Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  51

  WEST TAKES EAST

  THE WAR MADE ROOSEVELT A HERO. THE NATION HAD never seen his like. Eastern born and Harvard educated, but an adoptive son of the West, he mingled as easily with cowboys and Indians as with Ivy Leaguers—a few of whom slipped into the ranks of the Rough Riders.

  The war also made America an empire, with a western frontier thousands of miles beyond the coast of California and Oregon. Early in the war American naval forces captured Manila, the capital of the Philippines, another Spanish colony. The treaty that ended the war transferred the Philippines to the United States. The treaty provoked a debate about the meaning of the American experiment in self-government: Could a democracy become an empire without losing its soul? A vocal minority said no, but a ratifying majority in the Senate said yes, with many describing American expansion into the Pacific as being as inevitable and beneficent as American expansion across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains had been.

  Amid the debate Roosevelt converted his hero’s reputation into the currency of elective politics. Thomas Platt, the boss of the New York state Republican party, was looking for a fresh face, since Platt’s current protégé, the Republican governor, had become embroiled in corruption egregious even by the dubious standards of the late Gilded Age. Platt decided that Roosevelt was just the man to replace him. Roosevelt was popular enough to win votes yet young and green enough to require—and presumably follow—advice once elected.

  Chauncey Depew, a Platt adviser and Republican stalwart, was delighted at the idea of a Roosevelt nomination. Depew had to defend the party against the charges of corruption, and Roosevelt would make his life much easier. Depew imagined a Democratic heckler raising the graft issue. “If Colonel Roosevelt is nominated,” Depew told Platt, “I can say to the heckler with indignation and enthusiasm: ‘I am mighty glad you asked that question. We have nominated for governor a man who has demonstrated in public office and on the battlefield that he is a fighter for the right, and always victorious. If he is selected, you know and we all know from his demonstrated characteristics, courage and ability, that every thief will be caught and punished, and every dollar that can be found restored to the public treasury.’ Then I will follow the colonel leading his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill and ask the band to play the ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’”

  This was about how things happened. Roosevelt easily won the Republican nomination, and then carried the general election, albeit by a slimmer margin than Platt expected.

  Perhaps the boss thought the close contest would render Roosevelt more pliable than a landslide might have. If he did, he was quite mistaken. Roosevelt made clear from his first day in office that the voters had elected him, not Platt. On small issues at first, then larger ones, he declined and then openly refused to do Platt’s bidding.

  Platt cursed himself for not having seen this coming. He began plotting how to rid himself of this ungrateful wretch.

  Fate showed the way. William McKinley’s vice-president had died in office. The party would name a replacement candidate at the national convention in 1900. Platt decided that the replacement should be Roosevelt. Roosevelt remained popular among the voting public; he would add luster to the national ticket. And he would be McKinley’s problem rather than Platt’s.

  Mark Hanna, McKinley’s close friend and chief adviser, yielded nothing to Platt in political chicanery. Hanna understood exactly what Platt intended in promoting Roosevelt for the vice-presidency. Just like Platt, Hanna considered Roosevelt a loose cannon. But in those days, presidents and their advisers had far less control over the nomination of vice-presidential candidates than would be the norm by the late twentieth century. Hanna tried to foil Platt’s ploy. He grew worried as his efforts failed, then apoplectic as the Roosevelt nomination became unstoppable. A visitor to Hanna’s suite at the convention observed that he seemed upset, and he asked what was the matter. “Matter!” shouted Hanna. “Matter! Why, everybody’s gone crazy! What is the matter with all of you? Here is this convention going headlong for Roosevelt for vice president. Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one life between that madman and the presidency?”

  ANOTHER STROKE OF FATE—ANOTHER DEATH—CONFIRMED Hanna’s fears. The ticket of McKinley and Roosevelt won handily, and Roosevelt took up his post as vice-president. This might have augured the end of his political career, for the vice-presidency had a reputation as the office where ambition went to die. But an anarchist rescued Roosevelt by shooting McKinley, six months into the president’s second term. Roosevelt raced to the president’s bedside, in Buffalo, New York. The doctors stabilized McKinley, then declared him out of danger.

  Roosevelt, not wishing to appear to be hovering, left Buffalo. He took his family to the Adirondacks, where he tackled Mount Marcy, the highest peak in the area. He was just starting down from the summit when a message runner found him. McKinley had suddenly relapsed. The vice-president must return to Buffalo as quickly as possible.

  Roosevelt commandeered a wagon to take him to the nearest railroad. By the time he got there, the president had died, as Roosevelt was informed at the station. He continued the journey to Buffalo, reflecting on his unlikely path to the highest office in the land.

  Mark Hanna, considering the same subject, cursed again. “That damned cowboy is president of the United States,” he said.

  52

  CASHING IN

  SIX MONTHS LATER OWEN WISTER DEDICATED A NOVEL TO Roosevelt. “Some of these pages you have seen, some you have praised, one stands new-written because you blamed it,” Wister wrote. “And all, my dear critic, beg leave to remind you of their author’s changeless admiration.”

  Wister was an Easterner by birth, like Roosevelt; a Harvard man, like Roosevelt, whom he had met there; and a visitor to the West who, like Roosevelt, had become enchanted by the land and its inhabitants. The novel was The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains; its title character was the archetype of what Roosevelt and Wister—and much of America by this time—imagined the Western cowboy to be: the strong, silent, brave, honest knight of the frontier. Wister’s narrator encounters the Virginian, who goes by no other name, on arrival in Medicine Bow, Wyoming. “Lounging there at ease against the wall was a slim young giant, more beautiful than pictures. His broad, soft hat was pushed back; a loose-knotted, dull-scarlet handkerchief sagged from his throat; and one casual thumb was hooked in the cartridge-belt that slanted across his hips. He had plainly come many miles from somewhere across the vast horizon, as the dust upon him showed. His boots were white with it. His overalls were gray with it. The weather-beaten bloom of his face shone through it duskily, as the ripe peaches look upon their trees in a dry season. But no dinginess of travel or shabbiness of attire could tarnish the splendor that radiated from his youth and strength.”

  Wister wrote of things he had personally seen and experienced, yet he realized that what he described was now history. “Any narrative which presents faithfully a day and a generation is of necessity historical; and this one presents Wyoming between 1874 and 1890,” he explained in the preface. “Had you left New York or San Francisco at ten o’clock this morning, by noon the day after tomorrow you could step out at Cheyenne. There you would stand at the heart of the world that is the subject of my picture, yet you would look around you in vain for the reality. It is a vanished world. No journeys, save those which memory can take, will bring it to you now. The mountains are there, far and shining, and the sunlight, and the infinite earth, and the air that seems forever the true fountain of youth—but where is the buffalo, and the wild antelope, and where the horseman with his pasturing thousands? So like its old self does the sage-brush seem when revisited, that you wait for the horseman to appear. But he will never come again. He rides in the historic yesterday.”

  Wister had composed the novel in stages; chapters had been published in magazines as he wrote. There he had employed the present tense. He could do so no longer. “Verbs like ‘is’ and ‘have’ now read ‘was’ and �
��had,’” he explained. “Time has flowed faster than my ink.”

  Where had it gone? “What is become of the horseman, the cowpuncher, the last romantic figure upon our soil? For he was romantic. Whatever he did, he did with his might. The bread that he earned was earned hard, the wages he squandered were squandered hard—half a year’s pay sometimes gone in a night—‘blown in,’ as he expressed it, or ‘blowed in,’ to be perfectly accurate.” Wister suggested—hoped, anyway—that the type lived on in the American soul. “He will be here among us always, invisible, waiting his chance to live and play as he would like. His wild kind has been among us always, since the beginning: a young man with his temptations, a hero without wings.”

  COWBOYS AND THE WEST HAD PREVIOUSLY BEEN SUBJECTS for pulp fiction; The Virginian was the first Western novel that could have been called literature. It was an instant hit, running through many printings, and in due course it inspired multiple film adaptations.

  Andy Adams’s The Log of a Cowboy, which appeared a year after Wister’s book, tapped into the same nostalgia for life on the range. Subtitled “A Narrative of the Old Trail Days,” the novel was easily mistaken for a memoir. It was based on Adams’s experience driving cattle on the Western Trail from Texas to Montana, and it was dedicated to “the Cowmen and boys” of that earlier time.

  Adams’s account is straightforward and stoic—like the model cowboy—but at the end he allows his narrator a moment of wistfulness. The crew is about to deliver the herd to its Montana destination. “Another day’s easy travel brought us to within a mile of the railroad terminus; but it also brought us to one of the hardest experiences of our trip, for each of us knew, as we unsaddled our horses, that we were doing it for the last time. Although we were in the best of spirits over the successful conclusion of the drive; although we were glad to be free from herd duty and looked forward eagerly to the journey home”—by train—“there was still a feeling of regret in our hearts which we could not dispel. In the days of my boyhood I have shed tears when a favorite horse was sold from our little ranch on the San Antonio, and have frequently witnessed Mexican children unable to hide their grief when need of bread had compelled the sale of some favorite horse to a passing drover. But at no time in my life, before or since, have I felt so keenly the parting between man and horse as I did that September evening in Montana.”

  Adams understood that the horse was what made the cowboy, and gave the cowboy much of his appeal. This parting between cowboy and horse signaled the end of an era. Adams’s narrator closes by speaking as if from years later, and as if speaking for all the cowboys on that drive, or any other, about their horses. “Their bones may be bleaching in some coulee by now,” he says of the horses, “but the men who knew them then can never forget them or the part they played in that long drive.”

  FREDERIC REMINGTON LIKEWISE RODE THE WAVE OF NOSTALGIA for a vanishing West. Remington was another Ivy Leaguer, from Yale, and he first made a splash as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly, covering the army’s chase for Geronimo. His black-and-white images for publication gave way to watercolors and oils, and finally to sculpture. His subjects were cowboys and Indians and soldiers, typically on horseback; his work conveyed the drama of life on the last frontier. He connected with Roosevelt when The Century Magazine hired him to illustrate a serialized version of a book Roosevelt was writing on life in the West. The two became friends, sharing their fascination with the West and each admiring in the other what he couldn’t see in himself: Roosevelt the artistry of Remington, Remington the energy of Roosevelt.

  Remington covered the Spanish-American War; his Charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill captured Roosevelt in full gallop as his regiment stormed the heights. At war’s end the Rough Riders pooled resources to purchase a copy of Remington’s bronze sculpture The Broncho Buster for their valiant leader. Roosevelt was deeply moved. “No gift could have been so appropriate,” he told the men. “It comes from you who shared the hardships of the campaign with me, who gave me a piece of your hardtack when I had none, and who shared with me your blankets when I had none to lie upon.” He paused. “This is something I shall hand down to my children, and I shall value it more than I do the weapons I carried through the campaign.” For Roosevelt, this was saying a lot.

  Americans at large appreciated Remington’s work almost as much as Roosevelt did. His work was in constant demand by magazine publishers and the general public; Harper’s called him the busiest artist in America. He preferred painting soldiers but realized the money was in cowboys. “Cowboys are cash with me,” he said.

  53

  JOHN MUIR’S LAST STAND

  ROOSEVELT WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN MUCH OF A POLITICIAN if he hadn’t hitched his White House agenda to the nostalgia for the West. Roosevelt was the first Western president in the sense of being the first to have spent significant time in the West and to take a serious interest in issues peculiar to the West. His first annual message, delivered less than three months after the death of McKinley, proposed an ambitious program for the conservation and wise use of Western resources. At a time when federal policy still favored the transfer of public lands to the private sector, at low prices or gratis, Roosevelt advocated creating large national forest reserves. These tracts would be withdrawn from sale and administered by the federal government for the benefit of all the people of the United States, not for private or local interests. The idea was hugely controversial. As Roosevelt had learned from the Marquis de Morès in Dakota, powerful men and groups had long treated the public domain as theirs to exploit for private profit. The state governments were against him, too, for they considered federal lands within their borders to be theirs, in a moral sense, if not a legal one.

  Roosevelt reminded his critics that the West had been acquired by the national government—by treaty and war from the Indians, by purchase from France, by war and purchase from Mexico, by diplomacy with Britain. The Western states had been created by the national government. The Western lands still in the public domain belonged to the people of the United States. It was only proper that the Western lands be administered for their owners.

  Roosevelt parried criticism that he wanted to make a park out of the entire West. Far from it, he said. He intended to put the national forests to use, but to a more sustainable use than that to which they were being put at present. “Forest protection is not an end of itself,” he said. “The preservation of our forests is an imperative business necessity. We have come to see clearly that whatever destroys the forest, except to make way for agriculture, threatens our well being.”

  Roosevelt added the development of Western water resources to his list of national priorities. He had read John Wesley Powell’s report on the arid region and taken its message to heart. “In the arid region it is water, not land, which measures production,” Roosevelt said. “The western half of the United States would sustain a population greater than that of our whole country today if the waters that now run to waste were saved and used for irrigation.” The creation and maintenance of national forests, which held water and released it slowly, would be a start on the water problem. But more was required, and the federal government was the appropriate agent. “Great storage works are necessary to equalize the flow of streams and to save the flood waters. Their construction has been conclusively shown to be an undertaking too vast for private effort. Nor can it be best accomplished by the individual states acting alone. Far-reaching interstate problems are involved; and the resources of single states would often be inadequate. It is properly a national function.” And the whole nation would benefit. A more productive West would send its bounty east; a more populous West would increase demand for the produce of the rest of the country.

  Congress heeded Roosevelt’s call, and six months later he signed the Newlands Act, named for the bill’s sponsor in the House of Representatives, Francis Newlands of Nevada. The act put the federal government, for the first time, directly into the business of developing the natural resources of
the West. In particular, it provided for the construction of the dams and irrigation systems John Powell had declared essential to the settlement and development of the West.

  The Newlands law and follow-up legislation made the desert bloom; it also made possible the eventual building of large cities—Phoenix, Las Vegas—where none could have existed before. One of the dams on the Colorado River created a reservoir named Lake Powell.

  JOHN MUIR DIDN’T LIKE DAMS. HE PREFERRED NATURE AS God made it. And he spent his last days battling dam-builders who had the audacity to approach his beloved Yosemite.

  Theodore Roosevelt admired Muir almost as much as he admired Powell, with Muir falling short only for never having served in the military. Roosevelt learned that one of the perquisites of the presidency was the ability to get people to do things for him they wouldn’t have done on their own. He had long wished to visit Yosemite, and he could think of no better guide than Muir. “I do not want anyone with me but you,” he wrote to Muir, “and I want to drop politics absolutely for four days, and just be out in the open with you.”

  Muir by now was the acknowledged high priest of the High Sierra, and he received similar requests all the time. He knew Roosevelt, by reputation, as a loud, opinionated warmonger—hardly the sort Muir liked to camp with. But Roosevelt was the president, and he could be useful in the cause of wilderness protection. “I might be able to do some forest good in talking freely around the campfire,” Muir wrote to a friend. The arrangements were made.

  Roosevelt loved every minute of the outing. “John Muir met me with a couple of packers and two mules to carry our tent, bedding, and food for a three days’ trip,” he wrote afterward. “The first night was clear, and we lay down in the darkening aisles of the great Sequoia grove. The majestic trunks, beautiful in color and in symmetry, rose round us like the pillars of a mightier cathedral than ever was conceived even by the fervor of the Middle Ages. Hermit thrushes sang beautifully in the evening, and again, with a burst of wonderful music, at dawn.” Roosevelt was surprised and quietly pleased to discover that he knew more about birds than Muir did. Muir loved trees and flowers and cliffs and mountains, not birds. “The only birds he noticed or cared for were some that were very conspicuous, such as the water-ousels—always particular favorites of mine too.”