So far as any facts relating to Roosevelt or to the Western frontier can ever be described as "cold," it is a narrative of cold facts which I have attempted to tell in this book. The truth, in this case, is romantic enough and needs no embellishment. I have made every effort to verify my narrative, but, to some extent, I have had to depend, inevitably, on the character of the men and women who gave me my data, as every historical writer must who deals not with documents (which may, of course, themselves be mendacious), but with what is, in a sense, "raw material." One highly dramatic story, dealing with Roosevelt's defiance of a certain desperate character, which has at different times during the past twenty-five years been printed in leading newspapers and periodicals, told always by the same writer, I have had to reject because I could find no verification of it, though I think it may well be true.
In weaving my material into a connected narrative I have consciously departed from fact in only one respect. Certain names--a half-dozen or so in all--are fictitious. In certain cases, in which the story I had to tell might give needless offense to the actors in it still surviving, or to their children, and in which I was consequently confronted by the alternative of rejecting the story in question or changing the names, I chose the latter course without hesitation. It is quite unessential, for instance, what the real name was of the lady known in this book as "Mrs. Cummins"; but her story is an important element in the narrative. To those who may recognize themselves under the light veil I have thrown over their portraits, and may feel grieved, I can only say that, inasmuch as they were inhabitants of the Bad Lands when Theodore Roosevelt and the Marquis de Mores shaped their destinies there for good or ill, they became historical figures and must take their chances at the judgment seat of posterity with Nebuchadnezzar and Cæsar and St. Augustine and Calamity Jane.
The Northwestern newspapers of the middle eighties contain much valuable material, not only about the Marquis and his romantic enterprises, which greatly interested the public, but about Roosevelt himself. The files of the _Press_ of Dickinson, North Dakota, and the _Pioneer_ of Mandan, have proved especially useful, though scarcely more useful than those of the Bismarck _Tribune_, the Minneapolis _Journal_, and the _Dispatch_ and _Pioneer Press_ of St. Paul. The cut of Roosevelt's cattle-brands, printed on the jacket, is reproduced from the _Stockgrowers' Journal_ of Miles City. I have sought high and low for copies of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_, published in Medora, but only one copy--Joe Ferris's--has come to light. "'Bad-man' Finnegan," it relates among other things, "is serving time in the Bismarck penitentiary for stealing Theodore Roosevelt's boat." But that is a part of the story; and this is only a Preface.