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By Root 3815 0

If he had wanted society life or afternoon tea, he could have gone to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Still, he wasn’t much interested in meeting labor activists or radicals of any stripe, either. Nor did he write about the swirl of immigrants—Germans, Irish, Poles, and Swedes—who were pouring into the city. What was exciting to him, however, was Chicago’s role as the gateway to the great West. Walking the railyards he could for the first time imagine Lincoln’s rise as a populist, and the drama of Bleeding Kansas. How strange it was to think that Mary Todd Lincoln was living downstate in corn-stubbled Springfield, where her husband was buried, housebound after being released from the Bellevue Place insane asylum. It had been fifteen years since the tragedy at Ford’s Theatre, but Roosevelt still considered himself a Lincoln man. He could sense the power of Lincoln’s presence everywhere in Illinois and the surrounding prairie—the ghost of Lincoln, as the poet Vachel Lindsay wrote, haunted the streets, and “the sick world” still cried.36

Once again Wilcox collected the Roosevelts in Chicago—this time with an engineer and a former Confederate soldier in tow—for the second leg of the Midwest tramp. The party boarded the Chicago and North Western—nicknamed the “Pioneer Railroad”—and headed straight toward the Mississippi River as night fell. After crossing the Big Muddy at Davenport, their train rumbled on through Iowa City, where a state university flourished, and onto Grinnell along Rock Creek Lake, where farmers angled for crappies and bluegills in the long Indian summer. Eventually they found themselves in the small town of Carroll in western Iowa. This county seat, surrounded by strands of big bluestem grass, had a steel flour mill, eight general stores, five restaurants, and two grain warehouses, but life ran at a slow pace. People sometimes just sat by the river, a meandering brown stretch of the Des Moines. The previous year, most of the business district of Carroll had been destroyed in a fire, and the townsfolk were slowly starting to rebuild. There was nothing urban about the semi-prosperous community except the railroad depot.37

The Roosevelts leased a two-horse wagon and started hunting on the outskirts of Carroll, with a pack of eager dogs, roughly following the North Raccoon River northwest into what was considered one of the best prairie fowl hunting areas in the United States.* Theodore observed how “absolutely treeless” and “sparsely scattered over with settlers” western Iowa was.38 There was no misunderstanding why locals were called flatlanders—only the occasional low hill, high bluff, or forlorn dale was to be found in Carroll County. The creek grades were so gentle that horses and oxen meandered across them with little or no difficulty. The Homestead Act of 1862 had drawn German, Scandinavian, and Czech immigrants to western Iowa, and Roosevelt enjoyed meeting them, saluting their durable “pioneer stock.” Many of these flatlanders, however, were struggling in the 1880s; commodity prices had fallen, and it was difficult to overcome the fixed costs levied by grain elevators, railroad concerns, and butcher-yard operators.

Stricken with both asthma and cholera in town, Roosevelt nevertheless managed to bag the most game birds of his life around a plateau called Wall Lake, frequently referred to by locals as “goose pond.”39 Wildlife was abundant here. Using five Irish setters—“three of which worked well, the other two simple nuisances”—they kicked up covey after covey. Hardly trying, Roosevelt bagged thirty-eight grouse, five quail, one bittern, one grebe, and thirty-six yellowlegs (tall, long-legged shorebirds of freshwater ponds with a white rump, known for announcing themselves with a piercing “tew-tew-tew” siren wail). The sojourn in Illinois, by contrast, had yielded only thirty-five birds. And there were lots of other birds Roosevelt didn’t shoot in Iowa, only observing them in his diary. “There was a large flock of pelicans on the lake,” he noted on September 8, “and thousands of yellow-headed blackbirds.” *40