Hasten forward quickly there!

From The Boys of '98 by Dale L. Walker. Roosevelt's wife, Alice has just died.

He found solace in the West, still a great blank land in the 1880s where anyone who could abide its rigors could lose himself in its lonely grandeur.

Roosevelt, a dedicated hunter from his youth, had first gone out to Dakota Territory to kill buffalo in September 1883, stepping off the train at the Little Missouri station (called "Little Miser" by the scattering of residents there) in his derby hat and Brooks Brothers suit, and wearing his thick pince-nez eyeglasses. If his tailoring did not mark him as a greenhorn, the glasses did. Before long the cowboys, ranchmen and others among the horny-handed denizens of the Badlands were calling him "Four-Eyes" and "that dude Rosenfelder," and were amused no end by his Harvardish language, his spurning of tobacco in any form, and hard liquor, and his idea of swearing - an occasional "Damn!" more often a "By Godfrey!" uttered in a tinny-tenor voice.

Although he occasionally employed a mild form of it, he hated profanity and there are stories, some resembling dime novel tales, in Roosevelt's Autobiography attesting to this. Once a drunk accosted him in a Dakota hotel and in a stream of vile language and with six-guns drawn, announced that "Four-Eyes is going to treat!" Roosevelt, by now accustomed to the "Four-Eyes" name, listened to the man for a moment, got up from his chair and punched the drunk with a short combination, right and left hands working like pistons. The man slid to the floor and the story of the incident spread almost as quickly. It did that dude Rosenfelder's reputation no harm.

"Hell-Roaring" Bill Jones, Sheriff of Billings County, was another who felt the tenderfoot's wrath on the matter of the mouth. Roosevelt admired Jones, saying he was "a thorough frontiersman, excellent in all kinds of emergencies, and a very game man," and "a thoroughly good citizen when sober." But in the offices of the Bad Lands Cowboy, the newspaper in the Dakota town of Medora, Jones was regaling Roosevelt and a group of cowpunchers with some stories which Roosevelt regarded as filthy. He listened awhile then interrupted the sheriff, saying, "I can't tell you why in the world I like you, for you're the nastiest-talking man I ever heard." Sheriff Jones, who had shot men for lesser insults, was so taken aback at this gritty statement that he ended up allowing, meekly, "I don't mind saying that mebbe I've been a little too free with my mouth."

Roosevelt's own choice of language was long remembered. During his first roundup, some cowboys heard him shout, "Hasten forward quickly there!" and the phrase entered the Badlands lexicon with countless barflys thereafter bellowing to saloon keepers to "hasten forward quickly there" with their shot of whiskey or schooner of beer.