Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  The Colonel was not alone among the clan of fiftyish, self-styled Anglo-Saxon “gentlemen,” raised on both sides of the Atlantic, who felt a sense of social claustrophobia. For such men (restless Winty Chanler was an example, and Rider Haggard and Frederick Selous and Lord Delamere), there was little left to explore north of the equator except the El Dorados of economic, political, and scientific progress. Those parts of the Southern Hemisphere that were not ice or ocean still offered, here and there, opportunities for geographical exploration to persons no longer young. Roosevelt confided a few details of his Brazilian dream to Arthur Lee, admitting, “It is rather an ambitious trip for a stout, elderly, retired politician.”

  If he could persuade Dr. Lambert that he was fit, and get official backing from the American Museum of Natural History, he would probably not be back home until the late spring of 1914. “I shall be glad to be out of the country for one reason, and that is the Progressive Party,” he told Lee. “The temptation is for the Progressives always to lie down on me, and in the unlikely event of the party continuing to exist, it has got to learn to walk alone.”

  Another reason to leave home for six or seven months would be to spare himself from having to watch the Democrats pervert his political and social legacy. Here was President Wilson determined to remove all Negroes from the federal bureaucracy, and collaborating with Oscar Underwood, the House majority leader, on a tariff bill as pro-corporate as anything approved by Taft. The pious doctrines of pacificism and prohibition had become fashionable in Washington—nowhere more so than at the State Department, where William Jennings Bryan had declared that nothing stronger than grape juice should be served at diplomatic receptions. The secretary also announced that he would continue to accept fees for delivering his famous chautauqua oration, “The Prince of Peace.” Roosevelt, disgusted, took advantage of a visit of some British pacifists to Sagamore Hill to preach a sermon of his own on the text, “Thou Shalt Not Slop Over.”

  He was sufficiently alarmed at worsening relations with Mexico, and with Japan over the perennial problem of “yellow-peril” discrimination in California, to warn Franklin Roosevelt in the Navy Department that war with either country was not implausible. “In that case we shall be in an unpardonable position if we permit ourselves to be caught with our fleet separated.”

  There was little more he could say to influence administration policy without sounding meddlesome. In the fall, he intended to write a single, statesmanlike appraisal of the current political situation, and publish it in the neutral pages of Century Magazine. Then he would sail south and out of the public eye. He was more likely to feel liberated in the jungle, with jaguars and anacondas and peccaries, than as a beneficiary of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom.

  AS A FANTASY, Roosevelt’s South American project was not new. It had been implanted in his mind five years before, by one of the intellectual eccentrics he had enjoyed entertaining in the White House. Father John Augustine Zahm, C.S.C, Ph.D., was a former professor of physics at Notre Dame University, author of Sound and Music, a survey of the science of acoustics going back to Pythagorean times, and—more to the President’s taste—Evolution and Dogma. He was also the author of two travel books, Up the Orinoco and Down the Magdalena, and Along the Andes and Down the Amazon. Like David Livingstone before him, Father Zahm was a globetrotter rather than a man of God.

  If it had not been for the more powerful appeal of Africa in 1909, Roosevelt might have yielded to his suggestion that they together “go up the Paraguay,” then cross Brazil’s central plateau and descend the Rio Tapajoz, a tributary of the Amazon. The two men had kept in touch, and Roosevelt had made a point of alluding to Zahm’s evolutionary theology in his essay on faith and reason.

  There was a certain inevitability to him seeing the “funny little Catholic priest” at an American Museum lunch early in June. Frank M. Chapman, the museum’s director of ornithology, had gathered a group of naturalists to ascertain if any of them might like to accompany Roosevelt on his proposed expedition. Father Zahm did not quite qualify, but he was avidly anxious to participate, and had value as a multilingual scholar who knew Brazil well—or claimed to. Before the lunch was over, the Colonel and the sixty-two-year-old cleric were a team, and it remained only for Chapman to get Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the museum, to authorize their joint venture.

  Osborn and Chapman were among Roosevelt’s closest scientific friends, and the expedition would cover ground unknown to collectors, so he approved them as a matter of course. Chapman suggested the names of two professionals to go along, both veterans of tropical American forests: George K. Cherrie, an ornithologist and mammalogist, and Leo E. Miller, a field naturalist skilled at specimen retrieval.

  Roosevelt reviewed their dossiers and thought that Chapman had chosen well. Cherrie was one of the best naturalist-explorers in the United States. Whipcord-tough at forty-seven, with a clipped, military manner, he had spent more than half his life south of the border. The mere fact that he had sired six children, one of them born along the Orinoco within pouncing distance of jaguars, was enough to recommend him. But Cherrie had the added credentials, irresistible to Roosevelt, of having once been a gun-runner in Colombia, and a two-time jailbird for revolutionary activities in Venezuela. Readers of The Wilderness Hunter and The Rough Riders were aware that the Colonel had a weakness for men who packed pistols, impregnated their wives regularly, and showed scant reverence for the law.

  Miller was currently on assignment in British Guiana. But he had youth and Chapman’s word in his favor, so he was recruited sight unseen. Anthony Fiala, a forty-four-year-old former Arctic explorer who ran the sports department at Rogers, Peet & Co., became the fifth member of the expedition, in charge of equipment, supplies, and transport. Just how much gear and extra personnel would be needed depended on the final itinerary, to be mapped out by Father Zahm. Fiala soon proved his worth by ordering two light, strong, cedar-and-canvas Canadian power canoes as backups to the eight-hundred-pound steel riverboats that Zahm seemed to think suitable for jungle travel.

  By the end of June, Roosevelt had a pleased sense that another great trek, and maybe another great book contract, loomed ahead in the fall. With his autobiography now in syndication, his literary essays set in type, and Edith off to Europe to visit her sister, he was free to take Archie and Quentin to Arizona. “Thank heavens! I have never had more work than during the last eighteen months.”

  NINETEEN YEARS OLD, graduated at last from Andover, Archie had earned the luxury of seven weeks in his adored father’s company. He also loved being with “Quent.” The two boys had always been close, although they were as different as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Archie’s special schooling in Arizona gave him at least a destinational edge on his brother. Quentin, easygoing and uncompetitive at fifteen, did not mind where anybody took him, as long as he could investigate vehicular means.

  On this jaunt it was a regular train of the Santa Fe Railroad, arriving in Silver City, New Mexico, on 10 July. Two days later, they met up with Archie’s other best buddy, Nicholas Roosevelt, in Williams, Arizona, and registered that night at the El Tovar Hotel overlooking the Grand Canyon.

  Moonlit and mysterious, the enormous gorge filled the windows of their rooms, trivializing everything in the world that was not a million years old. One decade before—too momentary a flicker of time for the Colorado to have carved any deeper since—Roosevelt had come here and expressed his relief that the Santa Fe was not going to build another hotel at Rowe’s Point. He had stood on the South Rim and, ad-libbing to those around him, made the first great conservation call of his presidency: Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it—keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you.

  Now it was a national monument, thanks to the Antiquities Act of 1906, and he was back with two of his own inheritors. Archie, that seasoned veteran of desert living, had seen the canyon before. But Quenti
n had not. Someday, perhaps, Roosevelt’s other sons and daughters would see it too, followed by Ted’s little “Graciekins,” and Ethel’s coming baby, and their children’s children.

  THE MOON WAS FULL when they began their descent into the canyon at 2 A.M. on the morning of 15 July. Roosevelt, who had been assigned to write a serial travelogue for The Outlook, had arranged for guides, ponies, and pack animals to cover the 330-mile itinerary ahead of them. In the course of the next six weeks, he intended to give his sons a taste of some of the lessons he had learned in pursuit, survival, and acquaintance with the primeval, beginning with a cougar hunt on the high plateau of the North Rim, and ending with a trek through the Navajo Indian Reservation to Walpi, where they would attend the annual Hopi Snake Dance.

  Thirty-two hours later, having gone so deep that they lost view of both the moon and the sun, they crested Buckskin Mountain, where it was still, improbably, spring. They spent the next two weeks in Kaibab National Forest, going after cougar and camping out at temperatures close to freezing. Roosevelt apologized for being old and “slow” on the chase, but Nicholas wrote in his diary, “He still has the energy of a boy and is handicapped only by his weight.” He wanted his sons to do most of the shooting, although he killed one young female to gratify Archie. After the African lion, the mountain lion did not strike him as much of a threat; he was more afraid of losing Archie in reckless chases over the edges of the canyon. The bony youth seemed to have no fear. Roosevelt had taught all his children that courage could be developed like muscle, but Archie’s was uninhibited by imagination.

  Lacking fresh meat, they ate a fat cougar and judged it as good as venison. Roosevelt indulged in “elderly” things like washing up dishes and sitting alone, pondering the beauty around him. He was ravished by the sound of the silver-voiced Rocky Mountain hermit thrush, by the profusion of the stars at night, and by the vastness of the canyon’s views.

  The first day of August found them shogging across the blindingly white and sterile wastes of the Paria Plateau east of Vermilion Cliffs. The soil was so arid, or poisoned, that it failed to grow grass even where a streamlet trickled, producing only clutches of coarse weed with tiny, flaring white flowers. Squinting into a heat haze that retreated as they advanced, disclosing nothing but more nothingness, Roosevelt was reminded of Joaquin Miller’s lines They saw the silences / Move by and beckon. At Lees Ferry, some mule-wagons were waiting to relieve the riders of their heavy gear, and they proceeded with lightened steps southeast to Tuba Agency, deep in the dry heart of the Navajo reservation. Far off to their right, the Painted Desert glowed. They rested for a day in Tuba, then swung northeast through heavy sand toward Kayenta. It took two and a half days to get there. Harsher terrain lay ahead. Roosevelt wanted to visit Rainbow Bridge, spanning one of the most impenetrable canyons in the Plateau Province.

  Kayenta was a trading post run by John Wetherill, a member of the posse of white men that had “discovered” the Bridge only four years before. He had agreed to serve as the Roosevelt party’s local host and guide, and had guest rooms ready in his cedar-pole-and-rock house, surrounded by trees and lawns. It was well supplied with books and running water. Roosevelt admired Mrs. Wetherill’s taste in Navajo domestic design—she had decorated the walls of her parlor with delicate tei-bichai figures—and found her an impressively learned woman, versed in the lore of tribal ruins. It had been she, not her husband, who had first divined the existence of a rock buttress north of Navajo Mountain, from Indians protective of it as a sacrosanct place.

  On 10 August the excursion across the Utah border began, with Wetherill acting as guide and five pack horses carrying a minimum of supplies. Three days of the roughest possible riding ensued. At times the train had to pick its way along paths only six or eight inches wide, notched out of slickrock cliffs that fell hundreds of feet to stony bottoms. The boys learned to keep free of their stirrups when Wetherill pointed out the skeleton, far below, of a horse from which he had once parted company.

  The immense arch eventually disclosed itself, bathed in late-afternoon sunlight while the gorge below filled up with shadow. There were pools of clear water beneath it, enticing to hot and dirty travelers. Roosevelt was soon floating on his back, amid ferns and hanging plants, looking up at the darkening sky and still darker bar holding apart the cliffs. Later, the leaping flames of a campfire threw it into relief against the stars, and whenever he awoke during the night he was conscious of its overhanging majesty.

  He noted the next morning that one of Wetherill’s two Indian helpers would not ride beneath the Bridge. The man was a Navajo, and took the long way around, rather than follow the rest of the party down the canyon. “His creed bade him never pass under an arch, for the arch is the sign of the rainbow, the sign of the sun’s course over the earth, and to the Navajo it is sacred.”

  SO FAR IN ARIZONA, Roosevelt had gazed with little pity at the dark, dirt-poor sheepherders who crossed his trail, emerging like Africans from the most inhospitable crooks of the landscape. The blankets they wove might be superior to the designs of Duchamp, yet they seemed to have no desire to better themselves economically or socially. It was clear to him that until they forgot about their nomadic past, and listened to what the white man could teach them about ranching and stock-raising, they would languish in primitive poverty. He knew that a debate was dragging out in Congress over proposals to cut up and sell parts of the overpopulated Navajo reservation, for the benefit of white stockmen and railroad land grabbers. Although he held no brief for outside developers, his belief in a social “Square Deal” (first offered, ironically, to the Southwestern tribes, when he spoke at the Grand Canyon on 6 May 1903) persuaded him that aboriginals clinging to an antiquated way of life had no power to resist the facts of economics. “With Indians and white men alike it is use which should determine occupancy of the soil.”

  Roosevelt’s attitude toward “red” Americans differed from that of most of his kind only in that he had been willing, over the years, to moderate what had once been the harshest prejudice. As a young ranchman in Dakota Territory, he had blustered, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” Later, however, while researching The Winning of the West, he had developed a respect for Indian military heroes, and as a civil service commissioner touring reservations in the early 1890s, he had been shamed to anger at the government’s infliction of the spoils system on “a group of beings who are not able to protect themselves.” Some of his beloved Rough Riders had been Indians, and were therefore among the bravest of the brave.

  As President, he had struggled against constant Congressional opposition to reorganize and moralize the underfunded Bureau of Indian Affairs. A passionate young musicologist, Natalie Curtis, made him see that its suppression of Indian songs and Indian art in government schools was impoverishing the national culture. He had protected Miss Curtis from official harassment when she went into the reservations with a cylinder recorder, and coaxed nervous bards to sing for her. (“Be at rest, my friend, the great chief at Washington is father of all the people in this country.… He has given his permission for the writing of Hopi songs.”) As a result she was able to publish The Indians’ Book (1907), a luxury anthology of two hundred native lyrics, transcribed word for word and note by note. Roosevelt had contributed a short preface to it: “These songs cast a wholly new light on the depth and dignity of Indian thought, the simple beauty and strange charm—the charm of a vanished elder world—of Indian poetry.”

  AFTER FIVE DAYS the excursion party returned to Kayenta. Roosevelt spent a couple more nights under Louisa Wetherill’s hospitable roof before he and the boys set out for Walpi. He talked to her about the Navajo, and found that her expertise was not just to do with pots and cliff dwellings. Like Natalie Curtis, she was a scholar of the aboriginal soul. She copied out her own translation of a tribal poem for him to carry
in his saddlebag across the Black Mesa:

  Dawn, beautiful dawn, the Chief,

  This day, let it be well with me as I go;

  Let it be well before me as I go;

  Let it be well behind me as I go;

  Let it be well beneath me as I go;

  Let it be well above me as I go;

  Let all I see be well as I go.

  The poem was as moving as any in The Indians’ Book in its acceptance of the universe as a whole, spherical, yet infinite space of many dimensions—the circle of the horizon, the bowl of the sky, the complementary curves of sun, rainbow, moon, and arch—and in its concept of existence as a journey. Roosevelt decided that when he wrote about his stay in Kayenta, he would recommend the establishment there of a cultural halfway house for aspiring young Navajos, where Mrs. Wetherill could realize her dream of bridging the nation’s ancient and modern cultures.

  At mid-morning on Tuesday, 19 August, the Hopi mesa rose out of the flat desert ahead, a ridge perforated with seven pueblo villages. Nicholas, Archie, and Quentin spurred their horses toward Walpi, leaving Roosevelt to plod along alone. When he rode up a sandhill below the village he was surprised to see, coming over the crest, a woman with a cup of gasoline in her hand. She was wearing clothes almost as dusty as his, and there was a black smear of axle grease on the front of her skirt. Her face was familiar, as was her voice when she called out to him, “Hail to the chief!”