The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Despite all this activity, there were periods of depression, stimulated by the bleakness of the weather, which seemed so symbolic of the bleakness in his own life. He sensed a relationship between the iron in his soul and the iron in the landscape. The texture of the frozen soil, its ringing sound-effects, the blue metallic sheen of the Little Missouri, are images which recur obsessively in his writings about Dakota, with constant repetitions of the word iron, iron, iron. All these elements synthesized in one magnificent prose-poem, entitled simply “Winter Weather.”

  When the days have dwindled to their shortest, and the nights seem never-ending, then all the great northern plains are changed into an abode of iron desolation. Sometimes furious gales blow down from the north, driving before them the clouds of blinding snow-dust, wrapping the mantle of death round every unsheltered being that faces their unshackled anger. They roar in a thunderous bass as they sweep across the prairie or whirl through the naked canyons; they shiver the great brittle cottonwoods, and beneath their rough touch the icy limbs of the pines that cluster in the gorges sing like the chords of an æolian harp. Again, in the coldest midwinter weather, not a breath of wind may stir; and then the still, merciless, terrible cold that broods over the earth like the shadow of silent death seems even more dreadful in its gloomy rigor than is the lawless madness of the storms. All the land is like granite; the great rivers stand still in their beds, as if turned to frosted steel. In the long nights there is no sound to break the lifeless silence. Under the ceaseless, shifting play of the Northern Lights, or lighted only by the wintry brilliance of the stars, the snow-clad plains stretch out into dead and endless wastes of glimmering white.106

  With the New Year, and spring, and the return of the meadowlark to Dakota, his blood would begin to run warm again.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Four-Eyed Maverick

  Then said Olaf, laughing,

  “Not ten yoke of oxen

  Have the power to draw us

  Like a woman’s hair!”

  THE HA-HA-HONK, HA-HONK of wild geese grew louder in his ears. With unfocused eyes he watched the V-shaped skein flying low and heavily overhead and settling about a mile upriver. Then he hunched again over Bamie’s desk and scrawled, in his large, school-boyish hand, “I took the rifle instead of a shotgun and hurried after them on foot.”1

  Roosevelt had learned, that January of 1885, the old truism that writers write best when removed from the scene they are describing. At Elkhorn and Maltese Cross, he had been too much a part of his environment to re-create it on paper. Fleeing the reality of Dakota just before Christmas, he began to write almost immediately after arriving in New York.2 During the first nine weeks of the New Year, nearly a hundred thousand words poured from his pen; by 8 March, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman was finished. “I have just sent my last roll of manuscript to the printer,” he told Cabot Lodge. While modest about the quality of his prose, Roosevelt declared that “the pictures will be excellent.”3 It is not known whether by this he meant the book’s illustrations, or a series of publicity photographs of himself, in the full glory of his buckskin suit.

  “Now for the first time he could admire his recently completed house.”

  Sagamore Hill in 1885. (Illustration 12.1)

  One of these was chosen as frontispiece, and caused much hilarity when Hunting Trips came out.4

  Bristling with cartridges, a silver dagger in his belt, Roosevelt stands with Winchester at the ready, against a studio backdrop of flowers and ferns. His moccasins are firmly planted on a mat of artificial grass. For some reason his spectacles have been allowed to dangle: although his finger is on the trigger, one doubts if he could so much as hit the photographer, let alone a distant grizzly. His expression combines pugnacity, intelligence, and a certain adolescent vulnerability which touched Lodge, at least, very tenderly.5

  HUNTING TRIPS WAS PUBLISHED by G. P. Putnam’s Sons early in July, and dedicated “to that keenest of Sportsmen and truest of Friends, my Brother Elliott Roosevelt.”6 The first edition, limited to five hundred copies, set new standards of lavishness in Americana. It was printed on quarto-size sheets of thick, creamy, hand-woven paper, with two-and-a-half-inch margins and sumptuous engravings. Bound in gray, gold-lettered canvas, it retailed at the then unheard-of price of $15, and quickly became a collector’s item.7

  The book was well reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic (the British Spectator said it “could claim an honorable place on the same shelf as Waterton’s Wanderings and Walton’s Compleat Angler”), went through several editions, and was soon accepted as a standard textbook of big-game hunting in the United States.8 Roosevelt’s first published work had also achieved textbook status, yet few critics could have guessed, without comparing title pages, that the same man had written both. Where The Naval War of 1812 had been scholarly, dry, crammed with sterile statistics, Hunting Trips was lyrical, lush, and cheerfully rambling.

  It shows signs of being too hastily written. Anecdotes are repeated three times over, purplish tinges mar the otherwise crystal prose, thrilling chapters end in anticlimax. There are examples of Roosevelt’s perennial tendency to praise himself with faint damns. Some zoological details are inaccurate,9 betraying the fact that the author had, after all, lived only a few parts of one year in Dakota. He is at pains, however, to give the impression that he is a leathery pioneer of many years’ standing.10

  Less than half the text is about hunting as such. Although Roosevelt tells, with tremendous pace and gusto, the story of all his major expeditions, some of the best pages are those in which he muses on the beauty of the Badlands, the simple pleasures of ranch life, the joy of being young and free on the frontier. Except for an occasional outpouring of melancholy adjectives, he gives no indication that he was a brokenhearted man during most of these adventures. On the contrary, there is an abundance of lusty, sensuous images: the carpet-like softness of prairie roses under his horse’s hooves, the smell of bear’s blood on his hands, the taste of jerked beef after a mouthful of snow, and—most memorably—the warm freshness of a deer’s bed, with its “blades of grass still slowly rising, after the hasty departure of the weight that has flattened them down.”11

  Roosevelt’s characteristic auditory effects resonate on every page: from the “wild, not unmusical calls” of cowboys on night-herd duty, their voices “half-mellowed by the distance,” to the “harsh grating noise” of a dying elk’s teeth gnashing in agony. There are, to be sure, some vignettes that make non-hunters gag, such as that of a wounded blacktail buck galloping along “with a portion of his entrails sticking out … and frozen solid.”12 But the overwhelming impression left after reading Hunting Trips of a Ranchman is that of love for, and identity with, all living things. Roosevelt demonstrates an almost poetic ability to feel a bighorn’s delight in its sinewy nimbleness, the sluggish timidity of a rattlesnake, the cool air on an unsaddled horse’s back, the numb stiffness of a hail-bruised antelope.

  How such a lover of animals could kill so many of them (at the time of writing his lifetime tally was already well into the thousands) is a perhaps unanswerable question.13 But his bloodthirstiness, if it can be called that, was not unusual among men of his class and generation. Roosevelt hunted according to a strict code of personal morality. He had nothing but contempt for “the swinish game-butchers who hunt for hides and not for sport or actual food, and who murder the gravid doe and the spotted fawn with as little hesitation as they would kill a buck of ten points. No one who is not himself a sportsman and lover of nature can realize the intense indignation with which a true hunter sees these butchers at their brutal work of slaughtering the game, in season and out, for the sake of the few dollars they are too lazy to earn in any other and more honest way.”14

  ROOSEVELT’S ARDUOUS SPELL of writing in the early months of 1885 left him physically and emotionally drained. As usual when he was reduced to this condition, the cholera morbus struck, delaying his scheduled departure for Dakota from 22 March to 14 April. E
ven then he looked so pale and dyspeptic above his high white collar that Douglas Robinson wrote ahead to Bill Sewall, saying that his sisters were worried about him, and asking for reports of his health.15

  If Sewall was conscientious enough to obey, he would have replied that Roosevelt seemed determined to contract pneumonia after arriving back in Medora. Although the weather was still wintry, the Little Missouri was swollen with dirty thaw-water from upcountry. The only way to cross it was to ride between the tracks of the railroad trestles—unless one chose, like Roosevelt, to negotiate the submerged, slippery top of a dam farther downstream. “If Manitou gets his feet on that dam, he’ll keep them there and we can make it finely,” he told Joe Ferris.

  But halfway across Manitou overbalanced, and to the horror of spectators, horse and rider disappeared into the hurtling river. When they surfaced a few moments later, Roosevelt was seen swimming beside Manitou, pushing ice-blocks out of the horse’s way and splashing water in his face to guide him. They made the shore just in time to avoid being swept away completely: the next landing was more than a mile north.16

  Roosevelt actually enjoyed the experience. A few days later he again swam across the river with Manitou, at a point where there were no spectators to rescue him. “I had to strike my own line for twenty miles over broken country before I reached home and could dry myself,” he boasted to Bamie. “However it all makes me feel very healthy and strong.”17

  THE ELKHORN RANCH WAS NOW complete.18 Roosevelt, exploring its eight spacious rooms, found that they measured up in every way to the descriptions he had already written of them. Bearskins and buffalo robes strewed the beds and couches; a perpetual fire of cottonwood logs reddened the hearthstone; stuffed heads cast monstrous shadows across the rough log walls; there were rifles in every corner, coonskin coats and beaver caps hanging from the rafters. Sturdy shelves groaned with the collected works of Irving, Hawthorne, Cooper, and Lowell, as well as his favorite light reading—“dreamy Ike Marvel, Burroughs’s breezy pages, and the quaint, pathetic character-sketches of the Southern writers—Cable, Craddock, Macon, Joel Chandler Harris, and sweet Sherwood Bonner.” It was still too cold to sit out in his rocking-chair (“What true American does not enjoy a rocking-chair?”), but he looked forward to many summer afternoons on the piazza, reading or just simply contemplating the view. “When one is in the Bad Lands he feels as if they somehow look just exactly as Poe’s tales and poems sound.”19

  He was pleased to see that his cattle had apparently survived the harsh winter well. “Bill, you were mistaken about those cows. Cows and calves are all looking fine.”

  Nothing could shake Sewall’s habitual pessimism. “You wait until next spring, and see how they look.”20

  Unfazed, Roosevelt sent Sewall and Dow to Minnesota, along with Sylvane Ferris, to help Merrifield bring back an extra fifteen hundred head. This latest purchase, amounting to $39,000, raised his total investment in the Badlands to $85,000, virtually half his patrimony. Coming on top of the $45,000 he had already spent at Leeholm, it made Roosevelt’s family as nervous about his finances as about his health. Bamie asked for guarantees that the cattle venture would pay, but got only the unconvincing reply, “I honestly think that it will.”21

  THE NEW HERD ARRIVED in Medora on 5 May, and the bulk of it came north to Elkhorn under Roosevelt’s personal supervision. Never before had he attempted to manage so many cattle, and the experience nearly killed him. Since the river was still dangerously high, he was forced to stay clear of the valley, and trek inland. On the third day out the cattle had no water at all. That night they bedded down obediently, but an hour or two later, when Roosevelt and a cowboy were standing guard, a thousand thirst-maddened animals suddenly heaved to their feet and stampeded.

  The only salvation was to keep them close together, as, if they once got scattered, we knew they could never be gathered; so I kept on one side, and the cowboy on the other, and never in my life did I ride so hard. In the darkness I could but dimly see the shadowy outlines of the herd, as with whip and spurs I ran the pony along its edge, turning back the beasts at one point barely in time to wheel and keep them in at another. The ground was cut up by numerous little gullies, and each of us got several falls, horses and riders turning complete somersaults. We were dripping with sweat, and our ponies quivering and trembling like quaking aspens, when, after more than an hour of the most violent exertion, we finally got the herd quieted again.22

  PALE AND PATHETICALLY THIN, Theodore Roosevelt arrived at Box Elder Creek on 19 May to assist in the Badlands spring roundup. “You could have spanned his waist with your two thumbs and fingers,” a colleague remembered. The cowboys looked askance at his toothbrush and razor and scrupulously neat bed-roll.23 There were the usual jibes about his glasses, which he submitted to with resigned dignity. “When I went among strangers I always had to spend twenty-four hours in living down the fact that I wore spectacles, remaining as long as I could judiciously deaf to any side remarks about ‘four eyes,’ unless it became evident that my being quiet was misconstrued and that it was better to bring matters to a head at once.”24

  He did not need to knock a man down during the next four weeks to win the respect of the cowboys—although there was one occasion when he told a Texan who addressed him as “Storm Windows” to “Put up or shut up.”25 It soon became apparent that Roosevelt could ride a hundred miles a day, stay up all night on watch, and be back at work after a hastily gulped, 3:00 A.M. breakfast. On one occasion he was in the saddle for nearly forty hours, wearing out five horses, and winding up in another stampede.26 He roped steers till his hands were flayed, wrestled calves in burning clouds of alkali-dust, and stuck “like a burr” to bucking ponies, while his nose poured blood and hat, guns, and spectacles flew in all directions.27 One particularly vicious horse fell over backward on him, cracking the point of his left shoulder. There was no doctor within a hundred miles, so he continued to work “as best I could, until the injury healed of itself.” It was weeks before he could raise his arm freely.28

  “That four-eyed maverick,” remarked one veteran puncher, “has sand in his craw a-plenty.”29

  THE ROUNDUP RANGED down the Little Missouri Valley for two hundred miles, fanning out east and west at least half as far again. During the five weeks that it lasted, sixty men riding three hundred horses coaxed some four thousand cattle out of the myriad creeks, coulees, basins, ravines and gorges of the Badlands, sorting them into proprietary herds and branding every calf with the mark of its mother. When Roosevelt withdrew from the action on 20 June, he had been with the roundup for thirty-two days, longer than most cowboys, and had ridden nearly a thousand miles.

  “It is certainly a most healthy life,” he exulted. “How a man does sleep, and how he enjoys the coarse fare!”30

  Some extraordinary physical and spiritual transformation occurred during this arduous period. It was as if his adolescent battle for health, and his more recent but equally intense battle against despair, were crowned with sudden victory. The anemic, high-pitched youth who had left New York only five weeks before was now able to return to it “rugged, bronzed, and in the prime of health,” to quote a newspaperman who met him en route. His manner, too, had changed. “There was very little of the whilom dude in his rough and easy costume, with a large handkerchief tied loosely about his neck … The slow, exasperating drawl and the unique accent that the New Yorker feels he must use when visiting a less blessed portion of civilization had disappeared, and in their place is a nervous, energetic manner of talking with the flat accent of the West.”31

  In New York, another reporter was struck by his “sturdy walk and firm bearing.”32 Roosevelt’s own habitual assertion that he felt “as brown and tough as a hickory knot” at last carried conviction. All references to asthma and cholera morbus disappear from his correspondence. He was now, in the words of Bill Sewall, “as husky as almost any man I have ever seen who wasn’t dependent on his arms for his livelihood.”33

  Througho
ut that summer Roosevelt continued to swell with muscle, health, and vigor. William Roscoe Thayer, who had not seen him for several years, was astonished “to find him with the neck of a Titan and with broad shoulders and stalwart chest.” Thayer prophesied that this magnificent specimen of manhood would have to spend the rest of his life struggling to reconcile the conflicting demands of a powerful mind and an equally powerful body.34

  SUMMER WAS but five days old, and the sea breeze blew cool as Roosevelt’s carriage circled Oyster Bay and began to ascend the green slopes of Leeholm. Now, for the first time, he could admire his recently completed house. Huge, angular, and squat, it sat on the grassy hilltop with all the grace of a fort. Bamie’s gardeners had planted vines, shrubs, and saplings in an effort to refine its silhouette, but years would pass before leaves mercifully screened most of the house from view.35

  As Roosevelt drew nearer, its newness and rawness became more apparent. The mustard-colored shingles had not yet mellowed, and the green trim clashed with florid brick and garish displays of stained glass. However, flowers were clustering around the piazza, last year’s lawns had come up thick and velvety, and spring rains had washed away the last traces of construction dirt.36 Roosevelt might be excused a surge of proprietary emotion.

  Looking south across the bay toward Tranquillity (rented to others now, but still a symbol, in its antebellum graciousness, of Mittie), he could see the beach where “dem web-footed Roosevelts” used to run down to bathe; the private, reedy channels where he rowed little Edie Carow; the tidal waters where he and Elliott had once joyously battled a snowy northeaster and there, snaking west to the station, was the lane along which Theodore Senior used to speed, his linen duster ballooning out behind him. At nearer points, through the trees, could be seen the summerhouses of cousins and uncles and aunts. If there were some hillside walks, and a tennis court or two, that Roosevelt could not contemplate without being painfully reminded of his honeymoon, he had at last developed the strength to deal with allusive memories.37