The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [115]
Stalking bighorn was a difficult proposition requiring mountaineering skills, stamina, and tenacity. Larger than a deer, a bighorn ram weighed around 300 pounds and was swift and sure-footed. “In his movements he is not light and graceful like the pronghorn and other antelopes, his marvellous agility seeming rather to proceed from sturdy strength and wonderful command over iron sinews and muscles,” Roosevelt wrote. “The huge horns are carried proudly erect by the massive neck; every motion of the body is made with perfect poise, and there seems to be no ground so difficult that the big-horn cannot cross it. There is probably no animal in the world his superior in climbing, and his only equals are the other species of mountain sheep and the ibexes.”14
Eventually, after days of unstable tracking on slippery ledges and knifelike ridges, Roosevelt got his handsome sheep. Although Roosevelt admitted that it was a lucky shot, he claimed that skill was also a factor. Strapping the ram onto his horse Manitou’s back, he brought the prize to the Maltese Cross ranch and feasted on mountain “mutton.”15
For Roosevelt, his wilderness experiences always got back to his desire for good health and bragging rights. “I have just returned from a three day trip in the Badlands after mountain sheep; and after tramping over the most awful country that can be imagined I have finally shot a young ram with a fine head,” he wrote to his sister Anna. “I have now killed every kind of plains game.”16 (By the time Roosevelt became president in 1901, the bighorn sheep in the Badlands had been wiped out.)
As Christmas 1884 approached, however, the merciless “iron desolation” and strange landforms of the interior plains were too much for Roosevelt. He was homesick for his daughter Alice (or Baby Lee, as he often called her). The numbing Dakota cold proved unrestful and intellectually unproductive. Scooping up his notes for Hunting Trips once again, Roosevelt boarded the eastbound train. He was frustrated because writing about the Badlands while in the Badlands had proved elusive. After enduring the sad holiday in New York—the eggnog parties and Christmas packages were not the same without his mother and his wife—Roosevelt hunkered down to write seriously about the Badlands and Bighorns. Nothing could distract him from the arduous chore at hand. Unlike The Naval War of 1812, this first-person effort would be a memoir from Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming intermixed with Burroughsian observations on natural history, the sportsman’s code, hunting stories, warnings about biological conservation, and cowboy lore.
After Roosevelt settled down to write, and consuming pots of black coffee, he pushed himself relentlessly, usually writing for two or three sessions a day. By February 1885, he had written 95,000 words, and the next month Hunting Trips, a collocation of wilderness experiences, was finished. The pace had exhausted him. But once Roosevelt’s depleted health was restored, after days of almost nonstop sleep, he returned to Medora to spend a few weeks checking up on his ranches.17 Early on, Roosevelt—a bit out of practice in the saddle—was tossed from Manitou into the frigid Little Missouri River. Chunks of ice kept him from being swept away in the current, and somehow he managed to get a grip on the situation and save himself and his horse. Perversely, he was delighted by the thrill of being near death and by the tingly, numbing cold water. Days later, abruptly, he purposely tossed himself into the river