The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  FRIDAY, 6 JUNE. “Black Friday with the reformers in the Republican party,” as one correspondent puts it87—begins at 11:30 A.M. with the slam of Chairman Lynch’s gold-ringed gavel. There can be no more delays; the first ballot is called. Amid cheers, hisses, and boos, the secretary announces the tally. With 411 votes required for nomination, James G. Blaine has 334½; Chester A. Arthur, 278; George F. Edmunds, 93.88

  On the second ballot, Blaine’s support increases while that of Edmunds declines. The third ballot brings Blaine within thirty-six votes of the nomination. Even now, Roosevelt will not give up. He starts rushing frantically from delegation to delegation, while Judge Foraker moves to adjourn, so that a final line of defense against Blaine can be organized. The motion is shouted down, but Roosevelt jumps into his chair, yelling for a roll call until he is red in the face. By now the entire hall is reverberating with whistles and catcalls; he continues to shout and gesticulate; when a delegate from New Jersey tells him to “sit down and stop your noise,” his temper cracks. “Shut up your own head, you damned scoundrel you!”89 The Chair rejects his point of order on a technicality. However Roosevelt does succeed, says the Chicago Tribune, “in rousing the admiring remarks of the fair sex, who enthused over his 28 [sic] years and glasses.”90

  Once again William McKinley pours oil on troubled waters. “Let us have no technical objections. I am as good a friend of James G. Blaine as he has in this convention, and I insist that every man here shall have fair play.” The motion to adjourn is voted on, and defeated. Roosevelt sits “pale, jerky, and nervous” as the fourth ballot proceeds. “I was at the birth of the Republican party,” murmurs old George William Curtis, “and I fear I am to witness its death.”91

  The sun streams in through high windows, flooding the hall with yellow light. A secretary begins to announce the tally. One Arthur delegate retires to the wings, brushes tears from his eyes, and changes his purple badge for a white one. It is all over.92 In a hurricane of hats, umbrellas, and handkerchiefs, and what is generally calculated to be the loudest roar in the history of American politics, McKinley pushes smilingly through the crowd. He bends over Roosevelt’s chair, asks him to second a motion making the nomination unanimous. Roosevelt shakes his head. McKinley turns to Curtis. The old man shakes his head too.93

  OUTSIDE, AS THE DELEGATES disperse in the warm afternoon, Roosevelt snaps at a World reporter, “I am going cattle-ranching in Dakota for the remainder of the summer and a part of the fall. What I shall do after that I cannot tell you.” Asked if he will support the party’s choice for President, he replies with angrily flashing spectacles, “That question I decline to answer. It is a subject that I do not care to talk about.”94

  At midnight, he is still too wrought up to sleep. He tells an Evening Post editor that, rather than vote for Blaine, he would give “hearty support” to any decent Democrat. More than anything, this rash remark reveals that Roosevelt is politically and physically at the end of his tether.95 The editor does not print it—yet.

  SATURDAY, 7 JUNE. Henry Cabot Lodge heads east to muse on the future; Theodore Roosevelt heads west to forget about the past. He craves nothing so much as the shade of his front porch, the lowing of his own cattle, the soothing scratch of his pen across paper. Yet even at St. Paul, the roar of Chicago pursues him. A reporter from the Pioneer Press demands to know if he will accept Blaine’s nomination or “bolt.” Some sixth sense warns Roosevelt that “bolt” is the most fatal word in American politics. “I shall bolt the Convention by no means,” he says at last. “I have no personal objections to Blaine.”96

  With that, Roosevelt changes trains and rumbles off to Little Missouri. A boyhood ambition is rising within him. He will take a rifle, load up a horse, and ride off into the prairie, absolutely alone, for days and days—“far off from all mankind.”97

  “I am going cattle ranching … what I shall do after that I cannot tell you.”

  The first public advertisement of the Maltese Cross brand, 1884. (Illustration 10.2)

  CHAPTER 11

  The Cowboy of the Present

  Heart’s dearest,

  Why dost thou sorrow so?

  THE STARS WERE ALREADY PALE in the east as he rode across the river-bottom and struck off up a winding valley.1 His horse, Manitou, loped effortlessly through a sea of sweet-smelling prairie-rose bushes. Presently the sun’s first rays rushed horizontally across the Badlands, kissing the tops of the buttes, and shocking millions of drowsy birds into song.

  Among the swelling chorus of hermit thrushes, grosbeaks, robins, bluebirds, thrashers, and sparrows, Roosevelt’s acute ear caught one particularly rich and bubbling sound, with “a cadence of wild sadness, inexpressibly touching.”2 He identified it as the meadowlark. Ever afterward, the music of that bird would come “laden with a hundred memories and associations; with the sight of dim hills reddening in the dawn, with the breath of cool morning winds blowing across lowly plains, with the scent of flowers on the sunlit prairie.”3

  Some varieties of birdsong, however much they ravished Roosevelt’s ear, aroused in his heart that same sharp, indefinable nostalgia which he had felt as a child, gazing at the portrait of Edith Carow.4 Ache though he may, he could not escape hearing them in Dakota, in June, a month of prodigious migrations. Nor did he really want to. For four years or more, he had been starved of this, the only kind of music he really understood. In abandoning his natural history studies for Alice Lee, he had stifled the precocious sensitivity to nature that was so characteristic of him as a youth. Now, as a twenty-five-year-old widower, with his second career abandoned—or at least indefinitely postponed—he could reopen his ears to the “sweet, sad songs” of the hermit thrush, the “boding call” of the whippoorwill, and “the soft melancholy cooing of the mourning-dove, whose voice always seems far away and expresses more than any other sound in nature the sadness of gentle, hopeless, never-ending grief.”5

  “New York will certainly lose him for a time at least.”

  Theodore Roosevelt in his buckskin suit, 1884. (Illustration 11.1)

  TWO MAGPIES, perched on a bleached buffalo skull,6 greeted him as he left the creek and rode through a line of scoria-red buttes. The naked prairie opened out ahead, already hot and shimmering under the climbing sun. Choosing one course at random, he headed south, scanning the horizon for antelope. All he carried, beside his rifle, was a book, a blanket, an oilskin, a metal cup, a little tea and salt, and some dry biscuits. Since arriving in Dakota nine days before, he had eaten nothing but canned pork and starch. Ferris and Merrifield were too busy with the spring roundup to shoot any fresh meat. Roosevelt therefore had good dietetic reasons, as well as his “boyish ambition,” for embarking on a trip across the prairie. But his real hunger was for solitude.

  Nowhere, not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains … their vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him. The landscape seems always the same, and after the traveller has plodded on for miles and miles he gets to feel as if the distance were really boundless. As far as the eye can see, there is no break; either the prairie stretches out into perfectly level flats, or else there are gentle, rolling slopes … when one of these is ascended, immediately another precisely like it takes its place in the distance, and so roll succeeds roll in a succession as interminable as that of the waves in the ocean. Nowhere else does one feel so far off from all mankind; the plains stretch out in deathless and measureless expanse, and as he journeys over them they will for many miles be lacking in all signs of life.7

  Lonely, melancholy, monotony, deathless—these words, especially the first, became obsessive parts of Roosevelt’s vocabulary in 1884. There was, however, no shortage of his favorite adjective manly, and his favorite pronoun, I. While accepting that his first few days on the prairie must have had their moments of anguish (since Alice’s death he had not been alone for more than a few hours at a time), one cannot read h
is descriptions of the trip without sensing his overwhelming delight in being free at last. “Black care,” Roosevelt wrote, “rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.”8

  He sighted several small bands of antelope that morning. For hours he pursued them, first on foot, then on hands and knees, and finally flat on his face, wriggling through patches of cactus; but the nervous creatures were off before he could draw a bead. After a lunch of biscuits and water, and a snooze in the broiling sun—the only shade available was that of his own hat—he pushed on doggedly. Once horse and rider were very nearly engulfed in a quicksand, “and it was only by frantic strugglings and flounderings that we managed to get over.” Roosevelt learned to stay well clear of stands of tall grass in seemingly dry creeks: beneath might lurk a fathomless bed of slime.

  He learned, too, that fleeing antelope have a quasi-military tendency to gallop in straight lines, even when intercepted at an angle. Taking advantage of this, he succeeded eventually in rolling over one fine buck “like a rabbit.” Cutting off the hams and head, and stringing them to his saddle, he rode on in search of a campsite. Around sunset he found a wooded creek with fresh pools and succulent grass. Turning Manitou loose to browse, Roosevelt lit a fire “for cheerfulness,” cut himself an antelope steak, and roasted it on a forked stick. Later he lay on his blanket under a wide-branching cottonwood tree, “looking up at the stars until I fell asleep, in the cool air.”9

  THE SHRILL YIPPING of prairie dogs awoke him shortly before dawn. It was now very chill, and wreaths of light mist hung over the water. Roosevelt reached for his rifle and strolled through the dark trees out onto the prairie.

  Nothing was in sight in the way of game; but overhead a skylark was singing, soaring above me so high that I could not make out his form in the gray morning light. I listened for some time, and the music never ceased for a moment, coming down clear, sweet, and tender from the air above. Soon the strains of another answered from a little distance off, and the two kept soaring and singing as long as I stayed to listen; and when I walked away I could still hear their notes behind me.10

  On returning to the camp at sunrise, Roosevelt caught sight of a doe going down to the water, “her great, sensitive ears thrown forward as she peered anxiously and timidly around.” Gun forgotten, he watched enchanted while she drank her fill. She snatched some hasty mouthfuls of wet grass; presently a spotted fawn joined her. When they left, the pond was taken over by a mallard and her ducklings, “balls of fuzzy yellow down, that bobbed off into the reeds as I walked by.”11

  ROOSEVELT WAS BACK at the Maltese Cross Ranch on 22 June, having spent five days in the wilderness, feeling “as absolutely free as any man could feel.”12 He might have stayed away longer, but he did not wish his venison to spoil in the hot sun. The little log cabin was deserted. Ferris and Merrifield had left for St. Paul, with $26,000 of his money, to purchase a thousand new head of cattle;13 they would not be back for another month. He felt too restless to settle down and begin the writing he had vaguely planned for summer. Next day he was in the saddle again, riding downriver.14

  En route he stopped at Medora to pick up some mail, and was able to take his first good look around since returning to the Badlands.15 The hamlet of last fall, with its giant chimney and scattered, half-finished houses, was now a bustling town of eighty-four buildings, including a hotel which the Marquis de Morès had modestly named after himself. Little Missouri, meanwhile, was already slipping into ghosthood on the other side of the river. Trains no longer stopped there. Medora, clearly, was the future capital of the Badlands.16

  A spirit of lusty optimism pervaded the place. Roosevelt, tethering Manitou and gazing about him, could not help but respond to it. The beef business was prospering; it had been a mild winter, and plenty of fat steers were ambling to their doom in the slaughterhouse. A record number of calves had been born to replace them—155 at Maltese Cross alone.17 Daily consignments of dressed meat were being shipped East by the Marquis’s Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company. Meanwhile, de Morès was spawning new business ideas with codfish-like fertility. He would plant fifty thousand cabbages in the Little Missouri Valley, and force-feed them with his own patented fertilizer, made from offal; he would run a stagecoach line along the eastern rim of the Badlands; he would invest $10,000 in a huge blood-drying machine; he would extend a chain of icehouses as far west as Oregon, so that Columbia River salmon could be whisked, cold and fresh, to New York in seven days; he would open a pottery in Medora to process the fine local clay; he would string a telegraph line all the way south to the Black Hills; he would supply the French Army with a delicious new soup he had invented.… As fast as these schemes flourished or failed, the Marquis would think of others.18

  It is not definitely known whether Roosevelt met the Marquis in Medora that Monday, but they would have had difficulty avoiding each other. De Morès was the most ubiquitous person in town, given to riding up and down the street in a large white sombrero, his blue shirt laced with yellow silk cord, his mustaches prickling haughtily. Tall, wiry, and muscular, he sat his horse more gracefully than any cowboy.19 Gunmen treated him with scared respect: his reputation as a sharpshooter was exceeded only by the vivacious and redheaded Madame de Morès.20

  Almost certainly the couple entertained Roosevelt with iced champagne, this being their invariable custom whenever a distinguished stranger came to town. The atmosphere may have been a little stiff at first, for there had been a dispute over grazing rights between the Marquis and Roosevelt’s cattlemen during the winter.21 But it is a matter of record that Roosevelt and de Morès were soon conferring on subjects of mutual interest, and planning a visit to Montana together.22

  Before continuing his expedition downriver, Roosevelt dropped in at the office of Medora’s weekly newspaper, the Bad Lands Cowboy. Its editor, a bearded, flap-eared, engaging youth named Arthur Packard, had disquieting news. According to Eastern dispatches, much political vituperation was being lavished on the names Roosevelt and Lodge. The former’s railroad interview at St. Paul, stating that he had “no personal objections” to James G. Blaine, and the latter’s announcement, on returning to Boston, that he, too, would support the Chicago convention’s choice, had enraged the reform press.23 Clearly they had been expected to follow George William Curtis, and a host of other prominent Independents, out of the Republican party.

  Roosevelt showed little interest, merely saying that the St. Paul reporter had misquoted him out of “asininity.”24 Politics must have seemed impossibly remote and irrelevant in Packard’s whitewashed, inky-smelling office, with its slugs of type spelling out news of more immediate interest, to do with horse-thievery and the price of fresh manure.25

  Remounting Manitou, Roosevelt rode out of Medora and headed north into the green bottomlands of the Little Missouri.

  THE NEXT ISSUE OF the Bad Lands Cowboy briefly reported that a new dude had arrived in town.

  Theodore Roosevelt, the young New York reformer, made us a very pleasant call Monday, in full cowboy regalia. New York will certainly lose him for a time at least, as he is perfectly charmed with our free Western life and is now figuring on a trip into the Big Horn country …26

  WHEN PACKARD’S NEWS ITEM appeared, Roosevelt was at least thirty miles north, well beyond the farthest reach of ranch settlement. He was looking for “untrodden ground” on which to build a ranch house. The Maltese Cross log cabin, situated only eight miles south of Medora, did not satisy his present hunger for solitude. A popular pony-trail passed within a few yards of the front door; ten or twelve cowpunchers galloping by every week amounted, as far as he was concerned, to an intolerable amount of traffic noise. Worse still, at least half of them wanted to stop off and pass the time of day.27 How could a man write with so many interruptions? He wanted to live where the peace of nature was total.

  Acting on a tip from a friendly cattleman, Roosevelt kept splashing across the meandering river, heading directly north until he reached a magnificent stretch of bo
ttomland on the left bank. Grass spread smoothly back from the water’s edge for a hundred yards, merging into a belt of immense cottonwood trees. This bird-loud grove extended a farther two hundred yards west. Then a range of clay hills, which seemed to have been sculpted by a giant hand as preparatory studies for mountains, loomed steeply into the sky. A distant plume of lignite smoke, glowing pink as evening came on, hinted at the surrounding savagery of the Badlands. No place could be more remote from the world, yet more insulated from the wilderness.28 Roosevelt knew he had found his “hold” in Dakota.

  Here he would build “a long, low ranch house of hewn logs, with a verandah, and with in addition to the other rooms, a bedroom for myself, and a sitting-room with a big fireplace.” There would be a rough desk, well stocked with ink and paper, two or three shelves full of books, and a rubber tub to bathe in. Out front, on a piazza overlooking the river, there would be the inevitable Rooseveltian rocking-chair, in which he could sit reading poetry on summer afternoons, or watching his cattle plod across the sandbars. At night, when he came back tired and bloody from hunting, there would be a welcoming flicker of firelight through the cottonwood trees, plenty of fresh meat to eat, and beds spread with buffalo robes.…29

  Of course several practical things had to be done before these dreams were realized. He must first claim the site (the presence of a hunting shack nearby meant he would probably have to buy squatter’s rights);30 he must order many more cattle; he must hire men to build the house and run the ranch for him. As it happened, he already had two recruits for the latter job: his two old friends from the backwoods of Maine, Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow.