The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [86]
In the Iowa brakes the sodbusters had a keen sense of nature’s beauty and bounty. Even their economic problems couldn’t get them to abandon the land. There was something about the constrained landscape—whether it was the natural meadows or the planted acres of wheat—that soothed the soul. There was natural beauty everywhere in Iowa if you only knew how to look. Joy seemed to be found by modest Iowa farmers even in the dust of summer. They were what Emily Dickinson had referred to in her poem “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” as “nature’s people.”41 Back east, city dwellers like himself studied nature too much; in Iowa people lived with it as if by the grace of God. There was a subtlety to the Iowa plains that liberated Roosevelt’s psyche in a way he hadn’t anticipated. “No nation has ever achieved permanent greatness unless this greatness was based on the well-being of the great farmer class, the men who live on the soil,” Roosevelt would write of the Midwest as president, greatly influenced by this trip. “For it is upon their welfare, material and moral, that the welfare of the rest of the nation ultimately rests.”42
III
Once again, after shooting their fill of birds in Carroll County, muscles sore, the Roosevelts headed back to bustling Chicago to regroup. Although Roosevelt never declared it right out, his brother was grating on him a little. Perceiving himself as an authentic naturalist hunter of the Mayne Reid school, Theodore wrote to his sister Corinne that Elliott, by contrast, “revels in the change to civilization—and epicurean pleasures.” Because Roosevelt never overate and never drank much more than a glass or two of alcohol, he mocked his younger brother’s gluttonous ways. “As soon as we got here [to Chicago] he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat,” Roosevelt continued, “then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because he was hot; a brandy smash ‘to keep the cold out of his stomach’ and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite.”43
Holed up again at the Hotel Sherman, the Roosevelts were particularly glad to be rid of Wilcox’s two companions, the prattling engineer and the unreliable ex-Confederate soldier. They visited a gunsmith, who was unable to fix their damaged rifles, so they both bought new ones. They were now more determined than ever to turn their next adventure into even more birds bagged. Leg three of their Midwest tramp would be to the Red River country of Minnesota, part of the vast Hudson Bay watershed and reportedly abounding with wildlife. Newspapers back in 1880 often called the 550-mile tributary the “Red River of the North” to help differentiate it from the southern tributary of the Mississippi River, which formed part of the border between Texas and Oklahoma. The Roosevelt brothers stayed in Moorhead, a small city located on the border of North Dakota (or the Dakotah Territory, as it was known then). That’s where their cousin Jack Elliott lived, and the brothers were excited about spending time with him flushing out ruffed grouse from the forestland. Not since Dresden had the three been together.
Unlike Harvey and Carroll, Moorhead was irrigable, and a transportation hub in the Wild West for merchandise and agricultural products, situated conveniently between the Twin Cities of Minneapolis–Saint Paul and Winnipeg, Manitoba. Founded in 1871 by William G. Moorhead, a director of the Northern Pacific Railroad, it was notorious as a “sin city” because of its 100 or more smoky bars (and, one assumes, brothels).44 There was a certain unhurried stillness in the air around Moorhead that had an enduring appeal for Roosevelt. Here, among the “guns of autumn” (as fall hunting was called in Minnesota), for the first time in his life, Roosevelt felt the lure and tug of the Wild West he had read about. Staying at a “miserable old hotel” surrounded by a strip of bars, he could imagine himself in Tucson or Dodge City, where the saloon doors always swung open. (The outlaw Jesse James had launched his career as a notorious bank robber in 1876, just over 200 miles down the