It was this attitude of mind which encumbered his project for a stage-line to the Black Hills with difficulties from the very start. The project itself was feasible. Deadwood could be reached only by stage from Pierre, a matter of three hundred miles. The distance to Medora was a hundred miles shorter. Millions of pounds of freight were accumulating for lack of proper transportation facilities to Deadwood. That hot little mining town, moreover, needed contact with the great transcontinental system, especially in view of the migratory movement, which had begun early in the year, of the miners from Deadwood and Lead to the new gold-fields in the Coeur d'Alênes in Idaho.
Bill Williams and Jess Hogue, with the aid of the twenty-eight army mules which they had acquired in ways that invited research, had started a freight-line from Medora to Deadwood, but its service turned out to be spasmodic, depending somewhat on the state of Medora's thirst, on the number of "suckers" in town who had to be fleeced, and on the difficulty under which both Williams and Hogue seemed to suffer of keeping sober when they were released from their obvious duties in the saloon. There appeared to be every reason, therefore, why a stage-line connecting Deadwood with the Northern Pacific, carrying passengers, mail, and freight, and organized with sufficient capital, should succeed.
Dickinson, forty miles east, was wildly agitating for such a line to run from that prosperous little community to the Black Hills. The Dickinson _Press_ and the _Bad Lands Cowboy_ competed in deriding each other's claims touching "the only feasible route." The _Cowboy_ said that the Medora line would be more direct. The _Press_ agreed, but replied that the country through which it would have to go was impassable even for an Indian on a pony. The _Cowboy_ declared that "the Dickinson road strikes gumbo from the start"; and the _Press_ with fine scorn answered, "This causes a smile to percolate our features. From our experience in the Bad Lands we know that after a slight rain a man can carry a whole quarter-section off on his boots, and we don't wear number twelves either." The _Cowboy_ insisted that the Dickinson route "is at best a poor one and at certain seasons impassable." The _Press_ scorned to reply to this charge, remarking merely from the heights of its own eight months' seniority, "The _Cowboy_ is young, and like a boy, going through a graveyard at night, is whistling to keep up courage."