The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [116]
Despite Gregor Lang’s insistence that the cattle business was “the best there is,” Roosevelt must have known he was taking a risk in investing in it. There were huge profits to be made, presumably, but huge expenditures came first, and it would be years before any returns came in. Small wonder that most investors in “the beef bonanza” were Eastern capitalists and European aristocrats, men who could afford to spend—and lose—millions. Roosevelt was a fairly wealthy young man, but his funds were puny in comparison with those of, say, the Marquis de Morès.
What then was the great dream which visibly possessed him during that September of 1883, and committed him to spending one-third of his patrimony in Dakota? It could not have been the mere making of money: as far as he was concerned, he already had enough. The clue may lie in an observation by Lincoln Lang.
Clearly I recall his wild enthusiasm over the Bad Lands … It had taken root in the congenial soil of his consciousness, like an ineradicable, creeping plant, as it were, to thrive and permeate it thereafter, causing him more and more to think in the broad gauge terms of nature—of the real earth.71
There was, in this beautiful country, something which thrilled Roosevelt, body and soul. As a child, hardly able to breathe in New York City, he had craved the sweet breezes of Long Island and the Hudson Valley. Here the air had the sting of dry champagne. All his life he had loved to climb mountains and gaze upon as much of the world as his spectacles could take in. Here he had only to saunter up a butte, and the panorama extended for 360 degrees. In recent years, he had spent much of his time in crowded, noisy rooms. Here he could gallop in any direction, for as long as he liked, and not see a single human being. Fourteen thousand dollars was a small price to pay for so much freedom.
IT WAS AGREED that while Sylvane and Merrifield journeyed to Minnesota to break their contract, Roosevelt would remain in the Badlands and await a confirming telegram.72 On 20 September the ranchers set off downriver, and he and Joe went in search of buffalo yet again. This time they rode west into Montana. About noon, their ponies began to snuff the air. Roosevelt dismounted, and, following the direction of his horse’s muzzle, ran cautiously up a valley. He peeped over the rim.
There below me, not fifty yards off, was a great bison bull. He was walking along, grazing as he walked. His glossy fall coat was in fine trim and shone in the rays of the sun, while his pride of bearing showed him to be in the lusty vigor of his prime. As I rose above the crest of the hill, he held up his head and cocked his tail to the air. Before he could go off, I put the bullet in behind his shoulder. The wound was an almost immediately fatal one, yet with surprising agility for so large and cumbersome an animal, he bounded up the opposite side of the ravine … and disappeared over the ridge at a lumbering gallop, the blood pouring from his mouth and nostrils. We knew he could not go far, and trotted leisurely along his bloody trail.…
And in the next gully they found their prize “stark dead.”73
Roosevelt now abandoned himself to complete hysteria. He danced around the great carcass like an Indian war-chief, whooping and shrieking, while his guide watched in stolid amazement. “I never saw anyone so enthused in my life,” said Ferris afterward, “and by golly, I was enthused myself … I was plumb tired out.” When Roosevelt finally calmed down, he presented the Canadian with a hundred dollars.74
Now they stooped to the “tedious and tiresome” ritual