The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [211]
Next morning Roosevelt laboriously hacked off the grizzly’s head and hide. Somehow, en route back to Oyster Bay, he lost the skull, and had to replace it with a plaster one before proudly laying the pelt at Edith’s feet. Of all his encounters with dangerous game, this had been his most nearly fatal; of all his trophies, this—with the possible exception of his Dakota buffalo—was the one he loved best.76
ROOSEVELT FOUND HIMSELF something of a literary celebrity in the fall of 1889. His Winning of the West was not only a bestseller (the first edition disappeared in little more than a month)77 but a succès d’estime on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, where it rated full-page notices in such periodicals as the Spectator and Saturday Review, Roosevelt was hailed as a historian of model impartiality; the Athenaeum went as far as to call him George Bancroft’s successor.78 In America, scholars of the caliber of Fredrick Jackson Turner and William F. Poole praised The Winning of the West as a work of originality, scope, and power. Turner called it “a wonderful story, most entertainingly told.” He commended the author for his “breadth of view, capacity for studying local history in the light of world history, and in knowledge of the critical use of material.”79 Dr. Poole, representing the older generation of historians, wrote a rather more balanced criticism in The Atlantic Monthly:
The Winning of the West will find many appreciative readers. Mr. Roosevelt’s style is natural, simple, and picturesque, without any attempt at fine writing, and he does not hesitate to use Western words which have not yet found a place in the dictionary. He has not taken the old story as he finds it printed in Western books, but has sought for new materials in manuscript collections … Few writers of American history have covered a wider or better field of research, or are more in sympathy with the best modern method of studying history from original sources; and yet … we have a feeling that he might profitably have spent more time in consulting and collating the rich materials to which he had access.…
It is evident from these volumes that Mr. Roosevelt is a man of ability and of great industry. He has struck out fresh and original thoughts, has opened new lines of investigation, and has written paragraphs, and some chapters, of singular felicity … Mr. Roosevelt, in writing so good a work, has clearly shown that he could make a better one, if he would take more time in doing it.80
But the review which, paradoxically, gave Roosevelt the most satisfaction was a vituperative and error-filled notice in the New York Sun. Its pseudonymous author accused him of plagiarism and fraud: Theodore Roosevelt could not have written The Winning of the West alone. “It would have been simply impossible for him to do what he claims to have done in the time that was at his disposal.” Another scholar, at least, must be responsible for the book’s voluminous footnotes and appendices.81
Roosevelt had no difficulty in guessing the critic behind the pseudonym: James R. Gilmore, a popular historian whose own works had been rendered obsolete by The Winning of the West.82 He sent the Sun a long and humiliating rebuttal, identifying Gilmore by name and demolishing his charges, one by one, with ease. In conclusion he offered a thousand dollars to anybody who could prove he had a collaborator. “The original manuscript is still in the hands of the publishers, the Messrs Putnams, 27 West 23rd Street, New York; a glance at it will be sufficient to show that from the first chapter to the last the text and notes are by the same hand and written at the same time.”83
Gilmore was forced to issue an answer over his own signature.84 Unable to substantiate any of his charges, or refute any of Roosevelt’s answers, he desperately accused the latter of pirating certain “facts” hitherto published only by himself. Roosevelt annihilated him in a letter too long and too scholarly to quote here—unfortunately,