The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (19 page)

Later in the winter, once he was back at Harvard, word arrived that his father had died. Theodore took the grim news of February 10, 1878, as a body blow, and his grief was overwhelming. Bravely, he struggled to cope with the loss of “the one I loved dearest on the earth.”
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A curtain had fallen on his life. He had difficulties studying properly and felt haunted by his father’s visage. Roosevelt’s diary entries that winter and spring are full of lamentations: “Sometimes when I fully realize my loss I feel as if I should go wild.” “Oh Father, Father, how bitterly I miss you, mourn you and long for you.” The mainspring of Roosevelt’s life was gone. He prayed incessantly for his father, feeling terribly inferior to him in every way. Comparative anatomy and biology courses lost all appeal to Roosevelt. Slumping silently around Cambridge, he craved the recuperative powers of the wilderness.

Adding to Roosevelt’s depression, Hal decided to leave Harvard midway through his sophomore year, intending to learn law and increase the family fortune. Wasn’t it better, his friend hypothesized, to make big money and be a field ornithologist publishing popular books than to waste years in Harvard Square? Or to act like a New York dandy?

Discombobulated by his father’s death and Minot’s departure, restless beyond words, Roosevelt abandoned the notion of becoming a professional scientist. Years later, in
An Autobiography
, he explained how his disillusion with the professors at Harvard led him to set out on a different course. “I did not, for the simple reason that at the time Harvard, and I
suppose our other colleges, utterly ignored the possibilities of the faunal naturalist, the outdoor naturalist and observer of nature,” he wrote of his defection, with a trace of contempt. “They treated biology as purely a science of the laboratory and the microscope, a science whose adherents were to spend their time in the study of minute forms of marine life, or else in section-cutting and the study of the tissues of the higher organisms under the microscope. This attitude was, no doubt, in part due to the fact that in most colleges then there was a not always intelligent copying of what was done in the great German universities. The sound revolt against superficiality of study had been carried to an extreme; thoroughness in minutiae as the only end of study had been erected into a fetish.”
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Like Minot, Roosevelt had come to the conclusion that a naturalist huntsman who lost daily communication with wilderness was inconsequential. Desperately he craved the tonic of the Adirondacks or Maine, where his mourning could be salved and his nerves steadied. Only fresh, unobstructed air would clear his head. Thoreau had left Concord and headed to Maine’s Mount Katahdin for a rebirth of vitality. To escape the institutional dourness of Harvard, Roosevelt was looking for his own Katahdin to climb. Even though he didn’t consider himself a Transcendentalist, he was thirsting for nature trails and the wide-open wilderness. And he found it in September 1878 near where Thoreau did—in the North Woods of Maine.
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As a faunal naturalist, Roosevelt was revolting against the uninspiring idea that Moosehead Lake or Mount Katahdin could best be understood by specialists studying pine cones under a microscope. Decades later, in
Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter
, he praised Thoreau for writing
The Maine Woods
but downgraded him for being “slightly anaemic” where hunting was concerned.
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Essentially, Roosevelt saw himself as a bridge figure between Darwinian naturalists and old-time explorers and big game hunters. A conduit between the often clashing fields of biology and the humanities. Not that he was going to bail out of Harvard as Minot had done. To the contrary. His rebellion was of the inner kind. Meanwhile, T.R. had inherited $125,000 (a fortune back then) from his father. Invested wisely, it would yield $8,000 a year, money he began spending on books, wilderness guides, and expeditions.
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On campus Roosevelt started cultivating a lasting reputation for extracurricular achievements such as rowing and boxing. He didn’t turn his back on the scientific establishment completely, for he wrote and delivered papers before the Harvard Natural History Society about “Coloration of Birds” and “The Gills of Crustaceans.” Whenever possible, he
interacted with the Nuttall Ornithological Club, which was just starting to champion “citizen bird.” To aged club members, however, Roosevelt seemed a little too self-confident and “cocksure.”
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IV

At last Roosevelt had the wilderness experience he was craving. The place was Island Falls and it was tucked away in the upper reaches of Maine along the shore of Lake Mattawamkeag, an arduous ninety miles north of Bangor. Ever since Arthur Cutler spent a few weeks there with T.R.’s cousins Emlen and James West during the summer of 1876, the region’s vastness, as Cutler reported back to his pupil, had beckoned him. The North Woods of Maine had dramatic storms that rolled in from the Atlantic, crisp air, fast-moving rivers, speckled brook trout, white-tailed deer, herds of caribou, cascading waterfalls, and much more.
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Here an aspiring naturalist could find moose with huge antlers, beaver kits, and flocks of Canada geese. Here was where a real American hunter could test his mettle in the chill of the new morning. “I was not a boy of any natural prowess and for that very reason,” Roosevelt wrote, “the vigorous out-door life was just what I needed.”
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As Roosevelt eagerly anticipated hiking in the North Woods and canoeing on Lake Mattawamkeag with his West cousins, Cutler arranged for the guide from the trip two years earlier. Will Sewall was a native of Island Falls, whose mother and sister ran a lodge while he tramped all over Penobscot and Aroostook counties. Standing six feet tall, with kindly, sparkling eyes that said, “I’ve seen it all, boys,” the gravel-voiced Sewall prided himself on being a stoic and on being early to bed and early to rise. Difficult to startle, wise to the ways of the North Woods, he could forage off the forest by sapping maple trees or eating wild berries.
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Roosevelt immediately enjoyed being in his firm grip.

But there was more than backwoods hardiness to Sewall—he was a virtuous Bible-reading Yankee—who, much like Theodore Sr., frowned upon swearing, drinking, and fornicating. He knew Norse mythology and English literature as well, and he had a penchant for romantic novels like
Ivanhoe
and the rhyming verse of Longfellow, a fellow Mainer. Sometimes on a long hike he recited John Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes” aloud. It begins with the lines “St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold.” Unschooled in Darwin, Sewall, as Roosevelt would soon learn, knew as much as Harvard scholars about Nordic figures like the one-eyed god Odin and the
hammer-wielding mighty Thor. To Roosevelt, that Sewall romanticized Vikings as seafaring pagans wielding battleaxes was just another component of his charm as a storyteller.

So when Roosevelt headed north from Boston on the Maine Central (accompanied by his cousins Emlen and James West) past the sawmill centers of downstate Maine he was terribly excited both to explore the virgin sprucelands and to meet Sewall. Roosevelt had spent most of the summer of 1878 in Oyster Bay, playing the ornithologist and the swell. Now, for three weeks in September, just before having to start his junior year at Harvard, he was going to “get lost” in the wilderness. Meanwhile, Sewall’s job was to make sure he really didn’t.

Theodore and his cousins arrived at Sewall’s lodge in the first week of September 1878. Island Falls seemed more like a frontier outpost surrounded by howling wilderness than a town. It was scenic in the extreme: the largest peaks of Maine could be seen from its practically nonexistent town center. This was the great wide-open land. Even as late as 1878, glory-hound outdoorsmen could walk in practically any direction and name a creek or mountain ridge after themselves. The entire area was proof positive that you didn’t need to light out for the western territories to play Jim Bridger or John C. Frémont. Upper Maine was still raw and pristine and inhabited by Native American tribes who knew where the wild grapes grew.

After a round of greetings, the Roosevelt party was ready to set out into the surrounding wilderness. To help out on the trail, the bearded Sewall asked his clean-shaven nephew Wilmot Dow to join them. Sewall was the brains, and Dow had the sheer muscle. “Wilmot,” Roosevelt later wrote, “was from every standpoint one of the best men I ever knew.”
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Both guides were the soul of fidelity and honor. “Theodore was about eighteen when he first came to Maine,” Sewall later recalled. “He had an idea that he was going to be a naturalist and used to carry with him a little bottle of arsenic and go around picking up bugs.”
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They began by canoeing down the Mattawamkeag River until they got to the lake. Then it was another seven miles until they set up camp. As Cutler had expected, Sewall was a bracing antidote to Theodore’s Harvard blues; Roosevelt relished every minute of the outdoors strain. Nobody in the Agassiz School of Zoology, of course, would have thought of Sewall as a naturalist, but Roosevelt did. Bestowing that title on Sewall was part of his rebellion against the laboratory. Roosevelt was immediately impressed by Sewall. “I was accepted as part of the household; and the family and friends represented in their lives the kind of Americanism—
self-respecting, duty-performing, life-enjoying,” he wrote, “which is the most valuable possession that one generation can hand the next.”

During their eighteen days in the woods (September 7 to 26), Roosevelt and Sewall shot grouse, flushed out bats, bathed in the river, read scripture, and doused lanterns to sleep under the stars. Instead of inventorying the behavior of birds, Roosevelt seemed bent on assessing his own survivalist abilities. Sadly, Roosevelt felt that he was falling short of the expectations he had set for himself. As if hiking 110 miles with Sewall and Dow weren’t enough, Roosevelt bemoaned how woefully inadequate he found himself as a marksman. “I don’t think I ever made as many consecutive bad shots as I have this week,” he wrote, in a way all true hunters could sympathize with. “I’m disgusted with myself.”
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Such bouts of self-criticism aside, Roosevelt excelled during these September days, and he was entranced by the beauty of the North Woods. Although Sewall thought Roosevelt a “different fellow to guide from what I had ever seen,” he marveled at the way Theodore was “posted” about the politics and literature of the times.
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Even though Theodore was struggling with asthmatic attacks—“guffle-ing” was the way Sewall put it—he admired how the young man never complained, never lagged behind, and never asked for sympathy. There wasn’t anything about Theodore, in fact, that Sewall or Dow didn’t like. “Some folks said that he was headstrong and aggressive,” Sewall later wrote, “but I never found him so except when necessary; and I’ve always thought being headstrong and aggressive, on occasion, was a pretty good thing.”
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V

When Roosevelt arrived for classes at Harvard at the beginning of his junior year, all he could talk about was the North Woods of Maine: the looming mountains, the hemlocks and elms, the mulberries, the thick pines, the birches and wildflowers. He was now a self-styled outdoorsman. “He would come back with tales of exposure and hardship,” his classmate Charles G. Washburn recalled, “and, it seemed to us, which he had enjoyed.”
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To the walls at 16 Winthrop, Roosevelt added hard-earned trophies of Island Falls—a raccoon skin and stuffed ducks. A photograph taken of his room shows it as fairly neat and tidy, with the mounted birds placed under bell jars. Whether Maine was the inspiration or not, his grades went up during his junior year; they included near-perfect scores in zoology and political economy. His natural history library grew, and he treasured a personally inscribed copy of Coues’s
Birds of the Colorado Valley
.
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Follow
ing the lead of his uncle Robert B. Roosevelt, he joined several clubs at Harvard, with Porcellian as his primary focus. His activities as a clubman included serving as vice president of the Natural History Society; he quit this organization during his senior year, however, in an effort to downsize social life at Harvard in favor of time spent with his new love.

That autumn Roosevelt had started dating a conservative Boston girl, Alice Lee, whose parents lived on Chestnut Hill. A beautiful seventeen-year-old, Alice was gregarious and had impeccable manners. Theodore fell for this blond, who was nicknamed “Sunshine.” With compassionate eyes, a tennis player’s physique, and a flirtatious giggle, Alice was the true first love of Theodore’s life. Although there is no evidence to suggest that she shared his enthusiasm for birds, they wandered through meadows together, collected chestnuts, and admired wisteria. Alice, however, had many suitors, and Theodore had to pour on his charm and his gentlemanly ways.

By March 1879 Roosevelt was ready for another adventure in Maine with Sewall and Dow. While other classmates headed south in search of bright weather, Roosevelt took the train north to Island Falls, arriving to find three feet of snow on the ground. Sewall picked Roosevelt up by sleigh at the depot and, with bells jingling, took him to his cabin. For the first time, Roosevelt wore clumsy-looking snowshoes. They were Indian-made with rims of white ash, closed lacing, and the highest-quality raw
hide available. Three times longer than they were wide, they enabled Roosevelt to easily get traction on icy surfaces. Temperatures outside had dropped to ten degrees below zero. Ice coated all the bushes and every trace of road. Huge ten-foot snowdrifts buried low-lying cabins like coffins. At times the wind was so sharp with snow that it froze lips shut. Most sane people were huddled indoors by a fireplace, with plenty of lynx furs and wool blankets, but Roosevelt traipsed around the wintry woods in great spirits.