The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (30 page)

The killing of this first grizzly bear was cathartic. During the coming days Roosevelt bagged two more: a mother and a cub. Why was he was so compelled to slaughter an animal he loved so deeply? How could he have shot a baby face-to-face? Roosevelt would claim that he needed multiple
specimens for scientific study. He would claim that the bear meat went into the evening pot. But both answers were bunk. Quite simply, he enjoyed shooting the birds and animals he loved the most. The brutality of such acts never seemed to bother Roosevelt, for he considered himself privileged as a Darwinian biologist, a big game hunter, and a naturalist.

Feeling like a champion hunter, Roosevelt descended with Merrifield and Lebo out of the Bighorns carrying enough trophies to fill the walls of a small Wyoming lodge. They arrived in the town of Buffalo on September 18 full of superlatives, and rented rooms at the Occidental Hotel.
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That evening Roosevelt, the harried traveler, dined with U.S. Cavalry officers at Fort McKinney, listening to snatches of conversations about the peace settlements with the northern Cheyenne.
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Even though Lebo was a blacksmith, the Roosevelt party’s horses were going lame from collapsing in creeks and ravines.
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Although local wisdom dictated that any cowboy needed about a dozen mounts for round-ups or 1,000-mile treks, the Roosevelt trio started their journey back to Medora with just a couple of horses.
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On October 1 they got caught in what Roosevelt called a “furious hurricane” that whirled with “driving rain squalls.”
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For a couple of days they were forced to hide out in butte alcoves, desperate to stay warm and dry. By the time the weather cleared, Roosevelt had had enough. Leaving Lebo behind with the prairie schooner of supplies, he started riding off with Merrifield toward Medora. With winter around the corner and a presidential election just weeks away, Roosevelt was eager to return to New York with his fine trophies.

In
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
, Roosevelt wrote eloquently of what it was like to be an adventurer in the Bighorns and to see your ranch appear on the open range, promising clean sheets and a library shelf packed with books by Shakespeare and Hawthorne. He bowed to the unassailable beauty of the West. If nothing else, the Badlands had encouraged Roosevelt to be more poetic as a writer. He was inspired by nature, and his writing now took on a more colorful cast. Whatever hardships he endured had been distilled into only postcard memories. Clearly, he had the talent to succeed as a wilderness writer. As the naturalist E. O. Wilson of Harvard once aptly noted, field biologists have a lot more “gee whiz” or “sense of wonder” than other kinds of scientists.
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“The rolling plains stretched out on all sides of us, shimmering in the clear moonlight; and occasionally a band of spectral-looking antelope swept silently away from before our path,” Roosevelt wrote. “Once we went by a drove of Texan cattle, who stared wildly at the intruders; as we passed they charged down by us, the ground rumbling beneath
their tread, while their long horns knocked against each other with a sound like the clattering of a multitude of castanets. We could see clearly enough to keep our general course over the trackless plain, steering by the stars where the prairie was perfectly level and without landmarks; and our ride was timed well, for as we galloped down into the valley of the Little Missouri the sky above the line of the level bluffs in our front was crimson with the glow of the unrisen sun.”
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I

A
t some point in the fall of 1884, Roosevelt conceived of assembling his jottings about the Badlands and the Bighorns into a book. Updating Captain Mayne Reid, he considered how
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
(as he called the project) could combine vivid natural history with tales of big-game hunting; he wanted to offer an antidote to the artificiality of money-driven urban life, which he felt was hampering the democratic spirit as well as feminizing a generation of American men.
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Always a romantic, Roosevelt originally intended to write
Hunting Trips
at the Elkhorn and Maltese Cross ranches, even though there was no decent reference library in the entire Dakota Territory. Pragmatism, however, eventually held sway (as it usually did with Roosevelt), and he ended up composing
Hunting Trips
back east.

By October, in fact, Roosevelt was back in Manhattan, having abandoned his plan of getting away to Dakota. With the presidential election looming, he put
Hunting Trips
on hold and threw himself wholeheartedly into the heated political contest. Using Bamie’s home at 689 Madison Avenue as his pied-à-terre, Roosevelt stumped incessantly for the Republican, James G. Blaine. The fact that the Democratic nominee, Grover Cleveland, was hounded by charges of adultery and had fathered an illegitimate child increased Roosevelt’s zeal to elect Blaine. According to the
New York Sun
, Theodore, forever the puritan, chafed at the unholy notion of a womanizing rogue becoming commander in chief.
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(Perhaps if Roosevelt had fully known that Cleveland was a true outdoorsman, he would have been less antagonistic.) In private, however, Roosevelt didn’t care for the partisan stammerings of either candidate. They were both, he believed, old-school mugwumps while he was a new-school reformer. In any case, Blaine was accused of representing “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” and whether these charges proved decisive or not, went down in defeat on Election Day. (Cleveland won by a relatively close margin: 219 electoral votes to 182.
³
) Writing to Henry Cabot Lodge, who had himself lost a congressional race in Massachusetts, Roosevelt carped that the Re
publican Party had been done in by so-called “Independents” whom he deemed “pharisaical fools and knaves.”
⁴

Theodore Roosevelt wearing a customized Badlands hunting costume. This photograph was used to promote
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman.
Roosevelt in customized Badlands costume (
Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library
)

Disappointed by Blaine’s loss, Roosevelt headed back to the Badlands just two days after the elections in November, eager to gather material for
Hunting Trips
and to track bighorn sheep along the Montana line. His spirits rose once he was on a horse. He spent a few days at the cabin at Maltese Cross, catching up with Dakotan friends. Then, with hard snow falling, he trotted north on his horse Manitou. The solitude of the Elkhorn Ranch, he figured, would offer minimum distractions and he could start writing
Hunting Trips
in earnest.

The prairie winds of the Dakota Territory could be ruthless, and Roosevelt, traveling by himself, was nearly blinded when snow squalls started blowing in his face. As he forded the Little Missouri River the ice cracked and fear ran up and down his spine. Then, to use Jack London’s term in
The Call of the Wild
,
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the “dominant primordial beast” welled up in Roosevelt. Undaunted by his precarious predicament, he took the inclement weather as a challenge. By twilight, new snow was falling so heavily that Roosevelt was forced to seek shelter in a lean-to that he luck
ily stumbled upon. He’d forgotten to bring hard tack with him, so dinner consisted of only tea as snowdrifts layered up against his door.
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Roosevelt reported in his private diary that he slept, warm and without vexation, by a small fire while wolves—which he deemed “the beast of waste and desolation”—howled nearby.
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At daybreak a narrow band of light appeared in the east, intimating that the storm had subsided.

Having endured the wintry ordeal, a famished Roosevelt grabbed his shotgun and hunted sharptail grouse in the sparkling white snowdrifts. Pioneers in the Dakota Territory and Minnesota used to claim that the brushland was so filled with sharptails that when they flocked the sun was blocked (although this was a dubious claim, because grouse don’t rise that high), and indeed Roosevelt bagged five that day. “The sharptails fly strongly and steadily, springing into the air when they rise, and then going off in a straight line, alternately sailing and giving a succession of rapid wing-beats,” Roosevelt wrote. “Sometimes they will sail a long distance with set wings before alighting, and when they are passing overhead with their wings outstretched each of the separate wing feathers can be seen, rigid and distinct.”
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Immediately, Roosevelt roasted two grouse over a small fire. They were uncommonly tasty. Fortified, he continued on to the frozen trail to the Elkhorn. Upon arriving at the ranch, he was cheerfully greeted by Sewall and Dow. Roosevelt was pleased to learn that his hardy cattle were in relatively fine shape. The idea of going on a hunt was bandied about, but the trio decided to first procure firewood—lots of firewood—for the blustery winter days ahead. For hours they chopped down trees and collected kindling. The jocular Maine lumberjacks teased Roosevelt, saying that he was a rank amateur when it came to felling trees. As Dow mockingly told a rancher after three days of clear-cutting cottonwoods, “Well, Bill cut down fifty-three, I cut forty-nine, and the boss, he beavered down seventeen.”
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Always attuned to animal metaphors, Roosevelt knew he was being good-naturedly mocked. Beavers gnawed down cottonwoods and willows slowly and painstakingly, eating bark while they worked. For a tenderfoot trying to be a bull moose, being perceived by his workers as a “beaver” was a real put-down.

Nevertheless, with temperatures dropping to thirty degrees below zero, Roosevelt wisely retreated back to the Maltese Cross, where the primitive creature comforts of Medora were near at hand. He spent hours reading poetry, shooting mule deer, and lunching with the Marquis de Mores at his château in Medora. Roosevelt loved his winter outfit of coonskin cap, long overcoat, and fur-lined gloves. But most of his free
time was spent indoors, writing, and his deep love and appreciation for the wilderness in winter became evident in his prose. With a craftsman’s care he began pondering the power of death, the howling prairie, and the bitter cold. New England poetry was, of course, famous for bleakness, and Roosevelt imitated its tone. The deep-seated sentiment of “iron desolation” permeated his writing. (The naturalist John Burroughs had used iron as a poetic metaphor for a forest’s forlornness in his 1879 book
Locusts and Wild Honey
, which greatly influenced Roosevelt.
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) “When the days have dwindled to their shortest, and the nights seem never ending, then all the great northern plains are changed into an abode of iron desolation,” Roosevelt wrote. “Sometimes furious gales blow out of the north, driving before them the clouds of blinding snow-dust, wrapping the mantle of death round every unsheltered being that faces their unshackled anger. They roar in a thunderous bass as they sweep across the prairie or whirl through the naked cañons; they shiver the great brittle cottonwoods, and beneath their rough touch the icy limbs of the pines that cluster in the gorges sing like the chords of an aeolian harp.”
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One winter day Roosevelt was informed that some bighorn sheep were climbing buttes only twenty-five miles from the Maltese Cross. Ever since he had first arrived in the Badlands, he had wanted a ram’s head for his trophy collection at Sagamore Hill. The hunt itself would be recorded in Chapter 7 of
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
, “A Trip after Mountain Sheep.” With Merrifield at his side, Roosevelt rode deep into the “fantastic shapes” of the “curiously twisted” Badlands.
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Because bighorns lived in rocky precipices, they didn’t leave detectable footprints, so Roosevelt had only his rifle and luck to guide him.
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Stalking bighorn was a difficult proposition requiring mountaineering skills, stamina, and tenacity. Larger than a deer, a bighorn ram weighed around 300 pounds and was swift and sure-footed. “In his movements he is not light and graceful like the pronghorn and other antelopes, his marvellous agility seeming rather to proceed from sturdy strength and wonderful command over iron sinews and muscles,” Roosevelt wrote. “The huge horns are carried proudly erect by the massive neck; every motion of the body is made with perfect poise, and there seems to be no ground so difficult that the big-horn cannot cross it. There is probably no animal in the world his superior in climbing, and his only equals are the other species of mountain sheep and the ibexes.”
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Eventually, after days of unstable tracking on slippery ledges and knifelike ridges, Roosevelt got his handsome sheep. Although Roosevelt
admitted that it was a lucky shot, he claimed that skill was also a factor. Strapping the ram onto his horse Manitou’s back, he brought the prize to the Maltese Cross ranch and feasted on mountain “mutton.”
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For Roosevelt, his wilderness experiences always got back to his desire for good health
and
bragging rights. “I have just returned from a three day trip in the Badlands after mountain sheep; and after tramping over the most awful country that can be imagined I have finally shot a young ram with a fine head,” he wrote to his sister Anna. “I have now killed every kind of plains game.”
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(By the time Roosevelt became president in 1901, the bighorn sheep in the Badlands had been wiped out.)

As Christmas 1884 approached, however, the merciless “iron desolation” and strange landforms of the interior plains were too much for Roosevelt. He was homesick for his daughter Alice (or Baby Lee, as he often called her). The numbing Dakota cold proved unrestful and intellectually unproductive. Scooping up his notes for
Hunting Trips
once again, Roosevelt boarded the eastbound train. He was frustrated because writing about the Badlands while
in
the Badlands had proved elusive. After enduring the sad holiday in New York—the eggnog parties and Christmas packages were not the same without his mother and his wife—Roosevelt hunkered down to write seriously about the Badlands and Bighorns. Nothing could distract him from the arduous chore at hand. Unlike
The Naval War of 1812
, this first-person effort would be a memoir from Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming intermixed with Burroughsian observations on natural history, the sportsman’s code, hunting stories, warnings about biological conservation, and cowboy lore.

After Roosevelt settled down to write, and consuming pots of black coffee, he pushed himself relentlessly, usually writing for two or three sessions a day. By February 1885, he had written 95,000 words, and the next month
Hunting Trips
, a collocation of wilderness experiences, was finished. The pace had exhausted him. But once Roosevelt’s depleted health was restored, after days of almost nonstop sleep, he returned to Medora to spend a few weeks checking up on his ranches.
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Early on, Roosevelt—a bit out of practice in the saddle—was tossed from Manitou into the frigid Little Missouri River. Chunks of ice kept him from being swept away in the current, and somehow he managed to get a grip on the situation and save himself and his horse. Perversely, he was delighted by the thrill of being near death and by the tingly, numbing cold water. Days later, abruptly, he purposely tossed himself into the river to relive the experience. “I had to strike my own line for twenty miles over broken country
before I reached home and could dry myself,” he boasted to Bamie. “However it all makes me feel very healthy and strong.”
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Meanwhile, G.P. Putnam’s Sons was preparing to publish
Hunting Trips
(dedicated to Elliott Roosevelt, “That Keenest of Sportsmen and Truest of Friends”) in July, as a so-called sporting book.
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No other well-known politician in America, the advance notices boasted, could have written such a gripping hunting narrative. A photograph of Roosevelt posed in a fringed buckskin suit, Winchester rifle at his side, was used to promote the author as a gentleman-sportsman. Taken in a New York studio, the photo, a contrived combination of Buffalo Bill and John James Audubon, reeked of Broadway hokeyness, right down to the backdrop of ferns and an artificial grass carpet. But the actual book, filled with etchings and woodcuts and published in a first edition of only 500 copies, printed on quarto-size sheets of handwoven paper, remains a true collector’s item. Although it had a strong conservationist ethos,
Hunting Trips
was primarily aimed at gentleman-sportsmen like the writer, aristocrats who could afford hunting holidays, chuck-wagon hands, and what was then a hefty retail price of fifteen dollars.
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