ey discovered the "Eastern punkin-lily" which had
blossomed in their midst, is lost to history. It was unquestionably
frank, profane, and unwashed. He was, in fact, not a sight to awaken
sympathy in the minds of such inhabitants as Little Missouri
possessed. He had just recovered from an attack of cholera morbus, and
though he had written his mother from Chicago that he was already
"feeling like a fighting-cock," the marks of his illness were still on
his face. Besides, he wore glasses, which, as he later discovered,
were considered in the Bad Lands as a sign of a "defective moral
character."

It was a world of strange and awful beauty into which Roosevelt
stepped as he emerged from the dinginess of the ramshackle hotel into
the crisp autumn morning. Before him lay a dusty, sagebrush flat
walled in on three sides by scarred and precipitous clay buttes. A
trickle of sluggish water in a wide bed, partly sand and partly baked
gumbo, oozed beneath steep banks at his back, swung sharply westward,
and gave the flat on the north a fringe of dusty-looking cottonwoods,
thirstily drinking the only source of moisture the country seemed to
afford. Directly across the river, beyond another oval-shaped piece of
bottom-land, rose a steep bluff, deeply shadowed against the east, and
south of it stretched in endless succession the seamed ranges and
fantastic turrets and cupolas and flying buttresses of the Bad Lands.

It was a region of weird shapes garbed in barbaric colors, gray-olive
striped with brown, lavender striped with black, chalk pinnacles
capped with flaming scarlet. French-Canadian _voyageurs_, a century
previous, finding the weather-washed ravines wicked to travel through,
spoke of them as _mauvaises terres pour traverser_, and the name
clung. The whole region, it was said, had once been the bed of a great
lake, holding in its lap the rich clays and loams which the rains
carried down into it. The passing of ages brought vegetation, and the
passing of other ages turned that vegetation into coal. Other deposits
settled over the coal. At last this vast lake found an outlet in the
Missouri. The wear and wash of the waters cut in time through the
clay, the coal, and the friable limestone of succeeding deposits,
creating ten thousand watercourses bordered by precipitous bluffs and
buttes, which every storm gashed and furrowed anew. On the tops of
the flat buttes was rich soil and in countless pleasant valleys were
green pastur