The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [140]
Perhaps somewhat embarrassed, Burroughs feigned mild disbelief at the anecdote, certain that his musings about plovers and blackbirds couldn’t uplift ghetto boys who panhandled for stale bread and rotten fruit in the Bowery. But he was pleased that the nephew of Robert B. Roosevelt thought so highly of his work. Totally uncynical, seldom if ever putting anybody down with a jolt of criticism, Burroughs decided that he liked the cut of Roosevelt’s jib. (Essentially, Burroughs felt about Roosevelt as he did about a Catskills neighbor: “That man hasn’t a lazy bone in his body. But I have lots of ’em”—lots of ’em”22). After lunch, on the train ride back to the Hudson River valley, as Burroughs passed stops in Tarrytown, Cold Spring, Beacon, Poughkeepsie, and Hyde Park,* he wrote about his luncheon with Roosevelt, musing on how much luckier rural children like his own son, Julian, were than the urban poor. “How different is the life of Julian,” he wrote, “in the country with fresh air, good books, and parents with a measure of leisure—from that of the boys that Chapman and Roosevelt want so much to help.”23
While Burroughs simply thought of the lunch as enjoyable, Roosevelt had been deeply impressed. Burroughs, he was now certain, was the Thoreau of his time, perhaps the finest literary naturalist America had ever produced. Frequently when fans meet a writer or artist they admire, encountering the celebrity in person is a terrible disappointment. The exact opposite occurred at the Fellowcraft Club; the upshot of the lunch was that Roosevelt was now indissolubly linked to Burroughs. Not since his father died, in fact, had Roosevelt seen such Homeric dimensions in anyone as in John Burroughs. When Roosevelt started writing the last book of his North Dakota trilogy, The Wilderness Hunter, his style became infused with Burroughs’s naturalist writing. Unlike his previous two Dakota volumes, The Wilderness Hunter would emphasize the wildlife-sportsman ethos over even the best-honed hunting yarns.
II
Another factor that contributed to this change of emphasis in Roosevelt’s writings was his move to Washington, D.C., to assume his new duties as a member of the Civil Service Commission. Theodore and Edith had decided that she and the children (a second son, Kermit, was born in October 1889) would at first remain at Sagamore Hill while he lived rent-free at Cabot and Nannie Lodge’s residence in Washington.24 An insomniac Roosevelt usually slept only four or five hours a night, so he figured that, after his desk job, there would be plenty of spare time to continue writing The Wilderness Hunter and start in earnest to write The Winning of the West (his history as mural). Everything was either handwritten or dictated to a stenographer—typing never appealed to him. Every waking hour was a whirlwind of activity. “He was a live wire,” Burroughs noted about T.R. in his journal, “if there ever was one in human form.”25 (On another occasion Burroughs said Roosevelt was “a many-sided man and every side was like an electric battery.”26) Roosevelt himself wrote in Ranch Life, “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough”—a fitting observation that David McCullough used as the epigraph of Mornings on Horseback.27
Certainly overworking was preferable to behaving like his brother Elliott. Following a riding accident, the restless, ill-adjusted, but charming Nell turned to alcohol and opiates to deal with a broken leg and