The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [402]
That spring, Roosevelt also resumed regular contact with the prolific artist Frederic Remington, who had illustrated Roosevelt’s Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail. Remington’s sketchbooks of heavy-duty paper had themselves become American heirlooms. A few of Remington’s illustrations from Ranch Life—“An Agency Policeman,” “Making a Tenderfoot Dance” and “Cowboy Fun”—had grown in popularity since the 1890s.
And in October 1902 Remington published a novel that the president adored: John Ermine of Yellowstone (about a Caucasian boy who is raised by Crow Indians and becomes a scout in the U.S. Army). The New York Times said that this novel was reminiscent of Wister’s The Virginian. Remington’s characters included Sitting Bull, Crooked Bear, and the White Weasel. What stood out for Roosevelt was Remington’s brilliant description of life among the Crow as they roamed in the western prairies. Remington also did a fine job of illustrating John Ermine of Yellowstone, thirty drawings in all.18 In one drawing, the well-cut John Ermine looks a lot like the blond, blue-eyed George Armstrong Custer before the Battle of Little Bighorn. Conceived as an epic western, John Ermine of Yellowstone was an oddly complex tale of an intermixing of European American and Native American strains. The lead character, Ermine, is torn between both cultures, incapable of fully assimilating into either. The novel got solid reviews; one reviewer said that Remington had captured the imperishable quiet of Wyoming’s forestlands.
“My dear Remington,” Roosevelt wrote to Remington on February 20, 1906. “It may be true that no white man ever understood an Indian, but at any rate you convey the impression of understanding him! I have done what I very rarely do—that is read a serial story—and I have followed every installment of The Way of an Indian as it came out.”19 Flattered by Roosevelt’s praise of him in the parlors of Washington, D.C., as the Karl Bodner or George Catlin of their generation, Remington made Roosevelt a small wax bronze titled Paleolithic Man as an appreciation. It depicted, Remington wrote, a Darwinian representation of a “human figure bordering on an ape, squatting and holding a clam in right hand and a club in left.” Remington had created the sculpture at a makeshift studio on Cedar Island in the Chippewa Bay archipelago in the Thousand Islands area, along a scenic stretch of the Saint Lawrence River in New York. Suffering from health problems caused by overeating, Remington, who had become a quirky odd duck, was hiding from the world. Jokingly, Remington added in his note that the bronze was modeled after “the original inhabitant of the original Oyster Bay—whenever that was—.”20
Oh, boy! Did Roosevelt ever fancy that piece of Remingtonia! Hurrah for Darwinian art! Whatever tension and mistrust had developed between Roosevelt and Remington in the 1890s had vanished. Although Roosevelt never purchased a Remington, he had amassed a fine collection of items, which had been bestowed on him as gifts. Even though fanciful artists like Maxfield Parrish were now the rage, Roosevelt stood steadfastly by Remington, whose struggle with obesity had taken on tragic dimensions. (At over 350 pounds he weighed more than Secretary of War William Howard Taft, and his weight was obviously affecting the functioning of his vital organs.) The Paleolithic Man statue thrilled Roosevelt. “We hail the coming of the original native oyster,” he wrote to Remington. “Mrs. Roosevelt is as much pleased as I am with it. I think it is very appropriate, for undoubtedly Paleolithic man feasted on oysters long before he got to the point of hunting the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros.”21
Throughout the spring of 1906 Roosevelt corresponded with John Burroughs, sharing the excitement of spying all the springtime birds around the White House. Oom John was busy raising