ROOSEVELT’S TRIPS to the American West reflected the deep fascination that many in the East had with the nation’s wild places—and wild people. Not only did easterners like Roosevelt go west; the West came east. By the 1880s, Delaware Indians had returned to Manhattan. Chiefs in feathered bonnets and war paint stalked down Broadway. From nearby buildings came the sound of gunshots, followed by blood-curdling, savage screams. Ten years after Custer’s 1876 death by the Little Bighorn River, the country was mad with Western fever. New Yorkers flocked to theaters to experience the “blood curdling yells of the savages” and the “crack of the trusty rifle.” “During Act II,” one show promised, “Mr. Jack Dalton will present his great bowie knife act, in which ‘Baby Bessie, the Pet of the Gulch,’ will be pinned to a board by bowie knives.” Those men expecting Baby Bessie to be a thinly clad beauty were disappointed. One writer called her “exceedingly hard to look at.” When Dalton flung his knife at Bessie and the blade buried itself harmlessly next to her, one patron shouted disgustedly, “By Jove, he missed her!” When Frank Fayne tried to do the same with a “halo of real bullets,” he killed his target, and the show was closed.
Alongside white men in stage makeup often stood real American natives imported from west of the Mississippi. In the lobby of the theater they were pressed into service selling audience members “traditional Indian remedies,” such as “Pawnee Herb Tea” and “Rattle Snake Oil.” A theatergoer remembered one such “long haired medico, in a sombrero, a dirty white shirt, embellished by a glass stud, and with finger nails showing no evidence of a recent acquaintance with soap.” Such an appearance probably heightened his authenticity with most New Yorkers.
Many wealthy easterners attempted to slake their thirst for all things western by undertaking expensive and lavish expeditions. Raymond Tours began operating in 1879 and offered luxury winter trips to California for $750. The fabled Pullman “Palace” railroad cars—featuring carpeting, stained-glass windows, and elaborately frescoed ceilings—carried a constant stream of New Yorkers and New Englanders across the continent. Visiting America in 1883, Lord Charles Russell of Britain reveled in the lavishness of this elite mode of transportation. “It enabled the rich,” he said, “to create the clearest possible inequality in the conditions of even ordinary travel.” Travelers with means could rent entire private cars, as Ralph Waldo Emerson did in 1871 when he headed west. One wealthy family hired its own four-car train, which allowed them to travel with an entourage that included a maid, cooks, children’s nurses, and a Pinkerton bodyguard. Raymond Tours’ clients, the company noted in its advertising, were of only the “refined and cultured class.”
Upon his arrival in the West, even greater opulence greeted the wealthy eastern traveler. Most of the grand western resorts tried to recreate the comforts of home for its demanding clientele. Although Theodore Roosevelt may have loved roughing it in the Badlands, most of his Gramercy Park or Fifth Avenue neighbors would have shuddered at the very idea. Western hotels and spas boasted shops, gardens, post offices, and nightly entertainment. For their stay at the Hotel de Paris in Georgetown, Colorado, tourists packed as if they were really going to Paris. One English visitor commented on the ladies’ gowns, which were fit for a fancy ball. Their husbands sported fox-hunting coats. “The ladies breakfast toilets are good enough for the dinner table,” British visitor Daniel Pidgeon observed in an 1883 book about his travels in America, An Engineer’s Holiday, “while for dinner they dress as we do for the opera.” For Roosevelt, the West was about physical exertion and endurance. Not so for most other eastern tourists. “American ladies never walk,” Pidgeon continued, “but they go out ‘buggy-riding’ in dancing shoes and ball dresses, or amble about on ponies in highly ornamental riding habits. All this seems very odd among the mountains.” For their part, men shot clay pigeons and played polo. Instead of hunting foxes, they hunted coyotes. Studying the habits of most easterners on such holidays reveals little about the West, but much about eastern norms of etiquette and entertainment. “The guests . . . who rode out to the hunt at the sound of the horn,” Pidgeon concluded, “probably had moved west only geographically.” This could not be said of Theodore Roosevelt, who in the summer of 1884 appeared ready to settle down on his Dakota ranch.
WITHOUT A DOUBT, Theodore Roosevelt’s time in the West affected him profoundly. Roosevelt himself continually repeated this, even going as far as saying his western sojourn helped put him in the White House. The West allowed Roosevelt to transcend his wealthy, urban, eastern origins. It allowed him to prove his masculinity. It allowed him an escape from grief. Finally, it allowed him a refuge from recent political defeats. The West helped transform Roosevelt into the man and politician he would become.
At the same time, Roosevelt himself had a keen interest in amplifying his short time in the West, for the very personal and political reasons stated above. And the amplification seemed to increase over time. The vast pressures of family and political life would enhance Roosevelt’s nostalgia for a simpler, more solitary, and more romantic time of his life. That his amplification, even exaggeration, has been almost completely accepted by later biographers is a bit curious. Certainly, the romantic image of Roosevelt on horseback—herding cattle, hunting game, and sleeping by a campfire under the stars—is very attractive to both writers and readers of Roosevelt’s life. But it seems absurd to suggest, as biographers from William Henry Harbaugh to Joshua David Hawley have, that Roosevelt truly became one of the cowboys, or that he ever seriously considered giving up his life in the East.
In evaluating the influence of the West on Roosevelt, few writers have searched for evidence beyond Roosevelt’s own words. What did those closest to Roosevelt think of his stay in the Dakota Territory? The answer seems to be—not much. When shortly after Roosevelt’s death his closest friend, Lodge, eulogized him before a rare joint session of Congress, Lodge summarized Roosvelt’s entire life and career without speaking a word about the West. When the recollections of 150 people who knew Roosevelt were collected in a single volume, called Roosevelt as We Knew Him, in 1927, none of them mentioned his Dakota ranch. His cousin Nicholas Roosevelt related nothing about Theodore’s time in the West in his book Theodore Roosevelt: The Man as I Knew Him. Old family friend and Roosevelt’s secretary of state John Hay felt the West had mainly a maturing effect on Roosevelt, saying that there he “grew to full stature.” Fellow urban reformer Jacob Riis said something similar, that Roosevelt “rested” and “grew” there before “hearing the trumpet call to another life.” And the Reverend Ferdinand Iglehart, a friend of Roosevelt’s after the mid-1890s, called Roosevelt’s two years in the West a “post-graduate course,” implying they rounded out the education he received in his four years at Harvard and three years in the New York State Assembly. None of these friends or family members placed very great importance on Roosevelt’s western sojourn.
One of the most interesting accounts of Roosevelt as a western figure came from his sister Corinne. In 1890, Corinne traveled to the Badlands to visit her brother’s two North Dakota spreads, Elkhorn Ranch and Maltese Cross Ranch. (He would sell both in 1898, although his last visit occurred in 1892.) Corinne, by then in her late twenties, was accompanied by her husband; her sister Anna, then thirty-five; and the Lodges’ sixteen-year-old son, George. Staying for three weeks, Corinne gave a more sober and less embellished assessment of her brother in his western setting. She referred to his ranching endeavor as mainly a “business enterprise.” Far from believing her “city-bred” brother had become one his cowboys, Corinne noted that the ranch hands referred to their boss as “Mr. Roosevelt” and held a “reverential attitude” toward him. No doubt Corinne saw firsthand what many in the East failed to appreciate in their romantic image of cowboys. Cowboys were a rough and poorly schooled bunch. Some of them were illiterate. Far from being the self-contained men on horseback, traveling with their kits across lonesome plains, that western novels popularized, most cowboys were little more than itinerant workers, so poor they owned neither the horses they rode upon nor the gear they used when they found a job. And far from being excellent shots with a revolver, most could not afford the ammunition with which to practice, and were probably as good a shot as their near-sighted “Mr. Roosevelt.” No wonder Corinne hesitated to identify her beloved brother too closely with this motley lot.
Corinne’s party followed its stay at Elkhorn with a trip to Yellowstone. Significantly, in seeing her brother in both places, Corinne saw for herself his love of “wild places and wild companions, hard tramps and thrilling adventure.” These, then, were all part of Roosevelt’s ranching experience and his stay in, to use his own words, “hero land.” His love for the outdoors, for camping and hunting, were part of a larger, lifelong love affair he had with the wild places of the earth. From boyhood until his death, Roosevelt sought adventure. This quest took many forms, from being a soldier to exploring the Amazon. It also explained his later safari to Africa, an experience that can be likened to his time in the West. In Africa, Roosevelt hunted game much bigger and fiercer than the antelope of the American West, and there he camped beneath the stars for weeks at a time with other men. Roosevelt spent a total of ten months in Africa—but no one has ever suggested that Roosevelt “became African.” When Corinne sought to evaluate the effect the time in the West had on her brother, she echoed the sentiment of John Hay and others about Roosevelt’s growing maturity. Roosevelt’s time on his ranch, she said, mainly aided “the mental growth of the young man.”
Roosevelt returned to New York matured, but he also helped in the maturing eastern view of the West. Whereas the West had once been seen as a shadowy, savage wilderness, a sort of anti-Eden, by the end of the nineteenth century easterners were looking west for an alternative—even a panacea—for the increasingly urbanized and industrialized East. And it was easterners who helped establish this image of the West, interpreting their western experience for an eastern audience. Frederic Remington, a onetime Yale art student, became the great artist, sculptor, and illustrator of the West. Owen Wister, who, like Roosevelt, was a Harvard man, would write a novel, The Virginian, that set the standard for the cowboy genre. Wister dedicated his 1902 book to his friend Theodore Roosevelt. Finally, through his voluminous writings, Roosevelt himself contributed enormously to America’s image of the West. In his articles and books on western life—namely, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, Ranch Life and the Hunt-Trail, and The Wilderness Hunter—Roosevelt sketched for his largely eastern audience vivid firsthand accounts of a rugged, manly outdoors existence. For those back east who were exhausted by modern urban life—the noise, the smell, the jostling crowds—Roosevelt’s writings acted as a tonic. The reader was allowed to share a small sliver of a life spent riding, ranching, and hunting.
Roosevelt’s glowing description of his ranch was beguiling. “My home-ranch stands on the river brink,” he began. “From the low, long veranda, shaded by leafy cottonwoods, one looks across sand-bars and shallows to a strip of meadowland, behind which rises a line of sheer cliffs and grassy plateaus. This veranda is a pleasant place in the summer evenings when a cool breeze stirs along the river and blows in the faces of the tired men, who loll back in their rocking-chairs . . . gazing sleepily out at the weird-looking buttes opposite, until their sharp lines grow indistinct and purple in the afterglow of the sunset.” Roosevelt contrasted the well-earned ease of the rancher at dusk with the masculine activity of the day. He also wrote of the freedom such a life afforded. Certainly Roosevelt had gone west seeking a sort of freedom from the responsibilities of politics and parenthood. Yet he also sought his manhood, a common quest for the Victorian male. Eastern, urban life could be an emasculating one, a life completely void of physical exertion or work with the hands, yet full of opera, fancy balls, and white-tie dinners. Roosevelt was far from being the only young man in late nineteenth-century America who had inherited his name, wealth, and social status, while earning little on his own. Harvard, Yale, and Columbia were chock-full of tennis-playing dandies with cushy jobs in their fathers’ businesses awaiting them upon graduation. A previous generation of men had proven their worth and manhood in the Civil War. Roosevelt’s generation had no such outlet for its masculine anxieties. Absent war, ranching and hunting in the Badlands allowed Roosevelt, and through him, by proxy, thousands of other Victorian men, to savor the cult of true manhood. No one reading Theodore Roosevelt’s name as the author of these works mistook him for a cowboy. Indeed, the value in Roosevelt’s writing was that he was an easterner, he was one of them, and could help translate the very language of the West for his distant audience.
In addition to his accounts of western life, between 1889 and 1896 Roosevelt also authored the four-volume The Winning of the West. Much has been said about this work, particularly the claim that years before Frederick Jackson Turner stated his “frontier thesis” of American history, Roosevelt had already underscored the frontier as the unique characteristic of the American story. Yet Roosevelt’s works go beyond merely a retelling of western expansion. Through the volumes, Roosevelt addressed key themes meant to resonate with an eastern, urban audience. As the United States filled with southern and eastern European immigrants who changed the face and the politics of American cities, Roosevelt underscored the success of the “English-speaking ” peoples in conquering the continent. These hunters and settlers had done the real work of America, and had been a hardy bunch, in contrast increasingly to the urban, immigrant, industrial worker and the effete professional class. These early Americans had had no leaders, and so were truly democratic in their endeavors. Roosevelt underscored their “independent” nature—perhaps because they were free of the machinery of industrial America and even the political machinery of the American city. No leaders meant no bosses.
In Roosevelt’s depiction of the Wild West, the continent became a kind of antagonist, with Roosevelt telling the story of its defeat. His heroes were not the Indians, but the men who subjugated them. Conquering the continent meant filling it up, and this had been done by English-speaking peoples. The message Roosevelt sent east about Anglo-Saxon superiority was aptly timed for an audience that was watching the newest shipload of immigrants stepping onto the dock. It also touched the nerve of those who were contemplating America’s future. The United States was already an economic power and a continental power. Looking south to Cuba and west to Hawaii in the 1880s, the next obvious step was for the United States to become an imperial power. Roosevelt’s writing expressed the vast latent power of a continental nation, one that was, by the 1880s—much like Roosevelt himself—reaching maturity.
In interpreting the West for an eastern, urban audience, Roosevelt also sent back messages that made an impression on late nineteenth-century Americans. Almost sixty years ago, one historian of the American West, Earl Pomeroy, called Theodore Roosevelt “the best-known exponent of the wild West after Buffalo Bill Cody” and his Wild West Show. Roosevelt and Cody’s western stories were complementary. Not only was one highbrow, and the other decidedly low; their depictions also staked out different areas. Cody, a former cavalry scout, depicted exciting battles between Indians and American soldiers. Roosevelt described a life of hunting and ranching, punctuated by poetic descriptions of the scenery. Together, Roosevelt and Cody told the story of the western movement of American civilization at the expense of Native Americans. Although the heroes varied, from rancher and settler to scout and trooper, in the hands of their champions, they all became the romantic ideal of the manly, dynamic, and brave American. These were enduring images, and Roosevelt played a key role in creating the myth of the American West. The West did not “make” Theodore Roosevelt, but Theodore Roosevelt surely helped to make the West.
ALTHOUGH BIOGRAPHERS speak of Roosevelt’s two years in the West, in reality his stay there was a series of trips. With no stay on his ranch longer than seven months, Roosevelt really spent only about a year and a half out west. And his time there was continually punctuated by long stays back in New York. This included a lengthy five-month period in late 1885 and early 1886 during which he became secretly engaged to his onetime adolescent love interest, Edith Carow. Moreover, there was a distinct pattern to Roosevelt’s arrivals back in New York City: he made sure he was in Manhattan in October 1884, October 1885, and October 1886. October was not simply campaign time in New York City; it was nomination time. Throughout his western sojourn, Roosevelt made sure he was back in his hometown when Republican conventions picked their nominees for state and local office. Far from indicating that Roosevelt meant to give up his life in New York for a life on a ranch, this pattern indicated that Roosevelt meant to keep a hand in New York City politics. Making sure to be back in Manhattan at nomination time also suggested that Roosevelt was looking for a job.
Yet politics was not the only thing Roosevelt left behind him in New York. Upon returning to the city in the fall of 1884 Roosevelt made straight for sister Bamie’s house on Madison Avenue. There, he was reunited with his infant daughter, Alice Lee, now almost eight months old. Roosevelt seemed to suffer little pain in leaving behind his own child during his trips to his ranch. Possibly Roosevelt could not bear to be reminded of his departed wife, Alice. In fact, he appeared to try to put her out of his mind almost completely. In letters to his sisters, he rarely asked after Alice Lee. After returning to Elkhorn in the fall of 1884, his first letter to Anna asked her to “give many kisses to wee baby.” A month later, it was simply, “Best love to Baby Lee.” After that, all the while recounting his escapades among cowboys, cattle ranchers, and hunters, Roosevelt did not even ask after his daughter for a time.
In the spring of 1886, Roosevelt told Anna that he missed “darling Baby Lee dreadfully,” and that he was “hungry” to see her. Immediately, however, he qualified his feelings for his two-year-old daughter, who was growing up without either of her parents. He was thoroughly enjoying his life ranching, hunting, and writing. His affection for his little girl, it seemed, paled in comparison to his adventure in hero land. Significantly, Roosevelt only assumed the job of little Alice’s father after he remarried in 1886. When Roosevelt remarried, took up his parental duties, and reentered the social and political life of New York City, it marked his final attainment of maturity, as those who were closest to him recognized.
Roosevelt’s distant relationship with Alice Lee indicated strongly that his trips home to New York were more for political than for personal reasons. Even though his hat was not in the ring, Roosevelt still took a hand in the 1884 campaigns. Such work was not without controversy. In June, Roosevelt had attended the Republican National Convention in Chicago as a New York State delegate. He joined forces with rising Massachusetts politician and fellow Harvard alumnus Henry Cabot Lodge to oppose James Blaine as the favored presidential nominee of party leaders. Lodge had played this role before, helping to nominate dark-horse candidate James Garfield in 1880. When Blaine handily won the 1884 nomination, it was a bitter defeat for Roosevelt and Lodge. Still, both men eventually decided to back the party’s nominee, rather than bolting the party, as so many independent Republicans chose to do that fall. When Roosevelt returned to New York in October, he found himself in a difficult position. He had been very publicly identified as one of the leaders of the reformers’ rebellion in Chicago, yet he planned to campaign for Republicans. Roosevelt tried to use his time back home to mend fences with regular Republicans and show himself a loyal party man. This was not an easy thing to do, and he achieved only mixed results.
Roosevelt spoke to a number of Republican audiences that October, but wherever he turned—New York, Brooklyn, Boston—his independent revolt in Chicago dogged him. He became involved in a nasty public dispute with Mugwump Horace White, who related the story of an angry postconvention Roosevelt readying to bolt the party and support the Democratic candidate, New York governor Grover Cleveland. Roosevelt fervently denied it, but after Chicago, the story had the ring of truth about it. In Boston, he and Lodge were attacked by Josiah Quincy and the Massachusetts Reform Club, which opposed Lodge’s election to Congress. In his own Twenty-First District, Roosevelt failed to elect a ticket of reform delegates to the various state and local conventions, losing to the Republican boss of his district, Jake Hess. Even when Roosevelt tried to mend fences with party leaders by publicly backing Blaine, he could only bring himself to assure listeners that President Blaine would be “the servant of the people.” This was damning with faint praise indeed.
It did not help Roosevelt’s cause that come Election Day, Blaine narrowly lost to Cleveland. The vote in New York State was so close that if only six hundred independent Republicans had stayed loyal to Blaine rather than voting for Cleveland, Blaine would have ascended to the presidency, and likely held the White House for Republicans for the next eight years. In New York, Republican leaders blamed Roosevelt. In Massachusetts, Lodge lost his bid for a seat in Congress. But Lodge remained deeply enmeshed in the apparatus of the state Republican Party. Roosevelt instead simply headed west.
Roosevelt returned just in time to experience the severest winter conditions. With the days shortening and the weather turning increasingly foul, Roosevelt spent more time indoors than usual, brooding over the past and contemplating the future. With the anniversary of his wife’s and mother’s death looming, this may have been the bleakest time of Roosevelt’s life. Activity on the ranch came to a standstill, leaving Roosevelt with too much time to think. He spent much of his time occupying himself in writing Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, which he would deliver to the publisher that spring.
His chapter entitled “Winter Weather” captured his depressed frame of mind. Roosevelt referred to winter in the Badlands as “an irksome period of enforced rest and gloomy foreboding.” His description of the barren landscape mirrored his own feelings of loss, isolation, and anxiety. During the winter, Roosevelt wrote, the landscape was absolutely desolate, raked by blinding storms of snow mixed with dust. Then the wind would stop, and the stillness held its own horror. Nights were the worst. Roosevelt referred to the “lifeless silence” and the “dead and endless wastes.” With his constant references to death, Roosevelt probably contemplated the deaths not only of his wife and mother, but also of his beloved father, at the age of only forty-seven. With his own twenty-sixth birthday just past, no doubt Roosevelt speculated as to how much more time he had on the earth. Such gloomy thoughts were exactly why Roosevelt had fled to his ranch, seeing in the West a chance for escape and succor. Now, with the long winter stretching before him, perhaps it was at this moment that New York, rather than the West, beckoned him with the greater promise of comfort and support. Those he truly loved—his sisters, his baby, the Lodges—were all back east. The East held much greater opportunities for work and action. After the brutal winter of 1884–1885, Roosevelt began actively seeking to reinsert himself into life back in New York.
LODGE ALWAYS REMAINED a reliable conduit of political information from Washington and the East. In the spring, Roosevelt wrote his friend about newly inaugurated President Grover Cleveland’s cabinet. While calling most of the new secretaries “respectable,” Roosevelt took particular offense at the appointment of Daniel Manning, former head of the New York State Democratic Committee, as secretary of the treasury. Roosevelt went so far as to refer to the “Cleveland-Manning machine.” Then, turning to New York City politics, Roosevelt noted with dissatisfaction that the new Democratic governor, David Hill, had refused to oust from the Ludlow Street Jail Roosevelt’s old nemesis from the investigating committee, the utterly corrupt Sheriff Davidson. With the worst of Tammany’s men receiving plum positions in Washington, Roosevelt wondered whether the equally corrupt former commissioner of public works, Hubert O. Thompson, might “get anything.” By March 1885, Roosevelt had been in the Badlands for a few months, but his head was still in New York.
In that same letter to Lodge, Roosevelt spoke of American politics having reached a stage that he called “the Apotheosis of the Unknown.” Roosevelt might have been speaking about himself and the uncertain point he had reached in his life. The past six months indicated that Roosevelt meant to split his time between his ranch and New York, and to keep a hand in New York politics. Yet he had no position in New York, or even the prospect of one. True, he had written a book on his time in the West, and might write more, but was this his new calling? With a year having passed since his wife’s death, the official mourning period came to an end, and the grim black border on his stationery fell away. Moreover, his daughter, Alice Lee, was no longer a red-faced, shrieking, alien creature in her infancy. At a year old, a real person had begun to emerge, walking and babbling. Roosevelt must have seen at least something of his dead wife in the girl—a curl of hair, the shape of the eyes, her smile. And perhaps after a year Roosevelt realized that contemplating his daughter and the related grief did not hurt quite so much anymore.
All of this might have made Roosevelt yearn for a return to New York. But in the spring of 1885, his prospects were dim. Entering into any of the Roosevelt-affiliated businesses did not seem even to cross his mind. Since college, only politics had ever really interested him as a career. As long as he and district boss Jake Hess continued their feud at Morton Hall, a career path via the Twenty-First Assembly District was closed. A Democratic governor meant no appointment to a state position. Receiving a post from the current New York mayor, William Grace, remained a possibility, as he was a reform-minded independent much like Roosevelt himself. With memories of Roosevelt and Lodge’s rebellion of the previous June, Republican Party regulars remained wary of Roosevelt as prone to independent action, while the Mugwumps, led by editor E. L. Godkin at The Nation, and later the New York Evening Post, kept up their screed against those who had remained loyal to the party and supported Blaine. In terms of New York politics, Roosevelt was a man without a country.
Still, city, state, and federal politics remained very much on Roosevelt’s mind. Soon after returning for Christmas in 1884, Roosevelt’s article “Phases of State Legislation” appeared in the January 1885 issue of The Century. In the article, Roosevelt dissected state politics as conducted in Albany, including relating scenes from his three-year career. He gave a very mixed picture of the quality of politicians and the politics they practiced, pointing out the dishonesty and outright bribery he had witnessed. As an answer, Roosevelt called for greater participation of the better classes, just as newspapers had after the death of his father. So far, however, aside from loudly denouncing corruption and demanding reform, New York’s elite had done little. Roosevelt took aim directly at members of his own class, painting a ridiculous picture of such “swallowtails.” “A number of them will get together in a large hall,” Roosevelt wrote, drawing a vivid picture of countless Cooper Union mass meetings, “will vociferously demand ‘reform,’ as if it were some concrete substance which could be handed out to them in slices, and will then disband with a feeling of the most serene self-satisfaction, and the belief that they have done their entire duty as citizens and members of the community.” No doubt Roosevelt’s words contained an element of payback for the constant drubbing he and Lodge had received from members of their own social set. Roosevelt declared the vast majority of wealthy and educated men ignorant of even the basics of politics, such as the purpose of a caucus or primary. These men did not understand that they had to join political parties in order to have any sort of influence, rather than shrinking from the fight. Roosevelt took dead aim at the effete, shrill, and toothless reformers who in the end accomplished nothing. Certainly he attempted to set himself apart from such men. Yet what was Roosevelt himself doing in January 1885 but writing calls for action while remaining in self-imposed exile nearly 2,000 miles away? Perhaps Roosevelt did not see the irony. Or, perhaps, being back in New York and observing politics firsthand, he questioned whether he was, in fact, shrinking from the struggle.
During the spring and summer of 1885, as Roosevelt rode the roundup, politics was never far from his mind. Although it was an off-year with no federal elections, in New York State Democrat David Hill was running for reelection as governor. In early June, Roosevelt’s old Assembly colleague Walter Sage Hubbell wrote to inquire whether Roosevelt would seek a spot on the Republican ticket that fall. Hubbell was really fishing for information: he also asked whether someone called “H”—possibly Roosevelt’s friend Walter Howe from New York—was seeking the nomination for lieutenant governor. Hubbell sought Roosevelt’s support for his own possible bid for office as well. Roosevelt stated in response that he had no information about “H’s” plans, but he hoped there would be no rivalry among the younger members. In the end, Hubbell received no nomination for the state ticket, although Roosevelt’s old friend William O’Neil was briefly considered for the party nomination for state treasurer. Of his own plans, Roosevelt wrote, “I really have not given a single thought to my taking a place on the state ticket this fall . . . but I do’n’t [sic] think it all probable unless for some reason it should seem best to outsiders.” By “outsiders,” Roosevelt apparently meant those “outside the Republican machine.” If independents, such as the ones who had elected William Grace mayor, drafted Roosevelt, only then would he run. This seemed unlikely.
Still, by the time Roosevelt wrote Hubbell that June, things were looking up for him politically. Just before Roosevelt had left New York that April, he had organized a new slate of reform delegates to the various conventions from the Twenty-First District and prepared for the inevitable battle with Hess. Much to his surprise, his forces came to an agreement with the Hess men, and a union ticket of delegates was organized with Roosevelt at its head. With Roosevelt out of town and out of touch that political season, being named head of the delegates constituted, as he wrote Lodge, “a posthumous political victory.” “I am really sorry,” he continued, “for I can not spend the time necessary to take much personal part in politics now.” No doubt Roosevelt was truly sorry, as attending the various conventions that spring and summer might have been an avenue back into city and state politics. It was a good sign, however. He had begun the slow process of patching things up with the New York bosses.
Just as Roosevelt kept New York politics in mind, New York politicians evidently kept Roosevelt in mind. Even as he supervised a new herd arriving at his ranches in Dakota in early May, Roosevelt was appointed a member of a Republican state committee to evaluate new rules for picking convention delegates. The very next day, on May 7, 1885, the annual meeting of the Civil Service Association named Roosevelt to its executive committee. Although these were hardly positions that could draw him back to New York, a more interesting offer came from Mayor Grace in June. Grace was endeavoring to oust the corrupt president of the Board of Health, Alexander Shaler, and he offered the spot to Roosevelt. Roosevelt expressed his uncertainty to Lodge that June, yet decided to take the position. Shaler was indicted for bribe-taking at the end of the year. From then until the following summer, Roosevelt wrote letters back east asking people how long the court case would last and when he should ready himself to return to New York. Shaler’s case, however, lasted until 1891, as he was ably defended by old Roosevelt family friend Elihu Root. Only then was Shaler finally removed from office, much to Roosevelt’s disappointment. Here had been a real chance to return to New York, and it evaporated before his eyes.
After only five weeks back out west, Roosevelt again returned to New York in early July. This time he stayed for two months, spending most of that time at Sagamore Hill, the home he had built at Oyster Bay—originally for Alice, though she had never lived there. Indeed, he had nearly stopped construction on the house after her death, but had changed his mind at the urging of relatives who believed he should have a home for his daughter. The home was not yet completed in the summer of 1885, but it was close enough for him to host guests there. It was at this time that he first held his brother’s infant daughter, future First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. And he increasingly bonded with his own daughter, who was now almost one and a half years old. On July 23, as a captain in the New York State Militia, he marched in the funeral parade of former president General Ulysses S. Grant. At the end of August, Roosevelt readied once again to reprise his commute to his ranch, although this time he planned to stay only a month. He reached Medora, North Dakota, on August 25, and within four weeks, turned around and set off for the Republican state convention at Saratoga.
Roosevelt’s appearance at Saratoga was significant for several reasons. First, he was there. In the spring, he had been unsure whom to support for governor, and appeared ready to settle into cowherding until the big beef roundup in October. By mid-September, though, he was heading back to New York. Second, Roosevelt went to Saratoga as part of the New York delegation that included Jake Hess. Although they did not enter the convention hand-in-hand, rapprochement was the order of the day. “The general disposition,” one journalist observed in the New York Times, “was for the cultivation of harmony.” Third, by entering the fight against David Hill, who had succeeded Cleveland as governor, Roosevelt sought to strike a blow in favor of his career-long passion, civil service reform. Hill was a vocal supporter of the spoils system and did not shrink from declaring his opposition to civil service reform, as it prevented any administration, even at the federal level, from rewarding faithful service to the party. In Hill, Roosevelt found a deserving foe.
To counter Hill, Roosevelt looked to Cornelius Bliss, a successful businessman and independent Republican much like himself. For Roosevelt, Bliss had the additional advantage of not being the choice of machine politicians. This put Roosevelt in much the same position as only a year before, when he had backed Vermonter George Edmunds against Blaine at the Republican National Convention. Roosevelt energetically politicked for Bliss’s nomination, conferring with all the lesser candidates and former governor Alonzo Cornell. When other party leaders refused even to speak to Roosevelt about Bliss, Roosevelt stubbornly continued his canvass. After Bliss lost the nomination to a compromise candidate, Ira Davenport, Roosevelt stumped for the party choice that fall.
At Saratoga, Roosevelt had been an active participant, doing more than just routine work, especially considering his tenuous position in the party over the past year. On the Resolutions Committee, Roosevelt helped shape the very wording of the platform dealing with civil service reform. The platform also included another interest of Roosevelt’s, protecting black suffrage in the South. For Roosevelt and other Republicans, this was as much about breaking the Democrats’ stranglehold on the South’s 153 electoral votes as it was about social and racial justice. In drafting the strong language for the platform, Roosevelt actually found himself on the same side as his old Assembly nemesis, who was now state senator and the convention’s temporary chairman, Warner Miller. Just as when he had attacked corruption in Tammany-controlled New York, Roosevelt had found a cause that appealed to him both personally and politically.
Finally, Roosevelt had not simply arrived at Saratoga anonymously. He made an entrance. The time out west had dramatically changed his physical appearance, something that often shocked people who knew him. Gone forever, it seemed, was the pale and sickly young man. Roosevelt returned east healthy, bronzed, and carrying as much as thirty extra pounds. Moreover, Roosevelt understood the effect his changed appearance had on people, and he exploited it. To the riverside town of Saratoga, now filled to bursting with all manner of political hacks smoking cigars and plotting strategy, Roosevelt wore a large straw sombrero. It got him noticed. Men hollered, “Hello, where’s the rest of the cowboys?” Roosevelt explained the hat with a great story. “A bucking mustang stood on my head, and when I got to my feet I found that my best hat encircled my neck like a courtier’s collar,” he said. “This was the next best thing I could find to wear, and I’ve had to wait till I could get back to civilization to buy a substitute.” Why Roosevelt would have been wearing his best derby while riding a bucking bronco, he did not explain. While likely apocryphal, the story indicated how Roosevelt could use his time in the West to disarm a roomful of cigar-chomping eastern politicos. And hats would feature prominently in this performance. After his time in Cuba, Colonel Roosevelt would make sure to wear his Rough Rider hat to political gatherings—including the 1900 convention that nominated him for vice president. In Roosevelt’s case, the hat made the man.
With the convention over and Davenport nominated, Roosevelt turned to campaigning. He addressed the Young Republican Club of Brooklyn accompanied by a surprise guest, Henry Cabot Lodge. Reflecting the Saratoga platform he had helped to write, Roosevelt hammered the Democrats on civil service and their coercive political monopoly in the South. The next day, he attended a meeting that was billed as a conference of Republican leaders, then visited Republican headquarters. Roosevelt not only meant to take an active part in Republican Party politics that fall; he meant to have an influence and get noticed. To address an even wider audience, that October Roosevelt published an article in The North American Review, “The President’s Policy.” This article later attracted the attention of Roosevelt biographers because in it Roosevelt compared Jefferson Davis to Benedict Arnold, prompting Davis to send a letter of protest to Roosevelt. But these historians overlooked other details in the article, such as Roosevelt’s characterizations of the Democrats, his appeal to independent Republicans who had bolted the party the previous year, and references to his own Assembly career. In other words, Roosevelt was still working hard at making up for his actions of 1884 and reestablishing himself in the Republican Party. Such things would have been unnecessary, had he been planning to stay out west.
One final lure dangled in front of Roosevelt that October, and he bit eagerly. He became reacquainted with his childhood chum and onetime love interest Edith Carow. They were children no longer. At twenty-four, Edith was refined and intelligent. She was as sophisticated and cosmopolitan as Roosevelt, having spent time living with her family in Europe. And she was beautiful, with a long, graceful neck, slim waist, wide brown eyes, and an ample mouth. The attraction was immediate and mutual. Already, Roosevelt’s cowboy persona was fading away, the draw of the Badlands ranch receding into the distance.
Roosevelt had one more major event to attend that October, but it was far away from the political carnival gripping Manhattan. On October 26, the day before his twenty-seventh birthday, Roosevelt took to the hounds and rode with Long Island’s Meadowbrook Hunt. Rather than galloping across open ranchland, as in Dakota, the horses on this hunt had to maneuver through dense woodlands and make enormous jumps over fallen trees. Riding his large and powerful horse Frank, Roosevelt led all the riders. Behind him, the hunt was taking its toll in the form of broken bones and torn skin. It was too much for Frank, who started to go lame. As the hunt approached a stone wall about five feet high, Frank hesitated. Roosevelt drove his spurs into Frank’s sides to make the jump. With no power in his lame leg, however, Frank tripped on the wall, and horse and rider went down. With his face covered with blood and an arm broken, Roosevelt remounted Frank and took off after the hounds. “It’s a mere trifle,” he told a reporter for the Times who asked about it. To Lodge a few days later, he wrote, “I don’t grudge the broken arm a bit. . . . I am always willing to pay the piper when I have a good dance; and every now and then I like to drink the wine of life with brandy in it.” Except for the forced inactivity, the arm seemed to bother him little.
There may have been another reason why Roosevelt felt so happy. After his arm was set and his scraped nose bandaged, he hosted the Hunt Ball at Sagamore Hill. Edith was the guest of honor. Although Roosevelt had built the house for Alice, now another woman strode across the wooden floors. Edith danced and laughed as if the house had been built for her. With his freshly broken arm, and not a little pain, Roosevelt may not have been the most attentive host to Edith. But seeing her at Sagamore Hill must have awoken something inside him. She fit there, with him, and with his daughter. Within three weeks they would be engaged, and their marriage would last thirty-two years.
AS THE CLOCK STRUCK MIDNIGHT out on Long Island after the Meadowbrook Hunt, Roosevelt turned twenty-seven. Although he had spent many months out west, the events of the past few weeks made him eye a future in New York. Politics had been the foremost reason for returning, and Roosevelt had thrown himself into the election season with gusto. He had made up with Jacob Hess in the Twenty-First District. He had played an important role at the Republican state convention at Saratoga. He had been publicly recognized as one of the leaders of the Republican Party. And he had done good work for the party, campaigning for the nominee for governor and writing a piece for an influential journal that criticized the Democrats and sought to draw back independent bolters. With Mayor Grace offering him the position of president of the Board of Health, there even seemed to be a real chance of returning to New York in order to take a relatively important job. It had taken some work to undo the damage done in June 1884, but by October 1885, much of that work seemed complete.
As well as the political, the personal constituted a strong draw to New York. Roosevelt wrote often to Lodge expressing his affection for him and his “cara sposa,” Nannie Lodge. His brother and sisters were married and having their own families. And little Alice was a baby no longer, but a toddler of nearly two. Now there was Edith, well-read and well-bred, unlikely to become a housewife on a cattle ranch. A life with her meant returning to New York City and again taking up politics. With their engagement secret, because so little time had passed since Alice’s death, Roosevelt was free, for the time being, to return to Dakota. This last stretch of seven months on his ranch would be one of his longest. Perhaps this was because Roosevelt knew it would be his last.