The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (56 page)

O
N 9
M
ARCH 1884
—less than three weeks after burying Alice—Roosevelt had written to Sewall with a rather peremptory invitation to join him in Dakota. “I feel sure you will do well for yourself by coming out with me … I shall take you and Will Dow out next August.”
³¹
What persuaded him that a pair of forest-bred Easterners would flourish in the Badlands is unclear, but Sewall and Dow were agreeable. Their motives appear to have been pecuniary. “He said he would guarantee us a share of anything made in the cattle business,” Sewall recalled. “And if anything was lost, he would lose it and pay our wages … I told him that I thought it was very onesided, but if he thought he could stand it, I thought we could.”
³²
There were minor hindrances, such as mortgages and protesting wives, but Roosevelt settled the former with a check for $3,000, and assured Mrs. Sewall and Mrs. Dow that they could come West in a year, if all went well.
³³

Within a few days of discovering the downriver ranch-site in June, he purchased full rights to both shack and land for $400.
³⁴
Before returning East to pick up Sewall and Dow, he found time to make his scheduled visit to Montana with the Marquis de Morès.
³⁵
The date of this trip was deliberately kept secret, but 26 June seems likely. The Marquis would have found it prudent to be out of town that day, since it was the first anniversary of Riley Luffsey’s murder.

The two young men wished to sign on as members of a band of vigilantes, or “stranglers,” which had just been organized in Miles City, its purpose being to lynch the horse-thieves currently plaguing the Dakota-Montana border. Fortunately for Roosevelt’s subsequent
political reputation, their application was refused. Granville Stuart, leader of the vigilantes, told them that they were too “socially prominent” to belong to a secret society.
³⁶

On 1 July Roosevelt left Medora for New York.
³⁷

H
E FOUND
B
ABY
L
EE
, all blue eyes and blond curls, living with Bamie at 422 Madison Avenue. Henceforth this house would be his pied-à-terre on visits to New York—although Bamie was not keen on the idea of brother and sister sharing the same town address.
³⁸
Much as she loved to look after him, she was afraid they might drift into a cozy, quasi-marital relationship centering around her quasi-daughter. Bamie was a person of fine instinct and disciplined emotions, unlike Corinne, who could never see enough of her “Teddy,” and for whom he could never do wrong.
³⁹

But Bamie need not have worried. Roosevelt showed no desire to remain at No. 422 a moment longer than necessary. Sewall and Dow were ordered to fix up their affairs “at once” and hurry to New York, so that they could leave for Dakota by the end of the month.
⁴⁰
Then Roosevelt took the ferry to New Jersey for a few days with Corinne. He seemed anxious to stay away from his daughter, who was now almost five months old. (Since going to Dakota he had not asked a single question about the child in his letters home.) No record remains of their reunion. It is known, however, that after leaving New Jersey he took little Alice to Boston to see her grandparents.
⁴¹
The visit cannot have been cheerful. At the soonest possible moment he fled Chestnut Hill for Nahant, Henry Cabot Lodge’s summer place.
⁴²

A sentence in one of Aunt Annie Gracie’s letters provides a clue, perhaps, to Roosevelt’s curious terror of Baby Lee: “She is a very sweet pretty little girl, so much like her beautiful young Mother in appearance.”
⁴³

N
OR WAS THIS
his only phobia that summer. In New York, Bamie was told to warn him if a certain old family friend came to call, so
that he could arrange to be absent.
⁴⁴
As a married man, he had been able to withstand the cool blue eyes of Edith Carow; but now, widowed and alone, it was as if he feared they might once again find him childishly vulnerable.

O
N 11
J
ULY
the Democratic National Convention nominated Grover Cleveland for President of the United States. The Governor was in Albany, working as usual, when at 1:45 P.M. the dull booming of cannons floated through the windows of his office. An aide tried to congratulate him. “They are firing a salute, Governor, for your nomination.”

“Do you think so? Well, anyhow, we’ll finish up this work.”
⁴⁵

R
OOSEVELT FOUND
L
ODGE
depressed during his short stay at Nahant. The extent to which Independent revulsion had gathered against James G. Blaine—and, by extension, against Lodge for supporting him—must have amazed them both. Almost to a man, the intellectual and social aristocracy of Massachusetts had decided to vote for Cleveland. The list of Republican opponents to Blaine contained such names as Adams, Quincy, Lowell, Saltonstall, Everett, and Eliot. These were the same names which had so often been borne on a silver tray into Lodge’s parlor. Now, suddenly, the tray was empty, and his friends were snubbing him in the street. Lodge confessed that supporting Blaine was “the bitterest thing I ever had to do in my life.” What particularly hurt was the widespread assumption that he had sold his conscience for a Congressional nomination in the fall.
⁴⁶

It was time, Roosevelt decided, to come to the aid of his stricken friend. He himself had said nothing publicly since his confession of support for Blaine at St. Paul, except to telegraph an ambiguous denial of the interview from Medora.
⁴⁷
No sooner had he returned to Chestnut Hill on 19 July than he summoned a reporter from the
Boston Herald
and announced, once and for all, that he, too, would support the Republican presidential ticket.

He arrived back in New York to find Bamie’s doormat piled with abusive letters. “Most of my friends seem surprised to find that I have not developed hoofs and horns,” he wryly told Lodge.
⁴⁹
Harder to take, perhaps, was the criticism of Alice’s family, voiced by her uncle, Henry Lee: “As for Cabot Lodge, nobody’s surprised at
him;
but you can tell that young whipper-snapper in New York from me that his independence was the only thing in him we cared for, and if he has gone back on that, we don’t care to hear any more about him.”
⁵⁰

Reform newspapers, whose hero Roosevelt had so recently been, were loud in their denunciations of him. The
Evening Post
thundered that “no ranch or other hiding place in the world” could shelter a so-called Independent who voted for the likes of James G. Blaine. Roosevelt sent a mischievous message to the editor, Edwin L. Godkin, accusing him of suffering from “a species of moral myopia, complicated with intellectual strabismus.” Godkin, who was a man of little humor, forthwith became his severest public critic.
⁵¹

Roosevelt did not seem to mind his sudden unpopularity. When the rumor that Grover Cleveland was the father of a bastard flashed across the country on 21 July,
⁵²
he could afford to laugh at the Independents who had already bolted to the Governor’s side. Although he seemed, in a final interview on 26 July, to be talking only about his life out West, he subtly sounded a favorite theme: that of the
masculine hardness of the practical politician, as opposed to the effeminate softness of armchair idealists.

With that the ex-Assemblyman boarded a train with Sewall and Dow and returned to Dakota.

“W
ELL
, B
ILL, WHAT
do you think of the country?” asked Roosevelt. It was 1 August 1884, and the two backwoodsmen were spending their first night in the Badlands, at the Maltese Cross Ranch.

“I like it well enough,” said Sewall, “but I don’t believe that it’s much of a cattle country.”