The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (20 page)

Theodore Roosevelt vacationed regularly in the North Woods of Maine as a Harvard student. In March 1878 he went snowshoeing in the wild. Here (left to right) are Bill Sewall, Wilmot Dow, and Theodore Roosevelt.
T.R. on North Woods of Maine hike. (
Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library
)

There was nothing passive about the way Roosevelt listened to lumberjack slang and absorbed North Woods tall tales of the Paul Bunyan variety. “Even then,” Bill Sewall recalled, “he was quick to find the real man in the very simple men.”
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Sewall, for example, had two brothers whom T.R. got to know. “Sam was a deacon,” Roosevelt recalled of the pair. “Dave was NOT a deacon. It was from Dave that I heard an expression which ever after remained in my mind.” Apparently one afternoon Dave Sewall was “speaking of a local personage of shifty character who was very adroit in using fair-sounding words which completely nullified the meaning of other fair-sounding words which proceeded them.” Finding such mealy-mouthedness disingenuous, Dave fired off the backwoods insult that they were “weasel words.” As Roosevelt recounted, Dave Sewall said, “just like a weasel when he sucks the meat out of an egg and leaves nothing but the shell.” Roosevelt always remembered “weasel words” as applicable to disingenuous oratory delivered by sham publications.
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Later in life, during his Bull Moose years, Roosevelt used the term “weasel words” in both an article in
Outlook
and a major Missouri address.
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There was another aspect of Sewall’s life that was similar to Roosevelt’s childhood—childhood sickness. Although he didn’t have asthma, he had been afflicted with hyperthermia, diphtheria, and hearing difficulties. Growing up fragile in such unforgiving country wasn’t an option. Sewall either had to get in shape or die. Much like Roosevelt, he began a successful fitness regime and became an inspiration for the philosophy of mind over matter. Treating lumbering as a sport, he practiced day and night with his ax, priding himself at being able to chop a sycamore down faster than anybody else in Aroostook County. As if performing for Buffalo Bill’s show, he could toss an ax in the air, catch it, and then split a pine log, all in one motion. Starting at age sixteen, he became a boss man for lumber drives, overseeing pine logs floating down the Mattawamkeag River every harvest season, the months of April to July.

Back at Harvard that spring, a self-confident Theodore acted a bit like a roughneck weaned on frozen rivers. The gloves had come off. Bile
stirred in his stomach when he thought about all his anti-outdoors naturalist professors. The wilderness had been so intoxicating. One day he was in Cambridge, feeling hemmed in; the next day he was gazing at an ice-sheeted blue lake looking for moose. The North Woods had toughened him, or so he believed. The convivial ways of Sewall and Dow also lingered in him. No longer was he content behaving like an adolescent rajah collecting bird feathers and speckled eggs. Primitive Maine had knocked some of the tameness out of him, significantly. He now considered his asthma an ugly by-product of civilization’s stresses. Reading the Old Testament in Maine by a roaring fire, Roosevelt felt like an American Adam, uncontaminated by the corruptions of Tammany Hall politics or Harvard’s pecking orders. Once again Island Falls—even in a blind frenzy of snow—had redeemed his despair and fixed his determination to marry Alice Lee. “I never have passed a pleasanter two weeks than those just gone by,” Roosevelt wrote to his mother. “I enjoyed every moment. The first two or three days I had asthma but, funnily enough, this left me entirely as soon as I went into camp. The thermometer was below zero pretty often, but I was not bothered by the cold at all.”
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Just as bathing in Walden Pond had been a baptism for Thoreau, Roosevelt now felt the cleansing effect of the horizontally blowing snow in the Mooseleuk Range. It was as if Roosevelt’s worries about asthma had been stolen away by the blanket of icy whiteness. “I have never seen a grander or more beautiful sight than the northern woods in winter,” he wrote. “The evergreens laden with snow make the most beautiful contrast of green and white, and when it freezes after a rain all the trees look as though they were made of crystal. The snow under foot being about three feet deep, and drifting to twice that depth in places, completely changes the aspect of things.”
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VI

No sooner had the spring semester at Harvard begun than Roosevelt started plotting for a return visit to Maine. The spell of the North Woods had fallen over him. Some of his classmates, however, snickered that all Roosevelt learned in Maine was the art of manly bragging. Even though he would spend June and July in Oyster Bay, tending to family obligations, come August he was going to climb the peak that Thoreau had written about, the 5,268-foot Mount Katahdin. Even with Sewall as principal guide, that would be quite a mountaineering feat for a first-timer. Make no mistake about it—this was a big mountain. When a wall of white
clouds hovered in the sky, you couldn’t even see the pinnacle from base camp. Mountain climbing, Roosevelt knew, was a far trickier endeavor than hiking in river valleys.

While guests at Oyster Bay were having tea and crumpets, Roosevelt was purchasing camping gear from Greenville Sanders & Sons. His private diaries list a flannel shirt, duck trousers, long underwear, a parka, wool socks, bandannas, a thick blanket, and a bag of “necessaries.” The plan was to make camp at the eastern hinge of Mount Katahdin and climb the narrow ridge among the blackflies and ticks. He hoped plenty of bull moose would be encountered around ponds and lakes as they dined on aquatic plants—Roosevelt desperately wanted a moose’s palmate antlers for his trophy collection, and he wanted to eat a moose steak. In
The Maine Woods
Thoreau maintained that moose meat was “like tender beef with perhaps more flavor, sometimes like veal.”
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Because Roosevelt had studied the characteristics of bull moose carefully, he understood both their rutting habits and their boreal–mixed deciduous forest habitat.

Roosevelt relished the fact that moose were the largest member of the deer family populating North America, standing six feet tall, with the males weighing up to 1,300 pounds. (A bull bison, however, can be larger, weighing up to a ton.) With their poor eyesight, moose rely on their excellent hearing to escape predators at night. Certainly Roosevelt would have identified with the way the moose turned this deficit into an asset. Their sense of smell was so heightened that a favorite saying of Maine moose hunters was “Keep the wind in your face and the sun at your back” so as not to be detected. Able to run thirty-five miles an hour, neck craning with every sudden noise, the docile-looking bull moose became astonishingly aggressive when feeling threatened. And if a hunter killed a bull moose—which usually took more than a single bullet—two or three grown men were needed to carry the carcass off. Roosevelt was also impressed with the raw strength of the bull moose.

VII

Unfortunately, there is no photograph of Roosevelt on August 23, 1879, when he arrived in Island Falls full of vim and vigor. He was carrying a forty-five-pound pack on his back and held both a shotgun and a rifle in his hands. There was no telling what oddments were inside the pack. You could have recognized him as a greenhorn from as far away as the North Pole. Along with Emlen West and Arthur Cutler, he headed over to the Sewall cabin to plan their climb. Staring at Mount Katahdin, pointing
at it with his rifle, Roosevelt spontaneously decided to canoe more than twenty miles to Lake Mattawamkeag (with Emlen) just to loosen up for their big outing.

For eight days the Roosevelt-Sewall party camped and hiked in the Mount Katahdin area. (Today it’s part of Baxter State Park.) A huge mound looming out over a sea of woodlands, Katahdin had a soothing Japanese Zen-like aura. Just staring at the peak made you want to write a haiku. On a clear day from the Katahdin summit, Canada poured open on both sides of the mountain. You could see New Brunswick to the east and Quebec to the west. But that serenity was misleading. One misjudged step on the way up Katahdin could mean a broken neck or death.

About three-quarters of the way up Katahdin, both Cutler and Emlen collapsed from fatigue. Roosevelt soldiered on; he bragged in his diary that he had learned to “endure fatigue” as stoically as any lumberjack, even though his throat was burning and his joints were aching. At one juncture, he claimed he was “fagged” but was not stricken with asthma. His mind, however, was on fire. Looking toward the west, Roosevelt probably could see Moosehead Lake, where “the humiliation” had taken place. He’d come a long way since that hazing. As Hudson Stuck, a member of the first team to climb Mount McKinley in Alaska explained, first-time mountaineers like Roosevelt were embarked on a “privileged communion” with the “high places of earth.”
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And, indeed, as he was ascending Thoreau’s peak, Roosevelt’s heart filled with pure joy; he was double-charged with life, wearing everybody else out.

Once they all returned to Island Falls, Cutler and Emlen decided to call it quits. But Roosevelt wanted another wilderness adventure
now
, while the adrenaline was still coursing through his body like a river of fire. Full of spark and fizz, he said good-bye to his tutor and cousin and turned his sights to the caribou country around the Munsungun Lake region. The idea was for Roosevelt and Sewall to take a pirogue up the Aroostook River on a hunting jag in search of moose and caribou. They loaded up on hardtack, pork jerky, and flour, gearing up for a grueling nine or ten days combating rocks and rapids.

Refusing to take shortcuts, they forded rivers, slipped on stones in fast-moving streams, shot doves for dinner, and hiked until they dropped in clammy exhaustion. With each effort Roosevelt grew merrier. Tellingly, Cutler later wrote to Sewall that the next time T.R. came to Maine for his “semi-annual visit,” it would be easier to tether a “tame moose” for him to shoot instead of enduring an endless series of obstacle tests around the Munsungun Lake region.

Book Two of Yagyu Munenori’s
The Life Giving Sword
(part of his samurai meditation on martial arts) gives some insight on Roosevelt’s euphoria during this sojourn. Writing in the seventeenth century, Munenori explains a state of mind he calls “total removal,” a swooping moment when sickness of the mind disappears.
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Conquering Katahdin was the culmination of something Roosevelt’s father had told him: that the body and mind needed to run in tandem, that he had to be whole to succeed. As Roosevelt was going through “total removal,” one can only wonder what Bill Sewall thought when his eager client shouted “Bully!” or “By Jove!” every time the dugout flooded or a thunderstorm drenched them to the bone. But when they parted that September, Sewall promised to keep an eye on the Cambridge-bound Roosevelt from the North Woods. Shared experience, after all, is the cement of all friendships. They had forged an alliance that had all the power of a blood bond.

When Roosevelt left the depot at Kingman, Maine, on September 24, he didn’t know he was saying good-bye to the North Woods forever (the next summer he would visit the well-heeled Maine coast). Over the previous year, he had spent sixty-nine days with Sewall and traveled more than 1,000 miles of rugged backcountry by wagon, canoe, pirogue, and foot. Everywhere they went was as serene as a forgotten battlefield. Never again would Roosevelt write about debilitating asthma attacks or the disease of puniness. In “Jabberwocky” (in
Alice through the Looking-Glass
and then in
The Hunting of the Shark
), Lewis Carroll used a word he coined: “galumphing,” meaning, roughly, galloping triumphantly or marching exultantly with “irregular bounding movements.” No word devised before or since then has better described Roosevelt when he conquered Mount Katahdin.
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“As usual it rained,” Roosevelt noted, “but I am enjoying myself exceedingly, am in superb health and as tough as a pine knot.”
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The fact that Roosevelt left Maine’s North Woods didn’t mean that the North Woods left him. Ardor for the state stayed with him, as permanent as a ring in a redwood tree. Later in life, Roosevelt adopted the bull moose as his political symbol. He even dubbed his Progressive Party of 1912 the Bull Moose Party. Gleefully, Roosevelt, taking a cue from Dave Sewall, constantly accused his opponents of taking every opportunity to use “weasel words.” While serving as president, Roosevelt named his Blue Ridge Mountains retreat—a secluded cabin just outside Charlottesville, Virginia—“Pine Knot.” Bill Sewall’s cabin, where Roosevelt used to lodge, became the first official historic site in Island Falls; eventually, even the lean-to hunting camp on Mattawamkeag Lake was preserved. Meanwhile, the spot along the Mattawamkeag River, where it’s believed
Roosevelt read the Bible on Sundays, now has a historic marker in the ground, detailing Roosevelt’s Maine adventures in the late 1870s.

And Roosevelt wasn’t done with the straightforwardness of either Sewall or Dow. Because they “hitched well,” as Sewall put it, Roosevelt summoned them to the Dakota Territory to operate a cattle business in 1884. But that was six years away. First he had to graduate from Harvard and marry Alice Lee—those were his two primary objectives.