The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [84]
In many respects, the Midwest tramp became a hunting competition. Which brother could bag the most game? Because Elliott, who was two years younger, had already worked up his competitive appetite by flushing out prairie chickens in scrub brush in the Texas, he was the veteran. To Theodore, by contrast, it was all a new experience. He noted in his diary that it was “great fun to try this open plains shooting to which I am entirely unaccustomed among such vast, almost level fields, with so few trees.”28 After a couple of days in what Theodore referred to as the “fertile grain prairies,”29 both brothers had bagged many kinds of game birds—doves, ducks, snipes, grouse, plovers. They also collected gophers, impressed by their curved claws, used for tunneling through loose oil. “We had three good days of shooting,” he wrote to Anna, “and I feel twice the man for it already.”30
Yet ultimately the rural folks he encountered in Huntley fascinated Roosevelt more than the prairie chickens in the brush. Being a hunter and bird-watcher had taught him the art of observation, and now he was applying it to studying both rural and transient people. This would become a trademark of his future hunting and wilderness books. “I have been much amused by the people in this house, especially the labourers; a great, strong, jovial, blundering Irish boy; a quiet, intelligent yankee; a reformed desperado (he’s very silent but when we can get him to talk his reminiscences are very interesting—and startling); a good natured German boy who is delighted to find we understand and can speak ‘hochdeutch,’” he wrote to his mother on August 25. “There are but two women; a clumsy, giggling, pretty Irish girl, and a hard-featured backwoods woman who sings methodist hymns and swears like a trapper on occasion.” 31
At times on his Midwest tramp it almost seemed that Roosevelt was an onlooker, observing the styles and fashions and habits of American characters with the eye of a novelist. Although never abandoning his aristocratic bearing and always staying a bit removed, Roosevelt sometimes actually wore the garb and adopted the folkways of the regional people he encountered, in hopes of blending in. You might say he was a method actor of the Stella Adler school, playing in an American Arthuriad while mixing it up with different midwestern types like Iowa wheat farmers or Illinois dairymen. Elliott still dressed like a man of substance, sticking to gold scarves and polished boots. His wardrobe expressed his innate sense of aristocratic entitlement, and he had even taken to smoking a long-stemmed pipe. By contrast, Theodore wore dungarees and cotton work shirts and preferred his boots mud-stained. “I am afraid you would disown me if you could see me,” he boasted to his mother from the Illinois prairie. “I am awfully disreputable looking.”32
The bird collecting in Huntley, however, was a disappointment. “Before the sun was up we started off, tramping in sullen silence through the wet prairie grass,” he wrote in his diary, “but we found few birds and shot very badly.”33 Truth be told, the flat Illinois countryside lacked the geographical breadth Roosevelt had hoped to encounter. “I broke both of my guns, Elliott dented his, and the shooting was not as good as we expected,” he wrote to his sister Corinne. “I got bitten by a snake and chucked headforemost out of the wagon.”34 On August 27, after a particularly bad day’s hunting, a dejected Roosevelt recorded, “The country is shot out.”35
The Roosevelt brothers returned to Chicago for a few days to clean up and plot the next phase of their expedition. They stayed at the Hotel Sherman, which had burned down in the great fire and been rebuilt. Theodore found it off-putting and dreary.