The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [113]
CHAPTER SEVEN
CRADLE OF CONSERVATION: THE ELKHORN RANCH OF NORTH DAKOTA
I
At some point in the fall of 1884, Roosevelt conceived of assembling his jottings about the Badlands and the Bighorns into a book. Updating Captain Mayne Reid, he considered how Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (as he called the project) could combine vivid natural history with tales of big-game hunting; he wanted to offer an antidote to the artificiality of money-driven urban life, which he felt was hampering the democratic spirit as well as feminizing a generation of American men.1 Always a romantic, Roosevelt originally intended to write Hunting Trips at the Elkhorn and Maltese Cross ranches, even though there was no decent reference library in the entire Dakota Territory. Pragmatism, however, eventually held sway (as it usually did with Roosevelt), and he ended up composing Hunting Trips back east.
By October, in fact, Roosevelt was back in Manhattan, having abandoned his plan of getting away to Dakota. With the presidential election looming, he put Hunting Trips on hold and threw himself wholeheartedly into the heated political contest. Using Bamie’s home at 689 Madison Avenue as his pied-à-terre, Roosevelt stumped incessantly for the Republican, James G. Blaine. The fact that the Democratic nominee, Grover Cleveland, was hounded by charges of adultery and had fathered an illegitimate child increased Roosevelt’s zeal to elect Blaine. According to the New York Sun, Theodore, forever the puritan, chafed at the unholy notion of a womanizing rogue becoming commander in chief.2 (Perhaps if Roosevelt had fully known that Cleveland was a true outdoorsman, he would have been less antagonistic.) In private, however, Roosevelt didn’t care for the partisan stammerings of either candidate. They were both, he believed, old-school mugwumps while he was a new-school reformer. In any case, Blaine was accused of representing “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” and whether these charges proved decisive or not, went down in defeat on Election Day. (Cleveland won by a relatively close margin: 219 electoral votes to 182.3) Writing to Henry Cabot Lodge, who had himself lost a congressional race in Massachusetts, Roosevelt carped that the Republican Party had been done in by so-called “Independents” whom he deemed “pharisaical fools and knaves.” 4
Theodore Roosevelt wearing a customized Badlands hunting costume. This photograph was used to promote Hunting Trips of a Ranchman.
Roosevelt in customized Badlands costume (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
Disappointed by Blaine’s loss, Roosevelt headed back to the Badlands just two days after the elections in November, eager to gather material for Hunting Trips and to track bighorn sheep along the Montana line. His spirits rose once he was on a horse. He spent a few days at the cabin at Maltese Cross, catching up with Dakotan friends. Then, with hard snow falling, he trotted north on his horse Manitou. The solitude of the Elkhorn Ranch, he figured, would offer minimum distractions and he could start writing Hunting Trips in earnest.
The prairie winds of the Dakota Territory could be ruthless, and Roosevelt, traveling by himself, was nearly blinded when snow squalls started blowing in his face. As he forded the Little Missouri River the ice cracked and fear ran up and down his spine. Then, to use Jack London’s term in The Call of the Wild, 5 the “dominant primordial beast” welled up in Roosevelt. Undaunted by his precarious predicament, he took the inclement weather as a challenge. By twilight, new snow was falling