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| Marquis |
The Marquis de Morès was probably the most colorful
character to pass through St. Paul, Minnesota, if not the entire Midwest. He
wasn’t just colorful, but kaleidoscopic. Army officer, duelist, adventurer,
rancher, gunslinger, the handsome and dashing Marquis made a splash wherever he
landed.
Born in 1858, he graduated in 1879 from St. Cyr, France’s
leading military academy, where he was a classmate of Philippe Pètain, WWI
general and WWII leader of the Vichy government. Next it was on to Saumur,
France’s top cavalry school. Sent to Algiers to help quell an uprising, be
began his swashbuckling career, fighting his first duel, on his way to becoming a notable duelist of his era.
In 1882, he met the lovely Medora von Hoffman, daughter of a
wealthy New York banker. She was a couple of years older than he was and
accomplished. She spoke seven languages (three more than he did), played piano,
painted, and rode.
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| Medora |
He resigned from the cavalry, married Medora in Cannes, and
moved to the US. After working a short time for his new father-in-law, he got
an idea. Whether the idea was his or his father-in-law’s, or someone else’s—it
was bold. He set out to bust the Chicago “beef trust.” His plan was to raise
his own cattle, butcher them, and send the meat to market in refrigerated
railroad cars, bypassing the Chicago stockyards. He needed a headquarters, a
ranch, and a railroad.
He chose St. Paul as his headquarters for good reason. It
was the gateway to the Dakotas, Montana, and the Pacific Northwest. New England
and New York investors financed the growth of the burgeoning city, known as the
last eastern city. Others viewed it as the Boston of the Northwest. Boston’s
Endicott brothers, for instance, hired Cass Gilbert to design several downtown
buildings. The crown jewel was the Italian-Renaissance-themed Endicott
Building, an architectural and financial success, a building lampooned in the
1950s by Max Schulman as a running gag on The
Many Loves of Dobie Gillis—c’mon, Dobe, let’s go watch them tear down the
old Endicott Building.
The Marquis and his wife lived in a residential hotel on the
site of the present-day Ordway Center on Rice Park, the jewel of downtown St.
Paul today. He opened a butcher business in Lowertown. He bought a cottage on White
Bear Lake, the fashionable lake for St. Paulites. Even Mark Twain was impressed
by the lake. Scott Fitzgerald probably was, too, but he disguised it in his
“Basil” stories by calling it Black Bear Lake. After being introduced by
General Herman Haupt, general manager of the Northern Pacific, the Marquis
hired Cass Gilbert to remodel his lake cottage. Medora apparently spent only
summers in North Dakota. Both seemed to play more than work, suggesting the
Marquis wasn’t the best overseer of his enterprise.
St. Paul was becoming a center of manufacturing. At the
height of the boom, Conrad Gotzian employed five hundred workers to make shoes,
and his company wasn’t the only shoe manufacturer. The city was the head of
steamship navigation on the Mississippi River and was fast becoming the second
largest rail hub after Chicago. In 1881, Henry Villard devised the “blind
pool.” Fifty investors including the Endicott brothers, no-questions-asked,
loaned him twenty million dollars to take over Northern Pacific Railway. In1883,
just after the Marquis arrived, Henry Villard organized a three-train
procession to Gold Creek, Montana, to celebrate the railroad’s connection to
the Pacific Ocean. General Grant was along to hammer in the symbolic spike. It
was a long time coming. Abraham Lincoln chartered the railroad in 1864.
Triumphal arches were erected in St. Paul. Celebrations were
held along the way. One stop was Bismarck, North Dakota, where Leroy
Buffington, a Minneapolis architect who patented the skyscraper, was building
the state capitol. Sitting Bull, looking fat and unwarrior-like, was brought
from the reservation for entertainment. General Grant was a huge attraction at
every town along the route. Maybe the Marquis didn’t need his own railroad.
After he founded the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, the Marquis perhaps
wrongly believed he needed only locomotives.
The Marquis set up his ranch on a six-square-mile area of
Little Missouri River bottom in North Dakota. Shunning the citizens of nearby
Little Missouri because they opposed him and his barbed-wire fences, he founded
his own town named after his wife, Medora. He built a twenty-six room clapboard-sided
house, sometimes known as Chateau de Morès, a beef-packing plant, a hotel, a
church, a brickyard, a stage coach line, and a freighting company. And he
bought cattle. Today Medora is the number-one tourist attraction in North
Dakota.
His neighbor was Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt settled in North
Dakota to get away from his tragedy back home. His wife and his mother both
died on the same day. Later in life, Roosevelt claimed that if he hadn’t gone
to North Dakota, he would have never become president.
Once settled in Medora, the Marquis settled into his old
habits, killing a cowboy, Riley Luffsey, in a shootout in 1883. He was
arrested, but not charged. Over time his wife gained something of a reputation
as an Annie Oakley, having shot three or four bear on a Wyoming hunt. Sometime
later, a friend of Roosevelt’s lobbied the sheriff to put the Marquis on trial
for killing the cowboy. He was tried and acquitted in 1885 (some suggest he was
tried and acquitted for the same crime three times). Because the agitator was a
friend of Roosevelt’s, the Marquis suspected Roosevelt had something to do with
instigating the trouble he found himself in and challenged Roosevelt to a duel.
The situation was defused when Roosevelt assured him he was
not an enemy, and the two men became friends again, even traveling to Miles
City, Montana, together to attend a meeting of cattlemen. Disappointed there
was no agreement to fight cattle-rustling in the Badlands, both men attempted
to join the Stranglers, a vigilante group organized by Granville Stuart. Stuart
turned them down because of their high profiles. Another proof of their
friendship was the inscribed watch Roosevelt gave to de Morès, for sale on eBay
several years back.
Quick to anger, the Marquis wasn’t one to stay out of
trouble. Other instances of gunplay were reputed to have occurred, but the big
trouble was in his losing battle against the “beef trust.” His father-in-law,
stuck with one-point-five million of debt, cut him off. The business collapsed.
There were lawsuits. As the winter of 1886 arrived, the Marquis and his wife packed
up and headed off to India to hunt tigers. The town of Medora never recovered. Drought
and a frigid winter killed half the herds, completing the destruction.
Whatever his feeling towards Jews was before the collapse of
his business, the Marquis became hostile toward them after. He blamed the
failure of his business on a Jewish plot, claiming Jews dominated the “beef
trust.” He was correct about a plot. The “beef trust” negotiated a better deal
with the railroads, in the same way Rockefeller managed to have all other
shippers subsidize him. There may have been one, none, or a hundred Jews. It
was business as usual for the Gilded Age. Also, the public showed a preference
for corn-fed beef as opposed to range-fed. His virulent anti-Semitism, fueled
by the failure of his business, governed his behavior, leading to his downfall
and death.
In 1888, the French army commissioned the Marquis to build a
railroad from the Chinese border to the Gulf of Tonkin. The British were
building a railroad from Burma to China, so the project made sense to him. He
even cautioned the army to be kind to the Vietnamese. “The colonization of
Tonkin will not be accomplished with rifles, but public works,” he wrote.
Political intrigue and the shifting of power killed the
railroad. A year later the Marquis was recalled. He attacked Jean Constans, the
undersecretary of the navy, who opposed the railroad and demanded his recall. He
joined an anti-Semitic organization. He challenged a Jewish journalist and member
of the Chamber of Deputies, Ferdinand-Camille Dreyfus, to a duel. Dreyfus fired
first and missed. The Marquis shot Dreyfus in the arm.
In 1892, Captain Armand Meyer, a Jewish army officer
challenged the Marquis to a duel. The Marquis picked swords. The Marquis
reputedly killed Meyer in three seconds. An investigation followed. Meyer may
have had a bad arm (because the Marquis was challenged, he had the choice of
weapons and picked swords over pistols). Nothing came of the investigation.
His inflammatory behavior in France got the Marquis sent to Algeria.
He continued his anti-Semitic harangues, claiming African Jews and the British
were conspiring to take over North Africa. The British, since General Gordon literally
lost his head to the Mahdi, weren’t doing all that well in North Africa. Even
so, the Marquis determined to meet the Mahdi in Khartoum to forge an alliance.
A conspiracy in the French army sent the Marquis to Berresof
where he was to meet Taurag “guides.” The guides assassinated him a few days
later. Two men were later found guilty of murder, but no one in the French
government or army was convicted. The Marquis was thirty seven when he died.
In 1903, Medora traveled with her three children back to the
Badlands for a last visit.
In 1905, Teddy Roosevelt busted the “beef trust.”
During WWI Medora opened up her Cannes house to wounded
soldiers. She died in 1921.
In 1936, son Louis donated the Chateau de Morès to the State
of North Dakota.
