The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [88]
Another outcome of Roosevelt’s midwestern tramp was that he grew less interested in birds and more intrigued by the notion of hunting big game. After all, being wrapped in a buffalo robe in Minnesota wasn’t the same as either shooting a bison or seeing a thinned-down wild herd with his own eyes. “No man who is not of an adventurous temper, and able to stand rough food and living,” he soon wrote, “will penetrate to the haunts of the buffalo. The animal is so tough and tenacious of life that it must be hit in the right spot; and care must be used in approaching it, for its nose is very keen, and though its sight is dull, yet, on the other hand, the plains it frequents are singularly bare of cover; while, finally, there is just a faint spice of danger in the pursuit, for the bison, though the least dangerous of all bovine animals will, on occasions, turn upon the hunter and though its attack is, as a rule, easily avoided, yet in rare cases it manages to charge home.”52
After so many grouse, Roosevelt wanted to someday travel west of the Red River into buffalo country. (And he would have to do it soon, for the cattle were taking over.) Being in Moorhead was akin to traveling 1,400 miles to see a major attraction—buffalo—and then never entering the admission gate. He had, however, seen plenty of cattle. Between 1877 and 1885 more than 2.5 million head of cattle were slaughtered in Chicago; Roosevelt had been able to see the stockades and corrals for himself.53 What he hadn’t been able to witness on his midwestern tramp, however, were the cattle drovers herding from Fort Worth north by the ninety-ninth meridian to Ogallala, Nebraska, and from there into the northern plains of Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. Because he had not seen the great herds of buffalo and cattle, Roosevelt believed he had missed the main thrust of the western expansion. He vowed to return. Nobody would have to lend him a buffalo robe. He’d earn the next one for himself.
Paradoxically, that odd night with the buffalo robe in a stranger’s home was in many respects Roosevelt’s good-bye to his rigorous outdoors life for a while. Maturity and responsibility beckoned. Perhaps the recent college graduate wanted to push on westward through the Dakotah Territories to the Bitterroots, where the elk ran in healthy herds and the geysers of Yellowstone were reliable. But he couldn’t. He was planning to start studying law in New York and he was getting married the next month. His diary, in fact, abounds with paeans to Alice Lee: “She is so pure and holy that it seems almost profanation to touch her, no matter how gently and tenderly.” “My happiness now is almost too great.”54 It was as if he couldn’t write her name without bursting a vein. Pausing in Saint Paul about to board an eastbound train, burning with impatience to get home, he sounded tired: “How glad I am it is over,” the wanderer wrote from the depot, “and I am to see Alice.”55
Once he caught up with Alice in Chestnut Hill, everything became a whirlwind. In quick succession he enrolled at Columbia law school, purchased a diamond ring, spent two weekends at Oyster Bay with his mother, rode Lightfoot far and wide, chopped down trees for winter firewood, and prepared himself for his vows at the Unitarian Church in Brookline, Massachusetts. Sometimes he took long walks across green fields, and nobody knows what he thought.
IV
Everything went flawlessly on the wedding day of Theodore and Alice, October 27, 1880. Elliott arrived on cue to serve as best man. “At twelve o’clock on my twenty-second birthday, Alice and I were married,” Roosevelt wrote in his diary. “She made an ideally beautiful bride; and it was a lovely wedding. We came on for the night to Springfield [Massachusetts] where I had taken a suite of rooms…. Our intense happiness is too sacred to be written about.”56 The newlyweds honeymooned