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On the campaign trail, Roosevelt was brilliantly successful at inspiring young, conservation-minded outdoors enthusiasts to join the Bull Moose cause. In Chicago, for example, Harold L. Ickes, an attorney deeply interested in reform politics, quit the Republican Party and signed up with Roosevelt. Reporting for the Chicago Record Ickes—whose clients included Jane Addams of Hull House, a leader in the social work movement—for the first time became informed about federal forest reserves, national parks, and wildlife protection. Quirky and combative, with an impish smile that often beamed forth from his thin lips, Ickes didn’t look like an outdoorsman. But looks are often deceiving. The acerbic Ickes was a dyed-in-the-wool Pennsylvanian conservationist, a proud native son of Altoona, whose great love in life was the Appalachian mountain range.75 Clear, fast-moving western Pennsylvanian rivers like the Little Juniata, and secret places like Horseshoe Cave and Blue Knob, were indelible images in his memory. Ickes, a self-proclaimed lone wolf, was a paradox: an urban wheeler-dealer who thought America’s salvation was in the backcountry. “I love nature,” Ickes declared. “I love it in practically every form—flowers, birds, wild animals, running streams, gem-like lakes, and towering snow-clad mountains.”76

As Ickes noted in his diary for 1912, nobody could claim that Roosevelt wasn’t striking a nerve in the body politic with his fiery Bull Moose rhetoric. At his rallies, huge crowds hung on his words as he attacked Wall Street, overcome more by emotion than by insight. Because the Socialist Party had nominated the labor leader Eugene Debs for president, Roosevelt was facing an able challenger in campaigning for economic justice for the laboring class. Budding conservationists like Ickes, however, chanted, “The Bull Moose has left the wooded hill/His call rings through the land/It’s a summons to the young and strong/To join with willing hand.”77 Outdoors enthusiasts had long before developed a firm affection for Roosevelt’s high-purposed stagecraft; they voted for him without hesitation in 1912. As a performer, Roosevelt was raw and visceral, brimming with defiance, insisting that he was an unshakable one-man squad for American betterment. His words seemed to glow in the air. But stumping from coast to coast was banal compared with the outdoors life. “I am hoarse and dirty and filled with a bored loathing of myself,” he wrote to Kermit. “I often think with real longing of the hot, moonlit nights on our giant eland hunt, or in the white rhino camp, with the faithful gun-boys talking or listening to the strumming of the funny little native harp.”78

It was in this circus atmosphere that John Schrank, a Bavarian immigrant from New York, arrived in Milwaukee for a Bull Moose rally with murder on his mind. On October 14, Schrank approached Roosevelt and shot him at close range with a .38-caliber pistol. Two spectators restrained the psychotic shooter as Roosevelt tried not to faint. Schrank, it turned out, was angry because Roosevelt was behind laws that closed saloons on Sunday. Luckily, a thickly folded fifty-page copy of a speech and a metal eyeglass case (used for bird-watching) inside Roosevelt’s coat pocket stopped the bullet from piercing his heart. A scuffle ensued and Schrank was apprehended. Roosevelt refused medical attention and went on to speak for ninety minutes before being rushed first to Emergency Hospital in Milwaukee and then to Mercy Hospital in Chicago. The bullet, lodged close to his lungs, was never removed. “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quick as possible,” Roosevelt had said from the stage, his chin thrust high. “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”79

When Pinchot heard the news from Milwaukee, he was at first disbelieving. But when he learned that Roosevelt had continued to give the speech while bleeding profusely,