The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [100]
Nothing had prepared Roosevelt for the awesome rugged reaches of the Badlands that he encountered on his horse ride with Ferris in the noontime September heat.33 With delighted murmurs of awe, Roosevelt was essentially following the so-called Custer’s Trail he had read about back in New York. The geography was forbiddingly different, a memorial to stark erosion and sculptured sandstone. There was a prehistoric quality to the outcroppings and battlements, and fierce wind had shaped clay in a helter-skelter fashion unique in the world. (The closest geological counterparts to the Badlands were the arroyos of the Gobi and Namib deserts.34) General Alfred Sully, an old Indian fighter, had famously called the arid Badlands “hell with the fires out.” The Sioux—like the French—called the terrain Mako Shika (“land bad”). Writing in an 1876 edition of the esteemed journal The American Naturalist, to which Theodore Roosevelt subscribed, J. A. Allen described the area as a “boundless expanse” that reminded him of a “fierce sea.”35
More than any other landscape that Roosevelt would ever encounter, the Badlands had an inspiring resilience that swept him away into an almost spiritual state of appreciation. To him the desolate stretch of ridges and bluffs seemed “hardly proper to belong to this earth.”36 The towering buttes and scarred escarpments told geological stories of the prehistoric upheavals, the deposits, the erosion of forgotten times.37 There was, he said, a sacredness to the Badlands silhouette against the oceanic sky that exuded a cosmic sense of God’s Creation as described in Genesis. A cowboy could disappear into the Badlands and never be heard from again. Everything to Roosevelt, in fact, seemed magically contorted. Famously, he joked that the Badlands reminded him of the way Edgar Allan Poe wrote tales and poems.38 These buff buttes and towering sandstone pinnacles seemed to change shades by the hour, from heliotrope red to horizon blue to nickel gray to a blaze of different oranges. Everywhere bands of brownish yellow formed by shale exposed heavily cut Badlands ravines. “In coloring they are as bizarre as in form,” Roosevelt would write. “Among the level, parallel strata which make up the land are some of coal. When a coal vein gets on fire it makes what is called a burning mine, and the clay above it is turned into brick; so that where water wears away the side of a hill sharp streaks of black and red are seen across it, mingled with the grays, purples, and browns.”39
When Roosevelt and Ferris finally arrived at the Maltese Cross Ranch, they were met with reserve. Roosevelt wore spectacles; he spoke in a falsetto voice, which to the uninitiated could be as irritating as a whistle; and his talk was peppered with “by Joves” and “my boys,” dead giveaways that he was an aristocratic swell who never before had been west of the Yellowstone divide. “When I went among strangers I always had to spend twenty-four hours in living down the fact that I wore spectacles,” Roosevelt recalled, “remaining as long as I could judiciously deaf to any side remarks about ‘four eyes’ unless it became evident that my being quiet was misconstrued and that it was better to bring matters to a head at once.”40
Day after day fanciful hunters like Roosevelt came to kill game in the Dakotas, and enthusiastic comparisons were made to the bush country of British East Africa, where everything was wild. As advertised, wild-life truly did prolifically flourish in the Badlands region. Tree-rich bottomlands, for example, created an ideal habitat for browser animals of all shapes and sizes. Hunters often marveled at the swelling, verdureless red surface extending as far as the eye could see. But then autumn ended and the hunters fled, and the long winter of the