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By Root 3979 0

his chagrin, he never got a chance to see a Roosevelt elk grazing in the Olympic rain forests. He did smell the raw fir boards for sale along the wharf. Not surprisingly, given his adroitness as a politician, Roosevelt met with the who’s who of greater Seattle. No debutante failed to receive a presidential bow. With such a crowded itinerary Roosevelt simply didn’t have the time to experience the moss-grown snags of Puget Sound County. In general, he hadn’t given himself enough time to explore Washington state. Heading back to Washington, D.C., from Seattle on the “Roosevelt Special,” the president was in a sulky mood over this fact. With no appointments to keep, the pace of travel seemed sluglike. Even though Loeb had run a pretty good rolling White House, there was a backlog of bureaucratic work that needed the president’s immediate attention. Wall Street financiers were sowing the seed of monopolies, and Roosevelt knew he had to be a regulator of the economy for the sake of the people. He had been spending time with high-caliber men like Burroughs, Pitcher, Muir, Bullock, Lacey, Young, and Finley, and now his heart shriveled when he had to grapple with dry-lipped New York types whose life purpose was making money.

Roosevelt gave hurried conservation-infused speeches in towns like Walla Walla, Washington, and Helena, Montana, as the Roosevelt Special went eastward. Neither community had many buildings from the nineteenth century, and Roosevelt’s speeches were stale re-runs. He was starting to feel like an itinerant carny at a medicine show. The flame, spark, and glory of the Great Loop tour were over. The hour for paperwork had returned. No more acting like a child or savage in the wild. On the upside, Roosevelt was eager to get back to Edith and his six children. Nineteen-year-old Alice had just gone to Puerto Rico on a goodwill trip, and her father was as proud as a peacock. “You were of real service down there because you made those people feel like you liked them,” he wrote, “and took an interest in them, and your presence was accepted as a great compliment.”

Although Roosevelt was “pretty well tired” from the western trip, he wanted to tell stories about all the natural wonders he had explored. Draw your chair up, and Roosevelt would gladly tell a antecdote about Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, or Yosemite. Furthermore, he had taken a real liking to Josiah, keeping the little badger as his constant companion on the train. He knew his children would love the cute little critter. “So far he is very good tempered and waddles around everywhere like a little bear submitting with perfect equanimity to being picked up,” he continued to Alice, “and spending much of his time in worrying the ends of anybody’s trousers.”148

When Roosevelt arrived at the White House his wife was surprised to see him looking so healthy and fit. He was also immaculately groomed. If anything, all that travel seemed to have invigorated him. He was full of incredible stories about the Wyoming Rockies, Nebraska tree nurseries, the whitecapped Colorado River, towering California sequoias, comical Oregon puffins, and the unforgettable gentleness of John Muir in the snow. He was gripped by a hunger for the golden West, which defied description for those who hadn’t experienced it. Encounters with bears, fawns, raccoons, and so on had suddenly become well-honed campfire-like yarns at the White House. Heartland citizens had handed animals to Roosevelt as gifts—over a dozen of them—and most were being shipped off to zoos by Loeb. But Roosevelt hadn’t come home empty-handed. Josiah—just starting to cut its teeth—was the president’s new companion, having been nursed on a bottle all the way from Kansas. With great ceremony, Roosevelt presented the badger to his seven-year-old son Archie as a gift. The family had grown by one.

It seems that every decade some writer, anxious for quick money, publishes a book on White House pets. One star attraction in this lightweight pulp fare is Josiah. (Another is Calvin Coolidge’s pet pygmy hippopotamus, Billy.149) If anything