ice-filled river, and finally came to the spot where the gang had made camp.
Roosevelt, the experienced hunter, managed to approach silently and unseen until the moment he stood up, rifle in hands, and announced that they were his prisoners. Not a shot had to be fired.
But capturing Finnegan and his friends was the easy part. They had to be transported overland more than one hundred miles to the town of Dickenson, where they would stand trial. Within a couple of days the party of three lawmen and three outlaws was out of food. Finally Roosevelt set out on foot for a ranch—any ranch—and came back a day later with a small wagon filled with enough food to keep them alive on the long trek. The wagon had a single horse, and given the weather and conditions of the crude trails, the horse couldn't be expected pull all six men, so Sewell and Dow rode in the wagon while Roosevelt and the three captives walked behind it on an almost nonexistent trail, knee-deep in snow, in below-freezing weather. And the closer they got to Dickenson, the more likely it was that Finnegan would attempt to escape, so Roosevelt didn't sleep the last two days and nights of the forced march.
But he delivered the outlaws, safe and reasonably sound. He would be a lawman again in another nine years, but his turf would be as different from the Badlands as night is from day.
He became the police commissioner of New York City.
New York was already a pretty crime-ridden city, even before the turn of the twentieth century. Roosevelt, who had already been a successful politician, lawman, lecturer and author, was hired to change that—and change it he did.
He hired the best people he could find. That included the first woman on the New York police force—and the next few dozen as well. (Before long, every station had police matrons around the clock, thus assuring that any female prisoner would be booked by a member of her own sex.)
Then came another innovation: when Roosevelt decided that most of the cops couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with their sidearms, target practice was not merely encouraged but made mandatory for the first time in the force's history.
When the rise of the automobile meant that police on foot could no longer catch some escaping lawbreakers, Roosevelt created a unit of bicycle police (who, in the 1890s, had no problem keeping up with the cars of that era, which were traversing streets that had not been created with automobiles in mind.)
He hired Democrats as well as Republicans, men who disliked him as well as men who worshipped him. All he cared about was that they were able to get the job done.
He was intolerant only of intolerance. When the famed anti-Semitic preacher from Berlin, Rector Ahlwardt, came to America, New York's Jewish population didn't want to allow him in the city. Roosevelt couldn't bar him, but he came up with the perfect solution: Ahlwardt's police bodyguards were composed entirely of very large, very unhappy Jewish cops whose presence convinced the bigot to forego his anti-Semitic harangues while he was in the city.
Roosevelt announced that all promotions would be strictly on merit and not political pull, then spent the next two years proving he meant what he said. He also invited the press into his office whenever he was there, and if a visiting politician tried to whisper a question so that the reporters couldn't hear it, Roosevelt would repeat and answer it in a loud, clear voice.
As police commissioner, Roosevelt felt the best way to make sure his police force was performing its duty was to go out in the field and see for himself. He didn't bother to do so during the day; the press and the public were more than happy to report on the doings of his policemen.
No, what he did was go out into the most dangerous neighborhoods, unannounced, between midnight and sunrise, usually with a reporter or two in tow, just in case things got out of hand. (Not that he thought they would help him physically, but he expected them to accurately report what happened if a misbehaving or loafing cop turned on him.)
The press dubbed these his “midnight rambles,” and after a while the publicity alone caused almost all the police to stay at their posts and do their duty. They never knew when the commissioner might show up in their territory and either fire them on