Roosevelt owns an excellent boat, which he has tied up on the shore of the Little Missouri River outside the cabin at the Elkhorn Ranch. It is late March 1886. The initial spring thaw has come, but the river is choked with large blocks of ice.

He has just returned from the East and he is most eager to use the boat to go cougar hunting.

His ranch manager announces one morning that the boat is missing. The rope has been cut. A stray mitten is found on the shore.

Roosevelt concludes that someone has stolen his boat!

His men tell him that there is not much to do about it. The thieves have the boat. It would be difficult to follow them on the sodden shore, and getting through the ice floes to the river would be next to impossible. Besides, they are long gone.

Roosevelt takes control. Lawlessness and theft can never be condoned, he explains, especially on the raw frontier where institutions of justice have not yet been established. Every unchallenged act of lawlessness invites further disregard for the sanctity of property. Every crime is a blow to the idea of civilization, especially where civilization is still fragile. The boat thieves must be apprehended, in spite of the miserable conditions on the river, the blizzard that is moving through the district, and the fact that the thieves have a boat and Roosevelt doesn’t.

Roosevelt’s men build a makeshift boat. It is not a handsome boat, but it floats. While they labor, Roosevelt takes advantage of his leisure time to write the first chapter of his forthcoming biography of Thomas Hart Benton.

At last the boat is ready. Roosevelt and his men load it with two weeks’ provisions. The thieves have a six-day head start. Roosevelt is pretty sure he knows who they are. The ringleader is surely Red Headed Mike Finnegan, a notorious scofflaw and horse thief who is attempting to get out of the region before he is hanged for his offenses.

On the third day out, Roosevelt and his men catch up to the stolen boat. The thieves never expected to be followed in such weather. Two of them are off hunting. The third is a harmless old German named Pfaffenbach. Roosevelt and his cohorts arrest and disarm him, and then lay an ambush for the others. In the manner of a dime novel they manage to arrest the other two without violence, though Roosevelt will later report that “Finnigan hesitated for a second, his eyes fairly wolfish. Then, as I walked up within a few paces, covering the centre of his chest so as to avoid overshooting and repeating the command, he saw that he had no show, and, with an oath, let his rifle drop and held his hands up beside his head.”

The boat has been recovered. The thieves are in Roosevelt’s custody. Now all that remains is to get them to the authorities in Mandan. This can be done by floating everyone to the mouth of the Little Missouri River, then down the Missouri proper to Mandan, a distance of almost 200 river miles.

The desperadoes fulfill Roosevelt’s fantasies about frontier adventure. Pfaffenbach is a harmless and empty-headed old man. Roosevelt will later make sure he is spared a jail term. Burnsted is what Roosevelt calls a sullen halfbreed. And Finnegan was made for just such a lark as this. He has thick red hair, including facial hair, and evil black eyes. He cuts a mighty odd figure there on the Little Missouri River because he is still recovering from a clever practical joke. One night he got drunk in the Medora bars and passed out cold. His friends borrowed a barber’s shears and cut off all the hair on one side of his head, half of his beard, and half of his moustache on the same hemisphere. They even cut off all the fringe on one side of Finnegan’s buckskin shirt. When he woke up he was a half-shorn man, and he was hopping mad. “His heart got bad,” a contemporary said. “He laid down in a fringe of brush near the Marquis’s store, where he could command a clear view of the town, and began to pump lead into every-thing in sight.” By the time of the boat adventure, his hair is growing back, but he still bears the marks of the saloon joke.

Now problems begin to surface.

It’s so cold that Roosevelt dares not tie up the desperadoes at night, for fear that they will be frostbitten. So he and his two men mount a 24- hour watch. They force the thieves to remove their boots and socks at night so they will be less tempted to try to make a break for it.

It’s almost impossible to make any progress. The river is choked with ice that freezes and thaws and makes it difficult to move more than a mile or two downstream each day. The food supply is running out. The overflowing river makes shoreline hunting almost impossible. Eventually everyone is forced to eat unleavened bread made with muddy water scooped out of the Little Missouri.

Roosevelt considers turning the thieves loose as a humanitarian gesture. He cannot feed them and he cannot get them to jail. His old friend William Sewall convinces the boss to persevere. “It’s something to know that if we’re punishing ourselves, we’re punishing the thieves also.”

Fortunately, Roosevelt never travels without something to read. Better still, the book in his possession is an English translation of Leo Tolstoy’s interminable Anna Karenina. He reads it cover to cover to cut the tedium and to stay awake long enough to get the thieves to justice. He does not much like Tolstoy’s indifference to morality—the novel is, after all, about adultery— but he admires the sweep of Tolstoy’s imagination.

Eventually, Roosevelt decides he must abandon the idea of floating the thieves to Mandan. He’ll march them overland to Dickinson instead, a distance of more than fifty miles. He scours the plains and finally reaches a remote cow camp, where he borrows a horse. Now he rides fifteen miles to the Diamond C Ranch on the edge of the Killdeer Mountains. There he obtains some desperately-needed supplies, and borrows a prairie schooner and a ranch hand to drive it. They go back for the thieves. Roosevelt leaves Sewall and Dow to take care of the boats. He will handle the three boat thieves alone.

So far the adventure is ten days old.

Roosevelt has finished Anna Karenina. In his guileless way he asks Red Headed Mike Finnegan if he might possibly have a book on his person. Finnegan does have a book! It’s a dime novel about Jesse James. Roosevelt borrows it, and reads it through.

The adventure has become an ordeal. Alone with desperate men, Roosevelt knows that if he falls asleep even for an instant the thieves will abscond—or worse. Already desperately fatigued and hungry, he now finds it necessary to stay awake for 48 straight hours.

For most of three days Roosevelt walks behind the wagon holding his Winchester. He’d like to ride with the others, but he needs to keep his distance to avoid being overpowered by the ruffians, and he is not too sure about the virtue of the driver either. The plains are sodden from the thaw, and Roosevelt finds it difficult to trudge through the ankle-deep gumbo and mud. At night they stay in a squalid hut. Roosevelt sits with his back to the door fighting off sleep, the Winchester nestled in his weary arms.

Finally the five men arrive in Dickinson. Roosevelt turns them in to the sheriff. For his efforts he receives $50—which includes mileage compensation for his 300-mile journey.

Roosevelt is triumphant. He has done the right thing in the face of almost impossible odds. But he’s as tired as he has ever been, and his feet are bruised, swollen, and infected. He can barely walk.

He stops a man on the street and asks for directions to the nearest doctor. The stranger introduces himself as Dr. Victor Hugo Stickney, the only physician in the region. It’s the Roosevelt luck.

Dr. Stickney takes Roosevelt to his office, and does what he can for the New Yorker’s badly damaged feet. Stickney and Roosevelt, of course, become friends. Years later Stickney remembers how sorry Roosevelt looked as he trudged along the streets of Dickinson. “He was all teeth and eyes, but even so he seemed a man unusually wide awake. You could see he was thrilled by the adventures he had been through. He did not seem to think he had done anything particularly commendable, but he was, in his own phrase, ‘pleased as punch’ at the idea of having participated in a real adventure.” Roosevelt, said Stickney, “was just like a boy.”

Roosevelt catches the next train west so he can get back to Medora in time for the spring meeting of the Little Missouri River Stockmen’s Association, of which he is the president.

Roosevelt realizes that the story is so good that he must publish an account of it in Century Magazine. He writes a 4000-word account of his heroics. It would be such a better story if he had photographs to illustrate it. So he stages a couple of snapshots of the dramatic arrest of April 1, 1886, using Sewall and Dow as stand-ins for the desperadoes.

For the rest of his life, when he returns to North Dakota, Roosevelt reminds his audiences of his adventure with the boat thieves.