The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

  Rondon today remains one of Brazil’s greatest heroes, and his efforts on behalf of the Amazonian Indians have endured in the form of the modern Indian Protection Service—the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI. In spite of all that he had tried to do for the Indians he loved, however, the inroads he made into their territory have had as devastating an impact on their survival as the rubber boom. During Rondon’s last years, in the 1950s, the path that he had carved out of the wilderness for his short-lived telegraph line became a road now known as BR-364. That road brought cattle ranchers, gold prospectors, rubber-tappers, and adventurers of all grades into the interior, where they took Indian land and wiped out entire tribes. When Rondon left the military academy in 1889, Brazil had been home to roughly a million Indians. By the time he died sixty-nine years later, fewer than 200,000 survived.

  As the youngest American on the River of Doubt, Kermit Roosevelt might have been expected to carry his father’s legacy far into the twentieth century. Yet somehow, for all his brilliance, courage, and youthful Rooseveltian energy, he was never able to live up to his promise, or even his own expectations. Indeed, his death was so tragic that the only measure of comfort his family could have found in it was the fact that his father did not live to witness it.

  The unraveling of Kermit’s life began soon after he returned to South America with his new bride. He took a job in Argentina with a branch of the National City Bank, but while building railroads and bridges in wild Indian territory had suited Kermit’s adventurous spirit, banking in Buenos Aires did not. As the years passed, the young man who had once shown such promise and had impressed his father with his leadership skills and discipline became increasingly disaffected, able to cultivate an interest in little other than his wife and the son to whom she gave birth in Argentina—Kermit Jr., or Kim.

  On January 6, 1919, Kermit was in Germany with the occupying army when he was handed a telegram sent by his brother Archie, who was home with severe war wounds. The telegram read simply: “The old lion is dead.” Roosevelt had been a central figure in each of his children’s lives, but he had been his second son’s inspiration and moral compass. Without him, Kermit was lost. The next day, in a letter to his mother, Kermit confessed, “The bottom has dropped out for me.”

  Just as Roosevelt’s only brother, Elliott, had been devastated by the death of their father, so did the death of his own father deliver a staggering blow to Kermit. His romanticism and quiet introversion had been warmly reminiscent of his uncle Elliott in his youth, but the similarities between the two men in adulthood were as striking as they were tragic. Like Elliott, Kermit never really found his footing in the world. He could not easily put aside his romantic adventures and ideals and take up his real-world responsibilities, as his father had.

  Also like his ill-fated uncle, Kermit found himself turning more and more frequently to alcohol to take the edge off of real life. He often drank heavily with his brother Ted, but he was less able to hold his liquor—and less willing to stop. In the 1920s, at a party in honor of Richard Byrd, the American admiral who made the first flight over the South Pole, Kermit drank so much that he passed out, and was found the next day lying in a corner of the club. Finally, Archie had him admitted to a sanatorium against his will, just as their father had forcibly admitted Elliott to a French asylum half a century earlier.

  Like everything else in Kermit’s life, even the great love that had sustained him through his darkest days on the River of Doubt did not so much shatter as crumble, slowly eroding through years of neglect and betrayal. Belle’s hard-edged social ambition and Kermit’s dreamy, aimless approach to life left them both frustrated and sad. Kermit lost Belle’s substantial inheritance after investing it in a business opportunity that failed during the Depression of the 1930s, and the couple was eventually reduced to renting out their Oyster Bay home and selling family jewelry.

  Perhaps most painful of all for the proud, beautiful Belle, however, was Kermit’s open infidelity. He carried out his affairs with the same unencumbered ease and shrugging disregard for the consequences not only to his wife and children but to his father’s name, which seemed to pervade every aspect of his adult life. Although hurt and humiliated by the betrayal, Belle refused to let go. When Kermit disappeared in a drunken fog with his mistress, Belle asked Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her cousin by marriage and by then the president of the United States, to send the FBI to find him. When FDR committed the United States to World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, she asked him to give Kermit a military commission.

  FDR sent Kermit to Alaska. It would prove to be his final adventure. At fifty-two years of age, just three years younger than his father had been when they had set out together down the River of Doubt, Kermit’s body was so broken and ill-used that he could not do much more than sit at a local restaurant and drink wine. But he talked airmen into letting him ride along on their missions to bomb Japanese strongholds in the Aleutians, and he joined up with Muktuk Marston, a major who had organized Alaska’s Tundra Army.

  On the night of June 3, 1943, after making the rounds of Fort Richardson with Marston, Kermit turned to his friend and asked him what he was going to do after they returned to the post. When Marston told him that he was going to go to sleep, Kermit, haunted by all that he could have been and all that he had become, replied, “I wish I could go to sleep.” He returned to his quarters alone and took out a revolver that he had carried with him during his days in the British Army. Nearly thirty years after he had used his extraordinary physical and mental strength to prevent his father from taking his own life on the banks of the River of Doubt, Kermit, sick, tired, sad, and alone, was now too weak to save himself from that same fate. Feeling the weight of the cold, heavy revolver in his swollen and lined hands, he placed it under his chin, and pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  IN THE decades following Roosevelt’s journey down the River of Doubt, others tried to duplicate his achievement. Soon after his homecoming, two expeditions set out to retrace his route. One was forced to turn back for fear of an Indian attack. The other disappeared as soon as it launched its canoes on the remote river, and its members were never seen again. It was presumed that they were all killed by the same Indians that had shadowed Roosevelt’s expedition. Not until 1926 did another expedition, led by an American commander named George Miller Dyott, successfully descend the River of Doubt. Dyott returned to report that the river was just as Roosevelt had described it.

  As the decades passed, the Cinta Larga Indians became increasingly bold toward outsiders. By the 1950s, they were attacking rubber-tappers, gold prospectors, and settlements that had sprung up around the telegraph stations. At first, the objective of these attacks was almost always to acquire metal tools. As time passed, however, the BR-364, the road that had been constructed along Rondon’s telegraph line, brought in hundreds of prospectors and adventurers who hated and feared the Indians, and who tried their best to kill as many of them as they could. The Cinta Larga’s war against the outside world became a matter of self-preservation, a pitched battle against extinction. This time, the outsiders did not stop coming. They shot Indians on sight, dynamited their villages from the air, and left gifts of poisoned food on their trails. The Indians retaliated by attacking settlements, riddling men with arrows, and mutilating their corpses.

  It was not until the late 1960s, more than half a century after the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition, that the Indians living near the River of Doubt had their first official contact with the outside world. So-called sertanistas from FUNAI—men who, modeling themselves and their ideals after Rondon, set out to find and pacify Amazonian Indians—tried for years to make contact, but by that time too much damage had been done. The Indians did not trust anyone outside of their own tribe, especially not white men. The sertanistas’ advances were repeatedly repelled. The Indians kept their wives and children hidden, a clear sign of distrust, and defiantly mutilated a collection of dolls that the men had le
ft for them as gifts. “Next day we found them ripped apart,” a journalist following the sertanistas wrote, “the heads stuck on tree limbs, the bodies, skewered by arrows, lying beside the trail.”

  Steps toward pacification were slow and fearful on both sides, and when the moment of face-to-face contact finally arrived, it was fraught with emotion and heavy with the weight of two worlds colliding. This extraordinary meeting—the passing of gifts over what had seemed an unbridgeable divide—was chronicled in the pages of National Geographic magazine the following year, as an unarmed sertanista risked his life to reach out to a tribe that could easily have killed him. Standing in the rough clearing that the sertanistas had carved out of the forest as a place to leave gifts for the Indians, two terrified young men—one a nearly naked warrior, the other representing the Brazilian government—leaned forward, extended their right arms as far as they would reach, and exchanged gifts: a machete for a palm-frond headdress.

  After the exchange was completed in silence, a series of clicks echoed in the jungle as fifty Indian warriors who had stood ready to attack withdrew their arrows from their bows. “In this manner,” the magazine reported, “one of earth’s last Stone Age peoples took their first fearful steps into a bewildering new world of men who know how to fly to the moon.”

  * * *

  IN THE years since the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition made its journey, countless battles have been waged in the rain forest that flanks the River of Doubt. Untold millions of creatures have been born and died. They have multiplied, and they have protected, fed, and fought for their offspring. Some species have begun to evolve to become better predators and more elusive prey. Others have succumbed to extinction. To an outsider, this stretch of the Amazon, at least, appears untouched and unchanging, but in the delicately balanced, constantly evolving reality of the tropical rain forest, nothing ever remains the same.

  The moment the men of the expedition pounded their camp markers into the riverbank, the Amazon began to dismantle them. The rains expanded and warped their rough surfaces. Termites gnawed on the soft wood. Animals and Indians carried them off for their own uses. Even the elaborate network of fungus on the forest floor devoured the markers after they fell, reclaiming them for the jungle’s intricate and tightly woven web of life. The simple tribute to Simplicio that the men had left near the falls where the camarada had drowned soon disappeared, as did the crude cross over Paishon’s grave. Even the brave soldier’s bones were likely scavenged from their shallow resting place.

  Among the most ephemeral marks the men left on the rain forest were the ruts in the thin layer of leaf litter made by Roosevelt’s cot as he lay sweating and shaking, his voice fading in the early-morning darkness as he instructed his friend and his son to leave him there to die by his own hand. Had they done so, rather than resolve to find a way to bring Roosevelt and all of the expedition out of the rain forest alive, the former president’s remains would have been scattered along the River of Doubt—and used, like everything else in the jungle, to protect and sustain the living.

  But while the Amazon erased all evidence of the expedition, the rain forest, the wild river that runs through it, and the former president who had led them left an indelible impression on the men who survived. On March 1, 1919, not quite two months after Roosevelt’s death, the Explorers Club, a New York society devoted to scientific exploration, assembled at its clubhouse on Amsterdam Avenue for a memorial to the former president and fellow explorer. The club members, who included such legendary figures as Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen, invited George Cherrie to speak to them that night.

  Cherrie, who felt more at home in a remote South American rain forest than he did in the rich, formal surroundings of the Explorers Club, accepted the invitation with the same wry reluctance he had felt when he had been offered a spot on Theodore Roosevelt’s expedition six years earlier. Cherrie felt out of place at the black-tie affair, speaking before a gathering of some of New York’s wealthiest and most powerful men, and was not convinced that he could do justice to his topic.

  Stepping to the podium, his leathery skin and rugged appearance in stark contrast to the club’s fine white linens, gleaming silver, and polished wood, Cherrie regaled his audience with the tales of hard adventure that were his trademark and life story. But when he came to the subject of Theodore Roosevelt, his demeanor noticeably changed, and the man who had once objected to “camping with royalty” struggled for ways to express the depth of his feelings about the former president, and their shared struggle for survival on the River of Doubt.

  In the club’s ornate hall, filled with mounted polar bears, Indian spears, and other trophies from across the globe, the aging naturalist became lost in the memory of a distant jungle, and a friendship forged at the limits of human endurance.

  “I have always thought it strange,” Cherrie said quietly, “since I had the opportunity to know him and know him intimately—because I feel that I did know him very intimately—how any man could be brought in close personal contact with Colonel Roosevelt without loving the man.”

  As he continued, his audience of dignitaries and socialites realized that the man before them—a man whose callused hands had fought off cavalry charges, smuggled guns, and catalogued nature’s most dangerous mysteries—had begun to weep.

  “I was in the consulate at La Guayra, Venezuela,” the naturalist recalled, “when the Consul received the cable announcing Colonel Roosevelt’s death. He handed it to me without a word.

  “When I read that message,” Cherrie said at last, “the tears came to my eyes. As they do now.”

  NOTES

  MANUSCRIPT SOURCES

  Archives of the American Museum of Natural History, AMNH Indiana Province Archives Center, IPAC

  John A. Zahm Papers, CJZA, and Albert F. Zahm Papers, CAZA Archives of the University of Notre Dame

  Kermit and Belle Roosevelt Papers, KBRP Library of Congress, Manuscript Division

  National Geographic Society, NGS

  Rauner Special Collections Library, RSCL Dartmouth College Library

  Theodore Roosevelt Collection, TRC

  Harvard College Library, by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University

  Theodore Roosevelt Papers, TRP, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Presidential Papers Series

  PROLOGUE

  “I don’t believe” George Cherrie, Dark Trails (New York, 1930).

  “No civilized man” Theodore Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness (New York, 1914).

  “The scene is vivid” Kermit Roosevelt, The Long Trail (New York, 1921).

  As the fever-wracked Ibid.

  CHAPTER 1: Defeat

  The doors were not scheduled to open New York Times, Oct. 31, 1912.

  “Such unbounded energy” John Burroughs, “Theodore Roosevelt,” Journal of the American Museum of Natural History, Jan. 1919.

  Before the doors even opened New York Herald, Oct. 31, 1912.

  Men and boys New York Times, Oct. 31, 1912.

  More than two thousandIbid.

  “For some unexplained” Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, My Brother Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1921).

  “yelling their immortal souls” New York Sun, Oct. 31, 1912.

  As Roosevelt passed by Ibid.

  Inside the auditorium New York Times, Oct. 31, 1912.

  Roosevelt, still famously New York Herald, Oct. 31, 1912.

  The last time Roosevelt Arthur MacDonald, The Would-Be Assassin of Theodore Roosevelt (Washington, D.C., 1914).

  Incredibly, Roosevelt’s heavy Stan Gores, “The Attempted Assassination of Teddy Roosevelt,” in Wisconsin Magazine of History (Milwaukee, 1970).

  His coat unbuttoned Oscar King Davis, Released for Publication (Boston, 1925); Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (New York, 2002).

  At 10:03 p.m. New York Times, Oct. 31, 1912.

  “Friends, perhaps once” Ibid.

  “I know the American people” Henry
Fairfield Osborn, Impressions of Great Naturalists (New York, 1924), TRC.

  On election day New York Times, Dec. 29, 1912.

  “a flubdub” TR to Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Aug. 22, 1911, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, Elting E. Morison, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1951–1954), vol. 7.

  “I suppose you will” Quoted in Nathan Miller, Theodore Roosevelt: A Life (New York, 1992).

  “Roosevelt goes down” New York Herald, Nov. 7, 1912. (The article cites several different newspapers’ editorials about the election.)

  “I accept the result” Quoted in Hermann Hagedorn, The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill (New York, 1954).

  “There is no use” TR to Arthur Hamilton Lee, Nov. 5, 1912, in Letters, vol. 7.

  Before the Republican convention William Roscoe Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography (Boston, 1919).

  “Many of his critics” Ibid.

  “The telephone” Hagedorn, Roosevelt Family.

  Holed up at Dalton, TR: A Strenuous Life.

  “Of course I am” TR to KR, Dec. 7, 1912, TRC.

  Roosevelt’s family Hagedorn, Roosevelt Family.

  His sister Corinne Robinson, My Brother TR.

  “regular, monotonous motion” Ibid.

  “One of my memories” Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York, 1913).

  Desperate for their child David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback (New York, 1981).

  Finally, Theodore Sr. Robinson, My Brother TR.

  Early in 1879 Thayer, TR: Intimate Biography.