The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (57 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
“You don’t know anything about it,” Roosevelt protested.
Sewall obstinately went on: “It’s the way it looks to me, like not much of a cattle country.”
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Roosevelt shrugged off this remark. With a thousand new head just arrived from Minnesota (“the best lot of cattle shipped west this year,” said the
Bad Lands Cowboy)
and six hundred veterans of last winter browsing contentedly on the river, he could see no reasons for pessimism.
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The next morning he ordered Sewall and Dow north to the downriver ranch-site, with a hundred head “to practice on.” They left under the supervision of a grumpy herder, who was doubtful about Sewall’s capacity to stay on his horse. Sewall, jouncing along uncomfortably, allowed that he had more experience “riding logs.”
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Roosevelt remained behind. There was a certain amount of soothing to be done at Maltese Cross. Merrifield and Ferris had not
been pleased to discover, on returning from St. Paul, that a couple of Eastern lumbermen had displaced them in the boss’s esteem. Since Roosevelt intended to build his home-ranch downriver, and would spend most of his time there, it was obvious whose company he preferred. Merrifield in particular was a man of easily bruised ego: perhaps to mollify him, Roosevelt asked if he would be his guide in a major hunting expedition later that month.
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This was the “trip into the Big Horn country” of Wyoming that he had been excitedly planning since June. “You will probably not hear from me for a couple of months,” he warned Bamie, adding with relish, “… if our horses give out or run away, or we get caught in the snow, we may be out very much longer—till towards Christmas.”
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He stopped short of telling his nervous sister that he had set his heart on killing the most dangerous animal in North America—the Rocky Mountain grizzly bear.
He wanted to leave within two weeks, but extra ponies had to be found and he was forced to postpone his departure to 18 August. In the interim he roamed restlessly through the Badlands, riding thirty miles south to visit the Langs, and forty miles north to check up on “my two backwoods babies.” Exploring his new property with Sewall, he came upon the skulls of two elks with interlocked antlers. “Theirs had been a duel to the death,” he decided. It was just the sort of symbol to appeal to him, and he promptly named the ranch-site Elkhorn.
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Apart from a touch of diarrhea, brought on by the alkaline water of the Little Missouri, Sewall and Dow seemed to be adjusting well to Dakota, and enjoying their new work. During the day they worked at making Roosevelt’s hunting-shack habitable (it would serve as a home until the big ranch house was built), and at night took turns in watching the herd. Sewall still had misgivings about the Badlands as cattle country, while admitting that its “wild, desolate grandeur … has a kind of charm.”
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Roosevelt used almost the same words in his letter to Bamie of 12 August.
… I grow very fond of this place, and it certainly has a desolate, grim beauty of its own, that has a curious fascination
for me. The grassy, scantily wooded bottoms through which the winding river flows are bounded by bare, jagged buttes; their fantastic shapes and sharp, steep edges throw the most curious shadows, under the cloudless, glaring sky; and at evening I love to sit out in front of the hut and see their hard, gray outlines gradually growing soft and purple as the flaming sunset by degrees softens and dies away; while my days I spend generally alone, riding through the lonely rolling prairie and broken lands.
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He spent whole days in the saddle, riding as many as seventy-two miles between dawn and darkness. Sometimes he rode on through the night, rejoicing in the way “moonbeams play over the grassy stretches of the plateaus and glance off the windrippled blades as they would from water.”
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His body hardened, the tan on his face deepened, hints of gold appeared in his hair and reddish mustache. “I now look like a regular cowboy dandy, with all my equipments finished in the most expensive style,” he wrote Bamie. His buckskin tunic, custom-tailored by the Widow Maddox, seamstress of the Badlands, gave him particular delight, although its resemblance to a lady’s shirtwaist caused some comment in Medora. “You would be amused to see me,” he accurately wrote to Cabot Lodge, “in my broad sombrero hat, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horse hide chaparajos or riding trousers, and cowhide boots, with braided bridle and silver spurs.”
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It was probably during these seventeen free-ranging days that Roosevelt had his famous encounter with a bully in Nolan’s Hotel, Mingusville, thirty-five miles west of Medora.
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The incident, which has since become a cliché in a thousand Wild West yarns, is best told in his own words:
I was out after lost horses … It was late in the evening when I reached the place. I heard one or two shots in the bar-room as I came up, and I disliked going in. But there was nowhere else to go, and it was a cold night. Inside the room were several men, who, including the bartender, were wearing the kind of smile worn by men who are making believe to like
what they don’t like. A shabby individual in a broad hat with a cocked gun in each hand was walking up and down the floor talking with strident profanity. He had evidently been shooting at the clock, which had two or three holes in its face.
… As soon as he saw me he hailed me as “Four Eyes”, in reference to my spectacles, and said, “Four Eyes is going to treat.” I joined in the laugh and got behind the stove and sat down, thinking to escape notice. He followed me, however, and though I tried to pass it off as a jest this merely made him more offensive, and he stood leaning over me, a gun in each hand, using very foul language … In response to his reiterated command that I should set up the drinks, I said, “Well, if I’ve got to, I’ve got to,” and rose, looking past him.
As I rose, I struck quick and hard with my right just to one side of the point of his jaw, hitting with my left as I straightened out, and then again with my right. He fired the guns, but I do not know whether this was merely a convulsive action of his hands, or whether he was trying to shoot at me. When he went down he struck the corner of the bar with his head … if he had moved I was about to drop on my knees; but he was senseless. I took away his guns, and the other people in the room, who were now loud in their denunciation of him, hustled him out and put him in the shed.
Next morning Roosevelt heard to his satisfaction that the bully had left town on a freight train.
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A
NOTHER THREAT
, from a more powerful adversary, arrived at Elkhorn one day in the form of a letter from the Marquis de Morès. It coolly announced that Roosevelt had no title to the land around his ranch-site. In the summer of 1883 the Marquis had stocked it with twelve thousand sheep; therefore the range belonged to him.
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Like most Americans, Roosevelt had a profound contempt for sheep. Not only did the “bleating idiots” nibble the grass so short that they starved out cattle, they were, intellectually speaking, about
the lowest level of brute creation. “No man can associate with sheep,” he snorted, “and retain his self-respect.”
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In any case, the Marquis’s flock had not survived the winter. Roosevelt curtly informed de Morès, by return messenger, that only dead sheep remained on the range, and he “did not think that they would hold it.”
There was no reply, but Sewall and Dow were warned to look out for trouble.
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O
NE MELANCHOLY DUTY
awaited Roosevelt before he set off for the Big Horns on 18 August
:
the collation of some tributes, speeches, and newspaper clippings into a printed memorial for Alice Lee.
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Having arranged them as best he could, he added his own poignant superscription, under the heading “In Memory of my Darling Wife.”
She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; as a flower she grew, and as a fair young flower she died. Her life had always been in the sunshine; there had never come to her a single great sorrow; and none ever knew her who did not love and revere her for her bright, sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness. Fair, pure, and joyous as a maiden; loving, tender, and happy as a young wife; when she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be but just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her—then, by a strange and terrible fate, death came to her.
And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.
The manuscript was sent to New York for private publication and distribution.
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Roosevelt sank briefly back into total despair. Gazing across the burned-out landscape of the Badlands, he told Bill Sewall that all his hopes lay buried in the East. He had nothing to live for, he said, and his daughter would never know him: “She would be just as well off without me.”
Talking as to a child, Sewall assured him that he would recover.
“You won’t always feel as you do now and you won’t always be willing to stay here and drive cattle.”
But Roosevelt was inconsolable.
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A
MONTH LATER
, his mood had improved considerably. “I have had good sport,” he wrote Bamie, on descending from the Big Horn Mountains, “and enough excitement and fatigue to prevent overmuch thought.” He added significantly, “I have at last been able to sleep well at night.”
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Readers of Roosevelt’s diary of the hunt might wonder if by “excitement” he did not mean “carnage.” A list culled from the pages of this little book indicates just how much blood was needed to blot out “thought.” (Since Alice’s death his diaries had become a monotonous record of things slain.)
17 Aug
. “My battery consists of a long .45 Colt revolver, 150 cartridges, a no. 10 choke bore, 300-cartridge shotgun; a 45–75 Winchester repeater, with 1,000 cartridges; a 40–90 Sharps, 150 cartridges; a 50–150 double barrelled Webley express, 100 cartridges.”
19 Aug
. 4 grouse, 5 duck.
20 Aug
. 1 whitetail buck, “still in velvet,” 2 sage hens.
24 Aug
. “Knocked the heads off 2 sage grouse.”
25 Aug. 6
sharptail grouse, 2 doves, 2 teal.
26 Aug
. 8 prairie chickens.
27 Aug
. 12 sage hens and prairie chickens, 1 yearling whitetail “through the heart.”
29 Aug
. “Broke the backs” of 2 blacktail bucks with a single bullet.
31 Aug
. 1 jack rabbit, “cutting him nearly in two.”
3 Sept
. 2 blue grouse.
4 Sept
. 2 elk.
5 Sept
. 1 red rabbit, 1 blue grouse.
7 Sept
. 2 elk, 1 blacktail doe.
8 Sept
. Spares a doe and two fawns, “as we have more than enough meat.” Kills 12 grouse instead.
11 Sept
. 50 trout.