The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (63 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
A
UTUMN CAME EARLY
to the Badlands, but the cooling air did not prevent the sun from burning every last drop of green juice out of the grass. The prairie became a brittle carpet underfoot, wanting only the spark of a horseshoe on stone—or a tumbling ember of lignite—to erupt into flame.
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Several times that September, Roosevelt found himself fighting fires on his own range.
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Similar fires were reported all over Billings County. Stockmen plotted their various locations and grew increasingly suspicious. All the outbreaks were in the “drive” country—a broad strip of grassland lying between the Northern Pacific Railroad and the cattle ranches on either side. This strip, fifty miles wide and hundreds of miles long, had to be crossed by any herd en route to shipping points like Mingusville and Medora. Cattle driven over the blackened wastes shed tons of weight; on delivery they could be sold only as low-grade beef. Clearly it was not nature that so shrewdly sabotaged the profits of stockmen. The fires were being set by Indians, in protest against being deprived of their ancient hunting grounds in the Badlands.
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Roosevelt’s attitude toward the red man in 1885 was no more tolerant than that of any cowboy. He had publicly explained it in
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman:
During the past century a good deal of sentimental nonsense has been talked about our taking the Indians’ land. Now, I
do not mean to say for a moment that gross wrong has not been done the Indians, both by government and individuals, again and again … where brutal and reckless frontiersmen are brought into contact with a set of treacherous, vengeful, and fiendishly cruel savages a long series of outrages by both sides is sure to follow. But as regards taking the land, at least from the Western Indians, the simple truth is that the latter never had any real ownership in it at all. Where the game was plenty, there they hunted; they followed it when they moved away to new hunting grounds, unless they were prevented by stronger rivals, and to most of the land on which we found them they had no stronger claim than that of having a few years previously butchered the original occupants. When my cattle came to the Little Missouri, the region was only inhabited by a score or so white hunters; their title to it was quite as good as that of most Indian tribes to the lands they claimed; yet nobody dreamed of saying that these hunters owned the country … The Indians should be treated in just such a way that we treat the white settlers. Give each his little claim; if, as would generally happen, he declined this, why, then let him share the fate of the thousands of white hunters and trappers who have lived on the game that the settlement of the country has exterminated, and let him, like these whites, perish from the face of the earth which he cumbers.
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One day in early fall Roosevelt set off on another of his solo rides across the prairie.
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This time he headed northeast. He knew that he was wandering into “debatable territory,” where white land bordered on red, and knew of at least one cowboy who had been killed hereabouts by a band of marauding bucks; but this, of course, was more likely to challenge him than deter him. He was crossing a remote plateau when, suddenly, five Indians rode up over the rim.
The instant they saw me they whipped out their guns and raced full speed at me, yelling and flogging their horses. I was on a favorite horse, Manitou, who was a wise old fellow, with nerves not to be shaken at anything. I at once leaped off him and stood with my rifle ready.
It was possible that the Indians were merely making a bluff and intended no mischief. But I did not like their actions, and I thought it likely that if I allowed them to get hold of me they would at least take my horse and rifle, and possibly kill me. So I waited until they were a hundred yards off and then drew a bead on the first. Indians—and for the matter of that, white men—do not like to ride in on a man who is cool and means shooting, and in a twinkling every man was lying over the side of his horse, and all five had turned and were galloping backwards, having altered their course as quickly as so many teal ducks.
After this one of them made the peace sign, with his blanket first, and then, as he rode toward me, with his open hand. I halted him at a fair distance and asked him what he wanted. He exclaimed, “How! Me good Injun, me good Injun,” and tried to show me the dirty piece of paper on which his agency pass was written. I told him with sincerity that I was glad that he was a good Indian, but that he must not come any closer. He then asked for sugar and tobacco. I told him I had none. Another Indian began slowly drifting toward me in spite of my calling out to keep back, so I once more aimed with my rifle, whereupon both Indians slipped to the side of their horses and galloped off, with oaths that did credit to at least one side of their acquaintance with English.
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Although Roosevelt later dimissed this as “a trifling encounter,” it is further, perhaps unnecessary proof of his extraordinary courage.
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M
EANWHILE, THE MURDER TRIAL
of the Marquis de Morès was making daily headlines in the Dakota newspapers. Proceedings dragged on for week after week, but little fresh evidence was forthcoming. Neither prosecution nor defense could establish who fired first when the trio of frontiersmen rode into the Marquis’s ambush, and whose bullet had killed Riley Luffsey. The Marquis was his own best witness. Tall, calm, and dignified, he spoke in simple sentences
that made the testimony of Dutch Wannegan sound maundering and untruthful.
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On 16 September Roosevelt passed through Bismarck—en route to the New York State Republican Convention—and briefly visited the Marquis in his jail cell. De Morès sat tranquilly smoking, confident of a favorable verdict. Continuing on to New York, Roosevelt arrived just in time to read the news that the Frenchman had been acquitted.
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N
OT MUCH NEEDS
to be said of Roosevelt’s routine activities at the Convention in Saratoga, except that he helped draft the party platform and campaigned unsuccessfully on behalf of a reform candidate for the gubernatorial nomination.
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Little notice was taken of him during the ensuing county and state campaigns, which ended in general victory for the Democrats. The impression is that he worked with his usual energy and devotion to the reform cause, but without his usual flamboyance.
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For once he did not need “the full light of the press beating upon him.” There was radiance enough in his private life, the radiance of such happiness as he had not known in almost two years. Its secret source lay neither in politics, nor in the adulation of his family and friends, nor in his own superabundant health and vigor. He was in love.
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NE DAY THAT FALL
—probably in early October, although the exact date is unknown—Roosevelt returned to his pied-à-terre at 422 Madison Avenue and, opening the front door, met Edith Carow coming down the stairs. For twenty months now, since the death of Alice Lee, he had successfully managed to avoid her. It had been impossible, however, to avoid hearing items of news about his childhood sweetheart, who was still Corinne’s closest friend and a regular visitor to Bamie’s house on days when he was not in town. He must have known of the rapid decline in the Carow family fortunes, following the death of her improvident father in 1883; of the decision by her mother and younger sister to live in Europe, where their eroded wealth might better support them; of Edith’s decision to go
with them, having considered, and dismissed, the idea of marrying for money; of her curious aloofness, cloaked behind great sweetness of manner, which frustrated many a would-be beau; of evidence that poor “Edie,” at twenty-four, was already an old maid.
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But that latter item, at least, was mere negative rumor, whereas here, confronting him (had Bamie plotted this deliberately?), was positive reality. Edith was as alarmingly attractive as he had feared—even more so, perhaps, for she had matured into complex and exciting womanhood. He could not resist her.
Nor could Edith resist him. The Theodore she saw was unrecognizably different from the Teedie she knew as a child, or the Teddy of more recent years. He was a mahogany-brown stranger, slim of leg and forearm, inclining to burliness about the head and shoulders. Most changed of all was the bull-like neck, heavy with muscle and bulging out of his city collar as if about to pop its studs. His hair was sun-bleached, and cropped shorter than she had ever seen it, making his massive head look even larger. Only the reddish-brown mustache had been allowed to sprout freely and droop at the corners in approved cowboy fashion. His toothy smile was the same, and the eyes behind the flashing spectacles were still big and childishly blue. But the corrugations of his mobile face had multiplied and were much more deeply etched than she could remember. Edith had to accept the fact that his boyish ingenuousness, which used to be one of his great charms, was gone. In its place were reassuring signs of wisdom and authority.
Theodore, for his part, saw a woman of slender yet appealingly rounded figure, with small hands and feet which assumed semiballetic poses when she hesitated, as then, on a stair, in the knowledge that she was being examined. Whether the scrutiny was friendly or hostile, Edith flinched against it; her privacy was so intense, her sensitiveness so extreme, that she stiffened as if posing for an unwelcome photograph. Her own gaze—when she chose to direct it (for the wide-spaced eyes were usually set at an oblique angle)—was icy blue and uncomfortably penetrating. Its strength belied the general air of softness and shyness, and flashed the unmistakable warning,
hurt me and I will hurt you more
. Her jaw was firm, and her mouth was wide, tightly controlled at the corners. Smiles did not come
easily. Yet they did come on occasion, and they transformed her amazingly, for her teeth were pretty, and her cheekbones elegant beneath the peach-like skin. Her most arresting feature, best seen in profile, was a long, sharp, yet classically beautiful nose, of the kind that Renaissance portraitists loved to draw in silverpoint. Here was a person of refinement and steely discipline, yet in the glow of her flesh there was a hint of earthiness, and much sexual potential.
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No details are known about the meeting in the hallway, except that it occurred,
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and that it was, inevitably, followed by others. Whether these encounters were few or many—again the record is blank—they were certainly ardent, for on 17 November Theodore proposed marriage, and Edith accepted him.
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