The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [123]
News of the bravery of Roosevelt, Dow, and Sewall spread from Stark and Billings counties all the way back to New York. With Edith steaming across the Atlantic for the summer to spend time with her family in Europe, Roosevelt basked in his new status in the Badlands. No longer was he Jane Dandy or Lil’ Pumpkin in the Dakota Territory. The combination of writing Hunting Trips plus the episode of the boat thieves had transformed him into a minor Wild West legend. Everywhere he went in Medora or Dickinson, people cuffed him on the back in admiration. Locals—even Sewall and Dow—called him “Mr. Roosevelt,” and meant it. (Since the death of Alice he bristled if anybody dared call him “Teddy.”) The consensus was that the New York politician was a “fearless bugger.”59
That spring and summer Roosevelt felt “strong as a bear, full of healthiness of mind.”60 Constantly he wrote naturalist riffs about shimmering cottonwoods, low buttes, and prairie grasses. Taken together his prose amounted to a love song to the Badlands. “I have my time fully occupied with work of which I am fond; and so have none of my usual restless, raged wolf feeling,” he wrote to his sister Anna on May 15. “I work two days out of three at my book or papers; and I hunt, ride and lead the wild, half adventurous life of a ranchman all through it.”61
By Independence Day, Roosevelt had finished Thomas Hart Benton. Most of it had been written in the cool quiet of mornings at his desk at the Elkhorn Ranch, with its view of the Little Missouri River. When Benton was published, reviewers hailed it as workmanlike and a success.62 Nothing more than that. What Roosevelt most admired about Benton, it seemed, was his belief in the regenerative power of the American West, the fact that he championed frontiersmen with the “tenacity of a snapping turtle.”63 In discussing Benton’s support of westward expansion, Roosevelt insisted that the federal government should have acquired even more territory: the Baja peninsula from Mexico; and British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba from Great Britain. (His experience hunting in Minnesota made him want all of Canada to belong to the United States.) Only the United States, he maintained, knew how to properly manage land and rivers. He was acting as the wilderness warden of America. “No foot of soil to which we had any title in the Northwest should have been given up,” he wrote; “we were the people who could use it best, and we ought to have taken it all.”64 The United States, he argued, needed to “swallow up the land of all adjoining nations who were too weak to withstand us.” (In Roosevelt’s obsession with the western lands, conservationists could perhaps see the seeds of his future belief in vast forest reserves.)
Although the only book Roosevelt actually wrote at Elkhorn was Benton (and perhaps a couple of chapters of Hunting Trips of a Ranchman) the conservationist and scholar Lowell E. Baier—a longtime official of the Boone and Crockett Club—nevertheless called the Badlands cabin the “cradle of conservation” in an important 2007 article in the Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal.65 It was at the Elkhorn, that Roosevelt found his voice to caution against careless growth, deforestation, wildlife depletion, and environmental degradation. That July Fourth, Roosevelt traveled from the Elkhorn to a Dickinson’s Independence Day ceremony. He boasted about the largeness of the American landscape, its “big prairies, big forests and mountains.” Addressing an admiring crowd of ranchers and farmers, Roosevelt warned that the “Far West” might be raped by those who exercised their democratic rights “either wickedly or thoughtlessly.” 66
IV
Between March and August 1886, Roosevelt wrote six articles for The Outing Magazine, each time using the Elkhorn Ranch as his lead.67 This was a coup for the glossy magazine edited by Poultney Bigelow, a Yale-educated outdoors enthusiast.68 Outing, aimed at men, was rolling in advertising revenue because of its popular dog and horse stories. One contributor to Outing, trying to describe the magazine