The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (24 page)

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.”
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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.

After the New Year Theodore and Alice moved into Manhattan, to the mansion on West Fifty-Seventh Street. Life was quite good. Roosevelt had learned to dam his pent-up tears whenever his father’s memory was evoked. Wandering around the Bronx from time to time to get his nature fix amid the clamor of the new elevated railroads, Roosevelt daydreamed about the open spaces of the Far West. New York was getting crowded. Too many of the gadgets of tomorrow first showcased at the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition were now fairly commonplace. Bicycles were all the rave, as were typewriters. Theodore took to neither. (Robert B. Roosevelt, however, was a champion of both.)

Amid the many New York galas and soirees, Roosevelt, however, seemed to have deferred his need for wilderness. Besides attending Columbia law school, he was writing the last chapters of
The Naval War of 1812
. Books about Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry and Admiral John Paul Jones, not Elliott Coues’s newest bird key, now caught his eye. As a married man, he found that his diary writing waned, as did his taxidermy. His sketch pads were filled not with mice but with brig sloops. When drafting chapters about the Great Lakes, for example, Roosevelt never mentioned the nesting areas of plovers, gulls, or terns.

There was, however, an exception: he was writing an essay about an ornithological trip with Elliott in December 1880 aboard a twenty-one-foot sailboat around Long Island Sound. The short nautical-naturalist essay was called “Sou’-Sou’-Southerly”—the vernacular name for old-squaws
(Clangula hyemalis)
.
*
On March 24, in fact, a frustrated Roosevelt wrote in his diary that he was “still working hard at…one or two unsuccessful literary projects.”
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The first of these was
The Naval War of 1812;
the second was the Robert B. Rooseveltish “Sou’-Sou’-Southerly.”

A strong case can be made that “Sou’-Sou’-Southerly” was the first authentic naturalist essay ever fully realized by Roosevelt.
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It was written for publication in a sporting magazine but was—for whatever reason—never published. Based on his frozen, white-capped nautical journey with Elliott in a sloop traveling from Oyster Bay to Huntington Bay, the narrative hinged on the perils of duck hunting in the bitter cold of Long Island Sound. The Roosevelts overcame ragged floes, heavy seas, and icicles overtaking their beards, all in the name of bird hunting. “The snow storm had now fairly set in, the hard flakes, mingled with flying spray, driving fiercely into our faces, and (for the short winter day was already becoming even duller and grayer as evening drew on),” Roosevelt wrote, setting the stage, “the land was entirely veiled from our sight thought not far distant. Sometimes there would be a few minutes lull and partial clearing off, and then with redoubled fury the fitful gusts would strike us again, shrouding us from stern to stern in the scudding spoon drift.”
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If all Roosevelt wrote about in “Sou’-Sou’-Southerly” was ice-laden waters and wind, then history could chalk it up as a solid first effort by an aspiring adventure writer. Many of his nautical references, in fact, gave the impression that he was showing off. And, as usual, Roosevelt also wrote with far too many semicolons. But owing to its Audubon Society overtones Roosevelt’s essay offered much more than what one expects from an initial essay—“Sou’-Sou’-Southerly” is filled with his able portraits of such winter birds as coots, dippers, sheldrakes, and bluebills. Checker-back loons wade in shallow coves trying to shelter themselves from arctic-like gusts, and black ducks with white-and-chestnut plumage shake off the curlers breaking over their water-resistant bodies. Only a committed naturalist who cared deeply about shorebirds could have written “Sou’-Sou’-Southerly.” Although Roosevelt wrote about hunting black ducks in this piece, he had also captured their magnificence in real-time camera-like prose.
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Even though Roosevelt was writing
The Naval War of 1812
and perfecting “Sou’-Sou’-Southerly,” he followed through on his commitment to squire his wife around the grand capitals of Europe that summer. Emulating his father, he created a breakneck itinerary for them and kept it. Even though Alice had horrendous stomach problems they toured Irish castles, steamboated on the Rhine, shopped in Munich, and fished on Lake Como. Surprisingly, he didn’t care for much of the European art. Strangely, the sensuous women models of Rubens seemed to him like “handsome animals.”
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But for the most part Europe—as it had when he was just a little boy carting around arsenic paste—made him homesick. While he was in France and Italy, the word “wretchedness” became one of his favorite adjectives. A longing for the American wilderness returned to the forefront of his thinking. Even London’s Zoological Gardens disappointed him. Ironically, the British zoologists weren’t taking Darwinian advancements into their displays. Then there was the awful news that President Garfield had been shot and was in critical condition. “Frightful calamity for America,” he wrote in his diary.
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It seems the tragedy made him want to return home, but he didn’t.

Although they hadn’t seen each other for a few years, one of Roosevelt’s principal correspondents from that summer of 1881 was old Bill Sewall of Island Falls, who eagerly collected his young friend’s special-delivery missives from the little postal box. Clearly Roosevelt was still thinking about the Maine wild—and the exhilaration of climbing Mount Katahdin. Disregarding his Harvard physician’s recommendation to watch his heart, Roosevelt prepared to hike up the Matterhorn on his own while Alice rested in a hotel in Zermatt. Remembering all the lessons he had learned from Sewall, he had decided, quite spontaneously, to climb Switzerland’s famous peak as a retort to a cabal of snobby English climbers he had accidentally encountered in the hotel lobby. He was determined to prove to them that “a Yankee could climb just as well as they could.”
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Writing to his sister Bamie, he added that conquering the Matterhorn that August would give him at least the credential of being a “subordinate kind of mountaineer.”
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For serious mountain climbers, conquering the Matterhorn was an initiation ritual; if you could make it to the summit you were accepted as a player. The 14,690-foot Matterhorn was first successfully climbed twenty years before, in 1861, by the Englishman Edward Whymper. His 1880 book
The Ascent of the Mattern
was all the rage in Europe. Since Whymper’s historic climb, hundreds of others had accomplished the feat (including Lucy Walker, the first woman to make the ascent), and the Swiss Alpine Club
had built a shelter for climbers to rest and sleep in at 12,500 feet, which made a big difference.
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Here is an excerpt from a long letter of August 5, 1881, that Theodore sent to his sister Anna, proud of his feat: “We left the hut at three-forty, after seeing a most glorious sunrise which crowned the countless snow peaks and billowy, white clouds with a strange crimson iridescence, reached the summit at seven, and were down at the foot of the Matterhorn proper by one. It was like going up and down enormous stairs on your hands and knees for nine hours.”
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By making it to the top of the Matterhorn, Roosevelt, in essence, felt he had conquered Europe. He also climbed the Jungfrau, a peak only slightly less difficult for experienced mountaineers. Nevertheless, in Roosevelt’s mind the wilderness of America was more divine than the tame Alps and Pyrenees. As the historian Louis S. Warren noted in
The Hunter’s Game
, Roosevelt—like many of his generation—had come to believe that the United States was “nature’s nation,” that the pristine landscape represented God’s best work.
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In retrospect the most amazing part of Roosevelt’s European jaunt with Alice Lee—exemplified by climbing the Matterhorn—was his stamina. Zigzagging from city to city, he nevertheless kept assiduously working on
The Naval War of 1812
, preparing his manuscript for publication in May–June 1882. His powers of concentration that summer were amazing. No matter what task Roosevelt undertook, he was like a boll weevil eating its way through a bale of cotton. Over the years scholars of Roosevelt as a military man have garnered plenty of useful biographical tidbits from reading his diary entries about standing at Napoléon’s tomb and contemplating Caesar, Tamerlane, and Genghis Kahn. But for the conservationist-minded, the most interesting aspect of these months abroad was Roosevelt’s rejection of European nature in favor of American wilderness. He believed that the Europeans, with the exception of Scandinavians and British, had recklessly shot out all the wildlife. Because this was Roosevelt’s first foreign trip since experiencing Maine and Minnesota, he was now touting his glorious homeland as a Garden of Eden. “The summer I have passed traveling through Europe, and through I have enjoyed it greatly,” he wrote to Sewall, “yet the more I see, the better satisfied I am that I am an American; free born and free bred where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.”
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V

Upon returning from Europe, having squandered part of his inheritance, Roosevelt immediately threw himself back into the urban fray. He was happily married, enjoyed learning law, and, as an impassioned conversationalist, had an easy time making new friends. His asthma and weak heart weren’t giving him problems. He was finishing his book, which was scheduled for publication the following spring by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. To top the year off, that November he was elected to the New York state assembly from the twenty-first district.

When Roosevelt took office on January 2, 1882, he swore he’d be a steel-fisted reformer like Uncle Rob. He would hunt down thieves, swindlers, polecats, and robber barons; more controversially, he was willing to expose the frauds and shenanigans of the very governing class he was part of. He was itching to earn his spurs in the rough-and-tumble of New York politics. He wanted everything cleaner and better. It was no coincidence that the first bill he embraced would improve street cleaning in the city, and that it had a provision for the better treatment of workhorses.

Vivid stories abound about Roosevelt in Albany, dashing around in his frock coat trying to learn the rules of engagement. He was determined not to run with the wrong crowd, fearing being lampooned in the press as “politics as usual.” Fancying himself a change agent or reformer, he refused to see the world in gray, making snap judgments of his fellow legislators’ personalities that were oftentimes unfair. They were either good or evil, trustworthy or untrustworthy, front-parlor fresh or operators of smoke-filled backrooms. “He would come into that house like a thunderbolt,” Isaac Hunt, a fellow Republican legislator and Swiss cattle breeder from Watertown, recalled. “He would swing the door open and he would be half way up the stairs before that door would come together with a bang. Such a super-abundance of animal life was hardly condensed in a human life.”
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Nobody in the legislature knew quite what to make of Roosevelt. He was like a jaybird on the house roof, loud and sudden. Mocked as a “Squirt,” a “Punkin-Lily,” and a “Jane-Dandy”—and much worse—Roosevelt was held in contempt on both sides of the aisle.
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Annoyed by his reformist proclamations, irritated that he seemed above the give-and-take of politics, the longtime Republican speaker of the state house of representatives complained that with Roosevelt now in Albany the Republicans’ strength was “sixty and one-half members.” Rarely had Albany had an independent-minded legislator so determined to be nonpartisan.
The Republicans, then, saw Roosevelt as an annoyance, and the Democrats loathed him no end; these bad feelings were reciprocated. “There are some twenty-five Irish Democrats in the House,” Roosevelt wrote in his diary. “They are a stupid, sodden, vicious lot, most of them being equally deficient in brains and virtue.”
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On another occasion, unafraid of sounding elitist, Roosevelt noted that Tammany Hall Democrats were “totally unable to speak with even an approximation to good grammar; not even one of them can string three intelligible sentences together to save his neck.”
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Roosevelt’s closest friend in the New York legislature was—not surprisingly—Bill O’Neill, who lived in remote Saint Regis Falls in the Adirondacks. Much like Sewall, O’Neill was an honest backwoods type, obedient to existing laws, the owner of a rural general store who also ran a creamery. O’Neill later recalled that Roosevelt—who had published the only bird key of his Franklin County district—had constantly worried him; he was rocking the boat too much in 1882–1883 with his uncompromising reformist zeal. “In all the unimportant things we seemed far apart,” Roosevelt wrote fondly about O’Neill in
An Autobiography
, “but in all the important things we were close together…. Fortune favored me, whereas her hand was heavy against Billy O’Neill. All his life he had to strive hard to wring his bread from harsh surroundings and a reluctant fate; if fate had been but a little kinder, I believe he would have had a great political career.”
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