The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (54 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
Once again William McKinley pours oil on troubled waters. “Let us have no technical objections. I am as good a friend of James G. Blaine as he has in this convention, and I insist that every man here shall have fair play.” The motion to adjourn is voted on, and defeated. Roosevelt sits “pale, jerky, and nervous” as the fourth ballot proceeds. “I was at the birth of the Republican party,” murmurs old George William Curtis, “and I fear I am to witness its death.”
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The sun streams in through high windows, flooding the hall with yellow light. A secretary begins to announce the tally. One Arthur delegate retires to the wings, brushes tears from his eyes, and changes his purple badge for a white one. It is all over.
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In a hurricane of hats, umbrellas, and handkerchiefs, and what is generally calculated to be the loudest roar in the history of American politics, McKinley pushes smilingly through the crowd. He bends over Roosevelt’s chair, asks him to second a motion making the nomination
unanimous. Roosevelt shakes his head. McKinley turns to Curtis. The old man shakes his head too.
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O
UTSIDE, AS THE DELEGATES
disperse in the warm afternoon, Roosevelt snaps at a
World
reporter, “I am going cattle-ranching in Dakota for the remainder of the summer and a part of the fall. What I shall do after that I cannot tell you.” Asked if he will support the party’s choice for President, he replies with angrily flashing spectacles, “That question I decline to answer. It is a subject that I do not care to talk about.”
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At midnight, he is still too wrought up to sleep. He tells an
Evening Post
editor that, rather than vote for Blaine, he would give “hearty support” to any decent Democrat. More than anything, this rash remark reveals that Roosevelt is politically and physically at the end of his tether.
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The editor does not print it—yet.
S
ATURDAY,
7
JUNE
.
Henry Cabot Lodge heads east to muse on the future; Theodore Roosevelt heads west to forget about the past. He craves nothing so much as the shade of his front porch, the lowing of his own cattle, the soothing scratch of his pen across paper. Yet even at St. Paul, the roar of Chicago pursues him. A reporter from the
Pioneer Press
demands to know if he will accept Blaine’s nomination or “bolt.” Some sixth sense warns Roosevelt that “bolt” is the most fatal word in American politics. “I shall bolt the Convention by no means,” he says at last. “I have no personal objections to Blaine.”
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With that, Roosevelt changes trains and rumbles off to Little Missouri. A boyhood ambition is rising within him. He will take a rifle, load up a horse, and ride off into the prairie, absolutely alone, for days and days—“far off from all mankind.”
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“I am going cattle ranching … what I shall do after that I cannot tell you.”
The first public advertisement of the Maltese Cross brand, 1884
. (
Illustration 10.2
)
The Cowboy of the Present
Heart’s dearest
,
Why dost thou sorrow so?
T
HE STARS WERE ALREADY PALE
in the east as he rode across the river-bottom and struck off up a winding valley.
1
His horse, Manitou, loped effortlessly through a sea of sweet-smelling prairie-rose bushes. Presently the sun’s first rays rushed horizontally across the Badlands, kissing the tops of the buttes, and shocking millions of drowsy birds into song.
Among the swelling chorus of hermit thrushes, grosbeaks, robins, bluebirds, thrashers, and sparrows, Roosevelt’s acute ear caught one particularly rich and bubbling sound, with “a cadence of wild sadness, inexpressibly touching.”
2
He identified it as the meadowlark. Ever afterward, the music of that bird would come “laden with a hundred memories and associations; with the sight of dim hills reddening in the dawn, with the breath of cool morning winds blowing across lowly plains, with the scent of flowers on the sunlit prairie.”
3
Some varieties of birdsong, however much they ravished Roosevelt’s ear, aroused in his heart that same sharp, indefinable nostalgia which he had felt as a child, gazing at the portrait of Edith
Carow.
4
Ache though he may, he could not escape hearing them in Dakota, in June, a month of prodigious migrations. Nor did he really want to. For four years or more, he had been starved of this, the only kind of music he really understood. In abandoning his natural history studies for Alice Lee, he had stifled the precocious sensitivity to nature that was so characteristic of him as a youth. Now, as a twenty-five-year-old widower, with his second career abandoned—or at least indefinitely postponed—he could reopen his ears to the “sweet, sad songs” of the hermit thrush, the “boding call” of the whippoorwill, and “the soft melancholy cooing of the mourning-dove, whose voice always seems far away and expresses more than any other sound in nature the sadness of gentle, hopeless, never-ending grief.”
5
“New York will certainly lose him for a time at least.”
Theodore Roosevelt in his buckskin suit, 1884
. (
Illustration 11.1
)
T
WO MAGPIES
, perched on a bleached buffalo skull,
6
greeted him as he left the creek and rode through a line of scoria-red buttes. The naked prairie opened out ahead, already hot and shimmering under the climbing sun. Choosing one course at random, he headed south, scanning the horizon for antelope. All he carried, beside his rifle, was a book, a blanket, an oilskin, a metal cup, a little tea and salt, and some dry biscuits. Since arriving in Dakota nine days before, he had eaten nothing but canned pork and starch. Ferris and Merrifield were too busy with the spring roundup to shoot any fresh meat. Roosevelt therefore had good dietetic reasons, as well as his “boyish ambition,” for embarking on a trip across the prairie. But his real hunger was for solitude.
Nowhere, not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains … their vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him. The landscape seems always the same, and after the traveller has plodded on for miles and miles he gets to feel as if the distance were really boundless. As far as the eye can see, there is no break; either the prairie stretches out into perfectly level flats, or else there are gentle, rolling slopes … when one of these is
ascended, immediately another precisely like it takes its place in the distance, and so roll succeeds roll in a succession as interminable as that of the waves in the ocean. Nowhere else does one feel so far off from all mankind; the plains stretch out in deathless and measureless expanse, and as he journeys over them they will for many miles be lacking in all signs of life.
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Lonely, melancholy, monotony, deathless—
these words, especially the first, became obsessive parts of Roosevelt’s vocabulary in 1884. There was, however, no shortage of his favorite adjective
manly
, and his favorite pronoun,
I
. While accepting that his first few days on the prairie must have had their moments of anguish (since Alice’s death he had not been alone for more than a few hours at a time), one cannot read his descriptions of the trip without sensing his overwhelming delight in being free at last. “Black care,” Roosevelt wrote, “rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.”
8
He sighted several small bands of antelope that morning. For hours he pursued them, first on foot, then on hands and knees, and finally flat on his face, wriggling through patches of cactus; but the nervous creatures were off before he could draw a bead. After a lunch of biscuits and water, and a snooze in the broiling sun—the only shade available was that of his own hat—he pushed on doggedly. Once horse and rider were very nearly engulfed in a quicksand, “and it was only by frantic strugglings and flounderings that we managed to get over.” Roosevelt learned to stay well clear of stands of tall grass in seemingly dry creeks: beneath might lurk a fathomless bed of slime.