The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (23 page)

Once again Wilcox collected the Roosevelts in Chicago—this time with an engineer and a former Confederate soldier in tow—for the second leg of the Midwest tramp. The party boarded the Chicago and North Western—nicknamed the “Pioneer Railroad”—and headed straight toward the Mississippi River as night fell. After crossing the Big Muddy at Davenport, their train rumbled on through Iowa City, where a state university flourished, and onto Grinnell along Rock Creek Lake, where farmers angled for crappies and bluegills in the long Indian summer. Eventually they found themselves in the small town of Carroll in western Iowa. This county seat, surrounded by strands of big bluestem grass, had a steel flour mill, eight general stores, five restaurants, and two grain warehouses, but life ran at a slow pace. People sometimes just sat by the river, a meandering brown stretch of the Des Moines. The previous year, most of the business district of Carroll had been destroyed in a fire, and the townsfolk were slowly starting to rebuild. There was nothing urban about the semi-prosperous community except the railroad depot.
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The Roosevelts leased a two-horse wagon and started hunting on the outskirts of Carroll, with a pack of eager dogs, roughly following the North Raccoon River northwest into what was considered one of the best prairie fowl hunting areas in the United States.
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Theodore observed how “absolutely treeless” and “sparsely scattered over with settlers” western Iowa was.
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There was no misunderstanding why locals were called flatlanders—only the occasional low hill, high bluff, or forlorn dale was to be found in Carroll County. The creek grades were so gentle that horses and oxen meandered across them with little or no difficulty. The Homestead Act of 1862 had drawn German, Scandinavian, and Czech im
migrants to western Iowa, and Roosevelt enjoyed meeting them, saluting their durable “pioneer stock.” Many of these flatlanders, however, were struggling in the 1880s; commodity prices had fallen, and it was difficult to overcome the fixed costs levied by grain elevators, railroad concerns, and butcher-yard operators.

Stricken with both asthma and cholera in town, Roosevelt nevertheless managed to bag the most game birds of his life around a plateau called Wall Lake, frequently referred to by locals as “goose pond.”
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Wildlife was abundant here. Using five Irish setters—“three of which worked well, the other two simple nuisances”—they kicked up covey after covey. Hardly trying, Roosevelt bagged thirty-eight grouse, five quail, one bittern, one grebe, and thirty-six yellowlegs (tall, long-legged shorebirds of freshwater ponds with a white rump, known for announcing themselves with a piercing “tew-tew-tew” siren wail). The sojourn in Illinois, by contrast, had yielded only thirty-five birds. And there were lots of other birds Roosevelt didn’t shoot in Iowa, only observing them in his diary. “There was a large flock of pelicans on the lake,” he noted on September 8, “and thousands of yellow-headed blackbirds.”
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In the Iowa brakes the sodbusters had a keen sense of nature’s beauty and bounty. Even their economic problems couldn’t get them to abandon the land. There was something about the constrained landscape—whether it was the natural meadows or the planted acres of wheat—that soothed the soul. There was natural beauty everywhere in Iowa if you only knew how to look. Joy seemed to be found by modest Iowa farmers even in the dust of summer. They were what Emily Dickinson had referred to in her poem “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” as “nature’s people.”
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Back east, city dwellers like himself studied nature too much; in Iowa people lived with it as if by the grace of God. There was a subtlety to the Iowa plains that liberated Roosevelt’s psyche in a way he hadn’t anticipated. “No nation has ever achieved permanent greatness unless this greatness was based on the well-being of the great farmer class, the men who live on the soil,” Roosevelt would write of the Midwest as president, greatly influenced by this trip. “For it is upon their welfare, material and moral, that the welfare of the rest of the nation ultimately rests.”
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III

Once again, after shooting their fill of birds in Carroll County, muscles sore, the Roosevelts headed back to bustling Chicago to regroup. Although Roosevelt never declared it right out, his brother was grating on him a little. Perceiving himself as an authentic naturalist hunter of the Mayne Reid school, Theodore wrote to his sister Corinne that Elliott, by contrast, “revels in the change to civilization—and epicurean pleasures.” Because Roosevelt never overate and never drank much more than a glass or two of alcohol, he mocked his younger brother’s gluttonous ways. “As soon as we got here [to Chicago] he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat,” Roosevelt continued, “then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because he was hot; a brandy smash ‘to keep the cold out of his stomach’ and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite.”
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Holed up again at the Hotel Sherman, the Roosevelts were particularly glad to be rid of Wilcox’s two companions, the prattling engineer and the unreliable ex-Confederate soldier. They visited a gunsmith, who was unable to fix their damaged rifles, so they both bought new ones. They were now more determined than ever to turn their next adventure into even more birds bagged. Leg three of their Midwest tramp would be to the Red River country of Minnesota, part of the vast Hudson Bay watershed and reportedly abounding with wildlife. Newspapers back in 1880 often called the 550-mile tributary the “Red River of the North” to help differentiate it from the southern tributary of the Mississippi River, which formed part of the border between Texas and Oklahoma. The Roosevelt brothers stayed in Moorhead, a small city located on the border of North Dakota (or the Dakotah Territory, as it was known then). That’s where their cousin Jack Elliott lived, and the brothers were excited about spending time with him flushing out ruffed grouse from the forestland. Not since Dresden had the three been together.

Unlike Harvey and Carroll, Moorhead was irrigable, and a transportation hub in the Wild West for merchandise and agricultural products, situated conveniently between the Twin Cities of Minneapolis–Saint Paul and Winnipeg, Manitoba. Founded in 1871 by William G. Moorhead, a director of the Northern Pacific Railroad, it was notorious as a “sin city” because of its 100 or more smoky bars (and, one assumes, brothels).
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There was a certain unhurried stillness in the air around Moorhead that had an enduring appeal for Roosevelt. Here, among the “guns of autumn” (as fall hunting was called in Minnesota), for the first time in his life, Roosevelt felt the lure and tug of the Wild West he had read about. Staying
at a “miserable old hotel” surrounded by a strip of bars, he could imagine himself in Tucson or Dodge City, where the saloon doors always swung open. (The outlaw Jesse James had launched his career as a notorious bank robber in 1876, just over 200 miles down the road in Northfield, Minnesota.)

Taking a buggy out to the countryside with his brother and Jack Elliott, Theodore marveled at how easy it was to snare grouse in Minnesota. The great challenge in shooting these birds was that they clustered in dense, prickly thickets and usually flushed dramatically without warning.
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There was perhaps another reason that Roosevelt wanted to hunt in the lazy Red River region along the border between Minnesota and Dakotah territories. The Red River was in the middle of a crucial migratory route for dozens of bird species. Surely Roosevelt also knew that eagles and owls roosted permanently around the river bottom forests and remnant prairie.
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With the assistance of a “stub tailed old pointer” (and a Moorhead barkeeper who daylighted as a cart driver) he borrowed along the way in Saint Paul, Theodore’s goal was simple: shoot more game birds in Minnesota than he had shot in Illinois and Iowa combined; fill up those tarpaulin sacks.
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Unsurprisingly, Roosevelt relished playing a Minnesota-Dakota sportsman with shells in his jacket pocket, wandering through plowed land listening for the whir of wild ducks, and flushing ruffed grouse out of open grasslands and forest thickets. The desolate countryside was crisp and lovely in mid-September. Columns of cumulonimbus clouds ascended and spread in the blue sky. There wasn’t a hitching post for miles. Already the aspen and ash were starting to take on fall colors as dramatic as those in Vermont. This was the autumn rutting season, and the young four-point deer were challenging the eight-pointers over females. Roosevelt’s most memorable nights in Moorhead were spent camping under the stars, the fall nip adding an aura of romance to the outings. Although Theodore and Elliott were not good cooks, they had mastered the art of cleaning the chicken-sized grouse. Every night they stuffed themselves with fire-roasted bird until they burped.

For ten days in Minnesota, Roosevelt bagged more than 203 game birds, carefully listing them in his diaries: 95 grouse, 51 snipe, seventeen ducks, sixteen plovers, one goose, and so on. He had beaten his own Iowa record. Clearly Theodore was no longer collecting specimens or playing ornithologist. More telling, however, was his side note that Elliott had bagged only 201.
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That means he had beaten the “old boy” by two birds. Much of the time in western Minnesota Roosevelt had terrible asthma and was forced to sleep sitting up, dreaming intermittently, perhaps,
about the prairie potholes of the Dakotas, where the hunting was supposed to be even better than in Minnesota’s Red River region.

One morning Theodore and Elliott awoke at dawn and went searching for grouse hot spots. Carefully listening for the birds’ drumming noise—which sounded like a stomach growling—the Roosevelts got their game. They also got lost in a “cold driving rain storm”—so lost, in fact, that at dusk they were forced to knock on a Norwegian farmer’s “neat but frail little house” asking to “put up for the night.”
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It was a scene straight from the pages of
Giants in the Earth
. According to his diary Theodore lay silently that evening in front of the fireplace while the wind blew hard outside. He was covered by a bison robe but was unable to sleep. This was his first real western experience. To Roosevelt, however, getting lost in Minnesota was “lovely,” a softer alternative to “bully.” During the coming days the Roosevelt party would camp along a bend of the Buffalo River—an eighty-eight-mile tributary of the Red River, lined with hardwoods, which looked like a poorly maintained Dutch canal.
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Roosevelt’s fierce competition with Elliott does show that he used the sport as a mechanism to enhance his manly self-worth. His grousing also reflected class-consciousness. Men with an aristocratic mien shot game birds with a retinue of guides; by contrast, the working class went after squirrels and raccoons with a mongrel dog. Game laws made sense when you were rich, looking for sport. Poor people shot game—with or without laws—just to stay alive. Much like being initiated into Porcellian at Harvard, grouse hunting to Theodore was a rite of initiation into manhood with his younger brother. The very act of flushing grouse together was a brotherly bonding experience.
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Another outcome of Roosevelt’s midwestern tramp was that he grew less interested in birds and more intrigued by the notion of hunting big game. After all, being wrapped in a buffalo robe in Minnesota wasn’t the same as either shooting a bison or seeing a thinned-down wild herd with his own eyes. “No man who is not of an adventurous temper, and able to stand rough food and living,” he soon wrote, “will penetrate to the haunts of the buffalo. The animal is so tough and tenacious of life that it must be hit in the right spot; and care must be used in approaching it, for its nose is very keen, and though its sight is dull, yet, on the other hand, the plains it frequents are singularly bare of cover; while, finally, there is just a faint spice of danger in the pursuit, for the bison, though the least dangerous of all bovine animals will, on occasions, turn upon the hunter and though its attack is, as a rule, easily avoided, yet in rare cases it manages to charge home.”
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After so many grouse, Roosevelt wanted to someday travel west of the Red River into buffalo country. (And he would have to do it soon, for the cattle were taking over.) Being in Moorhead was akin to traveling 1,400 miles to see a major attraction—buffalo—and then never entering the admission gate. He had, however, seen plenty of cattle. Between 1877 and 1885 more than 2.5 million head of cattle were slaughtered in Chicago; Roosevelt had been able to see the stockades and corrals for himself.
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What he hadn’t been able to witness on his midwestern tramp, however, were the cattle drovers herding from Fort Worth north by the ninety-ninth meridian to Ogallala, Nebraska, and from there into the northern plains of Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. Because he had not seen the great herds of buffalo and cattle, Roosevelt believed he had missed the main thrust of the western expansion. He vowed to return. Nobody would have to lend him a buffalo robe. He’d earn the next one for himself.

Paradoxically, that odd night with the buffalo robe in a stranger’s home was in many respects Roosevelt’s good-bye to his rigorous outdoors life for a while. Maturity and responsibility beckoned. Perhaps the recent college graduate wanted to push on westward through the Dakotah Territories to the Bitterroots, where the elk ran in healthy herds and the geysers of Yellowstone were reliable. But he couldn’t. He was planning to start studying law in New York and he was getting married the next month. His diary, in fact, abounds with paeans to Alice Lee: “She is so pure and holy that it seems almost profanation to touch her, no matter how gently and tenderly.” “My happiness now is almost too great.”
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It was as if he couldn’t write her name without bursting a vein. Pausing in Saint Paul about to board an eastbound train, burning with impatience to get home, he sounded tired: “How glad I am it is over,” the wanderer wrote from the depot, “and I am to see Alice.”
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