The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [147]
Meanwhile, having heard so many stories from Theodore about Medora, Edith was now pleased to put a face on things. The Badlands stillness seemed unbreakable, eternal, and primeval. Nature, she understood anew, was tonic for her husband; serene solitude of the sagebrush calmed this act down. He simply was more relaxed without gaslights. And she undoubtedly discerned from reading the preface to volume one of The Winning of the West that her husband, in an imaginative leap of romantic fancy, equated his Dakota ranching days with those of the late-eighteenth-century pioneers clearing brush through the Allegheny upcountry and Great Smokies valleys. “The men who have shared in the fast-vanishing frontier life of the present,” he had written, “feel a peculiar sympathy with the already long-vanished frontier of the past.”67
On September 9, the Roosevelt party started making its way to Yellowstone National Park. For the next week, everybody’s eyes were fixed on wildlife around Inspiration Point and on the condensed force of Yellowstone’s Lower Falls as it roared downward 308 feet. Everything about Yellowstone was exhilarating to Roosevelt—although he was disappointed that game wasn’t found around the hundreds of geyser basins where the tourists congregated. One afternoon he and Ferguson fished in the Yellowstone River within close view of Tower Falls, bringing strings of brook trout back to camp for supper. According to Corinne’s diary, throughout their stay in Yellowstone National Park, Theodore kept copious notes about the wildlife they spotted. She marveled at her brother’s ability to distinguish birds at a glance or from merely hearing their thin cries. During just the first four days in Yellowstone they encountered the peregrine falcon, red-tailed hawk, Canada jay, raven, mallard duck, teal duck, nuthatch, dwarf-thrush, robin, water ouzel, sunbird, long-spur, grass finch, bittern, yellow-crowned warbler, Rocky Mountain white-throated sparrow, song sparrow, wren, and pigeon hawk. As a bird-watcher, Roosevelt was most stirred by the golden eagle, which put on an aerial show: these dark-brown raptors glided at fifty miles an hour and then swooped downward for direct strikes on chipmunks and ground squirrels. “Each one of the above I saw with the eyes of Theodore Roosevelt,” Corrine recalled, “and can still hear the tones of his voice as he described to me their habits of life and the differences between them and others of their kind.”68
Although Theodore occasionally sulked about not being able to “rough it”—the cost of having his family in tow—being in the fresh air brought ample reward. “He loved wild places and wild companions, hard tramps and thrilling adventure,” Corinne wrote, “and to be a part of the type of trip which women who were not accustomed to actual hunting could take, was really an act of unselfishness on his part.” On most days the Yellowstone sky was cloudless; the nights were cold, with frost chilling the eyeballs and causing sinuses to ache. Instead of eating elk venison, as T.R. would have liked, the party’s diet usually consisted of cutthroat trout plus canned ham and tomatoes. At night a theatrical Theodore tried to scare everybody, pretending to be a bear on the prowl outside their tents, swollen with laughter until thoroughly spent. As Corinne put it, they were all enjoying the “pretense of