In Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, Roosevelt wrote eloquently of what it was like to be an adventurer in the Bighorns and to see your ranch appear on the open range, promising clean sheets and a library shelf packed with books by Shakespeare and Hawthorne. He bowed to the unassailable beauty of the West. If nothing else, the Badlands had encouraged Roosevelt to be more poetic as a writer. He was inspired by nature, and his writing now took on a more colorful cast. Whatever hardships he endured had been distilled into only postcard memories. Clearly, he had the talent to succeed as a wilderness writer. As the naturalist E. O. Wilson of Harvard once aptly noted, field biologists have a lot more “gee whiz” or “sense of wonder” than other kinds of scientists.100
“The rolling plains stretched out on all sides of us, shimmering in the clear moonlight; and occasionally a band of spectral-looking antelope swept silently away from before our path,” Roosevelt wrote. “Once we went by a drove of Texan cattle, who stared wildly at the intruders; as we passed they charged down by us, the ground rumbling beneath their tread, while their long horns knocked against each other with a sound like the clattering of a multitude of castanets. We could see clearly enough to keep our general course over the trackless plain, steering by the stars where the prairie was perfectly level and without landmarks; and our ride was timed well, for as we galloped down into the valley of the Little Missouri the sky above the line of the level bluffs in our front was crimson with the glow of the unrisen sun.”101
CHAPTER SEVEN
CRADLE OF CONSERVATION: THE ELKHORN RANCH OF NORTH DAKOTA
I
At some point in the fall of 1884, Roosevelt conceived of assembling his jottings about the Badlands and the Bighorns into a book. Updating Captain Mayne Reid, he considered how Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (as he called the project) could combine vivid natural history with tales of big-game hunting; he wanted to offer an antidote to the artificiality of money-driven urban life, which he felt was hampering the democratic spirit as well as feminizing a generation of American men.1 Always a romantic, Roosevelt originally intended to write Hunting Trips at the Elkhorn and Maltese Cross ranches, even though there was no decent reference library in the entire Dakota Territory. Pragmatism, however, eventually held sway (as it usually did with Roosevelt), and he ended up composing Hunting Trips back east.
By October, in fact, Roosevelt was back in Manhattan, having abandoned his plan of getting away to Dakota. With the presidential election looming, he put Hunting Trips on hold and threw himself wholeheartedly into the heated political contest. Using Bamie’s home at 689 Madison Avenue as his pied-à-terre, Roosevelt stumped incessantly for the Republican, James G. Blaine. The fact that the Democratic nominee, Grover Cleveland, was hounded by charges of adultery and had fathered an illegitimate child increased Roosevelt’s zeal to elect Blaine. According to the New York Sun, Theodore, forever the puritan, chafed at the unholy notion of a womanizing rogue becoming commander in chief.2 (Perhaps if Roosevelt had fully known that Cleveland was a true outdoorsman, he would have been less antagonistic.) In private, however, Roosevelt didn’t care for the partisan stammerings of either candidate. They were both, he believed, old-school mugwumps while he was a new-school reformer. In any case, Blaine was accused of representing “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” and whether these charges proved decisive or not, went down in defeat on Election Day. (Cleveland won by a relatively close margin: 219 electoral votes to 182.3) Writing to Henry Cabot Lodge, who had himself lost a congressional race in Massachusetts, Roosevelt carped that the Republican Party had been done in by so-called “Independents” whom he deemed “pharisaical fools and knaves.” 4
Theodore Roosevelt wearing a customized Badlands hunting costume. This photograph was used to promote Hunting Trips of a Ranchman.
Roosevelt in customized Badlands costume (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
Disappointed by Blaine’s loss, Roosevelt headed back to the Badlands just two days after the elections in November, eager to gather material for Hunting Trips and to track bighorn sheep along the Montana line. His spirits rose once he was on a horse. He spent a few days at the cabin at Maltese Cross, catching up with Dakotan friends. Then, with hard snow falling, he trotted north on his horse Manitou. The solitude of the Elkhorn Ranch, he figured, would offer minimum distractions and he could start writing Hunting Trips in earnest.
The prairie winds of the Dakota Territory could be ruthless, and Roosevelt, traveling by himself, was nearly blinded when snow squalls started blowing in his face. As he forded the Little Missouri River the ice cracked and fear ran up and down his spine. Then, to use Jack London’s term in The Call of the Wild, 5 the “dominant primordial beast” welled up in Roosevelt. Undaunted by his precarious predicament, he took the inclement weather as a challenge. By twilight, new snow was falling so heavily that Roosevelt was forced to seek shelter in a lean-to that he luckily stumbled upon. He’d forgotten to bring hard tack with him, so dinner consisted of only tea as snowdrifts layered up against his door.6 Roosevelt reported in his private diary that he slept, warm and without vexation, by a small fire while wolves—which he deemed “the beast of waste and desolation”—howled nearby.7 At daybreak a narrow band of light appeared in the east, intimating that the storm had subsided.
Having endured the wintry ordeal, a famished Roosevelt grabbed his shotgun and hunted sharptail grouse in the sparkling white snowdrifts. Pioneers in the Dakota Territory and Minnesota used to claim that the brushland was so filled with sharptails that when they flocked the sun was blocked (although this was a dubious claim, because grouse don’t rise that high), and indeed Roosevelt bagged five that day. “The sharptails fly strongly and steadily, springing into the air when they rise, and then going off in a straight line, alternately sailing and giving a succession of rapid wing-beats,” Roosevelt wrote. “Sometimes they will sail a long distance with set wings before alighting, and when they are passing overhead with their wings outstretched each of the separate wing feathers can be seen, rigid and distinct.”8
Immediately, Roosevelt roasted two grouse over a small fire. They were uncommonly tasty. Fortified, he continued on to the frozen trail to the Elkhorn. Upon arriving at the ranch, he was cheerfully greeted by Sewall and Dow. Roosevelt was pleased to learn that his hardy cattle were in relatively fine shape. The idea of going on a hunt was bandied about, but the trio decided to first procure firewood—lots of firewood—for the blustery winter days ahead. For hours they chopped down trees and collected kindling. The jocular Maine lumberjacks teased Roosevelt, saying that he was a rank amateur when it came to felling trees. As Dow mockingly told a rancher after three days of clear-cutting cottonwoods, “Well, Bill cut down fifty-three, I cut forty-nine, and the boss, he beavered down seventeen.”9 Always attuned to animal metaphors, Roosevelt knew he was being good-naturedly mocked. Beavers gnawed down cottonwoods and willows slowly and painstakingly, eating bark while they worked. For a tenderfoot trying to be a bull moose, being perceived by his workers as a “beaver” was a real put-down.
Nevertheless, with temperatures dropping to thirty degrees below zero, Roosevelt wisely retreated back to the Maltese Cross, where the primitive creature comforts of Medora were near at hand. He spent hours reading poetry, shooting mule deer, and lunching with the Marquis de Mores at his château in Medora. Roosevelt loved his winter outfit of coonskin cap, long overcoat, and fur-lined gloves. But most of his free time was spent indoors, writing, and his deep love and appreciation for the wilderness in winter became evident in his prose. With a craftsman’s care he began pondering the power of death, the howling prairie, and the bitter cold. New England poetry was, of course, famous for bleakness, and Roosevelt imitated its tone. The deep-seated sentiment of “iron desolation” permeated his writing. (The naturalist John Burroughs had used iron as a poetic metaphor for a forest’s forlornness in his 1879 book Locusts and Wild Honey, which greatly influenced Roosevelt.10) “When the days have dwindled to their shortest,
and the nights seem never ending, then all the great northern plains are changed into an abode of iron desolation,” Roosevelt wrote. “Sometimes furious gales blow out of the north, driving before them the clouds of blinding snow-dust, wrapping the mantle of death round every unsheltered being that faces their unshackled anger. They roar in a thunderous bass as they sweep across the prairie or whirl through the naked cañons; they shiver the great brittle cottonwoods, and beneath their rough touch the icy limbs of the pines that cluster in the gorges sing like the chords of an aeolian harp.”11
One winter day Roosevelt was informed that some bighorn sheep were climbing buttes only twenty-five miles from the Maltese Cross. Ever since he had first arrived in the Badlands, he had wanted a ram’s head for his trophy collection at Sagamore Hill. The hunt itself would be recorded in Chapter 7 of Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, “A Trip after Mountain Sheep.” With Merrifield at his side, Roosevelt rode deep into the “fantastic shapes” of the “curiously twisted” Badlands.12 Because bighorns lived in rocky precipices, they didn’t leave detectable footprints, so Roosevelt had only his rifle and luck to guide him.13
Stalking bighorn was a difficult proposition requiring mountaineering skills, stamina, and tenacity. Larger than a deer, a bighorn ram weighed around 300 pounds and was swift and sure-footed. “In his movements he is not light and graceful like the pronghorn and other antelopes, his marvellous agility seeming rather to proceed from sturdy strength and wonderful command over iron sinews and muscles,” Roosevelt wrote. “The huge horns are carried proudly erect by the massive neck; every motion of the body is made with perfect poise, and there seems to be no ground so difficult that the big-horn cannot cross it. There is probably no animal in the world his superior in climbing, and his only equals are the other species of mountain sheep and the ibexes.”14
Eventually, after days of unstable tracking on slippery ledges and knifelike ridges, Roosevelt got his handsome sheep. Although Roosevelt admitted that it was a lucky shot, he claimed that skill was also a factor. Strapping the ram onto his horse Manitou’s back, he brought the prize to the Maltese Cross ranch and feasted on mountain “mutton.”15
For Roosevelt, his wilderness experiences always got back to his desire for good health and bragging rights. “I have just returned from a three day trip in the Badlands after mountain sheep; and after tramping over the most awful country that can be imagined I have finally shot a young ram with a fine head,” he wrote to his sister Anna. “I have now killed every kind of plains game.”16 (By the time Roosevelt became president in 1901, the bighorn sheep in the Badlands had been wiped out.)
As Christmas 1884 approached, however, the merciless “iron desolation” and strange landforms of the interior plains were too much for Roosevelt. He was homesick for his daughter Alice (or Baby Lee, as he often called her). The numbing Dakota cold proved unrestful and intellectually unproductive. Scooping up his notes for Hunting Trips once again, Roosevelt boarded the eastbound train. He was frustrated because writing about the Badlands while in the Badlands had proved elusive. After enduring the sad holiday in New York—the eggnog parties and Christmas packages were not the same without his mother and his wife—Roosevelt hunkered down to write seriously about the Badlands and Bighorns. Nothing could distract him from the arduous chore at hand. Unlike The Naval War of 1812, this first-person effort would be a memoir from Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming intermixed with Burroughsian observations on natural history, the sportsman’s code, hunting stories, warnings about biological conservation, and cowboy lore.
After Roosevelt settled down to write, and consuming pots of black coffee, he pushed himself relentlessly, usually writing for two or three sessions a day. By February 1885, he had written 95,000 words, and the next month Hunting Trips, a collocation of wilderness experiences, was finished. The pace had exhausted him. But once Roosevelt’s depleted health was restored, after days of almost nonstop sleep, he returned to Medora to spend a few weeks checking up on his ranches.17 Early on, Roosevelt—a bit out of practice in the saddle—was tossed from Manitou into the frigid Little Missouri River. Chunks of ice kept him from being swept away in the current, and somehow he managed to get a grip on the situation and save himself and his horse. Perversely, he was delighted by the thrill of being near death and by the tingly, numbing cold water. Days later, abruptly, he purposely tossed himself into the river to relive the experience. “I had to strike my own line for twenty miles over broken country before I reached home and could dry myself,” he boasted to Bamie. “However it all makes me feel very healthy and strong.”18
Meanwhile, G.P. Putnam’s Sons was preparing to publish Hunting Trips (dedicated to Elliott Roosevelt, “That Keenest of Sportsmen and Truest of Friends”) in July, as a so-called sporting book.19 No other well-known politician in America, the advance notices boasted, could have written such a gripping hunting narrative. A photograph of Roosevelt posed in a fringed buckskin suit, Winchester rifle at his side, was used to promote the author as a gentleman-sportsman. Taken in a New York studio, the photo, a contrived combination of Buffalo Bill and John James Audubon, reeked of Broadway hokeyness, right down to the backdrop of ferns and an artificial grass carpet. But the actual book, filled with etchings and woodcuts and published in a first edition of only 500 copies, printed on quarto-size sheets of handwoven paper, remains a true collector’s item. Although it had a strong conservationist ethos, Hunting Trips was primarily aimed at gentleman-sportsmen like the writer, aristocrats who could afford hunting holidays, chuck-wagon hands, and what was then a hefty retail price of fifteen dollars.20
All of Roosevelt’s major outdoors adventures between 1880 and 1884 were vividly recounted in Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (subtitled Sketches of Sport on the Northern Cattle Plains). Putting his college education to good use, he wrote about Minnesota grouse, Montana buffalo, Dakota Territory bighorn sheep, Great Plains antelope, and Bighorns bears. Chronology was abandoned, often to the reader’s confusion, in favor of biological and topographical edification. Showcasing his erudition as a naturalist was Roosevelt’s first priority; recounting thrilling hunts was a close second. Most chapter titles, in fact, had to do with wildlife: “Water Fowl,” “The Grouse of the Northern Cattle Plains,” “The Deer of the River-Bottoms,” “The Black-Tail Deer.” Roosevelt wrote that the American West was a Darwinian laboratory full of amazing wildlife action. “The doctrine seems merciless, and so it is; but it is just and rational for all that,” Roosevelt wrote about On the Origin of Species. “It does not do to be merciful to a few, at the cost of justice to the many.”21
The villains of Hunting Trips were the “swinish game butchers” who ruthlessly hunted for hides “not for sport or actual food,” and who cold-bloodedly murdered the “gravid doe and the spotted fawn with as little hesitation as they would kill a buck of ten points.”22 Whenever T.R. turned polemical on behalf of good sportmanship, he echoed the ethical sentiments and concerns of his uncle Robert B. Roosevelt and the sporting press, such as Forest and Stream. Like Uncle Rob pontificating on the essential beauty of shad, trout, and eels, throughout Hunting Trips Roosevelt gave loving naturalist observations about the elk, antelope, and buffalo he had hunted. Not all, however, was blood and thunder. There was an “Indian guide” feel to much of the prose. For example, Roosevelt wrote quietly about stumbling upon a white-tailed deer’s resting spot with the “blades of grass still slowly rising, after the hasty departure of the weight that has flattened them down.” 23 Reading Hunting Trips makes it abundantly clear that Roosevelt deeply respected these deer.
Although cherry-picking is required, genuine conservationist beliefs can be excavated from the pages of Hunting Trips. For example, true western outdoorsmen, Roosevelt wrote, would have to become citizen-protectors of the wildlife being devastated by bands of destructive rogues. In almost every chapter he feared the day when elk, buffalo, and prairie chickens would vanish forever. “No one who is not himself a sportsman and lover of nature can realize the intense indignati
on with which a true hunter sees these butchers at their brutal work of slaughtering the game, in season and out,” he wrote in Hunting Trips, “for the sake of the few dollars they are too lazy to earn in any other and more honest way.”24 By expressing such views in 1885, Roosevelt was pitting himself against the railroad behemoths, telegraph companies, real estate brokers, and even Buffalo Bill, whom he respected as a master horse-breaker.25 Although there are only a few such passages—in a book that promoted the joys of big game hunting—Hunting Trips nevertheless marked the beginning of Roosevelt’s great crusade for the conservation of deer, elk, antelope, big-horn sheep, and bears. Wringing a livelihood from the “outdoors” literary marketplace instead of U.S. naval history now became an all-important occupational pursuit for Roosevelt to juggle along with politics, ranching, and managing the family trust. And in wildlife protection he had found his cause.
Hunting Trips received impressive reviews that July. The New York Times, for example, said that the book was clear-eyed and would seize “a leading position in the literature of the American sportsman.” Although the first part of the review focused on Roosevelt’s ethnological delineation of cowboy culture, the Times also noted that his naturalist writing on the survivalist tactics of white-tailed deer was exemplary. “The common deer, or whitetailed deer, found in almost any State in the Union, he tells us was not so plentiful five years ago on the northern plains as it is to-day,” the unidentified reviewer wrote. “With this deer its increase seems to be due to its particular habits. It seeks the densest coverts, is fond of wet and swampy places, and is rarely jumped by accident. It demonstrates the survival of the fittest.”26
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