The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [109]
In late July, Roosevelt announced to the New York press that he would indeed, though reluctantly, back James G. Blaine for president—causing a wave of speculation that he was abandoning his reformist independence to embrace the Republican machine. Before he once again headed west a reporter for the New York Tribune buttonholed Roosevelt and asked about his sudden advocacy of Blaine. Roosevelt snapped that he was “disinclined to talk about the political situation” yet happy to discuss his newfound “life in the West.”81
Accompanying Roosevelt on this trip to the Badlands were Sewall and Dow (the straight talk in Roosevelt’s letter had worked). They had journeyed down from Maine to join their boss at the New York railroad station and take the Chicago Limited. The New York Herald reported that Roosevelt was carting along on the train all sorts of western paraphernalia—a heavy monogrammed saddle, angora chaps, a pearl-handled revolver, and silver-inlaid bits and spurs. He had temporarily purchased only squatters’ rights, so the game plan was to start living in an existing dilapidated hut at once and then purchase 1,000 new shorthorn cattle in Minnesota. Timber for a new primary ranch house—a close approximation to the “Ranchman’s Log ‘Schack’” as featured in the History of the Northern Pacific Railroad—would be cut in September, and construction would commence early the next year. Referring to the neophytes from Maine as his “backwoods babies,” Roosevelt got a huge kick out of pointing out, from the train window, Wisconsin dells, Minnesota lakes, and emerging rimrock canyons of the Badlands. Writing to Bamie on August 12, Roosevelt said that his lumberjack friends exhibited “absolute astonishment and delight at everything they saw” as they traversed the upper Midwest and that their “very shrewd and yet wonderfully simple remarks were a perfect delight to me.” 82
From the outset, however, Sewall had reservations about the Badlands as cattle country. He understood Roosevelt’s infectious excitement about the surreal terrain, but it seemed too arid for cattle. After meeting the Ferris brothers and Merrifield and working long days to get the Elkhorn Ranch built to Roosevelt’s specifications, Sewall wrote to his brother in Maine what he really thought of the whole “range management” enterprise: “Tell all who wish to know that I think this is a good place for a man with plenty of money to make more” he said, “but if I had enough money to start here I never would come.”83
What Sewall didn’t fully comprehend was that Roosevelt was multitasking: ranching at the Maltese Cross and Elkhorn was an excuse to hunt and write a popular book about his adventures. Never thrifty with money, essentially a horrific businessman, Roosevelt was less concerned that he had squandered one-fifth of his fortune in the cattle business than he was with collecting naturalist data and hunting anecdotes for the book he wanted to write about the Badlands. In addition, just being in the Dakota Territory was a balm to his grief, bringing him much-needed clarity. Life was short, he felt, so make the most of it. In fact, no sooner were the first logs split for the Elkhorn Ranch than Roosevelt announced that he was ready for a 1,000-mile hunt on horseback. The very name of the range he wanted to explore—the Bighorn Mountains—had him salivating.
VI
Located in both southern Montana Territory and north-central Wyoming Territory, the Bighorns—a sister range of the Rockies—had a truly varied ecosystem for more than 200 miles, with everything from sheer mountain walls to tall grasslands, from glacier-cut valleys to alpine