The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [161]
Although Roosevelt was enough of a social Darwinist to write that the Pawnee and Cherokee were far superior to the Sioux, he was more fair-minded in his assessment of the U.S. government’s failings in its Indian policies than most other leading politicians of the era. Exactly why Roosevelt behaved so decently to Indians is paradoxical but simple. Never one to romanticize Sitting Bull or Geronimo (deeming both dangerous rabble-rousers), he had invested so mightily in the U.S. Army’s western triumphs that he wanted to make sure the defeated Indians were not treated badly or as inferiors. This basic moral premise put him in the IRA camp. Just as presidents Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant forgave the Confederates after the Civil War, welcoming them back into the Union fold, Roosevelt believed that now that the West was won, the vanquished Indians should be brought into the constitutional democracy with the same God-given rights as everybody else. Roosevelt’s Americanism—that is, the need for the country to act as one—far outweighed his mistaken interest in armchair eugenics.
Yet there was another factor in play. Tickled to be called the Great White Chief by some Native Americans, Roosevelt truly respected the central role bison continued to play in the culture and religion of the Sioux (and other tribes). Unlike Euro-Americans, the pragmatic Sioux tribes used every part of the buffalo: hides were made into clothing and tepees; horns were eating utensils and cups; and muscles provided glue and bowstrings. After killing a buffalo, the Sioux would first eat the fresh meat and then preserve the rest as sun-dried jerky strips. A positive auxiliary effect of repopulating the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions with buffalo, Roosevelt believed, was to properly honor the folkways of the Plains Indians. George Bird Grinnell was in full agreement on this point. Like the Plains Indians, the Boone and Crockett Club hoped, as an Indian once told Grinnell, that someday the prairie lands would once again be “One Robe.”16
In a kingmaking mood following his successful appearances at the Deadwood Opera House and the Dakota-Nebraska-Kansas reservations, Roosevelt continued to give last-minute speeches back East championing President Harrison’s reelection whenever the Republican National Committee asked. His voice, however, wasn’t persuasive enough. On November 8, 1892, the Democrat Grover Cleveland easily defeated Harrison by 277 electoral votes to 145.17 As Cleveland took office on March 4, 1893, Roosevelt offered his resignation from the civil service. The incoming president refused, deciding that having a high-profile Republican reformer like Roosevelt in his administration was a good thing.
His job secure, Roosevelt forged ahead with more outside activity. He wanted the Boone and Crockett Club to have a log cabin exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, opening in May 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to America (as well as Chicago’s moment to present itself as a world-class city). There were more than 200 European-designed buildings going up on the fairgrounds alongside Lake Michigan, so Roosevelt had focused on displaying the vernacular frontier home, the log cabin, as a point of national pride. The humble birthplaces of Lincoln and Grant