The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

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

  He floundered somewhere, I suppose, and I must admit that I was occupied with other matters. The woodlands were dying in the Far West during the irreversible march of settlement. So I formed an association of amateur riflemen, hunters all—the Boone & Crockett Club—and it was our sacred duty to preserve the forests and an abundance of forest creatures. I appeared before Congress as president of Boone & Crockett. I warned that Yellowstone was being overrun by every sort of commercial parasite and would soon become a wasteland. “Gentlemen, we cannot have a national park and wildlife preserve of mountains and rivers and rich dark soil while we have plunderers and wastrels marching about. Yellowstone Park will dissolve into an ocean of dead sand and sea where plants cannot grow and where the elk and bison cannot feed.”

  And when the Park Protection Act of 1894 was passed, giving sanctuary to every bird and beast in Yellowstone, certain Senators rose up to shake my hand. They weren’t ignorant of all my other woes. As Civil Service Commissioner, I was at war with John Wanamaker, the department-store king, who had been named Postmaster General and heartily believed in the spoils system. The moment I went after some crooked postmaster in Indianapolis or Philadelphia, that hypocritical haberdasher had him shipped off to another venue or hid him where he couldn’t be touched. And I had my old problems with the Indian Bureau. Local agents were relying on Pinkerton detectives to police their reservations. The Pinks weren’t much better than the Stranglers. I had to fend them off as best I could. The Department of Interior wasn’t much help—it was swollen with spoils like some lazy leviathan. I had to arrive unannounced at a reservation with my Winchester and fire the Indian agent in front of his own men. Of course, the folks at Interior wouldn’t back me up. And sometimes I had to stare down an entire arsenal of Pinks. That’s how it went on the Shoshone reservation in Wyoming. The Pinks caught me at dusk, a dozen of them. They all wore their derbies and waistcoats, with badges pinned to their chests in silver and gold. And they were carrying Colts.

  “Mr. Roosevelt,” said their leader, a Pinkerton lieutenant with a filthy collar and a dyed mustache. “Some might consider you a trespasser, sir, here to harm the general population with that rifle of yours.”

  I looked into the dull, dead light of his eyes.

  “And others might consider you bandits, being reckless with Shoshone men and women.”

  He smiled his waxen smile and introduced himself as Detective Taggart, the Pink in charge of all Wyoming.

  “Sir, we have the law on our side. Agent Adams invited us here. We’re fully bonded. Would you care to have a look at my license?”

  “I know how a license looks, Detective. But how many Shoshone have you killed?”

  He calculated with those dead eyes peering out of his skull. “Four—so far. They drew on us. We didn’t have much of a selection.”

  His bravos began to fidget in their waistcoats. They’d expected to bushwhack me without a bundle of words. The Indian agent was on their side, or else they wouldn’t have acted. They could blame my death on a drunken Shoshone warrior. But I cut into their calculations with the scythe of an ex-lawman.

  “I’ve written to your bosses in Chicago,” I said. “And I keep a strict agenda. I like to account for every minute. I’ve told the people at Interior how disheartened I am with your waxed mustaches, your Winchesters, and your fancy Colts, how you should never have been allowed on Indian lands.”

  And while he was pondering, I happened to dig the barrel of my Winchester into the knuckle between his eyes. He lost that swagger of his. His fellow Pinks put down their Colts and vanished into the grayness.

  “I’d find another locale if I were wearing your shoes, Detective Taggart.”

  I put Taggart into my report, and that tale must have reached his superiors. The Pinks were pulled from the Shoshone reservation. But I couldn’t clean up every bit of Indian land. The Pinks were like their own nation. I returned to inspecting post offices. I wondered if Wanamaker and I would come to blows. And that’s when I heard about Ellie. He was back in Manhattan, had leased a limestone house on West 102nd Street, leased it under the name of Mr. Eliot. He was cohabiting with a certain Mrs. Valentina Morris. I couldn’t tell if Mrs. Morris was the same widow who had shared his house in Neuilly after Anna returned to America. She was an alcoholic, like my brother. That much I knew. Bamie had visited him behind my back. She’d come from London, where she found herself a beau, a naval man attached to the American Embassy. Perhaps she did not want to worry me about Elliott when I was feuding with Wanamaker, the Pinks, and various postmasters and Indian agents. She didn’t think I could survive such an onslaught. But I did. It was Ellie who didn’t survive. He was gulping down bottles of absinthe—nothing but green poison—with his paramour, and in a fit of delirium, he climbed out his parlor window and tottered on the sill like a crazed circus performer; it was Mrs. Morris and Elliott’s valet who coaxed him back in. That night he had a series of convulsions and died right in his own bed.

  I was in Washington, tilting against impossible windmills, when a telegram arrived from Sister next morning.

  ELLIE GONE.

  COME HOME.

  HER FACE WAS UNDER A VEIL. But I caught the fineness of her features and the wistful, luminous longing of her brown eyes. Her fingers were also fine. She was dressed in the blackest weeds, like the most loyal of widows. She sat on a simple ladder-back chair beside my brother’s bed, and I couldn’t intrude upon her mourning, ask her to leave the very room she had shared with Ellie. Mrs. Morris was present by the laws and privileges of her private domain. I was glad Ellie hadn’t spent his last days in a hovel, like his hobo boulevardiers of Paris. There were no bottles of brandy and green mint lying about. He had a picture of Anna and Eleanor on the mantel. He wasn’t bloated now, didn’t have that furrow of anger and grief I had encountered in Suresnes. That graceful brother of mine had always lived on a trampoline. Elliott was the handsome one, with the musical gait of a poet, while I could only mimic the music of birdcalls.

  I kissed him on the cheek. It did not have the waxen feel of the dead. I went into the parlor. It was packed with mourners, whom Ellie must have acquired like a contagion at the local saloon. They reminded me of the rabble at Morton Hall. They’d been his drinking companions. They called me Mr. Eliot.

  “He was a sport, your brother was. Never denied us a nip or a two-dollar bill.”

  I was troubled by their very presence in the parlor, by the sour perfume of their unwashed clothes. It irked me that Elliott had comported with such riffraff. At first I thought their devotion was feigned. I was wrong. They wanted something I could not give—camaraderie—but I couldn’t sit there in silence. I drank from the same schooner of shandygaff. Alcohol had always made me aggressive, even at Harvard, where I would scrap with my Porcellian brothers after a sip of wine.

  Bamie arrived. She had forgotten to wear her special shoes in the tempest of her own grief. She was hunched over, like someone who had been stricken, or had received a terrific stripe to the face. I should have asked her about London and her new beau, the naval attaché, but I did not seem to have that musical gift of speech, soused as I was with shandygaff.

  “We will have to bury him, Theodore. He has a plot in Tivoli beside Anna.”

  “No,” I said. “He belongs to us. We will bury him in Greenwood next to Brave Heart and Mittie . . . and Alice.”

  “But think of Eleanor and little Hall. They will want their mother and father in the same plot.”

  “He is my brother,” I said. “He will lie down with us—in Greenwood. That is final.”

  She wouldn’t contradict me in front of Elliott’s drinking companions, even if they could hardly hear a word.

  “And we must do something for poor Mrs. Morris.”

  “Why?” I asked. “They drank from the same bottle—his devilment is also hers.”

  “But she cared for him, Teedie. She paid his bills. And now she is heavily in debt. She cannot remain in this house.”

 
“I will not indulge his concubine. She can remain here until the lease is up.”

  “Papa wouldn’t have been so harsh,” she said. And she looked at me out of that keen sadness she’d had, even as a child, when Papa was away at war as an Allotment Commissioner, and she had to run the household and deal with conniving servants before she was ten.

  Bamie had never been unfair. She’d inherited Brave Heart’s feel for charity, while fighting wicked postmasters and the Pinks had made me rambunctious.

  “Teedie, we will talk another time . . . when you do not have such a bitter taste on your tongue.”

  She sat with the mourners for a little while, comforted Mrs. Morris, fondled Ellie’s ear, and then she was gone. I went back into the bedroom. I was bitten with bile. I was still that deputy sheriff lost in a world of black ice. Mrs. Morris’ shoulders began to heave in her ladder-back chair. I seized her up like a ruffian, took her in my arms. I could not treat her gently, but we did our own little war dance. She began to murmur.

  “I loved him, Mr. Ted, I really did.”

  “I know.”

  I released her from that fierce grip, and she walked out of the room. I was all alone with the rumpled corpse of my baby brother. I could hear the hiss of the lamps, as the light seemed to lick his face like an ornament. And then he rose up, this dead brother of mine.

  “Teedie, you are in big trouble.”

  I would not speak to the phantasm. He was growing whiskers, like that werewolf who had haunted me as a boy.

  “Where is Granny?”

  I was puzzled by that remark. He didn’t mean Grandmamma Bulloch, who had died years ago. He didn’t mean Grandma Mary, Anna’s mother. He meant Eleanor. Anna called the little girl Granny, because she had such a serious, solemn face. And Baby Lee picked up on that taunt, like a talisman.

  —Father, when is Granny going to stay with us again? Do I have to look at my twin? She wears all my clothes.

  Edie invited Eleanor to stay with us during the summers, when we were at Sagamore Hill. Her own mother couldn’t seem to take care of that child. Eleanor became another one of my little bunnies. I didn’t pamper her, but Edie did. Edie gave her a sewing kit, and they darned my socks with a fanciful stitch. She sat in the parlor, where Edie taught her penmanship with a personal flourish.

  “Where is Granny?”

  I started to cry, and my little brother fell back into his quietus. I was frightened to be with Ellie now. It was much of a muchness with John Wanamaker and the Indian Bureau. I’d never win no matter how many errant postmasters and agents I uncovered.

  I could not seem to check my own tears.

  Then Mrs. Morris returned, minus her veil. Her dark eyes had a startling gleam in the little penumbras of light.

  “You shouldn’t have banished him, Mr. Ted—taken his children away.”

  I was still besotted. “I will not be lectured to by his drinking partner—you deviled him, madame.”

  “Oh, I did much more than that,” she said with a puckish smile.

  “Should I have left him in Paris with his army of mendicants? He would have perished in the streets.”

  “That would have been better than banishment. He was lost without little Eleanor. Can you imagine for one moment the happiest day in his life? Your sister with the broken back brought Eleanor here to 102nd Street . . . like Cinderella in a glass carriage.”

  I was riddled with shame and doubt. “Bamie does not have a broken back.”

  “Your sister could see that Elliott was dying, but you could not. That visit revived him. Your sister was Elliott’s secret agent. She had to bribe Eleanor’s nanny and return her to Central Park—within the hour. They had ten, fifteen minutes together. It was their little paradise, without intruders.”

  “Stop! Not another sound.”

  She smiled again. “I will be as silent as the dead—and the damned.”

  She curtsied in her petticoats and was gone.

  CHAPTER 8

  POLICEMAN’S PARADISE

  1896

  THREE HUNDRED MULBERRY STREET. THERE WAS NOTHING of the purple in it but royal dust, grim and gray. I should have declared it a debacle, and had it ripped to the ground. It did have a stoop, where con men dallied, criminal lawyers mingled, and police reporters met. I had to bound up those steps or I would have been waylaid for an hour. My girl secretary, Minnie G. Kelly, had become a hit at headquarters. Previous Presidents of the Police Board had hired male assistants, but I couldn’t have gotten by without Miss Minnie. She looked like a schoolmarm in her spectacles and black hair twisted into a bun. Still, she had that wild Irish streak. She flirted with every copper in the building, but she was territorial, wouldn’t let a soul into my office without a fixed appointment. She saved every article that had ever been written about her boss, every caricature, and commented on them, too. She despised the newspapers that despised me—I had become the outcast of Manhattan because of the blue laws, teetotaler that I was.

  “But they love you in Texas, Mr. T. You’re a national figure. You could run for President—right from Mulberry Street.”

  “On what ticket? The Republicans dislike me almost as much as the Democrats.”

  I’d dug myself a graveyard downtown, a Dead Man’s Alley, like the old Mulberry Bend. I’d instituted a bicycle squad that could catch pickpockets on the fly. I’d installed a pistol range at the Eighth Regiment Armory on Ninety-fourth and Park, where coppers could finally learn how to handle a weapon and wouldn’t have it explode in the middle of some pursuit. But I couldn’t control the endemic graft in the system. Boss Platt still hadn’t forgiven me because I would not allow my election officers to rig the last election in favor of the Republicans. And Tammany had come roaring back into power.

  Still, I didn’t rein in my lads. I had them shut down every saloon that defied the Sunday prohibition. I even went after the “hotels” that hid behind the Raines Law, which declared that a saloon could sell liquor on Sundays if it had at least ten rooms to let. I accompanied my lads on their missions. The judges at police court exonerated every innkeeper. I didn’t care. I went after the same fraudulent hotels. My fellow Commissioners reprimanded me. “Roosevelt, you’re a madman.” I ignored them and their outcries. I went around with a repeater tucked into my pants. I wore a poncho at headquarters. I even had my lads raid Senator Platt’s little roost at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. I had warrants issued about illegal gambling on the premises. I closed down Platt’s “Amen Corner,” had his antique desk delivered to our property clerk. The court tossed out my warrants. I had to return the desk. But the Easy Boss was as quiet as a church mouse, while Mr. Joseph Pulitzer was relentless in his attacks on my presidency of the Police Board. He called me “that little runt of a man with the red mustache” who had failed as a Civil Service Commissioner and was now making a mess at 300 Mulberry Street. The World swore I was a despot, the czar of czars. I relished the fight, offered Pulitzer’s photographers my best smile. Pulitzer couldn’t stop talking about my teeth. “Roosevelt’s satanic grin,” the World said. “The Commissioner looks like a crazed colt.”

  Considered that a compliment.

  Then the Social Reform Club invited Manhattan’s reviled Police Commissioner to speak at its cramped headquarters on East Fourth Street. The building was a firetrap. I could have had the fire marshals shut it down. But even the anarchists and the socialists had to have their own little club. My talk had been advertised in all the papers. The Brooklyn Eagle ripped at me. “Come across the river and meet the buffoon who is both unwieldy and unwise.” I arrived with Edith, who had cautioned me against confronting the rabble. “Theodore, they will eat you up alive at their first chance. You had best plot an escape route.” Baby Lee had come along—as my bodyguard.

  The heat in that auditorium was decidedly hostile. I met nothing but a sea of angry faces—the women in this workingman’s parlor were as ferocious as the men. And then there were the Democrats. Boss Croker had his hirelings, vile lads trained to hoot and h
iss—they could drown the chant of any speaker. I had expected them. This vituperative chorus followed me from engagement to engagement. There was also the Saloonkeepers’ Association, with King Callahan at the helm, here in all his glory. And there were hoteliers I had locked out, with their lieutenants, and corrupt police captains who hadn’t survived the judicial decisions of my little court.

  Accustomed to such enemies, I could have had my own phalanx of police. I wanted none. But I was startled by Boss Platt, sitting in the audience, alone, without his flunkies, his nimble fingers surrounding the silk hat in his lap. He’d never graced any of my other performances, but he’d come to this socialist den. My mind wandered—no, it circled on to something else. I couldn’t stop thinking of Edith’s lovely, aquiline nose, so startling in profile, like an eagle with royal blood, and her deliciously dark hair, with Baby Lee beside her, in all her blondness. The two potentates! Edith hadn’t wanted Baby Lee to come to this meeting hall, declared it was unsafe for such a young girl. But Baby Lee said she would fill Madison Avenue with smoke bombs if she couldn’t be here to “protect” her father. They were always fighting, but they had a fondness for one another, and their own reading club.