The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [322]
During the two spring weeks President Roosevelt was in Yellowstone, and the sheets of ice in the tree-lined rivers were cracking, he wrote a series of long reports to Merriam on how the springtime wildlife was faring. After hiking footpaths, Roosevelt made detailed zoological descriptions of antelope near Gardiner, Montana, and bighorn sheep in Yellowstone Canyon, Wyoming. As if trying to out-naturalist even Burroughs, Roosevelt made Audubonist studies of golden eagles and water ouzels. And while Roosevelt’s gun may have been locked up by the U.S. Army, nothing prevented him from collecting a meadow vole for the Biological Survey. These tiny rodents were among the world’s most fertile mammals; females were capable of producing three to ten pups every three weeks. Roosevelt, using his hat as a net, scooped one up and skinned it. Unfortunately, his arsenic can was back at Sagamore Hill. “I send you a small tribute, in the shape of a skin with the attached skull, of a microtus [pennsylvania], a male, taken out of the lower geyser basin, National Park, Wyoming, April 8, 1903,” the president wrote to Merriam. “Its length, head and body, was 4.5 inches, tail to tip, 1.3 inches, of which .2 were the final hairs. The hind foot was .7 of an inch. I had nothing to put on the skin but salt.”40
While Roosevelt was studying birds and animals (and even evidence of insects), Burroughs was analyzing Homo sapiens Roosevelti. Since leaving Union Station in the District of Columbia, and all through the Midwest, while Roosevelt was giving stirring speeches in Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota, a watchful Burroughs was keeping copious notes. What amazed Burroughs most was how cordial Roosevelt was to everybody he met, offering good fellowship, firmly shaking people’s hands as if he were a next-door neighbor handing out free Farmer’s Almanacs. His hail-fellow-well-met routine was paying dividends. The trip seemed less like a presidential tour than a triumphant homecoming for a native son. “He gave himself very freely and heartily to the people wherever he went,” Burroughs noted. “He could easily match their Western cordiality and good-fellowship.” 41
It seemed that Roosevelt treated the citizens of North Dakota especially warmly. Every old ranch foreman in the state was offered red-carpet hospitality. Roosevelt truly admired these rural folks. North Dakotans never complained about working long hours or giving a neighbor free help. And the unbounded hills and plains hadn’t been spoiled by industrialization. Somehow the children of North Dakota seemed purer than children back east, whose heads were filled with false ideas of what constituted success in America. To Burroughs, in fact, it seemed as if Roosevelt were from North Dakota, as if the yeomen planting crops and the village merchants selling wares were somehow his kinfolk.
As his constant companion, with time to while away, Roosevelt regaled Burroughs with stories about western characters he loved, including Hell-Roaring Bill Jones and Hash-Knife Joe. At Saint Paul, Seth Bullock joined the Roosevelt party for a few days of travel. Once they reached Yellowstone, Roosevelt borrowed a sure-footed gray Third Cavalry stallion while Burroughs, hampered by arthritis, rode in a carriage (or ambulance, as he jokingly called it) pulled by two mules. Burroughs had a wild ride because the team got spooked and took off running. Off they went to Mammoth Hot Springs, which Burroughs later described as “the devil’s frying pan.” Roosevelt sported khaki pants, puttees, a black jacket, and a tan Stetson hat. Burroughs still wore his dark suit—a fashionista from the Whitman catalog of refined dishevelment. Shedding the Secret Service and newspapermen, they explored caves, spied songbirds, inspected pinecones, and studied topographical aberrations.