The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

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

  He rubbed the yellow moons of his fingernails. “Damn you, Theodore, you can have the nomination.”

  I dug into his flesh with a phantom stick. “I did not seek it, Senator.”

  “Republicans will rally around the hero of San Juan Hill. I can end this quarantine in a minute, declare war on the War Department.”

  “Senator, I can fight my own battles. Besides, I’m beginning to enjoy this monk’s retreat. I might take over Montauk with my Rough Riders.”

  He purred like a night owl. “I’ve visited their tents. Theodore, they’re all skin and bone.”

  I stared into his pale, watery eyes. He knew I couldn’t retire to Sagamore Hill. Republicans of every stripe would badger me to run, but I did not relish returning to that old Dutch town with its deep chill off the Hudson, and he could tell.

  “I take all the risks, and you take none,” he said. “You’ll rile up Albany, and send me packing.”

  “And what if I will?”

  He started to roar in my tent. “I’m satisfied.”

  “But I haven’t accepted the nomination,” I said.

  And he disappeared from the tent without another word. I had to puzzle it out with Winters-White, who was palpably excited as he trod across the tent. “What a victory! The Easy Boss leaves his shrine at the Fifth Avenue and comes crawling. It’s a first. He’s never done that before. He’s desperate. His precinct captains must be in open rebellion.”

  “He played me,” I said, “like a country fiddle.”

  And he had. The grand overture of a visit to Montauk. The political prince had anointed me with a touch of his hand. I would not have to bargain with him. He’d plucked a winner out of the hurricane. But I could not concern myself with November, not now. I had to nourish my troopers, those who hadn’t died on Cuban soil. New York’s Mayor, a Tammany man, wanted to honor the Rough Riders with a parade up Fifth Avenue.

  They are America’s uncrowned royalty, masters of the moment—Indians, cowpokes, miners, tennis champions, stockbrokers, and Harvard oars, who charged up that nefarious hill with Mr. Roosevelt, he wrote to the War Department and barely got a reply. Ordnance couldn’t release the guns and the mounts for a parade, not while the regiment concerned was under quarantine.

  These boys didn’t merit such a slap. They could deny me the Medal of Honor, but the Riders deserved their royal trot from City Hall to Central Park. Niles, the commandant of this camp on the dunes, was sympathetic to our plight. He was a young captain who had been caught in a compromising act with another officer’s wife, and was exiled to the edge of Long Island—he existed in a state of permanent truancy at Montauk Point. The War Department had forgotten who he was and why he was here. But he kept his rank and could still sign his name on a chit. He had the Rough Rider mounts delivered from several military stables in Tampa and San Antone. And then a crate arrived pocked with air holes. Inside the crate was Josephine, our cougar cub. I couldn’t tell how she would react to my battle-worn red whiskers. But our regimental lion made a heartbreaking yawp and leapt into my arms. I fell into the sand dunes, with Josephine licking my face.

  My cougar had grown since I saw her last. She could cover my pate with a single paw. Her own whiskers were as wild and unkempt as a plantation. And when she stretched on the sand, she was like her own transport ship with yellow spots. There was nothing savage, nothing rough, about our girl. She insisted on sleeping in my wall tent, and we had scarce enough room for Winters-White and his belongings. She’d climb onto my lap while I was at my desk, and the desk would totter as I flopped onto the floor. She would lick my face and purr like the gigantic she-cat that she was. There was no denying Josephine. I was, it seems, second in command.

  Out of a terrible ennui and anger at the War Department, the Rough Riders galloped along the shore, our guidons rattling in the wind, Josephine keeping pace with her near-perfect strides. It was a double reunion—Little Texas and a lovesick mountain lion. Captain Niles often rode with us, lost in a reverie that was impossible to unriddle.

  “You should leave the service,” I said.

  “And what would I do? I was bred into the military from the time I was a pup. I went to the Point—I was second in my class. I cannot conceive of another life.”

  “But they will leave you here until you rot. That’s how vindictive they are.”

  I began to scheme while I was in the saddle. I would ask Will to write up a portrait of the captain in the Herald. The War Department could not bear unfavorable publicity. But the general staff might wound Niles even worse out of pure spite.

  This quarantine could not last forever—yet Secretary Alger must have wanted it to seem that way. It was Will who rescued us. He smuggled out a series of dispatches to his editors at the Herald. He was wickedly shrewd. He never criticized the quarantine. He simply wrote about the troopers and their curious nicknames. Taggart was “Mr. Pink,” of course. But he was also known as “the Padre.” Trooper Anton-Antonia was “the Angel,” and she really was. We couldn’t have survived the charge up San Juan Hill without Antonia and her bloodied flag. Pollock the Pawnee, who never smiled, was “Boisterous Bob.” Henshaw, the blacksmith, who had hurled rock after rock at the Spaniards from our trenches, was “Professor Rockpicker.” Neiman, our regimental surgeon, became “Bloodless Bill.” Norfolk, his stretcher bearer, who didn’t even carry a gun, was “Billy the Kid.” Schoenfeld, the Jewish merchant who checked our payroll stubs, and tried to keep kosher in the jungle, was “Ham & Eggs.” Henderson, the trumpeter of Troop L, was known as “Noiseless.”

  Winters-White also listed the renegades who ran away and each Rough Rider who fell in battle:

  Brown, John, Private, Dropped from rolls as deserted, June 3.

  Hendriks, Milo A., Mortally wounded at battle of San Juan, July 1.

  Crosley, Henry S., Private, Dropped from rolls as deserted, July 8.

  Green, Henry C., Killed in action, July 1, near Santiago de Cuba . . .

  We were mustered out within a week and the First United States Volunteer Cavalry regiment ceased to exist—as if we’d been a chimera these past four months. The ordnance clerks collected our guns, our uniforms, and our mounts. Our ponies were sold at auction and we could not have our parade. Little Texas was mine, of course, and I also kept Josephine—the Riders from Arizona had given our regimental mascot outright to me.

  We were horseless horsemen in civilian rags. But not even our fiercest enemies on the general staff could have realized how we would enter the nation’s myth. Entire circuses, I was told, would be constructed around our charge up San Juan Hill. The battle would be rehearsed and reconstrued in every schoolhouse across the land, even in the Indian Territory, because of the Riders’ sensational scouts. But on our last day at Montauk Point, I was summoned out of my tent by an orderly, and had to confront a very bizarre configuration—a hollowed-out square of Rough Riders, Buffalo Soldiers, and civilians; not one of them uttered a word. And in truth, I thought I was among the living and the dead, that the casualties in Cuba had risen out of their graves to accuse their colonel of some terrible slight.

  “Trooper Green, is that you, son?”

  The trooper didn’t answer me. He’d died on the run up Kettle Hill. And then Private Will Murphy, the quiet one, of Troop M—alive he was—stepped in front of my path and guided me to a crooked table on which some object was covered with a horse blanket. I’m not sure why Will Murphy was chosen to represent the Rough Riders. He didn’t have Abe Hummel’s silver tongue. He hardly had a tongue at all. His face twisted into a knot and finally he said, “A gift, sir, a gift—a minuscule token of admiration from the First Volunteers to their commanding officer, who led them through thick and thin. . . . In conclusion, let me say that one and all will carry in his heart a memory of your kindness, sir, and your fairness that is so uncommon in war.”

  Poor Will Murphy must have practiced for a month. He put me to shame. He removed the horse blanket, and there on the table sat a bronze statuette of a bron
co buster, with Fred Remington’s unmistakable mark; no one else could have captured the furious décor of horse and rider, welded into one.

  And I, the master of sounds and birdsongs, was struck dumb. This gift hadn’t come from Fred’s own friends in the regiment, but from the cowpokes and bronco busters themselves. “Boys, you gave me your hardtack and your blankets when I had none.”

  “Aw,” said one of my ruffians, “you robbed the commissary clerks blind for our sake.”

  “Colonel,” said another, “you busted the generals’ balls.”

  “Never once were you outside the firing line.”

  “Except when I could not find my specs,” I shouted with a hoarseness in my throat.

  “Hurrah, hurrah for the next Governor of New York!”

  I could not part with them like that, knowing that I might never see my Rough Riders again, with their bandannas and sunburnt smiles.

  “Come,” I said, “I want to look you in the eye and shake every hand. I insist—indulge me, boys. It will be your commander’s last command.”

  The ranks formed, and my ruffians—one by one—passed before me in single file. I was not dreaming, I swear. I did talk to an occasional dead man. There was no fuss, no furor. Trooper Green’s hand wasn’t gray from the rotting soil. I did not hold on to him. I let the man go.

  I fell upon Bellows, my former body-servant, who was again with the Buffalos—his shoulder wound had healed.

  “Bellows, I would have crawled to Hades if it hadn’t been for you. I was blind, man, blind without my specs.”

  “Colonel, I had sewn a pair into every one of your garments.”

  “But the Mausers would have shaved me clean.”

  “Poppycock. You were immortal on that line.”

  And he was gone, every last one, paid their $77 by the clerk and signed their discharge slips. I went back to my tent, like some lost plainsman, with my bronze horse and rider, the wind blowing off the dunes with a constant roar, and I could still see their silent ponies pounding the shores, the rip of a regiment, the trumpeter’s call.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER 14

  JOSEPHINE

  1899

  MANY OF MY BOYS COULDN’T ADJUST TO CIVILIAN LIFE. I’m not talking about the stockbrokers and bankers and tennis champions from the East, of course. They doubled their good fortune on the Rough Rider legend. And I did hire a few of the cowpokes as my companions and bodyguards on the campaign trail. The Republicans would have lost without the Riders—Boss Platt was indeed a pariah with all his greedy barons. The Riders accompanied me to every whistle-stop. They hardly uttered a word, but it really didn’t matter much. We had Josephine, who raced along the roof of every car, her long tail curling in the wind; that cougar loved to show off and play to a crowd, as the yellow spots were beginning to vanish on her sand-colored coat. Her blue-gray eyes had turned brown since Montauk, but her muzzle was as white as it had ever been. She leapt onto my shoulder and sat there like a sentinel, while I swayed a bit under her seventy pounds of muscle and bone. And her constant caterwaul—that cougar serenade—was enough to enlist an entire town. Big as she was, she licked every Rough Rider on board.

  We prevailed with our regimental mascot and the sheer force of our charge up San Juan Hill, encrusted with memory and myth that sent the Tammany Tiger into a dizzifying spin. But sutlers and other charlatans took advantage of my boys, even after I was elected Governor. A number of the Riders couldn’t read or write. And they signed away their life stories to some quack publisher for a pittance. I had to hire lawyers to get them out of these contracts. Others worked in Wild West shows, some for Buffalo Bill himself. I did receive a letter dictated by ex-Trooper Abel Martinson to one of the stagehands at Madison Square Garden.

  Colonel, I am in the doghouse with Buffalo Bill. I will owe & owe & owe for the rest of my life. I miss Wyoming, sir. I miss my mare.

  Forgive me. I am ashamed to write.

  One of your devoted boys.

  Otherwise known as Abel.

  It ripped at me, that damn letter. I could hear Abel’s slow, saturnine drawl behind the words he dictated. He’d been my ace of spades with a long gun. He left more casualties with holes in their heads than any of my other sharpshooters. But he couldn’t stand up to Cody. So I abandoned my morning séance with reporters at the Capitol and took the train down to Grand Central. . . .

  I crossed the road to that terra-cotta Moorish castle on East Twenty-sixth with its three-hundred-foot tower—Madison Square Garden. Its arcades were covered with painted cloths of Buffalo Bill in his spangled buckskin suit. I didn’t fancy Buffalo Bill’s Wild West as a nativist dream against all outliers—white, red, or black. It had a different melody in Manhattan, summoning up a frontier that was all but gone. Cody had transformed the amphitheater at the Garden into a vast forest, with painted murals and backdrops that could reveal mountains, rivers, and a Pawnee reservation. Cowboys, Indians, or the Seventh Cavalry could come riding out of a flap in a mural and disappear into another flap. Nothing was ever stable except Buffalo Bill himself. He was the only constant in a shifting narrative tale. But I wasn’t here out of any nostalgia for the Badlands. I’d come for Buffalo Bill.

  The Wild West began with a curious race between a Pawnee on foot and a Cheyenne on a spotted pony. The runner was no stranger to me—it was Young-Man-Afraid-of-the-Sound-of-His-Own-Voice. I’d recruited him last year in the basement of the War Department in Washington. He’d gone with me to San Antone, to the sandy streets of Tampa, and to the hills surrounding Santiago, and had been one of my best scouts, though he never uttered a word. He had a fever in his hands. He communicated with a simple sign language that was akin to smoke signals. And here he was, racing a spotted pony in his moccasins. I wouldn’t have given him a chance in a million. But he must have had Cody’s wind machine in his rump. Perhaps the problem was with the pony, or the Cheyenne on its back. The pony galloped across the arena with a whinny that was fierce as any war cry. Its nostrils flared. Yet the strides of the Pawnee scout in his moccasins were faster than the human eye could behold, much faster. And he beat the spotted pony to the far edge of the arena by the length of a moccasin.

  Buffalo Bill stood there stunned in his spangled buckskin suit, his long hair as fine as a lady’s. His sharpshooter’s hand shook. He could barely put his lips to his speaking trumpet. I suspect that Young-Man-Afraid-of-the-Sound-of-His Own-Voice, or any other runner in Cody’s camp, had never won this race before. The Pawnee couldn’t have known I was in the house—it was much too dark in the stands. But he must have intuited it, like some miraculous smoke signal.

  So I didn’t have to worry about this Pawnee. It was the others who concerned me now. Boys like Abel Martinson, who had his present and his future held in Cody’s pocket. He was quite apologetic.

  “Couldn’t help myself, Colonel. I drank and drank and signed little chits. ’T ain’t Cody’s fault. I could have sucked on another nipple.”

  I went with Abel into Buffalo Bill’s headquarters—it was a wide tent, like the one I’d had at Montauk Point, only much grander. It was equipped with a telephone and a telegraph machine, a desk with brass handles, a sofa, a bed, hurricane lamps, a hardwood table, several plush chairs, and pictures on one of the canvas walls of Custer and Wild Bill Hickok.

  Cody eyed me and Abel up and down. He didn’t wear buckskin in his tent. He had yellow trousers and a coat with silk lapels.

  “Governor, I would have gladly given you a free ticket to the show. But I must insist that this Rider of yours leave. He is forbidden to enter my quarters. And rules are rules, sir.”

  I nodded to Abel, and he left.

  “General,” I said, plastering him with his rank in the militia, “your sutlers have been plying my boys with alcohol. Half of them are grown children. I’m susceptible to this. My father had to fight off sutlers during the late war.”

  Cody stepped out from behind his desk. “We do not employ sutlers of any kind at Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West, Colonel.”

  His long white hair was gorgeous, and he would not wear it in a knot. He was tall, with broad shoulders and the waist of an asp. He must have adored Hickok, genuinely adored him. Away from his customers, he wore a long black coat, like Wild Bill, with a belt rather than a holster. He employed more Indians than there were on some reservations. General Cody was a fitting title. He had to travel from terrain to terrain with an army of performers, mechanics, and cooks, plus stage props, horses, buffalo, and half-tame bears. He had to stage prairie fires without burning down the Garden and hire artists to paint his scenery. He couldn’t make a move without renting three dozen railroad cars. The logistics of it all would have ruined a lesser man.

  “There’s a more pressing matter than ex-Trooper Abel,” Buffalo Bill said, grooming his mustache and beard with a silver comb. “That big cat of yours. What’s her name?”

  I was shivering, I admit. I didn’t want Buffalo Bill near my cougar cub. “Josephine,” I finally said. “And she doesn’t concern what’s happening here.”

  “She sure does. She’d be a great attraction at my Wild West. What other big cat went off to a foreign war? Riveting. I could offer you five thousand—in gold—and a percentage of the gate.”

  “Josephine’s not a circus animal,” I said. “I do not want her mentioned again.”

  “Well,” he said, as if I had suddenly exhausted him and whatever interest he had in me. “I gave you my best offer. . . . Now, it’s not a question of whiskey, sir. Your heroes have been stealing from us. That’s why I have had to garnish their salaries.”

  I was annoyed with his truculent air. “That’s difficult to comprehend,” I said. “Abel Martinson is a sharpshooter, not a thief.”

  “But this isn’t Cuba, with war and the distractions of war. This is a civilization of tents and arenas. With whiskey, yes, and women. Martinson’s a celebrity. That’s the real problem. And it comes with a price he can’t afford. I’ve warned him. I won’t again.”