Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [171]
NINETEEN YEARS OLD, graduated at last from Andover, Archie had earned the luxury of seven weeks in his adored father’s company. He also loved being with “Quent.” The two boys had always been close, although they were as different as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Archie’s special schooling in Arizona gave him at least a destinational edge on his brother. Quentin, easygoing and uncompetitive at fifteen, did not mind where anybody took him, as long as he could investigate vehicular means.
On this jaunt it was a regular train of the Santa Fe Railroad, arriving in Silver City, New Mexico, on 10 July. Two days later, they met up with Archie’s other best buddy, Nicholas Roosevelt, in Williams, Arizona, and registered that night at the El Tovar Hotel overlooking the Grand Canyon.
Moonlit and mysterious, the enormous gorge filled the windows of their rooms, trivializing everything in the world that was not a million years old. One decade before—too momentary a flicker of time for the Colorado to have carved any deeper since—Roosevelt had come here and expressed his relief that the Santa Fe was not going to build another hotel at Rowe’s Point. He had stood on the South Rim and, ad-libbing to those around him, made the first great conservation call of his presidency: Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it—keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you.
Now it was a national monument, thanks to the Antiquities Act of 1906, and he was back with two of his own inheritors. Archie, that seasoned veteran of desert living, had seen the canyon before. But Quentin had not. Someday, perhaps, Roosevelt’s other sons and daughters would see it too, followed by Ted’s little “Graciekins,” and Ethel’s coming baby, and their children’s children.
THE MOON WAS FULL when they began their descent into the canyon at 2 A.M. on the morning of 15 July. Roosevelt, who had been assigned to write a serial travelogue for The Outlook, had arranged for guides, ponies, and pack animals to cover the 330-mile itinerary ahead of them. In the course of the next six weeks, he intended to give his sons a taste of some of the lessons he had learned in pursuit, survival, and acquaintance with the primeval, beginning with a cougar hunt on the high plateau of the North Rim, and ending with a trek through the Navajo Indian Reservation to Walpi, where they would attend the annual Hopi Snake Dance.
Thirty-two hours later, having gone so deep that they lost view of both the moon and the sun, they crested Buckskin Mountain, where it was still, improbably, spring. They spent the next two weeks in Kaibab National Forest, going after cougar and camping out at temperatures close to freezing. Roosevelt apologized for being old and “slow” on the chase, but Nicholas wrote in his diary, “He still has the energy of a boy and is handicapped only by his weight.” He wanted his sons to do most of the shooting, although he killed one young female to gratify Archie. After the African lion, the mountain lion did not strike him as much of a threat; he was more afraid of losing Archie in reckless chases over the edges of the canyon. The bony youth seemed to have no fear. Roosevelt had taught all his children that courage could be developed like muscle, but Archie’s was uninhibited by imagination.
Lacking fresh meat, they ate a fat cougar and judged it as good as venison. Roosevelt indulged in “elderly” things like washing up dishes and sitting alone, pondering the beauty around him. He was ravished by the sound of the silver-voiced Rocky Mountain hermit thrush, by the profusion of the stars at night, and by the vastness of the canyon’s views.
The first day of August found them shogging across the blindingly white and sterile wastes of the Paria Plateau east of Vermilion Cliffs. The soil was so arid, or poisoned, that it failed to grow grass even where a streamlet trickled, producing only clutches of coarse weed with tiny, flaring white flowers. Squinting