The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (62 page)

Amid the political theater of June 1900, Roosevelt nevertheless found time to read books by fellow naturalists. Back in 1882, he had read
Camps in the Rockies
by the British sportsman William Adolph Baillie-Grohman and was floored by its accurate description of elks. Now, while the Republican convention was going on, Roosevelt read Baillie-Grohman’s newest effort,
Sport in the Alps
, and was again pleased. “Ever since I read your
Camps in the Rockies
I have felt tantalized because you had nothing about bear and bison hunting,” Roosevelt wrote to him. “I know you look down on the latter, but after all it was something peculiar which has passed away forever and I do wish you had written about it. I shall always feel defrauded until you write a couple of chapters on Wapiti and Big Horn in your
Camps in the Rockies
. By the way, your
Sport in the Alps
was exactly the
book which I had long been hoping to see written. Again here I wish you could have extended your researches to take in the records of bison and aurochs shooting in Lithuania and Poland in former centuries.” Realizing, perhaps, that he was being too critical of a writer he admired, Roosevelt invited Baillie-Grohman to Sagamore Hill to see his favorite black-tailed buck head, an award-winning Boone and Crockett Club trophy.
²⁵

Once Roosevelt became the vice presidential nominee in June, he traveled throughout New York, speaking to huge crowds in Minneola, Brooklyn, Newburgh, Auburn, Syracuse, and Niagara Falls, plus numerous hamlets in between. A radiant atmosphere seemed to accompany his every step. “I am as strong as a bull-moose,” he told Hanna, who was running McKinley’s reelection campaign, “and you can use me to the limit.”
²⁶
Once again Roosevelt went to Chicago, on September 3, this time to discuss the “labor question” instead of the “strenuous life.” Hordes of frenzied citizens followed his train on horses shouting, “We Want Teddy!” Wherever he went in the West, a great fuss occurred. As Roosevelt prepared to deliver a stem-winder in Kansas, the showman William “Buffalo Bill” Cody hopped onto the bandwagon, endorsing him by saying, “A cyclone from the West had come, no wonder the rats hunted their cellars!”
²⁷
Both Cody and Roosevelt believed that the three great U.S. presidents—Washington, Jackson, and Lincoln—were all outdoorsmen in their youth. They both exuded the Wild West mythology in demeanor, and Americans loved them for it.
²⁸

Hundreds of veterans of the Rough Riders followed Roosevelt through the Rocky Mountain states, acting as both bodyguards and essential eyewitnesses of his valor in Cuba. Buffalo Bill had signed up sixteen of the veterans to reenact the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cody’s Wild West extravaganza.
²⁹
When one populist editor mocked Roosevelt in Cripple Creek, Colorado, a well-armed Rough Rider shot the critic with a revolver; Roosevelt wouldn’t denounce this act, perpetrated in defense of his besmirched character. The fact that the Democrats had nominated the pro-silver ticket of William Jennings Bryan and Adlai E. Stevenson (the grandfather of the Democratic presidential nominee of 1952 and 1956) egged on Roosevelt’s quarrelsome nature. These were repugnant types, he believed, afraid of Darwinism, the strenuous life, fierce expansionism, vehement nationalism, modern science, and old-fashioned hard work. His opinion of Bryan, in fact, was very low—and the Scopes trial was still twenty years in the future.

The most memorable moment of the American West tour occurred when Roosevelt visited Medora. Suddenly there was a proud luster to his
gait. The Badlands lay before him, the essence of eternity found in the fossils of ancient fish and odd-shaped buttes. He wanted nothing more than to disappear over the horizon with a fine horse, saddle, and bridle. “The romance of my life,” Roosevelt said, “began here.”
³⁰
That simple phrase was soon adopted by North Dakotans as something akin to the state motto. Having traveled more than 1,000 miles by rail, delivered more than 1,000 speeches, and met 3 million folks, he found the absolute stillness of the badlands mighty impressive. His day in Medora was his only moment of sustained reflection that fall. “Tis Teddy alone that’s runnin’,” Mr. Dooley reported, “an’ he ain’t a-runnin, he’s gallopin’.”
³¹

President William McKinley and Governor Theodore Roosevelt ran together as a ticket in the 1900 presidential election. Because they never were together, this photo was purposely doctored to give the appearance of a policy pow-wow.
McKinley and T.R.
(Courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Association)

For the first time in his storied Democratic career, Robert B. Roosevelt broke from his party to vote for his nephew. Blood was thicker than politics. Spending time at Lotus Lake oyster farming, continuing to perfect fish hatching techniques and breed eels, R.B.R. had retired his bicycle in favor of an automobile (the first Roosevelt to do so). Indeed, he was now fancying himself as a race car driver. Although he also maintained a stable of the best horses in Long Island. Old Charlie Hallock, founder of
Field and Forest
, fresh from his success in obtaining birds’ rights, wrote to R.B.R., curious about how he planned on voting in the 1900 election, as a
Democrat with a nephew on the Republican ticket. “I’m glad…that you are still fishing and shooting,” R.B.R. wrote back. “I have been a Democrat the last year [but] the wild extravagances of Bryan and his populist associates forced me to McKinley. I can go there easier now for Bryan is just as crazy about 16 to 1 as ever. Besides Theodore is half a Democrat and will keep the administration right. The tail will wag the dog.”
³²

On November 6, 1900, McKinley and Roosevelt won in an electoral landslide. Boss Platt was perhaps the happiest man in America, having foisted Roosevelt on Washington, D.C., and gotten him out of New York. On the other hand, Mark Hanna openly wept, shaking his head in dismay and mumbling, “That crazy cowboy.”
³³
The Rough Rider was now vice president (or would be as of his swearing in on March 4 on the U.S. Capitol steps). Roosevelt’s Democratic critics immediately scoffed that being vice president was a boot-polisher’s job (anticipating John Nance Gardner’s remark that it wasn’t worth “a bucket of warm spit”). The unconventional Roosevelt, who had made bold reformist improvements in New York, they said, fearlessly standing up to Boss Platt on conservation issues, among others, had been relegated to a lifeless position. Poor Teddy Roosevelt had become the “fifth wheel of the executive coach.”
³⁴
Typically, Roosevelt would have none of such talk. “If I have been put on the shelf,” he said, “my enemies will find that I can make it a cheerful place of abode.”
³⁵
This quip was, of course, touche defensiveness and smart public relations.

Days after McKinley’s reelection, Roosevelt, showing how easily he could shift from being governor of New York to being a national office holder, wrote a long open letter to the National Irrigation Congress about the “vital necessity” of “storing the floods and preserving the forests.” No longer was he pontificating just about the Catskills and Adirondacks. Wanting to bring western life to the national forefront, he had arid places like the Great Basin and the San Joaquin Valley in mind. Refusing to mince words he laid out a blueprint that the federal government would soon adopt. Dams and reservoirs would be constructed to help irrigate even the “vast stretches of so-called desert in the West.” Herein lay the seeds for what would soon become Roosevelt’s reclamation of the American West as U.S. president. Not pausing to think if it was smart to build cities in the Mojave or Sonoran deserts, Roosevelt’s open letter made some fine points about how deforestation of the arid West must be prevented. Certainly, Roosevelt had his heart in the right place—even if he wasn’t foresighted enough regarding the potential menace of dams.
³⁶

Besides writing to the National Irrigation Commission, Roosevelt took
time that December to settle scores with politicians who had mocked, obfuscated, or taken advantage of loopholes in New York’s game and fish laws. Reports from wardens that one of his commissioners was abusive toward them, scoffing at fish hatcheries, really set him off. Roosevelt’s ire toward one of his five Fisheries, Game, and Forests commissioners in particular—Percy S. Lansdowne, former secretary of the Erie County Fish and Game Association, nominated by Roosevelt that March—was triggered by the illegal loan of a state wildlife boat as a donor’s perk. To Roosevelt this was simply stealing from the state. Furthermore, Lansdowne had been known to mock Roosevelt’s idea that the ticky-tacky tourism around Niagara Falls wasn’t good for nature. Now, as governor, preparing to be vice president, Roosevelt lit into Landsdowne in a letter, calling him an untrustworthy, lying, thieving scoundrel and part of the “patronage machine.”
³⁷

That December Roosevelt also took stock of his own duty and destiny. As of New Year’s Day his tenure as governor would be finished. After delivering the most speeches ever in a U.S. presidential campaign, he felt as if he had jumped off a twenty-story ledge, had landed in a fire department net, and was now strolling around Oyster Bay with his hands in his pockets, glowing and in a “what next” trance. He worried about falling into an inward desolation of spirit. The open letter on western irrigation was for public consumption, but Roosevelt also wrote beautiful, serene letters to fellow naturalists about the disappearance of wildlife and forests in the American West. He lamented that the “great mountain forests” he encountered in 1891 in Idaho and Montana and Wyoming were “growing bare of life.”
³⁸
A meditation poured out of his pen on how wilderness had cured him of asthma.
³⁹

There was, however, a strange melancholy in Roosevelt’s voice, perhaps indicating delayed depression after finally leaving the adrenaline-fueled campaign. All he could think about that December were the Colorado Rockies. He needed them as a fix for his declining spirits. He decided to head to Colorado come January and hunt cougars for the Biological Survey of Dr. Merriam. Instead of debating at the Cosmos Club how many types of cougars existed in the West, he would collect specimens to help in the inventorying. “Now I am hard at work endeavoring to assume the vice-president poise,” he wrote Elihu Root. “Incidentally I may mention that I am getting altogether too much of it as regards habit of body, and have become so fat and stiff that after the first of January when I’m a private citizen, I shall take two months’ holiday in Colorado and hunt mountain lions, if the fates are willing.”
⁴⁰

Ironically, being elected vice president brought a jolt of jitters to Roosevelt. Had his political career hit an impasse? Had he really become just a “dignified nonentity”? Instead of satisfying his ambition, the vice presidency became distressing. Intoxication could be found, he believed, in the Colorado Rockies. Blocking out six weeks of his calendar in January–February 1901, Roosevelt put himself on assignment for the U.S. Biological Survey. He would collect cougar specimens and then write about his hunts for a magazine. That was, from his perspective, honest work. He wouldn’t have to be in Washington, D.C., until the inaugural ceremony on March 4. “How I wish I could wait and make the hunt in March and April, so as to get after bear,” Roosevelt wrote to Philip Stewart, “but, of course, I have to be back in time for the Inauguration.”
⁴¹

III

Ever since Roosevelt read Winthrop Chanler’s essay on forest-clad northeastern Colorado in
American Big-Game Hunting
he had been hankering to hike and hunt in the White River region. Right after New Year’s Day 1901, he headed to Colorado Springs—nicknamed “Little London” because so many English tourists came to see the Rockies by train—for a combination holiday and cougar hunt. At long last Roosevelt would get to see snow-tipped Pikes Peak, the parts not desecrated by logging, even though the awful January weather made the summit impossible to ascend. From a Colorado outfitter Roosevelt acquired a large leather coat, sweaters, a corduroy jacket, a buckskin shirt, and loads of other appropriate winter wardrobe accessories. With his clothing secure he would travel by train to Colorado Springs to connect with friends and then head north to Meeker.

Roosevelt’s host was Philip B. Stewart of Vermont, Yale class of 1886, a former football captain, now a utility executive. He lived off and on in the resort town. (Stewart’s Republican father had served as governor of and congressman from Vermont.) Gladly, Stewart pointed out such landmarks as the Antlers Hotel and Garden of the Gods upon Roosevelt’s arrival. And there were others involved in the hunt. A surgeon in the Rough Riders, Dr. Frank Donaldson, chief of the throat and chest clinic at the University of Maryland, lived part-time in Manitou Springs, Colorado, where he ran the Red Crags wellness clinic and lodge (advertised as “the Saratoga of the Rockies”), was also there to greet Roosevelt.
⁴²
As the nurse Clara Barton noted in her memoir
The Red Cross
, Donaldson had been able to find the best medical supplies in Cuba for his Rough Riders because he
demanded
them.
⁴³
Overflowing with excitement, however,
Roosevelt could do nothing but talk to Stewart and Donaldson about the beauty of Pikes Peak—which he climbed a quarter of the way up in a failed attempt to find bighorn sheep.
⁴⁴
Donaldson, who believed that thin mountain air was healing for asthmatics, enjoyed hearing Roosevelt talk about his personal medical history and how nature helped him breathe. Two other Rough Riders from Colorado Springs—Walter Cash and Ben Daniels—were also on hand for Roosevelt’s visit.