The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

by The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King- A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt

  YA-HA-HAW!

  I was at the head of the pack, the maestro behind me with his fancy stirrups and his horn.

  I didn’t have much sympathy for the maestro’s hounds. The target of the chase was much more appealing, with it fiery red coat, its ears like tiny antennae. That red fox was the one wild creature in this parade of costumes and killers. And I, in my pink uniform, watched it whirl past the dogs, avoiding every obstacle, while Lancelot went lame and couldn’t keep up with those dancing dogs.

  I should have quit the hunt, gone off with Lancelot and let the others chase after that red fox, yet I couldn’t. I had to stay at the head of the pack—it wasn’t courage. It was pure intransigence. I allowed Lancelot to gallop on his lame leg. He was gallant for another three miles of marshland and hilly terrain, vaulting over every obstacle. Then he tripped over the jagged edge of a timber fort, and I landed under my own horse; my left arm hadn’t fully knit after a fracture in the Dakota Territory, and it cracked near the elbow, while I cut my face on one of the fort’s wooden rails. Lancelot rose out of the marsh, and I hoisted myself into the saddle, with one useless arm flapping at my side, and I rejoined the chase. But that damn red fox made fools of us all, with our banners and fancy riding habits. He led the master’s hounds into a sand pit, and we had to call an end to the hunt.

  The master cursed himself and his dogs; the more they yelped, the deeper they sank into the sand. These killer dogs were little better than delinquent pups. None of us could help the hounds or the master. He had to wade into the sand and mud in his riding boots and carry out creatures of solid muscle and bone, one by one.

  His prize hounds returned to Sagamore Hill like drunken sentinels in a crooked line. I managed to get back to the stable, where Sister and Edith were waiting with Baby Lee, who looked at my bloody face and broken arm and hid behind Sister’s skirts. I performed a ferocious hop-hop like I had done for the last chuck wagon jamboree to prove that I was all in one piece. Edith was horrified by the blood and my dangling arm, but my little daughter slowly peeked out from behind Bamie’s skirts, and I grabbed her up in my one good arm. She’d come to accept me as her “sire,” who appeared out of nowhere from time to time and was no threat to Auntie Bye, as she called Bamie. I was Papa Ted, nothing more.

  I MUST HAVE LOOKED like a desperado from the buttes of Dakota masquerading in Eastern garb, with my left arm in a shoulder sling. We’d turned the main parlor into a ballroom, and we had our Hunt Ball at Sagamore Hill, with Bamie’s plush cushions and purple settees sitting in the barn. I wasn’t ignorant of Sister’s gloom. She’d put Baby Lee to bed upstairs, sang her lullabies, and must have felt like an intruder with Edith in the house. Edith didn’t have a crooked back, or wear a metal corset, while the mistress of Sagamore Hill had to sit on the sidelines and could not dance a single step. Edith was draped all in red, her pale skin burning under the lamps—it wasn’t hard to notice. I danced with her as master of the ball.

  “Theodore,” she whispered, “you’ll hurt yourself . . . if you keep dancing with your arm in a sling.”

  The great clock in the hall had struck midnight. And for a moment the chimes muffled the sweet sounds of the little orchestra near the window, borrowed from Delmonico’s, like owls in bloom.

  “It’s my birthday,” I said. “I’m twenty-seven, and I’ll have me a wife.”

  “Shhh,” she said. “You’re a widower.”

  “Widower be damned. I’ll have me a wife.”

  And I whirled Edie with utter abandon, in that little grasshopper step that defined my own peculiar art of dancing. It was the Roosevelt stuttering waltz. The other huntsmen and their wives looked at me with amazement—a widower with an unmarried woman in his arms. I did not care one dot of alkali dust. I would have worn my red bandanna had I been in cow country, not a starched collar and cuffs.

  The ball didn’t end until three. A carriage arrived for Edith—I’d booked a room for her at a local inn. I did not want her to leave my lair. But the widower had to maintain his widower’s dance. I helped her into the carriage, with my right arm around her waist. We did not utter a word. My own weak eyes were bolted to hers. Then I signaled to the driver and off he went, while I returned to Sagamore Hill.

  Bamie was sweeping up the debris. Her mind seemed scattered as she moved about; it was as if an army had descended upon us, not a hunter’s ball, with a random boot, broken ostrich feathers, cigar ashes, and lost ribbons. The bodice she wore could not mask her broad, manly shoulders. Still, an aging heiress like Auntie Bye did not lack suitors. There was a multitude of poets, painters, and handsome drummers with blond hair who would have loved to solder themselves to Sister’s fortune. She scoffed at every one. Sister was devoted to Baby Lee. She’d sculpted her existence around another man’s child, and I was the real interloper.

  “It won’t change a thing,” I said.

  I felt ashamed to soothe my own sister with such a lie. She did not answer, but kept up her sweeping.

  “I’m the stranger here,” I said. “You have Baby Lee. I’m returning to the Badlands.”

  She looked up from that surfeit of lost ribbons and ostrich feathers.

  “I felt the fool,” she whispered. She was crying now; a shiver went up her swollen back. And I was frightened of her, as I had always been a little frightened of Father—of his goodness and the rage he could sometimes summon. I did not dare gather her in my arms.

  “Teedie,” she said, talking to the child I had once been and had remained, at least in her eyes. “All the huntsmen know more about your affairs than I do. Did you have to make such a public display of your affection?” She wasn’t crying now, but her dark face was still fueled with a touch of Father’s anger. “And did you have to sneak behind my back and carry on your assignations in Mrs. Carow’s house?”

  “I didn’t. . . . There were no assignations.”

  “And you could not even tell me that you intend to marry Edith.”

  Here I played the cunning solicitor. “I promised myself to her in the icehouse at Tranquillity when she was fourteen—I gave her a silver ring.”

  Bamie’s composure had come back; she smiled in the afterglow of the dimmed lantern light. “It was such a miraculous engagement that you married Miss Alice four years later. And what happened to your first betrothed?”

  “We had an altercation . . . in the icehouse.”

  Sister peered at me with a marksman’s blue eyes. “Your romantic conquests are far too subtle for me. How do you intend to deal with your own daughter?”

  “Bamie, she’s much better off with you.”

  I’d deeply angered her again—no, repelled her, I imagine. “She’s a child, Theodore, not a rump of cattle from the Badlands. You cannot bequeath her—with or without a bill of sale. I will mind her for you, help you raise her until after your honeymoon.”

  I panicked. “I’m a widower. But I will have other children. Baby Lee is yours.”

  A kind of sorrow overwhelmed her. Perhaps she understood my own frailty and confusion. “Little brother, are you willing to start a war between Edith and myself? She will want the child, and I will be turned into an ogre—the evil, grasping aunt.”

  “No, no,” I insisted. “We will start afresh.”

  “Then you have no idea of the woman you are marrying—good night.”

  CHAPTER 6

  MAYHEM AT SAGAMORE HILL

  1887–1888

  BABY LEE WAS LIKE A BOLT OF QUICKSILVER, HER BLOND hair helmeted in a little hat, while she clutched a bouquet of pink roses tall as a beanstalk, with Bamie right beside her.

  “Say hello to your new mother, dear.”

  Baby Lee handed the bouquet to Edith. But she couldn’t seem to pronounce mother. The word remained mottled in her mouth.

  Sagamore Hill had been shuttered up for the winter while we were away, and until it could be replenished with Edith’s furniture and a fresh coat of paint, we were installed as Sister’s houseguests, at her palace on Madison, so that I
could reacquaint myself with Little Alice before she came to live with us. Her Ladyship had been very clear on that subject, though she herself was pregnant with our child. Sister was brave about it. But I wasn’t blind to the darkness that suddenly descended upon her. She and Little Alice had been inseparable for three years. Sister had raised her while I was in the Badlands and honeymooning on the Continent. I bought a Florentine sideboard and a hand-carved dining table for Sagamore Hill, even as my own finances sagged and I lost livestock in the worst blizzard the Badlands had ever known. Sister had sustained me through all my misfortunes, and now I was stealing the child I had gifted to her.

  She did not scold. She was gentle with Edith, though Baby Lee was forever at Sister’s side. We’d aroused her suspicion. Mother didn’t mean much to that child. And one morning, while Bamie cracked the shell of her boiled egg with a tiny silver spoon, she declared, “I think I will go south for a while.”

  “What the devil for?” I asked over the breakfast table, with Baby Lee sitting on a cushioned chair.

  “To visit some of our Georgia relatives,” she said.

  “But they’re all gone.”

  “Oh, I might scare up one or two.”

  Edith nudged me under the table. And I was silent after that. Later, while we were alone, and I was getting into a sack suit, since tails and morning coats had gone out of fashion, my little wife said, “Theodore, for heaven’s sake, your sister is bleeding blood and bile.”

  “What’s she bleeding about?”

  “Baby Lee.”

  “But we’ve given her plenty of notice,” I said. “I warned her months ago that we were coming.”

  “That doesn’t make the hurt any less. Theodore, you abandoned that child. And now we’re claiming her.”

  “Isn’t that what you want?”

  Edith looked at me as if I were her very own child. “Yes, but she’d rather not witness the changing of the guard. Let her ramble and find a little peace, while I make my own peace with your little girl.”

  It felt like I was walking into a bear trap. “But we aren’t at war with Baby Lee.”

  “We most certainly are,” Edith said. “She has your stubborn ways. But I will win her over.”

  And Edith did, though it took a while. Even I felt a trail of emptiness, as if some living flesh had been cut out, once Bamie disappeared from her palace, with its venetian blinds and scalloped sconces.

  Alice moped for a day in her pinafore and ringlets of blond hair. “Where’s Auntie Bye?”

  “Visiting,” I said. “And now you’re stuck with us.”

  She’d wait every morning in the front hall for Auntie Bye to come back. Then she’d shiver hard inside herself, and soon she stopped waiting. And who the hell was I, a Manhattan native with the Badlands in my blood, part cowpoke, part politician?

  I was savagely irritated to read reports in the Bad Lands Cowboy of a certain deputy sheriff’s recent marriage to a Montana cattle queen—it was a bundle of lies. And last year, the Albany barons swindled me into running for Mayor. I was “a pigeon,” in their parlance. The Republicans and Democrats were frightened to death of a third-party candidate, Henry George, who ran on the United Labor ticket. So they figured that a reformer like me would siphon off some of the vote, and Mr. George, a decent little runt in a red goatee who liked to campaign in a horsecar, would never be elected. He talked about the greed of the industrial giants—the wealthy criminal class, as I had once called them—and how he was the “heartbeart” of the disinherited. By jingo, I might have voted for him myself if he hadn’t also preached revolution. That’s why the barons needed their pigeon. They would have lost their Manhattan privileges if that goatee man ever occupied City Hall.

  I was dubbed “the Cowboy Candidate.” I campaigned in buckskin and a red bandanna and had my own “fort” at the Fifth Avenue Hotel—my headquarters spilled over into several suites. We had bonfires every night, and rockets exploded outside my window.

  Voters had an unbridled curiosity about the Badlands—they were more interested in the cowboy than the candidate. President Cleveland had catapulted the Dawes Act into existence. He believed that most Indians should get off the reservation and have their own plot of land, removed from their tribal chiefs. They might become citizens of the United States rather than remain wards of the government. Of course, there was a catch. White settlers were grabbing up parcel after parcel from every Indian who couldn’t till the soil. And reporters from all the Eastern papers were eager to have my opinion of Cleveland’s maneuvers.

  “It depends on reform,” I said. “If the Indian agents are crooked and unfair, then the white settlers will gobble up all there is to gobble.”

  They asked me what I would do if I were Secretary of the Interior.

  “Boys, I’m Manhattan-bound, running for Mayor. I can’t mix in. Besides, I’m all hobbled from the riding I did. My ranching days are over.”

  But I knew these Indian farmers didn’t have much of a chance, no matter how well they tilled. Greed was rampant, greed was everywhere. The Secretary of the Interior was a snippet of a man, blind to that dance of chaos around him.

  Still, I conducted a rattling good canvass. I rode up from Grand Central to Morrisania on a special car, climbed down from the observation cab at Tremont Station, in the bowels of the Bronx, and rushed to the local hall, where I had to don a floral horseshoe and woo the ladies of the Twenty-fourth Ward. I promised to throttle the Tammany tiger and reduce its vast empire of patronage.

  None of the barons visited my headquarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. But Henry George arrived in his red goatee, looking like a Confederate general rather than a raging radical. His hand shook while he drank a cup of Republican tea.

  “Roosevelt,” he said, in the mildest tone, “we ought to join forces, or we’ll never win. We want the same thing—a fair deal for the working man.”

  “But you encourage class warfare, sir. You’re a revolutionary.”

  “And so are you,” he said, with a sip of Republican tea. “Haven’t you talked of mounting an army of desperadoes to drive the Mexicans out of the borderlands?”

  That wasn’t revolution, I had to remind him. I had told the Bad Lands Cowboy and other gazettes that I would be willing to round up a regiment of desperadoes, cowboys, and Stranglers to safeguard our borders. “A pity, Roosevelt. We’ll butt heads, and both of us will lose.”

  The barons may have abandoned “the Boy,” as they liked to call me, but I continued to fight. I must have worried them, since they sent bruisers to break up my rallies. I leapt into the foray, and that’s when caricatures began to appear in the press, with me in a bandanna and a cowboy hat. “Young socialite attacks the lawless,” wrote the Brooklyn Eagle. and Brooklyn wasn’t even in the race.

  But that radical was right. I ran a dismal third to Tammany’s man and Henry George. I returned to my fort at the Fifth Avenue next morning and found an empty shell—all our banners had been removed, all our desks and tallying sheets. My fort was occupied by scrubwomen. Less than a week later I snuck out of New York on the Cunard Line and sailed to England under a fictitious name, “Mr. Merrifield,” to avoid the gossipmongers. And like two shady characters out of a dime detective novel, Edith and I were married at St. George’s, Hanover Square, in a private ceremony, far from the curious, vindictive eyes of Manhattan’s social set—the church was as dreary as a graveyard. I barely recognized Edith when she walked out of the mist. The church itself was laden with fog. We whispered our vows before the Anglican priest. We could very well have been at our very own wake.

  HER LITTLE LADYSHIP WAS in perpetual motion, as she removed every trace of Sister from Sagamore Hill. Bamie’s furniture was packed into the barn. The wallpaper was stripped, the shingles near the roof repainted in mustard-yellow, the wood paneling in the main hall varnished again and again, and the floor scraped to her liking. Mind you, she had to deal with two ghostly presences—Alice Lee and Auntie Bye. And she managed to expel both. She was al
so our chief clerk and chief mechanic. I could not handle money—it liquefied in my fist. Edith had to provide me with a daily allowance and warn that I could not overspend. She repaired the warped blades of the windmill that supplied the house with well water, took care of our orchards and acres of farmland and a household staff that included a cook, a nurse for Baby Lee, a laundress, and a furnaceman who was like a walking melody in a coal bin, but argued all the time about his wages.

  And then there was Little Alice, who chattered like a magpie, imitating the snorts of the furnaceman and my very own snarls. My daughter was becoming addicted to Edith. They plotted together in the sun-drenched room Edith had appropriated as her parlor, with the pale flowery patterns of its armchairs and button-down sofas, together with its miniature writing desk, where she sat in the afternoon with Little Alice, who was careful not to spill Her Ladyship’s red ink. When my first male heir—Little Ted—was born that September with his mottled hands and wrinkled red face, Baby Lee was his most attentive nurse, imitating Ted’s cries and calling him “polly, polly parrot.” She didn’t seem to understand why Edith had to be wrapped in muslin bandages that pinned her to the bed like a mummy from a museum—that was the custom of the time, to mummify the new mother in a wealth of bandages, so she would have a miraculous healing and wouldn’t harm her vitals. Edith lay there for two solid weeks under her doctor’s orders, until finally the doctor himself unwrapped the bandages. She was transferred to her favorite sofa, where she had to sit in a corset with metal stops that resembled a medieval torture instrument. She fell into a profound gloom, sobbing all the time. She could not manage the household affairs, not even to bargain with the furnaceman.