Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [352]
65 That hippo “bull” TR, Works, 5.214–16; Dawson, “Opportunity and TR,” 43. Another “joke” image that caused TR some irritation was that of Bwana Tumbu (“Boss with Big Belly”), his supposed nickname among the porters on safari. It appears to have been coined by reporters in the United States.
66 The lake lies almost still TR, Works, 5.216–17.
67 Darkness falls Ibid.; Dawson, “Opportunity and TR,” 45–48. Dawson describes TR as “in a state of such depression as I have never witnessed in that hardy and optimistic nature … positively haggard.” (Ibid., 48.) See also Dale B. Randall, Joseph Conrad and Warrington Dawson: The Record of a Friendship (Durham, N.C., 1968), 25.
68 He need not worry The New York Times, 22 July 1909; F. Warrington Dawson diary, 23 July 9, Dawson Papers, Duke University.
69 The letters, dictated Lodge, Selections, 2.330–35; John C. O’Laughlin to TR, 30 July 1909 (OL); Dawson, “Opportunity and TR,” 37.
70 “Remember that I never” Henry Cabot Lodge, Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884–1918 (New York, 1925), 2.344–45. In this same letter, TR writes in response to a forwarded article reviewing his presidency, “It almost frightened me to realize how completely the past was past as far as I was concerned.”
71 He admits Dawson, “Opportunity and TR,” 58, 63. According to TR, his safari received no periodicals except for occasional ancient issues of the Owego Gazette addressed to Dr. Loring.
72 one startling remark TR, Letters, 7.21 (italics added). See also Allan Nevins, Henry White: Thirty Years of American Diplomacy (New York, 1930), 297–99. Dawson may be excused for inattention if this was the day, cited by him afterward, when TR kept him “taking dictation … from 9 in the morning until 2:20 at night, our only pause being meals.” (Randall, Joseph Conrad and Warrington Dawson, 25.) However, Dawson, in his memoir, exaggerates the extent of his secretarial services to TR. He does not appear to have seen the Colonel again before a family emergency called him home in the early fall of 1909.
73 He is nearer death TR, Works, 5.245. The packthread simile is TR’s.
74 There are no bullets Lodge, Selections, 2.333; TR, Works, 5.414, 244–45. In 1919, Cuninghame was still marveling at TR’s “complete coolness” in a situation of extreme danger (they were surrounded by a rampaging herd of cows and young bulls), not to mention his eccentric behavior afterward. “I never saw a man so boyishly jubilant, waving his hat and dancing about.… Half an hour later, when we were back in camp … he sat down in a chair and began to read Balzac.” R. J. Cuninghame interview, The New York Times, 8 Jan. 1919.
75 Hunters’ etiquette TR, Works, 5.246.
76 Soon they were all splashed Ibid., 5.247.
77 Blood, nakedness Perhaps the most powerful indictment of TR the hunter was penned in 1907 by Rev. William J. Long, whom TR had himself pilloried as a “nature faker” in love with sentimental theories of animal behavior. Replying to the President’s attacks, Long wrote in an open letter, “Who is he to write, ‘I don’t believe that some of these nature-writers know the heart of wild things’? As to that, I find after carefully reading two of his big books, that every time Mr. Roosevelt gets near the heart of a wild thing he invariably puts a bullet through it.” Mark Sullivan, Our Times (New York, 1930), 3.155.
78 “Life is hard and cruel” TR, Works, 5.196. As with ugliness, so with beauty. Warrington Dawson noticed that TR admired even the