The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [104]
Roosevelt’s luck finally changed as, for the first time in his life, he ventured into Montana Territory, hoping to find his buffalo. Noticing that his horse was sniffing something in the air, Roosevelt dismounted, jogged up to a ridge, and peered over. There, grazing on grass, was a buffalo. “His glossy fall coat was in fine trim and shone in the rays of sun,” he later wrote, “while his pride of bearing showed him to be in the lusty vigor of his prime.” This wasn’t a lonesome George in size, but close enough. Stealthily Roosevelt advanced, one quiet foot at a time, to get within range. When he was about fifty yards away he fired a single shot. The bullet entered the buffalo’s massive shoulder. “The wound was an almost immediately fatal one,” Roosevelt wrote, “yet with surprising agility for so large and heavy an animal, he bounded up the opposite side of the ravine, heedless of two more balls, both of which went into his flank and ranged forwards, and disappeared over the ridge at a lumbering gallop, the blood pouring from his mouth and nostrils.”57
Sprinting ahead Roosevelt, sweating profusely, followed the blood trail until he found the buffalo “stark dead” in a ditch. All the buttes surrounding Roosevelt now took on a special glow. Hopping from foot to foot, Roosevelt encircled the buffalo, whooping and chanting as if he were White Bull or Two Moons in an effort to pay this “lordly buffalo” due reverence. A perplexed Joe Ferris had never imagined any white man behaving in such a queer fashion, imitating a Sioux or Cheyenne. An exhilarated Roosevelt, in an act of spontaneous generosity, next opened his wallet and handed Ferris $100. “I never saw any one so enthused in my life,” Ferris recalled, “and, by golly, I was enthused myself…. I was plumb tired out…I wanted to see him kill his first one as badly as he wanted to kill it.”58
That evening the men stuffed themselves on buffalo steak, Roosevelt claiming that the meat from the hump tasted best; this was contrary to George Catlin’s promotion of buffalo tongue being the true delicacy. To Roosevelt buffalo meat was barely distinguishable from beef. The hunters didn’t sever the head or skin the carcass, however, until the following day. “The flesh of this bull tasted uncommonly good to us,” Roosevelt wrote, “for we had been without fresh meat for a week.” The New York World had caricatured him as a Harvard-educated aristocrat, but from now on he’d be an all-American buffalo hunter.59
IV
When Roosevelt returned to Little Missouri on September 23, to spend another night at the Pyramid Park Hotel before heading east, he was a changed man. Francis Parkman had been right: only by living out the western experience could a scholar effectively write about it. Roosevelt’s fifteen-day growth of beard in the Dakota wilderness, and his rumble in the West, had strengthened him both mentally and physically. Now, as he slept on a cot at the Pyramid Park Hotel, he felt that he was one of the hardy trappers in the Jim Bridger vein, not Jane Dandy or Lil’ Punkin. In Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States 1880–1917, the historian Gail Bederman dissects Roosevelt’s obsession with becoming a “man’s man.” Pointing out how his political opponents in New York used to ridicule him as the “exquisite Mr. Roosevelt,” Bederman argues that Roosevelt’s “cowboy of the Dakotas” persona was an attempt to stamp out any traces of effeminacy. No longer would he be publicly insulted as “given to sucking the knob of an ivory cane,” a phallic