The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [108]
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For his part, Roosevelt couldn’t wait to get out of Chicago. As soon as the convention was wrapped up, with Blaine as the nominee, he took a train to Saint Paul. Near a nervous breakdown, his entire exhausted body in low-grade pain, Roosevelt turned into a semi-recluse, not wanting to read newspapers or receive telegrams from anybody. Arriving in the Little Missouri area on June 9, he went directly to the Maltese Cross Ranch, anxious to begin his life as a cowboy and hunter.76
Since September Merrifield and Ferris had tended to Roosevelt’s cattle herd of around 440 head; only twenty-five had been killed by wolves or the cold.77 The coulees and buttes, as hoped, had adequately protected the herd. Riding around the region and seeing the new buildings that had sprung up in the boomtown of Medora bolstered Roosevelt’s morale—even if he still couldn’t imagine life without Alice and Mittie. In another burst of Rooseveltian enthusiasm, he wrote Gregor and Lincoln Lang a $21,000 check to acquire 1,000 new cattle. His investment in the Badlands was now more than $35,000.
In photographs taken at the time, Roosevelt is often wearing a custom-made buckskin suit. He had commissioned the outfit from a seamstress in Amidon, North Dakota, because its “inconspicuous color” was ideal for hunting antelope; it caused, he wrote, “less rustling” than other fabrics “when passing among projecting twigs.” But the show-off in him also wanted the fringed suit and its accompanying hunting shirt because they were “the most picturesque and distinctively national dress ever worn in America,” the uniform in which “Daniel Boone was clad when he first passed through the trackless forests of the Alleghanies…. It was the dress worn by grim old Davy Crockett when he fell at the Alamo.”78
Despite his fanciful wardrobe, Roosevelt, as rancher, was a workhorse (not a showhorse). He participated with a vengeance in round-ups and brandings, becoming a decent roper and a cool presence during stampedes. While his horsemanship wasn’t exceptional he always had a good rapport with his mount. He learned how to braid a halter and bridle rein as if born on the range. With the crack of dawn he was up, anxious to perform morning chores. Whether it was going to find a stray or fixing a fence or coping with foul weather, Roosevelt always volunteered, at least to the point of showing to Merrifield and Ferris that the elitist in him had disappeared forever.79
Intoxicated with the Badlands, Roosevelt decided to ask his North Woods friends Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow to come jump-start his North Dakota ranch with him at the Maltese Cross. Generously Roosevelt insisted he would share all profits with them. They would all reunite in the West as business partners and kinsmen.
Roosevelt spent only three weeks in the Badlands. On June 30 he headed back east to spend time with his baby daughter in Massachusetts. But his thoughts kept returning to the West, as he thought about building a second ranch, to be called the Elkhorn, about twenty-five miles north of Medora. The Maltese Cross was too close to town, attracting a constant stream of locals eager to shoot the breeze with a newsy New Yorker. If he wanted to write books about the Badlands, he would need solitude. His tentative plan was to divide his time between New York and the Little Missouri River area (the building of his Sagamore Hill estate continued).
No sooner did Theodore arrive back east than he wrote Bill Sewall another letter. To Roosevelt, Sewall was like one of the characters Chekhov wrote about who were the salt of the earth but were so virtuous that they never tasted success; he was now hoping to change this. “If you are afraid of hard work and privation, do not come west,” Roosevelt wrote to Sewall. “If you expect to make a fortune in a year or two, do not come west. If you will give up under