ich to build the airy and arabesque
superstructure of my fancy--especially as I am writing a
history. Now I hesitate to give him a wholly fictitious date
of death and to invent all of the work of his later years.
Would it be too infernal a nuisance for you to hire some of
your minions on the _Advertiser_ (of course, at my expense)
to look up, in a biographical dictionary or elsewhere, his
life after he left the Senate in 1850? He was elected once
to Congress; who beat him when he ran the second time; what
was the issue; who beat him, and why, when he ran for
Governor of Missouri; and the date of his death? I hate to
trouble you; don't do it if it is any bother; but the Bad
Lands have much fewer books than Boston has.

The Executive Committee of the Montana Stockgrowers' Association, of
which Roosevelt was a member, had, in order to unify the work of the
rounding-up of the cattle throughout Montana and western Dakota,
issued directions at its meeting in April for the delimitation of the
various round-up districts and the opening of the round-ups. The
round-up for "District No. 6," which included the valley of the Little
Missouri,

commences [so ran the order] at Medora, May 25, 1886; works
down the Little Missouri to the mouth of Big Beaver Creek;
thence up the Big Beaver to its head; thence across to the
Little Beaver at the crossing of the old government road
(Keogh trail); thence down Little Beaver to its mouth;
thence across to Northern Hash-knife Camp on Little
Missouri, and down to Medora. John Goodall, foreman.

Roosevelt apparently could not resist the temptation which the
round-up offered, especially as its course would take him back in the
direction of Elkhorn, and he deserted his study and entered once more
into what was to him the most fascinating activity of the cowboy's
life.

There were half a dozen wagons along [he wrote
subsequently]. The saddle bands numbered about a hundred
each; and the morning we started, sixty men in the saddle
splashed across the shallow ford of the river that divided
the plain where we had camped from the valley of the long
winding creek up which we were first to work.

By the 7th of June he was back at Elkhorn Ranch again on a flying
visit.

I will get a chance to send this note to-morrow [he wrote
his sister "Bamie"] by an old teamster