The Wilderness Warrior
Page 19
Yet ultimately the rural folks he encountered in Huntley fascinated Roosevelt more than the prairie chickens in the brush. Being a hunter and bird-watcher had taught him the art of observation, and now he was applying it to studying both rural and transient people. This would become a trademark of his future hunting and wilderness books. “I have been much amused by the people in this house, especially the labourers; a great, strong, jovial, blundering Irish boy; a quiet, intelligent yankee; a reformed desperado (he’s very silent but when we can get him to talk his reminiscences are very interesting—and startling); a good natured German boy who is delighted to find we understand and can speak ‘hochdeutch,’” he wrote to his mother on August 25. “There are but two women; a clumsy, giggling, pretty Irish girl, and a hard-featured backwoods woman who sings methodist hymns and swears like a trapper on occasion.” 31
At times on his Midwest tramp it almost seemed that Roosevelt was an onlooker, observing the styles and fashions and habits of American characters with the eye of a novelist. Although never abandoning his aristocratic bearing and always staying a bit removed, Roosevelt sometimes actually wore the garb and adopted the folkways of the regional people he encountered, in hopes of blending in. You might say he was a method actor of the Stella Adler school, playing in an American Arthuriad while mixing it up with different midwestern types like Iowa wheat farmers or Illinois dairymen. Elliott still dressed like a man of substance, sticking to gold scarves and polished boots. His wardrobe expressed his innate sense of aristocratic entitlement, and he had even taken to smoking a long-stemmed pipe. By contrast, Theodore wore dungarees and cotton work shirts and preferred his boots mud-stained. “I am afraid you would disown me if you could see me,” he boasted to his mother from the Illinois prairie. “I am awfully disreputable looking.”32
The bird collecting in Huntley, however, was a disappointment. “Before the sun was up we started off, tramping in sullen silence through the wet prairie grass,” he wrote in his diary, “but we found few birds and shot very badly.”33 Truth be told, the flat Illinois countryside lacked the geographical breadth Roosevelt had hoped to encounter. “I broke both of my guns, Elliott dented his, and the shooting was not as good as we expected,” he wrote to his sister Corinne. “I got bitten by a snake and chucked headforemost out of the wagon.”34 On August 27, after a particularly bad day’s hunting, a dejected Roosevelt recorded, “The country is shot out.”35
The Roosevelt brothers returned to Chicago for a few days to clean up and plot the next phase of their expedition. They stayed at the Hotel Sherman, which had burned down in the great fire and been rebuilt. Theodore found it off-putting and dreary. If he had wanted society life or afternoon tea, he could have gone to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Still, he wasn’t much interested in meeting labor activists or radicals of any stripe, either. Nor did he write about the swirl of immigrants—Germans, Irish, Poles, and Swedes—who were pouring into the city. What was exciting to him, however, was Chicago’s role as the gateway to the great West. Walking the railyards he could for the first time imagine Lincoln’s rise as a populist, and the drama of Bleeding Kansas. How strange it was to think that Mary Todd Lincoln was living downstate in corn-stubbled Springfield, where her husband was buried, housebound after being released from the Bellevue Place insane asylum. It had been fifteen years since the tragedy at Ford’s Theatre, but Roosevelt still considered himself a Lincoln man. He could sense the power of Lincoln’s presence everywhere in Illinois and the surrounding prairie—the ghost of Lincoln, as the poet Vachel Lindsay wrote, haunted the streets, and “the sick world” still cried.36
Once again Wilcox collected the Roosevelts in Chicago—this time with an engineer and a former Confederate soldier in tow—for the second leg of the Midwest tramp. The party boarded the Chicago and North Western—nicknamed the “Pioneer Railroad”—and headed straight toward the Mississippi River as night fell. After crossing the Big Muddy at Davenport, their train rumbled on through Iowa City, where a state university flourished, and onto Grinnell along Rock Creek Lake, where farmers angled for crappies and bluegills in the long Indian summer. Eventually they found themselves in the small town of Carroll in western Iowa. This county seat, surrounded by strands of big bluestem grass, had a steel flour mill, eight general stores, five restaurants, and two grain warehouses, but life ran at a slow pace. People sometimes just sat by the river, a meandering brown stretch of the Des Moines. The previous year, most of the business district of Carroll had been destroyed in a fire, and the townsfolk were slowly starting to rebuild. There was nothing urban about the semi-prosperous community except the railroad depot.37
The Roosevelts leased a two-horse wagon and started hunting on the outskirts of Carroll, with a pack of eager dogs, roughly following the North Raccoon River northwest into what was considered one of the best prairie fowl hunting areas in the United States.* Theodore observed how “absolutely treeless” and “sparsely scattered over with settlers” western Iowa was.38 There was no misunderstanding why locals were called flatlanders—only the occasional low hill, high bluff, or forlorn dale was to be found in Carroll County. The creek grades were so gentle that horses and oxen meandered across them with little or no difficulty. The Homestead Act of 1862 had drawn German, Scandinavian, and Czech immigrants to western Iowa, and Roosevelt enjoyed meeting them, saluting their durable “pioneer stock.” Many of these flatlanders, however, were struggling in the 1880s; commodity prices had fallen, and it was difficult to overcome the fixed costs levied by grain elevators, railroad concerns, and butcher-yard operators.
Stricken with both asthma and cholera in town, Roosevelt nevertheless managed to bag the most game birds of his life around a plateau called Wall Lake, frequently referred to by locals as “goose pond.”39 Wildlife was abundant here. Using five Irish setters—“three of which worked well, the other two simple nuisances”—they kicked up covey after covey. Hardly trying, Roosevelt bagged thirty-eight grouse, five quail, one bittern, one grebe, and thirty-six yellowlegs (tall, long-legged shorebirds of freshwater ponds with a white rump, known for announcing themselves with a piercing “tew-tew-tew” siren wail). The sojourn in Illinois, by contrast, had yielded only thirty-five birds. And there were lots of other birds Roosevelt didn’t shoot in Iowa, only observing them in his diary. “There was a large flock of pelicans on the lake,” he noted on September 8, “and thousands of yellow-headed blackbirds.” *40
In the Iowa brakes the sodbusters had a keen sense of nature’s beauty and bounty. Even their economic problems couldn’t get them to abandon the land. There was something about the constrained landscape—whether it was the natural meadows or the planted acres of wheat—that soothed the soul. There was natural beauty everywhere in Iowa if you only knew how to look. Joy seemed to be found by modest Iowa farmers even in the dust of summer. They were what Emily Dickinson had referred to in her poem “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” as “nature’s people.”41 Back east, city dwellers like himself studied nature too much; in Iowa people lived with it as if by the grace of God. There was a subtlety to the Iowa plains that liberated Roosevelt’s psyche in a way he hadn’t anticipated. “No nation has ever achieved permanent greatness unless this greatness was based on the well-being of the great farmer class, the men who live on the soil,” Roosevelt would write of the Midwest as president, greatly influenced by this trip. “For it is upon their welfare, material and moral, that the welfare of the rest of the nation ultimately rests.”42
III
Once again, after shooting their fill of birds in Carroll County, muscles sore, the Roosevelts headed back to bustling Chicago to regroup. Although Roosevelt never declared it right out, his brother was grating on him a little. Perceiving himself as an authentic naturalist hunter of the Mayne Reid school, Theodore wrote to his sister Corinne that Elliott, by contrast, “revels in the change to civilization—and epicurean pleasures.” Because Roosevelt never overate and never drank much more than a glass or two of alcohol, he mocked his younger bro
ther’s gluttonous ways. “As soon as we got here [to Chicago] he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat,” Roosevelt continued, “then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because he was hot; a brandy smash ‘to keep the cold out of his stomach’ and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite.”43
Holed up again at the Hotel Sherman, the Roosevelts were particularly glad to be rid of Wilcox’s two companions, the prattling engineer and the unreliable ex-Confederate soldier. They visited a gunsmith, who was unable to fix their damaged rifles, so they both bought new ones. They were now more determined than ever to turn their next adventure into even more birds bagged. Leg three of their Midwest tramp would be to the Red River country of Minnesota, part of the vast Hudson Bay watershed and reportedly abounding with wildlife. Newspapers back in 1880 often called the 550-mile tributary the “Red River of the North” to help differentiate it from the southern tributary of the Mississippi River, which formed part of the border between Texas and Oklahoma. The Roosevelt brothers stayed in Moorhead, a small city located on the border of North Dakota (or the Dakotah Territory, as it was known then). That’s where their cousin Jack Elliott lived, and the brothers were excited about spending time with him flushing out ruffed grouse from the forestland. Not since Dresden had the three been together.
Unlike Harvey and Carroll, Moorhead was irrigable, and a transportation hub in the Wild West for merchandise and agricultural products, situated conveniently between the Twin Cities of Minneapolis–Saint Paul and Winnipeg, Manitoba. Founded in 1871 by William G. Moorhead, a director of the Northern Pacific Railroad, it was notorious as a “sin city” because of its 100 or more smoky bars (and, one assumes, brothels).44 There was a certain unhurried stillness in the air around Moorhead that had an enduring appeal for Roosevelt. Here, among the “guns of autumn” (as fall hunting was called in Minnesota), for the first time in his life, Roosevelt felt the lure and tug of the Wild West he had read about. Staying at a “miserable old hotel” surrounded by a strip of bars, he could imagine himself in Tucson or Dodge City, where the saloon doors always swung open. (The outlaw Jesse James had launched his career as a notorious bank robber in 1876, just over 200 miles down the road in Northfield, Minnesota.)
Taking a buggy out to the countryside with his brother and Jack Elliott, Theodore marveled at how easy it was to snare grouse in Minnesota. The great challenge in shooting these birds was that they clustered in dense, prickly thickets and usually flushed dramatically without warning.45 There was perhaps another reason that Roosevelt wanted to hunt in the lazy Red River region along the border between Minnesota and Dakotah territories. The Red River was in the middle of a crucial migratory route for dozens of bird species. Surely Roosevelt also knew that eagles and owls roosted permanently around the river bottom forests and remnant prairie.46 With the assistance of a “stub tailed old pointer” (and a Moorhead barkeeper who daylighted as a cart driver) he borrowed along the way in Saint Paul, Theodore’s goal was simple: shoot more game birds in Minnesota than he had shot in Illinois and Iowa combined; fill up those tarpaulin sacks.47
Unsurprisingly, Roosevelt relished playing a Minnesota-Dakota sportsman with shells in his jacket pocket, wandering through plowed land listening for the whir of wild ducks, and flushing ruffed grouse out of open grasslands and forest thickets. The desolate countryside was crisp and lovely in mid-September. Columns of cumulonimbus clouds ascended and spread in the blue sky. There wasn’t a hitching post for miles. Already the aspen and ash were starting to take on fall colors as dramatic as those in Vermont. This was the autumn rutting season, and the young four-point deer were challenging the eight-pointers over females. Roosevelt’s most memorable nights in Moorhead were spent camping under the stars, the fall nip adding an aura of romance to the outings. Although Theodore and Elliott were not good cooks, they had mastered the art of cleaning the chicken-sized grouse. Every night they stuffed themselves with fire-roasted bird until they burped.
For ten days in Minnesota, Roosevelt bagged more than 203 game birds, carefully listing them in his diaries: 95 grouse, 51 snipe, seventeen ducks, sixteen plovers, one goose, and so on. He had beaten his own Iowa record. Clearly Theodore was no longer collecting specimens or playing ornithologist. More telling, however, was his side note that Elliott had bagged only 201.48 That means he had beaten the “old boy” by two birds. Much of the time in western Minnesota Roosevelt had terrible asthma and was forced to sleep sitting up, dreaming intermittently, perhaps, about the prairie potholes of the Dakotas, where the hunting was supposed to be even better than in Minnesota’s Red River region.
One morning Theodore and Elliott awoke at dawn and went searching for grouse hot spots. Carefully listening for the birds’ drumming noise—which sounded like a stomach growling—the Roosevelts got their game. They also got lost in a “cold driving rain storm”—so lost, in fact, that at dusk they were forced to knock on a Norwegian farmer’s “neat but frail little house” asking to “put up for the night.”49 It was a scene straight from the pages of Giants in the Earth. According to his diary Theodore lay silently that evening in front of the fireplace while the wind blew hard outside. He was covered by a bison robe but was unable to sleep. This was his first real western experience. To Roosevelt, however, getting lost in Minnesota was “lovely,” a softer alternative to “bully.” During the coming days the Roosevelt party would camp along a bend of the Buffalo River—an eighty-eight-mile tributary of the Red River, lined with hardwoods, which looked like a poorly maintained Dutch canal.50
Roosevelt’s fierce competition with Elliott does show that he used the sport as a mechanism to enhance his manly self-worth. His grousing also reflected class-consciousness. Men with an aristocratic mien shot game birds with a retinue of guides; by contrast, the working class went after squirrels and raccoons with a mongrel dog. Game laws made sense when you were rich, looking for sport. Poor people shot game—with or without laws—just to stay alive. Much like being initiated into Porcellian at Harvard, grouse hunting to Theodore was a rite of initiation into manhood with his younger brother. The very act of flushing grouse together was a brotherly bonding experience.51
Another outcome of Roosevelt’s midwestern tramp was that he grew less interested in birds and more intrigued by the notion of hunting big game. After all, being wrapped in a buffalo robe in Minnesota wasn’t the same as either shooting a bison or seeing a thinned-down wild herd with his own eyes. “No man who is not of an adventurous temper, and able to stand rough food and living,” he soon wrote, “will penetrate to the haunts of the buffalo. The animal is so tough and tenacious of life that it must be hit in the right spot; and care must be used in approaching it, for its nose is very keen, and though its sight is dull, yet, on the other hand, the plains it frequents are singularly bare of cover; while, finally, there is just a faint spice of danger in the pursuit, for the bison, though the least dangerous of all bovine animals will, on occasions, turn upon the hunter and though its attack is, as a rule, easily avoided, yet in rare cases it manages to charge home.”52
After so many grouse, Roosevelt wanted to someday travel west of the Red River into buffalo country. (And he would have to do it soon, for the cattle were taking over.) Being in Moorhead was akin to traveling 1,400 miles to see a major attraction—buffalo—and then never entering the admission gate. He had, however, seen plenty of cattle. Between 1877 and 1885 more than 2.5 million head of cattle were slaughtered in Chicago; Roosevelt had been able to see the stockades and corrals for himself.53 What he hadn’t been able to witness on his midwestern tramp, however, were the cattle drovers herding from Fort Worth north by the ninety-ninth meridian to Ogallala, Nebraska, and from there into the northern plains of Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. Because he had not seen the great herds of buffalo and cattle, Roosevelt believed he had missed the main thrust of the western expansion. He vowed to return. Nobody would have to lend him a buffalo robe. He’d earn the next one for himself.
Paradoxically, th
at odd night with the buffalo robe in a stranger’s home was in many respects Roosevelt’s good-bye to his rigorous outdoors life for a while. Maturity and responsibility beckoned. Perhaps the recent college graduate wanted to push on westward through the Dakotah Territories to the Bitterroots, where the elk ran in healthy herds and the geysers of Yellowstone were reliable. But he couldn’t. He was planning to start studying law in New York and he was getting married the next month. His diary, in fact, abounds with paeans to Alice Lee: “She is so pure and holy that it seems almost profanation to touch her, no matter how gently and tenderly.” “My happiness now is almost too great.”54 It was as if he couldn’t write her name without bursting a vein. Pausing in Saint Paul about to board an eastbound train, burning with impatience to get home, he sounded tired: “How glad I am it is over,” the wanderer wrote from the depot, “and I am to see Alice.”55
Once he caught up with Alice in Chestnut Hill, everything became a whirlwind. In quick succession he enrolled at Columbia law school, purchased a diamond ring, spent two weekends at Oyster Bay with his mother, rode Lightfoot far and wide, chopped down trees for winter firewood, and prepared himself for his vows at the Unitarian Church in Brookline, Massachusetts. Sometimes he took long walks across green fields, and nobody knows what he thought.
IV
Everything went flawlessly on the wedding day of Theodore and Alice, October 27, 1880. Elliott arrived on cue to serve as best man. “At twelve o’clock on my twenty-second birthday, Alice and I were married,” Roosevelt wrote in his diary. “She made an ideally beautiful bride; and it was a lovely wedding. We came on for the night to Springfield [Massachusetts] where I had taken a suite of rooms…. Our intense happiness is too sacred to be written about.”56 The newlyweds honeymooned at Oyster Bay, with plans for a long springtime journey to Europe. To T.R. marriage clearly meant that hunting had to come second or third. No longer does he fill his diaries with bird sightings. Although he never slackened his pace, still hurrying on in everything he pursued, a domestication had taken place. Never once did his marriage become imprisoning. His diary entries now mention silk jackets, pajamas, lovely drives, and even chats with Alice while she was sewing. He gloats in his diaries about how he “won” Alice, worshipping the trill of her voice and the shape of her body. Politics also rose to the forefront of his thinking. On November 2, for example, he recounted how he proudly voted for James Garfield, the Republican standard-bearer, for president.