Roosevelt Pursues the Boat Thieves - Theodore Roosevelt National Park (U.S. National Park Service)

-->

Official websites use .gov<br>.gov website belongs to an official government<br>organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS<br>lock (

Lock<br>Locked padlock icon

) or https:// means you've safely connected to<br>the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official,<br>secure websites.

Skip to global NPS navigation

Skip to this park navigation

Skip to the main content

Skip to this park information section

Skip to the footer section

National Park Service

Search

Search

This Site

All NPS

Exiting nps.gov

Cancel

Info

Alerts

Maps

Calendar

Fees

Contact Us

Roosevelt Pursues the Boat Thieves

Theodore Roosevelt was particularly fond of retelling the story of his pursuit and capture of the boat thieves in the badlands. He put the story on paper in his 1888 book Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail. In early spring of 1886, just as the ice was beginning to break up on the Little Missouri River, three thieves cut Roosevelt’s boat from its mooring at the Elkhorn Ranch and took it downriver. Roosevelt, out of personal pride and duty as a Billings County Deputy Sheriff, chased after them with his ranch hands Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow.

As you read the story, imagine the thrill of the entire event for Roosevelt. A spring flood is no trivial matter, and navigating a river jammed with ice and powerful currents is treacherous work. The weather was viciously cold. The men he was chasing were armed and dangerous. How might you have reacted to the theft of a replaceable boat when capturing the thieves was so time-consuming and dangerous? The story begins with the ice breaking up on the Little Missouri River at the Elkhorn Ranch in March, 1886:

“It moved slowly, its front forming a high, crumbling wall, and creaming over like an immense breaker on the seashore; we could hear the dull roaring and crunching as it ploughed down the river-bed long before it came in sight round the bend above us. The ice kept piling and tossing up in the middle, and not only heaped itself above the level of the banks, but also in many places spread out on each side beyond them, grinding against the cottonwood-trees in front of the ranch veranda…."

“At night the snowy, glittering masses, tossed up and heaped into fantastic forms, shone like crystal in the moonlight; but they soon lost their beauty, becoming fouled and blackened, and at the same time melted and settled down until it was possible to clamber out across the slippery hummocks."

Ice jam on the Little Missouri River NPS

"We had brought out a clinker-built boat especially to ferry ourselves over the river when it was high, and were keeping our ponies on the opposite side…. This boat had already proved very useful and now came in handier than ever, as without it we could take no care of our horses. We kept it on the bank, tied to a tree, and every day would carry it or slide it across the hither ice bank, usually with not a little tumbling and scrambling on our part, lower it gently into the swift current, pole it across to the ice on the farther bank, and then drag it over that…”

On the other side, Roosevelt discovered evidence of mountain lions hunting deer among the bluffs. He followed the trail, but, after losing the trail, he headed back, determined to hunt the mountain lions the next day.

“But we never carried out our intentions, for next morning one of my men, who was out before breakfast, came back to the house with the startling news that our boat was gone – stolen, for he brought with him the end of the rope with which it had been tied, evidently cut off with a sharp knife; and also a red woollen mitten with a leather palm, which he had picked up on the ice. "

"We had no doubt as to who had stolen it; for whoever had done so had certainly gone down the river in it, and the only other thing in the shape of a boat on the Little Missouri was a small flat-bottomed scow in the possession of three hard characters who lived in a shack, or hut, some twenty miles above us, and whom we had shrewdly suspected for some time of wishing to get out of the country, as certain of the cattlemen had begun openly to threaten to lynch them. They belonged to a class that always holds sway during the raw youth of a frontier community, and the putting down of which is the first step toward decent government…."

"The three men we suspected had long been accused – justly or unjustly – of being implicated both in cattle-killing and in that worst of frontier crimes, horse-stealing; it was only by an accident that they had escaped the clutches of the vigilantes the preceding fall. Their leader was a well-built fellow named Finnigan, who had long red hair reaching to his shoulders, and always wore a broad hat and a fringed buckskin shirt. He was rather a hard case, and had been chief actor in a number of shooting scrapes. The other two were a half-breed, a stout, muscular...