The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (43 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
H
E SLEPT ENOUGH
, at any rate, to be up at dawn. The sound of rain drumming fiercely on the cabin’s roof did not deter him from beginning his buffalo hunt immediately. Joe Ferris protested they
should wait until the weather cleared, and the Langs warned that he would find the clay slopes round about too greasy to climb. But “he had come after buffalo, and buffalo he was going to get, in spite of hell or high water.”
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At six o’clock Roosevelt and Ferris mounted their horses and rode east into a wilderness of naked, streaming hills.
All day the rain continued. The clay slopes, slimy to begin with, dissolved into sticky gumbo, and finally into quagmires that sucked at the horses’ hooves, and squirted jets of black mud over the riders. Tracking was impossible: a buffalo might trot through this landscape and leave deep spoors, but within minutes they would disappear, like holes in dough. Visibility was wretched: no matter how often Roosevelt wiped his swimming spectacles, his vision would blur again, reducing the Badlands to a wash of dark shapes, any one of which might or might not be game. Often as not, a promising silhouette turned out to be a mere mound of clay, topped with a “head” of sandstone.
Eventually they encountered a few deer. Roosevelt fired at a buck from too far away, and missed. Joe Ferris followed up with a shot in a thousand, and brought the bounding animal down. “By Godfrey!” exclaimed his frustrated client. “I’d give anything in the world if I could shoot like that!”
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Not until nightfall did they return to the ranch. The Langs, who had been expecting them back for breakfast, looked on in wonder as two clay men dismounted from two clay horses and squelched toward the cabin. Incredibly, Roosevelt was grinning.
H
E CONTINUED TO GRIN
through four more days of ceaseless rain. Joe Ferris protested every morning, and was on the point of caving in every evening, but Roosevelt seemed incapable of fatigue or despair. “Returning at night, after another day fruitless, all save misery, the grin was still there, being apparently built in and ineradicable. Disfigured with clinging gumbo he might be, and generally was; but always the twinkling eyes and big white teeth shone through.”
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Not until Lincoln was old and living in another century did he
find an adjective that adequately described Roosevelt’s energy. The man was “radio-active.” Physically he was “none too robust,” yet “everything about him was force.”
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When supper was over, and Ferris rolled groaning into bed, the New Yorker would resume his conversation with Gregor Lang, and talk until the small hours of the morning. Lincoln listened for as long as he could, awed by the verbosity of “our forceful guest.” Among the subjects covered were aspects of literature; racial injustice; political reform (Lang taking the Democratic, and Roosevelt, the Republican side); the divine right of kings; Abraham Lincoln; the geology of the Badlands; human propagation (“I want to congratulate you, Mr. Lang,” Roosevelt said warmly, on learning that the Scotsman was one of fifteen brothers and sisters); hunting; conservation and development of natural resources; social structure and moral order.
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From the latter discussions young Lincoln deduced the Rooseveltian “view of life” as being
the upbuilding of a colossal pyramid whose apex was the sky. The eternal stability of this pyramid would be insured only through honest, intelligent, interworking and cooperation, to the common end of all the elements comprised in its structure. Individual elements might strive to build intensively and even high; but never well. Never well, because lacking an adequate base—the united stabilizing support of the other elements—they might never attain to the zenith.
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A pyramid built in the air, perhaps, but inspirational to a boy whose first fifteen years had been spent in a society with downward dynamics. “It was listening to these talks after supper, in the old shack on the Cannonball, that I first came to understand that the Lord made the earth for all of us, and not for a chosen few.”
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A
S THE EVENINGS WORE ON
, Roosevelt’s talk turned more and more to a subject which was clearly preoccupying him—ranching. “Mr. Lang,” he said one night, “I am thinking seriously of going into the cattle business. Would you advise me to go into it?”
His host reacted with Caledonian caution. “I don’t like to advise you in a matter of that kind. I myself am prepared to follow it out to the end. I have every faith in it … As a business proposition, it is the best there is.”
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Roosevelt had time to ponder this remark during long wet hours on the trail. But on the sixth day of the hunt, the sun finally broke through, and his thoughts returned with fierce concentration to the pursuit of buffalo. If he was passionate before, he became fanatic now.
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“He nearly killed Joe,” Lincoln recalled—with some satisfaction, for the boy did not care for that dour Canadian.
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Heading eastward into the rising sun, Roosevelt and his guide soon discovered the fresh spoor of a lone buffalo.
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For a while it was easy to follow, in earth still soft from rain; but as the day heated up, the ground baked hard, and the tracks dwindled to scratches. The hunters spent half an hour searching the dust of a ravine when suddenly
as we passed the mouth of a little side coulee, there was a plunge and crackle through the bushes at its head, and a shabby-looking old bull bison galloped out of it and, without an instant’s hesitation, plunged over a steep bank into a patch of rotten, broken ground which led around the base of a high butte. So quickly did he disappear that we had not time to dismount and fire. Spurring our horses we … ran to the butte and rode round it, only to see the buffalo come out of the broken land and climb up the side of another butte over a quarter of a mile off. In spite of his great weight and cumbersome, heavy-looking gait, he climbed up the steep bluff with ease and even agility, and when he had reached the ridge stood and looked back at us for a moment; while doing so he held his head high up, and at that distance his great shaggy mane and huge forequarter made him look like a lion.
This thrilling vision lasted only for a second; the buffalo was evidently used to the ways of hunters, and galloped off. Roosevelt and Ferris followed his trail for miles but never saw him again.
They found themselves now on the edge of the eastern prairie. “The air was hot and still, and the brown, barren land stretched out on every side for leagues of dreary sameness.” At about eleven o’clock they lunched by a miry pool, and then ambled on east, trying to conserve their horses in the midday heat. It was late in the afternoon before they saw three black specks in the distance, which proved to be buffalo bulls. The hunters left their horses half a mile off and began to wriggle like snakes through the sagebrush. Roosevelt blundered into a bed of cactus, and filled his hands with spines. At about 325 yards he drew up and fired at the nearest beast. Confused by its bulk and shaggy hair, he aimed too far back. There was a loud crack, a spurt of dust, “and away went all three, with their tails up, disappearing over a light rise in the ground.”
The hunters furiously ran back to their horses and galloped after the buffalo. Not until sunset did they catch up with them. By then their ponies were thoroughly jaded. Flailing with spurs and quirts, Roosevelt closed in on his wounded bull, as the last rays of daylight ebbed away. Fortunately for him, a full moon was rising, and he managed to move within twenty feet of the desperate animal. But the ground underfoot was so broken that his fagged horse could not canter smoothly. His first shot missed. The bull wheeled and charged.
My pony, frightened into momentary activity, spun round and tossed up his head; I was holding the rifle in both hands, and the pony’s head, striking it, knocked it violently against my forehead, cutting quite a gash … heated as I was, the blood poured into my eyes.
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Meanwhile the buffalo, passing me, charged my companion, and followed him as he made off, and, as the ground was very bad, for some little distance his lowered head was unpleasantly near the tired pony’s tail. I tried to run in on him again, but my pony stopped short, dead beat; and by no spurring could I force him out of a slow trot. My companion jumped off and took a couple of shots at the buffalo, which missed in the dim moonlight; and to our unutterable chagrin the wounded bull labored off and vanished into the darkness.
The critical thing now was to find water, both for themselves and for their mounts. They had had nothing to drink for at least nine hours. Roosevelt and Ferris led the foaming, trembling animals in search of moisture, and after much wandering found a mud-pool “so slimy that it was almost gelatinous.” Parched though they were, “neither man nor horse could swallow more than a mouthful of this water.” The night grew chill, and the prairie was too bare to provide even twigs for a fire. Each man ate a horn-hard biscuit (baked, rather too conscientiously, by Lincoln Lang).
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Then, wrapping themselves in blankets, they lay down to sleep. For pillows they used saddles, lariated—since there was no other tether—to the horses.
It was some time before they could doze off, for the horses kept snorting nervously and peering, ears forward, into the dark. “Wild beasts or some such thing, were about … we knew that we were in the domain of both white and red horse-thieves, and that the latter might, in addition to our horses, try to take our scalps.”
About midnight the hunters were brutally awoken by having their saddles whipped from beneath their heads. Starting up and grabbing their rifles, they saw the horses galloping frantically off in the bright moonlight. But there were no thieves to be seen. Only a shadowy, four-footed form in the distance suggested that a wolf must have come to inspect the camp, and terrified the horses into flight.
Following the dewy path left by the trailing saddles, they captured both animals, returned to camp, and resumed their interrupted slumbers. But then a cold rain began to fall, and they woke to find themselves lying in four inches of water. Shivering between sodden blankets, Ferris heard Roosevelt muttering something. To Joe’s complete disbelief, the dude was saying, “By Godfrey, but this is fun!”
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