Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  His original plan, conceived while fending off Republican attempts to nominate him for a third term in 1908, was for a private hunting trip in the environs of Mount Kenya. “If I am where they can’t get at me, and where I cannot hear what is going on, I cannot be supposed to wish to interfere with the methods of my successor.” But as his preparatory reading extended from J. H. Patterson’s The Man-Eaters of Tsavo to Lord Cromer’s Modern Egypt, and anti-hunting advocates protested his bloody intentions, he let scientific and political considerations reshape a more public-minded itinerary. The Smithsonian Museum is avid for male and female specimens of all the big-game species he can shoot, plus a complete series of smaller East African mammals. He is also expected to collect flora. The Colonial Office wants him to advertise its new railway, and attract settlers along the line to Victoria Nyanza. The British foreign secretary hopes he will cast a sympathetic American eye on Anglo-Egyptian problems in Khartoum and Cairo.

  He has, besides, his own image to worry about. Having made almost a religion of conservation in the White House, and laid the groundwork for a world conference on the subject, he can ill afford to be seen again, as he was in youth, as an indiscriminate killer of big game. In fact, he has always hunted for constructive reasons: as a boy, to fill the glass cases of his “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History,” and teach himself the minutest details of anatomy and coloration; in youth, to fight his way out of invalidism, choosing always to make the chase as difficult as possible; and in early middle age, to promulgate, as founder-president of the Boone & Crockett Club, the paradox that hunters are practical conservationists, needing to preserve what they pursue—not only birds and animals and fish, but the wilderness too.

  Hence this highly professional expedition organizing itself at Kapiti. It does so under the orders of his official guide and manager, R. J. Cuninghame, a bearded, bowlegged Scot and slayer of many elephants. Burned nearly black by wanderings extending from South Africa to the Arctic Circle, Cuninghame affects a Viking look that does not quite conceal the cultured poise of a Cambridge man. Leslie Tarlton, representing a Nairobi safari agency, is assistant manager, a tense little Australian and virtuoso sharpshooter. Three American naturalists represent the scientific side of the expedition. Edgar A. Mearns, a retired army surgeon, began his zoological career by collecting “a most interesting series of skulls” on active duty in the Philippines. He is also a botanist. Edmund Heller is a field taxidermist from Stanford University, and J. Alden Loring a mammalogist from New York. Seventh and last in the ranks of command is the official photographer, Kermit Roosevelt, a willowy nineteen-year-old on leave from Harvard. Kermit is Bwana Mdogo (“Little Master”) to the safari porters.

  As for Bwana Mkubwa Sana (“Very Great Master”), he congratulates himself on putting together a team of the kind of sinewy, well-bred, not overly scrupulous men he has always admired. His son may not qualify. Kermit is handy with a Kodak, and also with a mandolin; he is a reader and lover of languages, sure to profit from exposure to Africa’s tapestry of cultures. But the boy needs, or seems to need, toughening, having a broody, mother-fixated quality that sets him apart from the rest of the family.

  How Edith Roosevelt feels about consigning them both to a year in the wilderness is another matter. She accepts that her husband craves danger, perhaps in compensation for his own inclination to bury himself in books. He has proved to be practically indestructible. So has Ted, their grown son. Archie, halfway through Groton, is if possible even flintier. Quentin, the youngest and brightest, is currently a fiend hidden in the cloud of late puberty, yet promises to emerge from it a natural leader and risk taker.

  Kermit is made of more fragile material. He, his brothers, and his sisters, Alice and Ethel, worship their father as a sort of sun-god emanating power and love. Edith trusts that in Africa, the aura will be protective.

  BY NOW SHE SHOULD have answered or destroyed most of the fifteen thousand farewell letters that had poured into Sagamore Hill before he left. He has retained just one, hand-delivered the day he sailed, along with a gold expanding ruler—just the thing a man needs on safari. The ruler is engraved THEODORE ROOSEVELT FROM WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT: Goodbye—Good luck—and a safe return, and the letter, on heavy White House stationery, reads:

  My dear Theodore: If I followed my impulse, I should still say “My dear Mr. President.” I cannot overcome the habit. When I am addressed as “Mr. President,” I turn to see whether you are not at my elbow.…

  I write to you to say “farewell,” and to wish you as great pleasure and as much usefulness as possible in the trip you are about to undertake. I have had my qualms about the result, but in thinking it over they disappear. You will undertake no foolhardy enterprise, I know.…

  I want you to know that I do nothing in the Executive office without considering what you would do under the same circumstances and without having in a sense a mental talk with you over the pros and cons of the situation. I have not the facility for educating the public as you had through talks with correspondents, and so I fear that a large part of the public will feel as if I had fallen away from your ideals; but you know me better and will understand that I am still working away on the same old plan.

  “KERMIT IS MADE OF MORE FRAGILE MATERIAL.”

  Kermit Roosevelt in 1909. (photo credit p.2)

  Taft cannot find it easy to succeed the most confident executive in modern memory. “Mr. President,” in contrast, is happy to sacrifice supreme power—and along with it, a third term virtually guaranteed by the Republican Party and the American electorate. He waves aside token respect. “I am no hanger-on to the shreds of departing greatness.”

  That said, there is one title he cherishes, and asks everybody to use from now on: “Colonel Roosevelt.” He feels that it is both valid, reflecting his rank in the Reserve Army of the United States, and merited through bravery in battle. He was, after all, briefly and gloriously commander of a regiment of volunteer cavalrymen in ’98. If war ever comes again and finds him fit to serve, he intends to reactivate his brevet at once.

  He is already “Roosevelt, (Col.) Theodore” in The New York Times Index. Reporters do not intend to drop him as a subject, even as he retreats into the wilds of Africa. For more than a quarter of a century they have pursued him, drawn by his “Teddy-bear” caricaturability, perpetual motion, heroic glamour, machine-gun quotes, and ricochet denials. Most attractive of all is his disaster potential—the likelihood that one day he will spend the last cent of his legendary luck, and be destroyed by either violence from outside, or hubris within.

  This potential seems especially fraught now that he has elected to test his fifty-year-old body, and faulty vision, in some of the world’s riskiest hunting grounds. Aware of it himself, he has announced that his safari will be closed to all press coverage, save for occasional statistical bulletins that he may issue through cable facilities in Nairobi. Any attempt to follow in his footsteps will be “an outrage and an indecency.” He does not want every missed shot headlined—or, worse still, captured on camera by the increasingly annoying phenomenon of news photographers.

  And should he survive, he wishes to tell his own story. A lucrative publishing contract with Charles Scribner’s Sons calls upon him to write an account of his safari, in articles that will appear monthly in Scribner’s Magazine. After the safari is complete, the series will be edited for republication in book form. His payment for the articles is to be $50,000, and the book will earn him a 20 percent royalty. This is the most money he has ever negotiated as a writer. He could have gotten twice as much from Collier’s Weekly, but feels that periodical is too slick. A touch bon marché, as Edith would say.

  HE RIDES OUT to hunt with Kermit, while Cuninghame, Tarlton, and the naturalists continue their preparations. Two local ranchers act as guides. The sortie amounts to a rehearsal for the big safari soon to begin, with gunbearers, grooms, and porters trailing in a precedence as formal as any line he had led as President.

  Kapiti’s dry v
eldt, a word he recognizes as a particle of his own Dutch surname, does not compare in fecundity with the well-watered Athi preserve he passed through on the train. After two years of drought, it is largely depopulated of game. But the Intertropical Convergence Zone seems finally about to drift north across the equator, ahead of them as they ride. When it does, this plain will turn green, and masses of game arrive to graze. At present, ticks alone seem to thrive, attaching themselves like miniature grape clusters to the legs of the ponies. He is grateful for his leather-patch trousers, buttoned tight from knee to boot. A stiff sun helmet, de rigueur for all white travelers in the tropics, uncomfortably covers his large head. He yearns for his beloved slouch hat, but defers to the notion that solar rays are lethal in these latitudes.

  He strains to adjust his one good eye to the veldt’s visibility, particularly illusive when the sun is overhead, and makes out the delicate prancings of two species of buck. He aims his custom-sighted Springfield .30 at a Grant’s gazelle, but undershoots and misses. Focusing on a small Thomson’s at 225 yards, he breaks its back with a bullet that goes only slightly too high. It is his first African kill, and he looks forward to venison for dinner.

  What he really wants to shoot this afternoon, to set the right collecting tone, is “two good specimens, bull and cow, of the wildebeest.” It is the scientist in him, not the hunter, who first responds to a glimpse of brindled gnu moving blue-black and white across the plain, like shadows of the advancing storm clouds. He sees no evidence in that chiaroscuro of the fashionable theory of “protective coloration,” one of his pet biological peeves. How protective is a white throat mane, in angled light? How inconspicuous are zebra, to a lion? He notes, for his book, that Africa’s large game animals “are always walking and standing in conspicuous places, and never seek to hide or take advantage of cover.” Only the smaller quadrupeds, “like the duiker and steinbuck … endeavor to escape the sight of their foes by lying absolutely still.”

  Wildebeest, duiker, steinbuck—he is already picking up the Cape Dutch nomenclature that Afrikaans settlers have brought to British East Africa. Their language reminds him of the nursery songs his grandmother used to croon to him, in earliest memory:

  Trippa, troppa, tronjes,

  De varken’s in de boonjes.

  Reminiscent, too, is the Paleolithic profile of a wildebeest, as he closes on it in a sudden squall of rain. His first big trophy was an American buffalo, hunted in similar conditions twenty-three years ago. Then, the rain was so dense on his spectacles, he could not be sure what was bison, and what mere beading water. This shape shrinks at four hundred yards to something more slender than massive. Nevertheless, it is a good-sized bull. He wounds it into a run. Kermit, galloping with teenage abandon over rotten ground for more than six miles, administers the coup de grâce.

  By “veldt law,” credit goes to the man who shot first.

  AFTER A WEEK OF hunting around Kapiti, he feels confident enough to stalk lion with dogs. They do not have to sniff far. The hair rises on their backs as they follow catspaw prints down a dry donga, and his horse boy hisses, “Simba.”

  He follows the line of the pointing black finger. Just four yards away, something yellow moves in a patch of tall grass. He fires at once with his .405 Winchester. With nothing but color to aim at, he does not know if the movement will materialize into a lion. Kermit fires too. Presently two half-grown cubs emerge, both wounded. They have to be finished off.

  Disappointed as the day wanes without result, he allows one of his party to reconnoiter another ravine. More prints show in the sand, much larger this time, and at once he and Kermit are off their horses, alert to crashing, grunting noises in the brush ahead.

  Right in front of me, thirty yards off, there appeared, from behind the bushes which had first screened him from my eyes, the tawny, galloping form of a big maneless lion. Crack! the Winchester spoke; and as the soft-nosed bullet ploughed forward through his flank the lion swerved so that I missed him with the second shot; but my third bullet went through the spine and forward into his chest. Down he came … his hind quarters dragging, his head up, his jaws open and lips drawn up in a prodigious snarl, as he endeavored to turn to face us. His back was broken.… His head sank, and he died.

  There is no time to exult over the carcass, because he sees a second lion escaping. He runs it down and fires. The lion rolls over, one foreleg in the air, then takes two more bullets before dying at his feet.

  Three days later he kills a much bigger lion, plus another half-grown cub and a lioness. All are destined for the Smithsonian. He hopes that his trophy quota, set by Protectorate authorities, will eventually allow him to shoot a simba for himself. It is dark before the lioness is borne back to camp, swinging between two poles. A nearly full moon illumines the porters as they lope into view, intoning a deep, rhythmic song. He tries to notate it phonetically: Zou-zou-boulé ma ja guntai. They cluster around him as he stands by the fire, then begin to dance. Their chanting rises to a climax. He adds a descant of his own, obscurely derived from Irish folksong: “Whack-fal-lal for Lanning’s Ball.”

  The firelight glows on the body of his prey, and on the white and ebony of his jostling celebrants. Around them, the plain lies pale under the moon.

  LIKE A PYTHON TOO enormous to shift all its coils at once, the safari begins to move while still based at Kapiti Station. By early May it is in full motion, carrying its own weight, hunting as it goes, sending out flickering forays in search of choice specimens.

  As leader, he does his share of collecting and cataloging. Dendromus nigrifons, Arvicanthis abyssinicus nairobae, Myoscalops kapiti heller, Thamnomys loringi, Pelomys roosevelti.… Latin classifications come easily to him; he has been inscribing zoological labels since boyhood. He assists Heller and Loring in writing life histories, enjoying the precision of scientific description. Before politics, this was what he wanted to be: a naturalist in the field. Coarse bristly hair, he writes of the meadow mouse named in his honor. The dorsal coloration is golden yellow overlaid by long hairs with an olive iridescence; the under parts are silky white.

  But his main literary labor, at night in camp after dinner, is to process pocket-diary jottings and fresh memory into serial installments for Scribner’s Magazine. By 12 May he has completed his first article, “A Railroad Through the Pleistocene.” Eight days later he finishes another, describing his wildebeest hunt and visit to a Boer ranch, not failing to quote Trippa, troppa, tronjes. With a storyteller’s instinct for pacing, he reserves his lion kills for installment three, betting that readers who stay with him that long will stay to the end—unless his own end intervenes. “During the last decades in Africa,” he reports, “hundreds of white hunters, and thousands of native hunters, have been killed or wounded by lions, buffaloes, elephants, and rhinos.” A unique feature of his book is that it is being written on the march. The possibility of foreclosure adds an agreeable note of suspense to the narrative.

  “A PRECEDENCE AS FORMAL AS ANY LINE HE HAD LED AS PRESIDENT.”

  Roosevelt’s safari gets under way, May 1910. (photo credit p.3)

  He writes it as he talks—superabundantly, always interestingly, with clarity and total recall. Elegance of style is not his concern. He sometimes repeats himself, relying on his sharp ear to protect him from cliché, not always with success. He is aware of the page-filling benefits of purple passages, and scatters dying sunsets and brilliant tropic moons with a fine hand.

  Beyond these indulgences, the power of his prose comes from its realism. He is an honest writer, incapable of boasting, or even the discreet omissions tolerated by nonfiction editors. If he kills any animal clumsily, wasting bullets, he tells how, in detail. The same truthfulness keeps him from false modesty—the “my poor self” affectation of so many German and English memoirists. Being brave, he admits to acts of bravery; swelling with new experiences, he does not hide the breadth of his knowledge. As a result, his indelible pencil gouges the capital letter I with a frequency tending to blu
nt the point.

  Pressing down is necessary, because he writes with two sheets of carbon stuffed into his manuscript pad. One copy of each article is sealed in a blue canvas envelope and dispatched to Nairobi by runner, thence to be sent down the railroad to Mombasa and shipped via two oceans to New York. To insure against loss, a duplicate goes by the next sea mail, and he retains the third copy for himself.

  As he falls into the cross-rhythms of riding and shooting, collecting and writing, he becomes in effect a hunter of Africa itself, seeking to capture it whole—alive or dead—and process it into food for mind and body. His pursuit is not for the squeamish. Each new animal fixed in his sights poses a different combination of danger and documentary interest, whether in the number of bullets it absorbs, or the sounds it makes as it dies, or the inches it registers on his tape measure, or the browsing habits he deduces from the contents of its stomach. A bull rhino, shot through lungs and heart, bears down with such momentum that it skids to death just thirteen paces away, plowing a long furrow with its horn. A lion, nine feet long and copiously maned, comes on even faster, only to be hit in the chest, “as if the place had been plotted with dividers … smashing the lungs and the big blood vessels of the heart.” Two swamp buffalo bulls, black and glistening in the early morning light, fall to his biggest rifle, and two giant eland, heavy and dewlapped as prize steers, to his smallest. A lioness yields not only herself, but two unborn cubs. Three giraffes topple over in a single morning, followed by a whole family of rhinos, the bull needing nine bullets to finish off, the cow performing a “curious death waltz,” and the calf dropping with “a screaming whistle, almost like that of a small steam-engine.” His kills become repetitive. Yet another rhino, then another, and another, and another; two more lions and a lioness, somersaulting left and right in her final agony; more buffalo, more eland, more giraffes.