
 gathering round the table, the blessing, the dull 
 clatter of pewter spoons and pewter basins, the 
 talk about the crop and stock, the inquiry wheth- 
 
Frontier Character 51 
 
 er Dan'I (the boy) could be spared from the 
 house, and the general arrangements for the 
 day. Breakfast over, my function was to pro- 
 vide the sauce for dinner ; in winter, to open the 
 potato or turnip hole, and wash what I took out ; 
 in spring, to go into the field and collect the 
 greens ; in summer and fall, to explore the truck 
 patch, our little garden. If I afterward went 
 to the field my household labors ceased until 
 night; if not, they continued through the day. 
 As often as possible mother would engage in 
 making pumpkin pies, in which I generally bore 
 a part, and one of these more commonly graced 
 the supper than the dinner-table. My pride was 
 in the labors of the field. Mother did the spin- 
 ning. The standing dyestuff was the inner 
 bark of the white walnut, from which we ob- 
 tained that peculiar and permanent shade of dull 
 yellow, the butternut [so common and typical 
 in the clothing of the backwoods farmer] . Oak 
 bark, with copperas as a mordant, when father 
 had money to purchase it, supplied the ink with 
 which I learned to write. I drove the horses to 
 and from the range, and salted them. I tended 
 the sheep, and hunted up the cattle in the 
 woods." This was the life of the thrifty pio- 
 neers, whose children more than held their own 
 in the world. The shiftless men without ambi- 
 
52 The Pioneer 
 
 tion and without thrift, lived in laziness and 
 filth; their eating and sleeping arrangements 
 were as unattractive as those of an Indian wig- 
 wam. 
 
 The pleasures and the toils of the life were 
 alike peculiar. In the wilder parts the loneli- 
 ness and the fierce struggle with squalid pover- 
 ty, and with the tendency to revert to savage 
 conditions inevitably produced for a generation 
 or two a certain falling off from the standard of 
 civilized communities. It needed peculiar quali- 
 ties to insure success, and the pioneers were al^ 
 most exclusively native Americans. The Ger- 
 mans were more thrifty and prosperous, but 
 they could not go first into the wilderness. Men 
 fresh from England rarely succeeded. The 
 most pitiable group of emigrants that reached 
 the West at this time was formed by the French 
 who came to found the town of Gallipolis, on 
 the Ohio. These were mostly refugees from 
 the Revolution, who had been taken in by a 
 swindling land company. They were utterly 
 unsuited to life in the wilderness, being gentle- 
 men, small tradesmen, lawyers, and the like. 
 Unable to grapple with the wild life into which 
 they found themselves plunged, they sank into 
 shiftless poverty, not one in fifty showing in- 
 dustry and capacity to succeed. Congress took 
 
Frontier Character 53 
 
 pity \apon them and granted them twenty-four 
 thousand acres In Scioto County, the tract being 
 known as the French grant ; but no gift of wild 
 land was able to Insure their prosperity. By de- 
 grees they were absorbed Into the neighboring; 
 communities, a few succeeding, most ending 
 their lives in abject failure. 
 
 The troubles these poor French settlers had 
 with their lands was far from unique. The 
 early system of land sales in the West was most- 
 unwise. In Kentucky and Tennessee the grants, 
 were made under the laws of Virginia andl 
 North Carolina, and each man purchased or pre- 
 empted whatever he could, and surveyed It where- 
 he liked, with a consequent endless confusion of 
 titles. The National Government possessed the 
 disposal of the land in the Northwest and In 
 Mississippi; and it avoided the pitfall of un- 
 limited private surveying; but it made little ef- 
 fort to prevent swindling by land companies,, 
 and none whatever to people the country witk 
 actual settlers. Congress granted great tracta 
 of lands to companies and to individuals, sell- 
 ing to the highest bidder, whether or not he in- 
 tended personally to occupy the country. Pub- 
 lic sales were thus conducted by competition^ 
 and Congress even declined to grant to the men 
 in actual possession the right of pre-emption at 
 
54 2^^^ Pioneer 
 
 .the average rate of sale, refusing the request of 
 settlers in both Mississippi and Indiana that 
 they should be given the first choice to the lands 
 -which they had already partially cleared. It 
 was not until many years later that we adopted 
 the wise policy of selling the national domain in 
 small lots to actual occupants. 
 
 The pioneer in his constant struggle with 
 poverty was prone to look with puzzled anger 
 at those who made more money than he did, 
 and whose lives were easier. The backwoods 
 farmer or planter of that day looked upon the 
 merchant with much the same suspicion and hos- 
 tility now felt by his successor for the banker or 
 the railroad magnate. He did not quite under- 
 stand how it was that the merchant, who seemed 
 to work less hard than he did, should make more 
 money; and being ignorant and suspicious, he 
 usually followed some hopelessly wrong-headed 
 course when he tried to remedy his wrongs. 
 Sometimes these efforts to obtain relief took 
 the form of resolutions not to purchase from 
 merchants or triaders such articles as woollens, 
 linens, cottons, hats, or shoes, unless the same 
 could be paid for in articles grown or manufact- 
 ured by the farmers themselves. This particu- 
 lar move was taken because of the alarming 
 scarcity of money, and was aimed particularly 
 
Frontier Character 55 
 
 at the inhabitants of the Atlantic States. It was 
 of course utterly ineffective. A much less wise 
 and less honest course was that sometimes fol- 
 lowed of refusing to pay debts when the latter 
 became inconvenient and pressing. 
 
 The frontier virtue of independence and of 
 impatience of outside direction found a particu- 
 larly vicious expression in the frontier abhor- 
 rence of regular troops, and advocacy of a 
 hopelessly feeble militia system. The people 
 were foolishly convinced of the efficacy of 
 their militia system, which they loudly pro- 
 claimed to be the only proper mode of national 
 defence. While in the actual presence of the 
 Indians the stern necessities of border warfare 
 forced the frontiersmen into a certain semblance 
 of discipline. As soon as the immediate pres- 
 sure was relieved, however, the whole militia 
 system sank into a mere farce. 
 
 The extreme individualism of the frontier, 
 which found expression for good and for evil 
 both in its governmental system in time of peace 
 and in its military system in time of war, was 
 also shown in religious matters. In 1799 arid 
 1800 a great revival of religion swept over the 
 West. Up to that time the Presbyterian had 
 been the leading creed beyond the mountains. 
 There were a few Episcopalians here and there, 
 
56 The Pioneer 
 
 and there were Lutherans, Catholics, and adh( 
 ents of the Reformed Dutch and Germ; 
 churches ; but, aside from the Presbyterians, t 
 Methodists and Baptists were the only se( 
 powerfully represented. The great revival 
 1799 was mainly carried on by Methodists ai 
 Baptists, and under their guidance the Meth 
 dist and Baptist churches at once sprang to t 
 front and became the most important religio 
 forces in the frontier communities. The Pri 
 byterian Church remained the most promine 
 as regards the wealth and social standing of 
 adherents, but the typical frontiersman who pi 
 fessed religion at all became either a Method 
 or a Baptist, adopting a creed which was i 
 tensely democratic and individualistic, whi 
 made nothing of social distinctions, which d 
 trusted educated preachers, and worked undei 
 republican form of ecclesiastical government. 
 
DANIEL BOONE 
 
 Among the pioneer hunters one arose whose 
 wanderings were to bear fruit ; who was destined 
 to lead through the wilderness the first body of 
 settlers that ever established a community in the 
 far West, completely cut ojff from the seaboard 
 colonies. This was Daniel Boone. He was 
 born in Pennsylvania in 1734,* but when only a 
 boy had been brought with the rest of his fam- 
 ily to the banks of the Yadkin in North Caro- 
 lina. Here he grew up, and as soon as he came 
 of age he married, built a log hut, and made a 
 clearing, whereon to farm like the rest of his 
 backwoods neighbors. They all tilled their own 
 clearings, guiding the plough among the charred 
 stumps left when the trees were chopped down 
 and the land burned over, and they were all, as 
 a matter of course, hunters. With Boone hunt- 
 ing and exploration were passions, and the lone- 
 ly life of the wilderness, with its bold, wild free- 
 
 * August 2a, 1734 (according to James Parton, in his sketch of Boone). 
 His grandfather was an English immigrant ; his father had married a 
 Quakeress. When he lived on the banks of the Delaware, the country 
 was still a ^demess. He was born in Berks County. 
 
 57 
 
58 The Pioneer 
 
 dom, the only existence for which he really 
 cared. He was a tall, spare, sinewy man, with 
 eyes like an eagle's, and muscles that never 
 tired; the toil and hardship of his life made no 
 impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemper- 
 ance of any kind, and he lived for eighty-six 
 years, a backwoods hunter to the end of his 
 days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so 
 often portrayed, is familiar to every one ; it was 
 the face of a man who never blustered or bul- 
 lied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any 
 wrong, and who had a limitless fund of forti- 
 tude, endurance, and indomitable resolution 
 upon which to draw when fortune proved ad- 
 verse. His self-command and patience, his dar- 
 ing, restless love of adventure, and, in time of ^ 
 danger, his absolute trust in his own powers and 
 resources, all combined to render him peculiarly 
 fitted to follow the career of which he was so 
 fond. 
 
 Boone hunted on the Western waters at an 
 early date. In the valley of Boone's Creek, a 
 tributary of the Watauga, there is a beech-tree 
 still standing, on which can be faintly traced an 
 inscription setting forth that "D. Boone cilled 
 a bar on (this) tree in the year 1760." On the 
 expeditions of which this is the earliest record 
 he was partly hunting on his own account, and 
 
iTfy^^c^ 
 
 Engraved by J. B. Longacre, from an original painting by C. Harding. 
 
Daniel Boone 59 
 
 partly exploring on behalf of another, Richard 
 Henderson, Henderson was a prominent citi- 
 zen of North Carolina, a speculative man of 
 great ambition and energy. He stood high in 
 the colony, was extravagant and fond of dis- 
 play, and his fortune being jeopardized he 
 hoped to more than retrieve it by going into 
 speculations in Western lands on an unheard of 
 scale; for he intended to try to establish on his 
 own account a great proprietary colony beyond 
 the mountains. He had great confidence in 
 Boone ; and it was his backing which enabled the 
 latter to turn his discoveries to such good ac- 
 count. 
 
 Boone's claim to distinction rests not so much 
 on his wide wanderings in unknown lands, for 
 in this respect he did little more than was done 
 by a hundred other backwoods hunters of his 
 generation, but on the fact that he was able to 
 turn his daring woodcraft to the advantage of 
 his fellows. As he himself said, he was an in- 
 strument "ordained of God to settle the wilder- 
 ness." He inspired confidence in all who met 
 him, so that the men of means and influence were 
 willing to trust adventurous enterprises to his 
 care; and his success as an explorer, his skill as 
 a hunter, and his prowess as an Indian fighter, 
 enabled him to bring these enterprises to a sue- 
 
6o The Pioneer 
 
 cessful conclusion, and in some degree to control 
 the wild spirits associated with him. 
 
 Boone's expeditions into the edges of the wil- 
 derness whetted his appetite for the unknown. 
 He had heard of great hunting-grounds in 
 the far interior from a stray hunter and Indian 
 trader, who had himself seen them, and on May 
 I, 1769, he left his home on the Yadkin "to 
 wander through the wilderness of America in 
 quest of the country of Kentucky." He was ac- 
 companied by five other men, including his in- 
 formant, and struck out toward the Northwest, 
 through the tangled mass of rugged mountains 
 and gloomy forests. During five weeks of se- 
 vere toil the little band journeyed through vast 
 solitudes, whose utter loneliness can with diffi- 
 culty be understood by those who have not them- 
 selves dwelt and hunted in primeval mountain 
 forests. Then, early in June, the adventurers 
 broke through the interminable wastes of dim 
 woodland, and stood on the threshold of the 
 beautiful blue-grass region of Kentucky; a land 
 of running waters, of groves and glades, of prai- 
 ries, cane-brakes, and stretches of lofty forest. 
 It was teeming with game. The shaggy-maned 
 herds of unwieldy buffalo — ^the bison as they, 
 should be called — had beaten out broad roads 
 through the forest, and had furrowed the prai- 
 
Daniel Boone 6i 
 
 ries with trails along which they had travelled 
 for countless generations. The round-horned 
 elk, with spreading, massive antlers, the lord- 
 liest of the deer tribe throughout the world, 
 abounded, and like the buffalo travelled in bands 
 not only through the woods but also across the 
 reaches of waving grass land. The deer were 
 extraordinarily numerous and so were bears, 
 while wolves and panthers were plentiful. 
 Wherever there was a salt spring the country 
 was fairly thronged with wild beasts of many 
 kinds. For six months Boone and his compan- 
 ions enjoyed such hunting as had hardly fallen 
 to men of their race since the Germans came out 
 of the Hcrcynian forest. 
 
 In December, however, they were attacked 
 by Indians. Boone and a companion were capt- 
 ured; and when they escaped they found their 
 camp broken up, and the rest of the party scat' 
 tered and gone home. About this time they 
 were joined by Squire Boone, the brother of the 
 great hunter, and himself a woodsman of but 
 little less skill, together with another adventur- 
 er; the two had travelled through the immense 
 wilderness, partly to explore it and partly with 
 the hope of finding the original adventurers, 
 which they finally succeeded in doing more by 
 good luck than design. Soon afterward 
 
62 The Pioneer 
 
 Boone's companion in his first short captivity 
 was again surprised by the Indians, and this 
 time was slain — the first of the thousands of hu- 
 man beings with whose Hfe-blood Kentucky was 
 bought. The attack was entirely unprovoked. 
 The Indians had wantonly shed the first blood. 
 The land belonged to no one tribe, but was 
 hunted over by all, each feeling jealous of every 
 other intruder ; they attacked the whites, not be- 
 cause the whites had wronged them, but because 
 their invariable policy was to kiU any strangers 
 on any grounds over which they themselves ever 
 hunted, no matter what man had the best right 
 thereto. The Kentucky hunters were promptly 
 taught that in this no-man's-land, teeming with 
 game and lacking even a solitary human habita- 
 tion, every Indian must be regarded as a foe. 
 
 The man who had accompanied Squire Boone 
 was terrified by the presence of the Indians, and 
 now returned to the settlements. The two 
 brothers remained alone on their hunting- 
 grounds throughout the winter, living in a little 
 cabin. About the first of May Squire set off 
 alone to the settlements to procure horses and 
 ammunition. For three months Daniel Boone 
 remained absolutely alone in the wilderness, 
 without salt, sugar, or flour, and without the 
 companionship of so much as a horse or a dog. 
 
Daniel Boone 63 
 
 But the solitude-loving hunter, dauntless and 
 self-reliant, enjoyed to the full his wild, lonely 
 life; he passed his days hunting and exploring, 
 wandering hither and thither over the country, 
 while at night he lay off in the cane-brakes or 
 thickets, without a fire, so as not to attract the 
 Indians. Of the latter he saw many signs, and 
 they sometimes came to his camp, but his sleep- 
 less wariness enabled him to avoid capture. 
 
 Late in July his brother returned, and met 
 him, according to appointment, at the old camp. 
 Other hunters also now came into the Kentucky 
 wilderness, and Boone joined a small party of 
 them for a short time. Such a party of hunters 
 is always glad to have anything wherewith to 
 break the irksome monotony of the long even- 
 ings passed round the camp-fire; and a book or 
 a greasy pack of cards was as welcome in a camp 
 of Kentucky riflemen in 1770 as it was to a party 
 of Rocky Mountain hunters in 1888. Boone 
 has recorded in his own quaint phraseology an 
 incident of his life during this summer, which 
 shows how eagerly such a little band of fron- 
 tiersmen read a book, and how real its charac- 
 ters became to their minds. He was encamped 
 with five other men on Red River, and they had 
 with them for their "amusement the history of 
 Samuel Gulliver's travels, wherein he gave an 
 
64 The Pioneer 
 
 account of his young master, Glumdelick, care- 
 Ing [sic] him on a market day for a show to a 
 town called Lulbegrud.'* In the party who, 
 amid such strange surroundings, read and lis- 
 tened to Dean Swift's writings was a young man 
 named Alexander Neely. One night he came 
 into camp with two Indian scalps, taken from a 
 Shawnese village he had found on a creek run- 
 ning into the river ; and he announced to the cir- 
 cle of grim wilderness veterans that ''he had 
 been that day to Lulbegrud, and had killed two 
 Brobdignags in their capital." To this day the 
 creek by which the two luckless Shawnees lost 
 their lives is known as Lulbegrud Creek. 
 
 Soon after this encounter the increasing dan- 
 ger from the Indians drove Boone back to the 
 valley of the Cumberland River, and in the 
 spring of ly^i he returned to his home on the 
 Yadkin. 
 
 A couple of years be]fore Boone went to Ken- 
 tucky, Steiner, or Stoner, and Harrod, two 
 hunters from Pittsburg, who had passed 
 through the Illinois, came down to hunt in the 
 bend of the Cumberland, where Nashville now 
 stands ; they found vast numbers of buffalo, and 
 killed a great many, especially around the licks, 
 where the huge clumsy beasts had fairly de- 
 stroyed most of the forest, treading down the 
 
Daniel Boone 65 
 
 young trees and bushes till the ground was left 
 bare or covered with a rich growth of clover. 
 The bottoms and the hollows between the hills 
 were thickset with cane. Sycamore grew in the 
 low ground, and toward the Mississippi were 
 to be found the persimmon and cottonwood. 
 Sometimes the forest was open and composed of 
 huge trees ; elsewhere it was of thicker, smaller 
 growth. Everywhere game abounded, and it 
 was nowhere very wary. ^ 
 
 Other hunters of whom we know even the 
 names of only a few, had been through many 
 parts of the wilderness before Boone, and ear- 
 lier still Frenchmen had built forts and smelt- 
 ing-furnaces on the Cumberland, the Tennessee, 
 and the head tributaries of the Kentucky. 
 Boone is interesting as a leader and explorer; 
 but he is still more interesting as a type. The 
 West was neither discovered, won, nor settled 
 by any single man. No keen-eyed statesman 
 planned the movement, nor was it carried out by 
 any great military leader; it was the work of a 
 whole people, of whom each man was impelled 
 mainly by sheer love of adventure; it was the 
 outcome of the ceaseless strivings of all the 
 dauntless, restless backwoods folk to win homes 
 for their descendants and to each penetrate 
 deeper than his neighbors into the remote forest 
 
{ 
 
 66 The Pioneer 
 
 hunting-grounds where the perilous pleasures of 
 the chase and of war could be best enjoyed. We 
 owe the conquest of the West to all the back- 
 woodsmen, not to any solitary individual among 
 them; where all alike were strong and daring 
 there was no chance for any single man to rise 
 to unquestioned pre-eminence. 
 
THE HERO 
 
THE TRUE BASIS OF HEROISM 
 
 Here, where we meet to honor the memory of 
 those who drew the great prize of death in bat- 
 tle, a word in reference to the survivors: I 
 think that one lesson everyone who was capable 
 of learning anything learned from his expe- 
 rience in that war was the old, old lesson that 
 we need to apply in peace quite as much — the 
 lesson that the man who does not care to do any 
 act until the time for heroic action comes, does 
 not do the heroic act when the time does come. 
 You all of you remember, comrades, some man 
 — it is barely possible some of you remember be- 
 ing the man — who, when you enlisted, had a 
 theory that there was nothing but splendor and 
 fighting and bloodshed in the war, and then had 
 the experience of learning that the first thing you 
 had to do was to perform commonplace duties, 
 and perform them well. The work of any man 
 in the campaign depended upon the resolution 
 and effective intelligence with which he started 
 about doing each duty as it arose; not waiting 
 until he could choose the duty that he thought 
 
 69 
 
yo 
 
 The Hero 
 
 sufficiently spectacular to do, but doing the duty 
 that came to hand. That is exactly the lesson 
 that all of us need to learn in times of peace. 
 It is not merely a great thing, but an indispensa- 
 ble thing that the nation's citizens should be 
 ready and willing to die for it in time of need; 
 and the presence of no other quality could atone 
 for the lack of such readiness to lay down life 
 If the nation calls. But in addition to dying for 
 the nation you must be willing and anxious to 
 live for the nation, or the nation will be badly 
 off. If you want to do your duty only when the 
 time comes for you to die, the nation will be de- 
 prived of valuable services during your lives. 
 
 I never see a gathering of this kind; I never 
 see a gathering under the auspices of any of the 
 societies which are organized to commemorate 
 the valor and patriotism of the founders of this 
 nation ; I never see a gathering composed of the 
 men who fought In the great Civil War or In 
 any of the lesser contests In which this country 
 has been engaged, without feeling the anxiety to 
 make such a gathering feel, each in his or her 
 heart, the all-importance of doing the ordinary, 
 humdrum, commonplace duties of each day as 
 those duties arise. A large part of the success 
 on the day of battle Is always due to the aggre- 
 gate of the Individual performance of duty dur- 
 
The True Basis of Heroism 71 
 
 ing the long months that have preceded the day 
 of battle. The way in which a nation arises to 
 a great crisis is largely conditioned upon the way 
 in which its citizens have habituated themselves 
 to act in the ordinary affairs of the national life. 
 You cannot expect that much will be done in the 
 supreme hour of peril by soldiers who have not 
 fitted themselves to meet the need when the need 
 comes, and you cannot expect the highest type 
 of citizenship in the periods when it is needed 
 if that citizenship has not been trained by the 
 faithful performance of ordinary duty. What 
 we need most in this Republic is not special gen- 
 ius, not unusual brilliancy, but the honest and 
 upright adherence on the part of the mass of 
 the citizens and of their representatives to the 
 fundamental laws of private and public morality 
 — which are now what they have been during 
 recorded history. We shall succeed or fail in 
 making this Republic what it should be made 
 — I will go a little further than that — ^what it 
 shall and must be made, accordingly as we do 
 or do not seriously and resolutely set ourselves 
 to do the tasks of citizenship — and good citizen- 
 ship consists in doing the many small duties, pri- 
 vate and public, which in the aggregate make it 
 up. — Speech at Arlington, May 21, 1902, 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 [^An Address Delivered at LincoMs Birthplace on 
 February J2, igo^.'] 
 
 We have met here to celebrate the hundredth 
 anniversary of the birth of one of the two great- 
 est Americans; of one of the two or three great- 
 est men of the nineteenth century; of one of the 
 greatest men in the world's history. This rail- 
 splitter, this boy who passed his ungainly youth 
 in the dire poverty of the poorest of the frontier 
 folk, whose rise was by weary and painful labor, 
 lived to lead his people through the burning 
 flames of a struggle from which the nation 
 emerged, purified as by fire, born anew to a 
 loftier life. After long years of iron effort, and 
 of failure that came more often than victory, he 
 at last rose to the leadership of the Republic, 
 at the moment when that leadership had be- 
 come the stupendous world-task of the time. 
 He grew to know greatness, but never ease. 
 
 Success came to him, but never happiness, save 
 
 72 
 
Abraham Lincoln 73 
 
 that which springs from doing well a painful and 
 a vital task. Power was his, but not pleasure. 
 The furrows deepened on his brow, but his eyes 
 were undimmed by either hate or fear. His 
 gaunt shoulders were bowed, but his steel thews 
 never faltered as he bore for a burden the des- 
 tinies of his people. His great and tender heart 
 shrank from giving pain; and the task allotted 
 him was to pour out like water the life-blood of 
 the young men, and to feel in his every fibre 
 the sorrow of the women. Disaster saddened 
 but never dismayed him. As the red years of 
 war went by they found him ever doing his 
 duty in the present, ever facing the future 
 with fearless front, high of heart, and daunt- 
 less of soul. Unbroken by hatred, unshaken by 
 scorn, he worked and suffered for the people. 
 Triumph was his at the last; and barely had 
 he tasted it before murder found him, and 
 the kindly, patient, fearless eyes were closed 
 forever. 
 
 As a people we are indeed beyond measure 
 fortunate in the characters of the two greatest 
 of our public men, Washington and Lincoln. 
 Widely though they differed in externals, the 
 Virginia landed gentleman and the Kentucky 
 backwoodsman, they were alike in essentials, 
 they were ahke in the great qualities which 
 
74 The Hero 
 
 made each able to do service to his nation and 
 to all mankind such as no other man of his 
 generation could or did render. Each had lofty 
 ideals, but each in striving to attain these lofty 
 ideals was guided by the soundest common sense. 
 Each possessed inflexible courage in adversity, 
 and a soul wholly unspoiled by prosperity. 
 Each possessed all the gentler virtues commonly 
 exhibited by good men who lack rugged strength 
 of character. Each possessed also all the strong 
 qualities commonly exhibited by those towering 
 masters of mankind who have too often shown 
 themselves devoid of so much as the under- 
 standing of the words by which we signify the 
 qualities of duty, of mercy, of devotion to the 
 right, of lofty disinterestedness in battling for 
 the good of others. There have been other 
 men as great and other men as good; but 
 in all the history of mankind there are no other 
 two great men as good as these, no other twb 
 good men as great. Widely though the prob- 
 lems of to-day difi^er from the problems set 
 for solution to Washington when he founded 
 this nation, to Lincoln when he saved it and 
 freed the slave, yet the qualities they showed 
 in meeting these problems are exactly the same 
 as those we should show in doing our work 
 to-day. 
 
Abraham Lincoln 75 
 
 Lincoln saw into the future with the prophetib 
 imagination usually vouchsafed only to the poet 
 and the seer. He had in him all the lift toward 
 greatness of the visionary, without any of the 
 visionary's fanaticism or egotism, without any 
 of the visionary's narrow jealousy of the prac- 
 tical man and inability to strive in practical 
 fashion for the realization of an ideal. He had 
 the practical man's hard common sense and 
 willingness to adapt means to ends; but there 
 was in him none of that morbid growth of mind 
 and soul which blinds so many practical men to 
 the higher aims of life. No more practical man 
 ever lived than this homely backwoods idealist; 
 but he had nothing in common with those prac- 
 tical men whose consciences are warped until 
 they fail to distinguish between good and evil, 
 fail to understand that strength, ability, shrewd- 
 ness, whether in the world of business or of 
 politics, only serve to make their possessor a 
 more noxious, a more evil, member of the com- 
 munity if they are not guided and controlled by 
 a fine and high moral sense. 
 
 We of this day must try to solve many social 
 and industrial problems, requiring to an es- 
 pecial degree the combination of indomitable 
 resolution with cool-headed sanity. We can 
 profit by the way in which Lincoln used both 
 
^6 The Hero 
 
 these traits as he strove for reform. We can 
 learn much of value from the very attacks which 
 following that course brought upon his head, 
 attacks alike by the extremists of revolution and 
 by the extremists of reaction. He never wa- 
 vered in devotion to his principles, in his love for 
 the Union, and in his abhorrence of slavery. 
 Timid and lukewarm people were always de- 
 nouncing him because he was too extreme; but 
 as a matter of fact he never went to extremes, 
 he worked step by step; and because of this the 
 extremists hated and denounced him with a 
 fervor which now seems to us fantastic in its 
 deification of the unreal and the impossible. 
 At the very time when one side was holding him 
 up as the apostle of social revolution because he 
 was against slavery, the leading abolitionist de- 
 nounced him as the "slave hound of Illinois." 
 When he was the second time candidate for 
 President, the majority of his opponents at- 
 tacked him because of what they termed his ex- 
 treme radicalism, while a minority threatened 
 to bolt his nomination because he was not rad- 
 ical enough. He had continually to check those 
 who wished to go forward too fast, at the very 
 time that he overrode the opposition of those 
 who wished not to go forward at all. The goal 
 was never dim before his vision; but he picked 
 
Abraham Lincoln 77 
 
 his way cautiously, without either halt or 
 hurry, as he strode toward it, through such a 
 morass of difficulty that no man of less courage 
 would have attempted it, while it would surely 
 have overwhelmed any man of judgment less 
 serene. 
 
 Yet perhaps the most wonderful thing of all, 
 and, from the standpoint of the America of to- 
 day and of the future, the most vitally import- 
 ant, was the extraordinary way in which Lin- 
 coln could fight valiantly against what he 
 deemed wrong and yet preserve undiminished 
 his love and respect for the brother from whom 
 he differed. In the hour of a triumph that 
 would have turned any weaker man's head, in 
 the heat of a struggle which spurred many a 
 good man to dreadful vindictiveness, he said 
 truthfully that so long as he had been in his 
 office he had never willingly planted a thorn in 
 any man's bosom, and besought his supporters 
 to study the incidents of the trial through which 
 they were passing as philosophy from which to 
 leam wisdom and not as wrongs to be avenged; 
 ending with the solemn exhortation that, as the 
 strife was over, all should reunite in a common 
 effort to save their common country. 
 
 He lived in days that were great and terrible, 
 when brother fought against brother for what 
 
78 The Hero 
 
 each sincerely deemed to be the right. In a con- 
 test so grim the strong men who alone can carry 
 it through are rarely able to do justice to the 
 deep convictions of those with whom they grap- 
 ple in mortal strife. At such times men see 
 through a glass darkly; to only the rarest and 
 loftiest spirits is vouchsafed that clear vision 
 which gradually comes to all, even to the lesser, 
 as the struggle fades into distance, and wounds 
 are forgotten, and peace creeps back to the 
 hearts that were hurt. But to Lincoln was given 
 this supreme vision. He did not hate the man 
 from whom he differed. Weakness was as 
 foreign as wickedness to his strong, gentle na- 
 ture; but his courage was of a quality so high 
 diat it needed no bolstering of dark passion. 
 He saw clearly that the same high qualities, the 
 same courage, and willingness for self-sacrifice, 
 and devotion to the right as it was given them 
 to see the right, belonged both to the men of 
 the North and to the men of the South. As 
 the years roll by, and as all of us, wherever we 
 dwell, grow to feel an equal pride in the valor 
 and self-devotion, alike of the men who wore 
 the blue and the men who wore the gray, so this 
 whole nation will grow to feel a peculiar sense 
 of pride in the man whose blood was shed 
 for the union of his people and for the free- 
 
Abraham Lincoln 79 
 
 dom of a race; the lover of his country and 
 of all mankind; the mightiest of the mighty 
 men who mastered the mighty days, Abraham 
 Lincoln. 
 
GRANT 
 
 In the long run every great nation instinct- 
 ively recognizes the men who peculiarly and pre- 
 eminently represent its own type of greatness. 
 Here in our country we have had many public 
 men of high rank — soldiers, orators, construc- 
 tive statesmen, and popular leaders. We have 
 even had great philosophers who were also lead- 
 ers of popular thought. Each one of these men 
 has had his own group of devoted followers, 
 and some of them have at times swayed the na- 
 tion with a power such as the foremost of all 
 hardly wielded. Yet as the generations slip 
 away, as the dust of conflict settles, and as 
 through the clearing air we look back with keen- 
 er wisdom into the nation's past, mightiest 
 among the mighty dead loom the three great 
 iigures of Washington, Lincoln, and Grant. 
 There are great men also in the second rank; 
 for in any gallery of merely national heroes 
 Franklin and Hamilton, Jefferson and Jackson, 
 would surely have their place. But these three 
 greatest men have taken their place among the 
 
 80 
 
^riiSBiki^tA..^^^^ 
 
 GENERAL U. S. GRANT. 
 At headquarters in the Wilderness, May, 1864— aged 42. 
 
Grant gj 
 
 great men of all nations, the great men of all 
 time. They stood supreme In the two great 
 crises of our history, on the two great occasions 
 when we stood In the van of all humanity and 
 struck the most effective blows that have ever 
 been struck for the cause of human freedom un- 
 der the law, for that spirit of orderly liberty 
 which must stand at the base of every wise 
 movement to secure to each man his rights, and 
 to guard each from being wronged by his fel- 
 lows. 
 
 Washington fought in the earlier struggle, 
 and It was his good fortune to win the highest 
 renown alike as soldier and statesman. In the 
 second and even greater struggle the deeds of 
 Lincoln the statesman were made good by those 
 of Grant the soldier, and later Grant himself 
 took up the work that dropped from Lincoln^s 
 tired hands when the assassin's bullet went 
 home, and the sad, patient, kindly eyes were 
 closed forever. 
 
 It was no mere accident that made our three 
 mightiest men, two of them soldiers, and one the 
 great war President. It Is only through work 
 and strife that either nation or Individual moves 
 on to greatness. The great man Is always the 
 man of mighty effort, and usually the man 
 whom grinding need has trained to mighty ef- 
 
82 The Hero 
 
 fort. Rest and peace are good things, are great 
 blessings, but only if they come honorably; and 
 it is those who fearlessly turn away from them, 
 when they have not been earned, who in the long 
 run deserve best of their country. In the sweat 
 of our brows do we eat bread, and though the 
 sweat is bitter at times, yet it is far more bitter 
 to eat the bread that is unearned, unwon, unde- 
 served. America must nerve herself for labor 
 and peril. The men who have made our na- 
 tional greatness are those who faced danger and 
 overcame it, who met difficulties and surmount- 
 ed them, not those whose lines were cast in such 
 pleasant places that toil and dread were ever far 
 from them. 
 
 Neither was it an accident that our three lead- 
 ers were men who, while they did not shrink 
 from war, were nevertheless heartily men of 
 peace. The man who will not fight to avert or 
 undo wrong is but a poor creature ; but, after all, 
 he is less dangerous than the man who fights on 
 the side of wrong. Again and again in a na- 
 tion's history the time may, and indeed some- 
 times must, come when the nation's highest duty 
 is war. But peace must be the normal condi- 
 tion, or the nation will come to a bloody doom. 
 Twice in great crises, in 1776 and 1861, and 
 twice in lesser crises, in 18 12 and 1898, the na- 
 
Grant 83 
 
 tion was called to arms in the name of all that 
 makes the words "honor," "freedom," and 
 "justice" other than empty sounds. On each 
 occasion the net result of the war was greatly 
 for the benefit of mankind. But on each occa- 
 sion this net result was of benefit only because 
 after the war came peace, came justice and or- 
 der and liberty. If the Revolution had been fol- 
 lowed by bloody anarchy, if the Declaration of 
 Independence had not been supplemented by the 
 adoption of the Constitution, if the freedom 
 won by the sword of Washington had not been 
 supplemented by the stable and orderly govern- 
 ment which Washington was instrumental in 
 founding, then we should have but added to the 
 chaos of the world, and our victories would have 
 told against and not for the betterment of man- 
 kind. So it was with the Civil War. If the 
 four iron years had not been followed by peace, 
 they would not have been justified. If the great 
 silent soldier, the Hammer of the North, had 
 struck the shackles off the slave only, as so many 
 conquerors in civil strife before him had done, 
 to rivet them around the wrists of freemen, then 
 the war would have been fought in vain, and 
 worse than in vain. If the Union, which so 
 many men shed their blood to restore, were not 
 now a union in fact, then the precious blood 
 
84 The Hero 
 
 would have been wasted. But it was not wasted ; 
 for the work of peace has made good the work 
 of war, and North and South, East and West, 
 we are now one people in fact as well as in name ; 
 one in purpose, in fellow-feeling, and in high 
 resolve, as we stand to greet the new century, 
 and, high of heart, to face the mighty tasks 
 which the coming years will surely bring. 
 
 Grant and his fellow-soldiers who fought 
 through the war, and his fellow-statesmen who 
 completed the work partly done by the soldiers, 
 not only left us the heritage of a reunited coun- 
 try and of a land from which slavery had been 
 banished, but left us what was quite as impor- 
 tant, the great memory of their great deeds, to 
 serve forever as an example and an inspiration, 
 to spur us on so that we may not fall below the 
 level reached by our fathers. The rough, 
 strong poet of democracy has sung of Grant as 
 **the man of mighty days, and equal to the 
 days." The days are less mighty now, and that 
 is all the more reason why we should show our- 
 selves equal to them. We meet here to pay glad 
 homage to the memory of our illustrious dead ; 
 but let us keep ever clear before our minds the 
 fact that mere lip-loyalty is no loyalty at all, 
 and that the only homage that counts is the 
 homage of deeds, not of words. It is but an idle 
 
Grant 85 
 
 waste of time to celebrate the memory of the 
 dead unless we, the living, in our lives strive to 
 show ourselves not unworthy of them. If the 
 careers of Washington and Grant are not vital 
 and full of meaning to us, if they are merely 
 part of the storied past, and stir us to no eager 
 emulation in the ceaseless, endless war for right 
 against wrong, then the root of right thinking 
 is not in us ; and where we do not think right we 
 cannot act right. 
 
 I shall ask attention, not to Grant's life, but 
 to the lessons taught by that life as we of to-day 
 should learn them. 
 
 Foremost of all is the lesson of tenacity, of 
 stubborn fixity of purpose. In the Union armies 
 there were generals as brilliant as Grant, but 
 none with his iron determination. This quality 
 he showed as President no less than as general. 
 He was no more to be influenced by a hostile 
 majority in Congress into abandoning his atti- 
 tude in favor of a sound and stable currency 
 than he was to be influenced by check or repulse 
 into releasing his grip on beleaguered Rich- 
 mond. It is this element of unshakable strength 
 to which we are apt specially to refer when we 
 praise a man in the simplest and most effective 
 way, by praising him as a man. It is the one 
 quality which we can least afford to lose. It is 
 
86 The Hero 
 
 the only quality the lack of which is as unpar- 
 donable in the nation as in the man. It is the 
 antithesis of levity, fickleness, volatility, of un- 
 due exaltation, of undue depression, of hysteria 
 and neuroticism in all their myriad forms. The 
 lesson of unyielding, unflinching, unfaltering 
 perseverance in the course upon which the na- 
 tion has entered is one very necessary for a gen- 
 eration whose preachers sometimes dwell over- 
 much on the policies of the moment. There are 
 not a few public men, not a few men who try to 
 mould opinion within Congress and without, on 
 the stump and in the daily press, who seem to 
 aim at instability, who pander to and thereby 
 increase the thirst for overstatement of each sit- 
 uation as it arises, whose effort is, accordingly, 
 to make the people move in zigzags instead of 
 in a straight line. We all saw this in the Span- 
 ish War, when the very men who at one time 
 branded as traitors everybody who said there 
 was anything wrong in the army at another 
 time branded as traitors everybody who said 
 there was anything right. Of course such an 
 attitude is as unhealthy on one side as on the 
 other, and it is equally destructive of any effort 
 to do away with abuse. 
 
 Eighteen months after the Civil War began 
 the State and congressional elections went heav- 
 
Grant S? 
 
 Ily against the war party, and two years later the 
 opposition party actually waged the Presidential 
 campaign on the issue that the war was a failure. 
 Meanwhile there was plenty of blundering at 
 the front, plenty of mistakes at Washington. 
 The country was saved by the fact that our peo- 
 ple, as a whole, were steadfast and unshaken. 
 Both at Washington and at the front the lead- 
 ers were men of undaunted resolution, who 
 would not abandon the policy to which the na- 
 tion was definitely committed, who regarded 
 disaster as merely a spur to fresh effort, who 
 saw in each blunder merely something to be re- 
 trieved, and not a reason for abandoning the 
 long-determined course. Above all, the great 
 mass of the people possessed a tough and stub- 
 born fibre of character. 
 
 There was then, as always, ample room for 
 criticism, and there was every reason why the 
 mistakes should be corrected. But in the long 
 run our gratitude was due primarily, not to the 
 critics, not to the fault-finders, but to the men 
 who actually did the work; not to the men of 
 negative policy, but to those who struggled to- 
 ward the given goal. Merciful oblivion has 
 swallowed up the names of those who railed at 
 the men who were saving the Union, while it 
 has given us the memory of these same men as a 
 
88 The Hero 
 
 heritage of honor forever; and brightest among 
 their names flame those of Lincoln and Grant, 
 the steadfast, the unswerving, the enduring, the 
 finally triumphant. 
 
 Grant's supreme virtue as a soldier was his 
 doggedness, the quality which found expression 
 In his famous phrases of * 'unconditional surren- 
 der" and "fighting it out on this line if it takes 
 all summer." He was a master of strategy and 
 tactics, but he was also a master of hard hitting, 
 of that "continuous hammering" which finally 
 broke through even Lee's guard. While an 
 armed foe was in the field, It never occurred to 
 Grant that any question could be so Important 
 as his overthrow. He felt nothing but impatient 
 contempt for the weak souls who wished to hold 
 parley with the enemy while that enemy was 
 still capable of resistance. 
 
 Grant was no brawler, no lover of fighting 
 for fighting's sake. He was a plain, quiet man, 
 not seeking for glory; but a man who, when 
 aroused, was always in deadly earnest, and who 
 never shrank from duty. He was slow to strike, 
 but he never struck softly. He was not In the 
 least of the type which gets up mass-meetings, 
 makes Inflammatory speeches or passes inflam- 
 matory resolutions, and then permits overforcl- 
 ble talk to be followed by overfeeble action. 
 
Grant 80 
 
 His promise squared with his performance. 
 His deeds made good his words. He did not 
 denounce an evil in strained and hyperbolic lan- 
 guage ; but when he did denounce it, he strove 
 to make his denunciation effective by his action. 
 He did not plunge lightly into war, but once in, 
 he saw the war through, and when it was over, 
 it was over entirely. Unsparing in battle, he 
 was very merciful in victory. There was no let- 
 up in his grim attack, his grim pursuit, until the 
 last body of armed foes surrendered. But that 
 feat once accomplished, his first thought was for 
 the valiant defeated ; to let them take back their 
 horses to their little homes because they would 
 need them to work on their farms. Grant, the 
 champion whose sword was sharpest in the great 
 iight for liberty, was no less sternly insistent 
 upon the need of order and of obedience to law. 
 No stouter foe of anarchy in every form ever 
 lived within our borders. The man who more 
 than any other, save Lincoln, had changed us 
 into a nation whose citizens were all freemen, 
 realized entirely that these freemen would re- 
 main free only while they kept mastery over 
 their own evil passions. He saw that lawlessness 
 in all its forms was the handmaiden of tyranny. 
 No nation ever yet retained its freedom for any 
 length of time after losing its respect for the 
 
90 
 
 The Hero 
 
 law, after losing the law-abiding spirit, the spir- 
 it that really makes orderly liberty. 
 
 Grant, in short, stood for the great element- 
 ary virtues, for justice, for freedom, for order, 
 for unyielding resolution, for manliness in its 
 broadest and highest sense. His greatness was 
 not so much greatness of intellect as greatness 
 of character, including in the word "character" 
 all the strong, virile virtues. It is character 
 that counts in a nation as in a man. It is a good 
 thing to have a keen, fine intellectual develop- 
 ment in a nation, to produce orators, artists, suc- 
 cessful business men ; but it is an infinitely great- 
 er thing to have those solid qualities which we 
 group together under the name of character — 
 sobriety, steadfastness, the sense of obligation 
 toward one's neighbor and one's God, hard 
 common sense, and, combined with it, the lift 
 of generous enthusiasm toward whatever is 
 right. These are the qualities which go to make 
 up true national greatness, and these were the 
 qualities which Grant possessed in an eminent 
 degree. 
 
 We have come here, then, to realize what the 
 mighty dead did for the nation, what the dead 
 did for us who are now living. Let us in return 
 try to shape our deeds so that the America of 
 the future shall justify by her career the lives 
 
Grant 91 
 
 of the great men of her past. Every man who 
 does his duty as a soldier, as a statesman, or as 
 a private citizen Is paying to Grant's memory 
 the kind of homage that is best worth paying. 
 We have difficulties and dangers enough in the 
 present, and it is the way we face them which 
 is to determine whether or not we are fit de- 
 scendants of the men of the mighty past. We 
 must not flinch from our duties abroad merely 
 because we have even more important duties at 
 home. That these home duties are the most Im- 
 portant of all every thinking man will freely 
 acknowledge. We must do our duty to ourselves 
 and our brethren in the complex social life of 
 the time. We must possess the spirit of broad 
 humanity, deep charity, and loving-kindness for 
 our fellow-men, and must remember, at the 
 same time, that this spirit Is really the absolute 
 antithesis of mere sentimentalism, of soup- 
 kitchen, pauperizing philanthropy, and of leg- 
 islation which is inspired either by foolish mock 
 benevolence or by class greed or class hate. We 
 need to be possessed of the spirit of justice and 
 of the spirit which recognizes In work and not 
 ease the proper end of effort 
 
 Of course the all-important thing to keep in 
 mind is that if we have not both strength and 
 virtue we shall fail. Indeed, In the old accepta- 
 
92 
 
 The Hero 
 
 tion of the word, virtue included strength and 
 courage, for the clear-sighted men at the dawn 
 of our era knew that the passive virtues 
 could not by themselves avail, that wisdom with- 
 out courage would sink into mere cunning, and 
 courage without morality into ruthless, lawless, 
 self-destructive ferocity. The iron Roman 
 made himself lord of the world because to the 
 courage of the barbarian he opposed a courage 
 as fierce and an infinitely keener mind; while 
 his civilized rivals, the keen-witted Greek and 
 Carthaginian, though of even finer intellect, had 
 let corruption eat into their brilliant civiliza- 
 tions until their strength had been corroded as 
 if by acid. In short, the Roman had character 
 as well as masterful genius, and when pitted 
 against peoples either of less genius or of less 
 character, these peoples went down. 
 
 As the ages roll by, the eternal problem forr 
 ever fronting each man and each race forever 
 shifts its outward shape, and yet at the bottom 
 it is always the same. There are dangers of 
 peace and dangers of war; dangers of excess in 
 militarism and of excess by the avoidance of 
 duty that implies militarism; dangers of slow 
 dry-rot, and dangers which become acute only 
 in great crises. When these crises come, the 
 nation will triumph or sink accordingly as it 
 
Grant 93 
 
 produces or fails to produce statesmen like Lin- 
 coln and soldiers like Grant, and accordingly as 
 it does or does not back them in their efforts. 
 We do not need men of unsteady brilliancy or 
 erratic power — unbalanced men. The men we 
 need are the men of strong, earnest, solid char- 
 acter — the men who possess the homely virtues, 
 and who to these virtues add rugged courage, 
 rugged honesty, and high resolve. Grant, with 
 his self-poise, his self-command, his self-mas- 
 tery; Grant, who loved peace and did not fear 
 war, who would not draw the sword if he could 
 honorably keep it sheathed, but who, when once 
 he had drawn it, would not return it to the 
 sheath until the weary years had brought the 
 blood-won victory ; Grant, who had no thought 
 after the fight was won save of leading the life 
 led by other Americans, and who aspired to the 
 Presidency only as Zachary Taylor or Andrew 
 Jackson had aspired to it — Grant was of a type 
 upon which the men of to-day can well afford to 
 model themselves. 
 
SOME ROUGH RIDER HEROES 
 
 [Las Guasimas, June z^, iSgS.I 
 
 No man was allowed to drop out to help the 
 wounded. It was hard to leave them there in 
 the jungle, where they might not be found again 
 until the vultures and the land-crabs came, but 
 war is a grim game and there was no choice. 
 One of the men shot was Harry Heffner, of G 
 Troop, who was mortally wounded through the 
 hips. He fell without uttering a sound, and two 
 of his companions dragged him behind a tree. 
 Here he propped himself up and asked to be 
 given his canteen and his rifle, which I handed to 
 him. He then again began shooting, and contin- 
 ued loading and firing until the line moved for- 
 ward and we left him alone, dying in the gloomy 
 shade. When we found him again, after the 
 fight, he was dead. 
 
 At one time, as I was out of touch with that 
 part of my wing commanded by Jenkins and 
 0*Neill, I sent Greenway, with Sergeant Rus- 
 sell, a New Yorker, and Trooper Rowland, a 
 New Mexican cow-puncher, down in the valley 
 to find out where they wer^. To do this the 
 
 94 
 
Some Rough Rider Heroes 95 
 
 three had to expose themselves to a very severe 
 fire, but they were not men to whom this mat- 
 tered. Russell was killed; the other two re- 
 turned and reported to me the position of Jen- 
 kins and O'Neill. They then resumed their 
 places on the firing-line. After a while I no- 
 ticed blood coming out of Rowland's side and 
 discovered that he had been shot, although he 
 did not seem to be taking any notice of it. He 
 said the wound was only slight, but as I saw he 
 had broken a rib, I told him to go to the rear to 
 the hospital. After some grumbling he TC^ent, 
 but fifteen minutes later he was back on the fir- 
 ing-line again and said he could not find the 
 hospital — which I doubted. However, I then 
 let him stay until the end of the fight. 
 
 After we had driven the Spaniards off from 
 their position to our right, the firing seemed to 
 die away so far as we were concerned, for the 
 bullets no longer struck around us in such a 
 storm as before, though along the rest of the 
 line the battle was as brisk as ever. Soon we 
 saw troops appearing across the ravine, not very 
 far from where we had seen the Spaniards 
 whom we had thought might be Cubans. Again 
 we dared not fire, and carefully studied the new- 
 comers with our glasses; and this time we were 
 right, for we recognized our own cavalry-men. 
 
96 The Hero 
 
 We were by no means sure that they recognized 
 us, however, and were anxious that they should, 
 but it was very difficult to find a clear spot 
 in the jungle from which to signal; so Ser- 
 geant Lee, of Troop K, climbed a tree and from 
 its summit waved the troop guidon. They waved 
 their guidon back, and as our right wing was 
 now in touch with the regulars, I left Jen- 
 kins and O^Neill to keep the connection, and led 
 Llewellen's troop back to the path to join the 
 rest of the regiment, which was evidently still 
 in the thick of the fight. I was still very much 
 in the dark as to where the main body of the 
 Spanish forces were, or exactly what lines the 
 battle was following, and was very uncertain 
 what I ought to do ; but I knew it could not be 
 wrong to go forward, and I thought I would 
 find Wood and then see what he wished me to 
 do. I was in a mood to cordially welcome guid- 
 ance, for it was most bewildering to fight an 
 enemy whom one so rarely saw. 
 
 I had not seen Wood since the beginning of 
 the skirmish, when he hurried forward. When 
 the firing opened some of the men began to 
 curse. "Don't swear — shoot!" growled Wood, 
 as he strode along the path leading his horse, 
 and everyone laughed and became cool again. 
 The Spanish outposts were very near our ad- 
 
Some Rough Rider Heroes 97 
 
 vance guard, and some minutes of the hottest 
 kind of firing followed before they were driven 
 back and slipped off through the jungle to their 
 main lines in the rear. 
 
 Here, at the very outset of our active service, 
 we suffered the loss of two as gallant men as 
 ever wore uniform. Sergeant Hamilton Fish 
 at the extreme front, while holding the point 
 up to its work and firing back where the Spanish 
 advance guards lay, was shot and instantly 
 killed ; three of the men^ with him were likewise 
 hit. Captain Capron, leading the advance 
 guard in person, and displaying equal courage 
 and coolness in the way that he handled them, 
 was also struck, and died a few minutes after- 
 ward. The command of the troop then de- 
 volved upon the First Lieutenant, young Thom- 
 as. Like Capron, Thomas was the fifth in line 
 from father to son who had served in the Amer- 
 ican army, though in his case it was in the vol- 
 unteer and not the regular service; the four 
 preceding generations had furnished soldiers 
 respectively to the Revolutionary War, the War 
 of 1 8 12, the Mexican War, and the Civil War. 
 In a few minutes Thomas was shot through the 
 leg, and the command devolved upon the Sec- 
 ond Lieutenant, Day (a nephew of "Albe- 
 marle" Cushing, he who sunk the great Confed- 
 
q8 The Hero 
 
 erate ram). Day, who proved himself to be 
 one of our most efficient officers, continued to 
 handle the men to the best possible advantage, 
 and brought them steadily forward. L Troop 
 was from the Indian Territory. The whites, 
 Indians, and half-breeds in it, all fought with 
 equal courage. Captain McClintock was hur- 
 ried forward to its relief with his Troop B of 
 Arizona men. In a few minutes he was shot 
 through the leg and his place was taken by his 
 first Lieutenant, Wilcox, who handled his men 
 in the same soldierly manner that Day did. 
 
 Among the men who showed marked cour- 
 age and coolness was the tall color sergeant, 
 Wright; the colors were shot through three 
 times. 
 
 When I had led G Troop back to the trail I 
 ran ahead of them, passing the dead and wound- 
 ed men of L Troop, passing young Fish as he 
 lay with glazed eyes under the rank tropic 
 growth to one side of the trail. When I came 
 to the front I found the men spread out in a 
 very thin skirmish line, advancing through com- 
 paratively open ground, each man taking ad- 
 vantage of what cover he could, while Wood 
 strolled about leading his horse, Brodie being 
 close at hand. How Wood escaped being hit, 
 I do not see, and still less how his horse escaped. 
 
Some Rough Rider Heroes 99 
 
 I had left mine at the beginning of the action, 
 and was only regretting that I had not left my 
 sword with it, as it kept getting between my legs 
 when I was tearing my way through the jungle. 
 I never wore it again in action. Lieutenant Riv- 
 ers was with Wood, also leading his horse. 
 Smedburg had been sent off on the by no means 
 pleasant task of establishing communications 
 with Young. 
 
 Very soon after I reached the front, Brodie 
 was hit, the bullet shattering one arm and 
 whirling him around as he stood. He had kept 
 on the extreme front all through, his presence 
 and example keeping his men entirely steady, 
 and he at first refused to go to the rear ; but the 
 wound was very painful, and he became so faint 
 that he had to be sent. Thereupon, Wood di- 
 rected me to take charge of the left wing in Bro- 
 die's place, and to bring it forward; so over I 
 went.. 
 
 One of the men who fired first, and who dis- 
 played conspicuous gallantry, was a Cherokee 
 half-breed, who was hit seven times, and of 
 course had to go back to the States. Before he 
 rejoined us at Montauk Point he had gone 
 through a little private war of his own ; for on 
 his return he found that a cowboy had gone off 
 with his sweetheart, and in the fight that ensued 
 
loo The Hero 
 
 he shot his rival. Another man of L Troop who 
 also showed marked gallantry was Elliot Cow- 
 din. The men of the plains and mountains were 
 trained by lifelong habit to look on life and 
 death with iron philosophy. As I passed by a 
 couple of tall, lank, Oklahoma cow-punchers, I 
 heard one say, "Well, some of the boys got it in 
 the neck I" to which the other answered with the 
 grim plains proverb of the South: "Many a 
 good horse dies," 
 
 Thomas Isbell, a half-breed Cherokee in the 
 squad under Hamilton Fish, was among the 
 first to shoot and be shot at. He was wounded 
 no less than seven times. The first wound was 
 received by him two minutes after he had fired 
 his first shot, the bullet going through his neck. 
 The second hit him in the left thumb. The 
 third struck near his right hip, passing entirely 
 through the body. The fourth bullet (which 
 was apparently from a Remington and not from 
 a Mauser) went into his neck and lodged 
 against the bone, being afterward cut out. The 
 fifth bullet again hit his left hand. The sixth 
 scraped his head, and the seventh his neck. He 
 did not receive all of the wounds at the same 
 time, over half an hour elapsing between the first 
 and the last. Up to receiving the last wound he 
 had declined to leave the firing-line, but by that 
 
Some Rough Rider Heroes lor 
 
 time he had lost so much blood that he had to be 
 sent to the rear. The man's wiry toughness 
 was as notable as his courage. 
 
 We improvised litters, and carried the more 
 sorely wounded back to Siboney that afternoon 
 and the next morning ; the others walked. One 
 of the men who had been most severely wound- 
 ed was Edward Marshall, the correspondent, 
 and he showed as much heroism as any soldier 
 in the whole army. He was shot through the 
 spine, a terrible and very painful wound, which 
 we supposed meant that he would surely die; 
 but he made no complaint of any kind, and while 
 he retained consciousness persisted in dictating 
 the story of the fight. A very touching incident 
 happened in the improvised open-air hospital 
 after the fight, where the wounded were lying. 
 They did not groan, and made no complaint, 
 trying to help one another. One of them sud- 
 denly began to hum, '*My Country 'tis of 
 Thee," and one by one the others joined in the 
 chorus, which swelled out through the tropic 
 woods, where the victors lay in camp beside 
 their dead. I did not see any sign among the 
 fighting men, whether wounded or unwounded, 
 of the very complicated emotions assigned to 
 their kind by some of the realistic modern nov- 
 elists who have written about battles. At the 
 
I02 The Hero 
 
 front every one behaved quite simply and took 
 things as they came, in a matter-of-course way; 
 but there was doubtless, as is always the case, a 
 good deal of panic and confusion in the rear, 
 where the wounded, the stragglers, a few of the 
 packers, and two or three newspaper corre- 
 spondents were, and in consequence the first re- 
 ports sent back to the coast were of a most 
 alarming character, describing with minute in- 
 accuracy, how we had run into an ambush, etc. 
 The packers with the mules which carried the- 
 rapid-fire guns were among those who ran, and 
 they let the mules go in the jungle ; in conse- 
 quence the guns were never even brought to the 
 firing-line, and only Fred Herrig's skill as a 
 trailer enabled us to recover them. By patient 
 work he followed up the mules' tracks in the 
 for-^st until he found the animals. 
 
 Among the wounded who walked to the tem- 
 porary hospital at Siboney was the trooper, 
 Rowland, of whom I spoke before. There the 
 doctors examined him, and decreed that his 
 wound was so serious that he must go back to 
 the States, This was enough for Rowland, 
 who waited until nightfall and then escaped, 
 slipping out of the window and making his way 
 back to camp with his rifle and pack, though his 
 wound must have made all movement very pain- 
 
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Some Rough Rider Heroes 103 
 
 ful to him. After this we felt that he was enti- 
 tled to stay, and he never left us for a day, dis- 
 tinguishing himself again in the fight at San 
 Juan. 
 
 Next morning we buried seven dead Rough 
 Riders in a grave on the summit of the trail. 
 Chaplain Brown reading the solemn burial serv- 
 ice of the Episcopalians, while the men stood 
 around with bared heads and joined in singing, 
 "Rock of Ages." Vast numbers of vultures 
 were wheeling round and round in great circles 
 through the blue sky overhead. There could be 
 no more honorable burial than that of these men 
 in a common grave — Indian and cowboy, miner, 
 packer, and college athlete — ^the man of un- 
 known ancestry from the lonely Western plains, 
 and the man who carried on his watch the crest 
 of the Stuyvesants and the Fishes, one in the 
 way they had met death, just as during life they 
 had been one in their daring and their loyalty. 
 
 One of the men I took with me on one of 
 these trips was Sherman Bell, the former Dep- 
 uty Marshal of Cripple Creek, and Wells-Far- 
 go Express rider. In coming home with his 
 load, through a blinding storm, he slipped and 
 opened the old rupture. The agony was very 
 great and one of his comrades took his load. 
 He himself, sometimes walking, and sometimes 
 
104 The Hero 
 
 crawling, got back to camp, where Dr. ChurcK 
 fixed him up with a spike bandage, but in- 
 formed him that he would have to be sent back 
 to the States when an ambulance came along. 
 The ambulance did not come until the next day, 
 which was the day before we marched to San 
 Juan. It arrived after nightfall, and as soon as 
 Bell heard it coming, he crawled out of the hos- 
 pital tent into the jungle, where he lay all night ; 
 and the ambulance went off without him. The 
 men shielded him just as school-boys would 
 shield a companion, carrying his gun, belt, and 
 bedding; while Bell kept out of sight until the 
 column started, and then staggered along be- 
 hind it. I found him the morning of the San 
 Juan fight. He told me that he wanted to die 
 fighting, if die he must, and I hadn't the heart 
 to send him back. He did splendid service that 
 day, and afterward in the trenches, and though 
 the rupture opened twice again, and on each oc- 
 casion he was within a hair's breadth of death, 
 he escaped, and came back with us to the United 
 States. 
 
 The army was camped along the valley^ 
 ahead of and behind us, our outposts being es- 
 tablished on either side From the generals to 
 the privates all were eager to march against San- 
 tiago. At daybreak, when the tall palms begaa 
 
Some Rough Rider Heroes 105 
 
 to show dimly through the rising mist, the 
 scream of the cavalry trumpets tore the tropic 
 dawn ; and in the evening, as the bands of regi- 
 ment after regiment played the "Star-Spangled 
 Banner," all, oflScers and men alike, stood with 
 heads uncovered, wherever they were, until the 
 last strains of the anthem died away in the hot 
 sunset air. 
 
THE BATTLE OF SAN JUAN 
 
 HILL 
 
THE BATTLE OF SAN JUAN HILL 
 
 {July /, j-<?9<?.] 
 
 I sent messenger after messenger to try to 
 find General Sumner or General Wood and get 
 permission to advance, and was just about mak- 
 ing up my mind that in the absence of orders I 
 had better "march toward the guns," when 
 Lieutenant-Colonel Dorst came riding up 
 through the storm of bullets with the welcome 
 command "to move forward and support the 
 regulars in the assault on the hills in front." 
 General Sumner had obtained authority to ad- 
 vance from Lieutenant JVliley, who was repre- 
 senting General Shafter at the front, and was in 
 the thick of the fire. The General at once or- 
 dered the first brigade to advance on the hills, 
 and the second to support it. He himself was 
 riding his horse along the lines, superintending 
 the fight. Later I overheard a couple of my 
 men talking together about him. What they 
 said illustrates the value of a display of courage 
 among the officers in hardening their soldiers; 
 for their theme was how, as they were lying 
 
 down under a fire wMch they could not return, 
 
 109 
 
no The Battle of San Juan Hill 
 
 and were in consequence feeling rather nervous, 
 General Sumner suddenly appeared on horse- 
 back, sauntering by quite unmoved; and, ^aid 
 one of the men, ''That made us feel all right. 
 If the General could stand it, we could." 
 
 The instant I received the order I sprang on 
 my horse and then my "crowded hour" began. 
 The guerillas had been shooting at us from the 
 edges of the jungle and from their perches in 
 the leafy trees, and as they used smokeless pow- 
 der, it was almost impossible to see them, 
 though a few of my men had from time to time 
 responded. We had also suffered from the hill 
 on our right front, which was held chiefly by 
 guerillas, although there were also some Spanish 
 regulars with them, for we found their dead. I 
 formed my men in column of troops, each troop 
 extended in open skirmishing order, the right 
 resting on the wire fences which bordered the 
 sunken lane. Captain Jenkins led the first 
 squadron, his eyes literally dancing with joyous 
 excitement. 
 
 I started In the rear of the regiment, the po- 
 sition in which the colonel should theoretically 
 stay. Captain Mills and Captalin McCormick 
 were both with me as aides ; but I speedily had 
 to send them off on special duty in getting the 
 different bodies of men forward. I had intend- 
 
Major Major Major-Gen. Chaplain Colonel 
 
 Dunn. Brodie. Jos. Wheeler. H. A. Brown. Leonard Wood. 
 
 T.ieut.-Colouel 
 Theodore KoosevelU 
 
 GENERAL WHEELER AND GROUP OF ROUGH RIDER OFFICERS. 
 
 Tampa, Fla., 1808. 
 
The Battle of San Juan Hill \\\ 
 
 ed to go into action on foot as at Las Guaslmas, 
 but the heat was so oppressive that I found I 
 should be quit€ unable to run up and down the 
 line and superintend matters unless I was mount- 
 ed ; and, moreover, when on horseback, I could 
 see the men better and they could see me better. 
 A curious incident happened as I was getting 
 the men started forward. Always when men 
 have been lying down under cover for some 
 time, and are required to advance, there is a lit- 
 tle hesitation, each looking to see whether the 
 others are going forward. As I rode down the 
 line, calling to the troopers to go forward, and 
 rasping brief directions to the captains and lieu- 
 tenants, I came upon a man lying behind a little 
 bush, and I ordered him to jump up. I do not 
 think he understood that we were making a for- 
 ward move, and he looked up at me for a mo- 
 ment with hesitation, and I again bade him rise, 
 jeering him and saying: "Are you afraid to 
 stand up when I am on horseback?" As I 
 spoke, he suddenly fell forward on his face, a 
 bullet having struck him and gone through him 
 lengthwise. I suppose the bullet had beet? 
 aimed at me ; at any rate, I, who was on horse- 
 back in the open, was unhurt, and the man lying 
 flat on the ground in the cover beside me was 
 killed. There were several pairs of brothers 
 
112 The Battle of San Juan Hill 
 
 with us ; of the two Nortons one was killed ; of 
 the two McCurdys one was wounded. 
 
 I soon found that I could get that line, be- 
 hind which I personally was, faster forward 
 than the one immediately in front of it, with the 
 result that the two rearmost lines of the regi- 
 ment began to crowd together; so I rode 
 through them both, the better to move on the 
 one in front. This happened with every line in 
 succession, until I found myself at the head of 
 the regiment. 
 
 Both lieutenants of B Troop from Arizona 
 had been exerting themselves greatly, and both 
 were overcome by the heat; but Sergeants 
 Campbell ^nd Davidson took it forward in 
 splendid shape. Some of the men from this 
 troop and from the other Arizona troop 
 (Bucky O'Neill's) joined me as a kind of fight- 
 ing tail. 
 
 The Ninth Regiment was immediately in 
 front of me, and the First on my left, and these 
 went up Kettle Hill with my regiment. The 
 Third, Sixth, and Tenth went partly up Kettle 
 Hill (following the Rough Riders and the 
 Ninth and First), and partly between that and 
 the block-house hill, which the infantry were as- 
 sailing. General Sumner in person gave the 
 Tenth the order to charge the hills ; and it went 
 
The Battle of San Juan Hill 113 
 
 forward at a rapid gait. The three regiments 
 went forward more or less intermingled, ad- 
 vancing steadily and keeping up a heavy fire. 
 Up Kettle Hill Sergeant George Berry, of the 
 Tenth, bore not only his own regimental colors 
 but those of the Third, the color sergeant of the 
 Third having been shot down ; he kept shouting 
 **Dress on the colors, boys, dress on the colors !'* 
 as he followed Captain Ayres, who was running 
 in advance of his men, shouting and waving his 
 hat. The Tenth Cavalry lost a greater propor- 
 tion of its officers than any other regiment in the 
 battle — eleven out of twenty-two. 
 
 By the time I had come to the head of the 
 regiment we ran into the left wing of the Ninth 
 Regulars, and some of the First Regulars, who 
 were lying down; that is, the troopers were ly- 
 /ng down, while the officers were walking to 
 and fro. The officers of the white and col- 
 ored regiments alike took the greatest pride in 
 seeing that the men more than did their duty;^ 
 and the mortality among them was great. 
 
 I spoke to the captain in command of the rear 
 platoons, saying that I had been ordered to sup- 
 port the regulars in the attack upon the hills, 
 and that in my judgment we could not take these 
 hills by firing at them, and that we must rush 
 them. He answered that his orders were to- 
 
114 T^^^ Battle of San Juan Hill 
 
 keep his men lying where they were, and that 
 he could not charge without orders. I asked 
 where the Colonel was, and as he was not in 
 sight, said, *'Then I am the ranking officer here 
 and I give the order to charge" — for I did not 
 want to keep the men longer in the open suffer- 
 ing under a fire which they could not effectively 
 return. Naturally the Captain hesitated to 
 obey this order when no word had been received 
 from his own Colonel. So I said, "Then let my 
 men through, sir," and rode on through the 
 lines, followed by the grinning Rough Riders, 
 whose attention had been completely taken off 
 the Spanish bullets, partly by my dialogue with 
 the regulars, and partly by the language I had 
 been using to themselves as I got the lines for- 
 ward, for I had been joking with some and 
 swearing at others, as the exigencies of the case 
 seemed to demand. When we started to go 
 through, however, it proved too much for the 
 regulars, and they jumped up and came along, 
 their officers and troops mingling with mine, all 
 being delighted at the chance. When I got to 
 where the head of the left wing of the Ninth 
 was lying, through the courtesy of Lieutenant 
 Hartwick, two of whose colored troopers threw 
 down the fence, I was enabled to get back into 
 the lane, at the same time waving my hat, and 
 
The Battle of San Juan Hill 115 
 
 giving the order to charge the hill on our right 
 front. Out of my sight, over on the right, Cap- 
 tains McBlain and Taylor, of the Ninth, made 
 up their minds independently to charge at just 
 about this time ; and at almost the same moment 
 Cplpnels Carroll and Hamilton, who were off, I 
 believe, to my left, where we could see neither 
 them nor their men, gave the order to advance- 
 But of all this I knew nothing at the time. The 
 whole line, tired of waiting, and eager to close 
 with the enemy, was straining to go forward; 
 and it seems that different parts slipped the leash 
 at almost the same moment. The First Cavalry 
 came up the hill just behind, and partly mixed 
 with my regiment and the Ninth. As already 
 said, portions of the Third, Sixth, and Tenth 
 followed, while the rest of the members of these 
 three regiments kept more in touch with the in- 
 fantry on our left. 
 
 By this time we were all in the spirit of the 
 thing and greatly excited by the charge, the men 
 cheering and running forward between shots, 
 while the delighted faces of the foremost offi- 
 cers, like Captain C. J. Stevens, of the Ninth, 
 as they ran at the head of their troops, will al- 
 ways stay in my mind. As soon as I was in the 
 line I galloped forward a few yards until I saw 
 that the men were well started, and then gal- 
 
ii6 The Battle of San Juan Hill 
 
 loped back to help Goodrich, who was in com- 
 mand of his troop, get his men across the road 
 so as to attack the hill from that side. Captain 
 Mills had already thrown three of the other 
 troops of the regiment across this road for the 
 same purpose. Wheeling around, I then again 
 galloped toward the hill, passing the shouting, 
 cheering, firing men, and went up the lane, 
 splashing through a small stream; when I got 
 abreast of the ranch buildings on the top of Ket- 
 tle Hill, I turned and went up the slope. Being 
 on horseback I was, of course, able to get ahead 
 of the men on foot, excepting my orderly, Hen- 
 ry Bardshar, who had run ahead very fast in 
 order to get better shots at the Spaniards, who 
 .were now running out of the ranch buildings. 
 Sergeant Campbell and a number of the Ari- 
 zona men, and Dudley Dean, among others, 
 were very close behind. Stevens, with his pla- 
 toon of the Ninth, was abreast of us; so were 
 McNamee and Hartwick. Some forty yards 
 from the top I ran into a wire fence and jumped 
 off Little Texas, turning him loose. He had 
 been scraped by a couple of bullets, one of which 
 nicked my elbow, and I never expected to see 
 him again. As I ran up the hill, Bardshar 
 stopped to shoot, and two Spaniards fell as he 
 emptied his magazine. These were the only 
 
The Battle of San Juan Hill 117 
 
 Spaniards I actually saw fall to aimed shots by 
 any one of my men, with the exception of twa 
 guerillas in trees. 
 
 Almost immediately afterward the hill was. 
 covered by the troops, both Rough Riders and 
 the colored troopers of the Ninth, and some 
 men of the First. There was the usual confu- 
 sion, and afterward there was much discussion 
 as to exactly who had been on the hill first. The 
 first guidons planted there were those of the 
 three New Mexican troops, G, E, and F, of my 
 regiment, under their Captains, Llewellen, 
 Luna, and Muller, but on the extreme right of 
 the hill, at the opposite end from where we 
 struck it. Captains Taylor and McBlain and 
 their men of the Ninth were first up. Each of 
 the ^Y^ captains was firm in the belief that his. 
 troop was first up. As for the individual men,, 
 each of whom honestly thought he was first on. 
 the summit, their name was legion. One Span- 
 iard was captured in the buildings, another was 
 shot as he tried to hide himself, and a few 
 others were killed as they ran. 
 
 Among the many deeds of conspicuous gal- 
 lantry here performed, two, both to the credit 
 of the First Cavalry, may be mentioned as ex- 
 amples of the others, not as exceptions. Ser* 
 geant Charles Karsten, while close beside Cap- 
 
Ti8 The Battle of San Juan Hill 
 
 tain Tutherly, the squadron commander, was hit 
 by a shrapnel bullet. He continued on the line, 
 firing until his arm grew numb ; and he then re- 
 fused to go to the rear, and devoted himself to 
 taking care of the wounded, utterly unmoved 
 by the heavy fire. Trooper Hugo Brittain^ 
 when wounded, brought the regimental stand- 
 ard forward, waving it to and fro, to cheer the 
 men. 
 
 No sooner were we on the crest than the 
 Spaniards from the line of hills on our front, 
 where they were strongly intrenched, opened a 
 very heavy fire upon us with their rifles. They 
 also opened upon us with one or two pieces of 
 artillery, using time fuses which burned very ac- 
 curately, the shells exploding right over our 
 heads. 
 
 On the top of the hill was a huge iron kettle, 
 or something of the kind, probably used for 
 sugar refining. Several of our men took shelter 
 behind this. We had a splendid view of the 
 charge on the San Juan block-house to our left, 
 where the infantry of Kent, led by Hawkins, 
 were climbing the hill. Obviously the proper 
 thing to do was to help them, and I got the men 
 together and started them volley-firing against 
 the Spaniards in the San Juan block-house and 
 in the trenches around it. We could only see 
 
THE FIGHT AT THE KETTLES. 
 
 These kettles were on the crest of the first hill, up which General Wheeler's division 
 charged. Captain Day, of the Rough Riders, was wounded here, and being unable to 
 accompany his men, sat on the edge of the second kettle and watched the advance of 
 the troops up the second hill. 
 
The Battle of San Juan Hill 119 
 
 their heads ; of course this was all we ever could 
 see when we were firing at them in their trenches. 
 Stevens was directing not only his own colored 
 troopers, but a number of Rough Riders; for in 
 a melee good soldiers are always prompt to rec- 
 ognize a good officer, and are eager to follow 
 him. 
 
 We kept up a brisk fire for some five or ten 
 minutes; meanwhile we were much cut up our- 
 selves. Gallant Colonel Hamilton, than whom 
 there was never a braver man, was killed, and 
 equally gallant Colonel Carroll wounded. 
 When near the summit Captain Mills had been 
 shot through the head, the bullet destroying the 
 sight of one eye permanently and of the other 
 temporarily. He would not go back or let any 
 man assist him, sitting down where he was and 
 waiting until one of the men brought him 
 word that the hill was stormed. Colonel Viele 
 planted the standard of the First Cavalry on 
 the hill, and General Sumner rode up. He was 
 fighting his division in great form, and was al- 
 ways himself in the thick of the fire. As the 
 men were much excited by the firing, they 
 seemed to pay very little heed to their own 
 losses. 
 
 Suddenly, above the cracking of the carbines, 
 rose a peculiar drumming sound, and some of 
 
120 The Battle of San Juan Hill 
 
 the men cried, "The Spanish machine-guns!'* 
 Listening, I made out that it came from the flat 
 ground to the left, and jumped to my feet, 
 smiting my hand on my thigh, and shout- 
 ing aloud with exultation, ''It's the Catlings, 
 men, our Catlings I" Lieutenant Parker was- 
 bringing his four Catlings into action, and shov- 
 ing them nearer and nearer the front. Now and 
 then the drumming ceased for a moment ; then it 
 would resound again, always closer to San Juan 
 hill, which Parker, like ourselves, was hammer- 
 ing to assist the infantry attack. Our men 
 cheered lustily. We saw much of Parker after 
 that, and there was never a more welcome sound 
 than his Catlings as they opened. It was the 
 only sound which I ever heard my men cheer in 
 battle. 
 
 The Infantry got nearer and nearer the crest 
 of the hill. At last we could see the Spaniards 
 running from the rifle-pits as the Americans 
 came on in their final rush. Then I stopped my 
 men for fear they should Injure their comrades, 
 an4 called to them to charge the next line of 
 trenches, on the hills In our front, from which 
 we had been undergoing a good deal of punish- 
 ment. Thinking that the men would all come, 
 I jumped over the wire fence In front of us and 
 started at the double ; but, as a matter of fact, 
 
The Battle of San Juan Hill 121 
 
 the troopers were so excited, what with shooting 
 and being shot, and shouting and cheering, that 
 they did not hear, or did not heed me ; and after 
 running about a hundred yards I found I had 
 only five men along with me. Bullets were rip- 
 ping the grass all around us, and one of the men. 
 Clay Green, was mortally wounded; another, 
 Winslow Clark, a Harvard man, was shot first 
 in the leg and then through the body. He made 
 not the slightest murmur, only asking me to put 
 his water canteen where he could get at it, which 
 I did; he ultimately recovered. There was no 
 use going on with the remaining three men, and 
 I bade them stay where they were while I went 
 back and brought up the rest of the brigade. 
 This was a decidedly cool request, for there was 
 really no possible point in letting them stay there 
 while I went back; but at the moment it seemed 
 perfectly natural to me, and apparently so to 
 them, for they cheerfully nodded, and sat down 
 in the grass, firing back at the line of trenches 
 from which the Spaniards were shooting at 
 them. Meanwhile, I ran back jumped over the 
 wire fence, and went over the crest of the hill, 
 filled with anger against the troopers, and espe- 
 cially those of my own regiment, for not having 
 accompanied me. They, of course, were quite 
 innocent of wrong-doing; and even while I 
 
122 The Battle of San Juan Hill 
 
 taunted them bitterly for not having followed 
 me, it was all I could do not to smile at the look 
 of injury and surprise that came over their faces, 
 while they cried out, "We didn't hear you, we 
 didn*t see you go, Colonel; lead on now, we'll 
 sure follow you." I wanted the other regiments 
 to come, too, so I ran down to where General 
 Sumner was and asked him if I might make the 
 charge ; and he told me to go and that he would 
 see that the men followed. By this time every- 
 body had his attention attracted, and when I 
 leaped over the fence again, with Major Jen- 
 kins beside me, the men of the various regi- 
 ments which were already on the hill came with 
 a rush, and we started across the wide valley 
 which lay between us and the Spanish intrench- 
 ments. Captain Dimmick, now in command of 
 the Ninth, was bringing it forward; Captain 
 McBlain had a number of Rough Riders mixed 
 in with his troop, and led them all together; 
 Captain Taylor had been severely wounded. 
 The long-legged men like Greenway, Goodrich, 
 Sharp-shooter Profit, and others, outstripped 
 the rest of us, as we had a considerable distance 
 to go. Long before we got near them the Span- 
 iards ran, save a few here and there, who either 
 surrendered or were shot down. When we 
 reached the trenches we found them filled with 
 
The Battle of San Juan Hill 123 
 
 dead bodies In the light blue and white uniform 
 of the Spanish regular army. There were very 
 few wounded. Most of the fallen had little 
 holes in their heads from which their brains 
 were oozing; for they were covered from the 
 neck down by the trenches. 
 
 It was at this place that Major Wessels, of 
 the Third Cavalry, was shot in the back of the 
 head. It was a severe wound, but after having 
 it bound up he again came to the front in com- 
 mand of his regiment. Among the men who 
 were foremost was Lieutenant Milton F. Davis, 
 of the First Cavalry. He had been joined by 
 three men of the Seventy-first New York, who 
 ran up, and, saluting, said, "Lieutenant, we 
 want to go with you, our officers won't lead us." 
 One of the brave fellows was soon afterward 
 shot in the face. Lieutenant Davis's first ser- 
 geant, Clarence Gould, killed a Spanish soldier 
 with his revolver, just as the Spaniard was aim- 
 ing at one of my Rough Riders. At about the 
 same time I also shot one. I was with Henry 
 Bardshar, running up at the double, and two 
 Spaniards leaped from the trenches and fired at 
 us, not ttr\. yards away. As they turned to run 
 I closed in and fired twice, missing the first and 
 killing the second. My revolver was from the 
 sunken battle-ship Maine, and had been given 
 
124 '^^^ Battle of San Juan Hill 
 
 me by my brother-in-law, Captain W. S. Cowles, 
 of the Navy. At the time I did not know of 
 Gould's exploit, and supposed my feat to be 
 unique; and although Gould had killed his 
 Spaniard in the trenches, not very far from me, 
 I never learned of it until weeks after. It is as- 
 tonishing what a limited area of vision and ex- 
 perience one has in the hurly-burly of a battle. 
 
 There was very great confusion at this time, 
 the different regiments being completely inter- 
 mingled — ^white regulars, colored regulars, and 
 Rough Riders. General Sumner had kept a 
 considerable force In reserve on Kettle Hill, un- 
 der Major Jackson, of the Third Cavalry. We 
 were still under a heavy fire and I got together 
 a mixed lot of men and pushed on from the 
 trenches and ranch-houses which we had just 
 taken, driving the Spaniards through a line of 
 palm-trees, and over the crest of a chain of 
 hills. When we reached these crests we found 
 ourselves overlooking Santiago. Some of the 
 men, including Jenkins, Greenway, and Good- 
 rich, pushed on almost by themselves far ahead. 
 Lieutenant Hugh Berkely, of the First, with a 
 sergeant and two troopers, reached the extreme 
 front. He was, at the time, ahead of everyone ; 
 the sergeant was killed and one trooper wound- 
 ed; but the lieutenant and the remaining troop- 
 
The Battle of San Juan Hill 125 
 
 er stuck to their post for the rest of the after- 
 noon until our line was gradually extended to 
 include them. 
 
 While I was reforming the troops on the 
 chain of hills, one of General Sumner's aides, 
 Captain Robert Howze — as dashing and gal- 
 lant an officer as there was in the whole gallant 
 cavalry division, by the way — came up with or- 
 ders to me to halt where I was, not advancing 
 farther, but to hold the hill at all hazards. 
 Howze had his horse, and I had some difficulty 
 in making him take proper shelter; he stayed 
 with us for quite a time, unable to make up his 
 mind to leave the extreme front, and meanwhile 
 jumping at the chance to render any service, of 
 risk or otherwise, which the moment developed. 
 
 I now had under me all the fragments of the 
 six cavalry regiments which were at the extreme 
 front, being the highest officer left there, and I 
 was in immediate command of them for the re- 
 mainder of the afternoon and that night. The 
 Ninth was over to the right, and the Thirteenth 
 Infantry afterward came up beside it. The 
 rest of Kent's infantry was to our left. Of 
 the Tenth, Lieutenants Anderson, MuUer, and 
 Fleming reported to me ; Anderson was slightly 
 wounded, but he paid no heed to this. All 
 three, like every other officer, had troopers of 
 
126 The Battle of San Juan Hill 
 
 various regiments under them ; such mixing was 
 inevitable in making repeated charges through 
 thick jungle; it was essentially a troop com- 
 manders', indeed, almost a squad leaders', fight. 
 The Spaniards who had been holding the 
 trenches and the line of hills, had fallen back 
 upon their supports and we were under a very 
 heavy fire both from rifles and great guns. At 
 the point where we were, the grass-covered hill- 
 crest was gently rounded, giving poor cover, 
 and I made my men lie down on the hither 
 slope. 
 
 On the extreme left Captain Beck, of the 
 Tenth, with his own troop, and small bodies of 
 the men of other regiments, was exercising a 
 practically independent command, driving back 
 the Spaniards whenever they showed any symp- 
 toms of advancing. He had received his orders 
 to hold the line at all hazards from Lieutenant 
 Andrews, one of General Sumner's aides, just 
 as I had received mine from Captain Howze. 
 Finally, he was relieved by some infantry, and 
 then rejoined the rest of the Tenth, which was 
 engaged heavily until dark. Major Wint being 
 among the severely wounded. Lieutenant W. 
 N. Smith was killed. Captain Bigelow had 
 been wounded three times. 
 
 In the course of the afternoon the Spaniards 
 
The Battle of San Juan Hill \TJ 
 
 in our front made the only offensive movement 
 which I saw them make during the entire cam- 
 paign; for what were ordinarily called "at- 
 tacks'* upon our lines consisted merely of heavy 
 firing from their trenches and from their skir- 
 mishers. In this case they did actually begin to 
 make a forward movement, their cavalry com- 
 ing up as well as the marines and reserve infan- 
 try, while their skirmishers, who were always 
 bold, redoubled their activity. It could not be 
 called a charge, and not only was it not pushed 
 home, but it was stopped almost as soon as it 
 began, our men immediately running forward 
 to the crest of the hill with shouts of delight at 
 seeing their enemies at last come into the open. 
 A few seconds' firing stopped their advance and 
 drove them into the cover of the trenches. 
 
 They kept up a very heavy fire for some time 
 longer, and our men again lay down, only re- 
 plying occasionally. Suddenly we heard on our 
 right the peculiar drumming sound which had 
 been so welcome in the morning, when the in- 
 fantry were assailing the San Juan block-hous^e. 
 The Catlings were up again I I started over to 
 inquire, and found that Lieutenant Parker, not 
 content with uSing his guns in support of the at- 
 tacking forces, had thrust them forward to the 
 extreme front of the fighting line, where he was 
 
128 The Battle of San Juan Hill 
 
 handling them with great effect. From this time 
 on, throughout the fighting, Parker's Gatlings 
 were on the right of my regiment, and his men 
 and mine fraternized in every way. He kept 
 his pieces at the extreme front, using them on 
 every occasion until the last Spanish shot was 
 fired. Indeed, the dash and efficiency with 
 which the Gatlings were handled by Parker was 
 one of the most striking features of the cam- 
 paign; he showed that a first-rate officer could 
 use machine-guns, on wheels, in battle and skir- 
 mish, in attacking and defending trenches, 
 alongside of the best troops, and to their great 
 advantage. 
 
 As night came on, the firing gradually died 
 away. Before this happened, however. Cap- 
 tains Morton and Boughton, of the Third Cav- 
 alry, came over to tell me that a rumor had 
 reached them to the effect that there had been 
 some talk of retiring and that they wished to 
 protest in the strongest manner. I had been 
 watching them both, as they handled their 
 troops with the cool confidence of the veteran 
 regular officer, and had been congratulating my- 
 self that they were off toward the right flank, 
 for as long as they were there, I knew I was per- 
 fectly safe in that direction. I had heard no 
 rumor about retiring, and I cordially agreed 
 
The Battle of San Juan Hill 129 
 
 with them that it would be far worse than a 
 blunder to abandon our position. 
 
 To attack the Spaniards by rushing across 
 open ground, or through wire entanglements 
 and low, almost impassable jungle, without the 
 help of artillery, and to force unbroken infantry, 
 fighting behind earthworks and armed with the 
 best repeating weapons, supported by cannon, 
 was one thing ; to repel such an attack ourselves, 
 or to fight our foes on anything like even terms 
 in the open, was quite another thing. No pos- 
 sible number of Spaniards coming at us from in 
 front could have driven us from our position, 
 and there was not a man on the crest who did 
 not eagerly and devoutly hope that our oppo- 
 nents would make the attempt, for it would 
 surely have been followed, not merely by a re- 
 pulse, but by our immediately taking the city. 
 There was not an officer or a man on the firing- 
 line, so far as I saw them, who did not feel this 
 way. 
 
 As night fell, some of my men went back to 
 the buildings in our rear and foraged through 
 them, for we had now been fourteen hours 
 charging and fighting without food. They 
 came across what was evidently the Spanish offi- 
 cers' mess, where their dinner was still cooking, 
 and they brought it to the front in high glee. 
 
130 The Battle of San Juan Hill 
 
 It was evident that the Spanish officers were liv- 
 ing well, however the Spanish rank and file were 
 faring. There were three big iron pots, one 
 filled with beef stew, one with boiled rice, and 
 one with boiled peas ; there was a big demijohn 
 of rum (all along the trenches which the Span- 
 iards held were empty wine and liquor bottles) ; 
 there were a number of loaves of rice-bread; 
 and there were even some small cans of pre- 
 serves and a few salt fish. Of course, among so 
 many men, the food, which was equally divided, 
 did not give very much to each, but it freshened 
 us all. 
 
 Soon after dark, General Wheeler, who in 
 the afternoon had resumed command of the cav- 
 alry division, came to the front. A very few 
 words with General Wheeler reassured us about 
 retiring. He had been through too much heavy 
 fighting In the Civil War to regard the present 
 fight as very serious, and he told us not to be 
 under any apprehension, for he had sent word 
 that there was no need whatever of retiring, 
 and was sure we would stay where we were un- 
 til the chance came to advance. He was second 
 In command ; and to him more than to any other 
 one man was due the prompt abandonment of 
 the proposal to fall back — a proposal which, if 
 adopted, would have meant shame and disaster. 
 
The Battle of San Juan Hill 131 
 
 Shortly afterward General Wheeler sent us 
 orders to intrench. The men of the different 
 regiments were now getting in place again and 
 sifting themselves out. All of our troops who 
 had been kept at Kettle Hill came forward and 
 rejoined us after nightfall. During the after- 
 noon Greenway, apparently not having enough 
 to do in the fighting, had taken advantage of a 
 lull to explore the buildings himself, and had 
 found a number of Spanish intrenching tools, 
 picks, and shovels, and these we used in digging 
 trenches along our line. The men were very 
 tired, indeed, but they went cheerfully to work, 
 all the officers doing their part. 
 
 We finished digging the trench soon after 
 midnight, and then the worn-out men lay down 
 in rows on their rifles and dropped heavily to 
 sleep. About one in ten of them had blankets 
 taken from the Spaniards. Henry Bardshar, 
 my orderly, had procured one for me. He, 
 Goodrich, and I slept together. If the men 
 without blankets had not been so tired that they 
 fell asleep anyhow, they would have been very 
 cold, for, of course, we were all drenched with 
 sweat, and above the waist had on nothing but 
 our flannel shirts, while the night was cool, with 
 a heavy dew. Before anyone had time to wake 
 from the cold, however, we were all awakened 
 
132 The Bat lie of San Juan Hill 
 
 by the Spaniards, whose skirmishers suddenly 
 opened fire on us. Of course, we could not tell 
 whether or not this was the forerunner of a 
 heavy attack, for our Cossack posts were re- 
 sponding briskly. It was about three o'clock in 
 the morning, at which time men's courage is 
 said to be at the lowest ebb ; but the cavalry di- 
 vision was certainly free from any weakness in 
 that direction. At the alarm everybody jumped 
 to his feet and the stiff, shivering, haggard men, 
 their eyes only half opened, all clutched their 
 rifles and ran forward to the trench on the crest 
 of the hill. 
 
 The sputtering shots died away and we went 
 to sleep again. 
 
 In this fight our regiment had numbered 490 
 men, as, in addition to the killed and wounded 
 of the first fight, some had had to go to the hos- 
 pital for sickness and some had been left behind 
 with the baggage, or were detailed on other 
 duty. Eighty-nine were killed and wounded: 
 the heaviest loss suffered by any regiment in the 
 cavalry division. The Spaniards made a stiff 
 fight, standing firm until we charged home. 
 They fought much more stubbornly than at Las 
 Guasimas. We ought to have expected this, for 
 they have always done well in holding intrench- 
 ments. On this day they showed themselves to 
 
The Battle of San Juan Hill 133 
 
 be brave foes, worthy of honor for their gal- 
 lantry. 
 
 I think we suffered more heavily than the 
 Spaniards did in killed and wounded (though 
 we also captured some scores of prisoners). It 
 would have been very extraordinary if the re- 
 verse was the case, for we did the charging; 
 and to carry earthworks on foot with dismount- 
 ed cavalry, when these earthworks are held by 
 unbroken infantry armed with the best modern 
 rifles, is a serious task. 
 
HUNTING WILD ANIMALS 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 
 fn hunting costume. Taken about 1886. 
 
OLD EPHRAIM, THE GRISLY BEAR 
 
 The king of the game beasts of temperate 
 North America, because the most dangerous to 
 the hunter, is the grisly bear ; known to the few 
 remaining old-time trappers of the Rockies and 
 the Great Plains, sometimes as "Old Ephraim" 
 and sometimes as "Moccasin Joe" — the last in 
 allusion to his queer, half-human footprints, 
 which look as if made by some misshapen giant, 
 walking in moccasins. 
 
 Bear vary greatly in size and color, no less 
 than in temper and habits. Old hunters speak 
 much of them in their endless talks over the 
 camp-fires and in the snow-bound winter huts. 
 They insist on many species; not merely the 
 black and the grisly, but the brown, the cinna- 
 mon, the gray, the silver-tip, and others with 
 names known only in certain localities, such as 
 the range bear, the roach-back, and the smut- 
 face. But, in spite of popular opinion to the 
 contrary, most old hunters are very untrust- 
 worthy in dealing with points of natural history. 
 They usually know only so much about any giv- 
 
 137 
 
138 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 en game animal as will enable them to kill it. 
 They study its habits solely with this end in 
 view ; and once slain they only examine it to see 
 about its condition and fur. With rare excep- 
 tions they are quite incapable of passing judg- 
 ment upon questions of specific identity or differ- 
 ence. When questioned, they not only advance 
 perfectly impossible theories and facts in sup- 
 port of their views, but they rarely even agree 
 as to the views themselves. One hunter will as- 
 sert that the true grisly is only found In Califor- 
 nia, heedless of the fact that the name was first 
 used by Lewis and Clark as one of the titles they 
 applied to the large bears of the plains country 
 round the Upper Missouri, a quarter of a cen- 
 tury before the California grisly was known to 
 fame. Another hunter will call any big brindled 
 bear a grisly no matter where it Is found; and 
 he and his cornpanloris will dispute by the hour 
 as to whether a bear of large, but not extreme, 
 size Is a grisly or a silver-tip. In Oregon the 
 cinnamon s bear is a phase of the small black 
 bear; in Montana It is the plains variety of the 
 large mountain silver-tip. I have myself seen 
 the skins of two bears killed on the upper waters 
 of Tongue River; one was that of a male, one 
 of a female, and they had evidently just mated ; 
 yet one was distinctly a "silver-tip" and the oth- 
 
Old Ephraim^ the Grisly Bear 139 
 
 er a "cinnamon." The skin of one very big bear 
 which I killed in the Bighorn has proved a 
 standing puzzle to almost all the old hunters to 
 whom I have shown it; rarely do any two of 
 them agree as to whether it is a grisly, a silver- 
 tip, a cinnamon, or a "smut-face." Any bear 
 with unusually long hair on the spine and shoul- 
 ders, especially if killed in the spring, when the 
 fur is shaggy, is forthwith dubbed a "roach- 
 back." The average sporting writer, moreover, 
 joins with the more imaginative members of the 
 "old hunter" variety in ascribing wildly various 
 traits to these different bears. One comments 
 on the superior prowess of the roach-back; the 
 explanation being that a bear in early spring is 
 apt to be ravenous from hunger. The next in- 
 sists that the California grisly is the only really 
 dangerous bear; while another stoutly maintains 
 that it does not compare in ferocity with what 
 he calls the "smaller" silver-tip or cinnamon. 
 And so on, and so on, without end. All of 
 which is mere nonsense. 
 
 Nevertheless, it is no easy task to determine 
 how many species or varieties of bear actually 
 do exist in the United States, and I cannot even 
 say without doubt that a very large set of skins 
 and skulls would not show a nearly complete in- 
 tergradation between the most widely separated 
 
140 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 Individuals. However, there are certainly two 
 very distinct types, which diifer almost as widely 
 from each other as a wapiti does from a mule 
 deer, and which exist in the same localities in 
 most heavily timbered portions of the Rockies. 
 One is the small black bear, a bear which will 
 average about two hundred pounds weight, 
 with fine, glossy, black fur, and the foreclaws 
 but little longer than the hinder ones; in fact, 
 the hairs of the forepaw often reach to their tips. 
 This bear is a tree climber. It is the only kind 
 found east of the great plains, and it is also 
 plentiful in the forest-clad portions of the Rock- 
 ies, being common in most heavily timbered 
 tracts throughout the United States. The other 
 is the grisly, which weighs three or four times 
 as much as the black, and has a pelt of coarse 
 hair, which is in color gray, grizzled, or brown 
 of various shades. It is not a tree climber, and 
 the foreclaws are very long, much longer than 
 the hinder ones. It is found from the great 
 plains west of the Mississippi to the Pacific 
 coast. This bear inhabits indifferently lowland 
 and mountain; the deep woods and the barren 
 plains where the only cover Is the stunted 
 growth fringing the streams. These two types 
 are very distinct in every way, and their differ- 
 ences are not at all dependent upon mere geo- 
 
Old Ephraim, the Grisly Bear 141 
 
 graphical considerations; for they are often 
 found in the same district. Thus I found them 
 both in the Bighorn Mountains, each type be- 
 ing in extreme form, while the specimens I shot 
 showed no trace of intergradation. The huge 
 grizzled, long-clawed beast, and its little glossy- 
 coated, short-clawed, tree-climbing brother 
 roamed over exactly the same country in those 
 mountains; but they were as distinct in habits, 
 and mixed as little together as moose and cari- 
 bou. 
 
 On the other hand, when a sufficient number 
 of bears, from widely separated regions are ex- 
 amined, the various distinguishing marks are 
 found to be inconstant and to show a tendency 
 — exactly how strong I cannot say — to fade 
 into one another. The differentiation of the 
 two species seems to be as yet scarcely com- 
 pleted; there are more or less imperfect con- 
 necting links, and as regards the grisly it almost 
 seems as if the specific characters were still un- 
 stable. In the far Northwest, in the basin of the 
 Columbia, the "black" bear is as often brown 
 as any other color; and I have seen the skins of 
 two cubs, one black and one brown, which were 
 shot when following the same dam. When these 
 brown bears have coarser hair than usual their 
 skins are with difficulty to be distinguished from 
 
142 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 those of certain varieties of the grisly. More- 
 over, all bears vary greatly in size; and I have 
 seen the bodies of very large black or brown 
 bears with short foreclaws which were fully as 
 heavy as, or perhaps heavier than, some small 
 but full-grown grislies with long foreclaws. 
 These very large bears with short claws are very 
 reluctant to climb a tree; and are almost as 
 clumsy about it as is a young grisly. Among 
 the grislies the fur varies much in color and 
 texture even among bears of the same locality; 
 it is of course richest in the deep forest, while 
 the bears of the dry plains and mountains are 
 of a lighter, more washed-out hue. 
 
 A full-grown grisly will usually weigh from 
 five to seven hundred pounds; but exceptional 
 individuals undoubtedly reach more than 
 twelve hundredweight. The California bears 
 are said to be much the largest. This I think is 
 so, but I cannot say it with certainty — at any 
 rate, I have examined several skins of full-grown 
 Californian bears which were no larger than 
 those of many I have seen from the northern 
 Rockies. The Alaskan bears, particularly 
 those of the peninsula, are even bigger beasts; 
 the skin of one which I saw in the possession of 
 Mr. Webster, the taxidermist, was a good deal 
 larger than the average polar bear skin ; and the 
 
A GRISLY BEAR IN THE WILDS OF WYOMING. 
 From a stereograph, copjaight, 1904, by Underwood and Underwood, New York. 
 
Old Epliraim, the Grisly Bear i^^ 
 
 animal when alive, if in good condition, could 
 hardly have weighed less than 1,400 pounds. 
 Bears vary wonderfully in weight, even to the 
 extent of becoming half as heavy again, accord- 
 ing as they are fat or lean; in this respect they 
 are more like hogs than like any other animals. 
 
 The grisly is now chiefly a beast of the high 
 hills and heavy timber; but this is merely be- 
 cause he has learned that he must rely on cover 
 to guard him from man, and has forsaken the 
 open ground accordingly. In old days, and in 
 one or two very out-of-the-way places almost to 
 the present time, he wandered at will over the 
 plains. It is only the weariness born of fear 
 which nowadays causes him to cling to the thick 
 brush of the large river bottoms throughout the 
 plains country. When there were no rifle-bear- 
 ing hunters in the land, to harass him and make 
 him afraid, he roved hither and thither at will, 
 in burly self-confidence. Then he cared little 
 for cover, unless as a weather-break, or because 
 it happened to contain food he liked. If the 
 humor seized him he would roam for days over 
 the rolling or broken prairie, searching for 
 roots, digging up gophers, or perhaps following 
 the great buffalo herds either to prey on some 
 unwary straggler which he was able to catch at 
 a disadvantage in a washout, or else to feast on 
 
144 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 the carcasses of those which died by accident. 
 Old hunters, survivors of the long-vanished 
 ages when the vast herds thronged the high 
 plains and were followed by the wild red tribes, 
 and by bands of whites who were scarcely less 
 savage, have told me that they often met bears 
 under such circumstances; and these bears were 
 accustomed to sleep in a patch of rank sage bush, 
 in the niche of a washout, or under the lee of a 
 bowlder, seeking their food abroad even In full 
 daylight. The bears of the Upper Missouri 
 basin — ^which were so light in color that the 
 early explorers often alluded to them as gray or 
 >even as "white" — ^were particularly given to 
 this life in the open. To this day that close kins- 
 man of the grisly known as the bear of the bar- 
 ren grounds continues to lead this same kind of 
 life, in the far north. My friend, Mr. Rockhill, 
 of Maryland, who was the first white man to 
 explore eastern Tibet, describes the large gris- 
 ly-like bear of those desolate uplands as having 
 similar habits. * 
 
 However, the grisly is a shrewd beast and 
 shows the usual bear-like capacity for adapting 
 himself to changed conditions. He has in most 
 places become a cover-haunting animal, sly in 
 his ways, wary to a degree, and clinging to the 
 shelter of the deepest forests in the mountains 
 
Old Ephraim, the Grisly Bear 145 
 
 and of the most tangled thickets in the plains. 
 Hence he has held his own far better than such 
 game as the bison and elk. He is much less 
 common than formerly, but he is still to be 
 found throughout most of his former range; 
 save, of course, in the immediate neighborhood 
 of the large towns. 
 
 In most places the grisly hibernates, or, as old 
 hunters say, "holes up," during the cold season, 
 precisely as does the black bear ; but as with the 
 latter species, those animals which live farthest 
 south spend the whole year abroad in nlild sea- 
 sons. The grisly rarely chooses that favorite 
 den of his little black brother, a hollow tree or 
 log, for his winter sleep, seeking or making 
 some cavernous hole in the ground instead. 
 The hole is sometimes in a slight hillock in a 
 river bottom, but more often on a hill-side, and 
 may be either shallow or deep. In the moun- 
 tains it is generally a natural cave in the rock, 
 but among the foot-hills and on the plains the 
 bear usually has to take some hollow or open- 
 ing, and then fashion it into a burrow to his lik- 
 ing with his big digging claws. 
 
 Before the cold weather sets in the bear be- 
 gins to grow restless, and to roam about seeking 
 for a good place in which to hole up. One will 
 often try and abandon several caves or partially 
 
146 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 dug-out burrows in succession before finding a 
 place to its taste. It always endeavors to choose 
 a spot where there is little chance of discovery or 
 molestation, taking great care to avoid leaving 
 too evident trace of its work. Hence it is not 
 often that the dens are found. 
 
 Once in its den the bear passes the cold 
 months in lethargic sleep ; yet, in all but the cold- 
 est weather, and sometimes even then, its slum- 
 ber is but light, and if disturbed it will promptly 
 leave its den, prepared for fight or flight as the 
 occasion may require. Many times when a 
 hunter has stumbled on the winter resting-place 
 of a bear and has left it, as he thought, without 
 his presence being discovered, he has returned 
 only to find that the crafty old fellow was aware 
 of the danger all the time, and sneaked off as 
 soon as the coast was clear. But in very cold 
 weather hibernating bears can hardly be wak- 
 ened from their torpid lethargy. 
 
 The length of time a bear stays in its den de- 
 pends of course upon the severity of the season 
 and the latitude and altitude of the country. 
 
 When the bear first leaves its den the fur is 
 in very fine order, but it speedily becomes thin 
 and poor, and does not recover its condition un- 
 til the fall. Sometimes the bear does not betray 
 any great hunger for a few days after its ap- 
 
Old Ephraim^ the Grisly Bear 147 
 
 pearance; but in a short while it becomes rav- 
 enous. During the early spring, when the 
 woods are still entirely barren and lifeless, while 
 the snow yet lies in deep drifts, the lean, hungry 
 brute, both maddened and weakened by long 
 fasting, is more of a flesh eater than at any other 
 time. It is at this period that it is most apt to turn 
 true beast of prey, and show its prowess either 
 at the expense of the wild game, or of the flocks 
 of the settler and the herds of the ranchman. 
 Bears are very capricious in this respect, how- 
 ever. Some are confirmed game and cattle kill- 
 ers; others are not; while yet others either are 
 or are not accordingly as the freak seizes them, 
 and their ravages vary almost unaccountably, 
 both with the season and the locality. 
 
 I spent much of the fall of 1889 hunting on 
 the head-waters of the Salmon and Snake in Ida- 
 ho, and along the Montana boundary line from 
 the Big Hole Basin and the head of the Wisdom 
 River to the neighborhood of Red Rock 
 Pass and to the north and west of Henry's 
 Lake. During the last fortnight my com- 
 panion was the old mountain man, named 
 Griffeth or Griffin — I cannot tell which, as he 
 was always called either "Hank" or "Griff.'* 
 He was a crabbedly honest old fellow, and a 
 
148 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 very skilful hunter; but he was worn out with 
 age and rheumatism, and his temper had failed 
 even faster than his bodily strength. He showed 
 me a greater variety of game than I had ever 
 seen before in so short a time ; nor did I ever be- 
 fore or after make so successful a hunt. But he 
 was an exceedingly disagreeable companion on 
 account of his surly, moody ways. I generally 
 had to get up first, to kindle the fire and make 
 ready breakfast, and he was very quarrelsome. 
 Finally, during my absence from camp one day, 
 while not very far from Red Rock pass, he 
 found my whiskey-flask, which I kept purely for 
 emergencies, and drank all the contents. When 
 I came back he was quite drunk. This was un- 
 bearable, and after some high words I left him, 
 and struck off homeward through the woods on 
 my own account. We had with us four pack 
 and saddle horses ; and of these I took a very in- 
 telligent and gentle little bronco mare, which 
 possessed the invaluable trait of always staying 
 near camp, even when not hobbled. I was not 
 hampered with much of an outfit, having only 
 my buffalo sleeping-bag, a fur coat, and my 
 washing-kit, with a couple of spare pairs of 
 socks and some handkerchiefs. A frying-pan, 
 some salt, flour, baking-powder, a small chunk 
 of salt pork, and a hatchet made up a light 
 
Old Epkratm, the Grisly Bear 149 
 
 pack, which, with the bedding, I fastened across 
 the stock saddle by means of a rope and a spare 
 packing cinch. My cartridges and knife were 
 in my belt ; my compass and matches, as always, 
 in my pocket. I walked, while the little mare 
 followed almost like a dog, often without my 
 having to hold the lariat which served as halter. 
 
 The country was for the most part fairly 
 open, as I kept near the foot-hills where glades 
 and little prairies broke the pine forest. The 
 trees were of small size. There was no regular 
 trail, but the course was easy to keep, and I had 
 no trouble of any kind save on the second day. 
 That afternoon I was following a stream which 
 at last **canyoned up" — that is, sank to the bot- 
 tom of a canyon-like ravine impassable for a 
 horse. I started up a side valley, intending to 
 cross from its head coulies to those of another 
 valley which would lead in below the canyon. 
 
 However, I got enmeshed in the tangle of 
 winding valleys at the foot of the steep moun- 
 tains, and as dusk was coming on I halted and 
 camped in a little open spot by the side of a 
 small, noisy brook, with crystal water. The 
 place was carpeted with soft, wet, green moss, 
 dotted red with the kinnikinnic berries, and at its 
 edge, under the trees where the ground was dry, I 
 threw down the buffalo bed on the mat of sweet- 
 
1^0 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 smelling pine needles. Making camp took but 
 a moment. I opened the pack, tossed the bed- 
 ding on a smooth spot, knee-haltered the little 
 mare, dragged up a few dry logs, and then 
 strolled oif, rifle on shoulder, through the frosty 
 gloaming, to see If I could pick up a grouse for 
 supper. 
 
 For half a mile I walked quickly and silently 
 over the pine needles, across a succession of 
 slight ridges separated by narrow, shallow val- 
 leys. The forest here was composed of lodge- 
 pole pines, which on the ridges grew close to- 
 gether, with tall slender trunks, while In the val- 
 leys the growth was more open. Though the 
 sun was behind the mountains there was yet 
 plenty of light by which to shoot, but it was fad- 
 ing rapidly. 
 
 At last, as I was thinking of turning toward 
 camp I stole up to the crest of one of the ridges, 
 and looked over Into the valley some sixty yards 
 off. Immediately I caught the loom of some 
 large, dark object; and another glance showed 
 me a big grisly walking slowly off with his head 
 down. He was quartering to me, and I fired 
 into his flank, the bullet, as I afterward found, 
 ranging forward and piercing one lung. At the 
 shot he uttered a loud, moaning grunt and 
 plunged forward at a heavy gallop, while I 
 
Old Ephrainiy the Grisly beuf^ 151 
 
 raced obliquely down the hill to cut him off. 
 After going a few hundred feet he reached a 
 laurel thicket, some thirty yards broad, and two 
 or three times as long, which he did not leave. 
 I ran up to the edge and there halted, not liking 
 to venture into the mass of twisted, close-grow- 
 ing stems and glossy foliage. Moreover, as I 
 halted, I heard him utter a peculiar, savage kind 
 of whine from the heart of the brush. Accord- 
 ingly, I began to skirt the edge, standing on tip- 
 toe and gazing earnestly to see if I could not 
 catch a glimpse of his hide. When I was at the 
 narrowest part of the thicket, he suddenly left 
 it directly opposite, and then wheeled and stood 
 broadside to me on the hill-side, a little above. 
 He turned his head stiffly toward me; scarlet 
 strings of froth hung from his lips; his eyes 
 burned, like embers in the gloom. 
 
 I held true, aiming behind the shoulder, and 
 my bullet shattered the point or lower end of 
 his heart, taking out a big nick. Instantly the 
 great bear turned with a harsh roar of fury and 
 challenge, blowing the bloody foam from his 
 mouth, so that I saw the gleam of his white 
 fangs; and then he charged straight at me, 
 crashing and bounding through the laurel 
 bushes, so that it was hard to aim. I waited un- 
 til he came to a fallen tree, raking him as he 
 
152 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 topped it with a ball, which entered his chest 
 and went through the cavity of his body, but he 
 neither swerved nor flinched, and at the moment 
 I did not know that I had struck him. He came 
 steadily on, and in another second was almost 
 upon me. I iired for his forehead, but my bul- 
 let went low, entering his open mouth, smashing 
 his lower jaw and going into the neck. I leaped 
 to one side almost as I pulled trigger; and 
 through the hanging smoke the first thing I saw 
 was his paw as he made a vicious side blow at 
 me. The rush of his charge carried him past. 
 As he struck he lurched forward, leaving a pool 
 of bright blood where his muzzle hit the 
 ground ; but he recovered himself and made two 
 or three jumps onward, while I hurriedly 
 jammed a couple of cartridges into the maga- 
 zine, my rifle holding only four, all of which I 
 had fired. Then he tried to pull up, but as he 
 did so his muscles seemed suddenly to give way, 
 his head drooped, and he rolled over and over 
 like a shot rabbit. Each of my first three bullets 
 had inflicted a mortal wound. 
 
 It was already twilight, and I merely opened 
 the carcass, and then trotted back to camp. 
 Next morning I returned and with much labor 
 took off the skin. The fur was very fine, the an- 
 imal being in excellent trim, and unusually 
 
Old Ephraim, the Grisly Bear 153 
 
 bright colored. Unfortunately, in packing it 
 out I lost the skull, and had to supply its place 
 with one of plaster. The beauty of the trophy, 
 and the memory of the circumstances under 
 which I procured it, make me value it perhaps 
 more highly than any other in my house. 
 
 This is the only instance in which I have been 
 regularly charged by a grisly. On the whole, 
 the danger of hunting these great bears has been 
 much exaggerated. At the beginning of the 
 present century, when white hunters first en- 
 countered the grisly, he was doubtless an ex- 
 ceedingly savage beast, prone to attack without 
 provocation, and a redoubtable foe to persons 
 armed with the clumsy, small-bore, muzzle- 
 loading rifles of the day. But at present bitter 
 experience has taught him caution. He has 
 been hunted for sport, and hunted for his pelt, 
 and hunted for the bounty, and hunted as a dan- 
 gerous enemy to stock, until, save in the very 
 wildest districts, he has learned to be more wary 
 than a deer, and to avoid man's presence almost 
 as carefully as the most timid kind of game. 
 Except in rare cases he will not attack of his own 
 accord, and, as a rule, even when wounded his 
 object is escape rather than battle. 
 
 Still, when fairly brought to bay, or when 
 moved by a sudden fit of ungovernable anger, 
 
154 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 the grisly is beyond peradventure a very danger- 
 ous antagonist. The first shot, if taken at a bear 
 a good distance off and previously unwounded 
 and unharried, is not usually fraught with much 
 danger, the startled animal being at the outset 
 bent merely on flight. It is always hazardous, 
 however, to track a wounded and worried grisly 
 into thick cover, and the man who habitually 
 follows and kills this chief of American game 
 in dense timber, never abandoning the bloody 
 trail whithersoever it leads, must show no small 
 degree of skill and hardihood, and must not too 
 closely count the risk to life or limb. Bears dif- 
 fer widely in temper, and occasionally one may 
 be found who will not show fight, no matter 
 how much he is bullied ; but, as a rule, a hunter 
 must be cautious in meddling with a wounded 
 animal which has retreated into a dense thick- 
 et, and has been once or twice roused; and 
 such a beast, when it does turn, will usually 
 charge again and again, and fight to the last 
 with unconquerable ferocity. The jihort dis- 
 tance at which the bear can be seen through the 
 underbrush, the fury of his charge, and his te- 
 nacity of life make it necessary for the hunter 
 on such occasions to have steady nerves and a 
 fairly quick and accurate aim. It is always well 
 to have two men in following a wounded bear 
 
Old Ephraim^ the Grisly Bear 155 
 
 under such conditions. This is not necessary, 
 however, and a good hunter, rather than lose 
 his quarry, will, under ordinary circumstances, 
 follow and attack it, no matter how tangled the 
 fastness in which it has sought refuge; but he 
 must act warily and with the utmost caution and 
 resolution, if he wishes to escape a terrible and 
 probably fatal mauling. An experienced hunter 
 is rarely rash, and never heedless ; he will not, 
 when alone, follow a wounded bear into a thick- 
 et. If by the exercise of patience, skill, and 
 knowledge of the game's habits he can avoid 
 the necessity; but it is idle to talk of the feat as 
 something which ought In no case to be attempt- 
 ed. While danger ought never to be needlessly 
 incurred, It Is yet true that the keenest zest in 
 sport comes from Its presence, and from the con- 
 sequent exercise of the qualities necessary to 
 overcome It. The most thrilling moments of an 
 American hunter's life are those In which, with 
 every sense on the alert, and with nerves strung 
 to the highest point, he is following alone into 
 the heart of its forest fastness the fresh and 
 bloody footprints of an angered grisly; and no 
 other triumph of American hunting can com- ^ 
 pare with the victory to be thus gained. 
 
THE BIG-HORN SHEEP 
 
 It has happened that I have generally hunted 
 big-horn during weather of arctic severity; so 
 that In my mind this great sheep Is Inseparably 
 associated with snow-clad, desolate wastes, Ice- 
 coated crags, and the bitter cold of a northern 
 winter; whereas the sight of a prong-buck, the 
 game that we usually hunt early In the season, 
 always recalls to me the endless green of the 
 midsummer prairies as they shimmer In the 
 sunlight. 
 
 Yet In reality the big-horn is by no means 
 confined to any one climatic zone. Along the 
 Interminable mountain chains of the Great Di- 
 vide It ranges south to the hot, dry table-lands 
 of middle Mexico, as well as far to the north- 
 ward of the Canadian boundary, among the tow- 
 ering and tremendous peaks where the glaciers 
 are fed from fields of everlasting snow. There 
 exists no animal more hardy, nor any better 
 fitted to grapple with the extremes of heat and 
 cold. Droughts, scanty pasturage, or deep 
 
 snows make It shift its ground, but never mere 
 
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The Big-Horn Sheep 157 
 
 variation of temperature. The lofty mountains 
 form its favorite abode, but it is almost equally 
 at home in any large tract of very rough and 
 broken ground. It Is by no means an exclu- 
 sively alpine animal, like the white goat. It Is 
 not only found throughout the main chains of 
 the Rockies, as well as on the Sierras of the 
 south and the coast ranges of western Oregon, 
 Washington, and British Columbia, but It also 
 exists to the east among the clusters of high hills 
 and the stretches of barren Bad Lands that 
 break the monotonous level of the great plains. 
 
 Throughout most of Its range the big-horn 
 Is a partly migratory beast. In the summer it 
 seeks the highest mountains, often passing above 
 timber-line; and when the fall snows deepen it 
 comes down to the lower spurs or foot-hills, or 
 may even travel some distance southward. If 
 there Is a large tract of Bad Lands near the 
 mountains, sheep may be plentiful In them 
 throughout the severe weather, while In the 
 summer not a single individual will be found in 
 Its winter haunts, all having then retired to the 
 high peaks. 
 
 Sometimes big-horn wander widely for rea- 
 sons unconnected with the weather : all of those 
 in a district may suddenly leave it and perhaps 
 not return for several years. Such is often the 
 
158 hunting Wild Animals 
 
 result of a district being settled, or being ex- 
 posed to incessant hunting. After a certain 
 number of sheep have been killed the remainder 
 may all disappear, possibly one or two small 
 bands only staying behind; but it is quite likely 
 that two or three years later the bulk of the van- 
 ished host will come back again. 
 
 But where the region that they inhabit is cut 
 off from the mountains by settled districts, or by 
 great stretches of plain and prairie, then the 
 sheep that dwell therein can make no such mi- 
 grations. Thus they live all the year round in 
 the Little Missouri Bad Lands; and though the 
 different bands wander away and to and fro for 
 scores of miles, especially in the fall — for big- 
 horn are far more restless than deer — ^yet they 
 do not shift their positions much on account of 
 the season, and are often found in precisely the 
 same places both summer and winter. They 
 thus bear with indifference exposure to the ex- 
 tremes of heat and cold in a climate where the 
 yearly variation reaches the utmost possible lim- 
 it, the thermometer sometimes covering a range 
 of a hundred and seventy degrees in the course 
 of twelve months. There are few spots on 
 earth much hotter than these Bad Lands during 
 a spell of fierce summer weather, and, unlike the 
 deer, the sheep cannot seek the shade of the 
 
The Big'Horn Sheep I59 
 
 dense thickets. In the glare of midday the 
 naked angular hills yield no shelter whatever; 
 the barren ravines between them turn into ovens 
 beneath the brazen sun. The still, lifeless, 
 burning air stifles those who breathe it, while 
 the parched and heat-cracked canon walls are 
 intolerable to the touch. 
 
 But though the mountain sheep can stand 
 this, and in fact do so with even less protection 
 than the deer, yet they certainly dislike it more 
 than do the latter. If mountains are near, they 
 go up them far sooner and far higher than the 
 deer. On the other hand, they bear the winter 
 blizzards much better, caring less for shelter, 
 and keeping their strength pretty well. Ordi- 
 narily when in the Bad Lands they do not shift 
 their ground save to get on the lee side of the 
 cliffs, though the deep snows of course drive 
 them from the mountains. A very heavy fall of 
 snow, if they are high up on the hills, occasion- 
 ally forces a band to enter the evergreen woods 
 and make a regular yard, as deer do, beneath 
 the overhanging cover-giving branches; then 
 they subsist on the scanty browse until they can 
 get back to pasture lands. But this is rare. 
 Generally they stay in the open, and bid defiance 
 to the elements ; yet, like other game, they often 
 seem to have the knack of foretelling any storm 
 
i6o Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 or cold spell of unusual severity and length. 
 On the eve of such a storm they frequently re- 
 treat to some secure haven of refuge. This may 
 be a nook or cranny In the rocks, or merely a 
 slight hollow to leeward of a little grove of 
 stunted pines; and there the band may have to 
 stay without food for several days, until the 
 storm is over. Occasionally they succumb to the 
 deep snow ; but If they have any kind of chance 
 for their lives, this happens less often than with 
 -either deer or antelope. 
 
 Our American mountain sheep usually go In 
 bands of from fifteen to thirty individuals, occa- 
 sionally of many more ; while often small parties 
 of two or three will stay by themselves. In the 
 w^inter, or sometimes not until the early spring, 
 the old rams separate. The oldest and finest are 
 often found entirely alone, retiring to the most 
 inaccessible solitudes; the younger ones keep in 
 Jittle flocks of perhaps half a dozen or so. But at 
 all times their habits are very variable ; for they 
 are restless, wandering beasts, with something 
 whimsical in their tempers, and given at times 
 to queer freaks. If the fit seize them, and espe- 
 cially if they have been alarmed or annoyed, 
 they may at any time leave their accustomed 
 ■dwelling-places, or act in a manner absolutely 
 contrary to their usual conduct. They seem to 
 
The Big'Horn Sheep i6r 
 
 have fits of restless waywardness, or even of 
 panic curiosity; and so at times wander into un- 
 looked-for places, or betray a sudden heedless- 
 ness of dangers against which they on ordinary 
 occasions carefully guard. This last freak, 
 however, is generally shown only in very wild 
 localities or among young animals. Where 
 hunters are scarce or almost unknown, all wild 
 animals are very bold. I have seen deer in re- 
 mote forests, and even in little-hunted localities 
 near my ranch, so tame that they would stand 
 looking at the hunter within fifty yards for sev- 
 eral minutes before taking flight. Mountain 
 sheep under similar circumstances show a lordly 
 disregard for the human Intruder, leaving his 
 presence at a leisurely gait, in strong contrast to 
 the mad gallop of their more sophisticated 
 brethren when alarmed. 
 
 A very short experience with the rifle-bearing 
 portion of mankind changes the big-horn into a 
 quarry whose successful chase taxes to the ut- 
 most the skill alike of still-hunter and of moun- 
 taineer. A solitary old ram seems to be ever on 
 the watch. His favorite resting-place is a shelf 
 or terrace-end high up on some cliff, from 
 whence he can see far and wide over the coun- 
 try round about. The least sound — the rattle 
 of a loose stone, a cough, even a heavy footfall 
 
1 62 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 on hard earth — attracts his attention, making 
 him at once clamber up on some peak to try for 
 a glimpse of the danger. His eyes catch the 
 slightest movement. His nose is as keen as an 
 elk's, and gives him surer warning than any oth- 
 er sense; the slightest taint In the air produces 
 immediate flight in the direction away from the 
 danger. But there is one compensation, from the 
 himter's standpoint, for his wonderfully devel- 
 oped smelling powers; he lives In such very 
 broken country that the currents of air often go 
 over his head, so that it is at times possible to 
 hunt him almost down wind. 
 
 The mountain sheep of America, when the 
 choice is open to them, actually seem to prefer 
 regions as wild and rugged as they are sterile. 
 The tufts of grass between the rocks, the scanty 
 blades that grow on the clay buttes, suffice for 
 their wants, and the amount of climbing neces- 
 sary to get at them is literally a matter of indif- 
 ference to beasts whose muscles are like whip- 
 cord and whose tendons are like steel. A big- 
 horn is a marvellous leaper, perhaps even better 
 when the jump Is perpendicular than when it is 
 horizontal. His poise is perfect; his eye and 
 foot work together with unerring accuracy. One 
 will unhesitatingly bound or drop a dozen feet 
 on to a little rock pinnacle where there is scarce 
 
The Big-Horn Sheep 163 
 
 a hand's breadth on which to stand. The pres- 
 ence of the tiniest cracks in the otherwise smooth 
 surface of a sheer rock wall enables a mountain 
 sheep to go up it with ease. The proud, lordly 
 bearing of an old ram makes him look exactly 
 what he is, one of the noblest of game animals; 
 his port is the same whether at rest or in motion. 
 Except when very badly frightened, his move- 
 ments are all made with a certain self-confident 
 absence of hurry, as if he were conscious of a 
 vast reserve power of strength and activity on 
 which to draw at need. As a mountaineer he is 
 the embodiment of elastic, sinewy strength and 
 self-command rather than of mere nervous agil- 
 ity. He hardly ever makes a mistake, even 
 when rushing at speed over the slippery, ice- 
 coated crags in winter. 
 
 The most difficult of all climbing is to go over 
 rocks when the ice has filled up all the chinks and 
 crannies, and the flat slabs are glassy in their 
 hard smoothness. A black-tail buck is no mean 
 climber; yet under such circumstances I have 
 seen one lose his footing and tumble head over 
 heels, scraping great handfuls of hair off his 
 hide; but I have never known a big-horn to 
 make a misstep. This is undoubtedly largely 
 owing to the difference between the two ani- 
 mals in the structure of their feet. A sheep's 
 
164 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 hoof is an elastic pad, only the rims and the toe- 
 points being hard, and it thus gets a good grip 
 on the slightest projection, or on any little 
 roughness in the rock. The tracks are very dif- 
 ferent from deer tracks, being nearly square in 
 form, instead of heart-shaped, the prints of the 
 toes rather deep and wide apart, even when the 
 animal has been walking. 
 
 A band of sheep will often seem to court cer- 
 tain death by plunging off the brink of what 
 looks like a perpendicular cliff, where there is 
 not a ledge or a crack-yielding foothold. In 
 such cases, if the cliff is high, it will be found on 
 examination that it is not quite perpendicular, 
 and that the sheep, in making the fearful de- 
 scent, from time to time touch or strike the cliff 
 with their hoofs, thus going down in long 
 bounds, keeping their poise all the time. The 
 final bound is often made almost head first, as if 
 they were diving. 
 
 Narrow ledges, overlooking an abyss the 
 fathomless depths of which would make even a 
 trained cragsman giddy, are very favorite re- 
 sorts. So are the crests of the ridges themselves. 
 If in any patch of Bad Lands there is an unusu- 
 ally high chain of steep, bare clay buttes, moun- 
 tain sheep are sure to select their tops as a regu- 
 lar parade-ground After a rain the clay takes 
 
The Big'Horn Sheep 165 
 
 their hoof-prints as clearly as if it were sealing- 
 wax, and all along the top of the crest they beat 
 out a regular walk from one end to the other, 
 with occasional little side-paths leading out to 
 some overhanging shoulder or jutting spur, 
 from whence there is a good view of the sur- 
 rounding country. 
 
 The last big-horn I killed in the fall of i894> 
 while I was camped on the Little Missouri, 
 some ten miles below my ranch, cost me but 
 a single cartridge. The bottoms were broad 
 and grassy, and were walled in by rows of high, 
 steep bluffs, with back of them a mass of broken 
 country, in many places almost impassable for 
 horses. The wagon was drawn up on the edge 
 of the fringe of tall cottonwoods which stretched 
 along the brink of the shrunken river. The 
 weather had grown cold, and at night the frost 
 gathered thickly on our sleeping-bags. Great 
 flocks of sandhill cranes passed overhead from 
 time to time, the air resounding with their 
 strange, musical, guttural clangor. 
 
 For several days we had hunted persevering- 
 ly, but without success, through the broken coun- 
 try. We had come across tracks of mountain 
 sheep, but not the animals themselves, and the 
 few black-tail which we had seen had seen us 
 
1 66 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 first and escaped before we could get within 
 shot. The only thing killed had been a white- 
 tail fawn, which Lambert had knocked over by 
 a very pretty shot as we were riding through a 
 long, heavily timbered bottom. Four men in 
 stalwart health and taking much out-door exer- 
 cise have large appetites, and the flesh of the 
 white-tail was almost gone. 
 
 One evening Lambert and I hunted nearly to 
 the head of one of the creeks which opened close 
 to our camp, and, in turning to descend what 
 we thought was one of the side coulies leading 
 into it, we contrived to get over the divide into 
 the coulies of an entirely different creek system, 
 and did not discover our error until it was too 
 late to remedy it. We struck the river about 
 nightfall, and were not quite sure where, and 
 had six miles' tramp in the dark along the sandy 
 river-bed and through the dense timber bottoms, 
 wading the streams a dozen times before we 
 finally struck camp, tired and hungry, and able 
 to appreciate to the full the stew of hot venison 
 and potatoes, and afterward the comfort of our 
 buffalo and caribou-hide sleeping-bags. The 
 next morning the Sheriff's remark of "Look 
 alive, you fellows, if you want any breakfast," 
 awoke the other members of the party shortly 
 after dawn. It was bitterly cold as we scram- 
 
The Big' Horn Sheep 167 
 
 bled out of our bedding, and, after a hasty wash, 
 huddled around the fire, where the venison was 
 sizzling and the coffee-pot boiling, while the 
 bread was kept warm in the Dutch oven. 
 About a third of a mile away to the west the 
 bluffs, which rose abruptly from the river bot- 
 tom, were crowned by a high plateau, where the 
 grass was so good that overnight the horses had 
 been led up and picketed on it, and the man who 
 had led them up had stated the previous evening 
 that he had seen what he took to be fresh foot- 
 prints of a mountain sheep crossing the surface 
 of a bluff fronting our camp. The footprints 
 apparently showed that the animal had been 
 there since the camp had been pitched. The 
 face of the cliff on this side was very sheer, the 
 path by which the horses scrambled to the top 
 being around a shoulder and out of sight of 
 camp. 
 
 While sitting close up around the fire finish- 
 ing breakfast, and just as the first level sun- 
 beams struck the top of the plateau, we saw on 
 this cliff crest something moving, and at first 
 supposed it to be one of the horses which had 
 broken loose from its picket-pin. Soon the 
 thing, whatever it was, raised its head, and we 
 were all on our feet in a moment, exclaiming 
 that it was a deer or a sheep. It was feeding 
 
1 68 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 m plain sight of us only about a third of a 
 mile distant, and the horses, as I afterward 
 found, were but a few rods beyond it on the 
 plateau. The instant I realized that it was 
 game of some kind I seized my rifle, buckled 
 on my cartridge-belt, and slunk off toward the 
 river-bed. As soon as I was under the pro- 
 tection of the line of cottonwoods, I trotted 
 briskly toward the cliff, and when I got to 
 where it impinged on the river I ran a little 
 to the left, and, selecting what I deemed to be 
 a favorable place, began to make the ascent. 
 The animal was on the grassy bench, some 
 eight or ten feet below the crest, when I last 
 saw it; but it was evidently moving hither and 
 thither, sometimes on this bench and some- 
 times on the crest itself, cropping the short 
 grass and browsing on the young shrubs. 
 The cliff was divided by several shoulders or 
 ridges, there being hollows like vertical gullies 
 between them, and up one of these I scram- 
 bled, using the utmost caution not to dislodge 
 earth or stones. Finally I reached the bench 
 just below the sky-line, and then, turning to 
 the left, wriggled cautiously along it, hat in 
 hand. The cliff was so steep and bulged so 
 in the middle, and, moreover, the shoulders 
 or projecting ridges in the surface spoken of 
 
The Big'Horn Sheep 169 
 
 above were so pronounced, that I knew it was 
 out of the question for the animal to have seen 
 me, but I was afraid it might have heard me. 
 The air was absolutely still, and so I had no fear 
 of its sharp nose. Twice in succession I peered 
 with the utmost caution over shoulders of the 
 cliff, merely to see nothing beyond save another 
 shoulder some forty or fifty yards distant. 
 Then I crept up to the edge and looked over the 
 level plateau. Nothing was in sight excepting 
 the horses, and these were close up to me, and, 
 of course, they all raised their heads to look. I 
 nervously turned half round, sure that if the ani- 
 mal, whatever it was, was in sight, it would 
 promptly take the alarm. However, by good 
 luck, it appeared that at this time it was below 
 the crest on the terrace or bench already men- 
 tioned, and, on creeping to the next shoulder, I 
 at last saw it — a yearling mountain sheep — 
 walking slowly away from me, and evidently 
 utterly unsuspicious of any danger. I straight- 
 ened up, bringing my rifle to my shoulder, and 
 as it wheeled I fired, and the sheep made two or 
 three blind jumps in my direction. So close was 
 I to the camp, and so still was the cold morning, 
 that I distinctly heard one of the three men, who 
 had remained clustered about the fire eagerly 
 watching my movements, call, "By George, he's 
 
170 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 missed; I saw the bullet strike the cliff." I had 
 fired behind the shoulders, and the bullet of 
 course going through, had buried itself in the 
 bluff beyond. The wound was almost instanta- 
 neously fatal, and the sheep, after striving in 
 vain to keep its balance, fell heels over head 
 down a crevice, where it jammed. I descended, 
 released the carcass and pitched it on ahead of 
 me, only to have it jam again near the foot of the 
 cliff. Before I got it loose I was joined by my 
 three companions, who had been running head- 
 long toward me through the brush ever since the 
 time they had seen the animal fall. 
 
 I never obtained another sheep under circum- 
 stances which seemed to me quite so remarkable 
 as these ; for sheep are, on the whole, the wariest 
 of game. Nevertheless, with all game there is 
 an immense amount of chance in the chase, and 
 it is perhaps not wholly uncharacteristic of a 
 hunter's luck that, after having hunted faithfully 
 in vain and with much hard labor for several 
 days through a good sheep country, we should at 
 last have obtained one within sight and earshot 
 of camp. Incidentally I may mention that I have 
 never tasted better mutton, or meat of any kind, 
 ijian that furnished by this tender yearling. 
 
THE BOBCAT 
 
 In the books the bobcat is always called a 
 lynx, which it of course is ; but whenever a hunter 
 or trapper speaks of a lynx (which he usually 
 calls "link," feeling dimly that the other pronun- 
 ciation is a plural), he means a lucivee. Bob- 
 cat is a good distinctive name, and it is one which 
 I think the book people might with advantage 
 adopt ; for wild-cat, which is the name given to 
 the small lynx in the East, is already pre-empted 
 by the true wild-cat of Europe. Like all people 
 of European descent who have gone into strange 
 lands, we Americans have christened our wild 
 beasts with a fine disregard for their specific and 
 generic relations. We called the bison "buffalo" 
 as long as it existed, and we still call the big stag 
 an "elk," instead of using for it the excellent 
 term wapiti ; on the other hand, to the true elk 
 and the reindeer we gave the new names of 
 moose and caribou — excellent names, too, by the 
 way. The prong-buck is always called antelope, 
 though it is not an antelope at all ; and the white 
 
 goat is not a goat ; while the distinctive name of 
 
 171 
 
172 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 "big-horn'* is rarely used for the mountain 
 sheep. In most cases, however, It is mere ped- 
 antry to try to upset popular custom in such mat- 
 ters ; and where, as with the bobcat, a perfectly 
 good name Is taken, it would be better for scien- 
 tific men to adopt It. I may add that in this par- 
 ticular of nomenclature we are no worse sinners 
 than other people. The English in Ceylon, the 
 English and Dutch in South Africa, and the 
 Spanish in South America, have all shown the 
 same genius for misnaming beasts and birds. 
 
 Bobcats were very numerous where we were 
 hunting [in Colorado]. They fed chiefly upon 
 the rabbits, which fairly swarmed ; mostly cotton- 
 tails, but a few jacks. Contrary to the popular 
 belief, the winter is In many places a time of 
 plenty for carnivorous wild beasts. In this place, 
 for Instance, the abundance of deer and rabbits 
 made good hunting for both cougar and bobcat, 
 and all those we killed were as fat as possible, and 
 in consequence weighed more than their inches 
 promised. The bobcats are very fond of prairie- 
 dogs, and haunt the dog towns as soon as spring 
 comes and the inhabitants emerge from their hii 
 bernatlon. They sometimes pounce on higher 
 game. We came upon an eight-months' 
 fawn — ^very nearly a yearling — ^which had been 
 killed by a big male bobcat; and Judge Forci 
 
A BOBCAT. 
 From a photog^'aph taken in Colorado, January, 1901. 
 
The Bobcat 173 
 
 man informed me that near his ranch, a few 
 years previously, an exceptionally large bobcat 
 had killed a yearling doe. Bobcats will also 
 take lambs and young pigs, and if the chance 
 occurs will readily seize their small kinsman, the 
 house cat. 
 
 We found that the bobcats sometimes made 
 their lairs along the rocky ledges or in holes in 
 the cut banks, and sometimes in thickets, prowl- 
 ing about during the night, and now and then 
 even during the day. We never chased them 
 unless the dogs happened to run across them by 
 accident when questing for cougar, or when we 
 were returning home after a day when we had 
 failed to find cougar. Usually the cat gave a 
 good run, occasionally throwing out the dogs by 
 doubling or jack-knifing. Two or three times 
 one of them gave us an hour's sharp trotting, 
 cantering, and galloping through the open cedar 
 and pinyon groves on the table-lands; and the 
 runs sometimes lasted for a much longer period 
 when the dogs had to go across ledges and 
 through deep ravines. 
 
 On one of our runs a party of ravens fluttered 
 along from tree to trees beside us, making queer 
 gurgling noises and evidently perfectly aware 
 that they might expect to reap a reward from our 
 hunting. Ravens, multitudes of magpies, and 
 
174 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 golden and bald eagles were seen continually^ 
 and all four flocked to any carcass which was 
 left in the open. The eagle and the raven are 
 true birds of the wilderness, and in a way their 
 presence both heightened and relieved the iron 
 desolation of the wintry mountains. 
 
 Over half the cats we started escaped, getting 
 into caves or deep holes in washouts. In the 
 other instances they went up trees and were of 
 course easily shot. Tony and Baldy would bring 
 them out of any hole into which they them- 
 selves could get. After their loss, Lil, who is a 
 small hound, once went into a hole in a washout 
 after a cat. After a while she stopped barking, 
 though we could still hear the cat growling. 
 What had happened to her we did not know. 
 We spent a couple of hours calling to her and 
 trying to get her to come out, but she neither 
 came out nor answered, and as sunset was ap- 
 proaching and the ranch was some miles off, we 
 rode back there, intending to return with spades 
 in the morning. However, by breakfast we 
 found that Lil had come back. We supposed 
 that she had got on the other side of the cat and 
 had been afraid or unable to attack it; so that as 
 Collins, the cow-puncher, who was a Southerner, 
 phrased it, "she just naturally stayed in the hole" 
 until some time during the night the cat went out 
 
i I 
 
 The Bobcat 175 
 
 and she followed. When once hunters and 
 hounds have come into the land, it is evident that 
 the bobcats which take refuge in caves have a 
 far better chance of surviving than those which 
 make their lairs in the open and go up trees. 
 But trees are sure havens against their wilderness 
 foes. Goff informed me that he once came in 
 the snow to a place where the tracks showed that 
 some coyotes had put a bobcat up a tree, and 
 had finally abandoned the effort to get at it. A 
 single coyote will rarely meddle with a bobcat. 
 Any good fighting dog will kill one; but an un- 
 trained dog, even of large size, will probably 
 fail, as the bobcat makes good use of both teeth 
 and claws ; they frequently left marks on some of 
 the pack. We found them very variable in size. 
 My two largest — both of course males — 
 weighed respectively thirty-one and thirty-nine 
 pounds. The latter, Goff said, was of exception- 
 al size, and as large as any he had ever killed. 
 The full-grown females went down as low as 
 eighteen pounds, or even lower. 
 
 When the bobcats were in the tree tops we 
 could get up very close. They looked like large 
 malevolent pussies. I once heard one of then? 
 squawl defiance when the dogs tried to get it out 
 of a hole. Ordinarily they confined themselves 
 to a low growling. Stewart and Goff went up 
 
176 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 the trees with their cameras whenever we got a 
 bobcat in a favorable position, and endeavored 
 to take Its photograph. Sometimes they were 
 very successful. Although they were frequently 
 within six feet of a cat, and occasionally even 
 poked It In order to make It change Its position, 
 I never saw one make a motion to jump on them. 
 Two or three times on our approach the cat 
 jumped from the tree almost Into the midst of 
 the pack, but It was so quick that It got off before 
 they could seize It. They Invariably put It up 
 another tree before it had gone any distance. 
 
THE COUGAR 
 
 I had long been anxious to make a regular 
 hunt after cougar in a country where the 
 beasts were plentiful and where we could 
 follow them with a good pack of hounds. 
 Astonishingly little of a satisfactory na- 
 ture has been left on record about the 
 cougar by hunters, and in most places the 
 chances for observation of the big cats steadily 
 grow less. They have been thinned out almost 
 to the point of extermination throughout the 
 Eastern States. In the Rocky Mountain region 
 they are still plentiful in places, but are growing 
 less so; while on the contrary the wolf, which 
 was exterminated even more quickly in the East,, 
 is in the West at present increasing in numbers. 
 In northwestern Colorado a dozen years ago,, 
 cougars were far more plentiful than wolves; 
 whereas at the present day the wolf is probably 
 the more numerous. Nevertheless, there are 
 large areas, here and there among the Rockies,, 
 in which cougars will be plentiful for many years. 
 
 177 
 
178 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 No American beast has been the subject of so 
 much loose writing or of such wild fables as the 
 cougar. Even its name is unsettled. In the 
 Eastern States it is usually called panther or 
 painter ; In the Western States, mountain lion, or, 
 toward the South, Mexican lion. The Spanish- 
 speaking people usually call it simply Hon. It 
 is, however, sometimes called cougar in the West 
 and Southwest of our country, and in South 
 America, puma. As it is desirable where possi- 
 ble not to use a name that is misleading and is 
 already appropriated to some entirely different 
 animal, it is best to call it cougar. 
 
 The cougar is a very singular beast, shy and 
 elusive to an extraordinary degree, very coward- 
 ly and yet bloodthirsty and ferocious, varying 
 wonderfully in size, and subject, like many other 
 beasts, to queer freaks of character In occasional 
 individuals. This fact of individual variation 
 in size and temper is almost always Ignored in 
 treating of the animal; whereas it ought never 
 to be left out of sight. 
 
 The average writer, and for the matter of 
 that, the average hunter, where cougars are 
 scarce, knows little or nothing of them, and in 
 describing them merely draws upon the stock of 
 well-worn myths which portray them as terrible 
 foes of man, as dropping on their prey from 
 
The Cougar 17^ 
 
 trees where they have been lying in wait, etc., 
 etc. Very occasionally there appears an abso- 
 lutely trustworthy account like that by Dr. Hart 
 Merriam in his "Adirondack Mammals." 
 
 Fables aside, the cougar is a very interesting 
 creature. It is found from the cold, desolate 
 plains of Patagonia to north of the Canadian 
 line, and lives alike among the snow-clad peaks 
 of the Andes and in the steaming forests of the 
 Amazon. Doubtless careful investigation will 
 disclose several varying forms in an animal 
 found over such immense tracts of country and 
 living under such utterly diverse conditions. But 
 in its essential habits and traits, the big, slinking, 
 nearly unicolored cat seems to be much the same 
 everywhere, whether living in mountain, open 
 plain, or forest, under arctic cold or tropic heat. 
 When the settlements become thick, it retires to 
 dense forest, dark swamp, or inaccessible moun- 
 tain gorge, and moves about only at night. In 
 wilder regions it not infrequently roams during 
 the day and ventures freely into the open. Deer 
 are its customary prey where they are plentiful, 
 bucks, does, and fawns being kiUed indifferently. 
 Usually the deer is killed almost instantaneously, 
 but occasionally there is quite a scuffle, in which 
 the cougar may get bruised, though as far as I 
 know, never seriously. It is also a dreaded ene- 
 
i8o Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 my of sheep, pigs, calves, and especially colts^ 
 and when pressed by hunger a big male cougar 
 will kill a full-grown hors€ or cow, moose or wa- 
 piti. It is the special enemy of mountain sheep. 
 In 1886, while hunting white goats north of 
 Clarke's fork of the Columbia, in a region where 
 cougar were common, I found them preying as 
 freely on the goats as on the deer. It rarely 
 catches antelope, but is quick to seize rabbits, 
 other small beasts, and even porcupines. 
 
 No animal, not even the wolf, is so rarely seen 
 or so difficult to get without dogs. On the other 
 hand, no other wild beast of its size and power 
 is so easy to kill by the aid of dogs. There are 
 many contradictions in its character. Like the 
 American wolf, it is certainly very much afraid 
 of man ; yet it habitually follows the trail of the 
 hunter or solitary traveller, dogging his foot- 
 steps, itself always unseen. I have had this hap- 
 pen to me personally. When hungry it will seize 
 and carry off any dog ; yet it will sometimes go 
 up a tree when pursued even by a single small 
 dog wholly unable to do it the least harm. It is 
 small wonder that the average frontier settler 
 should grow to regard almost with superstition 
 the great furtive cat which he never sees, but of 
 whose presence he is ever aware, and of whose 
 prowess sinister proof is sometimes afforded by 
 
The Cougar i8r 
 
 the deaths not alone of his lesser stock, but even 
 of his milch cow or saddle-horse. 
 
 The cougar is as large, as powerful, and as 
 formidably armed as the Indian panther, and 
 quite as well able to attack man; yet the in- 
 stances of its having done so are exceedingly 
 rare. The vast majority of the tales to this ef- 
 fect are undoubtedly inventions. But it is fool- 
 ish to deny that such attacks on human beings 
 ever occur. 
 
 Even when hunted the cougar shows itself, as 
 a rule, an abject coward, not to be compared in 
 courage and prowess with the grisly bear, and 
 but little more dangerous to man than is the wolf 
 under similar circumstances. Without dogs it 
 is usually a mere chance that one is killed. Goff 
 has killed some 300 cougars during the sixteen 
 years he has been hunting in northwestern Col- 
 orado, yet all but two of them were encountered 
 while he was with his pack ; although this is in a 
 region where they are plentiful. When hunted 
 with good dogs their attention is so taken up 
 with the pack that they have little time to devote 
 to men. When hunted without dogs they never 
 charge unless actually cornered, and, as a gen- 
 eral rule, not even then, unless the man chooses 
 to come right up to them. I knew of one Indian 
 being killed in 1887, and near my ranch a cow- 
 
1 82 Huntmg Wild Animals 
 
 boy was mauled; but in the first instance the cou- 
 gar had been knocked down and the Indian was 
 bending over it when it revived ; and in the next 
 instance, the cowboy literally came right on top 
 of the animal. Now, under such circumstances 
 either a bull elk or a black-tail buck will occa- 
 sionally iight; twice I have known of wounded 
 wapiti regularly charging, and one of my own 
 cowboys, George Myer, was very roughly han- 
 dled by a black-tail buck which he had wounded. 
 In all his experience Goff says that he never but 
 once had a cougar start to charge him, and on 
 that occasion it was promptly killed by a bullet. 
 Usually the cougar does not even charge at the 
 dogs beyond a few feet, confining itself to seiz- 
 ing or striking any member of the pack which 
 comes close up; although it will occasionally, 
 when much irritated, make a rapid dash and 
 seize some bold assailant. While I was on my 
 hunt, one of Goff *s brothers lost a hound in hunt- 
 ing a cougar ; there were but two hounds, and the 
 cougar would not tree for them, finally seizing 
 and killing one that came too near. At the same 
 time a ranchman not far off set his cattle dog on 
 a cougar, which after a short run turned and 
 killed the dog. But time and again cougars are 
 brought to bay or treed by dogs powerless to do 
 them the slightest damage; and they usually 
 
The Cougar 183 
 
 meet their death tamely when the hunter comes 
 up. I have had no personal experience either 
 with the South American jaguar or the Old- 
 World leopard or panther ; but these great spot- 
 ted cats must be far more dangerous adversaries 
 than the cougar. 
 
 It is true, as I have said, that a cougar will 
 follow a man ; but then a weasel will sometimes 
 do the same thing. Whatever the cougar^s mo- 
 tive, it is certain that in the immense majority of 
 cases there is not the slightest danger of his at- 
 tacking the man he follows. Dr. Hart Merriam 
 informs me, however, that he is satisfied that he 
 came across one genuine instance of a cougar 
 killing a man whose tracks he had dogged. It 
 cannot be too often repeated that we must never 
 lose sight of the individual variation in character 
 and conduct among wild beasts'. A thousand 
 times a cougar might follow a man either not in- 
 tending or not daring to attack him, while in the 
 thousandth and first case it might be that the 
 temper of the beast and the conditions were such 
 that the attack would be made. 
 
 Normally, then, the cougar is not in any way 
 a formidable foe to man, and it is certainly by 
 no means as dangerous to dogs as it could be if 
 its courage and intelligence equalled its power 
 to do mischief. It strikes with its forepaw like 
 
184 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 a cat, lacerating the foe with its sharp claws ; or 
 else it holds the animal with them, while the mus- 
 cular forearm draws it in until the fatal bite may 
 be inflicted. Whenever possible it strives to bite 
 an assailant in the head. Occasionally, when 
 fighting with a large dog, a cougar will throw 
 itself on its back and try to rip open its antago- 
 nist with its hind feet. Male cougars often fight 
 desperately among themselves. 
 
 Occasionally, but not often, the cougars I shot 
 snarled or uttered a low, thunderous growl as 
 we approached the tree, or as the dogs came 
 upon them in the cave. In the death-grapple 
 they were silent, excepting that one younger cou- 
 gar snarled and squalled as It battled with the 
 dogs. <^ 
 
 The cougar is sometimes tamed. A friend of 
 mine had one which was as good-natured as pos- 
 ble until it was a year old, when it died. But one 
 kept by another friend, while still quite young, 
 became treacherous and dangerous. I doubt if 
 they would ever become as trustworthy as a 
 tame wolf, which, If taken when a very young 
 puppy, will often grow up exactly like a dog. 
 At the present time there is such a tame wolf 
 with the Colorado Springs greyhounds. It Is 
 safer and more friendly than many collies, and 
 IS on excellent terms with the great greyhounds ; 
 
The Cougar 185 
 
 though these are themselves solely used to hunt 
 wolves and coyotes, and tackle them with head- 
 long ferocity, having, unaided, killed a score or 
 two of the large wolves and hundreds of coyotes. 
 Hunting in the snow, we were able to tell very 
 clearly what the cougars whose trails we were 
 following had been doing. Goff's eye for a 
 trail was unerring, and he read at a glance 
 the lesson it taught. All the cougars which we 
 came across were living exclusively upon deer, 
 and their stomachs were filled with nothing else, 
 much hair being mixed with the meat. In each 
 case the deer was caught by stalking and not by 
 lying in wait, and the cougar never went up a 
 tree except to get rid of the dogs. In the day- 
 time it retires to a ledge, or ravine, or dense 
 thicket, starting to prowl as the dark comes on. 
 So far as I could see the deer in each case was 
 killed by a bite in the throat or neck. The cou- 
 gar simply rambled around in likely ground un- 
 til it saw or smelled its quarry, and then crept up 
 stealthily until with one or two tremendous 
 bounds it was able to seize its prey. If, as fre- 
 quently happened, the deer took alarm in time 
 to avoid the first few bounds, it always got away, 
 for though the cougar is very fast for a short 
 distance, it has no wind whatever. It cannot pur- 
 sue a deer for any length of time, nor run before 
 
1 86 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 a dog for more than a few hundred yards, if the 
 dog is close up at the start, I was informed by 
 the ranchmen that when in May the deer leave 
 the country, the cougars turn their attention to 
 the stock, and are very destructive. 
 
 We started early one morning, intending to go 
 to Juniper Mountain, where we had heard that 
 cougars were plentiful; but we had only ridden 
 about half an hour from the ranch when we came 
 across a trail which by the size we knew must 
 belong to an old male. It was about thirty-six 
 hours old and led into a tangle of bad lands, 
 where there was great difficulty in working it 
 out? Finally, however, we found where it 
 left these bad lands and went straight up a moun- 
 tain side, too steep for the horses to follow. 
 From the plains below we watched the hounds 
 working to and fro until they entered a patch 
 of pinyons in which we were certain the cougar 
 had killed a deer, as ravens and magpies were 
 sitting around in the trees. In these pinyons the 
 hounds were again at fault for a little while, but 
 at last evidently found the right trail, and fol- 
 lowed it up over the hill-crest and out of sight. 
 We then galloped hard along the plain to the 
 left, going around the end of the ridge and turn- 
 ing to our right on the other side. Here we en- 
 
The Cougar 187 
 
 tered a deep narrow valley or gorge which led 
 up to a high plateau at the farther end. On our 
 right, as we rode up the valley, lay the high and 
 steep ridge over which the hounds had followed 
 the trail. On the left it was still steeper, the 
 slope being broken by ledges and precipices. 
 Near the mouth of the gorge we encountered the 
 hounds, who had worked the trail down and 
 across the gorge, and were now hunting up the 
 steep cliff-shoulder on our left. Evidently the 
 cougar had wandered to and fro over this shoul- 
 der, and the dogs were much puzzled and 
 worked in zigzags and circles around it, grad- 
 ually getting clear to the top. Then old Boxer 
 suddenly gave tongue with renewed zest, and 
 started off on a run almost on top of the ridge, 
 the other dogs following. Immediately after- 
 ward they jumped the cougar. 
 
 We had been waiting below to see which di- 
 rection the chase would take and now put spurs 
 to our horses and galloped up the ravine, climb- 
 ing the hillside on our right so as to get a better 
 view of what was happening. A few hundred 
 yards of this galloping and climbing brought us 
 again in sight of the hounds. They were now 
 barking treed and were clustered around a pin- 
 yon below the ridge crest on the side hill oppo- 
 site us. The two fighters, Turk and Queen, who 
 
1 88 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 had been following at our horses' heels, appre- 
 ciated what had happened as soon as we did, 
 and, leaving us, ran down into the valley and be- 
 gan to work their way through the deep snow up 
 the hillside opposite, toward where the hounds 
 were. Ours was an ideal position for seeing the 
 whole chase. In a minute the cougar jumped 
 out of the tree down among the hounds, who 
 made no attempt to seize him, but followed him 
 as soon as he had cleared their circle. He came 
 downhill at a great rate and jumped over a 
 cliff, bringing after him such an avalanche of 
 snow that it was a moment before I caught sight 
 of him again, this time crouched on a narrow 
 ledge of a cliff some fifteen or twenty feet below 
 the brink from which he had jumped, and about 
 as far above the foot of the cliff, where the steep 
 hill-slope again began. The hounds soon found 
 him again and came along the ledge barking 
 loudly, but not venturing near where he lay fac- 
 ing them, with his back arched like a great cat. 
 Turk and Queen were meanwhile working their 
 way uphill. Turk got directly under the ledge 
 and could not find a way up. Queen went to the 
 left and in a minute we saw her white form as 
 she made her way through the dark-colored 
 hounds straight for the cougar. "That's the end 
 of Queen," said Goff ; "he'll kill her now, sure." 
 
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The Cougar 189 
 
 In another moment she had made her rush, and 
 the cougar, bounding forward, had seized her, 
 and as we afterward discovered had driven his 
 great fangs right through the side of her head, 
 fortunately missing the brain. In the struggle 
 he lost his footing and rolled off the ledge, and 
 when they struck the ground below he let go. 
 Turk, who was near where they struck, was not 
 able to spring for the hold he desired, and in 
 another moment the cougar was coming down 
 hill like a quarter horse. We stayed perfectly 
 still, as he was travelling in our direction. 
 Queen was on her feet almost as quick as the 
 cougar, and she and Turk tore after him, the 
 hounds following in a few seconds, being de- 
 layed in getting off the ledge. It was astonish- 
 ing to see the speed of the cougar. He ran con- 
 siderably more than a quarter of a mile down 
 hill, and at the end of it had left the dogs more 
 than a hundred yards behind. But his bolt was 
 shot, and after going perhaps a hundred yards 
 or so up the hill on our side and below us, he 
 climbed a tree, under which the dogs began to 
 bay frantically, while we scrambled toward 
 them. When I got down I found him standing 
 half upright on a big branch, his forepaws hung 
 over another higher branch, his sides puffing 
 like bellows, and evidently completely winded. 
 
1 90 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 In scrambling up the pinyon he must have struck 
 a patch of resin, for it had torn a handful of hair 
 off from behind his right forearm. I shot him 
 through the heart, At the shot he sprang clean 
 into the top of the tree, head and tail up, and his 
 face fairly demoniac with rage; but before he 
 touched the ground he was dead. Turk jumped 
 up, seized him as he fell, and the two rolled over 
 a low ledge, falling about eight feet into the 
 snow, Turk never losing his hold. 
 
 No one could have wished to see a prettier 
 chase under better circumstances. It was exceed- 
 ingly interesting. The only dog hurt was Queen, 
 and very miserable indeed she looked. She stood 
 in the trail, refusing to lie down or to join the 
 other dogs, as, with prodigious snarls at one an- 
 other, they ate the pieces of the carcass we cut 
 out for them. Dogs hunting every day, as these 
 were doing, and going through such terrific ex- 
 ertion, need enormous quantities of meat, and 
 as old horses and crippled steers were not always 
 easy to get, we usually fed them the cougar car- 
 casses. On this occasion, when they had eaten 
 until they could eat no longer, I gave most of my 
 lunch to Queen — Boxer, who, after his feast 
 could hardly move, nevertheless waddling up 
 with his ears forward to beg a share. Queen ev- 
 idently felt that the lunch was a delicacy, for she 
 
The Cougar 1 91 
 
 ate it, and then trotted home behind us with the 
 rest of the dogs. Rather to my astonishment, 
 next day she was all right, and as eager to go 
 with us as ever. Though one side of her head 
 was much swollen, in her work she showed no 
 signs of her injuries. 
 
 Early the following morning, February 14th, 
 the last day of my actual hunting, we again 
 started for Juniper Mountain, following the 
 same course on which we had started the pre- 
 vious day. Before we had gone a mile, that is, 
 only about half way to where we had come across 
 the cougar track the preceding day, we crossed 
 another, and, as we deemed, a fresher, trail, which 
 Goff pronounced to belong to a cougar even 
 larger than the one that we had just killed. The 
 hounds were getting both weary and footsore, 
 but the scent put heart into them, and away they 
 streamed. They followed it across a sage-brush 
 flat, and then worked along under the base of a 
 line of cliffs — cougar being particularly apt thus 
 to travel at the foot of cliffs. The pack kept well 
 together, and it was pleasant as we cantered over 
 the snowy plain beside them, to listen to their 
 baying, echoed back from the cliffs above. Then 
 they worked over the hill and we spurred 
 ahead and turned to the left, up the same gorge 
 or valley in which we had killed the cougar the 
 
192 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 day before. The hounds followed the trail 
 straight to the cliff-shoulder where the day be- 
 fore the pack had been puzzled until Boxer 
 struck the fresh scent. Here they seemed to be 
 completely at fault, circling everywhere, and at 
 one time following their track of yesterday over 
 to the pinyon-tree up which the cougar had first 
 gone. 
 
 We made our way up the ravine to the head of 
 the plateau, and then, turning, cam€ back along 
 the ridge until we reached the top of the shoul- 
 der where the dogs had been ; but when we got 
 there they had disappeared. It did not seem 
 likely that the cougar had crossed the ravine be- 
 hind us — although as a matter of fact this was 
 exactly what had happened — and we did not 
 know what to make of the affair. 
 
 We could barely hear the hounds; they had 
 followed their back trail of the preceding day, 
 toward the place where we had first come across 
 the tracks of the cougar we had already killed. 
 We were utterly puzzled, even Goff being com- 
 pletely at fault, and we finally became afraid 
 that the track which the pack had been running 
 was one which, instead of having been made dur- 
 ing the night, had been there the previous morn- 
 ing, and had been made by the dead cougar. 
 This meant, of course, that we had passed it 
 
The Cougar 193 
 
 without noticing it, both going and coming, on 
 the previous day, and knowing Goff's eye for a 
 track I could not believe this. He, however, 
 thought we might have confused it with some of 
 the big wolf tracks, of which a number had 
 crossed our path. After some hesitation, he said 
 that at any rate we could find out the truth by 
 getting back into the flat and galloping around 
 to where we had begun our hunt the day before ; 
 because if the dogs really had a fresh cougar be- 
 fore them he must have so short a start that they 
 were certain to tree him by the time they got 
 across the ridge-crest. Accordingly we scram- 
 bled down the precipitous mountain-side, gal- 
 loped along the flat around the end of the ridge 
 and drew rein at about the place where we had 
 first come across the cougar trail on the previous 
 day. Not a dog was to be heard anywhere, and 
 Goff's belief that the pack was simply running a 
 back track became a certainty both in his mind 
 and mine, when Jim suddenly joined us, evident- 
 ly having given up the chase. We came to the 
 conclusion that Jim, being wiser than the other 
 dogs, had discovered his mistake while they had 
 not; "he just naturally quit," said Goff. 
 
 After some little work we found where the 
 pack had crossed the broad flat valley Into a 
 mass of very rough broken country, the same in 
 
194 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 which I had shot my first big male by moonlight. 
 Cantering and scrambling through this stretch 
 of cliffs and valleys, we began to hear the dogs, 
 and at first were puzzled because once or twice it 
 seemed as though they were barking treed or 
 had something at bay; always, however, as we 
 came nearer we could again hear them running 
 a trail, and when we finally got up tolerably close 
 we found that they were all scattered out. Boxer 
 was far behind, and Nellie, whose feet had be- 
 come sore, was soberly accompanying him, no 
 longer giving tongue. The others were sepa- 
 rated one from the other, and we finally made 
 out Tree'em all by himself, and not very far 
 away. In vain Goff called and blew his horn; 
 Tree'em disappeared up a high hill-side, and 
 with muttered comments on his stupidity we gal- 
 loped our horses along the valley around the 
 foot of the hill, hoping to intercept him. No 
 sooner had we come to the other side, however, 
 than we heard Tree'em evidently barking treed. 
 We both looked at one another, wondering 
 whether he had come across a bobcat or 
 whether it had really been a fresh cougar trail 
 after all. 
 
 Leaving our horses we scrambled up the 
 canon until we got in sight of a large pinyon on 
 the hillside, underneath which Tree'em was 
 
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The Cougar 1 95 
 
 standing, with his preposterous tail arched like 
 a pump-handle, as he gazed solemnly up In the 
 tree, now and then uttering a bark at a huge cou- 
 gar, which by this time we could distinctly make 
 out standing in the branches. Turk and Queen 
 had already left us and were running hard to 
 join Tree'em, and in another minute or two all 
 of the hounds, except the belated Boxer and Nel- 
 lie, had also come up. The cougar having now 
 recovered his wind, jumped down and cantered 
 off. He had been running for three hours be- 
 fore the dogs, and evidently had been overtaken 
 again and again, but had either refused to tree, 
 or if he did tree had soon come down and con- 
 tinued his flight, the hounds not venturing to 
 meddle with him, and he paying little heed to 
 them. It was a different matter, however, with 
 Turk and Queen along. He went up the hill and 
 came to bay on the top of the cliffs, where we 
 could see him against the sky-line. The hounds 
 surrounded him, but neither they nor Turk came 
 to close quarters. Queen, however, as soon as 
 she arrived rushed straight in, and the cougar 
 knocked her a dozen feet off. Turk tried to 
 seize him as soon as Queen had made her rush ; 
 the cougar broke bay, and they all disappeared 
 over the hilltop, while we hurried after them^ 
 A quarter of a mile beyond, on a steep hill- 
 
ig6 Hunting Wild Animals 
 
 side, they again had him up a pinyon-tree. I ap- 
 proached as cautiously as possible so as not to 
 alarm him. He stood in such an awkward posi- 
 tion that I could not gtt a fair shot at the heart, 
 but the bullet broke his back well forward, and 
 the dogs seized him as he struck the ground. 
 There was still any amount of fight in him, and 
 I ran in as fast as possible, jumping and slipping 
 over the rocks and the bushes as the cougar and 
 dogs rolled and slid down the steep mountain- 
 side — for, of course, every minute's delay meant 
 the chance of a dog being killed or crippled. It 
 was a day of misfortunes for Jim, who was 
 knocked completely out of the fight by a single 
 blow. The cougar was too big for the dogs 
 to master, even crippled as he was ; but when I 
 came up close Turk ran in and got the great beast 
 by one ear, stretching out the cougar's head, 
 while he kept his own forelegs tucked way back 
 so that the cougar could not get hold of them. 
 This gave me my chance, and I drove the knife 
 home, leaping back before the creature could 
 get round at me. Boxer did not come up for 
 half an hour, working out every inch of the trail 
 for himself, and croaking away at short inter- 
 vals, while Nellie trotted calmly beside him. 
 Even when he saw us skinning the cougar he 
 would not hurry nor take a short cut, but fol- 
 
The Cougar 107 
 
 lowed the scent to where the cougar had gone 
 up the tree, and from the tree down to where we 
 were; then he meditatively bit the carcass, 
 strolled off, and lay down, satisfied 
 
 It was a very large cougar, fat and heavy, and 
 the men at the ranch believed it was the same one 
 which had at intervals haunted the place for two 
 or three years, killing on one occasion a milch 
 cow, on another a steer, and on yet another a big 
 work-horse. Goff stated that he had on two or 
 three occasions killed cougars that were quite as 
 long, and he believed even an inch or two longer, 
 but that he had never seen one as large or 
 as heavy. Its weight was 227 pounds, and as it 
 lay stretched out it looked like a small African 
 lioness. It would be impossible to wish a better 
 ending to a hunt. 
 
 The next day Goff and I cantered thirty miles 
 into Meeker, and my holiday was over.