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the news that he was secretly engaged to Edith Carow, who was spending the summer with family in Europe. Angry but embarrassed, he wrote to his sister Bamie, who’d been kept in the dark: “I am engaged to Edith and before Christmas I shall cross the ocean and marry her,” he confessed. “You are the first person to whom I have breathed a word on this subject.” He flogged himself for not staying devoted to his late wife. “I utterly disbelieve in and disapprove of second marriages; I have always considered that they argued weakness in a man’s character. You could not reproach me one half as bitterly for my inconstancy and unfaithfulness as I reproach myself. Were I sure there was a heaven my one prayer would be I might never go there, lest I should meet those I loved on earth who are dead.”

Politically, the autumn of 1886 wasn’t a good one for Roosevelt, either. Never fond of caution, he had quite impetuously decided to run for mayor of New York City, but he lost to Abram Hewitt, the nominee of Tammany and other Democratic organizations. Before Roosevelt had time to contemplate his rashness, he steamed off to Britain on an ocean liner to marry Edith. Bamie was one of the few people invited to the December wedding in London at St. George’s Church along Hanover Square. Just a few British men in top hats and women in silks attended. It was a very low-key event.75

While Roosevelt was in Europe for a fifteen-week honeymoon, disaster struck the Badlands. According to Lincoln Lang, starting in November ice-dust particles as sharp as glass fragments swirled about in cyclone-like gusts. There were whiteouts, and Lang later wrote that the rush of frigid air “coldly burns the skin as it strikes. It finds its way into your nostrils and then into your lungs, rapidly chilling you through and paralyzing the senses.”76 By New Year’s Day 1887, temperatures in the Dakota Territory had plummeted to forty-one degrees below zero. Beleaguered Badlanders boarded up windows, hoping to keep the deadly winds from blasting into their homes. Outside, stock literally froze in their tracks or died in snowdrifts, unable to feed on the buried grasses.77

At the end of January, another blizzard hit the area. Ice killed off most of the vegetation. Foodstuffs were suddenly in short supply. Snowdrifts were now ten to fifteen feet high against the buttes. Huge cattle herds had no safe place to huddle and stay warm. The Montanan painter Charles M. Russell later drew a series of stark illustrations showing skeletal cattle, all rib cage, in the grip of famine. Near death, some cattle even rammed their heads through cabin doors hoping desperately for warmth. Even the most sinewy cowboy was afraid of the wind chill and snow squalls along the ice-chewed rock formations. It was, as Edmund Morris aptly dubbed it, the “Winter of the Blue Snow.” 78

Roosevelt didn’t know how cataclysmic the “Winter of the Blue Snow” had been in the Dakota Territory until he arrived back in New York from his honeymoon. After reading reports of dead cattle across the Great Plains (from Merrifield and Ferris) he promised to travel to Medora soon to survey the devastation. But he had to keep his priorities straight. Family always came ahead of business—his father had taught him that rule. So Roosevelt settled into Sagamore Hill, spent time with little Alice, and reconnected with friends. Edith was now pregnant; that September she would give birth to Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (his first son). Roosevelt also needed to discuss his future in politics with Henry Cabot Lodge and his other trusted advisers. Worried that he was cursed when it came to both business ventures and electoral politics, Roosevelt now feared that he had lost his entire Dakota herd and could soon be financially insolvent. Feeling stuck, his intuition gone, not sure whether to advance or retreat from North Dakota, Roosevelt brooded over the cruel fickleness of fate.

Once Roosevelt finally arrived in the Badlands, in April, he was shocked by what he saw. Around 60 to 75 percent of the cattle in the northern plains had frozen to