Michael L. Cooper

by Theodore Roosevelt

  “I am now feeling very well and am enjoying the life very much,” one of TR’s letters to Alice reported. “Of course I am dirty,” a later letter added, “in fact I have not taken off my clothes for two weeks, not even at night, except for one bath in the river, but I sleep, eat and work as I never could do in ten years time in the city.”

  After a week and a half Theodore finally shot a buffalo. It weighed nearly two thousand pounds, by far the largest creature he had ever killed. The happy hunter danced around the dead animal and then rewarded his amused guide with a $100 tip. “Hurrah! The luck has turned at last,” he informed Alice. “I will bring you home the head of a great buffalo bull.”

  Another letter had more news. Theodore had given two men whom he had just met a check for $14,000 to buy a small ranch and four hundred head of cattle, which they would graze for him on government-owned grasslands. Now that the buffalo were nearly gone and the Indians were confined to reservations, raising cattle was becoming big business on the Great Plains. And it was fashionable for wealthy men from the East and from Europe to own cattle ranches. One local rancher was a young French nobleman. Theodore justified his hasty investment by saying it would provide a good income while leaving him time for public service.

  The last of the letters from this trip concluded, “This has been by all odds the pleasantest and most successful trip I have ever made.” Years later he would say that it was in the Dakota Badlands where “the romance of my life began.”

  That November voters in the 21st District reelected Theodore to a third term, and Republicans statewide won a majority of seats in the assembly. Eager to be speaker, Theodore tirelessly crisscrossed the state asking his fellow assemblymen for their votes. But when the assembly convened in Albany at the beginning of 1884, the Republican Old Guard showed it didn’t trust the independent young politician and elected another speaker.

  A few weeks later, on a Wednesday in mid-February, Theodore received a telegram that Alice had given birth the night before to a daughter. They had already agreed if the baby was a girl to name her Alice Lee. The new father, no doubt enjoying the hearty back-slapping and handshakes from the other assemblymen, planned to catch a late train into the city. But then a second telegram arrived. Alice, who was staying at his mother’s home, was seriously ill. Theodore took the next train south to Manhattan and, after what must have been a painfully long trip, arrived at his mother’s house on 57th Street near midnight. “There is a curse on this house,” Elliott told him. “Mother is dying, and Alice is dying too.”

  Everyone thought Mittie had been sick with a bad cold, but it turned out to be typhoid fever. At three A.M. Thursday she died. Eleven hours later, just as a thick fog over the city began to lift, Alice died. The cause was a kidney ailment called Bright’s disease. It was Valentine’s Day, exactly four years after they had announced their engagement. His journal entry for February 14, 1884, was a large cross.

  The family held a double funeral at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Just like Thee’s funeral six years earlier, more than two thousand of the city’s most prominent people filled the church. But this time there were two rosewood coffins side by side surrounded by roses and lilies of the field. “Theodore is in a dazed, stunned state,” observed his old tutor Arthur Cutler. “He does not know what he does or says.” Afterward, before putting his journal aside for several months, Theodore wrote, “For joy or for sorrow my life has now been lived out.”

  The following week, after entrusting his newborn daughter to Bamie, who lived in a town house on Madison Avenue, Theodore returned to Albany to fill his days, his thoughts, with work. To one friend he explained, “I shall go mad if I were not employed.”

  The assemblyman had promised his constituents that he would attack political corruption such as New York City’s Tammany Hall, the nation’s largest and most notorious political machine. Political machines were unofficial organizations that controlled political life in cities and states. Tammany was a force in New York City politics for about a century. Its most notorious leader was William M. Tweed, who was popularly known as Boss Tweed. He ran Tammany Hall when Theodore was a child. Boss Tweed was convicted in the early 1870s of stealing $100 million of taxpayer money, and he died in prison. But Tammany Hall lived on under new leadership.

  Many of the city’s twenty-four aldermen and the officials they appointed were puppets for Tammany Hall. Theodore’s biggest accomplishment in the assembly was passing the Reform Charter Bill, dubbed the “Roosevelt bill,” which gave the city’s mayor more power over political appointments. “Tammany Defeated: Mr. Roosevelt’s Brilliant Assault on Corruption,” lauded a headline in the New York Herald.

  After the assembly’s session ended, Theodore stepped briefly into the spotlight of national politics. He was one of New York State’s seventy-four delegates who attended the Republican National Convention in Chicago that June to nominate a candidate for president. Most of the convention’s delegates supported former secretary of state James G. Blaine, who was challenging the Republican incumbent Chester A. Arthur.

  Both Blaine and Arthur, Theodore believed, represented business as usual, political machines, patronage, and corruption. With his new friend Massachusetts politician Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore led a group of seventy independents who tried to nominate dull but honest Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont. Edmunds lost, and lost big, to Blaine.

  The defeat didn’t surprise Theodore, but it probably added to his discouragement with public life. It appeared that the Old Guard was firmly in charge of the Republican Party, and there was little future for a reform-minded independent. “I have very little expectation of being able to keep on in politics; my success so far has only been won by absolute indifference to my future career,” he had stated in an earlier letter to an Albany newspaper. “I will not stay in public life unless I can do so on my own terms, And my ideal, whether lived up to or not, is rather a high one.”

  At the Chicago convention he told a newspaper reporter simply, “I am going cattle ranching in Dakota… . What I shall do after that I cannot tell you.”

  Theodore wearing his custom-made cowboy outfit, 1884.

  4

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AFTER leaving Chicago, Theodore was in the Dakota Territory, where the only noise was the wind and where a man could ride a horse for days without seeing another person. He hoped being “far off from all mankind” would ease his grief. It seemed to work.

  “Having a glorious time here,” TR wrote to Bamie. “I have been playing at frontier hunter in good earnest, having been off entirely alone, with my horse and rifle… . I felt as absolutely free as a man could feel.”

  Ranchers, Theodore explained to friends back east, were sort of like Southern plantation owners or Arab sheiks; in other words, they were the frontier’s upper class. Even though he had yet to earn any money from his ranch, it appeared to be a life that he could commit to. Theodore bought a half dozen horses and another thousand head of cattle. He also bought a second ranch, which he named Chimney Butte, and hired two Maine woodsmen to move west to build him a house overlooking the Little Missouri River.

  Out west, just as he did in Albany, Theodore stood out as a dude. The famous Manhattan jeweler Tiffany had made his silver-mounted hunting knife. It matched the silver and gold on his Colt .45 revolver, silver belt buckle, and silver spurs, which were engraved with his initials. And his clothing was still eye-catching, as TR described in one letter: “I wear a sombrero, silk neckerchief, fringed buckskin shirt, sealskin chaparajos or riding trousers; alligator hide boots … with my pearl hilted revolver and beautifully finished Winchester rifle, I shall feel able to face anything.”

  His ranch hands—men with names such as Hashknife Simpson, Bronco Charlie Miller, and Hell-Roaring Jones—called him boss or Mr. Roosevelt. Despite the formality, there was still plenty of kidding. Glasses were seen as a sign of “defective moral character,” Theodore wrote. “When I went among strangers I always had to spend twenty-four hours
in living down the fact that I wore spectacles.”

  And of course the boss didn’t talk like a cowboy. During one cattle roundup, in his high-pitched voice, Theodore ordered his men to “hasten forward quickly there.” And he lacked cowboy skills. He wasn’t good at roping, said one cowhand, nor was he “a purty rider.”

  While the cowboys sometimes laughed at their boss, his energy and hard work impressed them. TR described a typical workday during a cattle roundup in a letter to his friend Cabot Lodge in Massachusetts: “I have been three weeks on the roundup and have worked as hard as any of the cowboys; but I have enjoyed it greatly … yesterday I was eighteen hours in the saddle—from 4 A.M. to 10 P.M.—having a half hour each for dinner and tea.”

  The boss’s courage also impressed the cowboys. People on the Dakota plains still tell stories about him. One story is like a scene from a western novel. Theodore walked into a saloon one afternoon and a drunk with a .45 in each hand spotted the well-dressed rancher and shouted, “Four eyes is going to treat.” Thinking the man was joking about him buying drinks for everyone, Theodore sat at a table. But the drunk followed him and repeated his command. “Well if I’ve got to, I’ve got to,” Theodore said, standing up. Then he slugged the guy with a right to the jaw, a quick left, and another right. The man fell, hitting his head on the edge of the bar, which knocked him out cold.

  Even more dangerous than a drunk cowboy were the hunting trips. During one hunt, he was tracking a grizzly bear through a dark pine forest when suddenly, “cocking my rifle and stepping quickly forward, I found myself face to face with the great bear, who was less than twenty-five feet off, not eight steps.” Because of his poor vision Theodore wasn’t a marksman, but this time his aim was good; the first shot hit the bear between the eyes. The grizzly was nine feet tall and weighed twelve hundred pounds. He took the skin and skull back to New York to decorate his new home at Oyster Bay.

  While he appeared fearless, years later Theodore admitted it wasn’t always so. “There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears, ‘mean horses,’ and gunfighters, but by acting as if I was not afraid, I gradually ceased to be afraid.”

  That first summer Theodore returned to New York twice. He began the winter at his ranch, but after a couple of months of what he described as “the still, merciless, terrible cold that broods over the earth like the shadow of silent death,” Theodore hastened back to Manhattan and Bamie’s warm home.

  He depended on his older sister, who was over thirty and unmarried, to take care of his financial and personal affairs. Bamie had sold his town house and was overseeing the construction of his new house on Long Island. She also took care of Theodore’s daughter, whom he called Baby Lee. “I shall call her Lee,” he explained, “for there can never be another Alice to me, nor could I have another, not even her own child, bear her name.”

  Theodore spent the first months of 1885 in Manhattan writing his second book, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, which described his Dakota adventures. He dedicated it to “that keenest of Sportsmen and truest of Friends, my Brother Elliott Roosevelt.” After serving as best man at Theodore and Alice’s wedding, Elliott had spent two years traveling around Europe, visiting China, and hunting tigers in India.

  After receiving his share of his mother’s estate, some $62,500, Theodore returned to the Dakota Territory and spent $39,000 for an additional fourteen hundred head of cattle, and furnished his new eight-room house on Chimney Butte Ranch, which, unusual on the frontier, included a library stocked with books by James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other favorite writers. He divided his time that summer between Chimney Butte and his newly finished home near Oyster Bay, which he had named Sagamore Hill.

  Theodore never lost interest in politics, and he regularly corresponded with his old political friends. In mid-September he went to New York for the Republican state convention and ended up staying much longer than he had anticipated.

  The pages in Theodore’s journal that autumn were often blank except for the letter “E.” The E was for Edith Carow. Bamie apparently had arranged an “accidental” meeting between the two. Edith, who was three years younger, had a roundish figure, blue eyes, and peachlike skin. He liked her “sweet manner,” and “air of softness and shyness.” TR told his younger sister, Corinne, “You have no idea how sweet Edith is. I don’t think even I had known how wonderfully good and unselfish she was.”

  But his sisters knew Edith quite well because she had been Corinne’s best friend when they were children and a frequent visitor to the Roosevelt home. Edith came from an old New York family. They had been well-to-do, but her alcoholic father had squandered most of the money. “Edith we have always known intimately. She is very bright & attractive & I believe absolutely devoted to Theodore,” Bamie reported to a friend. The sisters also knew that their brother and Edith were close as teenagers, but some unexplained quarrel had ended a budding romance. Edith was a deeply private person and told Theodore to destroy all of her letters, so little is known about their courtship.

  She must have been impressed, as others were, by how her old friend had matured since going west. Theodore was no longer a skinny, awkward-looking youth. Ranch work had made him more muscular, with a thick neck and broad chest and shoulders. Even his voice, at least when he wasn’t excited, was deeper. What immediately stood out on Theodore’s square, somewhat plump face were his large, blue eyes full of happiness and his big smile with even, pearly-white teeth that appeared to glitter.

  In November the couple became secretly engaged. Although he was in love with Edith, Theodore felt he was betraying Alice. “I utterly disbelieve in and disapprove of second marriages,” he explained to Bamie. “You could not reproach me one half as bitterly for my inconstancy and unfaithfulness, as I reproach myself.” To avoid the publicity of a New York society wedding, the couple decided to marry in England at the end 1886. Early that year Edith accompanied her sister and mother on a long trip abroad while Theodore went west for his last roundup and another frontier adventure.

  He returned in March to Chimney Butte, where it was still winter. Soon after his arrival thieves stole one of the ranch’s boats. Theodore and two ranch hands pursued the crooks in another boat down the icy Little Missouri River. Two days later they surprised the three thieves who, despite being heavily armed, surrendered without a fight. No one locally would have blamed Theodore for using frontier justice—either shooting or hanging the trio. But he told his men to take the two boats back to Chimney Butte, while he hired a rancher with a wagon to carry the thieves to the nearest jail, which was about forty miles away in Dickinson. Armed with a pistol and rifle, Theodore walked the entire way behind the wagon since the three prisoners weren’t tied up and he didn’t trust the rancher. At night, he stayed awake by the fire reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. After finishing that book, Theodore borrowed a paperback novel from one of his prisoners about the outlaw Jesse James. By the time the men reached Dickinson, Theodore’s feet were badly blistered, and, after turning his prisoners over to the sheriff, he immediately saw a doctor.

  This and other episodes during the short time Theodore lived in the Dakota Territory made a big impression on westerners, as expressed by an editorial in the Sioux Falls Press. “He is one of the finest thoroughbreds you ever met—a whole souled, clear headed, high minded gentleman. When he first was on the range, the cowboys took him for a dude, but soon they realized the stuff of which the youngster was built, and there is no man who now inspires such enthusiastic regard among them as he.”

  Later in his life, Theodore would exaggerate the amount of time he spent out west, claiming it was the “major part of seven years.” Actually, it was only about a year all together, but it was a significant year. A biographer called it “one of the great formative experiences of his life.”

  Back in New York City the Republicans persuaded Theodore to run for mayor in the November elections, even though there was little hope he would win in the
three-way race between Republicans, Democrats, and a new political power called the United Labor Party. Theodore ran an energetic campaign but still came in third behind Henry George, the United Labor Party candidate who barely lost to the Democrat. Soon afterward Theodore and Bamie sailed to England, where he would marry Edith.

  5

  AFTER A FIFTEEN-WEEK honeymoon in Europe, Edith and Theodore moved into Sagamore Hill, which was about a mile from the Long Island village of Oyster Bay and some thirty miles east of New York City. It was a special place, as he later explained, where “we love a great many things—birds and trees and books, and all things beautiful, and horses and rifles and children and hard work and the joy of life.”

  The three-story house sat on a hill overlooking Long Island Sound and 150 acres of fields. Its twenty-two-rooms, heated by two furnaces and eight fireplaces, included a parlor, a library, and—not counting servants’ quarters—ten bedrooms. The couple filled their home with oak and leather furniture. On the walls they hung Theodore’s hunting trophies, glass-eyed heads of elk and deer, and on the hardwood floors they spread thick buffalo skins and bear skins.

  Edith had a study on the first floor where she could read her favorite authors: Shakespeare, Trollope, Milton, and Shelley. And since she was much better than her husband at managing money and keeping records, Edith managed Sagamore Hill’s expenses as well as its servants and gardeners.

  Theodore’s study, which he called the Gun Room, was on the third floor. As the name suggests, he kept his guns there, as well as photographs of his ranches and stacks of books by Sir Walter Scott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and dozens of other writers. On one wall hung two small portraits of the Civil War leaders who had saved the Union: Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. Hanging between them was a large portrait of his father.