The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [74]
That autumn Roosevelt had started dating a conservative Boston girl, Alice Lee, whose parents lived on Chestnut Hill. A beautiful seventeen-year-old, Alice was gregarious and had impeccable manners. Theodore fell for this blond, who was nicknamed “Sunshine.” With compassionate eyes, a tennis player’s physique, and a flirtatious giggle, Alice was the true first love of Theodore’s life. Although there is no evidence to suggest that she shared his enthusiasm for birds, they wandered through meadows together, collected chestnuts, and admired wisteria. Alice, however, had many suitors, and Theodore had to pour on his charm and his gentlemanly ways.
By March 1879 Roosevelt was ready for another adventure in Maine with Sewall and Dow. While other classmates headed south in search of bright weather, Roosevelt took the train north to Island Falls, arriving to find three feet of snow on the ground. Sewall picked Roosevelt up by sleigh at the depot and, with bells jingling, took him to his cabin. For the first time, Roosevelt wore clumsy-looking snowshoes. They were Indian-made with rims of white ash, closed lacing, and the highest-quality rawhide available. Three times longer than they were wide, they enabled Roosevelt to easily get traction on icy surfaces. Temperatures outside had dropped to ten degrees below zero. Ice coated all the bushes and every trace of road. Huge ten-foot snowdrifts buried low-lying cabins like coffins. At times the wind was so sharp with snow that it froze lips shut. Most sane people were huddled indoors by a fireplace, with plenty of lynx furs and wool blankets, but Roosevelt traipsed around the wintry woods in great spirits.
Theodore Roosevelt vacationed regularly in the North Woods of Maine as a Harvard student. In March 1878 he went snowshoeing in the wild. Here (left to right) are Bill Sewall, Wilmot Dow, and Theodore Roosevelt.
T.R. on North Woods of Maine hike. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
There was nothing passive about the way Roosevelt listened to lumberjack slang and absorbed North Woods tall tales of the Paul Bunyan variety. “Even then,” Bill Sewall recalled, “he was quick to find the real man in the very simple men.”65 Sewall, for example, had two brothers whom T.R. got to know. “Sam was a deacon,” Roosevelt recalled of the pair. “Dave was NOT a deacon. It was from Dave that I heard an expression which ever after remained in my mind.” Apparently one afternoon Dave Sewall was “speaking of a local personage of shifty character who was very adroit in using fair-sounding words which completely nullified the meaning of other fair-sounding words which proceeded them.” Finding such mealy-mouthedness disingenuous, Dave fired off the backwoods insult that they were “weasel words.” As Roosevelt recounted, Dave Sewall said, “just like a weasel when he sucks the meat out of an egg and leaves nothing but the shell.” Roosevelt always remembered “weasel words” as applicable to disingenuous oratory delivered by sham publications.66 Later in life, during his Bull Moose years, Roosevelt used the term “weasel words” in both an article in Outlook and a major Missouri address.67
There was another aspect of Sewall’s life that was similar to Roosevelt’s childhood—childhood sickness. Although he didn’t have asthma, he had been afflicted with hyperthermia, diphtheria, and hearing difficulties. Growing up fragile in such unforgiving country wasn’t an option. Sewall either had to get in shape or die. Much like Roosevelt, he began a successful fitness regime and became an inspiration for the philosophy of mind over matter. Treating lumbering