The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  After days of striking out the Roosevelt party caught a break. They discovered fresh spoor, and off they went in pursuit. Suddenly, there was a buffalo in sight, but upon hearing their clamor it galloped off. For several miles Roosevelt chased the bull through a rough patch of prickly shrubs and eroded gullies, to no avail. Later that afternoon, the men came across three buffalo grazing within fairly easy firing distance. Roosevelt quickly dismounted, took aim, and fired. The bullet penetrated the flesh of one, but the wounded buffalo ran off. Desperate for his big game trophy, Roosevelt chased the buffalo for seven or eight miles, only to miss with his next shot. Once again the buffalo got away. Once again Roosevelt was embarrassed.

  Even though Roosevelt loved hunting, he was not a great shot; his poor eyesight prevented that. “Whatever success I have had in game-hunting,” Roosevelt later wrote, “has been due, as well as I can make it out, to three causes: first, common sense and good judgment; second, perseverance, which is the only way of allowing one to make good one’s own blunders; third the fact that I shoot as well at game as at a target. This did not make me hit difficult shots, but it prevented my missing easy shots, which a good target shot will often do in the field.”53 What he brought to hunting was instead a bookish knowledge of the species’ habits and coloration. But Roosevelt was so excited by the windswept panoramas that he didn’t comprehend his own clumsiness with a rifle. That evening by the campfire, he remained optimistic about bagging his trophy. It was raining again the next morning when the Roosevelt party stumbled upon a couple of grazing buffalo. Theodore fired and missed his mark again. This time, at least, he could blame the weather.

  The hardships Roosevelt endured in pursuit of the buffalo were many. Ants had built huge communities eight or nine feet deep. On one occasion, crawling in the sage to get closer to a bull, Roosevelt stumbled right into a cactus patch, and his hands were suddenly filled with needles as if they were pincushions; they stayed swollen for days. When the hunt party decided to charge at a couple of buffalo, Nell got spooked and tossed its head dramatically backward, causing Roosevelt’s rifle to smack against his forehead. According to Roosevelt the blood literally “poured” into his eyes from the stitchable gash.54 As the blood congealed, however, he spoke excitedly about the prospect of returning home with a purple scar. That evening, his face bruised, forced to sleep in the cold rain, with nothing but dry biscuit in his stomach, Roosevelt glowed with enthusiasm, refusing to engage in tremulous self-pity. It was the experience of freezing while skating at Cambridge all over again. A miserable Joe Ferris, shivering under a wet blanket, marooned in the backcountry darkness, was baffled that evening to hear Roosevelt exclaim, “By Godfrey, but this is fun!”55

  Doggedly Roosevelt kept hunting through the broken plains and pony paths along Little Cannonball Creek for his buffalo trophy. All a frustrated Joe Ferris could remember thinking was that “bad luck” was following them “like a yellow dog follows a drunkard.”56 On the morning of September 20 Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris left the hunt for an entirely unanticipated reason: Roosevelt, in a fit of exuberance, had handed them a $14,000 check to guarantee his partnership in the Maltese Cross Ranch. Roosevelt was to become a Dakota rancher. As if they had just won the lottery, Merrifield and Sylvane were ecstatic to be trusted with an investment check and tapped to be his highly paid new managers. The two were catching a train to Minnesota to iron out all the business and banking details. Basically, by signing his name once, Roosevelt had bought the boys hundreds of new cattle on spec.

  Roosevelt’s luck finally changed as, for the first time in his life, he ventured into Montana Territory, hoping to find his buffalo. Noticing that his horse was sniffing something in the air, Roosevelt dismounted, jogged up to a ridge, and peered over. There, grazing on grass, was a buffalo. “His glossy fall coat was in fine trim and shone in the rays of sun,” he later wrote, “while his pride of bearing showed him to be in the lusty vigor of his prime.” This wasn’t a lonesome George in size, but close enough. Stealthily Roosevelt advanced, one quiet foot at a time, to get within range. When he was about fifty yards away he fired a single shot. The bullet entered the buffalo’s massive shoulder. “The wound was an almost immediately fatal one,” Roosevelt wrote, “yet with surprising agility for so large and heavy an animal, he bounded up the opposite side of the ravine, heedless of two more balls, both of which went into his flank and ranged forwards, and disappeared over the ridge at a lumbering gallop, the blood pouring from his mouth and nostrils.”57

  Sprinting ahead Roosevelt, sweating profusely, followed the blood trail until he found the buffalo “stark dead” in a ditch. All the buttes surrounding Roosevelt now took on a special glow. Hopping from foot to foot, Roosevelt encircled the buffalo, whooping and chanting as if he were White Bull or Two Moons in an effort to pay this “lordly buffalo” due reverence. A perplexed Joe Ferris had never imagined any white man behaving in such a queer fashion, imitating a Sioux or Cheyenne. An exhilarated Roosevelt, in an act of spontaneous generosity, next opened his wallet and handed Ferris $100. “I never saw any one so enthused in my life,” Ferris recalled, “and, by golly, I was enthused myself…. I was plumb tired out…I wanted to see him kill his first one as badly as he wanted to kill it.”58

  That evening the men stuffed themselves on buffalo steak, Roosevelt claiming that the meat from the hump tasted best; this was contrary to George Catlin’s promotion of buffalo tongue being the true delicacy. To Roosevelt buffalo meat was barely distinguishable from beef. The hunters didn’t sever the head or skin the carcass, however, until the following day. “The flesh of this bull tasted uncommonly good to us,” Roosevelt wrote, “for we had been without fresh meat for a week.” The New York World had caricatured him as a Harvard-educated aristocrat, but from now on he’d be an all-American buffalo hunter.59

  IV

  When Roosevelt returned to Little Missouri on September 23, to spend another night at the Pyramid Park Hotel before heading east, he was a changed man. Francis Parkman had been right: only by living out the western experience could a scholar effectively write about it. Roosevelt’s fifteen-day growth of beard in the Dakota wilderness, and his rumble in the West, had strengthened him both mentally and physically. Now, as he slept on a cot at the Pyramid Park Hotel, he felt that he was one of the hardy trappers in the Jim Bridger vein, not Jane Dandy or Lil’ Punkin. In Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States 1880–1917, the historian Gail Bederman dissects Roosevelt’s obsession with becoming a “man’s man.” Pointing out how his political opponents in New York used to ridicule him as the “exquisite Mr. Roosevelt,” Bederman argues that Roosevelt’s “cowboy of the Dakotas” persona was an attempt to stamp out any traces of effeminacy. No longer would he be publicly insulted as “given to sucking the knob of an ivory cane,” a phallic insult Roosevelt had been forced to endure, for he was now a virile buffalo hunter straight out of “Cowboy Land.”60

  Bederman also explains the two different strains of masculinity that Theodore was juggling at age twenty-four. From his father he had inherited Victorian codes of “moral manliness” including unselfishness, chastity, physical strength, honesty, and altruism. Yet, as noted, his father had rejected serving as a Union soldier in the Civil War, hiring a surrogate in his place. Young T.R. had been humiliated by his father’s wartime decision. So perhaps he tried overcompensating in his effort to embrace the ethos of frontier masculinity in which a propensity for violence was often rewarded. Killing an animal, winning a fistfight, and declaring a duel, in other words, were obvious ways to cultivate his deficient “natural man” side. Therefore, Roosevelt felt a need to emulate Indians while simultaneously conquering them, and a need to worship big game like buffalo only to hunt them down. The Victorian mannered man turned to prim Europe whereas the “natural” American always had a westward focus. “On his first trip to the Badlands in 1883, he was giddy with delight and behaved as much like a Mayne Reid hero as possible,” Bederman wrot
e. “He flung himself into battle with nature and hunted the largest and fiercest game he could find. As a child, he had been attracted to natural history as a displacement of his desire to be a Western hero. Now, shooting buffalo and bullying obstreperous cowboys, he could style himself as the real thing.”61

  Roosevelt’s solid Victorian morals, however, were never expunged as he became a Great Plains hunter and Dakota rancher. Unlike most men wanting a buffalo head, he actually thought about, and was angered by, the possibility that the great herds might become extinct. His Harvard education in Darwinian biology and naturalist studies gave him a perspective on western wildlife that no ordinary cowboy or hunter could have had. As Lincoln Lang later noted, every day Roosevelt increasingly came to understand the “definite purpose of every natural [object] he saw in the Bad Lands.”62 In the coming decades, his “man’s man” side hunted big game while the intellectual Harvard part of his personality would preserve things of great environmental beauty and consequence.

  Considered in the light of Bederman’s thesis, hunting in the Dakota hills and killing a buffalo were the culmination of a series of masculine initiation rites T.R. had put himself through starting in Maine in 1871 with the incident at Moosehead Lake. Overall, life was going well—he had established himself as a historian, a lawyer, and a reform politician; the very fact that Alice was pregnant proved (to his mind) his virility; his health, while still fickle, was on an upswing. No wonder Roosevelt felt ebullient as he boarded his eastbound train. For in addition to everything else, he no longer believed himself to be a weakling or tenderfoot. Any remaining hints of self-disgust had been vanquished. Although he went to exaggerated extremes to get there and was physically spent by exaltation and fatigue, Roosevelt now saw himself as a western man, not a rich boy whose father had refused to serve in the Civil War.

  Once Roosevelt had his buffalo head onboard the train, he was ready to journey back to New York in a Pullman berth. Roosevelt wrapped his prize (weighing approximately twenty-five to thirty pounds) in burlap, loaded it onto a Northern Pacific railroad car, and headed east to Saint Paul.63 Unlike Texas longhorns, buffalo were singularly unimpressive if you stripped off their horns, just two stubby prongs jutting upward. A rack of deer or elk antlers was, by contrast, far more impressive. But a buffalo head, in all its grandeur, had become coveted all over America for saloon and library walls. The Union Pacific railroad system even acquired buffalo heads to hang in all its scattered depot offices.64

  Roosevelt returned to Alice as a conquering hunter hero. Of course he proudly hung his buffalo head (a taxidermist in Saint Paul had mounted it) in their Manhattan home. That fall, he talked excessively about the freshness and vigor of the West. After winning a third term in the New York state legislature, he put himself forward for speaker of the assembly at the end of the year, offering a capsule biographical sketch that claimed he was a man of Harvard, Albany, and the Dakota Territory.65 Yet when he lost the speakership, he characteristically found the silver lining. “The fact that I had fought hard and efficiently…and that I had made the fight single-handed, with no machine back of me, assured my standing as floor leader,” he wrote. “My defeat in the end materially strengthened my position, and enabled me to accomplish far more than I could have accomplished as Speaker.”66

  Starting in January 1884 Roosevelt found himself working almost full-time in Albany. He wanted nothing less than to break up the political machines of both parties in New York City and was also consumed with passing a series of municipal reform laws. Strapped for cash after writing the fat check in the Dakotas for cattle, Roosevelt decided to lease out his brownstone and move back into the house on West Fifty-Seventh Street with his mother. T.R.’s sister Bamie, married to Douglas Robinson, had recently given birth, and she also moved in. Alice suddenly had two family members—Mittie and Bamie—to look after her as her own pregnancy moved into its ninth month. Meanwhile, the construction of Leeholm (Sagamore Hill) continued. “How I did hate to leave my bright, sunny little love yesterday afternoon,” Roosevelt wrote to Alice in early February from Albany. “I love you and long for you all the time.”67

  Just days later tragedy struck the Roosevelt clan. On February 13, Theodore received a telegram announcing that Alice had just given birth to a girl. A plethora of hearty congratulations were telegraphed from fellow legislators and friends. Cigars were lit and glasses hoisted in his honor. But then a second telegram arrived. Although it didn’t survive, it was probably from Elliott and read something like: “There is a curse on this house. Mother is dying, and Alice is dying too.”68 (For that is what Elliott later told his brother in person at midnight.) Alice was afflicted with Bright’s disease (medically termed acute or chronic nephritis), and his mother had typhoid fever. A panic-stricken Theodore raced to board a train for Grand Central Station. The fog through Dutchess County was pea-soup thick as if village after village were floating in clouds. All he could do was sit and pray. It was around midnight when he finally arrived in Manhattan and made his way to West Fifty-Seventh Street. The pall of death hung all about as he entered the parlor and climbed the stairs to see Alice and the baby on the third floor.

  Alice was drifting into and out of consciousness. As Roosevelt took her in his arms, his spirit broke down. It was as if the fog had entered his throat. With his surety evaporated, he simply didn’t know what to do except clutch her and sob. As he watched her head sinking into the pillow his emotions ran the gamut from contempt of God to guilt for being away in Albany. Her breathing was soft and low, and he berated himself for not being a better husband. Bright’s disease ravaged the kidneys—its symptoms included vomiting, high fever, and excruciating back pain. Breathing became difficult, the body became puffy, and the urine turned bloody. It was death by slow torture.69

  The situation was no better on the second floor. Roosevelt’s mother was in utter misery, with a sustained fever of over 104 degrees as well as gastroenteritis and diarrhea. In the 1880s, when there were no antibiotics, death took one out of every ten patients afflicted with typhoid. The situation was beyond bleak. Mother had always been his one-woman support system. Without her he feared being rudderless.

  On February 14 (Valentine’s Day) Mittie died at two o’clock in the morning. Twelve hours later so did Alice.70 Two days later a cold spell gripped New York as two hearses made their way to the Presbyterian Church on Fifty-Fifth Street and Fifth Avenue. All the leading philanthropists and politicians in the city—including the Astors and Harrimans—arrived to pay their last respects to the deceased Roosevelt women.71 The New York Times and New York Sun covered the double funeral as if it were an important event.72 After an opening prayer, the old hymn “Rock of Ages” was sung by a chorus of mourners paying their respects. On top of the two rosewood coffins were wreaths of roses and green vines. Following the benedictions, Roosevelt’s mother and wife were buried at Greenwood Cemetery next to his father. During these painful days of February, Roosevelt returned to keeping his diaries. “The light has gone out of my life,” he wrote, and his words were accompanied by a huge cross on the page. A couple of days later he added, “For joy or for sorrow my life has now been lived out.”73

  Nobody will ever know the depths of the private pain that Roosevelt felt as winter changed into spring. For months afterward, everybody used kid gloves when dealing with him. His former tutor Arthur Cutler wrote to Bill Sewall in Maine that Theodore was stuck in a “dazed, stunned state.” Roosevelt himself put on a stoic veneer when writing to Sewall: “It was a grim and evil fate, but I have never believed it did any good to flinch or yield for any blow, nor does it lighten the blow to cease from working.”74

  During sleepless nights that spring, Roosevelt would sit in a rocking chair, silent as smoke, and read natural history books. The world seemed quite diabolical. He wondered whether the Badlands—where even the half-clad buttes had an unstable equilibrium—might be the best place to heal and hatched a plan to light out for the Dakota Territory following the Republican N
ational Convention in Chicago. Perhaps solace could be found in a ranch house with undraped windows surrounded by roping corrals and branching chutes. A saddle horse would probably be his best companion, his true equal and friend.

  People always devise their own ways of coping with loss. Roosevelt took the route of bottling up his emotions, seldom mentioning his wife by name, submerging her memory, and never reminiscing about her legacy to his daughter Alice. Oddly, he didn’t even invoke her name in his own An Autobiography. It was as if Roosevelt believed he could best respect his beloved wife in silence. Nevertheless, upon a return visit to North Dakota, he holed up in the Maltese Cross cabin and edited a volume of memorials about Alice; he had it privately printed by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. “She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; as a flower she grew, and as a fair young flower she died,” he wrote in the introduction. “Her life had been always in the sunshine; there had never come to her a single great sorrow; and none ever knew her who did not love and revere her for her bright, sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness.” 75

  Despite his grief Roosevelt that spring nevertheless engaged in politics at Albany with full fervor. Even though he loved the notion of General William T. Sherman as the Republican nominee for president, he reluctantly settled on the more pedestrian James G. Blaine. More and more his political coach was Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Although Lodge didn’t share Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for the wilderness he was keenly interested in organized fox hunts. A trusting Roosevelt used Lodge as a confidant and sounding board. Unlike Roosevelt, Lodge was terse, calculating, and unemotional. But he was also deeply honest, loyal, and a gentleman. Both shared a bedrock belief in the virtues of American exceptionalism. Both were dogged in their pursuit of western expansion. That spring Roosevelt and Lodge traveled together by train to Chicago for the smoky bedlam of the Republican National Convention. (Roosevelt left his infant daughter, whom he’d soon nickname Mouseskeins, in the care of his sister Bamie.) Although Lodge knew that Roosevelt had developed a reputation as a reformer, he was surprised at what a folk hero his New York friend had become with the western Republican delegates, merely for shooting a buffalo in the Dakota Territory. A rumor circulated at the convention that when the territory became a state, Roosevelt would probably be its first U.S. senator.