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at Oyster Bay, with plans for a long springtime journey to Europe. To T.R. marriage clearly meant that hunting had to come second or third. No longer does he fill his diaries with bird sightings. Although he never slackened his pace, still hurrying on in everything he pursued, a domestication had taken place. Never once did his marriage become imprisoning. His diary entries now mention silk jackets, pajamas, lovely drives, and even chats with Alice while she was sewing. He gloats in his diaries about how he “won” Alice, worshipping the trill of her voice and the shape of her body. Politics also rose to the forefront of his thinking. On November 2, for example, he recounted how he proudly voted for James Garfield, the Republican standard-bearer, for president.

After the New Year Theodore and Alice moved into Manhattan, to the mansion on West Fifty-Seventh Street. Life was quite good. Roosevelt had learned to dam his pent-up tears whenever his father’s memory was evoked. Wandering around the Bronx from time to time to get his nature fix amid the clamor of the new elevated railroads, Roosevelt daydreamed about the open spaces of the Far West. New York was getting crowded. Too many of the gadgets of tomorrow first showcased at the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition were now fairly commonplace. Bicycles were all the rave, as were typewriters. Theodore took to neither. (Robert B. Roosevelt, however, was a champion of both.)

Amid the many New York galas and soirees, Roosevelt, however, seemed to have deferred his need for wilderness. Besides attending Columbia law school, he was writing the last chapters of The Naval War of 1812. Books about Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry and Admiral John Paul Jones, not Elliott Coues’s newest bird key, now caught his eye. As a married man, he found that his diary writing waned, as did his taxidermy. His sketch pads were filled not with mice but with brig sloops. When drafting chapters about the Great Lakes, for example, Roosevelt never mentioned the nesting areas of plovers, gulls, or terns.

There was, however, an exception: he was writing an essay about an ornithological trip with Elliott in December 1880 aboard a twenty-one-foot sailboat around Long Island Sound. The short nautical-naturalist essay was called “Sou’-Sou’-Southerly”—the vernacular name for old-squaws (Clangula hyemalis).* On March 24, in fact, a frustrated Roosevelt wrote in his diary that he was “still working hard at…one or two unsuccessful literary projects.”57 The first of these was The Naval War of 1812; the second was the Robert B. Rooseveltish “Sou’-Sou’-Southerly.”

A strong case can be made that “Sou’-Sou’-Southerly” was the first authentic naturalist essay ever fully realized by Roosevelt.58 It was written for publication in a sporting magazine but was—for whatever reason—never published. Based on his frozen, white-capped nautical journey with Elliott in a sloop traveling from Oyster Bay to Huntington Bay, the narrative hinged on the perils of duck hunting in the bitter cold of Long Island Sound. The Roosevelts overcame ragged floes, heavy seas, and icicles overtaking their beards, all in the name of bird hunting. “The snow storm had now fairly set in, the hard flakes, mingled with flying spray, driving fiercely into our faces, and (for the short winter day was already becoming even duller and grayer as evening drew on),” Roosevelt wrote, setting the stage, “the land was entirely veiled from our sight thought not far distant. Sometimes there would be a few minutes lull and partial clearing off, and then with redoubled fury the fitful gusts would strike us again, shrouding us from stern to stern in the scudding spoon drift.”59

If all Roosevelt wrote about in “Sou’-Sou’-Southerly” was ice-laden waters and wind, then history could chalk it up as a solid first effort by an aspiring adventure writer. Many of his nautical references, in fact, gave the impression that he was showing off. And, as usual, Roosevelt also wrote with far too many semicolons. But owing to its Audubon Society overtones Roosevelt’s essay offered much more