Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [351]
53 As he falls TR, Works, 5.90–91, 187–88, 132–34, 155–56, 163–67. TR’s account of his hunt after buffalo, arguably the most dangerous game in Africa, is modest. “We walked toward them, rather expecting a charge; but when we were still over two hundred yards away they started back for the swamp, and we began firing.” The African hunters with him admitted afterward to feelings of panic as the buffalo massed to charge them on the open plain. TR took command, shouting an order that kept them standing still until the buffalo swerved into the papyrus. “We lost our heads, but the Colonel kept his, and saved us all from certain death.” F. Warrington Dawson, quoting his own diary, 31 May 1909, in “Opportunity and Theodore Roosevelt,” prepublication ts., 35–36 (KRP).
54 In a sudden TR, Works, 5.205–6.
55 But he is looking Ibid., 5.280.
56 Then, curling up Ibid., 5.450; KR diary, 15 July 1909 (KRP). KR photographed this incident.
57 zero at the bone The phrase is Emily Dickinson’s. TR sweated out this and other attacks of chronic fever with the aid of whiskey from Dr. Mearns’s medicine chest—the only alcohol he was seen to take on safari. With quaint precision, he calculated his consumption at “just six ounces in eleven months.” Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 333; TR, Works, 5.450. By May 1915, this had changed in his memory to “seven tablespoons of brandy.” See 278.
58 Although he assures himself TR, Letters, 7.22. Dawson, “Opportunity and TR,” 38, puts TR’s total as of 20 May 1909 at “some 60 specimens of big game, including about 20 species.” Nine days later, The Leader of British East Africa reported his big-game bag had risen to 86 specimens. TR and KR together shot, by mid-July 1909, 12 lion, 7 rhino, 6 giraffes, 6 topi, 5 buffalo, 4 eland, and 3 hippos, plus numerous other lesser species and an indeterminate quantity of game for food.
59 The trouble with such luck The New York Times commented on a report that TR had shot 18 antelope and 2 wildebeest on his first major hunt: “It really does seem to be a good deal of killing for a faunal naturalist.” William J. Long wrote in the San Francisco Examiner, “The worst thing about the whole bloody business … is not the killing of a few hundred wild animals … but the brutalizing influence which [such] reports have upon thousands of American boys.” Rice, “Trailing a Celebrity.”
60 scrawled trophy tally For a sample such press release, see TR, 18 June 1909, quoted in Rice, “Trailing a Celebrity.”
61 their avid interest In the case of local reporters, the interest was by no means friendly. Both The Leader of British East Africa (Nairobi) and the East African Standard (Nairobi) were enraged by TR’s press ban. The former felt that it “bode[d] a lack of consideration … not far short of contempt” (24 Apr. 1909).
62 The fact is George Juergens, News from the White House: The Presidential Press Relationship in the Progressive Era (Chicago, 1981), 14–21 and passim. See also TR, Letters, 3.252–53, and Oswald Garrison Villard, Fighting Years (New York, 1939), 151.
63 American editors TR noticed an unusual number of “vacationing” journalists aboard the SS Hamburg when he crossed the Atlantic eastbound in April. TR, Letters, 6.1403. For WHT’s unhappy relationship with the press, see Juergens, News from the White House, 91ff.
64 Hence the presence Dawson had met TR at Messina with a letter of recommendation from Henry White, the American ambassador in Paris. He had volunteered his services as TR’s safari press secretary, only to be rebuffed: “You may come with me as far as the African coast, if you promise not to follow me afterward and not to ask for any interviews.