A Rough Ride to Redemption: The Ben Daniels Story (review)

Gunfighter, horse thief, gambler, Rough Rider, miner, and politician, Ben Daniels practiced all of these professions and more, according to DeArment and DeMattos. In this work, the first full-length biography of Daniels, the authors attempt to recover the details of Daniels's life while also establishing his place in the history of the Old West. They argue, as the title indicates, that Daniels made critical errors in his early life that haunted his later years and limited his political accomplishments.

After a childhood filled with tragedy, Daniels made his way to Dodge City, Kansas, by the 1870s. In the surrounding areas, he scrounged out a living as a buffalo hunter and, it appears, occasional thief. As such, a conviction following a military mule theft in 1879 led to his incarceration in the Wisconsin Territorial Penitentiary. After his release in 1883, Daniels returned to Dodge and, perhaps having learned his lesson, pursued a career in law enforcement. However, the peace was broken with the loss of his deputyship and his subsequent murder of a fellow businessman, J. E. "Ed" Julian. Acquitted on all charges, the authors contend that Daniels acted in accordance with the "Code of the West," as Julian had vowed earlier in the day to kill Daniels on sight. Interestingly enough, this murder proved less of an obstacle to his subsequent dealings with Theodore Roosevelt than his mule theft.

After stints as a Colorado law officer and Cripple Creek enforcer, in 1898 a forty-five-year old Daniels joined the Rough Riders. DeArment and DeMattos really hit their stride when discussing the Daniels-Roosevelt interactions. Daniels's life proved the example that, even after the Rough Riders disbanded, Roosevelt continued to offer assistance, when he could, to his men. Despite the political backlash resulting from Daniels's checkered past, Roosevelt managed to push through an Arizona U.S. marshal appointment for Daniels, a post that he kept until 1909. Roosevelt and Daniels kept in touch via a regular correspondence and would even meet up when Roosevelt's train tours took him through western locales. Their friendship would last until Roosevelt's death.

Even though DeArment and DeMattos do a fine job as biographers, there are still a few concerns. First and foremost, a reader has to retain a healthy degree of skepticism regarding the pre-Roosevelt section of the work, as much of it is based on personal accounts and newspapers, such as the Dodge City Times, that were at best heavily biased and at worst unreliable. To their credit, the authors acknowledge such limitations, but they also exacerbate these issues by weighing down the text with lengthy quotations. Very few of these excerpts reflect Daniels's voice until the second half of the work when the Roosevelt letters and telegrams are included. Although a rough read at times, A Rough Ride to Redemption is recommended for individuals interested in understanding how Old West ideals, as embodied in Daniels, survived the transition into the twentieth century.