The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [105]
Bederman also explains the two different strains of masculinity that Theodore was juggling at age twenty-four. From his father he had inherited Victorian codes of “moral manliness” including unselfishness, chastity, physical strength, honesty, and altruism. Yet, as noted, his father had rejected serving as a Union soldier in the Civil War, hiring a surrogate in his place. Young T.R. had been humiliated by his father’s wartime decision. So perhaps he tried overcompensating in his effort to embrace the ethos of frontier masculinity in which a propensity for violence was often rewarded. Killing an animal, winning a fistfight, and declaring a duel, in other words, were obvious ways to cultivate his deficient “natural man” side. Therefore, Roosevelt felt a need to emulate Indians while simultaneously conquering them, and a need to worship big game like buffalo only to hunt them down. The Victorian mannered man turned to prim Europe whereas the “natural” American always had a westward focus. “On his first trip to the Badlands in 1883, he was giddy with delight and behaved as much like a Mayne Reid hero as possible,” Bederman wrote. “He flung himself into battle with nature and hunted the largest and fiercest game he could find. As a child, he had been attracted to natural history as a displacement of his desire to be a Western hero. Now, shooting buffalo and bullying obstreperous cowboys, he could style himself as the real thing.”61
Roosevelt’s solid Victorian morals, however, were never expunged as he became a Great Plains hunter and Dakota rancher. Unlike most men wanting a buffalo head, he actually thought about, and was angered by, the possibility that the great herds might become extinct. His Harvard education in Darwinian biology and naturalist studies gave him a perspective on western wildlife that no ordinary cowboy or hunter could have had. As Lincoln Lang later noted, every day Roosevelt increasingly came to understand the “definite purpose of every natural [object] he saw in the Bad Lands.”62 In the coming decades, his “man’s man” side hunted big game while the intellectual Harvard part of his personality would preserve things of great environmental beauty and consequence.
Considered in the light of Bederman’s thesis, hunting in the Dakota hills and killing a buffalo were the culmination of a series of masculine initiation rites T.R. had put himself through starting in Maine in 1871 with the incident at Moosehead Lake. Overall, life was going well—he had established himself as a historian, a lawyer, and a reform politician; the very fact that Alice was pregnant proved (to his mind) his virility; his health, while still fickle, was on an upswing. No wonder Roosevelt felt ebullient as he boarded his eastbound train. For in addition to everything else, he no longer believed himself to be a weakling or tenderfoot. Any remaining hints of self-disgust had been vanquished. Although he went to exaggerated extremes to get there and was physically spent by exaltation and fatigue, Roosevelt now saw himself as a western man, not a rich boy whose father had refused to serve in the Civil War.
Once Roosevelt had his buffalo head onboard the train, he was ready to journey back to New York in a Pullman berth. Roosevelt wrapped his prize (weighing approximately twenty-five to thirty pounds) in burlap, loaded it onto a Northern Pacific railroad car, and headed east to Saint Paul.63 Unlike Texas longhorns, buffalo were singularly unimpressive if you stripped off their horns, just two stubby prongs jutting upward. A rack of deer or elk antlers was, by contrast, far more impressive. But a buffalo head, in all its grandeur, had become coveted all over America for saloon and library walls. The Union Pacific railroad system even acquired buffalo heads to hang in all its scattered depot offices.64
Roosevelt returned to Alice as a conquering hunter hero. Of course he proudly hung his buffalo head (a taxidermist in Saint Paul