and as
fearless and as lawless as himself. The Little Missouri and
Powder River districts are the theater of his operations. An
Indian is Mr. Axelby's detestation. He kills him at sight if
he can. He considers that Indians have no right to own
ponies and he takes their ponies whenever he can. Mr. Axelby
has repeatedly announced his determination not to be taken
alive. The men of the frontier say he bears a charmed life,
and the hairbreadth 'scapes of which they have made him the
hero are numerous and of the wildest stamp.

During the preceding February, Axelby and his band had had a clash
with the Federal authorities, which had created an enormous sensation
up and down the Little Missouri, but had settled nothing so far as the
horse-thieves were concerned. In the Bad Lands the thieves became
daily more pestiferous. Two brothers named Smith and two others called
"Big Jack" and "Little Jack" conducted the major operations in
Billings County. They had their cabin in a coulee west of the Big Ox
Bow, forty miles south of Medora, in the wildest part of the Bad
Lands, and "worked the country" from there north and south. They
seldom stole from white men, recognizing the advisability of not
irritating their neighbors too much, but drove off Indian ponies in
herds. Their custom was to steal Sioux horses from one of the
reservations, keep them in the Scoria Hills a month or more until all
danger of pursuit was over, and then drive them north over the prairie
between Belfield and Medora, through the Killdeer Mountains to the
northeastern part of the Territory. There they would steal other
horses from the Grosventres Indians, and drive them to their cache in
the Scoria Hills whence they could emerge with them at their good
pleasure and sell them at Pierre. There had been other "underground
railways," but this had a charm of its own, for it "carried freight"
both ways. Occasionally the thieves succeeded in selling horses to the
identical Indians they had originally robbed. The efficiency of it all
was in its way magnificent.

Through the record of thievery up and down the river, that spring of
1884, the shadow of Jake Maunders slips in and out, making no noise
and leaving no footprints. It was rumored that when a sheriff or a
United States marshal from somewhere drifted into Medora, Maunders
would ride south in the dead of night to the Big Ox Bow and give the
thieves the warning; and ri