The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  There was another aspect of Sewall’s life that was similar to Roosevelt’s childhood—childhood sickness. Although he didn’t have asthma, he had been afflicted with hyperthermia, diphtheria, and hearing difficulties. Growing up fragile in such unforgiving country wasn’t an option. Sewall either had to get in shape or die. Much like Roosevelt, he began a successful fitness regime and became an inspiration for the philosophy of mind over matter. Treating lumbering as a sport, he practiced day and night with his ax, priding himself at being able to chop a sycamore down faster than anybody else in Aroostook County. As if performing for Buffalo Bill’s show, he could toss an ax in the air, catch it, and then split a pine log, all in one motion. Starting at age sixteen, he became a boss man for lumber drives, overseeing pine logs floating down the Mattawamkeag River every harvest season, the months of April to July.

  Back at Harvard that spring, a self-confident Theodore acted a bit like a roughneck weaned on frozen rivers. The gloves had come off. Bile stirred in his stomach when he thought about all his anti-outdoors naturalist professors. The wilderness had been so intoxicating. One day he was in Cambridge, feeling hemmed in; the next day he was gazing at an ice-sheeted blue lake looking for moose. The North Woods had toughened him, or so he believed. The convivial ways of Sewall and Dow also lingered in him. No longer was he content behaving like an adolescent rajah collecting bird feathers and speckled eggs. Primitive Maine had knocked some of the tameness out of him, significantly. He now considered his asthma an ugly by-product of civilization’s stresses. Reading the Old Testament in Maine by a roaring fire, Roosevelt felt like an American Adam, uncontaminated by the corruptions of Tammany Hall politics or Harvard’s pecking orders. Once again Island Falls—even in a blind frenzy of snow—had redeemed his despair and fixed his determination to marry Alice Lee. “I never have passed a pleasanter two weeks than those just gone by,” Roosevelt wrote to his mother. “I enjoyed every moment. The first two or three days I had asthma but, funnily enough, this left me entirely as soon as I went into camp. The thermometer was below zero pretty often, but I was not bothered by the cold at all.”68

  Just as bathing in Walden Pond had been a baptism for Thoreau, Roosevelt now felt the cleansing effect of the horizontally blowing snow in the Mooseleuk Range. It was as if Roosevelt’s worries about asthma had been stolen away by the blanket of icy whiteness. “I have never seen a grander or more beautiful sight than the northern woods in winter,” he wrote. “The evergreens laden with snow make the most beautiful contrast of green and white, and when it freezes after a rain all the trees look as though they were made of crystal. The snow under foot being about three feet deep, and drifting to twice that depth in places, completely changes the aspect of things.”69

  VI

  No sooner had the spring semester at Harvard begun than Roosevelt started plotting for a return visit to Maine. The spell of the North Woods had fallen over him. Some of his classmates, however, snickered that all Roosevelt learned in Maine was the art of manly bragging. Even though he would spend June and July in Oyster Bay, tending to family obligations, come August he was going to climb the peak that Thoreau had written about, the 5,268-foot Mount Katahdin. Even with Sewall as principal guide, that would be quite a mountaineering feat for a first-timer. Make no mistake about it—this was a big mountain. When a wall of white clouds hovered in the sky, you couldn’t even see the pinnacle from base camp. Mountain climbing, Roosevelt knew, was a far trickier endeavor than hiking in river valleys.

  While guests at Oyster Bay were having tea and crumpets, Roosevelt was purchasing camping gear from Greenville Sanders & Sons. His private diaries list a flannel shirt, duck trousers, long underwear, a parka, wool socks, bandannas, a thick blanket, and a bag of “necessaries.” The plan was to make camp at the eastern hinge of Mount Katahdin and climb the narrow ridge among the blackflies and ticks. He hoped plenty of bull moose would be encountered around ponds and lakes as they dined on aquatic plants—Roosevelt desperately wanted a moose’s palmate antlers for his trophy collection, and he wanted to eat a moose steak. In The Maine Woods Thoreau maintained that moose meat was “like tender beef with perhaps more flavor, sometimes like veal.”70 Because Roosevelt had studied the characteristics of bull moose carefully, he understood both their rutting habits and their boreal–mixed deciduous forest habitat.

  Roosevelt relished the fact that moose were the largest member of the deer family populating North America, standing six feet tall, with the males weighing up to 1,300 pounds. (A bull bison, however, can be larger, weighing up to a ton.) With their poor eyesight, moose rely on their excellent hearing to escape predators at night. Certainly Roosevelt would have identified with the way the moose turned this deficit into an asset. Their sense of smell was so heightened that a favorite saying of Maine moose hunters was “Keep the wind in your face and the sun at your back” so as not to be detected. Able to run thirty-five miles an hour, neck craning with every sudden noise, the docile-looking bull moose became astonishingly aggressive when feeling threatened. And if a hunter killed a bull moose—which usually took more than a single bullet—two or three grown men were needed to carry the carcass off. Roosevelt was also impressed with the raw strength of the bull moose.

  VII

  Unfortunately, there is no photograph of Roosevelt on August 23, 1879, when he arrived in Island Falls full of vim and vigor. He was carrying a forty-five-pound pack on his back and held both a shotgun and a rifle in his hands. There was no telling what oddments were inside the pack. You could have recognized him as a greenhorn from as far away as the North Pole. Along with Emlen West and Arthur Cutler, he headed over to the Sewall cabin to plan their climb. Staring at Mount Katahdin, pointing at it with his rifle, Roosevelt spontaneously decided to canoe more than twenty miles to Lake Mattawamkeag (with Emlen) just to loosen up for their big outing.

  For eight days the Roosevelt-Sewall party camped and hiked in the Mount Katahdin area. (Today it’s part of Baxter State Park.) A huge mound looming out over a sea of woodlands, Katahdin had a soothing Japanese Zen-like aura. Just staring at the peak made you want to write a haiku. On a clear day from the Katahdin summit, Canada poured open on both sides of the mountain. You could see New Brunswick to the east and Quebec to the west. But that serenity was misleading. One misjudged step on the way up Katahdin could mean a broken neck or death.

  About three-quarters of the way up Katahdin, both Cutler and Emlen collapsed from fatigue. Roosevelt soldiered on; he bragged in his diary that he had learned to “endure fatigue” as stoically as any lumberjack, even though his throat was burning and his joints were aching. At one juncture, he claimed he was “fagged” but was not stricken with asthma. His mind, however, was on fire. Looking toward the west, Roosevelt probably could see Moosehead Lake, where “the humiliation” had taken place. He’d come a long way since that hazing. As Hudson Stuck, a member of the first team to climb Mount McKinley in Alaska explained, first-time mountaineers like Roosevelt were embarked on a “privileged communion” with the “high places of earth.”71 And, indeed, as he was ascending Thoreau’s peak, Roosevelt’s heart filled with pure joy; he was double-charged with life, wearing everybody else out.

  Once they all returned to Island Falls, Cutler and Emlen decided to call it quits. But Roosevelt wanted another wilderness adventure now, while the adrenaline was still coursing through his body like a river of fire. Full of spark and fizz, he said good-bye to his tutor and cousin and turned his sights to the caribou country around the Munsungun Lake region. The idea was for Roosevelt and Sewall to take a pirogue up the Aroostook River on a hunting jag in search of moose and caribou. They loaded up on hardtack, pork jerky, and flour, gearing up for a grueling nine or ten days combating rocks and rapids.

  Refusing to take shortcuts, they forded rivers, slipped on stones in fast-moving streams, shot doves for dinner, and hiked until they dropped in clammy exhaustion. With each effort Roosevelt grew merrier. Tellingly, Cutler later wrote to Sewall that the next
time T.R. came to Maine for his “semi-annual visit,” it would be easier to tether a “tame moose” for him to shoot instead of enduring an endless series of obstacle tests around the Munsungun Lake region.

  Book Two of Yagyu Munenori’s The Life Giving Sword (part of his samurai meditation on martial arts) gives some insight on Roosevelt’s euphoria during this sojourn. Writing in the seventeenth century, Munenori explains a state of mind he calls “total removal,” a swooping moment when sickness of the mind disappears.72 Conquering Katahdin was the culmination of something Roosevelt’s father had told him: that the body and mind needed to run in tandem, that he had to be whole to succeed. As Roosevelt was going through “total removal,” one can only wonder what Bill Sewall thought when his eager client shouted “Bully!” or “By Jove!” every time the dugout flooded or a thunderstorm drenched them to the bone. But when they parted that September, Sewall promised to keep an eye on the Cambridge-bound Roosevelt from the North Woods. Shared experience, after all, is the cement of all friendships. They had forged an alliance that had all the power of a blood bond.

  When Roosevelt left the depot at Kingman, Maine, on September 24, he didn’t know he was saying good-bye to the North Woods forever (the next summer he would visit the well-heeled Maine coast). Over the previous year, he had spent sixty-nine days with Sewall and traveled more than 1,000 miles of rugged backcountry by wagon, canoe, pirogue, and foot. Everywhere they went was as serene as a forgotten battlefield. Never again would Roosevelt write about debilitating asthma attacks or the disease of puniness. In “Jabberwocky” (in Alice through the Looking-Glass and then in The Hunting of the Shark), Lewis Carroll used a word he coined: “galumphing,” meaning, roughly, galloping triumphantly or marching exultantly with “irregular bounding movements.” No word devised before or since then has better described Roosevelt when he conquered Mount Katahdin.73 “As usual it rained,” Roosevelt noted, “but I am enjoying myself exceedingly, am in superb health and as tough as a pine knot.” 74

  The fact that Roosevelt left Maine’s North Woods didn’t mean that the North Woods left him. Ardor for the state stayed with him, as permanent as a ring in a redwood tree. Later in life, Roosevelt adopted the bull moose as his political symbol. He even dubbed his Progressive Party of 1912 the Bull Moose Party. Gleefully, Roosevelt, taking a cue from Dave Sewall, constantly accused his opponents of taking every opportunity to use “weasel words.” While serving as president, Roosevelt named his Blue Ridge Mountains retreat—a secluded cabin just outside Charlottesville, Virginia—“Pine Knot.” Bill Sewall’s cabin, where Roosevelt used to lodge, became the first official historic site in Island Falls; eventually, even the lean-to hunting camp on Mattawamkeag Lake was preserved. Meanwhile, the spot along the Mattawamkeag River, where it’s believed Roosevelt read the Bible on Sundays, now has a historic marker in the ground, detailing Roosevelt’s Maine adventures in the late 1870s.

  And Roosevelt wasn’t done with the straightforwardness of either Sewall or Dow. Because they “hitched well,” as Sewall put it, Roosevelt summoned them to the Dakota Territory to operate a cattle business in 1884. But that was six years away. First he had to graduate from Harvard and marry Alice Lee—those were his two primary objectives.

  Near the end of his life, Roosevelt presented his wilderness days in the North Woods as the apogee of his happiness during adolescence. He became the adventitious expert on Maine. In a nostalgic essay, “My Debt to Maine,” published as part of a volume celebrating the Pine Tree State’s centennial in 1919, Colonel Roosevelt (as his byline read in Maine, My State) noted that camping out in the North Woods had been transformative for him. His memories ran deep: the soft-needled branches; collecting kindling; shoveling snow; building a rainproof bonfire; stirring up embers with a walking stick; the smell of drifting woodsmoke; the cry of a hawk, loud and clear; roasting grouse, venison, or trout on a spit; concocting new dishes like muskrat and fish-duck (merganser) stew; and ladling out Boston baked beans for breakfast. But more than anything else, those shrill high-wind whistles, all those aromas of pine and hemlock and spruce, never faded away.

  Maine, to Roosevelt, was where he first found his authentic self. Men acquired the skills of survival early, in such a rugged terrain, if they wanted to succeed in life. In the North Woods, unlike official Washington or Harvard, there was no gyp game. Nor was Maine benevolent or controllable. Death by avalanche, death by frostbite, death by becoming lost—these were hazards men like Sewall and Dow had learned to overcome. The entire state had a stimulating effect on Roosevelt, almost as if it made him drunk. “I owe a personal debt to Maine because of my association with certain staunch friends in Aroostook County,” he wrote, “an association that helped and benefited me throughout my life in more ways than one.” 75

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MIDWEST TRAMPING AND THE CONQUERING OF THE MATTERHORN

  I

  The Harvard Athletic Association was sponsoring its spring boxing competition and twenty-year-old Theodore Roosevelt had entered in the lightweight division. The rounds were all held on campus, at the old gymnasium near Memorial Hall. Although once denounced as immoral because of its brutality, boxing in 1879 had become chic, particularly in the Boston area, where the Irish-American John L. Sullivan had brazenly challenged anyone with enough guts to fight him for a $500 wager. Even the New York Times and Harper’s Weekly were pro-boxing, asserting that the sport enhanced physical fitness and manliness. Sullivan was nicknamed the Boston Strongboy; Roosevelt deserved a more Ivy League moniker like the Cambridge Clerk or the Harvard Horticulturist. Even though Roosevelt had been training for months, nobody imagined he’d actually be in a twenty-four-foot ring fighting for a college championship trophy.

  That was precisely what happened on March 22, 1879. Besides undergoing intensive training Roosevelt had carefully studied the official Queensberry rules, determined not to lose by default owing to a technical infraction or an illegal maneuver. Grueling as it sounds, the Harvard Athletic Association organized the competition by a process of elimination. You boxed not just one match but two or three in the same day. With the gymnasium packed, his friends and classmates cheering him on, the 130-pound Roosevelt, to the shock of most present, with a couple of good right punches, actually beat a senior, W. W. Coolidge of the class of 1879, in his first square-off. It was considered something of an upset. According to the Harvard Advocate, Roosevelt “displayed more coolness and skill than his opponent.” Meanwhile, C. S. Hanks of the class of 1879 had defeated his opponent in his semifinal round. Therefore, the championship fight that afternoon would be Roosevelt versus Hanks.1

  Sitting on a floor seat watching the fisticuffs was Owen Wister, an aristocratic Pennsylvanian who would go on to write the classic western novel The Virginian. Two years behind Roosevelt at Harvard, Wister was something of a class clown, famously contributing both the music and the libretto for the Hasty Pudding Club’s comic opera Dido and Aeneas. As a product of boarding schools in New England and Switzerland, Wister had become extremely erudite by the time he arrived in Cambridge. Just as Roosevelt was an accomplished ornithologist of sorts upon entering Harvard, the easy-tempered Wister had composed songs he thought rivaled the worst of Stephen Foster, which was at least a starting place in show biz. Like Roosevelt, Wister suffered from bad health. Throughout his life he had nervous breakdowns, migraine headaches, sudden tremors, and even prolonged hallucinations; and—again as with Roosevelt—only Mother Nature, it seemed, brought him relief from his physical anguish.2

  A shrewd judge of character, Wister studied Roosevelt with puzzlement that afternoon in the old gymnasium, figuring he was going to get his block knocked off by Hanks. As a freshman Wister knew Roosevelt only by reputation but was pulling for him as the well-muscled underdog of the bout. According to the Advocate, it was a “spirited contest,” but Hanks got the “best of his opponent” by his impressive “quickness and power of endurance.” Yet something occurred that afternoon that Wister never forgot, and years
later he showcased it as the prized anecdote of his memoir Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship. According to Wister, amazingly, near defeat, Roosevelt, by virtue of his good sportsmanship, became the real winner of the Harvard bout. As Wister put it, the packed crowd witnessed that “prophetic flash of the Roosevelt that was to come.”

  At one point during the bout, in accordance with the Queensberry rules, the referee called time-out, thereby ending a round. However, in the frenzy of the fight, Hanks didn’t hear the referee’s intervention, and just as Roosevelt relinquished his guard, Hanks smashed him in the face. Blood spurted everywhere. The audience gasped; boos and hisses filled the gym. What a cheap shot! But Roosevelt held a boxing glove up in a theatrical gesture, demanding silence from the crowd. “It’s all right,” he reassured the crowd. “He didn’t hear him.”3

  As Wister recounted in his memoir, he watched mesmerized as the junior walked over to Hanks with extended hand, simply refusing to be victimized. (Some scholars, however, doubt the veracity of Wister’s story, feeling that the novelist had probably confabulated the bloody-champ aspect of the spectacle.4) With his fine eye for nuance, Wister noticed that Roosevelt’s conciliatory gesture combined dash and spirit. “He was his own limelight, and could not help it,” Wister surmised; “a creature charged with such voltage as his, became the central presence at once, whether he stepped on a platform or entered a room.”5 One can only imagine how proud Alice Lee must have felt learning that her Theodore won over the crowd’s heart by losing the boxing match with such dignity. (Wister intimated that Lee was among the spectators, but it seems unlikely.)

  Although Roosevelt kept collecting a multitude of birds, as 1879 turned to 1880 he toyed with the idea of a career in politics for the first time. Business or law brought home income; ornithology clearly didn’t. Also, he was itching to be a public servant for the state of New York; politics ran deep in the family gene pool. Upon his engagement to Alice Lee in February, in fact, he wrote Minot a very telling letter about his future plans. “I have made everything subordinate to winning her,” he wrote, “so you can perhaps understand a change in my ideas as regards to science.” Roosevelt’s main goal in life, as he put it, was to “keep up” the family name.6 He and Alice would marry in October. “Natural History was to remain a genuine avocation,” his biographer Carleton Putnam rightly noted in Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, “but it never loomed again as a feasible career.” 7