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grew angry at the trolley driver, who was arrested but later released on bail. An atmosphere of chaos prevailed, with onlookers screaming in horror and running in all directions. “I am all right,” Roosevelt kept saying. “I am unhurt.” When people saw that he had survived the crash, they began shouting enthusiastically. “Don’t cheer,” Roosevelt scolded them. “Don’t. One of our party lies dead inside.” Sipping brandy to steady his nerves at a physician’s office, deeply distraught over the death of his trusted friend, the president nevertheless continued his tour of Massachusetts, but he refused to speak to crowds, opting to instead praise William Craig’s courage. The novelist Edith Wharton heard Roosevelt speak in Lenox and noted that what he said was an appropriate response for the grim episode. Roosevelt had developed abscesses on his left leg, turning his ankle a weird purple-green. “This is a dreadful thing,” Roosevelt kept saying over and over again, “dreadful.”78 The New York Times ran a story with the subhead “Soft Earth Saves President” (he had fallen into a wash from the hill).79

Refusing to let the crash at Pittsfield preclude his visit to the Biltmore estate to study its forestry program firsthand, Roosevelt arrived as scheduled on September 9, 1902, following tours of the Civil War battlefields of Chickamauga and Chattanooga. The Pittsburgh Times suggested that the president needed to stop traveling so much, that the “strenuous life is sometimes overdone.” But onward he went. Local dignitaries in North Carolina poured onto Roosevelt’s railway car, eager to shake hands with the president, who, with artificial geniality, kept saying “dee-lighted.” His face was still battered and bruised from the accident, so polite people tried not to stare. Heading for Battery Park Hotel, built on the highest point in Asheville, Roosevelt peered out, mesmerized by the Great Smoky Mountains foothills. “Oh, this is magnificent!” he said. “This is indeed a most magnificent country—the grandest east of the Rockies!”80

After delivering a patriotic speech Roosevelt headed in his carriage to the Biltmore estate, in a bone-chilling wind. Full of questions, Roosevelt toured the mansion, inspected the lotus ponds, and talked with the levelheaded young foresters who had gathered to pay their respects. Ever since Pinchot had promoted the Biltmore at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, the effects of its forestry program (including how best to plant the seedlings of yellow poplar, black cherry, black walnut, and other species) had increased. Garden and Forest magazine, for instance, was raving about the experimental station. Under the guidance of Carl A. Schenck, Biltmore’s forestry school was setting a standard for scientific professionalism. To Roosevelt the Biltmore was the “cradle of forestry in America” (in 1968 President Lyndon Johnson commemorated it as such by a congressional act).81 Yet Roosevelt was piqued because Schenck wasn’t an American citizen (he kept his German citizenship), so their conversation didn’t go well. Although Roosevelt was at the Biltmore for only a few hours, he returned to Washington full of talk about timber physics, dendrology, and wood utilization. And he left all of Asheville abuzz, warmed by his scientific enthusiasm for forestry. “The president came and went yesterday,” the Biltmore reported to George W. Vanderbilt, who was in Bar Harbor, Maine. “It had been raining before he came and rained immediately after he left but it was clear while he was here.”82

Later that month Roosevelt headed to the Midwest. After speaking in Indianapolis he fell ill; his leg looked gangrenous. With the first flash of pain he tried to conceal a cold panic. Listlessness fell over him. He was placed under local anesthesia at Saint Vincent’s Hospital, and doctors removed two ounces of serum from a sac in the anterior tibial region. Roosevelt slowly recovered from the makeshift operation, but he was never the same afterward. “I have never gotten over the effects of the trolley car accident six years ago,” he wrote to Kermit in September