“Plenty of Work to Do Writing”
My work this winter has been very harassing, and I feel both tired and restless; for the next few months I shall probably be in Dakota, and I think I shall spend the next two or three years in making shooting trips, either in the far West or in the Northern Woods—and there will be plenty of work to do writing.
{ Theodore Roosevelt to Newton Dexter North, April 30, 1884 }1
In the winter of 1883, amid the minutiae of politics in Albany, Theodore Roosevelt sang the praises of family life: “Back again in my own lovely little home, with the sweetest and prettiest of all little wives—my own sunny darling.”2 He played his usual exultant notes in the privacy of his diary: “I can imagine nothing more happy in life than an evening spent in the cozy little sitting room, before a bright fire of soft coal, my books all around me, and playing backgammon with my own dainty mistress.” We note the books all around him, always within reach. The next month, he echoed his thoughts about family life in a letter to his mother, whom he called Darling Motherling: “There is nothing to me that compares with a home evening passed with those I love.”3 The diary ended abruptly for the year on January 10 and, oddly, picked up again on August 16, 1884, as musings on his second book, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman: Sketches of Sport on the Northern Cattle Plains, a tale of an eastern dude who “honestly imbibed something of the spirit of that wild Western life.”4 The diary simply records: “Have been spending a couple of weeks on my ranch on the Little Missouri. I now intend starting out for a ten months trip overland to the Bighorn Mountains.”5
What happened during the missing year and more? As Theodore indulged in the pleasures of his family and learned the lessons of the political arena in Albany, his asthma troubled him, so much so that he traveled in July of 1883 with Alice to Richfield Springs, where the sulfuric waters promised full health. Sulfur springs, popular throughout the nineteenth century, offered any number of palliatives, from bathing in emollients for dermatitis to drinking purgatives for colitis. Close to Cooperstown in distance and Saratoga Springs in spirit, Richfield attracted wealthy patrons, including the Chicago tycoon Cyrus McCormick, who had just built a “cottage” designed by the New York architects McKim, Mead, and White with a garden by Frederick Law Olmsted. Sulfur springs offered the rich more than medicinal panaceas by providing an escape from the congestion and contagion of cities. Perched in the mountains, Richfield also provided fresh air for Roosevelt’s lungs; the trip itself was bracing.6 On the way up Overlook Mountain in a buggy, Theodore actually walked the four-mile trail because, ironically, his horse Lightfoot was “uncommon bad with the heaves.”
Alice refused to eat what she considered “aboriginal” food, forcing Theodore to toast crackers for her “in the greasy kitchens of the grimy inns” along the way. His high-spirited letter to Corinne, whom he called “Wee Pussie,” detailed the curative powers of the trip itself.7 “But, on the other hand, the scenery was superb; I have never seen grander views than among the Catskills, or a more lovely country than that we went through afterwards.” Rigorous walking in the out of doors drew mountain air into his lungs. All was well by the time they reached Cooperstown; Lightfoot “throve wonderfully,” and Alice “after having eaten looked like a little pink boa constrictor.” What he didn’t say was that Alice ate crackers and looked like a pink boa constrictor because she was in her first months of pregnancy, fussing about food and showing a bump in her belly.
Roosevelt loathed the cures offered to them once they arrived in Richfield Springs. He described the medical man as a “heavy jowled idiot” whose ministrations caused a rapid relapse of his asthma. “I do’n’t so much mind drinking the stuff,” he quipped to his sister as he sipped the waters; “you can get an idea of the taste by steeping a box of sulphur matches in dish water and drinking the delectable compound tepid from an old kerosene oil can.” The hot baths put him “in an ace of fainting.” He awoke the next morning with an aching head and a feeling of lassitude, “bored out of my life by having nothing whatever to do.” One thinks of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” depicted a wealthy woman in the hands of “rest cure” quacks. For Theodore, the worst thing about the cure was his surroundings. Edith Wharton’s satirical portraits of spas for rich New Yorkers come to mind, and here her compatriot sported as droll a pen, complaining of “being placed in that quintessence of abomination, a large summer hotel at a watering place for underbred and overdressed girls, fat old female scandal mongers, and a select collection of assorted cripples and consumptives.” Roosevelt’s humor was at its most irreverent when he joked with the people he loved best. He wrote his mother to say, “This place is monotonous enough to give an angel the blues.”8
By September 1883, Theodore was ready for a manly remedy, a hunting trip in the Dakotas, considered to be curative for men suffering from the anxieties of American leisure-class living. Roosevelt’s family, stunningly rich from four generations of industrious Dutch businessmen, was plagued by a variety of mental ills. Elliott, a manic-depressive who suffered from seizures (he would become addicted to alcohol and die in delirium tremens at the age of thirty-four), had gone to India, hunting tigers and elephants, and then to the Himalayas for the restorative power of life in the open. Silas Weir Mitchell famously advocated what he called the “rest cure” for wealthy women—including Gilman and Wharton and Jane Addams—but prescribed the “West cure” as the complementary treatment for men diagnosed with a variety of maladies—neurasthenia, depression, anxiety, asthma—stemming from the pressures, such as they were, of an easy life. Mitchell had begun his medical career during the Civil War, working with phantom-limb pain.9
After the war, in 1871, he published a study on phantom social afflictions, Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked, arguing that nature is curative, particularly for men. A friend and patron of Walt Whitman, Mitchell prescribed “mountain air” for the poet in 1878, a western trip recorded in Whitman’s Specimen Days. Nature, Whitman proclaims, restored his health. “DEMOCRACY most of all affiliates with the open air, is sunny and hardy and sane only with Nature—just as much as Art is. Something is required to temper both—to check them, restrain them from excess, morbidity.” American democracy, he testifies, “must either be fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free skies, or it will certainly dwindle and pale.”10 For another friend, the painter Thomas Eakins, Mitchell advocated cowboy life in the Dakotas, illustrated luminously in Eakins’s paintings, especially “Cowboys in the Bad Lands” (1888).
Theodore Roosevelt’s friend Owen “Dan” Wister also took Mitchell’s advice and wrote The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902), a seminal novel about a man’s life in the American West, set in Medicine Bow, Wyoming.11 Artists, that is to say, used the cure to think and paint and write, just as Roosevelt would do.
In a letter to Anna on September 3, 1883, Theodore announced: “Today I leave for a hunting trip in Dacotah.”12 Even as he traveled west, he kept his eye on Albany, where he was vying for Speaker of the state legislature from the minority party. In a letter to Jonas Van Duzer, a colleague who would become a confidant, he wrote what was perhaps his first autobiographical narrative, all in one sentence: “I should state that, after having passed through Harvard College, I studied for the bar; but going into politics shortly after leaving college, and finding the work in Albany, if conscientiously done, very harassing, I was forced to take up some out-of-doors occupation for the summer, and now have a cattle ranch in Dakotah.”13 He asked for Van Duzer’s support of his platform based on honesty and common sense, particularly in the selection of committee members on the basis of integrity and intelligence, not patronage. “I am a Republican, pure and simple,” he declared, knowing the corruption at the heart of both political parties in Albany.
“I feel now as though I had the reins in my hand,” the young legislator assured his wife on January 22, 1884. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. Theodore’s letters, jotted quickly from Albany to Alice, who was in New York City awaiting labor, make clear the irony of his metaphor. Their daughter was born on February 12, a birth that revealed Alice’s dire case of Bright’s disease. As he rushed home late the next evening, Elliott met him at the door with the news that both his wife and mother lay dying. Theodore held his mother as she died of typhoid fever in the early morning hours and then his wife later that Valentine’s Day afternoon.
His 1884 diary began on February 14 with an X: “The light has gone out of my life.” Two days later, he offered in this most private of places a simple tribute: “We spent three years of happiness greater and more unalloyed than I have ever known fall to the lot of others.”14 Unalloyed happiness left him utterly bereft: “For joy or for sorrow my life has now been lived out.” He wrote to his colleague Andrew Dickson White, thanking him for his condolences: “There is now nothing left for me except to try to so live as not to dishonor the memory of those I loved who have gone before me.”15 Another letter to Carl Schurz on February 21 was even more revealing: “You can see I have taken up my work again; indeed I think I should go mad if I were not employed,” and, echoing his diary, “though I have not lived long, yet the keenness of joy and the bitterness of sorrow are now behind me.” He could say that only because he was young.
Theodore turned to his pen for solace, writing the preface to a collection of remembrances that included the full text of the funeral, together with a resolution marking the two deaths by the New York State Legislature and newspaper reports and obituaries, all published at his expense by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in an elegant volume meant for the family.16 The young man crafted language to immortalize Alice. Lying even to himself, he wrote that the birth of the baby went perfectly well and Alice had slipped into a coma, not knowing she was dying, “thinking only that she was falling into a sleep.” He wrote sentimentally: “Fair, pure, and joyous as a maiden; loving, tender, and happy as a young wife; when she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her—then, by a strange and terrible fate, death came to her. And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.” The image stunningly before him was darkness.
At the double service, Reverend John Hall, pastor of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City, addressed friends and family, Theodore sitting between his brother Elliott and his father-in-law George L. Lee. Of Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, Hall’s message was tranquil and clear; her husband had been “taken from her” seven years earlier; her children were grown; she had no burdens; her work was finished. The line that stayed in Theodore’s mind was: “He [her husband] was more than half her life, and the hope of the reunion was a precious and present and blessed hope to her.” Theodore understood that Alice, too, lay waiting for him. Hall warned the congregation and especially the young widower about “our earthly tastes and our groveling passions” and prayed in language that Theodore understood well: “Thou wilt enable him to address himself afresh to the duties that thou givest him to do, manifesting his true submission of soul to thee by the zeal, fervor, and activity with which he tries to serve thee while his life is continued on the earth.” Duty, zeal, and fervor were words of comfort to the young man affronting his destiny.
Theodore returned to Albany, leaving baby Alice Lee with his sister Anna, an act that has always puzzled biographers, who find it hard to imagine that a father would abandon a baby so linked to his wife and mother. In the spring, he sketched another outline of his life for a newspaper correspondent there. “I was born in New York, Oct. 27th 1858; my father of old dutch knickerbocker stock; my mother was a Georgian, descended from the revolutionary Governor Bulloch,” he began by placing himself in the world. “I graduated at Harvard in 1880; in college did fairly in my studies, taking honors in Natural History and Political Economy; and was very fond of sparring, being champion light weight at one time,” he added, giving himself more credit than he had earned. And then he turned to his writing, defining himself first as an author: “Have published sundry papers on ornithology, either on my trips to the north woods, or around my summer home on the wooded, broken shore of northern Long Island. I published also a ‘History of the Naval War of 1812 with an account of the Battle of New Orleans,’ which is now a text book in several colleges, and has gone through three editions.” He marked his life by deaths and a birth: “My father died in 1878; my wife and mother died in February 1884. I have a little daughter living.”17 And then, before listing his political work, Theodore Roosevelt limned his life as a hunter: “I am very fond of both horse and rifle, and spend my summers either on the great plains after buffalo and antelope or in the northern woods, after deer and caribou.”
He wrote to Simon Newton Dexter North, the editor of the Utica Morning Herald, assessing his future as a politician, confiding that the political arena seemed “ephemeral” and hostile to a man who lived by ideals. With the deaths of his wife and mother most in his mind, he philosophized: “Although not a very old man, I have yet lived a great deal in my life, and I have known sorrow too bitter and joy too keen to allow me to become either cast down or elated for more than a brief period over any success or defeat.”18 His sketch is a good one to keep in mind; he would live his life between those impulses, by turns cast down and elated. Roosevelt acknowledged that he was “tired and restless” and in need of a private life as a hunter and a writer. “I think I shall spend the next two or three years in making shooting trips, either in the far West or in the Northern Woods—and there will be plenty of work to do writing.”
Uppermost in his mind was “plenty of work to do writing.” Life in the saddle spurred his literary imagination. He published Hunting Trips of a Ranchman in 1885, followed by Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail in 1888, and later Wilderness Hunter in 1893, and Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter while president in 1905; near the end of his life, he collected bits and pieces into A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916). He cofounded the Boone and Crockett Club with naturalist George Bird Grinnell in 1887, and together they wrote American Big-Game Hunting in 1893, Hunting in Many Lands in 1895, and Trail and Camp-Fire in 1897. The writing style of his hunting stories grew directly from his boyhood journals on birding and from his literary experiment, “Sou’ Sou’ Southerly.”
By June 17, he wrote to Anna about the joys of solitary life. He was having a “glorious time” and felt “well hardened” by physical toil. “I have just come from spending thirteen hours in the saddle,” he enthused. Ranching was not yet financially viable but seemed to him—never good with money—a sound investment over time. Sylvane Ferris and Arthur Merrifield partnered with him on his first venture, the Chimney Butte or Maltese Cross Ranch, and worked with him to build a second Elkhorn Ranch along the Little Missouri River. Roosevelt had lost 25 head of cattle over the winter of 1883–84 but had 155 calves and planned to hire his friends, the Maine outdoorsmen William Sewall and Wilmot Dow, who would bring their families with them, to help him run the new Elkhorn Ranch. Being in the saddle and shooting antelope had done the trick. His diary recorded the blood sport: “I leaped off as [the antelopes] passed within twenty five yards, and gave them both barrels, killing a fine buck shot through both shoulders.”19 Shooting another antelope three days later, he called it “the best shot I ever made with this rifle” and boasted to Anna, “I have never been in better health than on this trip.”20 The West cure was working.
In the background, Roosevelt kept a hand in the political world, working with Henry Cabot Lodge to resist the nomination of Blaine for president in 1884 and displaying considerable skill and energy in the battle for an independent coalition. On August 24, 1884, he wrote to Lodge from the hunting trail: “You must pardon the paper and general appearance of this letter, as I am writing out in camp, a hundred miles or so from any house.”21 He joked about the reliability of his pony express rider, “a cowboy or a horse thief,” under guard and sleeping between him and his foreman. Roosevelt took issue with an Atlantic Monthly review of Lodge’s Studies in History, lauding especially the sections on the Puritans: “Puritanism left if anything a more lasting impress upon America than upon England.”
Hundreds of miles into the wilderness, Roosevelt could not keep away from the intellectual and political life that would draw him back to the East. “But unless I was bear hunting all the time I am afraid I should soon get as restless with this life as with the life at home,” he admitted to Anna.22 Restlessness was the very core of his being. He returned to New York in the fall and traveled west again in November in order to kill a mountain sheep and thereby complete a set of western game for the book he was working on in New York.23
Roosevelt was writing from diary notes, jotted at the scene, of actual kills and specific places and random embellishments. Edmund Morris makes a prescient point about a writer’s life: “Roosevelt had learned, that January of 1885, the old truism that writers write best when removed from the scene they are describing.”24 Theodore reported to Cabot Lodge on March 8, 1885, “I have just sent my last roll of manuscript to the printer,” and then he offered a tepid review of his own second book: “The pictures will be excellent—as for the reading matter, I am a little doubtful.”25
The book he crafted, narrative sketches by turns lyrical and brutal, blending and blurring literary genres, appeals to a modern reader. If one were to choose a single book of Roosevelt’s to read, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman would be a good choice for its freshness and candor. The story invites us into Roosevelt’s home in the Dakotas: “My home ranch house stands on the river brink. 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.” The veranda offers a cool breeze and a rocking chair as the writer slips his splendidly illustrated and lushly printed book into his reader’s hand alongside a pile of recent books on hunting in the western United States that includes Theodore S. Van Dyke’s Still Hunter (1882), Richard Irving Dodge’s Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants (1877), John Dean Caton’s The Antelope and Deer of America (1877), and Eliot Coues’s Birds of the Northwest (1874).26 He carefully folds himself into an American literary community of writers of all sections of the country: Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, and James Russell Lowell from the East; George Washington Cable and Joel Chandler Harris from the South; and Francis Parkman (though a Boston Brahmin) from the West. And he stretches still further to recommend “for lighter reading there are dreamy Ik Marvel, [and John] Burroughs’ breezy pages” (17). Ik Marvel was the pen name of Donald Grant Mitchell, whose popular sentimental novel Reveries of a Bachelor; or, a Book of the Heart (1850) may have caught Roosevelt’s mood.
Looking across the landscape, in a moment of synesthesia, Roosevelt hears the rhythms of Edgar Allan Poe: “And when one is in the Bad Lands he feels as if they somehow look just exactly as Poe’s tales and poems sound” (17). The Badlands are called “bad” because of the dramatic distresses in contour. “This broken country extends back from the river for many miles, and has been called always, by Indians, French voyageurs, and American trappers alike, the ‘Bad Lands,’ partly from its dreary and forbidding aspect and partly from the difficulty experienced in traveling through it” (14). The shapes are fantastical and the colors bizarre. “When a coal vein gets on fire it makes what is called a burning mine, and the clay above it is turned into brick; so that where water wears away the side of a hill sharp streaks of black and red are seen across it, mingled with the grays, purples, and browns.” And then he relents, telling his reader that even in such savage desolation, the land provides nourishing grasses and shelter from storms.
The music of the natural world consoles the writer. The meadowlark looks at first like its eastern cousin, “which utters nothing but a hard, disagreeable chatter,” but, like the writer himself, finds its true voice in the Dakotas: “The plains air seems to give it a voice, and it will perch on the top of a bush or tree and sing for hours in rich, bubbling tones” (18). Certainly, that is what Roosevelt is doing. The prince of the plains birds is the Missouri skylark: “The skylark sings on the wing, soaring overhead and mounting in spiral curves until it can hardly be seen, while its bright, tender strains never cease for a moment.” In the book’s most lyrical language, Roosevelt records the music of a flock of snow buntings: “One bleak March day, when the snow covered the ground and the shaggy ponies crowded about the empty corral, a flock of snow-buntings came familiarly round the cow-shed, clamoring over the ridge-pole and roof. Every few moments one of them would mount into the air, hovering about with quivering wings and warbling a loud, merry song with some very sweet notes” (19).
The book, however rich the notes, is about loss. “They were a most welcome little group of guests, and we were sorry when, after loitering around a day or two, they disappeared toward their breeding haunts.” As the weather turns colder, the coyotes wail uncannily and the larger wolves join in “a kind of deep, dismal howling,” a keening that signals losses to come in the book (19). Hunting Trips of a Ranchman narrates the shooting of one stunning bird and mammal after another, arranged by prey from small to large, from passive to fierce, from easy to difficult, including a complete set of the seven kinds of plains game: whitetail deer, blacktail deer, antelope, bighorn rams or mountain sheep, buffalo, elk, and finally bear. Even in triumph as a hunter, Roosevelt sees the specter of loss: “For we ourselves, and the life that we lead, will shortly pass away from the plains as completely as the red and white hunters who have vanished” (25).
His Elkhorn Ranch offered him no more safety than his New York brownstone: “The free, open-air life of the ranchman, that pleasantest and healthiest life in America, is from its very nature ephemeral.” “Ephemeral” was a word much on his mind in 1884; it was the word he used to describe the political arena in Albany and the only word to describe what had become of his family life. He pressed the metaphor in the book’s most eloquent passage: “The broad and boundless prairies have already been bounded and will soon be made narrow. It is scarcely a figure of speech to say that the tide of white settlement during the last few years has risen over the West like a flood; and the cattlemen are but a spray from the crest of the wave, thrown far in advance, but soon to be overtaken” (26).
Philosophically, he knew that life itself was ephemeral and that we are but spray on the crest of a wave. And unwittingly, he described the literal fate that would strike his ranch in the blizzard to come in 1886–87: “A winter of unusual severity will work sad havoc among the young cattle, especially the heifers; sometimes a disease like the Texas cattle fever will take off a whole herd; and many animals stray and are not recovered.”
Losses in the West had already devastated the land and the culture. “There are now no Indians left in my immediate neighborhood,” he reported, although he was not altogether sorry about that loss (23). “During the past century a good deal of sentimental nonsense has been talked about our taking the Indians’ land,” he wrote in a passage that makes absolutely clear attitudes that he would have his whole life (23). “Now, I do not mean to say for a moment that gross wrong has not been done the Indians, both by Government and individuals, again and again,” he conceded, yet Native Americans seemed to him “treacherous, revengeful and fiendishly cruel savages.” Roosevelt adhered to notions of cultural as well as biological evolution, so that for him and other social Darwinists, looking into the face of a Native American was like looking into the face of primitive man. Indians were remnants of the human past, and he would always see native peoples that way in the western United States and, later, in Africa and South America.
As for the idea of land ownership, Roosevelt hewed to European notions of property. “But as regards taking the land, at least from the Western Indians, the simple truth is that the latter never had any real ownership in it at all,” he could argue with a clear conscience (24). As for fair play, he offered a simple solution. Let Indians compete alongside white settlers, every man being given 160 acres, and if an Indian should decline the offer, “let him, like these whites, who will not work, perish from the face of the earth which he cumbers.” The doctrine, to his mind, was both just and rational, even as the encroachment of settlers, who fenced land in the name of business, would put an end to the West that he revered. “The cattlemen at least keep herds and build houses on the land; yet I would not for a moment debar settlers,” he continued, “though their coming in means in the end the destruction of us and our industry” (24). His world was indeed ephemeral.
We hear in his voice a paean to that dying world. He lauded the old hunters of a bygone age, who headed into the American West to live a “solitary, lonely life” and wage “constant and ferocious war” against the tribes on the plains. “They rarely had regular wives or white children, and there are none to take their places, now that the greater part of them have gone” (37). The businessmen who followed on the Pacific Northern Railroad, no longer needing to face the dangers of the uncivilized West, had grown shiftless. The true heroes, for Roosevelt, were the already extinct white hunters, who were “skillful shots, and were cool, daring, and resolute to the verge of recklessness,” embodying the strenuous life that would become the touchstone of his political prose. That striving to be resolute, even to the verge of recklessness, lay at the heart of the myth Roosevelt was creating about his own life.
The cowboy offered him a modern version of that manly heroism. In his diary, Roosevelt sketched the figure we all know from the popular culture that would follow in the twentieth century: “Cowboys are a jolly set: picturesque, with broad hats, loosely knotted neckerchiefs, flannel shirts, leather chaparajos.”27 In the book, he wrote: “The cowboy’s dress is both picturesque and serviceable, and, like many of the terms of his pursuit, is partly of Hispano-Mexican origin. It consists of a broad felt hat, a flannel shirt, with a bright silk handkerchief loosely knotted round the neck, trousers tucked into high-heeled boots, and a pair of leather ‘chaps’ (chaparajos) or heavy riding overalls. Great spurs and a large-calibre revolver complete the costume” (12). The full portrait typifies Roosevelt’s way of revising manuscripts with embellishments that are more specific, colorful, and detailed; rarely did he remove a word, much less a phrase, from a manuscript once he had written it firmly on paper. The mixed-race nature of the western cowboy, “Hispano-Mexican,” is remarkable in that he would later rail against such hyphenations, gibing that he was American-American.
Roosevelt’s prose illustrates the disruption of the western stage that he sets. Crowded into the middle of a paragraph, breaking into the scene, rides the true hero of the late nineteenth century. “In place of these heroes of a bygone age, the men who were clad in buckskin and who carried long rifles,” the sentence begins, “stands, or rather rides, the bronzed and sinewy cowboy, as picturesque and self-reliant, as dashing and resolute as the saturnine Indian fighters whose place he has taken.” Roosevelt continues, “and, alas that it should be written! he in his turn must at no distant time share the fate of the men he has displaced” (37). The cowboy will perish, in time, just as the old hunter had perished. The writer intrudes into the sentence, complete with an errant exclamation mark, taking center stage. Wielding a pen and a gun, Roosevelt strides onto a stage of his own making as the hero of the new West.
“I myself am not, and never will be, more than an ordinary shot,” Roosevelt surprisingly confesses, “for my eyes are bad and my hand not oversteady” (42). That is an odd admission for a marksman who claims the center of the stage. With all his flaws, he boasts having killed “every kind of game to be found on the plains,” because he is persevering and watchful and has good judgment and “a little dash and energy.” He invites the reader, perhaps a novice hunter—perchance a bad shot too—to follow. Always keen on costume, he meticulously dresses himself for the fall and winter hunting, an ensemble that features the practicality of the old hunter and the dash of the cowboy. A ranchman, who usually dresses in flannel shirts and “overalls tucked into alligator boots,” needs substantially heavier garments for cold weather and rough work: “there is nothing better than a fringed buckskin tunic or hunting-shirt (held in at the waist by the cartridge belt), buckskin trousers, and a fur cap, with heavy moccasins,” together with fur gloves and a coonskin overcoat or jacket of fisher’s fur for when the weather grows especially cold.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York displays one of Roosevelt’s bespoke tunics, the sleeves lined with silk pinstripe and the chest ornamented with leather appliqués in the pattern of flowers (of all things); the tunic and matching trousers reveal him as a relatively small man, at least in his vigorous youth. For sleeping, he suggests a buffalo robe sewn up like a bag; when the temperature drops to sixty below zero, beaver robes and bearskins are warmest; for rainy days, an oilskin “slicker” and chaps keep the body dry.28 For hunting on horseback, he selects “the best and most valuable animal on the ranch,” named Manitou, a stout, strong, enduring, sure-footed, and fast horse. Before the hunt starts, he equips himself with a Winchester rifle, because “it is as deadly, accurate, and handy as any, stands very rough usage, and is unapproachable for the rapidity of its fire” (39). He also carries a 45 Colt or Smith & Wesson; and a hunter ought to have a couple of double-barreled shotguns, like his No. 10 choke-bore made by Thomas of Chicago and No. 16 hammerless by Kennedy of Saint Paul.
Roosevelt sets the stage for each hunt, much as he had set the stage for each battle in The Naval War of 1812, giving his reader precise details about equipment and weather and adversaries. Once equipped, the young hunter is ready for each episode as the book documents the shooting of specimens, the gutting of bodies, and preserving of heads and skins to authenticate his accomplishments as a hunter. The prizes he brought back adorned his house in Oyster Bay, and later filled the American Museum of Natural History in New York and, later still, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., establishing him as game hunter and natural scientist.
The chapters are arranged not by the calendar of actual killings, but by the rarity of prey. Teal and wood ducks are relatively easy to shoot at lunchtime as the hungry hunters halt near ponds and reedy sloughs: “We had half an hour’s good sport in ‘jumping’ these little ducks, moving cautiously along the margin of the reeds, keeping as much as possible concealed from view, and shooting four teal and a wood-duck, as, frightened, at our near approach, they sprang into the air and made off” (67). The truth is that the hunters are better than eagles at killing teals: “The little ducks went along like bullets; flop, flop came the great eagle after them,” even as they dodged him by landing in the reeds (68). Roosevelt as a writer is very good at bringing the reader into the scene. As he walks along and hears a covey of prairie fowl, for example, he records “a loud kuk-kuk-kuk,” growing into a “crowing cluck” if the birds are frightened, or settling into “a sociable garrulous cackling” when undisturbed. He trudges on foot in the fresh, cool morning air through a creek valley edged with “rose-bushes, bullberry bushes, ash, and wild cherry” thickets, taking shots along the way, nearly stepping on young grouse, and prizing himself for knowing where to aim as a bird takes flight, in order to kill it cleanly.
Deer are relatively hard to kill and muscular and for that reason had not been hunted to near extinction as were the buffalo and then the elk. Roosevelt puts himself into a hunting tale that begins with a wounding of a whitetail deer that leaves the animal limping on three legs but able to outrun and outsmart the hunters, who find his tracks and continue hunting the next morning, when the deer has weakened. “He turned his head sharply toward me,” Roosevelt crowed, “as I raised the rifle, and the bullet went fairly into his throat, just under the jaw, breaking his neck, and bringing him down in his tracks with hardly a kick” (117).
The blacktail deer are larger, with two-pronged antlers, superior in every way to the “low-scudding, brush-loving white-tail” (137). They are regal: “Over rough ground, along precipitous slopes, and among the boulders of rocky cliffs, it will go with surprising rapidity and surefootedness, only surpassed by the feats of the big-horn in similar localities, and not equaled by those of any other plains game” (138). The blacktail are shy and scarce, requiring a hunter to go sure-footedly and quietly to be successful in seeing a buck, much less killing it. “Nevertheless, it is by still-hunting that most deer are killed, and the highest form of hunting craft is shown in the science of the skillful still-hunter” (143). And here, too, Roosevelt triumphs fifty pages later. He had been hunting mountain sheep, and as he “crept cautiously up to the edge of great gorge, whose sheer walls went straight down several hundred feet,” he spied a blacktail buck lying on a narrow ledge. “He lay with his legs half stretched out, and his head turned so as to give me an exact centre-shot at his forehead; the bullet going in between his eyes, so that his legs hardly so much as twitched when he received it” (193). In his typical way, Roosevelt positions himself in a most difficult situation: “I have never known any other individual, even of this bold and adventurous species of deer, to take its noonday siesta in a place so barren of all cover and so difficult of access even to the most sure-footed climber” (193). He retrieves his prize, praising his own skills in completing the dangerous task.
The next chapter is on the antelope, and the artificiality of the book’s structure is most apparent here for the simple reason that antelopes were actually his first kills at his Chimney Butte Ranch in June of 1884, only four months after Alice’s death. In his diary, he flushes with pride: “I leaped off as they passed, within twenty five yards, and gave them both barrels, killing a fine buck shot through both shoulders.”29 Three days later, he rejoices over “the best shot I ever made with this rifle.” The book version of the antelope hunt is colored by Roosevelt’s sense of loss over the deaths of his wife and mother. It is a chapter more about landscape and loneliness than about heroic manliness as he travels on horseback to the west of the Badlands through the grand prairies in search of spiritual nourishment, the vast stretches of the American plains echoing the writer’s mood. “Nowhere, not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains; and after a man has lived a little while on or near them, their very vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him” (216). Nowhere else does a man feel so “far off from all mankind,” Roosevelt confesses; “the plains stretch out in deathlike and measureless expanse.” The landscape becomes for the lonely hunter almost a phantasm: “Although he can see so far, yet all objects on the outermost verge of the horizon, even though within the ken of his vision, look unreal and strange; for there is no shade to take away from the bright glare, and at a little distance things seem to shimmer and dance in the hot rays of the sun.” At the distance of a mile, a white shape appears as a prairie wagon, but as the rider draws near, “it changes into the ghastly staring skull of some mighty buffalo, long dead and gone to join the rest of his vanished race” (217).
He admires the antelope, its care for the young, its capacity to be tamed and live almost as a pet, its battles with predatory eagles and wolves and coyotes. In the spirit of fair play, ranchmen have agreed to hunt antelopes only on horseback, and Roosevelt admits that they are so swift and unpredictable that he isn’t much of a threat to them as a hunter. And yet, by the end of the essay, he leaps from his horse and aims perfectly. “An antelope’s gait is so even that it offers a good running mark; and as the smoke blew off I saw the buck roll over like a rabbit, with both shoulders broken” (223). That kill is precisely the first that he recorded in his dairy on June 18. In the book, he re-created the scene, adding that he slit the throat and cut off the hams, and left the rest of the carcass because it offered so little meat. Not much practical use, finally, for this quarry.
His next kill is a bighorn ram, or mountain sheep, the hunting of which is what he calls the hardest kind of sport. In truth this hunt happened on December 14, 1884, and was the reason for his return to his Dakota ranch. In the book, he calls the chase “the noblest form of sport with the rifle” when it comes to an animal not dangerous to the hunter. The ram is rare and wary and next in size to the elk and buffalo. “The huge horns are carried proudly erect by the massive neck; and there seems to be no ground so difficult that the big-horn can not cross it” (246). It is comfortably at home in the vast, lonely, barren Badlands, camouflaged as a boulder. In the diary account Roosevelt records coming upon the ram and shooting him at ninety yards, but in the book the chase becomes riskier in the ice and snow. “Clambering instantly up the steep side, digging my hands and feet into the loose snow, and grasping at every little rock or frozen projection, I reached the top” (257). From his perch, he spots two rams; the bigger one, sturdy and massive against the sky, catches his eye. “I dropped to my knee, raising the rifle as I did so; for a second he did not quite make me out, turning his head half round to look.” Roosevelt shoots him behind the shoulder, the bullet ranging clear through the body; even with such a death wound, the ram staggers and pitches and jumps and slides before his eyes roll up in death. A blizzard begins on his ride back to the Elkhorn ranch, and Roosevelt tells his reader, “I congratulated myself upon the last hunting trip I should take during that season” (259).
Roosevelt embroidered the story to keep his readers’ attention. The buffalo hunt especially sounds like a yarn, perhaps because he wrote it from memory and not, as with the other kills, from diary notes. The plains buffalo had been hunted to extinction by “the rough forerunners of civilization” (7). It is a hard argument to make that the extinction of a noble animal somehow marks civilization, even harder that a sensitive naturalist would desire to shoot a “lordly” buffalo merely to fulfill his quest. Where is he to find such a creature in the first place? Cattle ranchers and hunters had changed the very nature of buffalo: “The formation of this race is due solely to the extremely severe process of natural selection that has been going on among the buffalo herds” (268). The ones that survived through adaptation are active and wary and suspicious, making them harder to find and kill. To find a buffalo, the men must lie flat on the ground and “wiggle like snakes” to avoid suspicion. “It was the first time I ever shot at buffalo,” he admits, as he grazes the body with a loud crack, raising dust from the hide. The chase is on for the wounded bull over eight miles of rugged land, and even then Roosevelt misses the next shot. Mayhem ensues. “I tried to get in closer, when suddenly up went the bull’s tail, and wheeling, he charged me with lowered horns” (284). Roosevelt’s pony bolts, his rifle cracks against his forehead, blood flows into his eyes. Getting the better of the hunters, the bull vanishes. In a relatively wild and lonely spot, the hunters, hungry and thirsty, camp for the night, fearing that their horses might be stolen or, worse, that Indians might scalp them. Scared by wolves, the horses run off in the night, rain sets in, and the men cower, shivering under wet blankets.
In the morning, they find the horses and continue “over the formless, shapeless plain, all drenched through, and thoroughly uncomfortable” (287). Seeing before them a herd of buffalo, the men dismount and stalk their prey, slithering on hands and knees through the muddy terrain until they manage to get within shooting range. “To crown my misfortunes, I now made one of those misses which a man to his dying day always looks back upon with wonder and regret” (287). Stiff from the cold, numb in the fingers, sullen from the miss, Roosevelt continues to pursue the wily buffalo, and his yarn continues to stretch. Roosevelt claims that his pony hit a hole, turning a complete somersault and throwing him to the ground, and scrambled into a dry creek bed that gave way under the hooves, requiring the men to rescue the animal with ropes. Sunburned, parched, hungry, and cold, Roosevelt reminds his reader of an English proverb from The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope: “It’s dogged as does it” (289). What other hunter would be thinking of a literary phrase from a British novelist at such a time? Peering over a hill, Roosevelt finally spots a great bull bison, trim and shining and lusty. “Before he could go off, I put the bullet in behind his shoulder,” he beams. The hardest part for Roosevelt is cutting the trophy head off and stripping steaks from the carcass for dinner. When he returned to hunt in the fall of 1884, he lamented that even the wily buffalo were gone.
Roosevelt saw signs that the elk, called wapiti, were likewise disappearing because, ironically, their majestic bodies made them desirable and conspicuous to hunters. He had seen for himself the results of the slaughter over his short years along the Little Missouri River. The elk, already chased from New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, had abandoned the plains for the protection of dense woods in the Rocky Mountains. “The last individual of the race,” Roosevelt records in a strange echo of James Fenimore Cooper’s Mohicans, “was killed in the Adirondacks in 1834; in Pennsylvania not till nearly thirty years later; while a very few are still to be found in northern Michigan.” He deplores the relentless persecution, even extermination, of the stately creature. The movement of European settlers across the United States, the very Manifest Destiny that Roosevelt chronicled and admired, threatened the natural world he loved.
The young man, a naïve narrator, fails to grasp the irony. “The gradual extermination of this, the most stately and beautiful animal of the chase to be found in America, can be looked upon only with unmixed regret by every sportsman and lover of nature” (296). This is, after all, a book about hunting. His central question is how the sportsman will find an elk to kill after they are all gone. For Roosevelt, the place to go is farther west to the Bighorn Mountains, where intrepid hunters had not yet prevailed. “I have had very good sport with them in a still wilder and more western region; and this I will now describe,” he promises his reader (297). Eventually, Roosevelt manages to kill his prey. “I only brought down one elk, a full-grown cow, with a broken neck, dead in its tracks,” he reports, “but I also broke the hind leg of a bull calf” (304). His diary records the same shot on September 6, 1884: “killed an old cow and a bull calf as they ran off.” In the book, he gives flesh to the scene: “They look very handsome as they trot through the wood, stepping lightly and easily over the dead trunks and crashing through the underbrush, with the head held up and nose pointing forward” (304).
Roosevelt is good at taking his reader into the scene. “All of the sights and sounds in these pine woods that clothed the Bighorn Mountains reminded me of the similar ones seen and heard in the great, somber forests of Maine and the Adirondacks” (308). He is especially good when he stops to listen, noting a “nutcracker, a large, noisy, crow-like bird, with many of the habits of a woodpecker,” and “a Little Chief hare, a wee animal, with a shrill, timorous squeak.” Gazing on the natural world, he ponders its meaning. “The great pine-clad mountains, their forests studded with open glades, were the best place for the still-hunter’s craft. Going noiselessly through them in our dull-colored buckskin and noiseless moccasins, we kept getting glimpses, as it were, of the inner life of the mountains. Each animal that we saw had its own individuality. Aside from the thrill and tingle that a hunter experiences at the sight of his game, I by degrees grew to feel as if I had a personal interest in the different traits and habits of the wild creatures” (314).
His last quarry is the grizzly bear. “The lumbering, self-confident gait of the bears, their burly strength, and their half-humorous, half-ferocious look, gave me a real insight into their character,” he confides, “and I never was more impressed by the exhibition of vast, physical power, than when watching from an ambush a grisly burying or covering up an elk carcass” (314–15). The grizzly bear was the closest beast he could find in North America to rival his sibling Elliott’s tigers in India. “Still, after all is said, the man should have a thoroughly trustworthy weapon and a fairly cool head who would follow into his own haunts and slay grim Old Ephraim” (326). Old Ephraim is a legendary name for grizzlies of prodigious size and ferocity; Roosevelt’s grizzly was, in truth, not large or particularly fearsome. The story of the bear hunt began in his diary when he, clad in moccasins, followed a trail “noiselessly up, and found him in his bed. I shot him through the brain at 25 feet,” he reported on September 16, 1884. From his notes, Roosevelt built the ultimate tale of hunting in the West. The story has a good deal of color, complete with anecdotes about the danger of bears to humans and to other animals, including elk. In the scene itself, Roosevelt strides past his partner Merrifield with his rifle ready as the bear rears up from his bed, stands on his haunches to fight, and drops back bristling on all fours, sensing the danger before him. He personalizes the battle: “And when I saw the top of the white head fairly between his small, glittering, evil eyes, I pulled the trigger” (338). How did the eyes come to glitter? How is it that Old Ephraim is evil? In the contest, Roosevelt claims both bravery and skill in firing a single shot between the eyes “as if the distance had been measured by a carpenter’s rule,” the whole thing over in twenty seconds. The speller in Roosevelt could not resist stopping the story to talk about the pun on “grisly,” meaning horrible, and “grizzly,” the conventional spelling, from “grizzled,” meaning fur tinged with gray color (339). And he ends the story, indeed the collection, with an anecdote about a grizzly that broke the skull and gnawed the arm of a hunter.
The book is experimental and fragmentary, dwelling on episodes in the life of a naturalist and hunter. G. P. Putnam’s Sons contracted with the young writer to publish five hundred copies, called the Medora Edition—after the town of Medora, where Roosevelt’s ranch was located—bound in canvas and gold lettering, printed on large-size, handwoven paper, and illustrated with stunning works of art. At the same time, they printed one thousand copies of a popular edition and agreed to print more if sales were good. Roosevelt agreed to pay $5,000 ($120,000 in today’s dollars) up front with any other expenses to follow and would own the plates himself. The press agreed to pay him 65 percent of the large paper edition, 50 percent of the popular one, and 75 percent of any sales in foreign countries; payments were to come twice a year in February and August. The Medora volume cost fifteen dollars (over $350 today), and one wonders what audience he had in mind. “The book is far too sumptuous for the general public,” sniffed a reviewer in the Athenaeum.30
The New York Times signaled approval of its hometown writer: “Mr. Roosevelt writes most happily, tells naturally what he sees and does, and ‘Hunting Trips of a Ranchman’ will take a leading position in the literature of the American sportsman.”31 No review would ever be as crisp and true about Theodore Roosevelt’s prose. Another laudatory piece in the Saturday Review on August 29, 1885, ranked the book in the top ten of “sporting classics” of western literature. Editions followed in the United States and Britain, earning favorable reviews on both sides of the Atlantic.
George Bird Grinnell, editor and reviewer of Forest and Stream, took the young writer to task: “Where Mr. Roosevelt details his own adventures he is accurate, and tells his story in a simple, pleasant fashion,” he began, offering the caveat “that hunting myths are given as fact,” owing to the author’s inexperience. He joked good-naturedly: “A man who went gunnin’ or fishin’ lost caste among respectable people just about in the same way that one did who got drunk.”32 Roosevelt, an instinctive politician, had a way of absorbing criticism. He would work with Grinnell to found the Boone and Crockett Club and coauthor American Big-Game Hunting and Hunting in Many Lands.
In London, the Spectator hailed the young writer: “What Harte has done for the miners Theodore Roosevelt has done for the more manlier and useful folk of the plains, the ranchmen and cowboys.”33 Roosevelt understood the gravity of the comparison. He admired Harte’s stories, including “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” and thrilled to the sounds in his Civil War poetry, selecting “The Reveille” as epigraph to The Rough Riders: “Hark! I hear the tramp of thousands / And of armed men the hum.” When Bret Harte died in 1902, President Roosevelt congratulated California on giving us “so great a figure in our literary development.” Reading such reviews, Theodore Roosevelt knew that he, too, was taking his place in American letters.