Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [350]
48 But his main TR, Letters, 7.8–9, TR; Works, 5.62.
49 He is aware One admittedly “wrought up” description of a tropical storm pleased TR so much that he begged his editor not to delete it. TR, Letters, 7.33–34.
Biographical Note: TR took with him to Africa two custom-made, watertight, antproof steel-frame writing boxes, covered with black bridle leather and sling-strapped for portage. The boxes contained 30 thick manuscript pads, enough for 1,500 pages of copy, with commensurate numbers of carbon sheets and two dozen indelible pencils.
By June 1, he had completed six “chapters” of about 7,000 to 8,000 words each, and had decided on a title for his book: African Game Trails (TR, Letters, 7.16). Robert Bridges, TR’s editor at Scribners, was amazed at the steadiness, promptness, and copiousness of his dispatches. “I have always said that you are the best contributor we had” (Bridges to TR, 24 June 1909 [SCR]).
The Bridges/Roosevelt correspondence in SCR reveals TR’s professionalism as an author. For example, on 17 July 1909, he sends instructions as to how his text may be split or shortened for serialization (“In the book, of course, I want the chapters to appear just as I have written them”), suggests chapter titles and illustrations, indicates the probable subject matter of future installments, and urges early publication in hardcover (“I am told that no less than eight books on hunting and travelling in British East Africa have been or are now being written.… The object of course is to forestall our book.”) He requests a $20,000 contractual payment, suggests a negotiant (F. Warrington Dawson) for French serial and book rights, and repeatedly presses the value of his son’s photographs. “I regard this book as a serious thing,” he wrote in another letter. “I have put my very best into it and I cannot consent to have it appear in any but first class form.” TR to Bridges, 26 Mar. 1910 (SCR).
50 He is an honest writer See, e.g., TR, Works, 5.55: “Generally each head of game cost me a goodly number of bullets; but only twice did I wound animals which I failed to get.… Some of my successful shots at Grant’s gazelle and kongoni were made at three hundred, three hundred and fifty, or four hundred yards, but at such distances my proportion of misses was very large indeed—and there were altogether too many even at short ranges.”
Biographical Note: Asked if he considered himself a good shot, he joked, “No, but I shoot often.” Lord Cranworth, Sir Frederick Jackson, and Bartle Bull have harshly criticized TR for this profligacy. Before losing the sight of his left eye, he had been a good marksman, managing once to put five bullets through the same target hole. But lack of target practice caused him to grow rusty as President—so much so that in 1908, he called in Admiral W. S. Sims, the navy’s ranking gunnery expert, to prepare him for Africa. Sims set up “a little apparatus” on the upper floor of the White House, consisting of a clamped gun firing at a revolving needle at 60-foot range. “We put the President on the machine,” he told a dinner audience long afterward, “and from the point of view of a rhinoceros, he did not shoot for sour apples.” TR’s half-blindness caused him problems in the early stages of his safari, but he shot better with practice, getting about half of his trophies at ranges of 200+ yards. After his death, the professional hunter Stewart Edward White pointed out that target shooting and game shooting are two very different skills. “So far from being a poor shot, [TR] was an exceedingly good game-shot, a much better game-shot than the majority of riflemen.” Sims to Roosevelt Memorial Association, 1926, quoted in “The Story of the Roosevelt Medals,” ts. (TRB); Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 223; Bull, Safari, 173, 180–81; TR, Works, 2.xxiii–xxiv.
51 his indelible pencil A holograph chapter of African Game Trails, still in the original pad, is preserved in TRBU, and an almost complete copy of the original (top-sheet) ms. is in TRC.
52 One copy of each Bibliographical note by R. W. G. Vail enclosed