• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4266 0

Crockett Club and as a writer, his political career had stagnated. After all, it was hard to build momentum after losing the mayoralty. He hoped that stumping for Harrison, giving the Republican Party his everything as a surrogate, would earn him a major (or even minor) government post in the administration. Tactically, Roosevelt was on track. On November 6, Harrison defeated the incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, by 233 electoral votes to 168. “I am as happy as a king,” Roosevelt wrote to his British diplomat friend Cecil Spring-Rice, “—to use a Republican simile.”33 And sure enough, Roosevelt was rewarded with an appointment as U.S. civil service commissioner starting on May 7, 1889. It was a post he would hold for almost six years.34 His primary task would be to clean up corruption in the federal government.

That Christmas season was a joyous one for Roosevelt. When Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail* was published in December, most reviewers applauded his well-crafted prose and Frederic Remington’s fine engravings and pen-and-ink line drawings. Whether T.R. was writing about cattle branding at Elkhorn, cowboys’ rope tricks, or goat hunting in the canyon of the Coeur d’Alene, Remington delivered spot-on illustrations that electrified the narrative. Although Hunting Trips of a Ranchman had been a better book than Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, Remington’s sketches upgraded the latter into an enduring western classic. Nobody alive could draw mountain men, French-Canadian trappers, or timber wolves with the realistic precision of Remington. (For some reason, however, Remington could never properly depict mountain lions, a deficit that annoyed Roosevelt.)

Like Remington, Roosevelt had romantic sentiments about the American West, finding it an almost inexhaustible source of material for books and articles. “Civilization seems as remote as if we were living in an age long past,” Roosevelt wrote approvingly about being a westerner in Ranch Life. “Ranching is an occupation like those of vigorous, primitive pastoral peoples, having little in common with the humdrum, workaday business world of the nineteenth century; and the free ranchman in his manner of life shows more kinship to an Arab sheik than to a sleek city merchant or tradesman.”35

Remington wanted merely to draw the reality in Ranch Life. “I don’t consider that there is any place in the world that offers the subjects that the West offers,” he once observed. “Everything in the West is life, and you want life in art…. The field to me is almost inexhaustible.”36 By contrast, Roosevelt was on an accelerated mission to save its wilderness areas and big game. Underneath his name on the title page of Ranch Life, Roosevelt identified himself as president of the Boone and Crockett Club of New York: the club had become a “bully pulpit” for his ideas about wildlife management and forestry reserves. In the text, he mourned for the “fast vanishing” elk and told readers that when hunting deer they should shoot “only the bucks.”37 The descriptions in Ranch Life of shifting weather and natural wonders were both precise and poetic. Roosevelt’s zoological descriptions rose to the high standard Grinnell had inspired at Forest and Stream. Of antelope, for instance, he wrote: “Antelope see much better than deer, their great bulging eyes, placed at the roots of the horns, being as strong as twin telescopes. Extreme care must be taken not to let them catch a glimpse of the intruder, for it is then hopeless to attempt approaching them. On the other hand, there is never the least difficulty about seeing them.”38

Predictably, Roosevelt ended Ranch Life with a boast about the natural grandeur of the American West. With jingoistic but good-natured pride he tried to one-up both Asia and his brother, Elliott. (The fact that he had turned thirty didn’t mean the sibling rivalry had dissipated.) Elliott, at this juncture, however, was on an alcoholic downslope, desperately struggling with depression and contemplating suicide. “My brother has done a good deal of ibex, mountain sheep, and markhoor