The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  ON 9 MARCH 1884—less than three weeks after burying Alice—Roosevelt had written to Sewall with a rather peremptory invitation to join him in Dakota. “I feel sure you will do well for yourself by coming out with me … I shall take you and Will Dow out next August.”31 What persuaded him that a pair of forest-bred Easterners would flourish in the Badlands is unclear, but Sewall and Dow were agreeable. Their motives appear to have been pecuniary. “He said he would guarantee us a share of anything made in the cattle business,” Sewall recalled. “And if anything was lost, he would lose it and pay our wages … I told him that I thought it was very onesided, but if he thought he could stand it, I thought we could.”32 There were minor hindrances, such as mortgages and protesting wives, but Roosevelt settled the former with a check for $3,000, and assured Mrs. Sewall and Mrs. Dow that they could come West in a year, if all went well.33

  Within a few days of discovering the downriver ranch-site in June, he purchased full rights to both shack and land for $400.34 Before returning East to pick up Sewall and Dow, he found time to make his scheduled visit to Montana with the Marquis de Morès.35 The date of this trip was deliberately kept secret, but 26 June seems likely. The Marquis would have found it prudent to be out of town that day, since it was the first anniversary of Riley Luffsey’s murder.

  The two young men wished to sign on as members of a band of vigilantes, or “stranglers,” which had just been organized in Miles City, its purpose being to lynch the horse-thieves currently plaguing the Dakota-Montana border. Fortunately for Roosevelt’s subsequent political reputation, their application was refused. Granville Stuart, leader of the vigilantes, told them that they were too “socially prominent” to belong to a secret society.36

  On 1 July Roosevelt left Medora for New York.37

  HE FOUND BABY LEE, all blue eyes and blond curls, living with Bamie at 422 Madison Avenue. Henceforth this house would be his pied-à-terre on visits to New York—although Bamie was not keen on the idea of brother and sister sharing the same town address.38 Much as she loved to look after him, she was afraid they might drift into a cozy, quasi-marital relationship centering around her quasi-daughter. Bamie was a person of fine instinct and disciplined emotions, unlike Corinne, who could never see enough of her “Teddy,” and for whom he could never do wrong.39

  But Bamie need not have worried. Roosevelt showed no desire to remain at No. 422 a moment longer than necessary. Sewall and Dow were ordered to fix up their affairs “at once” and hurry to New York, so that they could leave for Dakota by the end of the month.40 Then Roosevelt took the ferry to New Jersey for a few days with Corinne. He seemed anxious to stay away from his daughter, who was now almost five months old. (Since going to Dakota he had not asked a single question about the child in his letters home.) No record remains of their reunion. It is known, however, that after leaving New Jersey he took little Alice to Boston to see her grandparents.41 The visit cannot have been cheerful. At the soonest possible moment he fled Chestnut Hill for Nahant, Henry Cabot Lodge’s summer place.42

  A sentence in one of Aunt Annie Gracie’s letters provides a clue, perhaps, to Roosevelt’s curious terror of Baby Lee: “She is a very sweet pretty little girl, so much like her beautiful young Mother in appearance.”43

  NOR WAS THIS his only phobia that summer. In New York, Bamie was told to warn him if a certain old family friend came to call, so that he could arrange to be absent.44 As a married man, he had been able to withstand the cool blue eyes of Edith Carow; but now, widowed and alone, it was as if he feared they might once again find him childishly vulnerable.

  ON 11 JULY the Democratic National Convention nominated Grover Cleveland for President of the United States. The Governor was in Albany, working as usual, when at 1:45 P.M. the dull booming of cannons floated through the windows of his office. An aide tried to congratulate him. “They are firing a salute, Governor, for your nomination.”

  “Do you think so? Well, anyhow, we’ll finish up this work.”45

  ROOSEVELT FOUND LODGE depressed during his short stay at Nahant. The extent to which Independent revulsion had gathered against James G. Blaine—and, by extension, against Lodge for supporting him—must have amazed them both. Almost to a man, the intellectual and social aristocracy of Massachusetts had decided to vote for Cleveland. The list of Republican opponents to Blaine contained such names as Adams, Quincy, Lowell, Saltonstall, Everett, and Eliot. These were the same names which had so often been borne on a silver tray into Lodge’s parlor. Now, suddenly, the tray was empty, and his friends were snubbing him in the street. Lodge confessed that supporting Blaine was “the bitterest thing I ever had to do in my life.” What particularly hurt was the widespread assumption that he had sold his conscience for a Congressional nomination in the fall.46

  It was time, Roosevelt decided, to come to the aid of his stricken friend. He himself had said nothing publicly since his confession of support for Blaine at St. Paul, except to telegraph an ambiguous denial of the interview from Medora.47 No sooner had he returned to Chestnut Hill on 19 July than he summoned a reporter from the Boston Herald and announced, once and for all, that he, too, would support the Republican presidential ticket.

  While at Chicago I told Mr. Lodge that such was my intention; but before announcing it, I wished to have time to think the whole matter over. A man cannot act both without and within the party; he can do either, but he cannot possibly do both …

  I am by inheritance and education a Republican; whatever good I have been able to accomplish in public life has been accomplished through the Republican party; I have acted with it in the past, and wish to act with it in the future; I went as a regular delegate to the Chicago convention, and I intend to abide by the outcome of that convention. I am going back in a day or two to my Western ranches, as I do not expect to take any part in the campaign this fall.48

  He arrived back in New York to find Bamie’s doormat piled with abusive letters. “Most of my friends seem surprised to find that I have not developed hoofs and horns,” he wryly told Lodge.49 Harder to take, perhaps, was the criticism of Alice’s family, voiced by her uncle, Henry Lee: “As for Cabot Lodge, nobody’s surprised at him; but you can tell that young whipper-snapper in New York from me that his independence was the only thing in him we cared for, and if he has gone back on that, we don’t care to hear any more about him.”50

  Reform newspapers, whose hero Roosevelt had so recently been, were loud in their denunciations of him. The Evening Post thundered that “no ranch or other hiding place in the world” could shelter a so-called Independent who voted for the likes of James G. Blaine. Roosevelt sent a mischievous message to the editor, Edwin L. Godkin, accusing him of suffering from “a species of moral myopia, complicated with intellectual strabismus.” Godkin, who was a man of little humor, forthwith became his severest public critic.51

  Roosevelt did not seem to mind his sudden unpopularity. When the rumor that Grover Cleveland was the father of a bastard flashed across the country on 21 July,52 he could afford to laugh at the Independents who had already bolted to the Governor’s side. Although he seemed, in a final interview on 26 July, to be talking only about his life out West, he subtly sounded a favorite theme: that of the masculine hardness of the practical politician, as opposed to the effeminate softness of armchair idealists.

  It would electrify some of my friends who have accused me of representing the kid-glove element in politics if they could see me galloping over the plains day in and day out, clad in a buckskin shirt and leather chaparajos, with a big sombrero on my head. For good healthy exercise I would strongly recommend some of our gilded youth to go West and try a short course of riding bucking ponies, and assist at the branding of a lot of Texas steers.53

  With that the ex-Assemblyman boarded a train with Sewall and Dow and returned to Dakota.

  “WELL, BILL, WHAT do you think of the country?” asked Roosevelt. It was 1 August 1884, and the two backwoodsmen were spending their first night in the Badlands, at the
Maltese Cross Ranch.

  “I like it well enough,” said Sewall, “but I don’t believe that it’s much of a cattle country.”

  “You don’t know anything about it,” Roosevelt protested.

  Sewall obstinately went on: “It’s the way it looks to me, like not much of a cattle country.”54

  Roosevelt shrugged off this remark. With a thousand new head just arrived from Minnesota (“the best lot of cattle shipped west this year,” said the Bad Lands Cowboy) and six hundred veterans of last winter browsing contentedly on the river, he could see no reasons for pessimism.55 The next morning he ordered Sewall and Dow north to the downriver ranch-site, with a hundred head “to practice on.” They left under the supervision of a grumpy herder, who was doubtful about Sewall’s capacity to stay on his horse. Sewall, jouncing along uncomfortably, allowed that he had more experience “riding logs.”56

  Roosevelt remained behind. There was a certain amount of soothing to be done at Maltese Cross. Merrifield and Ferris had not been pleased to discover, on returning from St. Paul, that a couple of Eastern lumbermen had displaced them in the boss’s esteem. Since Roosevelt intended to build his home-ranch downriver, and would spend most of his time there, it was obvious whose company he preferred. Merrifield in particular was a man of easily bruised ego: perhaps to mollify him, Roosevelt asked if he would be his guide in a major hunting expedition later that month.57

  This was the “trip into the Big Horn country” of Wyoming that he had been excitedly planning since June. “You will probably not hear from me for a couple of months,” he warned Bamie, adding with relish, “… if our horses give out or run away, or we get caught in the snow, we may be out very much longer—till towards Christmas.”58 He stopped short of telling his nervous sister that he had set his heart on killing the most dangerous animal in North America—the Rocky Mountain grizzly bear.

  He wanted to leave within two weeks, but extra ponies had to be found and he was forced to postpone his departure to 18 August. In the interim he roamed restlessly through the Badlands, riding thirty miles south to visit the Langs, and forty miles north to check up on “my two backwoods babies.” Exploring his new property with Sewall, he came upon the skulls of two elks with interlocked antlers. “Theirs had been a duel to the death,” he decided. It was just the sort of symbol to appeal to him, and he promptly named the ranch-site Elkhorn.59

  Apart from a touch of diarrhea, brought on by the alkaline water of the Little Missouri, Sewall and Dow seemed to be adjusting well to Dakota, and enjoying their new work. During the day they worked at making Roosevelt’s hunting-shack habitable (it would serve as a home until the big ranch house was built), and at night took turns in watching the herd. Sewall still had misgivings about the Badlands as cattle country, while admitting that its “wild, desolate grandeur … has a kind of charm.”60

  Roosevelt used almost the same words in his letter to Bamie of 12 August.

  … I grow very fond of this place, and it certainly has a desolate, grim beauty of its own, that has a curious fascination for me. The grassy, scantily wooded bottoms through which the winding river flows are bounded by bare, jagged buttes; their fantastic shapes and sharp, steep edges throw the most curious shadows, under the cloudless, glaring sky; and at evening I love to sit out in front of the hut and see their hard, gray outlines gradually growing soft and purple as the flaming sunset by degrees softens and dies away; while my days I spend generally alone, riding through the lonely rolling prairie and broken lands.61

  He spent whole days in the saddle, riding as many as seventy-two miles between dawn and darkness. Sometimes he rode on through the night, rejoicing in the way “moonbeams play over the grassy stretches of the plateaus and glance off the windrippled blades as they would from water.”62 His body hardened, the tan on his face deepened, hints of gold appeared in his hair and reddish mustache. “I now look like a regular cowboy dandy, with all my equipments finished in the most expensive style,” he wrote Bamie. His buckskin tunic, custom-tailored by the Widow Maddox, seamstress of the Badlands, gave him particular delight, although its resemblance to a lady’s shirtwaist caused some comment in Medora. “You would be amused to see me,” he accurately wrote to Cabot Lodge, “in my broad sombrero hat, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horse hide chaparajos or riding trousers, and cowhide boots, with braided bridle and silver spurs.”63

  It was probably during these seventeen free-ranging days that Roosevelt had his famous encounter with a bully in Nolan’s Hotel, Mingusville, thirty-five miles west of Medora.64 The incident, which has since become a cliché in a thousand Wild West yarns, is best told in his own words:

  I was out after lost horses … It was late in the evening when I reached the place. I heard one or two shots in the bar-room as I came up, and I disliked going in. But there was nowhere else to go, and it was a cold night. Inside the room were several men, who, including the bartender, were wearing the kind of smile worn by men who are making believe to like what they don’t like. A shabby individual in a broad hat with a cocked gun in each hand was walking up and down the floor talking with strident profanity. He had evidently been shooting at the clock, which had two or three holes in its face.

  … As soon as he saw me he hailed me as “Four Eyes”, in reference to my spectacles, and said, “Four Eyes is going to treat.” I joined in the laugh and got behind the stove and sat down, thinking to escape notice. He followed me, however, and though I tried to pass it off as a jest this merely made him more offensive, and he stood leaning over me, a gun in each hand, using very foul language … In response to his reiterated command that I should set up the drinks, I said, “Well, if I’ve got to, I’ve got to,” and rose, looking past him.

  As I rose, I struck quick and hard with my right just to one side of the point of his jaw, hitting with my left as I straightened out, and then again with my right. He fired the guns, but I do not know whether this was merely a convulsive action of his hands, or whether he was trying to shoot at me. When he went down he struck the corner of the bar with his head … if he had moved I was about to drop on my knees; but he was senseless. I took away his guns, and the other people in the room, who were now loud in their denunciation of him, hustled him out and put him in the shed.

  Next morning Roosevelt heard to his satisfaction that the bully had left town on a freight train.65

  ANOTHER THREAT, from a more powerful adversary, arrived at Elkhorn one day in the form of a letter from the Marquis de Morès. It coolly announced that Roosevelt had no title to the land around his ranch-site. In the summer of 1883 the Marquis had stocked it with twelve thousand sheep; therefore the range belonged to him.66

  Like most Americans, Roosevelt had a profound contempt for sheep. Not only did the “bleating idiots” nibble the grass so short that they starved out cattle, they were, intellectually speaking, about the lowest level of brute creation. “No man can associate with sheep,” he snorted, “and retain his self-respect.”67 In any case, the Marquis’s flock had not survived the winter. Roosevelt curtly informed de Morès, by return messenger, that only dead sheep remained on the range, and he “did not think that they would hold it.”

  There was no reply, but Sewall and Dow were warned to look out for trouble.68

  ONE MELANCHOLY DUTY awaited Roosevelt before he set off for the Big Horns on 18 August: the collation of some tributes, speeches, and newspaper clippings into a printed memorial for Alice Lee.69 Having arranged them as best he could, he added his own poignant superscription, under the heading “In Memory of my Darling Wife.”

  She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; as a flower she grew, and as a fair young flower she died. Her life had always been in the sunshine; there had never come to her a single great sorrow; and none ever knew her who did not love and revere her for her bright, sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness. Fair, pure, and joyous as a maiden; loving, tender, and happy as a young wife; when she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be
but just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her—then, by a strange and terrible fate, death came to her.

  And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.

  The manuscript was sent to New York for private publication and distribution.70 Roosevelt sank briefly back into total despair. Gazing across the burned-out landscape of the Badlands, he told Bill Sewall that all his hopes lay buried in the East. He had nothing to live for, he said, and his daughter would never know him: “She would be just as well off without me.”

  Talking as to a child, Sewall assured him that he would recover. “You won’t always feel as you do now and you won’t always be willing to stay here and drive cattle.”

  But Roosevelt was inconsolable.71

  A MONTH LATER, his mood had improved considerably. “I have had good sport,” he wrote Bamie, on descending from the Big Horn Mountains, “and enough excitement and fatigue to prevent overmuch thought.” He added significantly, “I have at last been able to sleep well at night.”72

  Readers of Roosevelt’s diary of the hunt might wonder if by “excitement” he did not mean “carnage.” A list culled from the pages of this little book indicates just how much blood was needed to blot out “thought.” (Since Alice’s death his diaries had become a monotonous record of things slain.)

  17 Aug. “My battery consists of a long .45 Colt revolver, 150 cartridges, a no. 10 choke bore, 300-cartridge shotgun; a 45–75 Winchester repeater, with 1,000 cartridges; a 40–90 Sharps, 150 cartridges; a 50–150 double barrelled Webley express, 100 cartridges.”

  19 Aug. 4 grouse, 5 duck.

  20 Aug. 1 whitetail buck, “still in velvet,” 2 sage hens.

  24 Aug. “Knocked the heads off 2 sage grouse.”