The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [78]
Maine, to Roosevelt, was where he first found his authentic self. Men acquired the skills of survival early, in such a rugged terrain, if they wanted to succeed in life. In the North Woods, unlike official Washington or Harvard, there was no gyp game. Nor was Maine benevolent or controllable. Death by avalanche, death by frostbite, death by becoming lost—these were hazards men like Sewall and Dow had learned to overcome. The entire state had a stimulating effect on Roosevelt, almost as if it made him drunk. “I owe a personal debt to Maine because of my association with certain staunch friends in Aroostook County,” he wrote, “an association that helped and benefited me throughout my life in more ways than one.” 75
CHAPTER FIVE
MIDWEST TRAMPING AND THE CONQUERING OF THE MATTERHORN
I
The Harvard Athletic Association was sponsoring its spring boxing competition and twenty-year-old Theodore Roosevelt had entered in the lightweight division. The rounds were all held on campus, at the old gymnasium near Memorial Hall. Although once denounced as immoral because of its brutality, boxing in 1879 had become chic, particularly in the Boston area, where the Irish-American John L. Sullivan had brazenly challenged anyone with enough guts to fight him for a $500 wager. Even the New York Times and Harper’s Weekly were pro-boxing, asserting that the sport enhanced physical fitness and manliness. Sullivan was nicknamed the Boston Strongboy; Roosevelt deserved a more Ivy League moniker like the Cambridge Clerk or the Harvard Horticulturist. Even though Roosevelt had been training for months, nobody imagined he’d actually be in a twenty-four-foot ring fighting for a college championship trophy.
That was precisely what happened on March 22, 1879. Besides undergoing intensive training Roosevelt had carefully studied the official Queensberry rules, determined not to lose by default owing to a technical infraction or an illegal maneuver. Grueling as it sounds, the Harvard Athletic Association organized the competition by a process of elimination. You boxed not just one match but two or three in the same day. With the gymnasium packed, his friends and classmates cheering him on, the 130-pound Roosevelt, to the shock of most present, with a couple of good right punches, actually beat a senior, W. W. Coolidge of the class of 1879, in his first square-off. It was considered something of an upset. According to the Harvard Advocate, Roosevelt “displayed more coolness and skill than his opponent.” Meanwhile, C. S. Hanks of the class of 1879 had defeated his opponent in his semifinal round. Therefore, the championship fight that afternoon would be Roosevelt versus Hanks.1
Sitting on a floor seat watching the fisticuffs was Owen Wister, an aristocratic Pennsylvanian who would go on to write the classic western novel The Virginian. Two years behind Roosevelt at Harvard, Wister was something of a class clown, famously contributing both the music and the libretto for the Hasty Pudding Club’s comic opera Dido and Aeneas. As a product of boarding schools in New England and Switzerland, Wister had become extremely erudite by the time he arrived in Cambridge. Just as Roosevelt was an accomplished ornithologist of sorts upon entering Harvard, the easy-tempered Wister had composed songs he thought rivaled the worst of Stephen Foster, which was at least a starting place in show biz. Like Roosevelt, Wister suffered from bad health. Throughout his life he had nervous breakdowns, migraine headaches, sudden tremors, and even prolonged hallucinations; and—again as with Roosevelt—only Mother Nature, it seemed, brought him relief from his physical anguish.2
A shrewd judge of character, Wister studied Roosevelt