The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (28 page)

Bederman also explains the two different strains of masculinity that Theodore was juggling at age twenty-four. From his father he had inherited Victorian codes of “moral manliness” including unselfishness, chastity, physical strength, honesty, and altruism. Yet, as noted, his father had rejected serving as a Union soldier in the Civil War, hiring a surrogate in his place. Young T.R. had been humiliated by his father’s wartime decision. So perhaps he tried overcompensating in his effort to embrace the ethos of frontier masculinity in which a propensity for violence was often rewarded. Killing an animal, winning a fistfight, and declaring a duel, in other words, were obvious ways to cultivate his deficient “natural man” side. Therefore, Roosevelt felt a need to emulate Indians while simultaneously conquering them, and a need to worship big game like buffalo only to hunt them down. The Victorian mannered man turned to prim Europe whereas the “natural” American always had a westward focus. “On his first trip to the Badlands in 1883, he was giddy with delight and behaved as much like a Mayne Reid hero as possible,” Bederman wrote. “He flung himself into battle with nature and hunted the largest and fiercest game he could find. As a child, he had been attracted to natural history as a displacement of his desire to be a Western hero. Now, shooting buffalo and bullying obstreperous cowboys, he could style himself as the real thing.”
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Roosevelt’s solid Victorian morals, however, were never expunged as he became a Great Plains hunter and Dakota rancher. Unlike most men wanting a buffalo head, he actually thought about, and was angered by, the possibility that the great herds might become extinct. His Harvard education in Darwinian biology and naturalist studies gave him a perspective on western wildlife that no ordinary cowboy or hunter could have had. As Lincoln Lang later noted, every day Roosevelt increasingly came to understand the “definite purpose of every natural [object] he saw in the Bad Lands.”
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In the coming decades, his “man’s man” side hunted big game while the intellectual Harvard part of his personality would preserve things of great environmental beauty and consequence.

Considered in the light of Bederman’s thesis, hunting in the Dakota hills and killing a buffalo were the culmination of a series of masculine initiation rites T.R. had put himself through starting in Maine in 1871 with the incident at Moosehead Lake. Overall, life was going well—he had established himself as a historian, a lawyer, and a reform politician;
the very fact that Alice was pregnant proved (to his mind) his virility; his health, while still fickle, was on an upswing. No wonder Roosevelt felt ebullient as he boarded his eastbound train. For in addition to everything else, he no longer believed himself to be a weakling or tenderfoot. Any remaining hints of self-disgust had been vanquished. Although he went to exaggerated extremes to get there and was physically spent by exaltation and fatigue, Roosevelt now saw himself as a western man, not a rich boy whose father had refused to serve in the Civil War.

Once Roosevelt had his buffalo head onboard the train, he was ready to journey back to New York in a Pullman berth. Roosevelt wrapped his prize (weighing approximately twenty-five to thirty pounds) in burlap, loaded it onto a Northern Pacific railroad car, and headed east to Saint Paul.
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Unlike Texas longhorns, buffalo were singularly unimpressive if you stripped off their horns, just two stubby prongs jutting upward. A rack of deer or elk antlers was, by contrast, far more impressive. But a buffalo head, in all its grandeur, had become coveted all over America for saloon and library walls. The Union Pacific railroad system even acquired buffalo heads to hang in all its scattered depot offices.
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Roosevelt returned to Alice as a conquering hunter hero. Of course he proudly hung his buffalo head (a taxidermist in Saint Paul had mounted it) in their Manhattan home. That fall, he talked excessively about the freshness and vigor of the West. After winning a third term in the New York state legislature, he put himself forward for speaker of the assembly at the end of the year, offering a capsule biographical sketch that claimed he was a man of Harvard, Albany, and the Dakota Territory.
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Yet when he lost the speakership, he characteristically found the silver lining. “The fact that I had fought hard and efficiently…and that I had made the fight single-handed, with no machine back of me, assured my standing as floor leader,” he wrote. “My defeat in the end materially strengthened my position, and enabled me to accomplish far more than I could have accomplished as Speaker.”
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Starting in January 1884 Roosevelt found himself working almost full-time in Albany. He wanted nothing less than to break up the political machines of
both
parties in New York City and was also consumed with passing a series of municipal reform laws. Strapped for cash after writing the fat check in the Dakotas for cattle, Roosevelt decided to lease out his brownstone and move back into the house on West Fifty-Seventh Street with his mother. T.R.’s sister Bamie, married to Douglas Robinson, had recently given birth, and she also moved in. Alice suddenly had two family members—Mittie and Bamie—to look after her as her own
pregnancy moved into its ninth month. Meanwhile, the construction of Leeholm (Sagamore Hill) continued. “How I did hate to leave my bright, sunny little love yesterday afternoon,” Roosevelt wrote to Alice in early February from Albany. “I love you and long for you all the time.”
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Just days later tragedy struck the Roosevelt clan. On February 13, Theodore received a telegram announcing that Alice had just given birth to a girl. A plethora of hearty congratulations were telegraphed from fellow legislators and friends. Cigars were lit and glasses hoisted in his honor. But then a second telegram arrived. Although it didn’t survive, it was probably from Elliott and read something like: “There is a curse on this house. Mother is dying, and Alice is dying too.”
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(For that is what Elliott later told his brother in person at midnight.) Alice was afflicted with Bright’s disease (medically termed acute or chronic nephritis), and his mother had typhoid fever. A panic-stricken Theodore raced to board a train for Grand Central Station. The fog through Dutchess County was pea-soup thick as if village after village were floating in clouds. All he could do was sit and pray. It was around midnight when he finally arrived in Manhattan and made his way to West Fifty-Seventh Street. The pall of death hung all about as he entered the parlor and climbed the stairs to see Alice and the baby on the third floor.

Alice was drifting into and out of consciousness. As Roosevelt took her in his arms, his spirit broke down. It was as if the fog had entered his throat. With his surety evaporated, he simply didn’t know what to do except clutch her and sob. As he watched her head sinking into the pillow his emotions ran the gamut from contempt of God to guilt for being away in Albany. Her breathing was soft and low, and he berated himself for not being a better husband. Bright’s disease ravaged the kidneys—its symptoms included vomiting, high fever, and excruciating back pain. Breathing became difficult, the body became puffy, and the urine turned bloody. It was death by slow torture.
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The situation was no better on the second floor. Roosevelt’s mother was in utter misery, with a sustained fever of over 104 degrees as well as gastroenteritis and diarrhea. In the 1880s, when there were no antibiotics, death took one out of every ten patients afflicted with typhoid. The situation was beyond bleak. Mother had always been his one-woman support system. Without her he feared being rudderless.

On February 14 (Valentine’s Day) Mittie died at two o’clock in the morning. Twelve hours later so did Alice.
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Two days later a cold spell gripped New York as two hearses made their way to the Presbyterian Church on Fifty-Fifth Street and Fifth Avenue. All the leading philanthro
pists and politicians in the city—including the Astors and Harrimans—arrived to pay their last respects to the deceased Roosevelt women.
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The
New York Times
and
New York Sun
covered the double funeral as if it were an important event.
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After an opening prayer, the old hymn “Rock of Ages” was sung by a chorus of mourners paying their respects. On top of the two rosewood coffins were wreaths of roses and green vines. Following the benedictions, Roosevelt’s mother and wife were buried at Greenwood Cemetery next to his father. During these painful days of February, Roosevelt returned to keeping his diaries. “The light has gone out of my life,” he wrote, and his words were accompanied by a huge cross on the page. A couple of days later he added, “For joy or for sorrow my life has now been lived out.”
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Nobody will ever know the depths of the private pain that Roosevelt felt as winter changed into spring. For months afterward, everybody used kid gloves when dealing with him. His former tutor Arthur Cutler wrote to Bill Sewall in Maine that Theodore was stuck in a “dazed, stunned state.” Roosevelt himself put on a stoic veneer when writing to Sewall: “It was a grim and evil fate, but I have never believed it did any good to flinch or yield for any blow, nor does it lighten the blow to cease from working.”
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During sleepless nights that spring, Roosevelt would sit in a rocking chair, silent as smoke, and read natural history books. The world seemed quite diabolical. He wondered whether the Badlands—where even the half-clad buttes had an unstable equilibrium—might be the best place to heal and hatched a plan to light out for the Dakota Territory following the Republican National Convention in Chicago. Perhaps solace could be found in a ranch house with undraped windows surrounded by roping corrals and branching chutes. A saddle horse would probably be his best companion, his true equal and friend.

People always devise their own ways of coping with loss. Roosevelt took the route of bottling up his emotions, seldom mentioning his wife by name, submerging her memory, and never reminiscing about her legacy to his daughter Alice. Oddly, he didn’t even invoke her name in his own
An Autobiography
. It was as if Roosevelt believed he could best respect his beloved wife in silence. Nevertheless, upon a return visit to North Dakota, he holed up in the Maltese Cross cabin and edited a volume of memorials about Alice; he had it privately printed by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. “She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; as a flower she grew, and as a fair young flower she died,” he wrote in the introduction. “Her life had been always in the sunshine; there had never come to
her a single great sorrow; and none ever knew her who did not love and revere her for her bright, sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness.”
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Despite his grief Roosevelt that spring nevertheless engaged in politics at Albany with full fervor. Even though he loved the notion of General William T. Sherman as the Republican nominee for president, he reluctantly settled on the more pedestrian James G. Blaine. More and more his political coach was Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Although Lodge didn’t share Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for the wilderness he was keenly interested in organized fox hunts. A trusting Roosevelt used Lodge as a confidant and sounding board. Unlike Roosevelt, Lodge was terse, calculating, and unemotional. But he was also deeply honest, loyal, and a gentleman. Both shared a bedrock belief in the virtues of American exceptionalism. Both were dogged in their pursuit of western expansion. That spring Roosevelt and Lodge traveled together by train to Chicago for the smoky bedlam of the Republican National Convention. (Roosevelt left his infant daughter, whom he’d soon nickname Mouseskeins, in the care of his sister Bamie.) Although Lodge knew that Roosevelt had developed a reputation as a reformer, he was surprised at what a folk hero his New York friend had become with the western Republican delegates, merely for shooting a buffalo in the Dakota Territory. A rumor circulated at the convention that when the territory became a state, Roosevelt would probably be its first U.S. senator.

V

For his part, Roosevelt couldn’t wait to get out of Chicago. As soon as the convention was wrapped up, with Blaine as the nominee, he took a train to Saint Paul. Near a nervous breakdown, his entire exhausted body in low-grade pain, Roosevelt turned into a semi-recluse, not wanting to read newspapers or receive telegrams from anybody. Arriving in the Little Missouri area on June 9, he went directly to the Maltese Cross Ranch, anxious to begin his life as a cowboy and hunter.
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Since September Merrifield and Ferris had tended to Roosevelt’s cattle herd of around 440 head; only twenty-five had been killed by wolves or the cold.
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The coulees and buttes, as hoped, had adequately protected the herd. Riding around the region and seeing the new buildings that had sprung up in the boomtown of Medora bolstered Roosevelt’s morale—even if he still couldn’t imagine life without Alice and Mittie. In another burst of Rooseveltian enthusiasm, he wrote Gregor and Lincoln Lang a $21,000 check to acquire 1,000 new cattle. His investment in the Badlands was now more than $35,000.

In photographs taken at the time, Roosevelt is often wearing a custom-made buckskin suit. He had commissioned the outfit from a seamstress in Amidon, North Dakota, because its “inconspicuous color” was ideal for hunting antelope; it caused, he wrote, “less rustling” than other fabrics “when passing among projecting twigs.” But the show-off in him also wanted the fringed suit and its accompanying hunting shirt because they were “the most picturesque and distinctively national dress ever worn in America,” the uniform in which “Daniel Boone was clad when he first passed through the trackless forests of the Alleghanies…. It was the dress worn by grim old Davy Crockett when he fell at the Alamo.”
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Despite his fanciful wardrobe, Roosevelt, as rancher, was a workhorse (not a showhorse). He participated with a vengeance in round-ups and brandings, becoming a decent roper and a cool presence during stampedes. While his horsemanship wasn’t exceptional he always had a good rapport with his mount. He learned how to braid a halter and bridle rein as if born on the range. With the crack of dawn he was up, anxious to perform morning chores. Whether it was going to find a stray or fixing a fence or coping with foul weather, Roosevelt always volunteered, at least to the point of showing to Merrifield and Ferris that the elitist in him had disappeared forever.
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