The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [140]
The first public advertisement of the Maltese Cross brand, 1884. (Illustration 10.2)
CHAPTER 11
The Cowboy of the Present
Heart’s dearest,
Why dost thou sorrow so?
THE STARS WERE ALREADY PALE in the east as he rode across the river-bottom and struck off up a winding valley.1 His horse, Manitou, loped effortlessly through a sea of sweet-smelling prairie-rose bushes. Presently the sun’s first rays rushed horizontally across the Badlands, kissing the tops of the buttes, and shocking millions of drowsy birds into song.
Among the swelling chorus of hermit thrushes, grosbeaks, robins, bluebirds, thrashers, and sparrows, Roosevelt’s acute ear caught one particularly rich and bubbling sound, with “a cadence of wild sadness, inexpressibly touching.”2 He identified it as the meadowlark. Ever afterward, the music of that bird would come “laden with a hundred memories and associations; with the sight of dim hills reddening in the dawn, with the breath of cool morning winds blowing across lowly plains, with the scent of flowers on the sunlit prairie.”3
Some varieties of birdsong, however much they ravished Roosevelt’s ear, aroused in his heart that same sharp, indefinable nostalgia which he had felt as a child, gazing at the portrait of Edith Carow.4 Ache though he may, he could not escape hearing them in Dakota, in June, a month of prodigious migrations. Nor did he really want to. For four years or more, he had been starved of this, the only kind of music he really understood. In abandoning his natural history studies for Alice Lee, he had stifled the precocious sensitivity to nature that was so characteristic of him as a youth. Now, as a twenty-five-year-old widower, with his second career abandoned—or at least indefinitely postponed—he could reopen his ears to the “sweet, sad songs” of the hermit thrush, the “boding call” of the whippoorwill, and “the soft melancholy cooing of the mourning-dove, whose voice always seems far away and expresses more than any other sound in nature the sadness of gentle, hopeless, never-ending grief.”5
“New York will certainly lose him for a time at least.”
Theodore Roosevelt in his buckskin suit, 1884. (Illustration 11.1)
TWO MAGPIES, perched on a bleached buffalo skull,6 greeted him as he left the creek and rode through a line of scoria-red buttes. The naked prairie opened out ahead, already hot and shimmering under the climbing sun. Choosing one course at random, he headed south, scanning the horizon for antelope. All he carried, beside his rifle, was a book, a blanket, an oilskin, a metal cup, a little tea and salt, and some dry biscuits. Since arriving in Dakota nine days before, he had eaten nothing but canned pork and starch. Ferris and Merrifield were too busy with the spring roundup to shoot any fresh meat. Roosevelt therefore had good dietetic reasons, as well as his “boyish ambition,” for embarking on a trip across the prairie. But his real hunger was for solitude.
Nowhere, not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains … their vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him. The landscape seems always the same, and after the traveller has plodded on for miles and miles he gets to feel as if the distance were really boundless. As far as the eye can see, there is no break; either the prairie stretches out into perfectly level flats, or else there are gentle, rolling slopes … when one of these is ascended, immediately another precisely like it takes its place in the distance, and so roll succeeds roll in a succession as interminable as that of the waves in the ocean. Nowhere else does one feel so far off from all mankind; the plains stretch out in deathless and measureless expanse, and as he journeys over them they will for many miles be lacking in all signs of life.7
Lonely, melancholy, monotony, deathless—these words, especially the first, became obsessive parts of Roosevelt’s vocabulary in 1884. There was, however, no