ponies--on the
farther side of the river, he could not afford to lose the boat. But
the determining motive in his mind was neither chagrin nor anxiety to
recover his property. In a country where self-reliant hardihood and
the ability to hold one's own under all circumstances ranked as the
first of the virtues, to submit tamely to theft or to any other
injury was, he knew, to invite almost certain repetition of the
offense.

A journal which he kept for a month or two that spring gives in
laconic terms a vivid picture of those March days.

March 22. Tramped over to get deer; mountain lions had got them.

March 23. Shot 4 prairie chickens.

March 24. Thieves stole boat; started to build another to go
after them.

March 25. Went out after deer; saw nothing. Boat being
built. River very high; ice piled upon banks several feet.

March 26. Boat building.

March 27. Boat built. Too cold to start. Shot 4 chickens.

March 28. Bitter cold.

March 29. Furious blizzard.

While Sewall and Dow, who were mighty men with their hands, were
building the boat, and his other cowpuncher, Rowe, was hurrying to
Medora to bring out a wagon-load of supplies for their contemplated
journey, Roosevelt himself was by no means idle. He had agreed to
write a life of Thomas Hart Benton for the _American Statesmen
Series_, and, after two or three months' work in the East gathering
his material, had begun the actual writing of the book immediately
after his return to the Bad Lands.

I have written the first chapter of the Benton [he wrote to
Lodge on March 27th], so at any rate I have made a start.
Writing is horribly hard work to me; and I make slow
progress. I have got some good ideas in the first chapter,
but I am not sure they are worked up rightly; my style is
very rough, and I do not like a certain lack of _sequitur_
that I do not seem able to get rid of.

I thought the article on Morris admirable in every way; one
of your crack pieces. Some of the sentences were so
thoroughly characteristic of you that I laughed aloud when I
read them. One of my men, Sewall (a descendant of the
Judge's, by the way), read it with as much interest as I
did, and talked it over afterwards as intelligently as any
one could.

At present we are all snowed up by a blizzard; as soon as it
lightens up I shall start down the riv