Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [355]
Biographical Note: Bartle Bull notes that TR’s bag of nine white rhinos, including four cows and a calf, exceeded his licensed quota by three. The species was then, as now, one of the most endangered in Africa. His excessive kill offended even the sensibilities of the time. “Do those nine white rhino ever cause ex-President Roosevelt a pang of conscience?” Lord Cranworth wrote in a 1912 memoir. “… I venture to hope so.” (Bull, Safari, 179–80.) TR admits in African Game Trails that the white rhino was already virtually extinct in Africa outside of the Lado Enclave. It was, however, the only major game animal he had not yet collected for his sponsors. “We deemed it really important to get good groups for the National Museum in Washington and the American Museum in New York, and a head for National Collection of Heads and Horns [in] the Bronx Zoological Park.” Kermit killed at least one charging cow in self-defense. “He was sorry … but I was not, for it was a very fine specimen, with the front horn thirty-one inches long.” (TR, Works, 5.389, 399, 408.) The kills, plus five found skulls, enabled Edmund Heller to write a definitive Smithsonian study, “The White Rhinoceros.” See TR, Letters, 7.46. For the role unwittingly played by Winston Churchill in this hunt, see below, 604–605.
104 he feels that he has advanced TR, Letters, 7.348–49.
105 A letter from Henry Cabot Lodge Lodge, Selections, 2.357. “The country is crazy-mad about Father,” ERD wrote KR. Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 352.
106 “At present it does not” Lodge, Selections, 2.362. After reaching Gondokoro on 17 Feb., TR and KR took a final eight-day hunt for eland on the Belgian Congo side of the river. (TR, Works, 5.430–37.) At the end of the month he paid off his Uganda porters and sent them back to Kampala. On 28 Feb., he set sail from Gondokoro with KR and the naturalists aboard the Dal.
107 Three members Chicago Tribune, 12 Mar. 1910. Another correspondent described the barge as “a crowded cemetery for animals, with the lid off.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 12 Mar. 1910.
108 They listen frustrated John C. O’Laughlin in the Chicago Tribune, 12 Mar. 1910. See also John C. O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe with Roosevelt (Boston, 1910), 28–36. In letters home to his wife, 15, 20 Mar. 1910 (OL), O’Laughlin confidentially reported that “Mr. Roosevelt will run again in 1912.” There is no other evidence to suggest that TR admitted such an ambition so early.
109 the Nile birds he pursued TR, Works, 5.448. Three of TR’s youthful specimens, mounted by himself, are preserved in the American Museum of Natural History: an Egyptian spur-winged lapwing, a white-tailed lapwing, and a crocodile bird. For an account of his ornithological researches in Egypt and the Levant in 1872–1873, see Cutright, TR, 39–69.
110 “whirls and wakes” TR, Works, 5.448.
111 All that remains Ibid., 5.450–52; KR diary, 17 Feb. 1910 (KRP). The total bag of the Smithsonian–Theodore Roosevelt African Expedition, as it is now officially known, was 4,900 mammals, 4,000 birds, 500 fish, and 2,000 reptiles—approximately 11,400 items, plus 10,000 plant specimens and a small collection of ethnological objects.
112 “Kermit and I” TR, Works, 5.453. TR told John C. O’Laughlin at Gordon’s Tree, four miles south of Khartoum, that he had just finished the last chapter of his book. Chicago Tribune, 15 Mar. 1910.
113 “the twentieth century” TR, Letters, 7.149. The Dal can be seen approaching civilization in “TR’s Return from Africa,” a newsreel in Theodore Roosevelt on Film, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/.
CHAPTER 1: LOSS OF IMPERIAL WILL
1 Epigraph Edwin Arlington Robinson, Collected Poems (New York, 1922), 359.
2 He was informed Chicago Tribune and AP dispatch, 14 Apr. 1910. The governor of Khartoum was away at the time of TR’s visit.
3 On its boards Alan Moorehead, The White Nile (New York, 1971), 339–41.
4 Rebuilt