The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  The story of the ensuing boat-chase was to become, with that of the Mingusville bully, one of Roosevelt’s favorite after-dinner yarns.

  EARLY ON THE MORNING of 30 March the three pursuers pushed their scow into the icy water.23 Mrs. Sewall and Mrs. Dow, who were both five months pregnant, worriedly watched them go. The fact that Redhead Finnegan already had six days’ start was no reassurance that they would see their menfolk again, for the north country was known to be bleak, and full of hostile Indians.

  The boat picked up speed as the river current took it. With Sewall steering, and Dow keeping watch at the bow, there was nothing much for Roosevelt to do. He snuggled down amidships with his books and buffalo robes, determined to have “as good a time as possible.”24 From time to time he would look up from Matthew Arnold and watch the high, barren buttes slide by. They were rimed with snow, yet blotched here and there with rainbow outbursts of yellow, purple, and red. Closer, and on either side, the ice-walls loomed in crazy, glittering stacks. “Every now and then overhanging pieces would break off and slide into the stream with a loud, sullen splash, like the plunge of some great water-beast.” These sights and sounds were duly memorized for his article.25 Seeking a simile to describe the shape of the buttes as dusk came on and reduced them to silhouettes, he thought of “the crouching figures of great goblin beasts,” then decided that Browning had said it better:

  The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay

  Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay …26

  Progress was fairly rapid that day and the next, Sewall and Dow poling through stretches of bad water with an expertise no Westerner could match. They would have moved faster had it not been for a freezing wind in their faces, which seemed to bluster ever stronger, no matter which way the river turned. (Sewall was heard grumbling that it was “the crookedest wind in Dakota.”)27 The temperature dropped steadily, and ice began to form on the handles of the poles. The only sign of human life was a deserted group of tepees, sighted on the second day. Of the thieves there was no trace whatsoever. It began to seem as if Finnegan had not headed downriver after all. Then why steal a boat?

  They camped, when they were too cold to go on, under whatever shelter they could find ashore, but naked trees afforded little relief from the wind. During the second night, the thermometer reached zero.

  Next morning, 1 April, anchor-ice was jostling so thick they could not push on for several hours. They managed to shoot a couple of deer for breakfast, and the hot meat warmed their frozen bodies back to life. Early that afternoon, when they were nearly a hundred miles north of Elkhorn, they rounded a bend, laughing and talking, and almost collided with their stolen boat.28 It lay moored against the right bank.

  From among the bushes some little way back, the smoke of a campfire curled up through the frosty air … Our overcoats were off in a second, and after exchanging a few muttered words, the boat was hastily and silently shoved toward the bank. As soon as it touched the shore ice I leaped and ran up behind a clump of bushes, so as to cover the landing of the others, who had to make the boat fast. For a moment we felt a thrill of keen excitement and our veins tingled as we crept cautiously toward the fire …

  We took them absolutely by surprise. The only one in the camp was the German [Pfaffenbach], whose weapons were on the ground, and who, of course, gave up at once, his companions being off hunting. We made him safe, delegating one of our number to look after him particularly and see that he made no noise, and then sat down and waited for the others. The camp was under the lee of a cut bank, behind which we crouched, and, after waiting an hour or over, the men we were after came in. We heard them a long way off and made ready, watching them for some minutes as they walked towards us, their rifles on their shoulders and the sunlight glittering on their steel barrels. When they were within twenty yards or so we straightened up from behind the bank, covering them with our cocked rifles, while I shouted to them to hold up their hands … The half-breed obeyed at once, his knees trembling as if they had been made of whalebone. Finnegan hesitated for a second, his eyes fairly wolfish; then, as I walked up within a few paces, covering the center of his chest so as to avoid overshooting, and repeating the command, he saw that he had no shot, and, with an oath, let his rifle drop and held his hands up beside his head.29

  Having divested his prisoners of an alarming array of rifles, revolvers, and knives, Roosevelt now found himself in something of a quandary. He could not tie them up, for their hands and feet would freeze off.30 What was more, Mandan, the first big town downriver, was more than 150 miles away, and the ice-floes ahead were so thick it could be weeks before they got there. With six mouths to feed, and game apparently nonexistent upriver, he was fast running out of provisions.31 The surrounding countryside, as far as he could see, was uninhabited. There was no question of returning to Elkhorn: the river was nonnavigable in reverse. Any right-minded Westerner, of course, would have executed his prisoners on the spot, then abandoned the boats, and walked back to civilization. But Roosevelt’s ethics would not allow that. He was determined to see Finnegan in jail, according to due process of law. His only choice, therefore, was to pole on downriver behind the ice-jam, pray that it would quickly thaw, and maintain a constant guard over the thieves. If this meant losing half a night’s sleep every second night, he could stand it.

  Now began eight days as monotonous and wearing as any he ever spent. The weather remained so cold that the ice-jam rarely shifted before noon, only to wedge again, like a floating mountain, a few miles farther on. Sometimes they had to fight against being sucked under by the current—all the while keeping an eye on Redhead, who was capable of quick and murderous movement. “There is very little amusement in combining the functions of a sheriff with those of an Arctic explorer,” Roosevelt decided.32

  Game continued scarce. By 6 April the party had nothing to eat but dry flour. They were forced to make soggy, unleavened cakes by dunking fistfuls of it in the dirty water. But Roosevelt’s spirits remained high. The strange camaraderie that develops between captors and captives in isolation reached the point where all six men joked and talked freely, “so that an outsider overhearing the conversation would never have guessed what our relations to each other really were.” No reference was made to the boat-theft after the first night out.33

  ROOSEVELT, HAVING FINISHED his volume of Matthew Arnold, proceeded to devour Anna Karenina, in between spells of guard duty. He saw nothing incongruous in this. “My surroundings were quite grey enough to harmonize with Tolstoy.”34 The book both attracted and repelled him. His subsequent review of it for Corinne reveals a strange combination of sophistication and naiveté in his critical intellect, plus the insistence that all art should reaffirm certain basic moral values:

  I hardly know whether to call it a very bad book or not. There are two entirely different stories in it; the connection between Levin’s story and Anna’s is of the slightest, and need not have existed at all. Levin’s and Kitty’s history is not only very powerfully and naturally told, but is also perfectly healthy. Anna’s most certainly is not, though of great and sad interest; she is portrayed as being prey to the most violent passion, and subject to melancholia, and her reasoning power is so unbalanced that she could not possibly be described otherwise than as in a certain sense insane. Her character is curiously contradictory; bad as she was however she was not to me nearly as repulsive as her brother Stiva; Vronsky had some excellent points. I like poor Dolly—but she should have been less of a patient Griselda with her husband. You know how I abominate the Griselda type. Tolstoy is a great writer. Do you notice how he never comments on the actions of his personages? He relates what they thought or did without any remark whatever as to whether it was good or bad, as Thucydides wrote history—a fact which tends to give his work an unmoral rather than moral tone, together with the sadness so characteristic of Russian writers.35

  On 7 April Roosevelt struck civilization in the form of a cow camp, and stocked up on bacon, sugar, and coffee. Th
e following day he rode a borrowed bronco fifteen miles to the C Diamond Ranch in the Killdeer Mountains, where he hired a prairie schooner and two horses. The rancher was puzzled as to why he had not strung up his prisoners long since, but agreed to drive them to the sheriff’s office in Dickinson, forty-five miles south. Sewall and Dow were to continue downriver to Mandan at their own speed.36

  Roosevelt elected to walk behind the ranchman’s wagon, for he did not trust him. “I had to be doubly at my guard … with the inevitable Winchester.” They set off on 10 April, the twelfth day of the expedition. By now the long-delayed thaw had begun, and the prairie was a sea of clay:

  I trudged steadily the whole time behind the wagon through the ankle-deep mud. It was a gloomy walk. Hour after hour went by always the same, while I plodded along through the dreary landscape—hunger, cold, and fatigue struggling with a sense of dogged, weary resolution. At night, when we put up at the squalid hut of a frontier granger, I did not dare to go to sleep, but … sat up with my back against the cabin door and kept watch over them all night long. So, after thirty-six hours’ sleeplessness, I was most heartily glad when we at last jolted into the long, straggling main street of Dickinson, and I was able to give my unwilling companions into the hands of the sheriff.

  Under the laws of Dakota I received my fees as a deputy sheriff for making the arrests, and also mileage for the three hundred miles gone over—a total of some fifty dollars.37

  DR. VICTOR H. STICKNEY of Dickinson was just going home to lunch when he met Roosevelt limping out of the sheriff’s office.

  This stranger struck me as the queerest specimen of strangeness that had descended on Dickinson in the three years I had lived there … He was all teeth and eyes. His clothes were in rags from forcing his way through the rosebushes that covered the river bottoms. He was scratched, bruised, and hungry, but gritty and determined as a bulldog … I remember he gave me the impression of being heavy and rather large. As I approached him he stopped me with a gesture, asking me whether I could direct him to a doctor’s office. I was struck by the way he bit off his words and showed his teeth. I told him I was the only practicing physician, not only in Dickinson, but in the whole surrounding country.

  “By George,” he said emphatically, “then you’re exactly the man I want to see … my feet are blistered so badly that I can hardly walk. I want you to fix me up.”

  I took him to my office and while I was bathing and bandaging his feet, which were in pretty bad shape, he told me the story of his capture of the three thieves … We talked of many things that day … He impressed me and he puzzled me, and when I went home to lunch, an hour later, I told my wife that I had met the most peculiar and at the same time the most wonderful man I ever came to know.38

  Relaxing next morning in his Dickinson hotel room, Roosevelt wrote to Corinne: “What day does Edith go abroad, and for how long does she intend staying? Could you not send her, when she goes, some flowers from me? I suppose fruit would be more useful, but I think flowers ‘more tenderer’ as Mr. Weller would say.”39

  Of course he knew very well when Edith was leaving, and where she was going; but his sisters were not yet in on the secret, and appearances had to be kept up.40

  HE RETURNED TO MEDORA on 12 April, just in time to witness Billings County’s first election as an organized community. Under the supervision of one “Hell-Roaring” Bill Jones, who stood over the ballot-box with a brace of pistols, the votes were cast with a minimum of bloodshed, and a county council duly returned to power. While its first edict, promising “to hang, burn, or drown any man that will ask for public improvements at the expense of the County,” could have been worded more diplomatically, it at least voiced sound Republican sentiments, and Roosevelt had every reason to be optimistic about the future of representative government in the Badlands.41

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, 13 April, he chaired the spring meeting of his Stockmen’s Association. The Marquis de Morès was present, yet there was no doubt as to who was the dominant force in the room. Roosevelt conducted the proceedings with iron authority, instantly gaveling to order any speaker who strayed from the subject under discussion. Afterward the stockmen were loud in his praise.42

  By 18 April, when he arrived in Miles City as a delegate to the much larger Montana Stock Grower’s Convention, word of his capture of Redhead Finnegan had spread across the West, and Roosevelt found that he had become a minor folk hero. During his three days there he was “constantly in the limelight,” and could report to Bamie, “these Westerners have now pretty well accepted me as one of themselves.”43 No longer was he “Four Eyes,” “that dude Rosenfelder,” and “Old Hasten Forward Quickly There” (an allusion to the unfortunate order he had yelled at some cowboys shortly after coming to Dakota). Sourdoughs everywhere allowed that he was “one of our own crowd,” “not a purty rider, but a hell of a good rider,” and (highest praise of all) “a fearless bugger.”44

  Roosevelt accepted such compliments graciously, while being careful “to avoid the familiarity which would assuredly breed contempt.”45 Somehow he managed to preserve his gentlemanly status without offending democratic sensibilities—a trick the Marquis de Morès must have envied. Bill Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris thought nothing of moving their mattresses to the loft of the Maltese Cross cabin whenever he came to stay: it was understood that “the boss” liked to sleep alone downstairs.46 Sewall and Dow were allowed to sit in their shirt-sleeves at the Elkhorn table, but they were expected to address him always as “Mr. Roosevelt.” So, for that matter, were his fellow ranchers, some of whom were wealthy enough to consider themselves his social equal. “[Howard] Eaton called him ‘Roosevelt’ once,” Merrifield remembered, “and he turned round and said, ‘What did you say.’ You bet Eaton never did again.”47 Nobody, of course, dared call him “Teddy,” a word which since the death of Alice had become anathema to him. “That was absolutely wrong.”48

  During the spring roundup, which was even more arduous than that of 1885 (five thousand cattle and five hundred horses were involved), Roosevelt put in his fair share of twenty-four-hour days, although he was distracted periodically by Benton.49 The conflict between mind and body which Thayer had forecast had already begun. But Roosevelt insisted that he was having “great fun” and felt “strong as a bear.” On 19 June he wrote Bamie: “I should say this free open air life, without any worry, was perfection. I write steadily three or four days, then hunt (I killed two elk and some antelope recently) or ride on the round-up for many more.” Although he was wistful for Sagamore Hill, and missed Baby Lee “dreadfully,” he decided to remain West all summer.50

  BENTON, INCREDIBLY, was reported to be complete “all but about thirty pages” by the end of June.51 It will be remembered that Roosevelt had only just finished chapter 1 before setting off on his boat-chase on 30 March. A month’s hiatus followed: after returning from Dickinson he had been so busy with cattle-politics and hunting that he did not take up his pen again until 30 April. During the next three weeks he must have written the bulk of the 83,000-word volume, for on 21 May he left to join the roundup.52 From time to time after that, when there was a lull in activity on the range, he would ride into Medora and put in a day or two of literary labor in his room over Joe Ferris’s store. Ferris remembered the sound of his footsteps upstairs, as Roosevelt paced up and down, wrestling with obstinate sentences far into the night.53 “Writing is horribly hard work to me,” he complained.54 On 7 June, when the roundup was at its height, he sent a wry appeal to Henry Cabot Lodge:

  I have pretty nearly finished Benton, mainly evolving him from my inner consciousness; but when he leaves the Senate in 1850 I have nothing whatever to go by; and, being by nature a timid and, on occasions, by choice a truthful man, I would prefer to have some foundation of fact, no matter how slender, on which to build the airy and arabesque superstructure of my fancy, especially as I am writing a history. Now I hesitate to give him a wholly fictitious date of death and to invent all the work of his later years. Wou
ld it be too infernal a nuisance for you to hire one of your minions on the Advertiser (of course at my expense) to look up his life after he left the Senate in 1850?55

  Lodge agreed to help, but he begged the fanciful author to check his entire text in a library. As will be seen, Roosevelt did revise the manuscript thoroughly before publication. By then he was sick of it, and doubtful as to its literary value. “I hope it is decent … I have been troubled by dreadful misgivings.”56

  HIS MISGIVINGS WERE ONLY partly justified. Thomas Hart Benton (Houghton Mifflin, 1887) became Roosevelt’s third book in a row to achieve “standard” status, and was considered the definitive biography for nearly two decades.57 However it did not sell well. Contemporary critics, while generally praising it, had some harsh things to say about the author’s “muscular Christianity minus the Christian part.”58 Today the book is dismissed as historical hackwork.

  This reputation is not fair. Benton may be unread, but it is not unreadable. Certainly there are long stretches of rather dogged narrative, such as the chapters devoted to the politics of nullification and redistribution of federal surplus funds. One can read the volume from cover to cover without finding out what its subject looked like. Secondary characters, such as Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster, are merely referred to, like names in an encyclopedia. The only personality whose lusty presence stamps every page is that of Theodore Roosevelt. Herein lies the book’s main appeal, for its scholarship is so dated as to be spurious now. Roosevelt gleefully discovers many points of common identity with his subject, and in describing them, describes himself. As a testament to his developing political philosophy and theory of statesmanship, Benton is sometimes humorous, often entertaining, and, in its great climactic chapter on America’s “Manifest Destiny,” even inspiring.