The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [103]
By the beginning of August he was, if not fully recovered, at least well enough to retire to Oyster Bay and begin a survey of Leeholm. On the twentieth of that month he bought a further 95 acres of property for $20,000, bringing his total holdings to 155 acres.70 This, in effect, gave him the whole of the estate he had coveted since boyhood; and even though he afterward resold two large tracts to Bamie, he could still consider himself monarch of all he surveyed.71 Before the month was out, Roosevelt was seen pacing across the grassy hilltop with his architects, Lamb and Rich, spelling out his “perfectly definite views” for their benefit. Out of this discussion came sketches, crystallizing later into approved blueprints, of an enormous three-story mansion, deep of foundation and sturdy of rafter, with no fewer than twelve bedrooms (poor pregnant Alice must have blanched at that specification) plus plenty of gables, dormers, and stained glass.72 Although Roosevelt protested he had nothing to do with exterior design, a reader of the blueprints could not help noticing certain resemblances to the Capitol at Albany.
ON 3 SEPTEMBER, Roosevelt kissed his wife good-bye, and loaded a duffel bag and gun case aboard the first of a series of westbound express trains. Alice’s emotions, as she watched his beaming, bespectacled face accelerating away from her, may well be guessed. Remembering how ill her “Teddy” had been when he first went West, she was not encouraged by the ravages of his recent illness, still markedly upon him. Last time, at least, he had had Elliott to look after him; now he was alone—for Commander Gorringe had decided, only four days before, not to go. Dakota, to her mind, was a place impossibly remote and inhospitable: “Badlands” indeed, roamed by dangerous animals and even more dangerous men. She could not have contemplated her husband arriving in Little Missouri, where he did not know a single human being, without consternation.73
Roosevelt was characteristically optimistic. By the time he reached Chicago he had gotten over his disappointment with Gorringe, and wrote Mittie that he was “feeling like a fighting cock” again.74 Changing to the St. Paul Express on 6 September, he began the second half of his 2,400-mile journey. When the train crossed the Red River at Fargo, the westernmost limit of his wanderings three years before with Elliott, he knew that he was leaving the United States, and heading west into the empty vastness of Dakota Territory. The landscape was so flat now, as darkness descended, that he was conscious of little but the overwhelming moonlit sky. About eight o’clock the huge spread of the Missouri swam out of the blackness ahead, slid beneath the train’s clattering wheels, and disappeared into the blackness behind. For hour after hour, flatness gave way to more flatness, and Roosevelt must surely have tired of pressing his face against the unrewarding glass. Perhaps he slept, lulled by the steady rush of air and wheels. If so, he missed seeing a corrugation on the western horizon, shortly after midnight; then, within minutes, all geological hell broke loose. On both sides the landscape disintegrated into a fantastic maze of buttes, ravines, mudbanks, and cliffs, smoldering here and there with inexplicable fires.75 Pillars of clay drifted by—more and more slowly now, as the train snaked