Postscript
The business ventures of the Marquis de Morès suffered their final collapse in 1886 and he departed for France in the fall of that year, having lost more than a million of his father-in-law’s dollars in an age when the value of the dollar could be measured by the fact that the average annual wage—a comfortable living wage—was $250. He said he would return to Dakota but he never did.
After he left the United States, De Morès went to India and hunted tigers. His fortunes were dissipated; his father-in-law refused to support his ventures any further. Nevertheless, increasingly paranoiac, he resumed his vain and somewhat absurd attempts to restore the French monarchy and ascend the throne. Perhaps the most extreme public bigot of his day, he stood for a Paris council seat on the “Pure Anti-Semite” ticket, killed at least one Jewish army officer in a duel and—curiously—helped stir up a scandal of charges of rampant corruption in connection with the financing of Suez Canal builder Ferdinand De Lesseps’s celebrated attempt to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. De Morès’s plots against De Lesseps and Clemenceau brought final destruction to the French attempt to build a Panama Canal—thereby opening the way for Theodore Roosevelt to complete the Canal two decades later.
De Morès served several months in prison for inciting a crowd to riot, and was instrumental in provoking the anti-Semitic frenzy that led to the infamous Dreyfus case that inflamed Zola to write J’Accuse.
In 1896, in a mirror-reversal of the ambush that killed Riley Luffsey, the Marquis was himself ambushed. At age thirty-eight, Antoine Amédée Marie Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, Marquis De Morès, was murdered in the Tunisian desert by Tuaregs, who hacked him limb from limb. He had gone to North Africa to lead a preposterous expedition whose objective was to form a Franco-Islamic alliance against the Jews and the British.
His widow Medora, faithful to the end, posted a reward for the capture of his killers. She saw them brought to justice and executed. They were reported to have been bandits but more likely they were hired assassins in the pay of the French government, to whom De Morès had become an embarrassment too vast to be tolerated.
De Morès had been in line to succeed his father as Duc de Vallombrosa but, as things worked out, his father survived him by a decade.
One suspects De Morès would not be amused to know that today his birthplace, a sturdy 250-year-old manor, serves as the Paris Embassy of the USSR.
Nearly all his evil schemes were frustrated; he saw himself as a tragic hero but the mustache-twisting Marquis, like other great evildoers, remains as absurdly and malevolently comical as Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon.
I know of no evidence of any communication between Theodore Roosevelt and the lady Medora, Marquise De Morès, at any time after their Dakota adventures. It is a fact, however, that Madame De Morès paid her last visit to the town of Medora in 1903 not long before President Roosevelt made his pre-campaign swing through the West. On that final visit to Dakota, Madame De Morès was accompanied by her grown son Louis and daughter Athenais; she stayed six weeks and closed up the chateau, which had remained unchanged from seventeen years earlier—the De Morès servants had kept it intact, just as it had been on the day of the family’s departure in 1886.
Later, during the First World War, Lady Medora maintained the Vallombrosa family mansion in Paris as a hospital for wounded men. She ministered tirelessly to their injuries; she was wounded by a German shell when the house was bombarded. In March 1921, as a result of that wound, she died at the age of sixty-three; she had outlived Theodore Roosevelt by two years.
Medora and her husband are buried side-by-side in Cannes. They were survived by three children: the two abovementioned, born in America, and son Paul, born later in France.
Arthur T. Packard remained a newspaperman throughout his life. The last issue of his Bad Lands Cow Boy was published on December 23, 1887; the next day, the building where Pack and his new bride lived, and where the Cow Boy was published, burned down. (In 1970 publication of the Cow Boy was resumed by Clayton C. Bartz and David C. Bartz, as a historical journal.) Pack remained in the West and in the newspaper game, carving out a long journalistic career in the region between Chicago and Montana. As late as 1912 he was a prominent supporter of Roosevelt’s independent Progressive Party (“Bull Moose”) attempt to regain the Presidency.
In Chicago in 1931, Arthur T. Packard died; he was seventy.
William Wingate Sewall published a memoir shortly after Roosevelt’s death, and died a decade later at eighty-four, in March 1930. His nephew Wilmot Dow had died earlier of acute Bright’s Disease in Island Falls, Maine, at the age of thirty-six in 1891.
Joe Ferris joined Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign for the Vice Presidency in 1900, and traveled with Roosevelt through North Dakota and Montana. Long before that, Joe had sold his store and moved to Montana. Roosevelt kept in touch with him for many years. In 1912 Joe, like his friend Pack, was a delegate to Roosevelt’s Bull Moose convention.
Howard Eaton, the first dude rancher, ran his tourist outfit at Custer Trail until 1904, when with his brothers he moved to the Big Horn country—Wolf, Wyoming, where the famous Eaton Ranch still operates today. Meanwhile the Eaton brothers’ original Custer Trail Ranch near Medora has become a Bible camp operated by the Lutheran Church.
A.C. Huidekoper was one of the few ranchers to remain in the Bad Lands and keep faith in the region. As the foregoing story shows, he was still living there when Roosevelt visited in 1903. Huidekoper raised horses there, quite successfully, until he retired in 1906, at which time according to memoirist Lincoln Lang, “his herd numbered … approximately five thousand head of equine blue bloods, constituting perhaps the grandest, most distinctive single herd of horses the world ever knew, … ranging from full-blooded Percherons to polo ponies from a cross between thoroughbred racing stock and the best Indian pony mares obtainable. The latter were, in fact, the pick of Sitting Bull’s war ponies.”
Roosevelt wrote dryly in his Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, “One committee of vigilantes in eastern Montana shot or hung nearly sixty—not, however, with the best judgment in all cases.” Ironically the founder of the Montana Stock Growers Association and clandestine leader of the neighboring state’s vigilantes, Granville Stuart, according to Roosevelt’s Autobiography “was afterwards appointed Minister by [President Grover] Cleveland, I think to the Argentine.”
As for Theodore Roosevelt (magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard 1880), by 1886 he was revitalized and as mature as he was going to become. He returned east to marry Edith Carow (she later described her husband the President fondly as “a six-year-old boy”) and to plunge back into the political life. He lost his bid for election to the office of Mayor of New York but that failure did not daunt him. Soon after, he was appointed Police Commissioner of New York City; he went on to higher offices.
He recruited many Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War from amongst the Bad Lands cowboys with whom he had worked during his ranching days.
Throughout his adventurous life as New York Police Commissioner, Colonel of Rough Riders, Governor of New York State, Vice President of the United States, two-term (1901-1908) President of the United States (the twenty-sixth, and the youngest ever to be inaugurated), builder of the Panama Canal, first American winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, candidate in the ill-fated 1912 Bull Moose election campaign, world traveler, hunter, naturalist, author of three dozen books and uncounted articles and essays and at least 150,000 letters—some 20 million words in all (he read as many as three books a day throughout most of his life)—and leader of the gruelling Amazon River explorations: as for Roosevelt, right up to his death at sixty in 1919 he kept up running correspondences and frequent reunions with old friends like Joe Ferris and Bill Sewall. Several of them (particularly Sewall, still a woodsman and guide) were frequent honored guests in the Roosevelt White House.