The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [247]
To think that a wretched little anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, had tried to snuff out America’s twenty-fifth president set Roosevelt’s teeth on edge. Securing the only telephone line on the island for hours, Roosevelt was able to get a message to the hospital in Buffalo. Word of McKinley’s dire plight spread throughout the Fish and Game League crowd and everybody was aghast. Senator Redfield Proctor made a formal announcement which had the effect of nauseating the shocked conservationists even more. “Friends,” he said, “a cloud has fallen over this happy event.”81 A short while later another call arrived, telling Roosevelt that the president was “resting quietly” and that recovery was likely. “Good!” Roosevelt exclaimed, his face relaxing.82
Announcing the positive news to the guests at the banquet, who listened with bated breath to Roosevelt’s every word, the vice president asked to be excused from the event. Roosevelt’s friend Dr. Webb, who owned the Elfrida, was going to take him to Arrow Point on the mainland near Burlington, where he could take a special train (Engine 108), which pulled the private car of the president of Rutland Railroad to Buffalo. When Roosevelt was asked by a local reporter about the attempted assassination, his face became impassive. Staring straight ahead, with utter stillness as if he were a statue, he said, “I am so inexpressively grieved, shocked, and horrified that I can say nothing.”83
Nobody knew what Roosevelt thought as his night train traveled across New York state. There are no accounts to describing him as serene or anxious or melancholy. Oddly, this is one of the few historic moments in his life that he himself never recounted. Probably his heart had sunk into his boots, and his mind was reeling like the discord of untuned fiddles, for a collective ominousness held sway over America that evening. Had yet another president been killed in his prime? Not since a bullet struck President Garfield twenty years earlier had the nation’s nervous system been given such a jolt. President McKinley’s wound was quite serious; the bullets had penetrated his abdomen, damaging his stomach and pancreas. McKinley had been rushed to Exposition Hospital for immediate surgery. He was then moved to the home of John G. Milburn on Delaware Avenue to rest.
Arriving in Buffalo in the hush of dawn, catching a morning chill, Roosevelt hurried to McKinley’s bedside where, more or less, he stayed for the next three days. By September 10, President McKinley’s health had vastly improved. The situation didn’t look fatal; it seemed that the president was going to pull through. A very relieved Roosevelt didn’t want to hang around Buffalo any longer (like one of those Cuban land crabs or vultures circling the dead) so he said good-bye and headed for Oyster Bay and then the Adirondacks to reconvene with Edith. Everybody deals with tragedy differently, and Roosevelt now felt the urge to climb Mount Marcy. (Probably the ascent had already been planned and he was getting his itinerary back on track.) Roosevelt knew life was short and he didn’t want to miss his home state’s glorious peak, which had tugged at him since those long-ago campfire readings of Last of the Mohicans. To Roosevelt it was wrong for a governor of New York not to have climbed the great summit. Even though Burroughs had written extensively about his 1863 trek to Mount Marcy, the “sage of Slabsides” had never made it to the top; Roosevelt would do it for him.
For the first time since Yellowstone Edith agreed to climb a mountain with her husband, exited to see the virgin groves of birch, pine, spruce, and fir. Two of Roosevelt