The River of Doubt (47 page)

In October 1918, Roosevelt turned sixty years old. Although sick, frustrated, and brokenhearted over Quentin’s death, he continued to fight, refusing to bow to the sorrow and grief that he had outrun his entire life. “When the young die at the crest of life, in their golden morning, the degrees of difference are merely degrees in bitterness,” he had written to his sister Corinne. “Yet there is nothing more foolish and cowardly than to be beaten down by sorrow which nothing we can do will change.” By November, he was back in the hospital, so ill he was hardly able to walk or even stand. When told that he might be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, Roosevelt paused and then replied, “All right! I can work that way too.”

He returned home to Sagamore Hill on Christmas Day. At 4:00 a.m. on January 6, 1919, James Amos, the man who had long been Roosevelt’s loyal valet, awoke with a start from his chair near Roosevelt’s bed, which had been set up in what had once been the family’s busy second-story nursery. The sound that had awoken Amos was a hoarse, strangled breathing—the sound of Theodore Roosevelt dying. Amos alerted Roosevelt’s nurse, who rushed to get Edith. By the time she reached her husband, he was already dead.

For the country that he had served and inspired for so many years,
and which was still reeling from World War I, Roosevelt’s death was as stunning as it was painful. The newspapers the next morning were filled with long obituaries, and pictures of the former president with his famous big teeth and pince-nez, but for most Americans his death still seemed impossible. A man like Roosevelt could never die. When John Burroughs was asked for a remembrance of his old friend and fellow naturalist, he spoke for a grieving nation when he wrote, “Never before in my life has it been so hard for me to accept the death of any man as it has been for me to accept the death of Theodore Roosevelt. A pall seems to settle upon the very sky. The world is bleaker and colder for his absence from it. We shall not look upon his like again.”

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O
F THE
men who had planned and led the descent of the River of Doubt in the spring of 1914, Roosevelt was not the first to die. Just three years after the expedition completed its journey, Rondon’s faithful lieutenant and longtime companion, João Salustiano Lyra, drowned while attempting to survey the Rio Sepotuba, the river that Roosevelt and Rondon had steamed up on their way to Tapirapoan and the commencement of their overland journey. As the current swept him to his death, Lyra’s last act was to throw his survey notebooks onto the riverbank so that they would be spared for posterity—a tribute to the teachings of Rondon, who had so often asked him to risk his life in the pursuit of a greater cause.

After his abrupt dismissal from the expedition, Father Zahm, the co-planner of Roosevelt’s journey, continued to write about travel to distant lands, but never achieved the fame he had so long dreamed of. To the extent that his family name was to make headlines, it was his brother, Albert, rather than Father Zahm, who was to earn them, becoming a key figure in of one of the nation’s most notorious attempts to rewrite history. As head of the Smithsonian Institution’s aerodynamics laboratory, Albert Zahm became a principal proponent of the contention that the Smithsonian’s former director, Samuel Langley,
had invented the airplane before the successful flight of the Wright brothers’ famous Flyer in 1903. The controversy generated by that claim—now widely discredited—so angered the Wrights that in 1928 Orville Wright chose to donate the original Wright Flyer to the Science Museum in London rather than permit it to be displayed in the United States. Only after a new regime at the Smithsonian retracted Zahm’s claims was the Flyer finally returned to the United States in 1948. At work on a new travel book, Father Zahm himself fell ill and died at age seventy in Germany, and his body was returned to the United States for burial at Notre Dame, where a campus hall now bears his name.

Despite the many close calls of George Cherrie’s adventure-filled life, he died in bed after a long retirement with his family on his beloved Vermont farm. After his expedition with Roosevelt, he continued his work as a field naturalist in South America for several years, collecting more than a hundred thousand birds over his lifetime. But the call to Rocky Dell had always been strong, and one day he finally went home for good. He loved fishing for brook trout in the stream that ran through one of his fields, tending his bees, and spending time with his grandchildren, who thought that he was “the biggest man in the world.” He died at Rocky Dell in 1948, when he was eighty-three years old.

Only one man in the expedition lived longer than Cherrie. Despite the near-constant hardship and danger of his chosen career, Cândido Rondon lived to be ninety-two years old—thirty-two years longer than Roosevelt. Rondon’s telegraph line, the central achievement of his life, was finally inaugurated on January 1, 1915, less than a year after he and Roosevelt had completed their journey. The telegraph line, however, was fated to fall obsolete in much less time than Rondon had taken to build it. The same year the line opened, radiotelegraphy found its way to Brazil, rendering unnecessary the copper telegraph wires that Rondon and his men had strung across eight hundred miles of the country’s uncharted interior.

Like Roosevelt, Rondon returned home a hero and remained one
for the rest of his life. He was hounded by photographers and journalists, invited to meet the president of Brazil, asked to run for political office (an opportunity he repeatedly declined), and promoted first to brigadier general and then, near the end of his life, to marshal. In the 1920s, after meeting Rondon on a trip to Brazil, Albert Einstein nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, and, in 1956, the Brazilian government renamed a territory of ninety-four thousand square miles—nearly twice the size of England—Rondônia in his honor. Two years later, on January 19, 1958, having explored and mapped more of the Amazon than any other man alive, and having made first contact with dozens of isolated Indian tribes, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon died in his own bed at his home in Rio de Janeiro.

Rondon today remains one of Brazil’s greatest heroes, and his efforts on behalf of the Amazonian Indians have endured in the form of the modern Indian Protection Service—the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI. In spite of all that he had tried to do for the Indians he loved, however, the inroads he made into their territory have had as devastating an impact on their survival as the rubber boom. During Rondon’s last years, in the 1950s, the path that he had carved out of the wilderness for his short-lived telegraph line became a road now known as BR-364. That road brought cattle ranchers, gold prospectors, rubber-tappers, and adventurers of all grades into the interior, where they took Indian land and wiped out entire tribes. When Rondon left the military academy in 1889, Brazil had been home to roughly a million Indians. By the time he died sixty-nine years later, fewer than 200,000 survived.

As the youngest American on the River of Doubt, Kermit Roosevelt might have been expected to carry his father’s legacy far into the twentieth century. Yet somehow, for all his brilliance, courage, and youthful Rooseveltian energy, he was never able to live up to his promise, or even his own expectations. Indeed, his death was so tragic that the only measure of comfort his family could have found in it was the fact that his father did not live to witness it.

The unraveling of Kermit’s life began soon after he returned to
South America with his new bride. He took a job in Argentina with a branch of the National City Bank, but while building railroads and bridges in wild Indian territory had suited Kermit’s adventurous spirit, banking in Buenos Aires did not. As the years passed, the young man who had once shown such promise and had impressed his father with his leadership skills and discipline became increasingly disaffected, able to cultivate an interest in little other than his wife and the son to whom she gave birth in Argentina—Kermit Jr., or Kim.

On January 6, 1919, Kermit was in Germany with the occupying army when he was handed a telegram sent by his brother Archie, who was home with severe war wounds. The telegram read simply: “The old lion is dead.” Roosevelt had been a central figure in each of his children’s lives, but he had been his second son’s inspiration and moral compass. Without him, Kermit was lost. The next day, in a letter to his mother, Kermit confessed, “The bottom has dropped out for me.”

Just as Roosevelt’s only brother, Elliott, had been devastated by the death of their father, so did the death of his own father deliver a staggering blow to Kermit. His romanticism and quiet introversion had been warmly reminiscent of his uncle Elliott in his youth, but the similarities between the two men in adulthood were as striking as they were tragic. Like Elliott, Kermit never really found his footing in the world. He could not easily put aside his romantic adventures and ideals and take up his real-world responsibilities, as his father had.

Also like his ill-fated uncle, Kermit found himself turning more and more frequently to alcohol to take the edge off of real life. He often drank heavily with his brother Ted, but he was less able to hold his liquor—and less willing to stop. In the 1920s, at a party in honor of Richard Byrd, the American admiral who made the first flight over the South Pole, Kermit drank so much that he passed out, and was found the next day lying in a corner of the club. Finally, Archie had him admitted to a sanatorium against his will, just as their father had forcibly admitted Elliott to a French asylum half a century earlier.

Like everything else in Kermit’s life, even the great love that had
sustained him through his darkest days on the River of Doubt did not so much shatter as crumble, slowly eroding through years of neglect and betrayal. Belle’s hard-edged social ambition and Kermit’s dreamy, aimless approach to life left them both frustrated and sad. Kermit lost Belle’s substantial inheritance after investing it in a business opportunity that failed during the Depression of the 1930s, and the couple was eventually reduced to renting out their Oyster Bay home and selling family jewelry.

Perhaps most painful of all for the proud, beautiful Belle, however, was Kermit’s open infidelity. He carried out his affairs with the same unencumbered ease and shrugging disregard for the consequences not only to his wife and children but to his father’s name, which seemed to pervade every aspect of his adult life. Although hurt and humiliated by the betrayal, Belle refused to let go. When Kermit disappeared in a drunken fog with his mistress, Belle asked Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her cousin by marriage and by then the president of the United States, to send the FBI to find him. When FDR committed the United States to World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, she asked him to give Kermit a military commission.

FDR sent Kermit to Alaska. It would prove to be his final adventure. At fifty-two years of age, just three years younger than his father had been when they had set out together down the River of Doubt, Kermit’s body was so broken and ill-used that he could not do much more than sit at a local restaurant and drink wine. But he talked airmen into letting him ride along on their missions to bomb Japanese strongholds in the Aleutians, and he joined up with Muktuk Marston, a major who had organized Alaska’s Tundra Army.

On the night of June 3, 1943, after making the rounds of Fort Richardson with Marston, Kermit turned to his friend and asked him what he was going to do after they returned to the post. When Marston told him that he was going to go to sleep, Kermit, haunted by all that he could have been and all that he had become, replied, “I wish I could go to sleep.” He returned to his quarters alone and took out a revolver that he had carried with him during his days in the
British Army. Nearly thirty years after he had used his extraordinary physical and mental strength to prevent his father from taking his own life on the banks of the River of Doubt, Kermit, sick, tired, sad, and alone, was now too weak to save himself from that same fate. Feeling the weight of the cold, heavy revolver in his swollen and lined hands, he placed it under his chin, and pulled the trigger.

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I
N THE
decades following Roosevelt’s journey down the River of Doubt, others tried to duplicate his achievement. Soon after his homecoming, two expeditions set out to retrace his route. One was forced to turn back for fear of an Indian attack. The other disappeared as soon as it launched its canoes on the remote river, and its members were never seen again. It was presumed that they were all killed by the same Indians that had shadowed Roosevelt’s expedition. Not until 1926 did another expedition, led by an American commander named George Miller Dyott, successfully descend the River of Doubt. Dyott returned to report that the river was just as Roosevelt had described it.

As the decades passed, the Cinta Larga Indians became increasingly bold toward outsiders. By the 1950s, they were attacking rubber-tappers, gold prospectors, and settlements that had sprung up around the telegraph stations. At first, the objective of these attacks was almost always to acquire metal tools. As time passed, however, the BR-364, the road that had been constructed along Rondon’s telegraph line, brought in hundreds of prospectors and adventurers who hated and feared the Indians, and who tried their best to kill as many of them as they could. The Cinta Larga’s war against the outside world became a matter of self-preservation, a pitched battle against extinction. This time, the outsiders did not stop coming. They shot Indians on sight, dynamited their villages from the air, and left gifts of poisoned food on their trails. The Indians retaliated by attacking settlements, riddling men with arrows, and mutilating their corpses.

It was not until the late 1960s, more than half a century after the
Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition, that the Indians living near the River of Doubt had their first official contact with the outside world. So-called
sertanistas
from FUNAI—men who, modeling themselves and their ideals after Rondon, set out to find and pacify Amazonian Indians—tried for years to make contact, but by that time too much damage had been done. The Indians did not trust anyone outside of their own tribe, especially not white men. The
sertanistas’
advances were repeatedly repelled. The Indians kept their wives and children hidden, a clear sign of distrust, and defiantly mutilated a collection of dolls that the men had left for them as gifts. “Next day we found them ripped apart,” a journalist following the
sertanistas
wrote, “the heads stuck on tree limbs, the bodies, skewered by arrows, lying beside the trail.”