The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [82]
II
There was another reason, however, that Roosevelt didn’t collect birds on Mount Desert Island—his mind was reeling over his coming Midwest hunting trip with his brother, Elliott. Together they were going to explore the broad expanse of the Great Plains. Ever since Dresden, Theodore had been struggling to keep pace with Elliott, the most troubled of the four Roosevelt children. Handsome, irreverent, and charming, Elliott—a tenderhearted bon viant—constantly fought against fatigue, dizzy spells, and bouts of depression. He gave no meaningful signs of professional ambition; he simply excused himself from serious work, preferring pleasure. But he was very sweet-natured. According to a well-circulated family story, Elliott, when he was seven years old, took a walk one winter morning only to return without his overcoat. On being interrogated by his parents Elliott explained that he had seen a homeless “street urchin” shivering, so naturally he gave the poor lad his own coat. “I can think of many occasions in his later life when generosity of the same kind actuated him, not, perhaps, to wise giving, for unlike some people he never could learn to control his heart by his head,” his daughter Eleanor Roosevelt, first lady from 1933 to 1945, recalled. “With him the heart always dominated.”18
Theodore Roosevelt and his brother, Elliott, with a big game hunting coach.
T.R. and Elliott with big-game hunting coach. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
A better all-around student than Theodore, Elliott (or “Nell” as the family affectionately called him) was also a tremendous hunter and equestrian who excelled at polo.19 By 1880 Elliott had already hunted wild turkey in Florida and Bengal tigers in India. “Everything is in an advanced state in Texas,” he had written to his father from Fort McKavett, where he was bagging around a dozen birds daily. “By everything I mean all fruits, flowers and vegetables and by Texas I mean the civilized portions thereof.”20 A crack shot and excellent rider, sly as a magpie, Elliott was not overtly proper like his father; he had unfortunately inherited Uncle Rob’s libertine ways and was attracted to the bottle.21
Leaving Maine on August 6, Theodore visited Alice at Chestnut Hill and then his family at Oyster Bay. In the middle of the month Elliott and Theodore boarded a Chicago-bound train from Manhattan, ready to roll across the prairies Francis Parkman had written about so dramatically in The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life.22 Like Roosevelt, Parkman believed that actually visiting American landscapes was essential for gaining impressionistic reportorial material to help make a historical narrative come alive for the reader. It electrified Roosevelt that Parkman, a fellow Harvard alumnus (class of 1846), had used his classical education to honor the western frontier in serious historical prose. Roosevelt adopted Parkman—a devoted naturalist and horticulturist, with expertise in roses and lilies—as his guiding light in history studies. And Parkman knew the forests of America better than anybody else alive. To Roosevelt, Parkman, who also suffered from bad eyesight and was nearing blindness, was quite simply “the greatest historian whom the United States had yet produced.”23 Given a choice between Walden and The Oregon Trail, Roosevelt would have chosen the latter every time.
On the weekend before the Roosevelt brothers’ “Midwest tramp,” Theodore was