It was a matter of principle, Theodore later said. “To submit tamely and meekly to theft or to any other injury is to invite almost certain repetition of the offense . . .”
They were three days on the river before catching up with the thieves, their boat charging along between snow-covered buttes and weird Bad Lands configurations that looked to Theodore like “the crouching figures of great goblin beasts.” He had brought along some books to read and his camera, expecting there might be a magazine article in the adventure. Each man had his rifle. The second night the temperature dropped below zero.
The next day, at a point about a hundred miles downstream from where they had started, they spotted the missing boat and going ashore found Finnegan and his partners, who surrendered without a fight. (”We simply crept noiselessly up and rising when only a few yards distant covered them with the cocked rifles.”) From there they spent another six days moving on down the river, making little headway now because of ice jams, and taking turns at night guarding the prisoners, who because of the extreme cold could not be bound hand and foot. Food ran low and the cold and biting winds continued. But not the least extraordinary part of the story is that during these same six days after catching the thieves, Theodore, in odd moments, read the whole of Anna Karenina, and “with very great interest.” (Tolstoy was truly a great writer, he would tell Corinne in a letter written at Dickinson the day after his encounter with Dr. Stickney. But had Corinne noticed the unmoral, as opposed to the immoral, tone of the book? “Do you notice how he never comments on the actions of his personages?” For his own part Theodore found Anna “curiously contradictory; bad as she was, however, she was not to me nearly as repulsive as her brother Stiva; Vronsky had some excellent points. I like poor Dolly—but she should have been less of a patient Griselda with her husband.”)
At a remote cow camp Theodore was able to borrow a horse and ride another fifteen miles to the main ranch, at the edge of the Killdeer Mountains, where he got supplies and hired a team, a wagon, and a driver. And then came the roughest part of the escapade. It was agreed that Sewall and Dow would continue downstream with the two boats and that he, Theodore, would go with the three captives overland heading due south some forty-five miles to Dickinson, where he could turn them over to the sheriff. The captives rode in the wagon with the driver; Theodore walked behind, keeping guard with his trusty Winchester. So by the time Dr. Stickney saw him he had walked forty-five miles in something less than two days with no sleep and had at last deposited his prisoners in jail.
When Stickney and others at Dickinson asked why he had not simply shot or hanged the thieves when he first found them and saved himself all that trouble, Theodore answered that the thought had never occurred to him.
“He impressed me and he puzzled me,” wrote Stickney years afterward, “and when I went home to lunch, an hour later, I told my wife that I had met the most peculiar and at the same time the most wonderful man I had ever come to know. I could see that he was a man of brilliant ability and I could not understand why he was out there on the frontier.”
At Dickinson’s Fourth of July celebration that summer, Theodore was asked to be the “orator of the day.” It was the first time Dickinson (population: 700) had made an all-out occasion of the Fourth and Dr. Stickney, who in a lifelong career of patching up broken cowboys and delivering babies at remote ranches would become as legendary locally as Theodore or the Marquis, was the presiding officer. The crowd was also the largest ever seen in Stark County and included about half of Medora, its citizens having come over on the same train as Theodore. A parade led by the Dickinson Silver Cornet Band included a wagon drawn by four white horses carrying thirty-eight little girls dressed in white, representing the states of the Union. According to one Medora man, everybody got caught up in the spirit and wanted to be part of the parade, with the result that there was no one left to watch it except two drunks who were beyond watching anything.
Somebody named Western Starr read the Declaration of Independence and the crowd joined in singing “America, the Beautiful.” Another speaker, well practiced in oratorical flourishes, spoke in advance of Theodore, his theme the size of the country on its one hundred and tenth birthday; and then it was Theodore’s turn.
I am peculiarly glad to have an opportunity of addressing you, my fellow citizens of Dakota, on the Fourth of July, because it always seems to me that those who dwell in a new territory, and whose actions, therefore, are peculiarly fruitful, for good and for bad alike, in shaping the future, have in consequence peculiar responsibilities. . . . Much has been given to us, and so, much will be expected of us; and we must take heed to use aright the gifts entrusted to our care.
The Declaration of Independence derived its peculiar importance, not on account of what America was, but because of what she was to become; she shared with other nations the present, and she yielded to them the past, but it was felt in return that to her, and to her especially, belonged the future. It is the same with us here. We, grangers and cowboys alike, have opened a new land; and we are the pioneers, and as we shape the course of the stream near its head, our efforts have infinitely more effect, in bending it in any given direction ... In other words, the first comers in a land can, by their individual efforts, do far more to channel out the course in which its history is to run than can those who come after them; and their labors, whether exercised on the side of evil or on the side of good, are far more effective than if they had remained in old settled communities.
So it is peculiarly incumbent on us here today so to act throughout our lives as to leave our children a heritage, for which we will receive their blessing and not their curse. . . . If you fail to work in public life, as well as in private, for honesty and uprightness and virtue, if you condone vice because the vicious man is smart, or if you in any other way cast your weight into the scales in favor of evil, you are just so far corrupting and making less valuable the birthright of your children. . . .
It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.
I do not undervalue for a moment our material prosperity; like all Americans, I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields, railroads—and herds of cattle, too—big factories, steamboats, and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue. It is of more importance that we should show ourselves honest, brave, truthful, and intelligent, than that we should own all the railways and grain elevators in the world. We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune. Here we are not ruled over by others, as in the case of Europe; we rule ourselves. All American citizens, whether born here or elsewhere, whether of one creed or another, stand on the same footing; we welcome every honest immigrant no matter from what country he comes, provided only that he leaves off his former nationality, and remains neither Celt nor Saxon, neither Frenchman nor German, but becomes an American, desirous of fulfilling in good faith the duties of American citizenship.
When we thus rule ourselves, we have the responsibilities of sovereigns, not of subjects. We must never exercise our rights either wickedly or thoughtlessly; we can continue to preserve them in but one possible way, by making the proper use of them. In a new portion of the country, especially here in the Far West, it is peculiarly important to do so; and on this day of all others we ought soberly to realize the weight of the responsibility that rests upon us. I am, myself, at heart as much a Westerner as an Easterner; I am proud, indeed, to be considered one of yourselves, and I address you in this rather solemn strain today, only because of my pride in you, and because your welfare, moral as well as material, is so near my heart.
On the train back to Medora later in the day, Theodore sat with Arthur Packard, the editor-proprietor of The Bad Lands Cow Boy, and remarked to Packard that he thought now he cou
ld do his best work “in a public and political way.” “Then,” responded Packard, “you will become President of the United States.”
What impressed Packard was that Theodore seemed to have arrived at the same conclusion.
Remembering how it all had ended in the Bad Lands, Bill Sewall was to write, “We were glad to get back home—gladder, I guess, than about anything that had ever happened to us, and yet we were melancholy, for with all the hardships and work it was a very happy life . . . the happiest time that any of us have known.”
Of Theodore’s status as things wound up, Sewall said simply: “When he got back into the world again, he was as husky as almost any man I have ever seen who wasn’t dependent on his arms for a livelihood. He weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, and was clear bone, muscle, and grit.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Return
1
SHE REMAINED “the strong good wise old sister,” sole survivor of the original “big people.” In January she had turned thirty-one. So she was well established now as a spinster, the role everyone had long since consigned her to. Family and friends spoke of her attributes of character, her poise and wonderful vitality, seldom ever of her looks. “She has no looks,” a friend once remarked. “She is very nearly ugly—she is almost a cripple, and yet no one for a moment thinks of those things.” She was prized for her wit, her breadth of knowledge, her insights, her strong, logical approach to things. “In many ways hers was the best mind in the family, and her personality one of the most dominant and fascinating,” we read in the reminiscences of a Roosevelt of the next generation. There was a subtleness to her not present in her brothers or her sister, she was more of a diplomat, she had more ballast, as it was said. She was stable, capable, a “powerful” figure with a strong sense of duty, and the resources of energy she drew upon, somewhere in her small misshapen frame, seemed greater even than Theodore’s. She was constantly busy—”dear busy Bamie”—but more than that her energy and activity stirred others into motion. Anyone around her for long got going, doing things. She liked minding other people’s affairs, liked responsibility, and because she was so extremely dependable, she was depended upon time and again.
She was, as another of the next generation would say of her, “intensely on-the-ball.” She seemed always to know what was going on, in the world and in the family. She made it her business to know and to keep the others abreast, with letters, clippings, telegrams if necessary. She was the indispensable gatherer and dispenser of vital Roosevelt information, out of thoughtfulness in part, but also because she knew that was what was expected of her and it gave her influence if not exactly control. How would he know anything of importance if it were not for Bamie’s correspondence, James Alfred Roosevelt once remarked while traveling abroad, and her letters to Theodore in the Bad Lands had arrived some weeks by the bundle.
She could deal with “situations” better than anyone, the others felt. In time of need or crisis she was the first person they turned to. When Elliott’s wife, Anna, gave birth to her first child on October 11,1884, after months of family worry, because of what had happened to Alice, it was Bamie they wanted on the scene to help.
“Bamie’s telegram at 11:30 this morning brought us the joyful news,” reads a message from Aunt Anna Gracie. The child had been christened Anna Eleanor—Anna for her mother and for Bamie, Eleanor for her father, Ellie—but she was to be known only as Eleanor and in time would become deeply attached to Bamie, depending on her for the love and understanding she desperately needed and could find nowhere else. Indeed, for the two children born to her two brothers in the year 1884—Theodore’s Alice and Elliott’s Eleanor, two very individual, very different little girls—Bamie was to be childhood’s primary source of kindness, stories, humor, guidance, sympathy, interest, and from what each was to write of her in later years there is no question as to the influence she had on their lives or their utter devotion to “Auntie Bye.” (Bye and Bysie were nicknames her father had sometimes used and that Theodore and others used interchangeably with Bamie as time went on.)
In the world of blond, blue-eyed Alice, now approaching age three, there was no more marvelous figure. Except for summers, when she stayed with her grandparents at Chestnut Hill, she was with Bamie constantly, and no one, as she later said, had such importance. “Always Auntie Bye meant more to me than anyone.” Auntie Bye was “always the mainstream somehow,” it was she who “brought the generations together.”
“Auntie Bye provided . . . a great warmth and pooling of the generations. . . . It was that.”
She used to tell me stories about her, Father’s, Uncle Elliott’s, and Corinne’s childhood, and about Grandfather and Grandmother Roosevelt, what they looked like and the things they did—how Grandfather Roosevelt drove a four-in-hand, how he used to bring them peaches when he came home in the afternoon. . . . She told of the sad, difficult times during the Civil War when Grandmother Roosevelt’s brothers were fighting on the southern side, she living in New York with her northern husband. There were stories too about their trips abroad when they were children, of the time when she was in school near Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. I used to make her describe to me over and over the soldiers marching past, singing, on their way to the fighting.
More wonderful still, Auntie Bye would tell the child about her own real mother who was in heaven. “She was the only one who did,” Alice remembered years afterward. “You see none of the others ever mentioned her. . . . Oh, she said how pretty she was and how attractive she was and how fond Auntie Bye was of her . . . things of that sort.”
“Auntie Bye had a mind that worked as a very able mans mind works,” remembered Eleanor. “She was full of animation, was always the center of any group she was with . . . wherever she lived there was an atmosphere of comfort. . . . The talk was always lively . . . and, young or old, you really felt Auntie Bye’s interest in you.”
To Eleanor she was “one of the most interesting women I have ever known.” Alice, in an interview years later, said Auntie Bye would have been President had she been a man—”because she had such determination . . . [and] an extraordinary gift with people.”
“Her hair was lovely, soft and wavy,” remembered Eleanor. “Her eyes were deep set and really beautiful, making you forget the rest of the face, which was not beautiful. . . . To young people ... she was an inspiration . . .”
If she had a fault it was an instinct for the cutting or caustic remark about those who were perhaps not quite so “on-the-ball” as she, an ability “to stick the knife in” with a word or two, and not without certain pleasure. Yet no one seems to have been damaged as a result. And as Corinne’s daughter—her second child, Corinne Douglas Robinson—was to remark, “She was such a tremendous personality that you wanted to be in her favor.”
As in childhood, because of her back, Bamie was required still to lie down part of each day. She still wore a piece of ram’s wool as a cushion on her back, to ease the discomfort of sitting, and the evidence is that, sitting or standing, she was in pain much of the time, though she never said so.
She read widely, saw a great deal of a few particular friends, visited, entertained constantly, and made one long trip to Mexico and California that spring of 1886, traveling in “the most ideal way,” by private railroad car as the guest of Cousin Sally, still among her closest friends, and James Roosevelt, whom she regarded as “the most absolutely honorable upright gentleman” she knew. Her best friend was Mrs. Whitelaw Reid—Elizabeth Mills Reid—whose husband owned the Tribune and who, somewhat like Bamie herself, would be remembered as a “queer, little dumpy figure, but bursting with vitality and intelligence.”
Her joy was in good talk. She was in her element in stimulating company, with friends who traveled, with artists, men of affairs, “people who wrote,” Theodore’s political friends—”every kind of person,” as Eleanor remembered proudly. All the Roosevelts were talkers, but with Bamie conversation was an art form. She was never tor
rential, as Theodore could be when off on one of his subjects. She often listened more than she spoke. Corinne was more imaginative, mercurial and gregarious like Theodore. Bamie chose her words with care. But she could, by all accounts, draw out the very best in people; even in the dullest guest she could find something and make that person shine under her encouragement. (”I amused myself by drawing the little there was in him out,” her father had written Mittie of someone he had met on a train.) But she could also pick up at once on virtually any subject. “She grasped everything immediately,” remembered a cousin.
Her letters, it is said, suggest little of the life and originality that characterized her talk. Something happened in conversation that did not on paper. She was somebody people wanted to meet and when they did they opened up to her, as they did not to others. Theodore, who was enormously proud of her, kidded her about the “incongruous” circle she attracted, but also saw her as the center of a future salon and hoped, for his own benefit, that she might take that role very seriously.
He called her “the Driving Wheel of Destiny and Superintendent-in-Chief of the Workings of Providence.”
Theodore mattered most of all. He gave focus to her life; he was her consuming interest, her favorite subject, her primary means of selffulfillment. His child, his house, his health, his career, his future, had become uppermost in her life. The house on Madison Avenue was maintained as much for his as for her own use, as his base of operations in New York. “I always insisted that we did not live together,” she later explained, “that we only visited one another.” That way, she said, a breakup, if it ever came, would be easier for both of them. Her teas and “evenings” were for his benefit often as not; the parties—summer dinner dances, hunt breakfasts—she gave at Sagamore Hill (as he had renamed the Oyster Bay house) were designed to bring him back into society, back to the life he knew.
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