The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [173]
IV
A shock wave rippled through Roosevelt’s life on August 14, 1894, when news reached him that his brother Elliott had died. The New York Times cited heart disease as the cause of death, but Theodore knew it was heartbreak. Elliott’s wife, Anna, and son, Elliott Jr., had died of diphtheria in the preceding years. Unable to ward off the demons of the double loss, Elliott had been drinking heavily all summer long. Theodore felt downcast, but found a bit of closure at the funeral. “When dead the poor fellow looked very peaceful,” he wrote to his sister Bamie, “and so like his old, generous, gallant self of fifteen years ago. The horror, and the terrible mixture of sadness and grotesque, grim evil continued to the very end; and the dreadful flashes of his old sweetness, which made it all even more hopeless.”80 Elliott left behind his ten-year-old daughter, Eleanor, who was then raised by her grandmother Mary Livingston Ludlow Hall.
No sooner was his brother buried than Theodore headed to North Dakota for a couple of recuperative weeks. Once again he left his wife and children behind. With Bill Merrifield accompanying him, Roosevelt went antelope hunting on the plains around Medora in honor of Elliott. Game was scarce that year, chased away by Plains Indians and Dakota sheepherders. Nevertheless, he managed to shoot, skin, and eat five antelope. Drinking in a bit of Badlands solitude helped bring perspective back into his life. Full of deep thoughts, he spent his nights sleeping in his buffalo-lined bag in the open grassy plains with a tarpaulin to pull over him if the wind squalled. As if following the stations of the cross, he visited the great landmarks of the North Dakota Badlands—Sentinel Butte, Square Butte, and Middle Butte. “Great flocks of sandhill cranes passed overhead from time to time,” Roosevelt wrote, “the air resounding with their strange, musical, guttural clangor.”81 The deep-rooted sagebrush of the plains colored long stretches of the parched summer landscape. “The cattle aren’t doing particularly well,” Roosevelt told Lodge in a letter. “The drought has been very severe on everything. However, except for feeling a little blue, I passed a delightful fortnight all the time in the open; and feel as rugged as a bull-moose.”82
The year 1894 also saw the publication of Volume 3 of The Winning of the West, covering the post–Revolutionary War expansion into the Ohio River Valley, the Tennessee Valley, and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Kentucky. The book is marred by stereotypes of Indians as being “cunning and stealthy,” essentially “the tigers of the human race.” Roosevelt claimed it was only natural that white Americans would persevere. “The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him,” he wrote. “American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartan, New Zealander and Maori—in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people.”83
Such passages, redolent of the white man’s burden, occur throughout Volume 3 of The Winning of the West—Roosevelt even promotes his theory of “dominant world races” over “aboriginals.” In his landmark study Theodore Roosevelt and Six Friends of the Indian, the historian William T. Hagan was generally perplexed at the difference in attitude toward Native Americans in Volume