The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (33 page)

News of the bravery of Roosevelt, Dow, and Sewall spread from Stark and Billings counties all the way back to New York. With Edith steaming across the Atlantic for the summer to spend time with her family in Europe, Roosevelt basked in his new status in the Badlands. No longer was he Jane Dandy or Lil’ Pumpkin in the Dakota Territory. The combination of writing
Hunting Trips
plus the episode of the boat thieves had transformed him into a minor Wild West legend. Everywhere he went in Medora or Dickinson, people cuffed him on the back in admiration. Locals—even Sewall and Dow—called him “Mr. Roosevelt,” and meant it. (Since the death of Alice he bristled if anybody dared call him “Teddy.”) The consensus was that the New York politician was a “fearless bugger.”
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That spring and summer Roosevelt felt “strong as a bear, full of healthiness of mind.”
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Constantly he wrote naturalist riffs about shimmering cottonwoods, low buttes, and prairie grasses. Taken together his prose amounted to a love song to the Badlands. “I have my time fully occupied with work of which I am fond; and so have none of my usual restless, raged wolf feeling,” he wrote to his sister Anna on May 15. “I work two days out of three at my book or papers; and I hunt, ride and lead the wild, half adventurous life of a ranchman all through it.”
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By Independence Day, Roosevelt had finished
Thomas Hart Benton
. Most of it had been written in the cool quiet of mornings at his desk at the Elkhorn Ranch, with its view of the Little Missouri River. When
Benton
was published, reviewers hailed it as workmanlike and a success.
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Nothing more than that. What Roosevelt most admired about Benton, it seemed, was his belief in the regenerative power of the American West, the fact that he championed frontiersmen with the “tenacity of a snapping turtle.”
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In discussing Benton’s support of westward expansion, Roosevelt insisted that the federal government should have acquired even more territory: the Baja peninsula from Mexico; and British Columbia,
Saskatchewan, and Manitoba from Great Britain. (His experience hunting in Minnesota made him want all of Canada to belong to the United States.) Only the United States, he maintained, knew how to properly manage land and rivers. He was acting as the wilderness warden of America. “No foot of soil to which we had any title in the Northwest should have been given up,” he wrote; “we were the people who could use it best, and we ought to have taken it all.”
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The United States, he argued, needed to “swallow up the land of all adjoining nations who were too weak to withstand us.” (In Roosevelt’s obsession with the western lands, conservationists could perhaps see the seeds of his future belief in vast forest reserves.)

Although the only book Roosevelt actually wrote at Elkhorn was
Benton
(and perhaps a couple of chapters of
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
) the conservationist and scholar Lowell E. Baier—a longtime official of the Boone and Crockett Club—nevertheless called the Badlands cabin the “cradle of conservation” in an important 2007 article in the
Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal
.
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It was at the Elkhorn, that Roosevelt found his voice to caution against careless growth, deforestation, wildlife depletion, and environmental degradation. That July Fourth, Roosevelt traveled from the Elkhorn to a Dickinson’s Independence Day ceremony. He boasted about the largeness of the American landscape, its “big prairies, big forests and mountains.” Addressing an admiring crowd of ranchers and farmers, Roosevelt warned that the “Far West” might be raped by those who exercised their democratic rights “either wickedly or thoughtlessly.”
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IV

Between March and August 1886, Roosevelt wrote six articles for The
Outing Magazine
, each time using the Elkhorn Ranch as his lead.
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This was a coup for the glossy magazine edited by Poultney Bigelow, a Yale-educated outdoors enthusiast.
⁶⁸
Outing
, aimed at men, was rolling in advertising revenue because of its popular dog and horse stories. One contributor to
Outing
, trying to describe the magazine’s readership, said it was for “plain, uneducated, shrewd minded men of sport.”
⁶⁹
Illustrated with drawings by J. R. Chapin, R. Swain Gifford, and J. B. Sword, among others, the action-packed pieces by Roosevelt bemoaned the depletion of game in the West. One was titled “The Last of the Elk.” Although all these articles were tied together by hunting and bravado, Roosevelt nevertheless discussed nongame birds like avocets and stilts.
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Although Roosevelt admired the illustrators assigned to his own ar
ticles, he was astonished by the exquisite pen-and-ink sketches of an obscure artist named Frederic Remington that he discovered elsewhere in the magazine, accompanying stories about the Apache Wars along the Arizona-Sonora border. Impressed by Remington’s clear, honest eye, Roosevelt decided to tap him to illustrate future stories he planned on writing about the Badlands for
Century
.

In the
Outing
article “The Ranch,” Roosevelt expressed his environmental concerns in earnest. “To see the rapidity with which larger kinds of game animals are being exterminated throughout the United States is really melancholy,” he grumbled. “Fifteen years ago, the Western plains and mountains were places fairly thronged with deer, elk, antelope, and buffalo…. All this has now been changed, or else is being changed at a really remarkable rate of speed. The buffalo are already gone; a few straggling individuals, and perhaps here and there a herd so small that it can hardly be called more than a squad, are all that remain. Over four-fifths of their former range the same fate has befallen the elk; and their number…is greatly decreased. The shrinkage among deer and antelope has been relatively nearly as serious. There are but few places left now where it is profitable for a man to take to hunting as a profession; the brutal skin-hunters and greasy Nimrods are now themselves sharing the fate of the game that has disappeared from before their rifles.”
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In August 1886 Roosevelt took another hunting trip, with Merrifield as sidekick, this time to the Coeur d’Alene mountains of Montana and Idaho in search of white goats. He would draw on this trip for two essays about these sure-footed climbers, which he considered the “queerest wild beasts in North America.” Roosevelt, in fact, wrote naturalist essays about mountain goats (he sometimes called them white goats) for both his second book on the Badlands (
Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail
, published in 1888) and
Harper’s Round Table
in 1897. They were among his very best prose efforts. Even though Roosevelt thought that the meat of mountain goats was musky (and that trying to compete with them in mountain climbing was a fool’s errand), he developed a deep fondness for them. Tracing their lineage back to the Himalayas, Roosevelt described their agility, long tail, and distinctive hump. “If a goat is on its guard, and can get its back to a rock,” he enthused, “both wolf and panther [mountain lion] will fight shy of facing the thrust of the dagger-like horns.”
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The hunt for the white goat marked the beginning of Roosevelt’s injecting the “fair chase” doctrine (or code of ethics) into his personal relationships with westerners. Roosevelt employed a market hunter, Joe Willis, as his guide in the Coeur d’Alene mountains.
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Up to this point
Roosevelt had treated his rugged, unwashed guides almost as equals (although he insisted that they all call him “Mr. Roosevelt,” never by his first name). Not anymore—on the white goat hunt, Roosevelt continually lectured Willis about changing his careless hunting habits. Grinnell would later describe how Theodore “made himself agreeable as usual and preached so effectively the doctrine of game preservation that he wholly converted Willis, who up to this time had been a skin and meat hunter, considering game animals valuable only for the dollars they yielded the hunter. Roosevelt was constantly doing such individual useful work in conservation matters.”
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Once back in Medora with his new white goat trophies, Roosevelt received a jolt. A gossip columnist in New York had broken the news that he was secretly engaged to Edith Carow, who was spending the summer with family in Europe. Angry but embarrassed, he wrote to his sister Bamie, who’d been kept in the dark: “I am engaged to Edith and before Christmas I shall cross the ocean and marry her,” he confessed. “You are the first person to whom I have breathed a word on this subject.” He flogged himself for not staying devoted to his late wife. “I utterly disbelieve in and disapprove of second marriages; I have always considered that they argued weakness in a man’s character. You could not reproach me one half as bitterly for my inconstancy and unfaithfulness as I reproach myself. Were I sure there was a heaven my one prayer would be I might never go there, lest I should meet those I loved on earth who are dead.”

Politically, the autumn of 1886 wasn’t a good one for Roosevelt, either. Never fond of caution, he had quite impetuously decided to run for mayor of New York City, but he lost to Abram Hewitt, the nominee of Tammany and other Democratic organizations. Before Roosevelt had time to contemplate his rashness, he steamed off to Britain on an ocean liner to marry Edith. Bamie was one of the few people invited to the December wedding in London at St. George’s Church along Hanover Square. Just a few British men in top hats and women in silks attended. It was a very low-key event.
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While Roosevelt was in Europe for a fifteen-week honeymoon, disaster struck the Badlands. According to Lincoln Lang, starting in November ice-dust particles as sharp as glass fragments swirled about in cyclone-like gusts. There were whiteouts, and Lang later wrote that the rush of frigid air “coldly burns the skin as it strikes. It finds its way into your nostrils and then into your lungs, rapidly chilling you through and paralyzing the senses.”
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By New Year’s Day 1887, temperatures in the Dakota Territory had plummeted to forty-one degrees below zero. Beleaguered Badlanders
boarded up windows, hoping to keep the deadly winds from blasting into their homes. Outside, stock literally froze in their tracks or died in snowdrifts, unable to feed on the buried grasses.
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At the end of January, another blizzard hit the area. Ice killed off most of the vegetation. Foodstuffs were suddenly in short supply. Snowdrifts were now ten to fifteen feet high against the buttes. Huge cattle herds had no safe place to huddle and stay warm. The Montanan painter Charles M. Russell later drew a series of stark illustrations showing skeletal cattle, all rib cage, in the grip of famine. Near death, some cattle even rammed their heads through cabin doors hoping desperately for warmth. Even the most sinewy cowboy was afraid of the wind chill and snow squalls along the ice-chewed rock formations. It was, as Edmund Morris aptly dubbed it, the “Winter of the Blue Snow.”
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Roosevelt didn’t know how cataclysmic the “Winter of the Blue Snow” had been in the Dakota Territory until he arrived back in New York from his honeymoon. After reading reports of dead cattle across the Great Plains (from Merrifield and Ferris) he promised to travel to Medora soon to survey the devastation. But he had to keep his priorities straight. Family always came ahead of business—his father had taught him that rule. So Roosevelt settled into Sagamore Hill, spent time with little Alice, and reconnected with friends. Edith was now pregnant; that September she would give birth to Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (his first son). Roosevelt also needed to discuss his future in politics with Henry Cabot Lodge and his other trusted advisers. Worried that he was cursed when it came to both business ventures and electoral politics, Roosevelt now feared that he had lost his entire Dakota herd and could soon be financially insolvent. Feeling stuck, his intuition gone, not sure whether to advance or retreat from North Dakota, Roosevelt brooded over the cruel fickleness of fate.

Once Roosevelt finally arrived in the Badlands, in April, he was shocked by what he saw. Around 60 to 75 percent of the cattle in the northern plains had frozen to death, and the dead cattle were still piled up along buttes and in bottoms. Day in and day out he tried to inventory his losses. “The land was a mere barren waste,” Roosevelt wrote; “not a green thing could be seen; the dead grass eaten off till the country looked as if it had been shaved with a razor.”
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America’s great range had been ravaged. Less than half of Roosevelt’s own herd had survived the series of blizzards. For once he was hard-pressed to find a silver lining. The only optimistic observation he could muster was that at least a thaw was under way. No longer, however, was the spring roundup a glorious, fun event. Instead of branding and roping, dour-faced local ranchers collected rot
ting carcasses and scattered bones in wooden carts as if bubonic plague had stricken the region. The winter of 1886–1887 had made the Elkhorn and Maltese Cross ranches nearly go bust as a business venture. “I am bluer than indigo about the cattle,” Roosevelt wrote to his sister. “It is even worse than I feared; I wish I was sure I would lose not more than half the money ($80,000) I invested out here. I am planning to get out.” All told, his net loss would be $23,556.68.
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For the first time in his life nature had been cruel to Roosevelt. The magic of the Badlands had turned menacing and gruesome. No longer was he writing prose hymns about the Missouri lark being the “sweetest singer” or snow geese “nibbling and jerking at the grass.”
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The wildlife seemed to have died or disappeared. Within a few years Medora would become nearly a ghost town, and the open-range cattle business would be steadily diminished. Nevertheless, over the coming decades, Roosevelt continued to boost North Dakota, telling people that in the Badlands he found vigor based on self-assuredness.
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Even though Roosevelt would return to Medora in the coming years (his last visit was in October 1918), his days as a serious rancher were over. Although he didn’t abandon the cattle business entirely in 1887—keeping, for example, his ranch brand—after the “Winter of the Blue Snow” he was always downsizing. His years of genuine residency—September 7, 1883, to December 5, 1887—were history. Yet Roosevelt was rich in glorious memories. Even the gray alkali dust, layers of sandstone, and heaps of debris, it seemed, took on a romantic cast in his highly selective mind. Years later, after being president, he told Senator Albert Fall that his days in North Dakota had been far and away the best of his entire life. “Do you know what chapter or experience in all my life I would choose to remember, were the alternative forced upon me to recall one portion of it, and to have erased from my memory all the other experiences?” he asked himself and then answered. “I would take the memory of my life on the ranch with its experiences close to Nature and among the men who lived nearest her.”
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