The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (74 page)

O
N 28
M
ARCH 1887
, New York newspapers headlined the return of Theodore Roosevelt and his “charming young wife” to the United States, after a fifteen-week tour of England, France, and Italy.
¹
Every reporter commented on how well Roosevelt looked, in contrast to the drained and defeated mayoral candidate of last fall. His face was “bronzed,” even “handsome,” and he gave off “a rich glow of health” as he strode down the gangplank of the
Etruria
. A certain bearish heaviness was noticeable in his physique (he had put on considerable weight in European restaurants), and several friends were seen to wince as he exuberantly hugged them tight.
²

Edith’s health was rather more delicate than her husband’s. In Paris, about halfway through their trip, she had begun to feel “the reverse of brightly,” and Theodore had hinted in his next letter home that a honeymoon baby was on its way.
³
This had not stopped them accepting a flood of fashionable invitations during their last weeks in London. There had been Parliamentary visits with members of both Houses (Roosevelt remarking sourly, of some Irish Parnellites, that he had met them before—“in the New York legislature”);
lunches, dinners, and teas with a variety of British intellectuals; supper with the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury; and, by way of climax, a sumptuous weekend at Wroxton Abbey in Warwickshire, where the honeymooners slept in the Duke of Clarence’s bed and were waited on by powder-wigged servants.
⁴

“A longing for nobler game soon overwhelmed him.”
The Meadowbrook Hunt meeting at Sagamore Hill in the 1880s
. (
Illustration 15.1
)

“I have had a roaring good time,” Roosevelt told the New York press. Pacing up and down, and tugging excitedly at his pince-nez, he said how glad he was, nevertheless, to be home. Having met “all the great political leaders,” and made “as complete a study as I could of English politics,” he was convinced that the American governmental system was superior. “Why, Mr. Roosevelt?” asked a
Herald
reporter. “Because a written constitution is better than an unwritten one. Their whole system seemed clumsy. It might do well enough for a social club, but not for a great legislative body.”

In answer to the inevitable questions about his political plans, Roosevelt said he had none—at present. “I intend to divide my time between literature and ranching.”
⁵

H
AD HE OPENED HIS MAIL
from Medora before talking to the press that afternoon, he might well have dropped the latter option. Vague news of the Dakota blizzards had reached him in Europe, but the true extent of the devastation had become apparent only during his return voyage. Even now, with the spring thaw still going on, Merrifield and Ferris were unable to tell him how many cattle had been lost. They urged him to hurry West and judge the situation for himself.

Roosevelt was plainly anxious to leave right away, but he had to spend at least a week in New York with his wife and sister and “sweet Baby Lee.” It was a period of difficult adjustment among them. The decision had been made in Europe that Bamie might not, after all, keep her adored foster daughter.
⁶
Before remarrying, Theodore had more than once reassured Bamie that the child would stay with her, “I of course paying the expenses.”
⁷
But when Edith heard about the arrangement, she had reacted with surprising vehemence. Little Alice was
her
child now, she insisted, and would live at Sagamore Hill, where she belonged. In a rare display of helplessness,
Roosevelt had thrown up his hands. “We can decide it all when we meet.”
⁸

What was decided, in those waning days of March, was that to ease the pain of parting, Baby Lee would remain with Bamie for another month. Meanwhile her father would go West, and Edith visit relatives in Philadelphia. Upon their return to New York at the end of April, they would take over Bamie’s new house at 689 Madison Avenue, while its mistress went South for a short vacation. By the time she got back in late May the Roosevelts would have opened Sagamore Hill, and they could all move out there for the summer. Together they would spend June and July supervising the delicate task of transferring the child’s affections from aunt to stepmother.
⁹
Not until August, therefore, need Bamie face the prospect of resuming her lonely spinster life.

Bamie accepted that Edith’s instinct was the right one—she had never felt entirely secure in her surrogate role—but relations between the two women would never be the same now that they were sisters-in-law. For all their determined sweetness to each other, neither could forget that Bamie had nursed little Alice through her first years of life,
¹⁰
and that Bamie had been the first mistress of Sagamore Hill. Corinne, too, was to learn that she now had a formidable rival to her brother’s affections and that access to him would henceforth be strictly controlled.
¹¹
It was an ironic reversal for someone who, not so long ago, had served as duenna between Edith and the teenage Theodore.

Two welcome guests at 689 helped smooth things over while negotiations over Baby Lee went on: Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge and “Springy” Spring Rice, now Secretary of the British Legation in Washington. Roosevelt seized on their masculine company with some relief, and lost no time in returning Spring Rice’s hospitality of the previous November. The Englishman became an honorary member of the Century Club, which he found as intellectually exclusive as the Savile, and was introduced to an enormous circle of Rooseveltian acquaintances. One morning Whitelaw Reid, the immensely rich and influential owner of the
New York Tribune
, invited the three friends to a political breakfast in his mansion. There, in a magnificent dining hall, paneled with
inlaid wood and embossed leather, Roosevelt, Lodge, and Reid gravely discussed whether or not James G. Blaine should again be nominated for the Presidency in 1888. Spring Rice listened in utter fascination. “It was the first real piece of political wire-pulling I had come across,” he wrote home afterward. “I am getting quite excited over it.”
¹²

Not until 4 April was Roosevelt free to go West and find out exactly how poor he was.

H
E ALREADY HAD
a fairly accurate idea. Or rather, Edith had. That level-headed lady knew that her husband, whatever his other talents, was a financial imbecile.
¹³
Soon after the wedding she had gone over his affairs with him and discovered that, on the basis of last year’s figures alone, they should “think very seriously of closing Sagamore Hill.” Then had come the first reports of Dakota blizzards, followed by her attacks of morning sickness. Clearly, if they were to rear their family at Oyster Bay, they would have to “cut down tremendously along the whole line.”
¹⁴
Roosevelt must learn to live within his income for a change, and begin to pay off his debts. He must sell his enormously expensive hunting-horse, grow his own crops and fodder (for Sagamore Hill was a potentially profitable farm), and stop running the house as a summer resort for friends with large appetites, and thirsts to match.
¹⁵

As to his cattle business, the winter’s toll was still a matter of guesswork. Roosevelt could only hope that enough cows would survive to produce at least a token number of healthy calves. In the years ahead he would sell as many beeves as possible for whatever price he could get, and so slowly reduce his losses. Given enough time—and no more freak weather—he might be able to dispose of his entire stock and save most of his $85,000 investment.

But now, as he rode once more out of Medora into the devastated Badlands, all such optimism vanished. “The land was a mere barren waste; not a green thing could be seen; the dead grass eaten off till the country looked as if it had been shaved with a razor.” Occasionally, in some sheltered spot, he would come across “a band of gaunt, hollow-flanked cattle feebly cropping the sparse, dry
pasturage, too listless to move out of the way.” Blackened carcasses lay piled up against the bluffs: he counted twenty-three in a single patch of brushwood. Here and there a dead cow perched grotesquely in the branches of a cottonwood tree, the high snow upon which it once stood having melted away.
¹⁶

Of the once-teeming Elkhorn and Maltese Cross herds, only “a skinny sorry-looking crew” of some few hundred seemed to have survived.
¹⁷
He could not find out exactly how many had died until after the spring roundup.

But the roundup was never held. The Little Missouri Stockmen’s Association, meeting on 16 April with Roosevelt in the chair, decided that losses were too heavy to merit a general mobilization. There were so few cattle left on the range, ranchers might as well sort them out individually. One search party was dispatched to Standing Rock, in the hope that some thousands of cattle may have migrated south, and returned after three weeks, with exactly two steers.
¹⁸

No official figures, therefore, survive as to the effect of the winter of 1886–87 on the Badlands cattle industry as a whole, nor on Roosevelt in particular. Estimates of the average loss sustained by local ranchers range from 75 percent to 85 percent.
¹⁹
Gregor Lang, who began the winter with three thousand head, ended it with less than four hundred. Thanks to the thickly wooded bottoms on both of Roosevelt’s properties, his loss was probably about 65 percent. Even so, it was catastrophic.
²⁰
“I am bluer than indigo about the cattle,” he wrote Bamie from Medora. “It is even worse than I feared. I wish I was sure I would lose no more than half the money ($80,000) I invested here.
²¹
I am planning to get out of it.” And on 20 April, after attending another gloomy stockmen’s meeting in Montana, he wrote Lodge, “The losses are crippling. For the first time I have been utterly unable to enjoy a visit to my ranch. I shall be glad to get home.”
²²