The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [102]
The Commander said that he had bought an abandoned army cantonment there, at a railroad depot on the banks of the Little Missouri. Although the cantonment was not yet ready to receive paying guests, there was a hotel—of sorts—at the depot, plus a few stores and a saloon where hunting guides might be found and hired, if sufficiently sober. The countryside round about teemed with buffalo, not to mention elk, mountain sheep, deer, antelope, beaver, and even the occasional bear. Gorringe added that he was returning to Little Missouri in the fall. Perhaps Roosevelt would like to come along.64
ROOSEVELT WAS QUICK to accept. But he had more pressing matters to consider that spring. Alice had just become pregnant. The news stimulated his old ambition to build Leeholm, the hilltop manor at Oyster Bay. Since his initial purchase of land there, a few weeks after their wedding, he had been too busy with politics to think much about the future; but now the responsibilities of parenthood crowded upon him. He began to plan a house that befitted his stature as a man of wealth, public influence, and proven fertility.65
Since he and Alice would live out their days at Leeholm, surrounded of course by numerous children, his first instincts were toward solidity and size. What the manor would look like was of less consequence than what it would feel like to live in. Apart from Roosevelt’s natural penchant for massive walls, heavy oak paneling, and stuffed segments of large animals, he was not, at this stage, interested in decorative details. But he did have “perfectly definite views” as to the general layout of his home.
I wished a big piazza, very broad at the n.w. corner where we could sit in rocking chairs and look at the sunset; a library with a shallow bay window opening south, the parlor or drawing-room occupying all the western end of the lower floor; as broad a hall as our space would permit; big fireplaces for logs; on the top floor the gun room occupying the western end so that north and west it look[ed] over the Sound and Bay.66
Questions of health—his own, rather more than Alice’s—prevented him from making any more definite architectural plans. The nervous strains of the past winter, aggravated by the excitement of becoming a prospective father, brought about a return of asthma and cholera morbus. This time he became so ill that, looking back on the summer of 1883, he described the whole period as “a nightmare.”67 At the beginning of July the family doctor sentenced him to “that quintessence of abomination, a large summer hotel at a watering-place for underbred and overdressed girls”—Richfield Springs, in the Catskill Mountains.68 Characteristically, Roosevelt chose to drive there with Alice in the family buggy. Settling down amid “a select collection of assorted cripples and consumptives,” he submitted patiently to a variety of cures, and relieved his embarrassment in a humorous letter to Corinne.69
The drive up was very pleasant—in spots. In spots it wasn’t … as we left civilization, Alice mildly but firmly refused to touch the decidedly primitive food of the aborigines, and led a starvling [sic] existence on crackers which I toasted for her in the greasy kitchens of the grimy inns. But, on the other hand, the scenery was superb; I have never seen grander views than among the Catskills, or a more lovely country than that we went through afterwards; the horse, in spite of his heaves, throve wonderfully, and nearly ate his head off; and Alice, who reached Cooperstown very limp indeed, displayed her usual powers of forgetting past woe, and in two hours time, after having eaten until she looked like a little pink boa constrictor, was completely herself again. By the way, having listened with round eyed interest to one man advising me to “wet the feed and hay” of Light-foot, she paralyzed the ostler by a direction “to wet his feet and hair” for the same benevolent object. Personally, I enjoyed the trip immensely,