There was at the party a certain Commander H. H. Gorringe, who happened to share Roosevelt’s dreams of a more powerful American Navy.62 It was natural that this retired officer should wish to meet the young author of The Naval War of 1812, and equally natural that, having discussed nautical matters at length, the two men should turn to another subject of mutual interest—buffalo hunting.
The recent return from India of Elliott Roosevelt, laden down with trophies of Oriental big game, had aroused a great longing in his brother to do something similarly romantic.63 The papers were full of newspaper articles about hunting ranches in the Far West, where wealthy dudes from New York were invited to come in search of buffalo. By a strange coincidence, Commander Gorringe had just been West, and was in the process of opening a hunting ranch there himself. When Roosevelt wistfully remarked that he would like to shoot a buffalo “while there were still buffalo left to shoot,” Gorringe, scenting business, suggested a trip to the Badlands of Dakota Territory.
The Commander said that he had bought an abandoned army cantonment there, at a railroad depot on the banks of the Little Missouri. Although the cantonment was not yet ready to receive paying guests, there was a hotel—of sorts—at the depot, plus a few stores and a saloon where hunting guides might be found and hired, if sufficiently sober. The countryside round about teemed with buffalo, not to mention elk, mountain sheep, deer, antelope, beaver, and even the occasional bear. Gorringe added that he was returning to Little Missouri in the fall. Perhaps Roosevelt would like to come along.64
ROOSEVELT WAS QUICK to accept. But he had more pressing matters to consider that spring. Alice had just become pregnant. The news stimulated his old ambition to build Leeholm, the hilltop manor at Oyster Bay. Since his initial purchase of land there, a few weeks after their wedding, he had been too busy with politics to think much about the future; but now the responsibilities of parenthood crowded upon him. He began to plan a house that befitted his stature as a man of wealth, public influence, and proven fertility.65
Since he and Alice would live out their days at Leeholm, surrounded of course by numerous children, his first instincts were toward solidity and size. What the manor would look like was of less consequence than what it would feel like to live in. Apart from Roosevelt’s natural penchant for massive walls, heavy oak paneling, and stuffed segments of large animals, he was not, at this stage, interested in decorative details. But he did have “perfectly definite views” as to the general layout of his home.
I wished a big piazza, very broad at the n.w. corner where we could sit in rocking chairs and look at the sunset; a library with a shallow bay window opening south, the parlor or drawing-room occupying all the western end of the lower floor; as broad a hall as our space would permit; big fireplaces for logs; on the top floor the gun room occupying the western end so that north and west it look[ed] over the Sound and Bay.66
Questions of health—his own, rather more than Alice’s—prevented him from making any more definite architectural plans. The nervous strains of the past winter, aggravated by the excitement of becoming a prospective father, brought about a return of asthma and cholera morbus. This time he became so ill that, looking back on the summer of 1883, he described the whole period as “a nightmare.”67 At the beginning of July the family doctor sentenced him to “that quintessence of abomination, a large summer hotel at a watering-place for underbred and overdressed girls”—Richfield Springs, in the Catskill Mountains.68 Characteristically, Roosevelt chose to drive there with Alice in the family buggy. Settling down amid “a select collection of assorted cripples and consumptives,” he submitted patiently to a variety of cures, and relieved his embarrassment in a humorous letter to Corinne.69
The drive up was very pleasant—in spots. In spots it wasn’t … as we left civilization, Alice mildly but firmly refused to touch the decidedly primitive food of the aborigines, and led a starvling [sic] existence on crackers which I toasted for her in the greasy kitchens of the grimy inns. But, on the other hand, the scenery was superb; I have never seen grander views than among the Catskills, or a more lovely country than that we went through afterwards; the horse, in spite of his heaves, throve wonderfully, and nearly ate his head off; and Alice, who reached Cooperstown very limp indeed, displayed her usual powers of forgetting past woe, and in two hours time, after having eaten until she looked like a little pink boa constrictor, was completely herself again. By the way, having listened with round eyed interest to one man advising me to “wet the feed and hay” of Light-foot, she paralyzed the ostler by a direction “to wet his feet and hair” for the same benevolent object. Personally, I enjoyed the trip immensely, in spite of the mishaps to both spouse and steed, and came into Richfield Springs feeling superbly. But under the direction of the heavy-jowled idiot of a medical man to whose tender mercies Doctor Polk has intrusted me, I am rapidly relapsing. I don’t so much mind drinking the stuff—you can get an idea of the taste by steeping a box of sulphur matches in dish water and drinking the delectable compound tepid, from an old kerosene oil can—and at first the boiling baths were rather pleasant; but, for the first time in my life I came within an ace of fainting when I got out of the bath this morning. I have a bad headache, a general feeling of lassitude, and am bored out of my life by having nothing whatever to do.
By the beginning of August he was, if not fully recovered, at least well enough to retire to Oyster Bay and begin a survey of Leeholm. On the twentieth of that month he bought a further 95 acres of property for $20,000, bringing his total holdings to 155 acres.70 This, in effect, gave him the whole of the estate he had coveted since boyhood; and even though he afterward resold two large tracts to Bamie, he could still consider himself monarch of all he surveyed.71 Before the month was out, Roosevelt was seen pacing across the grassy hilltop with his architects, Lamb and Rich, spelling out his “perfectly definite views” for their benefit. Out of this discussion came sketches, crystallizing later into approved blueprints, of an enormous three-story mansion, deep of foundation and sturdy of rafter, with no fewer than twelve bedrooms (poor pregnant Alice must have blanched at that specification) plus plenty of gables, dormers, and stained glass.72 Although Roosevelt protested he had nothing to do with exterior design, a reader of the blueprints could not help noticing certain resemblances to the Capitol at Albany.
ON 3 SEPTEMBER, Roosevelt kissed his wife good-bye, and loaded a duffel bag and gun case aboard the first of a series of westbound express trains. Alice’s emotions, as she watched his beaming, bespectacled face accelerating away from her, may well be guessed. Remembering how ill her “Teddy” had been when he first went West, she was not encouraged by the ravages of his recent illness, still markedly upon him. Last time, at least, he had had Elliott to look after him; now he was alone—for Commander Gorringe had decided, only four days before, not to go. Dakota, to her mind, was a place impossibly remote and inhospitable: “Badlands” indeed, roamed by dangerous animals and even more dangerous men. She could not have contemplated her husband arriving in Little Missouri, where he did not know a single human being, without consternation.73
Roosevelt was characteristically optimistic. By the time he reached Chicago he had gotten over his disappointment with Gorringe, and wrote Mittie that he was “feeling like a fighting cock” again.74 Changing to the St. Paul Express on 6 September, he began the second half of his 2,400-mile journey. When the train crossed the Red River at Fargo, the westernmost limit of his wanderings three years before with Elliott, he knew that he was leaving the United States, and heading west into the empty vastness of Dakota Territory. The landscape was so flat now, as darkness descended, that he was conscious of little but the overwhelming moonlit sky. About eight o’clock the huge spread of the Missouri swam out of the blackness ahead, slid beneath the train’s clattering wheels, and disappeared into the blackness behind. For hour after hour, flatness gave way to more flatness, and Roosevelt must surely have tired of pressing his face against the unrewarding glass. Perhaps he sl
ept, lulled by the steady rush of air and wheels. If so, he missed seeing a corrugation on the western horizon, shortly after midnight; then, within minutes, all geological hell broke loose. On both sides the landscape disintegrated into a fantastic maze of buttes, ravines, mudbanks, and cliffs, smoldering here and there with inexplicable fires.75 Pillars of clay drifted by—more and more slowly now, as the train snaked down into the very bowels of the Badlands. A sluggish swirl of silver water opened out ahead; the train rumbled across on trestles, and stopped near a shadowy cluster of buildings. The time was two in the morning, and the place was Little Missouri.76
Roosevelt’s heels, as he jumped down from his Pullman car, felt no depot platform, only the soft crackle of sagebrush. The train, having no other passengers to discharge, puffed away toward Montana, and the buttes soon muted its roar into silence. Roosevelt was left with nothing but the trickling sounds of the river, and the hiss of his own asthmatic breathing. Shouldering his guns, he dragged his duffel bag across the sage toward the largest of the darkened buildings.77
CHAPTER 8
The Dude from New York
From his window Olaf gazed,
And, amazed,
“Who are these strange people?” said he.
THE BUILDING LOOMED PALE against a black backdrop of buttes as Roosevelt approached. Somebody had given it a coat of white paint, in an ineffective attempt to make it look respectable, and hung out a sign reading PYRAMID PARK HOTEL. Encouraged, Roosevelt hammered on the door until the bolts shot back, to the sound of muttered curses from within.1 He was confronted by the manager, a whiskery, apoplectic-looking old man. History does not record what the latter said on discovering that his boozy slumbers had been interrupted by an Eastern dude, but it was probably scatological. “The Captain,” as he was locally known, had been notorious in steamboat days for having the foulest mouth along the entire Missouri River.2
Roosevelt had only to drop the name of Commander Gorringe to reduce his host to respectful silence. He was escorted upstairs to the “bull-pen,” a long, unpartitioned, unceilinged room furnished with fourteen canvas cots, thirteen of which already had bodies in them. In exchange for two bits, Roosevelt won title to the remaining bed, along with the traditional Western “right of inheritance to such livestock as might have been left by previous occupants.”3 The cot’s quilts were rough, and its uncased feather pillow shone unpleasantly in the lamplight;4 but at two thirty on a cool Dakota morning, to an exhausted youth with five days of train travel vibrating in his bones, it must have seemed a welcome haven.
“I shall become the richest financier in the world!”
Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent-Amat Manca de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Morès. (Illustration 8.1)
ROOSEVELT AWOKE EARLY next day. He did not need an alarm clock: breakfast in the Pyramid Park was routinely announced by a yell downstairs, followed by a stampede of hungry guests. There were two tin basins in the lobby, but the seamless sack towel was so filthy as to discourage ablutions. Besides, an aroma of cooking wafting out of the adjoining dining room was too distracting. For all its rough accommodations, the hotel was a famously good place to eat.5
Peering out of the dining-room window into the brilliant prairie light, Roosevelt could take stock of Little Missouri, or “Little Misery,” as residents pronounced it. Various citizens “of more or less doubtful aspect” were walking about. Next to the hotel was a ramshackle saloon entitled “Big-Mouthed Bob’s Bug-Juice Dispensary.” It advertised a house specialty, “Forty-Mile Red Eye,” guaranteed to scour the alkali dust out of any parched hunter’s throat. On the opposite side of the railroad stood a store and three or four shacks, dwarfed by the massive clay outcrop of Graveyard Butte. (A few high crosses, glinting in the sun, explained the butte’s name.) Three hundred yards downrail, on the flat bank of the river, were a pair of shabby bungalows, facing each other across the tracks; uprail near the point where Roosevelt’s train had disappeared into the bluffs, a section-house sat in the shade of a giant water tank. These few scattered buildings completed what was Little Missouri on 8 September 1883—with the exception of Gorringe’s cantonment, a group of gray log huts in a cottonwood grove, about a quarter of a mile downriver.6 Unimpressive in any context, the tiny settlement was reduced to total insignificance by the buttes hemming it in on both sides of the river, and by Dakota’s stupendous arch of sky.
For all its sleepy aspect, Little Missouri was unofficially rated by the Northern Pacific as “the toughest town on the line,”7 a place where questions of honor—or, more frequently, dishonor—were settled with six-shooters. The nearest sheriff was 150 miles to the east; the nearest U.S. marshal, over 200 miles to the south. The presence of a military detachment, assigned to guard railroad construction gangs from attacks by predatory Sioux, had until recently established some semblance of law and order in the community, but now the soldiers were gone. Only the day before Roosevelt’s arrival, a “Golden Spike Special” had passed through town, carrying dignitaries west to Montana for ceremonies marking completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad corridor.8 Ex-President Grant had been on board, and the glimpse of his profile speeding by was symbolic to Little Missouri’s fifty or sixty residents. Uncle Sam had withdrawn his protection from yet another frontier outpost; now the settlement lay open to the conflicting interests of white man and Indian, greed and conservation, law and anarchy, money and guns. A few months would determine whether Little Missouri would survive as a hunting resort, or whether, like so many obsolete railroad towns, it would become a few crumbling sticks in the wilderness.
ROOSEVELT, THAT SUNNY Saturday morning, could not have cared less about Little Missouri’s economic future. He had come West to kill buffalo; he was impatient to get out of town and into the Badlands, whose violet ravines beckoned excitingly in all directions. But first a guide must be found. The saloon was not yet open, and the Captain, grouchy from lack of sleep, would not say where else Roosevelt might recruit help. His son, a fat youth with whiskey-red cheeks, apparently inherited, was more helpful. He suggested that Joe Ferris, down at the cantonment, might be willing.9
About this time, perhaps, Roosevelt began to realize that hiring a professional guide would not necessarily guarantee him a buffalo. Commander Gorringe, anxious for clients, had doubtless intimated that buffalo were still plentiful in the Badlands, when Roosevelt first met him in May. Actually there had been several thousand animals left to shoot then, but the situation soon changed dramatically for the worse. In mid-June a band of excited Sioux, encouraged by the U.S. Government, had slaughtered five thousand buffalo on the plains just east of the Badlands. Throughout the summer, passengers on the Northern Pacific had blazed away at whatever beasts wandered near the tracks, leaving their carcasses to the successive depredations of skin hunters, coyotes, buzzards, and “bone merchants.” Less than a week before Roosevelt’s arrival in the Badlands, the Sioux had returned to kill off a herd of ten thousand survivors. Again, the slaughter was carried out with full federal approval; Washington knew that plains bare of buffalo would soon be bare of Indians too.10
Joe Ferris’s first reaction to Roosevelt’s proposal was negative. He was a short, husky young Canadian, built like “the power end of a pile driver.” Although his mustache was sad, his eyes were friendly—or was the gloom of the cantonment post store delusive?11 In his twenty-five-odd years, Ferris had laid railroads, jacked lumber, managed stables, and guided a succession of buffalo hunters through the Badlands, before accepting the job of barn superintendent for Commander Gorringe. For all his out-of-doors background, he was of sedentary disposition; the prospect of another expedition in pursuit of a vanishing species did not appeal to him. Neither, for that matter, did this new dude, with his owlish spectacles and frenzied grin.12 But the dude proved remarkably persuasive. There was about him the intoxicating smell of money—and Joe Ferris, whose private ambition was to become the first banker in Little Missouri, found himself agreeing to be Roosevelt’s guide for the next two weeks.
THE TWO MEN SPENT most of the afternoon loading a buckboard with provisions and hunting equipment. By the time they rolled out of town to the ford just north of the railroad trestle, the sun was already low over Graveyard Butte. Before crossing over to the east bank of the river, they stopped at one of the downrail bungalows to borrow an extra buffalo-gun. Roosevelt had discovered that the hammer of his big Sharps .45-caliber rifle was broken. He had brought a spare Winchester, but Ferris thought the latter was too light to rely on.13
The owner of the bungalow stood tall, cold, and quiet as Ferris asked the favor. He was a grizzled, villainous-looking man with pale eyes, a black goatee, and mandarin mustaches dangling below his chin. A pair of revolvers rode easily on his narrow hips.14 Surprisingly, he agreed to lend the gun without a deposit, and also supplied a new Sharps hammer.
No doubt Roosevelt had plenty of questions to ask about this sinister person as the buckboard splashed across the shallow river. He would have questions, too, about what looked like a rival settlement to Little Missouri, in the process of construction on the sagebrush flats opposite; questions about a giant brick chimney in the midst of the unfinished buildings; questions about a magnificent new ranch house perched on a bluff about half a mile to the southwest, and dominating the entire valley; questions about the crosses on Graveyard Butte (starkly etched now against the setting sun); questions arising out of these questions, and many more besides. It would have taken a harder man than Joe Ferris to withstand the drilling force of Roosevelt’s curiosity. The odds are that by the time the buckboard had swung south across the sagebrush flats, Ferris had begun to answer in detail, and that the full story, linking all Roosevelt’s objects of inquiry, emerged as they rumbled on upstream in the deepening twilight.
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Page 23