A rough and tumble frontier hotel on the Northern Pacific line just inside Montana.

The tenderfoot Roosevelt has been riding the range in search of strayed horses. It is too late to get back to his ranches on the Little Missouri River, so he takes a room at Nolan’s Hotel in Mingusville (since 1895 known as Wibaux, Montana). The tenderfoot is informed that the only restaurant in Mingusville is in the saloon downstairs. Roosevelt, who is essentially a teetotaler, reluctantly makes his way to the saloon. Inside there is pandemonium. A drunken gunslinger is shooting up the bar and menacing the clientele. He has been using the clock for target practice.

The other patrons in the bar are “wearing the kind of smile worn by men who are making believe to like what they don’t like.”

The gunslinger, “not a ‘bad man’ of the really dangerous type,” but nevertheless “an objectionable creature,” notices the bespectacled dude Roosevelt as he tries to slip as unobtrusively as possible into a corner table behind the stove.

Now the trouble begins.

“Four eyes is going to treat.”

Roosevelt laughs in a good-natured way “and got behind the stove and sat down, thinking to escape notice.”

The bully persists. “Though I tried to pass it off as a jest this merely made him more offensive, and he stood leaning over me, a gun in each hand, using very foul language.” The ruffian again insists that Roosevelt is standing drinks for the whole bar.

Theodore Roosevelt has had enough.

Roosevelt studied boxing at Harvard. He is a rather skilled pugilist. He is, moreover, sober. He notices that the drunken gunslinger’s feet are rather too close together and that his center of gravity, therefore, is by no means adequate.

Says Roosevelt, “Well, if I’ve got to, I’ve got to.” “As I rose, I struck quick and hard with my right just to one side of the point of his jaw, hitting with my left as I straightened out, and then again with my right. He fired the guns, but I do not know whether this was merely a convulsive action of his hands or whether he was trying to shoot me.” Surely Roosevelt hopes it was the latter.

Down goes the ruffian. Down goes the gunslinger, like a sack of potatoes.

Fortunately, in falling backward from the force of Roosevelt’s punches, the gunslinger hits his head on the bar and is knocked cold.

“It was not a case in which one could afford to take chances, and if he had moved I was about to drop on his ribs with my knees; but he was senseless.”

Roosevelt disarms the ruffian. Suddenly, the bar patrons who had been cowering and doing everything in their power to conciliate the gunman when Roosevelt entered the saloon, grow brave and “loud in their denunciation of him.”

The troublemaker is hustled out of the bar and thrown into a shed.

“When my assailant came to, he went down to the station and left on a freight [train].”

Roosevelt finishes his meal and goes back to his room. Word travels fast in the badlands. The punkinlily from New York is not to be trifled with. He’s got pluck and courage, and he’s outstanding in a crisis.

“Roosevelt was regarded by the cowboys as a good deal of a joke until after the saloon incident. After that it was different,” said railroad official Frank Greene, years later.

Historians are not quite sure just when this incident occurred. Edmund Morris, in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, places it in the late summer of 1884. Hermann Hagedorn, the author of Roosevelt in the Badlands, prefers June 1884. Morris dismisses this as logistically impossible. Carleton Putnam, Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, chooses April 1885. Contemporaries, including Pierre Wibaux of Mingusville, agree that the incident occurred “shortly after July 1884.” Unless new evidence surfaces, it is only safe to conclude that the incident occurred sometime between June 1884 and June 1885.