Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

THIE GOL)EN SPIKE ANID AANY JOTRNEYS 395
The letters were shaped with difficulty by his brawny
hand. I formed the idea that it was a purely mechanical
performance, learned at the agency school, and that for
a thousand times a dollar and a half the distinguished
prisoner could not have produced on demand any other
written name, however short. In captivity he had become
overfat. His face suggested the type of the backwoods
Methodist bishop, strong-featured, properly bronzed. At
the autograph cart the saturnine peddler penned away
laboriously and pocketed the cash with placidity. Standing near him and observing him curiously were Ulysses S.
Grant, Philip H. Sheridan, and a dozen senators and representatives of the government against which he had fought
ferociously and treacherously. He paid no attention to
Grant or to Sheridan, but he did look up with a grunt of
something like admiration when there passed by the redshirted chief of the Bismarck fire brigade. Seven years
later he died as he had lived, the armed enemy of the race
he hated.
Near the Montana border we traversed the so-called
Bad Lands where Nature, gone crazy, has produced a
vast agglomeration of fantastic hills of vividly colored
ash and burned clay-a landscape which seemed to the
newcomer as unearthly as if a piece of the moon had
dropped and covered the region. We drove miles to the
place of subterranean fires and walked over their crusts of
soil, glowing red hot through every crevice. To light a
cigarette it was only necessary to pluck a dry stalk and
thrust it down underfoot for fire. We were near the estate
of the astonishing Marquis de Mores; some of his cowboys

visited us in their favorite pursuit of tenderfeet to guy.
We did not know that just at that time in 1883 young
Theodore Roosevelt was buying and stocking in the immediate neighborhood the ranches whereon he was to live
for the next two years and acquire physical merit for a
career to come.