The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [385]
Inside the house a telephone shrilled. While Fisk answered it, Roosevelt stood in the sun chatting to one or two companions. Then Fisk appeared at the door and beckoned him in wordlessly. To the puzzlement of other people on the lawn, the door was locked as soon as the Vice-President had stepped through it. Keys were heard turning in all the other doors in the house, and volunteer guards stood at the windows. They would answer no questions as to what was being discussed on the telephone. Yet somehow a realization swept through the crowd that the President had been shot, perhaps killed.
Meanwhile Roosevelt had put down the receiver and was addressing the house company. “Gentlemen, I am afraid that there is little ground for hope that the report is untrue. It comes now from two sources and appears to be authentic.” He gave them the facts. A young anarchist had approached the President in Buffalo’s Temple of Music with a handkerchief wrapped around his right hand. McKinley, thinking it a bandage, had reached to shake his left hand, whereupon a revolver concealed in the handkerchief blasted two bullets into the President’s breast and belly. He was now undergoing exploratory surgery, and the assailant, whose name was Leon Czolgosz, had been apprehended. “Don’t let them hurt him,” McKinley had murmured before lapsing into deep shock.7
While Senator Redfield Proctor apprised the crowd of the details, Roosevelt and his aides left immediately for Buffalo.
McKinley’s condition next morning, Saturday, 7 September, gave encouragement to his attending physicians. The breast wound was no more than a gash on the ribs, but the abdominal penetration was deep and serious. Both walls of the stomach had been torn open; the bullet was buried somewhere irretrievable. The most dangerous threat was of gangrene; however there were no visible signs of sepsis.8
McKinley was a man of strong constitution, and he rallied amazingly over the weekend. By Tuesday, 10 September, his condition was so improved that Roosevelt (who had comported himself with extraordinary dignity and concern throughout) was told he no longer need remain at the presidential bedside. In fact it would be best, from the point of view of publicity, if he quit Buffalo altogether.9
The Vice-President left that afternoon for a short vacation in the Adirondacks, where Edith and the children were waiting for him in a mountain cabin.
HE COULD NOT HAVE CHOSEN a destination more likely to reassure the American people that the national crisis was over, and that his services would not be required in some dread emergency. The cabin stood at Camp Tahawus, “the most remote human habitation in the Empire State,” on the slopes of Mount Marcy, highest peak in the Adirondacks. Half a century before, Tahawus had been a little mining community; now, thanks to the enterprise of Roosevelt’s wealthy friend and fellow conservationist James McNaughton, it had been transformed into a luxury resort for hunters, fishermen, and climbers.10
On arrival at the camp Roosevelt stopped at Tahawus Club, the old village lodging-house, and arranged for two ranger guides to accompany him on an ascent of the mountain, beginning on 12 September.11 This done, he went on up the slope to his cabin in the trees.
By nightfall on the twelfth, Roosevelt and his climbing party, consisting of Edith, Kermit, ten-year-old Ethel, a governess, James McNaughton, three other friends, and the two rangers, were at Lake Colden, altitude 3,500 feet, where they spent the night in two cabins. The next morning, Friday the thirteenth, was cold and gray: an impenetrable drizzle screened off the mountain above them, and the women and children elected to return to Tahawus. But Roosevelt, who could never resist the highest peak in any