The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (29 page)

Intoxicated with the Badlands, Roosevelt decided to ask his North Woods friends Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow to come jump-start his North Dakota ranch with him at the Maltese Cross. Generously Roosevelt insisted he would share all profits with them. They would all reunite in the West as business partners and kinsmen.

Roosevelt spent only three weeks in the Badlands. On June 30 he headed back east to spend time with his baby daughter in Massachusetts. But his thoughts kept returning to the West, as he thought about building a second ranch, to be called the Elkhorn, about twenty-five miles north of Medora. The Maltese Cross was too close to town, attracting a constant stream of locals eager to shoot the breeze with a newsy New Yorker. If he wanted to write books about the Badlands, he would need solitude. His tentative plan was to divide his time between New York and the Little Missouri River area (the building of his Sagamore Hill estate continued).

No sooner did Theodore arrive back east than he wrote Bill Sewall another letter. To Roosevelt, Sewall was like one of the characters Chekhov wrote about who were the salt of the earth but were so virtuous that they never tasted success; he was now hoping to change this. “If you are afraid of hard work and privation, do not come west,” Roosevelt wrote
to Sewall. “If you expect to make a fortune in a year or two, do not come west. If you will give up under temporary discouragements, do not come west. If, on the other hand, you are willing to work hard, especially the first year; if you realize that for a couple of years you cannot expect to make much more than you are now making; and if you also know at the end of that time you will be [in] receipt of about a thousand dollars for the third year, with an unlimited rise ahead of you and a future as bright as you yourself choose to make it, then come.”
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In late July, Roosevelt announced to the New York press that he would indeed, though reluctantly, back James G. Blaine for president—causing a wave of speculation that he was abandoning his reformist independence to embrace the Republican machine. Before he once again headed west a reporter for the
New York Tribune
buttonholed Roosevelt and asked about his sudden advocacy of Blaine. Roosevelt snapped that he was “disinclined to talk about the political situation” yet happy to discuss his newfound “life in the West.”
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Accompanying Roosevelt on this trip to the Badlands were Sewall and Dow (the straight talk in Roosevelt’s letter had worked). They had journeyed down from Maine to join their boss at the New York railroad station and take the Chicago Limited. The
New York Herald
reported that Roosevelt was carting along on the train all sorts of western paraphernalia—a heavy monogrammed saddle, angora chaps, a pearl-handled revolver, and silver-inlaid bits and spurs. He had temporarily purchased only squatters’ rights, so the game plan was to start living in an existing dilapidated hut at once and then purchase 1,000 new shorthorn cattle in Minnesota. Timber for a new primary ranch house—a close approximation to the “Ranchman’s Log ‘Schack’” as featured in the
History of the Northern Pacific Railroad
—would be cut in September, and construction would commence early the next year. Referring to the neophytes from Maine as his “backwoods babies,” Roosevelt got a huge kick out of pointing out, from the train window, Wisconsin dells, Minnesota lakes, and emerging rimrock canyons of the Badlands. Writing to Bamie on August 12, Roosevelt said that his lumberjack friends exhibited “absolute astonishment and delight at everything they saw” as they traversed the upper Midwest and that their “very shrewd and yet wonderfully simple remarks were a perfect delight to me.”
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From the outset, however, Sewall had reservations about the Badlands as cattle country. He understood Roosevelt’s infectious excitement about the surreal terrain, but it seemed too arid for cattle. After meeting the Ferris brothers and Merrifield and working long days to get the Elkhorn
Ranch built to Roosevelt’s specifications, Sewall wrote to his brother in Maine what he really thought of the whole “range management” enterprise: “Tell all who wish to know that I think this is a good place for a man with plenty of money to make more” he said, “but if I had enough money to start here I never would come.”
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What Sewall didn’t fully comprehend was that Roosevelt was multitasking: ranching at the Maltese Cross and Elkhorn was an excuse to hunt and write a popular book about his adventures. Never thrifty with money, essentially a horrific businessman, Roosevelt was less concerned that he had squandered one-fifth of his fortune in the cattle business than he was with collecting naturalist data and hunting anecdotes for the book he wanted to write about the Badlands. In addition, just being in the Dakota Territory was a balm to his grief, bringing him much-needed clarity. Life was short, he felt, so make the most of it. In fact, no sooner were the first logs split for the Elkhorn Ranch than Roosevelt announced that he was ready for a 1,000-mile hunt on horseback. The very name of the range he wanted to explore—the Bighorn Mountains—had him salivating.

VI

Located in both southern Montana Territory and north-central Wyoming Territory, the Bighorns—a sister range of the Rockies—had a truly varied ecosystem for more than 200 miles, with everything from sheer mountain walls to tall grasslands, from glacier-cut valleys to alpine meadows populated by an amazing array of raptors. Accounts of the mountain men who first saw Cloud Peak and Black Tooth Peak abruptly rising out of the rolling prairie were legendary. Jim Bridger had floated through the lofty Bighorns on a raft, and Jedediah Smith had been mauled by a grizzly bear not too far away. When escaping General Crook’s Army in 1876 the Sioux had taken refuge in the lodgepole pine and spruce forests of the Bighorns as if these were the last haven on earth.
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The exaggerated reports of wild animals trappers said this eastern front range of the Rockies had more game animals than the human eye had ever seen—and particularly the thought of hunting a grizzly bear inspired Roosevelt to undertake the most arduous expedition of his life so far.

Most of the Bighorn peaks were rounded on top, with flanks that gently sloped. The glacial lakes throughout the range were as bright blue as those in Alberta or the Yukon. Temperatures during the winter months could unexpectedly drop to forty degrees below zero in a few hours. Yet, compared with other Rocky Mountain zones, the Bighorns received little snow. All the spring rains emanated from general weather systems. Veg
etation encountered in the Bighorns depended completely on whether one was below or above the timberline. Lumber companies were eyeing the area as a prime source of timber.
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To ride horseback and hike into the Bighorns, Roosevelt took with him Merrifield and Norman Lebo, an old Union soldier and blacksmith from Ohio. Sewall and Dow stayed at the Maltese Cross and Elkhorn ranches to tend the cattle. While Roosevelt and Merrifield rode horses, Lebo followed with the “prairie schooner” supply wagon.
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From Medora to the foothills of the Bighorns was nearly 300 miles across the chilly flatlands toward the town of Buffalo, Wyoming. With no map to guide them the trio simply mounted and started heading toward the Montana line as if nomadic characters in a Zane Grey novel. “We had no directions as to where the Big Horns were,” Merrifield recalled, “except that they lay to the southwest.”
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No sooner did the trio reach Montana than a storm appeared. Horrific cloudbursts filled the big sky as lightning bolts popped and boomed. Day turned to night. Heavy raindrops fell, and their horses tried to run away. The odor of ozone, stronger than in the East, was almost intoxicating. “The storm rolled down toward us at furious speed and the wind shrieked and moaned as it swept over the prairie,” Roosevelt recalled in
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
. “We spurred hard to get out of the open, riding with loose reins for the creek…. The first gust caught us a few hundred yards from the creek, almost taking us from the saddle, and driving the rain and hail in stinging level sheets against us.”
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The detailed diaries Roosevelt kept of the trek to the Bighorns tell exciting stories of shooting duck at Lake Stanton (filled with cutthroat trout) and hearing coyotes wail all night when the men camped along the Powder River. Nearly every Wild West cliché happened to Roosevelt on the trail: a non-injurious shooting powwow with the Cheyenne; the near-loss of their wagon to quicksand; the hunting of enough grouse to feed a village; magnificent herds of white-tailed deer. At one point Roosevelt miraculously shot two deer with a single bullet. “I elevated the sights (a thing I hardly ever do) to four hundred yards,” he wrote, “and waited for the second buck to come out further, which he did immediately and stood still just alongside of the first. I aimed above his shoulder and pulled the trigger. Over went the two bucks!…This was much the best shot I ever made.”

A full three days before reaching them, Roosevelt could see the Bighorns rise in the distance over the plateau. He couldn’t wait to hike up into them—after all, he had climbed both the Matterhorn and Mount Ka
tahdin. But his enthusiasm was dangerously naive. Already the September nights in the Wyoming mountains were bitter cold. The weather was known to be freaky; it didn’t snow much, but that didn’t mean three or four feet couldn’t be dumped within a couple of hours. Packhorses—even first-rate ones—would have a hard time making it up the sides of the steep ridges. Challenging nature, they would have to leave their horses in the valley. Because of the spruces, of course, there would be plenty of wood to build a bonfire. But this was no guarantee of survival. Many men had perished in the Bighorns mistakenly believing that fire trumped sleet; it never did. Even the most sure-footed mountaineer was no match for the raw natural powers of this Wyoming wilderness. Whether it was wolf packs prowling or wind whistling through the canyons, only a fool wasn’t reduced to humbleness in such potentially lethal terrain. At the curl of twilight everything was ghostly and mysterious beyond even the deepest backcountry of the Adirondacks. “If I listened long enough, it would almost seem that I heard thunderous voices laughing and calling to one another,” Roosevelt wrote, “and as if at any moment some shape might stalk out of the darkness into the dim light of the embers.”
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Roosevelt took to calling the elk “lordly,” just as he had done with the buffalo. Even though the naturalist in him carefully studied every coloration and trait variation of those he killed, he began seeing the elk as almost holy. Nonhunters might be perplexed by this, but the northern Cheyenne would have completely understood the spiritual aspect of Roosevelt’s search for game. “From morning till night I was on foot,” he wrote, “in cool, bracing air, now moving silently through the vast, melancholy pine forests, now treading the brink of high, rocky precipices, always amid the most grand and beautiful scenery; and always after as noble and lordly game as is to be found in the Western world.”
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Since his boyhood, grizzly bears had enthralled Roosevelt. Carefully he studied all their zoological traits, realizing that they were essentially shy and not predatory. The sheer hulk of the omnivorous grizzly—a member of the brown bear family often weighing up to 1,300 pounds—made it the true king of the Rockies. With their astounding senses of hearing and smell, grizzlies were hard to hunt. But as any trapper could testify, they had terrible eyesight, and if you happened to stumble upon one in a refuge like the Bighorns it could lunge without warning or retreat. Come October, all the grizzlies would hibernate in dens until late April. So Roosevelt knew that his best chance for getting a large, full-grown grizzly was in September. But this was also the time of year when the bears had spent months actively digging for rodents and roots, so that their claws were
the longest. As Darwin would have appreciated, these fearsome claws had an additional purpose besides warding off predators: they enabled grizzlies to dig winter dens with relative ease.
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The damp afternoon when Roosevelt stumbled upon his first grizzly provides one of the classic stories in American outdoor literature. Roosevelt’s desire for precision and suspense was urgent, even if the latter wasn’t always fulfilled. As recounted in
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
, the odyssey began at sunset on September 12, 1884, when he happened to encounter bear tracks. It’s a testimony to Roosevelt’s familiarity with bears that he knew the bear was a grizzly. A strange “eerie feeling” of expectancy swept over him. Alone, he followed the footprints from tree stand to stand. As darkness neared, however, he could no longer see anymore. It was time to head back to camp. He vowed to pick up the bear’s trail in the morning.

Upon waking, Roosevelt and Merrifield checked on the carcass of an elk they had killed. To their surprise a grizzly had gnawed the body during the night. Wearing moccasins so as not to scare away game, the two men began following the bear marks. The mingling odors of pine and sweat filled Roosevelt’s nose. He drank it all in. “When in the middle of the thicket we crossed what was almost a breastwork of fallen logs, and Merrifield, who was leading, passed by the upright stem of a great pine,” Roosevelt recalled. “As soon as he was by it he sank suddenly on one knee, turning half round, his face fairly aflame with excitement; and as I strode past him, with my rifle at the ready, there, not ten steps off, was the great bear, slowly rising from his bed among the young spruces.”
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And what a huge grizzly it was, standing about nine feet tall and weighing more than 1,200 pounds. It would have been impossible for Roosevelt to have found a better specimen for his North American mammal collection.
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“He had heard us but apparently hardly knew exactly where or what we were, for he reared up on his haunches sideways to us,” he wrote. “Then he saw us and dropped down again on all fours, the shaggy hair on his neck and shoulders seeming to bristle as he turned toward us. As he sank down to his forefeet I had raised the rifle…Half-rising up, the huge beast fell over on his side in the death throes, the ball having gone into his brain, striking as fairly between the eyes as if the distance had been measured by a carpenter’s rule.”
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