The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [189]
Two welcome guests at 689 helped smooth things over while negotiations over Baby Lee went on: Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge and “Springy” Spring Rice, now Secretary of the British Legation in Washington. Roosevelt seized on their masculine company with some relief, and lost no time in returning Spring Rice’s hospitality of the previous November. The Englishman became an honorary member of the Century Club, which he found as intellectually exclusive as the Savile, and was introduced to an enormous circle of Rooseveltian acquaintances. One morning Whitelaw Reid, the immensely rich and influential owner of the New York Tribune, invited the three friends to a political breakfast in his mansion. There, in a magnificent dining hall, paneled with inlaid wood and embossed leather, Roosevelt, Lodge, and Reid gravely discussed whether or not James G. Blaine should again be nominated for the Presidency in 1888. Spring Rice listened in utter fascination. “It was the first real piece of political wire-pulling I had come across,” he wrote home afterward. “I am getting quite excited over it.”12
Not until 4 April was Roosevelt free to go West and find out exactly how poor he was.
HE ALREADY HAD a fairly accurate idea. Or rather, Edith had. That level-headed lady knew that her husband, whatever his other talents, was a financial imbecile.13 Soon after the wedding she had gone over his affairs with him and discovered that, on the basis of last year’s figures alone, they should “think very seriously of closing Sagamore Hill.” Then had come the first reports of Dakota blizzards, followed by her attacks of morning sickness. Clearly, if they were to rear their family at Oyster Bay, they would have to “cut down tremendously along the whole line.”14 Roosevelt must learn to live within his income for a change, and begin to pay off his debts. He must sell his enormously expensive hunting-horse, grow his own crops and fodder (for Sagamore Hill was a potentially profitable farm), and stop running the house as a summer resort for friends with large appetites, and thirsts to match.15
As to his cattle business, the winter’s toll was still a matter of guesswork. Roosevelt could only hope that enough cows would survive to produce at least a token number of healthy calves. In the years ahead he would sell as many beeves as possible for whatever price he could get, and so slowly reduce his losses. Given enough time—and no more freak weather—he might be able to dispose of his entire stock and save most of his $85,000 investment.
But now, as he rode once more out of Medora into the devastated Badlands, all such optimism vanished. “The land was a mere barren waste; not a green thing could be seen; the dead grass eaten off till the country looked as if it had been shaved with a razor.” Occasionally, in some sheltered spot, he would come across “a band of gaunt, hollow-flanked cattle feebly cropping the sparse, dry pasturage, too listless to move out of the way.” Blackened carcasses lay piled up against the bluffs: he counted twenty-three in a single patch of brushwood. Here and there a dead cow perched grotesquely in the branches of a cottonwood tree, the high snow upon which it once stood having melted away.16
Of the once-teeming Elkhorn and Maltese Cross herds, only “a skinny sorry-looking crew” of some few hundred seemed to have survived.17 He could not find out exactly how many had died until after the spring roundup.
But the roundup was never held. The Little Missouri Stockmen’s Association, meeting on 16 April with Roosevelt in the chair, decided that losses were too heavy to merit a general mobilization. There were so few cattle left on the range, ranchers might as well sort them out individually. One search party was dispatched to Standing Rock, in the hope that some thousands of cattle may have migrated south, and returned after three weeks, with exactly two steers.18
No official figures, therefore, survive as to the effect of the winter of 1886–87 on the Badlands cattle industry as a