The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [147]
… As soon as he saw me he hailed me as “Four Eyes”, in reference to my spectacles, and said, “Four Eyes is going to treat.” I joined in the laugh and got behind the stove and sat down, thinking to escape notice. He followed me, however, and though I tried to pass it off as a jest this merely made him more offensive, and he stood leaning over me, a gun in each hand, using very foul language … In response to his reiterated command that I should set up the drinks, I said, “Well, if I’ve got to, I’ve got to,” and rose, looking past him.
As I rose, I struck quick and hard with my right just to one side of the point of his jaw, hitting with my left as I straightened out, and then again with my right. He fired the guns, but I do not know whether this was merely a convulsive action of his hands, or whether he was trying to shoot at me. When he went down he struck the corner of the bar with his head … if he had moved I was about to drop on my knees; but he was senseless. I took away his guns, and the other people in the room, who were now loud in their denunciation of him, hustled him out and put him in the shed.
Next morning Roosevelt heard to his satisfaction that the bully had left town on a freight train.65
ANOTHER THREAT, from a more powerful adversary, arrived at Elkhorn one day in the form of a letter from the Marquis de Morès. It coolly announced that Roosevelt had no title to the land around his ranch-site. In the summer of 1883 the Marquis had stocked it with twelve thousand sheep; therefore the range belonged to him.66
Like most Americans, Roosevelt had a profound contempt for sheep. Not only did the “bleating idiots” nibble the grass so short that they starved out cattle, they were, intellectually speaking, about the lowest level of brute creation. “No man can associate with sheep,” he snorted, “and retain his self-respect.”67 In any case, the Marquis’s flock had not survived the winter. Roosevelt curtly informed de Morès, by return messenger, that only dead sheep remained on the range, and he “did not think that they would hold it.”
There was no reply, but Sewall and Dow were warned to look out for trouble.68
ONE MELANCHOLY DUTY awaited Roosevelt before he set off for the Big Horns on 18 August: the collation of some tributes, speeches, and newspaper clippings into a printed memorial for Alice Lee.69 Having arranged them as best he could, he added his own poignant superscription, under the heading “In Memory of my Darling Wife.”
She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; as a flower she grew, and as a fair young flower she died. Her life had always been in the sunshine; there had never come to her a single great sorrow; and none ever knew her who did not love and revere her for her bright, sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness. Fair, pure, and joyous as a maiden; loving, tender, and happy as a young wife; when she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be but just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her—then, by a strange and terrible fate, death came to her.
And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.
The manuscript was sent to New York for private publication and distribution.70 Roosevelt sank briefly back into total despair. Gazing across the burned-out landscape of the Badlands, he told Bill Sewall that all his hopes lay buried in the East. He had nothing to live for, he said, and his daughter would never know him: “She would be just as well off without me.”
Talking as to a child, Sewall assured him that he would recover. “You won’t always feel as you do now and you won’t always be willing to stay here and drive cattle.”
But Roosevelt was inconsolable.71
A MONTH LATER, his mood had improved considerably. “I have had good sport,” he wrote Bamie, on descending from the Big Horn Mountains, “and enough excitement and fatigue to prevent overmuch thought.” He added significantly, “I have at last