The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  By Roosevelt’s senior year at Harvard his classmates respected him for more than just losing boxing bouts and misplacing turtles at 16 Winthrop with a patrician air. Everywhere he walked on campus (or took his dogcart, pulled by his favorite horse, Lightfoot) he was met with “uproarious cordiality.” The combination of having his own horse plus his doggedness and vitality had made Roosevelt legendary by his junior and senior years. Everybody had to admit that Roosevelt was sui generis, that he wore no man’s collar. Although President Eliot later scoffed that Roosevelt took “soft courses” during his last years, keeping a “very light schedule,” he nevertheless received A’s and B’s. Reading over his journal for the senior year 1879–1880 makes it clear that Roosevelt’s worst problem was insomnia. Unable to turn off his mind, he’d spend “night after night” walking by himself in the Cambridge woods near Fresh Pond, sometimes never catching even a couple of hours of shut-eye.8 It appears that Roosevelt was afflicted with some kind of mania.

  In Kay Redfield Jamison’s 2004 book about manic depression, Exuberance, Roosevelt is exhibit A for this condition. His set of symptoms—propulsive behavior, deep grief, chronic insomnia, and an all-around hyperactive disposition—demonstrate both the manic and the depressive phases of bipolar disorder. Too often, Dr. Jamison argued, people mistakenly thought manic depression meant despondence and withdrawal from human endeavors. Usually it does. But those afflicted with exuberance, she argued, go in the opposite direction; behaving as relentless human blowtorches they’re unable to turn down their own flame. Diagnosing Roosevelt’s medical condition more than eighty years after his death, Jamison claimed that the highs of the exuberance phase brought many wonderful gifts; but, she warned, there was also a sharp-edged downside. Living by throwing up skyrockets—as P. T. Barnum once put it—wore one down to nothing. No sleep, for example, wasn’t good for the heart or other vital organs. Only by exhausting oneself in physical activity—like climbing Mount Katahdin or ice-skating on the Charles River in a winter storm—could an exuberant manic like Roosevelt turn himself off.9

  Essentially, Roosevelt’s exuberance syndrome was both a source of power and a sometimes curse. The poet Robert Lowell once described manics like T.R. as harboring “pathological enthusiasm;”10 Jamison tended to agree. What Jamison admired about Roosevelt, however, was that he channeled his manic-depressive energies in constructive ways, taking what could have been a terrible handicap and using it as an asset. A friend of Roosevelt once colorfully explained T.R.’s ceaseless zest as the “unpacking of endless Christmas stockings,” a description Roosevelt wouldn’t have minded.11 Constantly calling life “The Great Adventure,” Roosevelt derived “literally delirious joy” from Christmas, never wanting the holiday season to end. The more candles lit and carols sung, the happier he was.12

  Unfortunately, even though Roosevelt felt fit as a fiddle operating on intermittent sleep, his exultancy was taking a physical toll. On March 26, 1880, Roosevelt went to see Dr. Dudley A. Sargeant, the university physician. On the preexamination form, Roosevelt noted that asthma had bothered him since childhood. As of late, however, he was feeling well and expected a clean bill of health. After thoroughly examining Roosevelt from head to toe, however, Dr. Sargeant pulled his patient aside with troublesome news. There was something wrong with Roosevelt’s heart—it was terribly weak. If he kept exerting himself, he would die young. Sternly Dr. Sargeant told Roosevelt to cease all activity that would make his heart rate go up. Mountaineering, twenty-mile hikes, and even climbing staircases would have to stop. All exertion was unhealthy.

  Such a bleak diagnosis didn’t go over well with Roosevelt. He didn’t want to live gently. If he had only a few seasons left to breathe, so be it. Instead of pampering himself or living like a baby he would fight with both fists against the tide of gloomy fatalism. Going back to being a weakling, a runt in the litter of life, was unacceptable to him. Dismissing Dr. Sargeant’s verdict out of hand, Roosevelt started planning a six-week hunting trip with his younger brother, Elliott, to the Midwest heartland. They would start from Chicago, go northwest to Iowa, and eventually wind up on the western edge of Minnesota. Inspired by an earful of Elliott’s Texas bird-hunting triumphs in Galveston and the Big Thicket, eager to learn more about grouse and prairie chickens, Theodore read Coues’s pioneering Birds of the Colorado in preparation.

  Later in life, as a politician, Roosevelt downplayed his Harvard years, recognizing them as a liability in a country more impressed with log cabins and cowboy mythology. Furthermore, only one in every 5,000 Americans graduated from college in 1880; merely receiving a diploma meant that one was part of an elite.13 Roosevelt’s diaries, however, show that he was elated at finishing twenty-first in a class of 177.14 And the Phi Beta Kappa graduate had even managed to publish two ornithology chapbooks, a thesis on women’s rights, and wrote chapters of The Naval War of 1812. “I have certainly lived like a prince for my last two years in college,” he recorded in his diary. “I have had just as much money as I could spend; belonged to the Porcellian Club; have had some capital hunting trips; my life has been varied; I have kept a good horse and cart; I have had half a dozen good and true friends in college, and several very pleasant families outside; a lovely home; I have had but little work, only enough to give me an occupation; and to crown all infinitely above everything else put together—I have won the sweetest girl for my wife. No man ever had so pleasant a college course.”15

  After dutifully following all the rituals on commencement day—spending time, for example, with Alice Lee’s family in Chestnut Hill—Roosevelt packed up the contents of Winthrop Street and shipped them to the Fifty-Seventh Street house in New York. His plan was to first spend a few weeks in Oyster Bay and then head to the blue-green Maine coast to sun, sail, and explore. Instead of climbing Mount Katahdin, he would enjoy the tumble of the surf on Mount Desert Island, the second-largest island on the Eastern Seaboard. Surrounding the main island were numerous tiny shore islands, each with marine enchantment all its own. After some days with friends Alice would join him.

  Partly because Roosevelt was writing The Naval War of 1812—an act of genuine hubris for a twenty-two-year-old—he wanted proximity to the boundless Atlantic Ocean to study the cold, buffeting waters around Mount Desert Island.* Two of Roosevelt’s favorite painters of the Hudson River school, Frederick Church and Thomas Cole, had summered around the Maine island in the 1850s. Recognizing the island as one of God’s great galleries, Church had both painted and sketched landscapes of the indented shoreline with great skill. Two of his faithful renderings—Fog of Mount Desert and Newport Mountain—were beloved by locals for generations. As for Cole, he sketched sixteen natural sites on Mount Desert Island ranging from bold headlands to strands of northern white cedar, red spruce, and black spruce. A particular emphasis was given to blasted pine standing alone on rocky cliffs and to the gorgeous islets that dot Frenchman Bay.16

  Roosevelt went to Mount Desert Island with his friends Dick Saltonstall and Jack Tebbetts. They lodged four miles from Bar Harbor near Schooner Head, a huge jagged rock very near the Atlantic Ocean. The trio called the bungalow where they slept “bachelors’ hall.” Right outside their door was the stony beach where crab skeletons, seaweed tangles, and broken shell bits were washed ashore. An immediate favorite locale for Roosevelt was Cadillac Mountain, at 1,530 feet the highest point along the North Atlantic seaboard, and the first place in the United States where you could see the sunrise. Roosevelt also rode horseback over stone bridges and hunted for sea urchins among the shell heaps on Fernald’s Point. He was lulled by the murmuring ocean; he picked baskets of cranberries, collected shellfish in the tidal marsh, and gathered wild berries; and when Alice, unchaperoned, arrived, strolled “with my darling in the woods and on the rocky shores.”

  To an ornithologist the sheer diversity of the marine environment of Mount Desert Island offered merriment. Seabirds such as jaegers, shearwaters, puffins, and razorbills were everywhere, prancing around in the
surf then flying away when the shades of twilight fell under the full onset of the sea. At Thunder Hole, Theodore and Alice sat entranced as seawater waves rushed in and out of a perfectly formed cave while debonair black skimmers circled above. Soon, however, Roosevelt was sick again, this time stricken with cholera morbus. Dehydration, diarrhea, and body flux ensued. There were no pills or port or morphine to make him feel better. Not only was he unable to show off for Alice but, as he wrote to his sister Corinne on July 24, the infectious gastroenteritis was “very embarrassing for a lover…unromantic…suggestive of too much ripe fruit.”17 Refusing to be an invalid, Roosevelt decided to climb Newport Mountain—with Bar Harbor at its base—as a quick cure while he was recuperating. Onward and upward he went for more than 1,000 feet, peering down at the little harbor skiffs, which looked like bathtub toys from that crow’s nest vantage point. Given that he was ill, Roosevelt’s mountaineering feat at Newport can be attributed only to sheer will—a will ever growing, ever persistent in overcoming obstacles.

  II

  There was another reason, however, that Roosevelt didn’t collect birds on Mount Desert Island—his mind was reeling over his coming Midwest hunting trip with his brother, Elliott. Together they were going to explore the broad expanse of the Great Plains. Ever since Dresden, Theodore had been struggling to keep pace with Elliott, the most troubled of the four Roosevelt children. Handsome, irreverent, and charming, Elliott—a tenderhearted bon viant—constantly fought against fatigue, dizzy spells, and bouts of depression. He gave no meaningful signs of professional ambition; he simply excused himself from serious work, preferring pleasure. But he was very sweet-natured. According to a well-circulated family story, Elliott, when he was seven years old, took a walk one winter morning only to return without his overcoat. On being interrogated by his parents Elliott explained that he had seen a homeless “street urchin” shivering, so naturally he gave the poor lad his own coat. “I can think of many occasions in his later life when generosity of the same kind actuated him, not, perhaps, to wise giving, for unlike some people he never could learn to control his heart by his head,” his daughter Eleanor Roosevelt, first lady from 1933 to 1945, recalled. “With him the heart always dominated.”18

  Theodore Roosevelt and his brother, Elliott, with a big game hunting coach.

  T.R. and Elliott with big-game hunting coach. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)

  A better all-around student than Theodore, Elliott (or “Nell” as the family affectionately called him) was also a tremendous hunter and equestrian who excelled at polo.19 By 1880 Elliott had already hunted wild turkey in Florida and Bengal tigers in India. “Everything is in an advanced state in Texas,” he had written to his father from Fort McKavett, where he was bagging around a dozen birds daily. “By everything I mean all fruits, flowers and vegetables and by Texas I mean the civilized portions thereof.”20 A crack shot and excellent rider, sly as a magpie, Elliott was not overtly proper like his father; he had unfortunately inherited Uncle Rob’s libertine ways and was attracted to the bottle.21

  Leaving Maine on August 6, Theodore visited Alice at Chestnut Hill and then his family at Oyster Bay. In the middle of the month Elliott and Theodore boarded a Chicago-bound train from Manhattan, ready to roll across the prairies Francis Parkman had written about so dramatically in The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life.22 Like Roosevelt, Parkman believed that actually visiting American landscapes was essential for gaining impressionistic reportorial material to help make a historical narrative come alive for the reader. It electrified Roosevelt that Parkman, a fellow Harvard alumnus (class of 1846), had used his classical education to honor the western frontier in serious historical prose. Roosevelt adopted Parkman—a devoted naturalist and horticulturist, with expertise in roses and lilies—as his guiding light in history studies. And Parkman knew the forests of America better than anybody else alive. To Roosevelt, Parkman, who also suffered from bad eyesight and was nearing blindness, was quite simply “the greatest historian whom the United States had yet produced.”23 Given a choice between Walden and The Oregon Trail, Roosevelt would have chosen the latter every time.

  On the weekend before the Roosevelt brothers’ “Midwest tramp,” Theodore was pining for Alice in Chestnut Hill. Although he was quite excited about seeing Chicago and crossing the Mississippi River for the first time, he was already “frightfully homesick” for her. Still, there was a lot of packing and there were many good-byes to make for what was he was calling his western trip. And once they were under way to Chicago, he was filled with excitement, behaving like an able-bodied seaman about to discover the world. “Traveled all day through the wooded hills of Pennsylvania and the rolling prairie of Ohio,” Roosevelt excitedly recorded in his diary. “It is great fun to be off with old Nell; he and I can do about anything together; we never lose our temper under difficulties and always accomplish what we set about.”24

  Chicago in 1880 was the regional hub for the entire Midwest. All the major grain-producing states—Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Nebraska—used the city as their in-transit wholesale distribution center. If Roosevelt had looked at a railroad map of the trans-Allegheny West, in fact, he would have seen clearly that Chicago was the crossroads—or like a fist with all the ubiquitous track lines extending outward like fingers. The novelist Theodore Dreiser referred to late-nineteenth-century Chicago as the “magnet” city of the Midwest and West. Pioneers overlanding to California by covered wagon or railroad, or on foot, usually began their journey in Chicago. The city had been built on the bottom lip of Lake Michigan and rebuilt after the great fire of 1871. Freighters carried timber and iron ore south from Wisconsin and Minnesota to the city’s cargo ports, warehouses, and railroad yards. Not only did railroads converge there, but the Illinois and Michigan Canal linked Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River, opening up the agricultural markets of the Midwest. In just four years the first skyscraper—the Home Insurance Building—would be erected on the corner of LaSalle and Adams streets. The city was expanding at an amazing clip.

  The eye of Chicago seemed to be looking everywhere across America. As the historian William Cronon pointed out in his landmark study Nature’s Metropolis (1991), Chicago in the late nineteenth century oversaw an economic domain that stretched from the Sierra Nevada to the Appalachians, and from Duluth, Minnesota, in the north to Cairo, Illinois, in the south. All the varied ecosystems of the Great Plains about which Roosevelt would later be so enthusiastic—the Sandhills of Nebraska and the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma, the Great Basin of Nevada and the Badlands of the Dakotas—were all linked to Chicago in one way or another.25 Given his predilection for the outdoors, Theodore wasn’t elated with Chicago; he itched to leave for the neighboring prairies. Having conquered the Adirondacks, the North Woods, and Mount Desert Island, he craved the fabled pastoral life of the Great Plains, which Washington Irving had written about in A Tour on the Prairies (1835).26 As a fan of Zebulon Pike, he had a headful of frontier myths about discovering the headwaters of the Red and Arkansas rivers (he never quite found them on this Midwest tramp). Over the coming weeks, Theodore and Elliott would hunt grouse, with the euphoria of treasure hunters, in three separate locales: Huntley, Illinois; Carroll, Iowa; and Moorhead, Minnesota, which sat on the border of the Dakota Territories.

  The Roosevelt boys’ guide in Illinois was “a man named Wilcox”—his first name remains unknown—whom Theodore mentions only perfunctorily in the diaries he kept.* Clearly, to Theodore’s mind, Wilcox was no Bill Sewall or Moses Sawyer. But in a letter of August 22 to his sister Anna—posted from the Wilcox farm in Illinois—T.R. did reflect on the hardworking midwesterners he was meeting. Huntley was a tiny village with only one paved street. From the town center there was plenty of cropland to be seen in every direction, but there were virtually no woods—only a few scattered trees. “The farm people are pretty rough but I like them very much,” he wrote to Anna. “Like all rural Americans they are
intensely independent; and indeed I don’t wonder at their thinking us their equals, for we are dressed about as badly as mortals could be, with our cropped heads, unshaven faces, dirty gray shirts, still dirties [dirtier] yellow trousers and cowhide boots; moreover we can shoot as well as they can (or at least Elliott can) and can stand as much fatigue.” 27

  In many respects, the Midwest tramp became a hunting competition. Which brother could bag the most game? Because Elliott, who was two years younger, had already worked up his competitive appetite by flushing out prairie chickens in scrub brush in the Texas, he was the veteran. To Theodore, by contrast, it was all a new experience. He noted in his diary that it was “great fun to try this open plains shooting to which I am entirely unaccustomed among such vast, almost level fields, with so few trees.”28 After a couple of days in what Theodore referred to as the “fertile grain prairies,”29 both brothers had bagged many kinds of game birds—doves, ducks, snipes, grouse, plovers. They also collected gophers, impressed by their curved claws, used for tunneling through loose oil. “We had three good days of shooting,” he wrote to Anna, “and I feel twice the man for it already.”30