Marquis de Mores

An extraordinary fact: the chairman of the 1884 Republican party convention in Chicago was a black man. Not strictly French this blog entry, I concede. But i am reading a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and these details are surely worth airing. But there is one fascinating French connection in the book: in the person of the Badlands cattle rancher and French aristocrat Antoine Amedee-Marie-Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, better known as the Marquis de Mores. The Marquis was Roosevelt's neighbour in Dakota when the future president moved there in search of open space and solace after the deaths (within hours of each other) of his wife and mother. De Mores had married an American heiress called Medora Von Hoffman, and named his frontier settlement after her. Does it still exist? Must check google earth. He was an incorrigible schemer, renowned gunslinger and obviously a total crackpot. Roosevelt seems to have liked him -- though their relations were at times tense. De Mores's ranching business went belly up in 1885, and he went on to lead an equally bizarre life in French Indochina and North Africa. He became virulently anti-Semitic and was challenged to a duel by Camille Dreyfus, a Jewish member of parliament in Paris. Dreyfus missed, and de Mores winged him. In 1896 de Mores was murdered by Touareg tribesmen - a fittingly adventurous end. He is buried in Cannes.