The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  By the time the Etruria arrived in Liverpool on 13 November, “Springy” had agreed to act as Roosevelt’s best man.77

  LOOKING BACK on the eighteen days he spent in London and the Home Counties before his wedding on 2 December, Roosevelt said he felt “as if I were living in one of Thackeray’s novels.”78 Romantically foggy weather added a dreamlike quality to his adventures.79 Spring Rice’s connections afforded him easy entry into British society: he was “treated like a prince … put down at the Athenaeum and the other swell clubs … had countless invitations to go down in the country and hunt or shoot.” For every invitation he accepted there were at least three he turned down—some, such as lunch with the Duke of Westminster or weekends with Lords North and Caernarvon, with real regret. “But I was anxious to meet some of the intellectual men, such as Goschen, John Morley, Bryce, Shaw-Lefèvre … I have dined or lunched with them all.”80 So busy was he that he found no time to pay his respects to the American Ambassador, and that gentleman let his displeasure be known.81

  But Roosevelt had his priorities. No doubt he took frequent strolls through Mayfair to the Bucklands Hotel on Brook Street, where Edith was staying with her mother and sister. No doubt she returned these calls, and sat with him in his rooms in Brown’s Hotel on Dover Street; here they discovered “how cosy and comfortable one could be, with a small economical handful of coal in the grate and heavy fog outside.”82

  “You have no idea how sweet Edith is,” Roosevelt wrote Corinne in a defensive tone wholly new to him. “I don’t think even I had known how wonderfully good and unselfish she was; she is naturally reserved and finds it especially hard to express her feelings on paper.”83 He had never had to explain his first wife to anybody, but then Alice Lee had needed no explanation. The complicated, mysterious person who was now preparing to marry him had depths and secrets and silences, like this very fog enshrouding London; it would be years before she disclosed herself fully to him, and even then he might not altogether understand her.

  Visibility was so bad on the morning of 2 December that link-bearers had to be hired to guide Roosevelt’s carriage to St. George’s, Hanover Square. Bamie, arriving separately, found the church itself full of fog. She could not see her brother at the far end of the nave, much less the altar. When she moved into close range she noticed that Spring Rice had, for inscrutable reasons, persuaded him to wear bright orange gloves.84

  The church was almost empty. Even if hundreds had been in the congregation, the fog would have muffled their whispering. This wedding, unlike Theodore’s first, was to be quiet—“as the wedding of a defeated mayoralty candidate should be.”85

  He stood there alone with his orange gloves, waiting for Edith to walk out of the mists behind him.

  INTERLUDE:

  Winter of the Blue Snow, 1886–1887

  THE HAZE WHICH HAD HUNG over the Badlands all autumn rose to high altitudes in late October, causing weird “dogs” to glow around the sun and the moon.1 Then, late on the afternoon of 13 November, it turned white and began to sink again, very slowly, cushioned on the dead still air. Only when it touched the Elkhorn bottom, and sent an icy sting into the nostrils of the cattle, did the whiteness prove to be snow—snow powdered so fine and soft that it hovered for hours before settling.2

  That night the temperature fell below zero, and a sudden gale came down from Canada, blowing curtains of thicker snow before it. By morning the drifts were piling up six or seven feet deep, and the air was so charged with snow that the cattle coughed to breathe it. Some cows stupidly faced north until the blizzard plugged their noses and throats, asphyxiating them.3

  The beavers, meanwhile, snuggled down philosophically in their burrows. Thanks to six weeks of overtime chewing, they had cut and stored enough willow-brush to last them several seasons. They could not hear the wind, but as the mud around them froze it resonated with the growling of ice in the river. When the growling stopped they knew that the Little Missouri had glaciated, and that wolves and lynxes were now patrolling it.4

  “Their hoofs were locked in ice, and they froze like so many statues.”

  Dying cow, December 1886. Painted by Charles Russell. (Illustration col.1)

  All through November the snow continued to fall—whirling, sifting, billowing across the prairie as rhythmically as waves in the ocean. Lines of violet shadow separated each “roller” from the next. Ever afterward pioneers would call this the Winter of the Blue Snow,5 the worst in frontier history.

  One day in mid-December there was a brief spell of Indian summer. The temperature jumped to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, melting the snow to a depth of six inches. But then subzero weather returned, and the slush became a slabby crust of ice. Cattle hungry for buried grass had to gnaw through it until their muzzles were raw and swollen. Sometimes the crust would split beneath a very heavy steer, and he would drop through it on all fours, lacerating his legs and bleeding to death in the soft snow beneath.6

  It grew colder and colder. On Christmas Day the mercury stood at minus 35 degrees; on New Year’s Day it was minus 41, and still sinking.7 The first month of the year is traditionally cruel in Dakota—local Indians call it “Moon of Cold-Exploding Trees”—and January 1887 proved to be the coldest in the memory of any man, white or red. Blustery storms alternated with periods of aching calm, but the snowfall rarely ceased. Soon the prairie was covered to a depth of three or four feet. While the lower snow compacted, the powdery flakes on top responded to the slightest breeze. They rolled across the flat country like fog, and on reaching the Badlands tumbled slowly down into cuts and coulees. There they settled in great drifts which piled up, a hundred feet or more, to prairie level, making the broken country seem as smooth as any plain. Ranches—especially the dugout variety—disappeared overnight, with their owners asleep inside them. Thousands of cattle were buried alive.8

  Beasts nimble enough to escape suffocation emerged wild-eyed on the open range, and began to search for herbage in places where the wind had kept the snow fairly thin. But last summer’s drought, aggravated by overstocking, had reduced the grass to stubble. The starving cattle were forced to tear it out and eat the frozen, sandy roots. Then they browsed the bitter sagebrush, gnawing every shred of bark off until the twigs were naked, finally chomping the twigs themselves. When there was nothing left but stumps, the cattle huddled along the railroad, waiting for dropped garbage, and staring at every passing train as if about to stampede aboard.9

  Then, on 28 January, a blizzard struck which made all previous storms that winter seem trivial. “For seventy-two hours,” wrote one survivor, “it seemed as if all the world’s ice from Time’s beginnings had come on a wind which howled and screamed with the fury of demons.”10 Children wandering out of doors froze to death within minutes, bent by the wind into the fetal position. Women in isolated ranches went mad; men shot themselves and each other. Many cattle exposed on the prairie were too weak to withstand the gale: they simply blew over and died. Others kept their footing, until their hoofs were locked in ice, and they froze like so many statues. Dogies from Texas and yearlings from Iowa, who had not yet experienced the savagery of a northern winter, perished almost without exception, as did bulls and cows heavy with calf. Older range steers, whose coats were shaggier and whose flesh was tougher, survived through February, but they became so mad with cold and hunger that they invaded the streets of Medora, and began to eat tar paper from the sides of the buildings.11 Townspeople had to nail planks across their windows to prevent desperate steers from thrusting their heads through the glass. Every night the streets echoed with agonized bellowing. There was nothing to do but watch the carcasses pile up in vacant lots, until the snow mercifully shrouded them from view.

  At last, on 2 March, when it seemed the Badlands could not possibly hold any more snow, a balmy chinook stole in from the west. Sunshine burned away the haze, and revealed a sky whose bright blue color, coming after a hundred days of monochrome visibility, was a shock to the eyes. Within hours the white lands
cape began to twinkle with thaw. Rivulets trickled down the slopes, carving cracks in the ice, exposing bits of yellow earth. Gullies and washouts flowed into each other, then sought out the creeks leading down to the river. The air was filled with the sound of running water.12 About the middle of the month it became a roar. Lincoln Lang hurried to a vantage point near the river, and saw a sight which haunted him through life.

  A flood-wave was hurtling down the valley, so full of heavy debris that it battered the cottonwoods like reeds. At first Lincoln could not make out what the debris was: then he understood. “Countless carcasses of cattle [were] going down with the ice, rolling over and over as they went, so that at times all four of the stiffened legs of a carcass would point skyward, as it turned under the impulsion of the swiftly moving current and the grinding ice-cakes. Now and then a carcass would become pinched between two ice-floes, and either go down entirely or else be forced out on top of the ice, to be rafted along … carcasses continuously seemed to be going down while others kept bobbing up at one point or another to replace them.”13

  This river of death roared on for days, and still the carcasses jostled and spun. Ranchers estimated their numbers in the thousands, then tens of thousands, then gave up guessing in despair. When the last drifts of snow melted away, and the flood abated, cowboys went out onto the range to look for survivors. Bill Merrifield was among them. “The first day I rode out,” he reported, “I never saw a live animal.”14

  In the wake of the cowboys trundled a ghoulish convoy of wagons, not seen in the Badlands since the buffalo massacre of 1883. The wagons were driven by bone pickers in the employ of fertilizer companies. For such men alone the winter had brought wealth. Patiently they began to sort and stack the skeletons of what had been one of the greatest range herds in the world.15

  CHAPTER 15

  The Literary Feller

  Sing me a song divine

  With a sword in every line!

  ON 28 MARCH 1887, New York newspapers headlined the return of Theodore Roosevelt and his “charming young wife” to the United States, after a fifteen-week tour of England, France, and Italy.1 Every reporter commented on how well Roosevelt looked, in contrast to the drained and defeated mayoral candidate of last fall. His face was “bronzed,” even “handsome,” and he gave off “a rich glow of health” as he strode down the gangplank of the Etruria. A certain bearish heaviness was noticeable in his physique (he had put on considerable weight in European restaurants), and several friends were seen to wince as he exuberantly hugged them tight.2

  Edith’s health was rather more delicate than her husband’s. In Paris, about halfway through their trip, she had begun to feel “the reverse of brightly,” and Theodore had hinted in his next letter home that a honeymoon baby was on its way.3 This had not stopped them accepting a flood of fashionable invitations during their last weeks in London. There had been Parliamentary visits with members of both Houses (Roosevelt remarking sourly, of some Irish Parnellites, that he had met them before—“in the New York legislature”); lunches, dinners, and teas with a variety of British intellectuals; supper with the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury; and, by way of climax, a sumptuous weekend at Wroxton Abbey in Warwickshire, where the honeymooners slept in the Duke of Clarence’s bed and were waited on by powder-wigged servants.4

  “A longing for nobler game soon overwhelmed him.”

  The Meadowbrook Hunt meeting at Sagamore Hill in the 1880s. (Illustration 15.1)

  “I have had a roaring good time,” Roosevelt told the New York press. Pacing up and down, and tugging excitedly at his pince-nez, he said how glad he was, nevertheless, to be home. Having met “all the great political leaders,” and made “as complete a study as I could of English politics,” he was convinced that the American governmental system was superior. “Why, Mr. Roosevelt?” asked a Herald reporter. “Because a written constitution is better than an unwritten one. Their whole system seemed clumsy. It might do well enough for a social club, but not for a great legislative body.”

  In answer to the inevitable questions about his political plans, Roosevelt said he had none—at present. “I intend to divide my time between literature and ranching.”5

  HAD HE OPENED HIS MAIL from Medora before talking to the press that afternoon, he might well have dropped the latter option. Vague news of the Dakota blizzards had reached him in Europe, but the true extent of the devastation had become apparent only during his return voyage. Even now, with the spring thaw still going on, Merrifield and Ferris were unable to tell him how many cattle had been lost. They urged him to hurry West and judge the situation for himself.

  Roosevelt was plainly anxious to leave right away, but he had to spend at least a week in New York with his wife and sister and “sweet Baby Lee.” It was a period of difficult adjustment among them. The decision had been made in Europe that Bamie might not, after all, keep her adored foster daughter.6 Before remarrying, Theodore had more than once reassured Bamie that the child would stay with her, “I of course paying the expenses.”7 But when Edith heard about the arrangement, she had reacted with surprising vehemence. Little Alice was her child now, she insisted, and would live at Sagamore Hill, where she belonged. In a rare display of helplessness, Roosevelt had thrown up his hands. “We can decide it all when we meet.”8

  What was decided, in those waning days of March, was that to ease the pain of parting, Baby Lee would remain with Bamie for another month. Meanwhile her father would go West, and Edith visit relatives in Philadelphia. Upon their return to New York at the end of April, they would take over Bamie’s new house at 689 Madison Avenue, while its mistress went South for a short vacation. By the time she got back in late May the Roosevelts would have opened Sagamore Hill, and they could all move out there for the summer. Together they would spend June and July supervising the delicate task of transferring the child’s affections from aunt to stepmother.9 Not until August, therefore, need Bamie face the prospect of resuming her lonely spinster life.

  Bamie accepted that Edith’s instinct was the right one—she had never felt entirely secure in her surrogate role—but relations between the two women would never be the same now that they were sisters-in-law. For all their determined sweetness to each other, neither could forget that Bamie had nursed little Alice through her first years of life,10 and that Bamie had been the first mistress of Sagamore Hill. Corinne, too, was to learn that she now had a formidable rival to her brother’s affections and that access to him would henceforth be strictly controlled.11 It was an ironic reversal for someone who, not so long ago, had served as duenna between Edith and the teenage Theodore.

  Two welcome guests at 689 helped smooth things over while negotiations over Baby Lee went on: Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge and “Springy” Spring Rice, now Secretary of the British Legation in Washington. Roosevelt seized on their masculine company with some relief, and lost no time in returning Spring Rice’s hospitality of the previous November. The Englishman became an honorary member of the Century Club, which he found as intellectually exclusive as the Savile, and was introduced to an enormous circle of Rooseveltian acquaintances. One morning Whitelaw Reid, the immensely rich and influential owner of the New York Tribune, invited the three friends to a political breakfast in his mansion. There, in a magnificent dining hall, paneled with inlaid wood and embossed leather, Roosevelt, Lodge, and Reid gravely discussed whether or not James G. Blaine should again be nominated for the Presidency in 1888. Spring Rice listened in utter fascination. “It was the first real piece of political wire-pulling I had come across,” he wrote home afterward. “I am getting quite excited over it.”12

  Not until 4 April was Roosevelt free to go West and find out exactly how poor he was.

  HE ALREADY HAD a fairly accurate idea. Or rather, Edith had. That level-headed lady knew that her husband, whatever his other talents, was a financial imbecile.13 Soon after the wedding she had gone over his affairs with him and discovered that, on the basis of last year’s figures alone, they shoul
d “think very seriously of closing Sagamore Hill.” Then had come the first reports of Dakota blizzards, followed by her attacks of morning sickness. Clearly, if they were to rear their family at Oyster Bay, they would have to “cut down tremendously along the whole line.”14 Roosevelt must learn to live within his income for a change, and begin to pay off his debts. He must sell his enormously expensive hunting-horse, grow his own crops and fodder (for Sagamore Hill was a potentially profitable farm), and stop running the house as a summer resort for friends with large appetites, and thirsts to match.15

  As to his cattle business, the winter’s toll was still a matter of guesswork. Roosevelt could only hope that enough cows would survive to produce at least a token number of healthy calves. In the years ahead he would sell as many beeves as possible for whatever price he could get, and so slowly reduce his losses. Given enough time—and no more freak weather—he might be able to dispose of his entire stock and save most of his $85,000 investment.

  But now, as he rode once more out of Medora into the devastated Badlands, all such optimism vanished. “The land was a mere barren waste; not a green thing could be seen; the dead grass eaten off till the country looked as if it had been shaved with a razor.” Occasionally, in some sheltered spot, he would come across “a band of gaunt, hollow-flanked cattle feebly cropping the sparse, dry pasturage, too listless to move out of the way.” Blackened carcasses lay piled up against the bluffs: he counted twenty-three in a single patch of brushwood. Here and there a dead cow perched grotesquely in the branches of a cottonwood tree, the high snow upon which it once stood having melted away.16

  Of the once-teeming Elkhorn and Maltese Cross herds, only “a skinny sorry-looking crew” of some few hundred seemed to have survived.17 He could not find out exactly how many had died until after the spring roundup.