The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [73]
After a round of greetings, the Roosevelt party was ready to set out into the surrounding wilderness. To help out on the trail, the bearded Sewall asked his clean-shaven nephew Wilmot Dow to join them. Sewall was the brains, and Dow had the sheer muscle. “Wilmot,” Roosevelt later wrote, “was from every standpoint one of the best men I ever knew.”58 Both guides were the soul of fidelity and honor. “Theodore was about eighteen when he first came to Maine,” Sewall later recalled. “He had an idea that he was going to be a naturalist and used to carry with him a little bottle of arsenic and go around picking up bugs.”59
They began by canoeing down the Mattawamkeag River until they got to the lake. Then it was another seven miles until they set up camp. As Cutler had expected, Sewall was a bracing antidote to Theodore’s Harvard blues; Roosevelt relished every minute of the outdoors strain. Nobody in the Agassiz School of Zoology, of course, would have thought of Sewall as a naturalist, but Roosevelt did. Bestowing that title on Sewall was part of his rebellion against the laboratory. Roosevelt was immediately impressed by Sewall. “I was accepted as part of the household; and the family and friends represented in their lives the kind of Americanism—self-respecting, duty-performing, life-enjoying,” he wrote, “which is the most valuable possession that one generation can hand the next.”
During their eighteen days in the woods (September 7 to 26), Roosevelt and Sewall shot grouse, flushed out bats, bathed in the river, read scripture, and doused lanterns to sleep under the stars. Instead of inventorying the behavior of birds, Roosevelt seemed bent on assessing his own survivalist abilities. Sadly, Roosevelt felt that he was falling short of the expectations he had set for himself. As if hiking 110 miles with Sewall and Dow weren’t enough, Roosevelt bemoaned how woefully inadequate he found himself as a marksman. “I don’t think I ever made as many consecutive bad shots as I have this week,” he wrote, in a way all true hunters could sympathize with. “I’m disgusted with myself.”60
Such bouts of self-criticism aside, Roosevelt excelled during these September days, and he was entranced by the beauty of the North Woods. Although Sewall thought Roosevelt a “different fellow to guide from what I had ever seen,” he marveled at the way Theodore was “posted” about the politics and literature of the times.61 Even though Theodore was struggling with asthmatic attacks—“guffle-ing” was the way Sewall put it—he admired how the young man never complained, never lagged behind, and never asked for sympathy. There wasn’t anything about Theodore, in fact, that Sewall or Dow didn’t like. “Some folks said that he was headstrong and aggressive,” Sewall later wrote, “but I never found him so except when necessary; and I’ve always thought being headstrong and aggressive, on occasion, was a pretty good thing.”62
V
When Roosevelt arrived for classes at Harvard at the beginning of his junior year, all he could talk about was the North Woods of Maine: the looming mountains, the hemlocks and elms, the mulberries, the thick pines, the birches and wildflowers. He was now a self-styled outdoorsman. “He would come back with tales of exposure and hardship,” his classmate Charles G. Washburn recalled, “and, it seemed to us, which he had enjoyed.”63
To the walls at 16 Winthrop, Roosevelt added hard-earned trophies of Island Falls—a raccoon skin and stuffed ducks. A photograph taken of his room shows it as fairly neat and tidy, with the mounted birds placed under bell jars. Whether Maine was the inspiration or not, his grades went up during his junior year; they included near-perfect scores in zoology and political economy. His natural history library grew, and he treasured