The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [239]
Nothing written prior to Roosevelt’s Presidency shows the breadth of his mind to greater advantage than the introduction to The Winning of the West, which makes it clear that his specific subject—white settlement of Indian lands west of the Alleghenies in the late eighteenth century—is but a chapter in the unfolding of an epic racial saga, covering thousands of years and millions of square miles. The erudition with which he traces the “perfectly continuous history” of Anglo-Saxons from the days of King Alfred to those of George Washington is impressive. He draws effortless parallels between the Romanticization of the Celto-Iberians in the second century B.C. and the capture of Mexico and Peru by the conquistadores; between the Punic Wars and the War of the American Revolution; even between the future of whites in South Africa and the fate of Greek colonists in the Tauric Chersonese.
“During the past three centuries,” Roosevelt begins, “the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world’s waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world’s history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its importance.”10 What else but destiny—a destiny yet to be fully realized—can explain the remorseless advance of Anglo-Saxon civilization? The language of what was, in Queen Elizabeth’s time, “a relatively unimportant insular kingdom … now holds sway over worlds whose endless coasts are washed by the waves of three great oceans.” Never in history has a race expanded over so wide an area in so short a time; and the winning of the American West may be counted as “the crowning and greatest achievement” of that mighty movement.11
The narrative proper begins in chapter 6 with the first trickle of settlement following Daniel Boone’s penetration of the Cumberland Gap in 1765. Roosevelt uses a striking flood metaphor: “The American backswoodsmen had surged up, wave upon wave, till their mass trembled in the troughs of the Alleghenies, ready to flood the continent beyond.”12 As the flood gathers volume, he achieves the effect of ever-widening waves by making his chapters overlap, every one moving farther afield geographically, and further ahead in time. So intoxicated is Roosevelt as he rides these waves that he sweeps uncaring past such solid obstructions as Institutional Analysis and Land Company Proceedings. (“I have always been more interested in the men themselves than the institutions through which they worked,” he confessed.)13 He might have added, “and in action rather than theory.” Far and away the best parts of The Winning of the West are the fighting chapters. In describing border battles, Roosevelt reveals himself with the utter unself-consciousness which was always part of his charm. He makes no secret of his boyish identification with those gaunt, fierce warriors of the frontier, who were “strong and simple, powerful for good and evil, swayed by gusts of stormy passion, the love of freedom rooted in their very heart’s core.”14
Here is Roosevelt the aggressor, single-handedly killing or crippling seven Indians in the pitch darkness of his pioneer log cabin; wrenching himself from the stake and running naked for five days through mosquito country; trying consecutively to shoot, knife, throttle, and drown a reluctant Chief Bigfoot, while his own brother puts a bullet in his back; advancing upon Vincennes through mile after mile of freezing, waist-deep water; and, in a moment of supreme ecstasy, spurring a white horse over a sheer, three-hundred-foot cliff:
There was a crash, the shock of a heavy body, half-springing, half-falling, a scramble among loose rocks, and the snapping of saplings and bushes; and in another moment the awestruck Indians above saw their unarmed foe, galloping his white horse in safety across the plain.15
Here, too, is Roosevelt the righteous, assailing the “warped, perverse, and silly morality” that would preserve the American continent “for the use of a few scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid,