The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [87]
Taking a buggy out to the countryside with his brother and Jack Elliott, Theodore marveled at how easy it was to snare grouse in Minnesota. The great challenge in shooting these birds was that they clustered in dense, prickly thickets and usually flushed dramatically without warning.45 There was perhaps another reason that Roosevelt wanted to hunt in the lazy Red River region along the border between Minnesota and Dakotah territories. The Red River was in the middle of a crucial migratory route for dozens of bird species. Surely Roosevelt also knew that eagles and owls roosted permanently around the river bottom forests and remnant prairie.46 With the assistance of a “stub tailed old pointer” (and a Moorhead barkeeper who daylighted as a cart driver) he borrowed along the way in Saint Paul, Theodore’s goal was simple: shoot more game birds in Minnesota than he had shot in Illinois and Iowa combined; fill up those tarpaulin sacks.47
Unsurprisingly, Roosevelt relished playing a Minnesota-Dakota sportsman with shells in his jacket pocket, wandering through plowed land listening for the whir of wild ducks, and flushing ruffed grouse out of open grasslands and forest thickets. The desolate countryside was crisp and lovely in mid-September. Columns of cumulonimbus clouds ascended and spread in the blue sky. There wasn’t a hitching post for miles. Already the aspen and ash were starting to take on fall colors as dramatic as those in Vermont. This was the autumn rutting season, and the young four-point deer were challenging the eight-pointers over females. Roosevelt’s most memorable nights in Moorhead were spent camping under the stars, the fall nip adding an aura of romance to the outings. Although Theodore and Elliott were not good cooks, they had mastered the art of cleaning the chicken-sized grouse. Every night they stuffed themselves with fire-roasted bird until they burped.
For ten days in Minnesota, Roosevelt bagged more than 203 game birds, carefully listing them in his diaries: 95 grouse, 51 snipe, seventeen ducks, sixteen plovers, one goose, and so on. He had beaten his own Iowa record. Clearly Theodore was no longer collecting specimens or playing ornithologist. More telling, however, was his side note that Elliott had bagged only 201.48 That means he had beaten the “old boy” by two birds. Much of the time in western Minnesota Roosevelt had terrible asthma and was forced to sleep sitting up, dreaming intermittently, perhaps, about the prairie potholes of the Dakotas, where the hunting was supposed to be even better than in Minnesota’s Red River region.
One morning Theodore and Elliott awoke at dawn and went searching for grouse hot spots. Carefully listening for the birds’ drumming noise—which sounded like a stomach growling—the Roosevelts got their game. They also got lost in a “cold driving rain storm”—so lost, in fact, that at dusk they were forced to knock on a Norwegian farmer’s “neat but frail little house” asking to “put up for the night.”49 It was a scene straight from the pages of Giants in the Earth. According to his diary Theodore lay silently that evening in front of the fireplace while the wind blew hard outside. He was covered by a bison robe but was unable to sleep. This was his first real western experience. To Roosevelt, however, getting lost in Minnesota was “lovely,” a softer alternative to “bully.” During the coming days the Roosevelt party would camp along a bend of the Buffalo River—an eighty-eight-mile tributary of the Red River, lined with hardwoods, which looked like a poorly maintained Dutch canal.50
Roosevelt’s fierce competition with Elliott does show that he used the sport as a mechanism to enhance his manly self-worth. His grousing also reflected class-consciousness. Men with an aristocratic mien shot game birds with a retinue of guides; by contrast, the working class went after squirrels and raccoons with a mongrel dog. Game laws made sense when you were rich, looking for sport. Poor people shot game—with or without laws—just to stay alive. Much like