Theodore noted that the first white hunters who populated the Little Missouri region had as good a title to the area as “that of most Indian tribes to the lands they claim,” but no one “dreamed of saying that these hunters owned the country.” He felt that the Indians, like the white settlers, should be given 160 acres as their claim. Should they decline the offer, “then let him share the fate of the thousands of white hunters and trappers who have lived on the game that the settlement of the country has exterminated, and let him, like these whites, who will not work, perish from the face of the earth which he cumbers.”
Agreeing that such a doctrine was merciless, Theodore felt it was “just and rational . . . it does not do to be merciful to a few, at the cost of justice to the many. The cattle-men at least keep herds and build houses on the land; yet I would not for a moment debar settlers from the right of entry to cattle country, though their coming in means in the end the destruction of us and our industry.”27
Chance Meeting
Her face stirred up in me homesickness and longings for the past which will come again never, alack never.
THEY HAD BEEN FRIENDS SINCE CHILDHOOD. THEIR PARENTS WERE friends, and the young girl, who was born Edith Kermit Carow in Norwich, Connecticut, on August 6, 1861, often thought of the Roosevelt household as her second home.
She had been born a few weeks after Theodore’s younger sister, Corinne, who became her childhood friend.1 The daughter of Charles and Gertrude Carow, Edith, like Theodore, enjoyed a life of privilege. Her father ran the family shipping company, one of the richest in America. A well-educated child, she was known to favor a quiet corner of the house to read a book rather than join a party. It was obvious, even in those early years, that a special relationship was growing between Edith and Theodore. She had stood next to Theodore and his brother, Elliott, in the window at their grandfather’s home, watching President Lincoln’s funeral procession. (Both Theodore and Edith shared a deep admiration for the slain president for the rest of their lives.) They loved books, often reading to each other. Edith would let “Teedie” play house with her, but she excluded his brother when they came to play at the Carow home.2 Yet they were complete opposites in personality. Theodore was passionate and impetuous, while Edith was perceptive and circumspect. It was said that Edith was the calm center of Theodore’s cyclone.
As a twelve-year-old boy, Theodore had wept openly over leaving his friend behind when the Roosevelt family traveled to Europe. He wrote Edith letters detailing his adventures, and when her written reply met him in a foreign city, he was overcome with homesickness. In Paris, he noted in his diary, “Mama showed me the portrait of Eidieth [sic] Carow and her face stired [sic] up in me homesickness and longings for the past which will come again never, alack never.”3 Edith was a constant visitor at the Roosevelt summer home, Tranquility, which the family rented on Long Island, not far from where Theodore would later build his own home. When he was old enough, Theodore would take her out in his small rowboat. They both attended the same social events, and his name appeared more than any other boy’s on her dance card.4
Despite Edith’s idyllic times with Theodore and the rest of his family, the Carow family was anything but unspoiled. Her father fell into the cargo hold of one of the company’s ships and struck his head. It appears that after this accident, his instability advanced, especially with his fondness for alcohol. At the end of the Civil War, the family business began to decline, eventually leaving Charles Carow penniless. Edith’s mother, Gertrude, who already suffered from the pangs of a loveless marriage, became a hypochondriac. The family began living with various relatives in Manhattan starting in 1867. Little wonder Edith eagerly sought the stability of the Roosevelt household.
Gertrude Carow’s father died in November 1882, leaving her $40,000. His will stipulated that the money was to remain invested, with the interest ($5,000) paid semiannually for the rest of Gertrude’s life.5 While not an exorbitant sum, it allowed the Carows to live somewhat comfortably. However, the money couldn’t help Charles Carow, who died on March 17, 1883, at the age of fifty-eight.
In the fall of 1877, Theodore left for Harvard. In his few letters to his family, he neither mentions Edith, nor asks anyone to give her his regards. It wasn’t until December of that year that Theodore and Edith had a chance to spend time together. During May 1878, when his family traveled to Boston to visit him, he asked Edith to come with them. When she returned home, in a brief letter to Theodore, she described the visit as “three perfectly happy days.”6
Family members on both sides expected Theodore and Edith to marry when he finished his studies at Harvard. During August 1878, they spent a great deal of time together at Tranquility. In his diary entry for August 22, he noted that they went up to the summer house, yet after that date Edith is not mentioned in his diary for several weeks. Many believe Theodore had asked Edith to marry him on August 22, but she refused. No one can state with certainty what happened that night, including family members. Both Theodore and Edith never discussed the matter, although he indicated in a letter to his sister, Bamie, that they both had tempers. Edith once ambiguously noted, “Theodore had not been nice.”7
After August 22, Theodore’s personality took on a darker tone. He rode his horse, Lightfoot, so hard, he later worried he had hurt the animal. When a neighbor’s dog ran after them, nipping at Lightfoot’s hoofs, he turned around and shot the dog. Anger burned in him.
Two months later, Theodore met Alice Lee at a party.
Edith, despite the break from Theodore, did not walk away from the Roosevelt family. She remained close to Bamie and Corinne, even attending Theodore’s wedding, where she spent the night “dancing the soles off her shoes.”8 She was also a bridesmaid at Corinne’s 1882 wedding, and hosted a party for her former love when he won his Assembly seat.9 From the time of their breakup, it appears that Edith never showed any true romantic interest in another man until early October 1885.
One has to wonder whether Theodore’s romantic feelings for Alice, at least when they first met, were simply those of a broken heart on the rebound. It’s obvious that he did love Alice, and that her death greatly affected him. Why, in 1885, did he ask Bamie and Corrine to warn him when Edith might visit? Why would he want to avoid her at all costs? The likely answer is that Theodore still held deep feelings for Edith. Evading her was his way to avoid confronting his emotions. Just as he had done in burying Alice’s memory so deeply, if he shunned any contact with Edith, she did not exist.
Leaving Medora in the middle of September 1885, Theodore returned to New York City for the Republican convention, where he would help to draft the party platform. He received little notice at the convention, and it does not appear that he did much to attract attention. A few weeks later, in early October, walking into Bamie’s house one day, he was met by a lovely woman of twenty-four coming down the stairs.
It was Edith Carow.
There is no record of what they said to each other. Their romance was one of the best-kept secrets, with not even Bamie or Corinne having any knowledge of it. In his diaries for 1885 and 1886, Theodore does not mention Edith by name, but a simple “E” appears on various pages. In some instances, he mentions attending a dinner party or the theater, with the solitary “E” noted alongside the event.10 It was not considered good form in “polite society” for a recent widower to jump into another romance too quickly. A widower, no matter what age, had to show restraint and, at all times, remain a gentleman. To outsiders, it appeared that they had simply renewed their old childhood friendship.
On November 17, Theodore asked Edith to marry him, and she accepted. They agreed to hold off on publicly announcing their engagement for a year. Instead of returning to his ranches, he remained in New York to be as close to Edith as possible. He attended numerous dinners and balls during the society season in Manhattan, usually with Edith discreetly nearby. The day before his twenty-seventh birthday, he invited Edith to attend the Long Island Meadowbrook Fox Hunt
, which began at Sagamore Hill. Although a fox hunt was considered by Eastern blue bloods to be far more dignified than the grizzly bear or buffalo hunts of the West, it was just as intense. In typical fashion, Theodore led the hunt, galloping for over three miles ahead of the other riders. Five miles into the ride, his horse showed signs of being lame and, at the next jump, tripped over a wall, hitting a group of stones. Thrown from the saddle, Theodore’s face hit something hard, possibly some rocks, and he felt a snap in his left arm. Once his horse had regained its footing, Theodore was back in the saddle chasing the other riders, this time using just one hand. His left arm dangling at his side, his face bloodied, he rode on and arrived in time to see the hounds corner the fox. When, in this condition, he approached Baby Lee at the stables, the child ran away in complete horror. Writing to his friend Lodge, an avid fox hunter, Theodore commented that he did not mind the broken arm. “I am always ready to pay the piper when I’ve had a good dance; and every now and then I like to drink the wine of life with brandy in it,” he added.11
February 14, 1886.
It had been two years since that tragic day in Theodore’s life. On that day in 1884, he had drawn a bold X in his diary, with the comment “The light has gone out of my life.” His 1886 diary contains no entry for February 14, but two days, later an arrow and a heart are drawn next to each other. (That date, February 16, he attended a dinner at Whitelaw Reid’s home.)12
During this time, Theodore was a young man torn by two emotions. The first was his elation at being in love and his expectation of sharing his life with someone who knew him very well. The second emotion was the deep guilt he felt in not honoring Alice’s memory. The Victorian era had many formalities that, from a current-day perspective, seem antiquated, oppressive, and nonsensical. In that period, of which Theodore was very much a part, it was generally accepted that a widower would remain faithful to his deceased spouse for the rest of his life, and not remarry. There were no exceptions, even for a young widower. One was duty-bound to honor such a tradition.
The guilt he felt weighed on him—at times heavily. Because both Theodore and Edith were very careful not to write anything that would divulge their engagement, let alone their personal feelings, the historian is left to surmise the feelings each harbored. This tendency on the part of the historian can easily become a very slippery slope. One is left to wonder whether the guilt Theodore felt led to verbal clashes with Edith; both of them were, after all, strong personalities. Did Theodore ever have second thoughts about marrying Edith? This may have been possible when he was deep in the throes of guilt pangs; still, whatever the two of them may have felt, they worked through it.
Despite his bouts of guilt, Theodore attended numerous social events with Edith. (In January and February 1886, he attended more than two dozen parties.) On January 11, 1886, his diary simply notes, “E.K.C. dinner,” while the entry for February 12, 1886, mentions “Theater with E.K.C.”13
In February, through the help of his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, he agreed to write a biography of statesman Thomas Hart Benton for the American Statesman series.14 (Lodge was writing a book on George Washington for the same series.) In a February 7 letter to Lodge, Theodore exhibits uncertainty over the project. “I feel a little appalled over the Benton; I have not the least idea whether I shall make a flat failure of it or not. However, I will do my best and trust to luck for the result.”15
His lack of any strong feelings over the Benton book could have been due to the fact he was starting to research another book that was of greater interest to him. The book he envisioned would detail the westward expansion of the country in the nineteenth century. Theodore reached out for help, sending a letter to the leading authority on that period, Lyman Copeland Draper:
I am now engaged on a work in reference to the extension of our boundaries to the southward from the day when Boone crossed the Alleghenies, to the days of the Alamo and San Jacinto.
I know of no one whose researches into, and collection of material for, our early western history, have been so extensive as your own; so I venture to ask you if you can give me any information how I can get at what I want. I wish particularly to get a hold of any original or unpublished mss; such as the diaries or letters of the first settlers, who crossed the mountains, and their records of early Indian wars, the attempt at founding the State of Franklin, etc.16
Theodore probably looked upon the Benton book as more of a work-for-hire assignment, while his effort on the early West was truly a passion project.
Aside from attending parties and researching material for his two upcoming books, Theodore also found time to deliver some speeches, including one at Princeton and another at Morton Hall.17 On October 17, 1885, he had been the featured speaker at the Young Republican Club of Brooklyn. Although some party leaders and reformers might have still harbored ill feelings toward Theodore and Lodge (who also appeared at the meeting), the rank and file had greeted them with “great enthusiasm.”18 Theodore spoke of civil service reform, which he noted would soon lead to a very discernible division between the Republicans (who favored it) and the Democrats (who were against it). But that, as he noted, was just one difference between the two parties. “Throughout the North the bulk of the honesty and intelligence of the community is to be found in the Republican ranks. If the Republicans take a false step it is usually because the politicians have tricked them into it; while if the Democrats make a good move it is almost always merely because the astute party leaders have been able for a short time to dragoon their dense-witted followers into the appearance of deference to decent public sentiment,” he said.19
His speeches were not limited to politics. Theodore spoke about the West and his life as a cattle rancher, noting that the worst thing a frontiersman had to deal with was skunks. “Yet, says Mr. Roosevelt, this is not so bad as politics in New York,” the Bismarck Daily Tribune observed after one of his New York speeches.20
The winter was beginning to lose its luster for Theodore, even though Edith was always around. He missed his ranch, and was concerned about how Sewall and Dow were getting along. Theodore planned to leave for Medora on March 15, while Edith, her sister, and her mother would move to England in April, in an effort to extend what remained of the family inheritance.
Theodore, while making plans for his departure, spent his last ten days in Manhattan almost exclusively with “E.”
A Matter of Justice
The capture itself was as tame as possible.
THEODORE’S TRAIN PULLED INTO THE MEDORA STATION ON MARCH 18. This trip, encompassing a total of fifteen weeks, would mark the longest amount of time he stayed in the Badlands. That night he bunked in his room at Joe Ferris’s general store, where he met Joe’s bride. The new Mrs. Ferris was a bit apprehensive about meeting Theodore, especially when he arrived in his city clothes. “I was scairt to death,” she reportedly said. When she tried to treat him like a big-city gentleman, Theodore smiled broadly and told her to treat him like one of the boys. Sitting down to dinner with the couple, he exclaimed to Joe, “A white tablecloth in the Bad Lands! Joe, did you ever expect to see it?”1
Weather in the Badlands had been capricious in recent weeks. The cold froze the Little Missouri River; a few days later it would be as warm as late spring before freezing temperatures returned. The teetering difference in the temperature caused the river to create huge ice floes that would break apart, then once again freeze, jamming the river and its banks. The jagged piles of ice along the riverbank only added to the eerie appearance of the Badlands.
The following morning, Theodore left Medora, with Sewall and Dow, for the Elkhorn, reaching the ranch “long after sunset, the full moon flooding the landscape with light.” Describing to Bamie an ice gorge that had formed on the river in front of the cabin, he noted that “The swelling mass of broken fragments [have] been pushed almost up to our doorstep. The current then broke through the middle, leaving on each side of the stream, for some miles, a bank of huge ice floes, tumbled
over each other in the wildest confusion.” He stated that no horse had a chance of getting across the river, but he had bought a boat in St. Paul (for thirty dollars) that could take him and his men across the river easily. With the river running high because of the spring thaw, they could take the boat across the river to check on their horses and cattle, although he noted it was “most laborious. We work like Arctic explorers.”2
At night, lying in bed under buffalo hides, he could hear the “dull roar and crunching” of the ice floes outside his cabin.3 Fortunately, the line of cottonwood trees standing in front of the cabin served as a barrier that kept the ice floes from reaching the cabin’s front door. Defying the weather, Theodore, Sewall, and Dow went hunting, bagging four deer. They left them tied up in a thicket of dwarf cedar trees overnight, as the cold weather would help keep the game fresh. Returning the following morning, they discovered that some mountain lions had feasted on the carcasses, leaving behind fresh tracks. The men followed until they lost the tracks in a morass of rocky hills. Returning to the Elkhorn, Sewall moved their small boat further onto the bank, tying it securely to a tree to avoid being dragged off into the river’s current.
In the early-morning hours of March 24, the boat went missing.
The boat was not carried off by the river, but by Mike “Redhead” Finnegan, a recent arrival with a very bad attitude. Described as a surly man with a brick-red complexion and long, red hair and beard, he was also a notorious consumer of any saloon’s “Kansas sheep dip.” During one visit at Bigmouth Bob’s Bug Juice Dispensary, he absorbed too much and passed out. John Goodall, the foreman at the Marquis’s ranch, found the plastered bad man on the floor and decided to have some fun. Placing him on a billiard table, Goodall acquired a pair of scissors and proceeded to shear the long locks of Finnegan’s hair on one side, as well as cutting off a side of his beard and mustache.4
THE COWBOY PRESIDENT Page 16
