The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (60 page)

T
HE
HA-HA-HONK, HA-HONK
of wild geese grew louder in his ears. With unfocused eyes he watched the V-shaped skein flying low and heavily overhead and settling about a mile upriver. Then he hunched again over Bamie’s desk and scrawled, in his large, school-boyish hand, “I took the rifle instead of a shotgun and hurried after them on foot.”
¹

Roosevelt had learned, that January of 1885, the old truism that writers write best when removed from the scene they are describing. At Elkhorn and Maltese Cross, he had been too much a part of his environment to re-create it on paper. Fleeing the reality of Dakota just before Christmas, he began to write almost immediately after arriving in New York.
²
During the first nine weeks of the New Year, nearly a hundred thousand words poured from his pen; by 8 March,
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
was finished. “I have just sent my last roll of manuscript to the printer,” he told Cabot Lodge. While modest about the quality of his prose, Roosevelt declared that “the
pictures will be excellent.”
³
It is not known whether by this he meant the book’s illustrations, or a series of publicity photographs of himself, in the full glory of his buckskin suit.

“Now for the first time he could admire his recently completed house.”
Sagamore Hill in 1885
. (
Illustration 12.1
)

One of these was chosen as frontispiece, and caused much hilarity when
Hunting Trips
came out.
⁴

Bristling with cartridges, a silver dagger in his belt, Roosevelt stands with Winchester at the ready, against a studio backdrop of flowers and ferns. His moccasins are firmly planted on a mat of artificial grass. For some reason his spectacles have been allowed to dangle: although his finger is on the trigger, one doubts if he could so much as hit the photographer, let alone a distant grizzly. His expression combines pugnacity, intelligence, and a certain adolescent vulnerability which touched Lodge, at least, very tenderly.
⁵

H
UNTING
T
RIPS
WAS PUBLISHED
by G. P. Putnam’s Sons early in July, and dedicated “to that keenest of Sportsmen and truest of Friends, my Brother Elliott Roosevelt.”
⁶
The first edition, limited to five hundred copies, set new standards of lavishness in Americana. It was printed on quarto-size sheets of thick, creamy, hand-woven paper, with two-and-a-half-inch margins and sumptuous engravings. Bound in gray, gold-lettered canvas, it retailed at the then unheard-of price of $15, and quickly became a collector’s item.
⁷

The book was well reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic (the British
Spectator
said it “could claim an honorable place on the same shelf as Waterton’s
Wanderings
and Walton’s
Compleat Angler”)
, went through several editions, and was soon accepted as a standard textbook of big-game hunting in the United States.
⁸
Roosevelt’s first published work had also achieved textbook status, yet few critics could have guessed, without comparing title pages, that the same man had written both. Where
The Naval War of 1812
had been scholarly, dry, crammed with sterile statistics,
Hunting Trips
was lyrical, lush, and cheerfully rambling.

It shows signs of being too hastily written. Anecdotes are repeated three times over, purplish tinges mar the otherwise crystal prose, thrilling chapters end in anticlimax. There are examples of
Roosevelt’s perennial tendency to praise himself with faint damns. Some zoological details are inaccurate,
⁹
betraying the fact that the author had, after all, lived only a few parts of one year in Dakota. He is at pains, however, to give the impression that he is a leathery pioneer of many years’ standing.
¹⁰

Less than half the text is about hunting as such. Although Roosevelt tells, with tremendous pace and gusto, the story of all his major expeditions, some of the best pages are those in which he muses on the beauty of the Badlands, the simple pleasures of ranch life, the joy of being young and free on the frontier. Except for an occasional outpouring of melancholy adjectives, he gives no indication that he was a brokenhearted man during most of these adventures. On the contrary, there is an abundance of lusty, sensuous images: the carpet-like softness of prairie roses under his horse’s hooves, the smell of bear’s blood on his hands, the taste of jerked beef after a mouthful of snow, and—most memorably—the warm freshness of a deer’s bed, with its “blades of grass still slowly rising, after the hasty departure of the weight that has flattened them down.”
¹¹

Roosevelt’s characteristic auditory effects resonate on every page: from the “wild, not unmusical calls” of cowboys on night-herd duty, their voices “half-mellowed by the distance,” to the “harsh grating noise” of a dying elk’s teeth gnashing in agony. There are, to be sure, some vignettes that make non-hunters gag, such as that of a wounded blacktail buck galloping along “with a portion of his entrails sticking out … and frozen solid.”
¹²
But the overwhelming impression left after reading
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
is that of love for, and identity with, all living things. Roosevelt demonstrates an almost poetic ability to feel a bighorn’s delight in its sinewy nimbleness, the sluggish timidity of a rattlesnake, the cool air on an unsaddled horse’s back, the numb stiffness of a hail-bruised antelope.

How such a lover of animals could kill so many of them (at the time of writing his lifetime tally was already well into the thousands) is a perhaps unanswerable question.
¹³
But his bloodthirstiness, if it can be called that, was not unusual among men of his class
and generation. Roosevelt hunted according to a strict code of personal morality. He had nothing but contempt for “the swinish game-butchers who hunt for hides and not for sport or actual food, and who murder the gravid doe and the spotted fawn with as little hesitation as they would kill a buck of ten points. No one who is not himself a sportsman and lover of nature can realize the intense indignation with which a true hunter sees these butchers at their brutal work of slaughtering the game, in season and out, for the sake of the few dollars they are too lazy to earn in any other and more honest way.”
¹⁴

R
OOSEVELT’S ARDUOUS SPELL
of writing in the early months of 1885 left him physically and emotionally drained. As usual when he was reduced to this condition, the
cholera morbus
struck, delaying his scheduled departure for Dakota from 22 March to 14 April. Even then he looked so pale and dyspeptic above his high white collar that Douglas Robinson wrote ahead to Bill Sewall, saying that his sisters were worried about him, and asking for reports of his health.
¹⁵

If Sewall was conscientious enough to obey, he would have replied that Roosevelt seemed determined to contract pneumonia after arriving back in Medora. Although the weather was still wintry, the Little Missouri was swollen with dirty thaw-water from upcountry. The only way to cross it was to ride between the tracks of the railroad trestles—unless one chose, like Roosevelt, to negotiate the submerged, slippery top of a dam farther downstream. “If Manitou gets his feet on that dam, he’ll keep them there and we can make it finely,” he told Joe Ferris.

But halfway across Manitou overbalanced, and to the horror of spectators, horse and rider disappeared into the hurtling river. When they surfaced a few moments later, Roosevelt was seen swimming beside Manitou, pushing ice-blocks out of the horse’s way and splashing water in his face to guide him. They made the shore just in time to avoid being swept away completely: the next landing was more than a mile north.
¹⁶

Roosevelt actually enjoyed the experience. A few days later he again swam across the river with Manitou, at a point where there were no spectators to rescue him. “I had to strike my own line for twenty miles over broken country before I reached home and could dry myself,” he boasted to Bamie. “However it all makes me feel very healthy and strong.”
¹⁷

T
HE
E
LKHORN
R
ANCH WAS NOW
complete.
¹⁸
Roosevelt, exploring its eight spacious rooms, found that they measured up in every way to the descriptions he had already written of them. Bearskins and buffalo robes strewed the beds and couches; a perpetual fire of cottonwood logs reddened the hearthstone; stuffed heads cast monstrous shadows across the rough log walls; there were rifles in every corner, coonskin coats and beaver caps hanging from the rafters. Sturdy shelves groaned with the collected works of Irving, Hawthorne, Cooper, and Lowell, as well as his favorite light reading—“dreamy Ike Marvel, Burroughs’s breezy pages, and the quaint, pathetic character-sketches of the Southern writers—Cable, Craddock, Macon, Joel Chandler Harris, and sweet Sherwood Bonner.” It was still too cold to sit out in his rocking-chair (“What true American does not enjoy a rocking-chair?”), but he looked forward to many summer afternoons on the piazza, reading or just simply contemplating the view. “When one is in the Bad Lands he feels as if they somehow
look
just exactly as Poe’s tales and poems
sound.”
¹⁹

He was pleased to see that his cattle had apparently survived the harsh winter well. “Bill, you were mistaken about those cows. Cows and calves are all looking fine.”

Nothing could shake Sewall’s habitual pessimism. “You wait until next spring, and see how they look.”
²⁰

Unfazed, Roosevelt sent Sewall and Dow to Minnesota, along with Sylvane Ferris, to help Merrifield bring back an extra fifteen hundred head. This latest purchase, amounting to $39,000, raised his total investment in the Badlands to $85,000, virtually half his patrimony. Coming on top of the $45,000 he had already spent at Leeholm, it made Roosevelt’s family as nervous about his finances
as about his health. Bamie asked for guarantees that the cattle venture would pay, but got only the unconvincing reply, “I honestly think that it will.”
²¹