Theodore Rex (54 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
ROOSEVELT WAS NO
stranger to Yellowstone, having first visited it in 1886. As founder of the Boone & Crockett Club, he had worked to save it from vandalism and exploitation, and he took pride in having been a motive force behind the National Park Protective Act of 1894. Only last year he had won an appropriation that made the Yellowstone bison wards of the federal government. Now he could enjoy the benefits of his work in solitude.
Or near solitude. John Burroughs caught cold the first day, and remained behind at Mammoth Hot Springs; but Major Pitcher stuck tight. Roosevelt bided his time. He passed several sociable nights with the superintendent, eating sardines and hardtack round the campfire, and helping wash up in the icy river.
Each day, he rode deeper into the park, while snow dust boiled in the peaks and mountain sheep stared down at him, half veiled by their own breath. He feasted his eyes, long starved for the sight of game, on pronghorns and buffalo and black-tailed deer. A giant herd of elk enthralled him for four hours. His ear caught the counterpoint between a solitaire singing at the top of a canyon, and a water-ouzel perched a thousand feet below.
On 12 April, he suddenly said that, as it was Sunday, he wished to “take a walk alone.” Pitcher felt unable to deny a President’s desire for private devotion, so Roosevelt marched happily off and for six hours worshiped God in his own fashion.
There were rumors, later on, of rifle shots echoing in the park, and Roosevelt
was definitely seen with a cartridge bruise on his cheek. But Pitcher announced that the President had merely indulged in “a little target shooting” back at camp and been wounded by an ejected shell.
Burroughs, who had rejoined the party, confirmed this. Roosevelt was sincere in his vow not to kill local wildlife, even such permissible prey as coyotes and cougar. He still lusted, or thought that he lusted, after big game, but nowadays it was the pursuit, rather than the quarry, that interested him. A new protective sensibility was notable in his account of these days in Yellowstone:
Every man who appreciates the majesty and beauty of the wilderness and of wild life, should strike hands with the far-sighted men who wish to preserve our material resources, in the effort to keep our forests and our game-beasts, game-birds, and game-fish—indeed, all the living creatures of prairie and woodland and seashore—from wanton destruction. Above all, we should recognize that the effort toward this end is essentially a democratic movement. It is entirely within our power as a nation to preserve large tracts of wilderness, which are valueless for agricultural purposes and unfit for settlement, as playgrounds for rich and poor alike.… But this end can only be achieved by wise laws and by a resolute enforcement of the laws.
Roosevelt expressed contempt for “the kind of game butcher … who leaves deer and ducks and prairie chickens to rot,” worse still market hunters and rich dilettantes who hunted by proxy.
Only once did he weaken, when a four-inch meadow mouse hopped across his path. He slew it in the interest of science, and sent the skin and skull, with tabulations, to the United States Biological Survey.
BACK IN GARDINER
, bored members of the White House press detail fished, scavenged for elk antlers, and got drunk with mountain men. Their thirdhand reports of Roosevelt’s activities began to sound slightly testy. When word came that the President had watched Old Faithful erupting and its mist turning to hail as it fell, the New York
World
man called it “his only rival in intermittent but continuous spouting.”
Finally, on 24 April, a cloud of dust in the foothills signaled the President’s return. The train was shunted out of its siding, and Hell-Roaring Bill Jones brought in from the sagebrush, stark sober for the first time in years, for a quick reunion.
Before leaving, Roosevelt dedicated a new arched gateway to the park, calling Yellowstone a “veritable wonderland,” and noted that Europeans seemed more interested in visiting it than were most Americans. He
spoke feelingly about forest reserves, buffalo breeding, and Yellowstone’s “essential democracy.”
Then, with a flash of teeth (his face dark tan with snow burn, his nose peeling), he swung aboard the
Elysian
and was gone. The train moved northeast, then southeast, descending to levels of hotter, thicker air.
On the flatland, it accelerated to maximum speed, crossing the Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska state lines in a single day. The succession of prairie hamlets blurred into a dreary pattern to travelers on board. Always a long, low depot, red-painted and sand-coated, with wide, rakish eaves; always a concentration of buggies and carts, iron filings magnetized on the papersheet plain; Roosevelt running out onto his platform and waving, sometimes with his table napkin. (“Those children wanted to see the President of the United States, and I could not disappoint them.”) Then the cheers suddenly stifled, as if a door had been slammed, and in dwindling retrospect, the sight of families turning their backs against whorls of white dust.
At whistle-stops, always the local dignitaries, with their furrowed eyes and crooked medals and drooping trousers, silver cornets playing “Hail to the Chief,” whiskery veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, a bobbing sea of bowlers and bonnets, and invariably, boys on telegraph poles screeching, “How are you, Teddy?”
Just as invariably, the President would rehearse his litany of McGuffey Reader virtues (“If I might give a word of advice to Omaha …”) until reporters no longer bothered to transcribe them. Only Roosevelt found new stimulation eight or ten times a day, thundering every platitude with the pleased air of having just discovered it. He was quite unapologetic: “Platitudes and iteration are necessary in order to hammer the truths and principles I advocate into people’s heads.”
Indistinguishable as the whistle-stops soon became, even to him, each was supreme drama to a little audience that had been looking forward to it for weeks. Some buggy travelers had come one hundred miles to perch on the platform and peer endlessly at the horizon, waiting for a smudge of smoke to signal that “Teddy” was imminent. Then a speck growing in the smoke, a crescendo of wind and wheels, a great locomotive advancing—too fast, surely, to stop? Despair as it indeed keeps moving. Relief when it halts, after all, under the water tank one hundred yards down the track. A general stampede toward the
Elysian
, where Roosevelt stands grinning in frock coat and vest. He leans over the rail, pumping hands and tousling cowlicks. “Dee-
lighted!”
Rearing back, he begins to orate, punctuating every sentence with palm-smacks and dental percussion, while his listeners stand mesmerized. The engine bell rings; the train jerks forward. Another grin, and a farewell wave. The Cheshire-cat flash of those teeth floats in the sky long after the train is a speck again.
“WHEREVER HE WENT, INFANTS WERE BRANDISHED AT HIM.”
The President on his cross-country tour, 1903
(photo credit 15.1)
THE “ESSENTIAL DEMOCRACY”
of Yellowstone—its lesson that government can both serve and conserve, and that future generations had as much right to natural resources as contemporaries—remained on Roosevelt’s mind as he journeyed through America’s heartland. No longer was he the patrician politician addressing high affairs of state in Eastern cities. He was, at least for the moment, a man of the earth, a cuddler of babies. Wherever he went, infants were brandished at him, wiggling representatives of the next generation. His robust views on childbearing (“Three cheers for Mr. and Mrs. Bower and
their really satisfactory American family of twelve children!”) were bolstered by spaces so wide and soil so deeply fertile. With the irrigation schemes he had signed into law, these plains might one day support a hundred million people.
In Iowa’s fecund fields, glistening with spring rain, women in faded Mother Hubbard gowns crowded around his car, their arms bursting with progeny. A platoon of boys and girls hoisted a banner over their heads:
NO “RACE SUICIDE” HERE, TEDDY
! It was another of Roosevelt’s catchphrases, broadly biological rather than ethnic in its implications. Bachelors declining to marry, urban women repressing their natural reproductive function, denied America the seed she needed to grow and be great. Ripeness was all. “I congratulate you upon your crops,” he said, smiling around at clustered families, “but the best crop is the crop of children.”
Some of his new democracy, and all of his charm, was evident in the west Kansas cow town of Sharon Springs, where on 3 May he attended divine service:
There were two very nice little girls standing in the aisle beside me. I invited them in and we all three sang out of the same hymn book. They were in their Sunday best and their brown sunburned little arms and faces had been scrubbed till they almost shone. It was a very kindly, homely country congregation … all of them looking well-to-do and prosperous in a way hardly warranted as it seemed to me by the eaten-off, wired-fence-enclosed, shortgrass ranges of the dry plains roundabout. When church was over I shook hands with the three preachers and all the congregation, whose buggies, ranch wagons, and dispirited-looking saddle ponies were tied to everything available in the village. I got a ride myself in the afternoon, and on returning found that all the population that had not left had gathered solemnly around the train. Among the rest there was a little girl who asked me if I would like a baby badger which she said her brother Josiah had just caught. I said I would, and an hour or two later the badger turned up from the little girl’s father’s ranch some three miles out of town. The little girl had several other little girls with her, all in clean starched Sunday clothes and ribbon-tied pigtails. One of them was the sheriff’s daughter, and I saw her nudging the sheriff, trying to get him to make some request, which he refused. So I asked what it was and found that the seven little girls were exceedingly anxious to see the inside of my car, and accordingly I took them all in. The interior arrangements struck them as being literally palatial—magnificent.… I liked the little girls so much that I regretted having nothing to give them but flowers; and they reciprocated my liking with warm western enthusiasm, for they hung
about the car until it grew dark, either waving their hands to me or kissing their hands to me whenever I appeared at the window.
The baby badger, which reminded Roosevelt of “a small mattress, with a leg at each corner,” was christened Josiah, and given well-ventilated accommodations on the
Elysian’s
front platform. From this vantage point he was able to survey an unrolling landscape as the train proceeded to Denver and then bent south along the line of the Rockies.
