The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [90]
Even though Roosevelt was writing The Naval War of 1812 and perfecting “Sou’-Sou’-Southerly,” he followed through on his commitment to squire his wife around the grand capitals of Europe that summer. Emulating his father, he created a breakneck itinerary for them and kept it. Even though Alice had horrendous stomach problems they toured Irish castles, steamboated on the Rhine, shopped in Munich, and fished on Lake Como. Surprisingly, he didn’t care for much of the European art. Strangely, the sensuous women models of Rubens seemed to him like “handsome animals.”61 But for the most part Europe—as it had when he was just a little boy carting around arsenic paste—made him homesick. While he was in France and Italy, the word “wretchedness” became one of his favorite adjectives. A longing for the American wilderness returned to the forefront of his thinking. Even London’s Zoological Gardens disappointed him. Ironically, the British zoologists weren’t taking Darwinian advancements into their displays. Then there was the awful news that President Garfield had been shot and was in critical condition. “Frightful calamity for America,” he wrote in his diary.62 It seems the tragedy made him want to return home, but he didn’t.
Although they hadn’t seen each other for a few years, one of Roosevelt’s principal correspondents from that summer of 1881 was old Bill Sewall of Island Falls, who eagerly collected his young friend’s special-delivery missives from the little postal box. Clearly Roosevelt was still thinking about the Maine wild—and the exhilaration of climbing Mount Katahdin. Disregarding his Harvard physician’s recommendation to watch his heart, Roosevelt prepared to hike up the Matterhorn on his own while Alice rested in a hotel in Zermatt. Remembering all the lessons he had learned from Sewall, he had decided, quite spontaneously, to climb Switzerland’s famous peak as a retort to a cabal of snobby English climbers he had accidentally encountered in the hotel lobby. He was determined to prove to them that “a Yankee could climb just as well as they could.”63 Writing to his sister Bamie, he added that conquering the Matterhorn that August would give him at least the credential of being a “subordinate kind of mountaineer.”64
For serious mountain climbers, conquering the Matterhorn was an initiation ritual; if you could make it to the summit you were accepted as a player. The 14,690-foot Matterhorn was first successfully climbed twenty years before, in 1861, by the Englishman Edward Whymper. His 1880 book The Ascent of the Mattern was all the rage in Europe. Since Whymper’s historic climb, hundreds of others had accomplished the feat (including Lucy Walker, the first woman to make the ascent), and the Swiss Alpine Club had built a shelter for climbers to rest and sleep in at 12,500 feet, which made a big difference.65 Here is an excerpt from a long letter of August 5, 1881, that Theodore sent to his sister Anna, proud of his feat: “We left the hut at three-forty, after seeing a most glorious sunrise which crowned the countless snow peaks and billowy, white clouds with a strange crimson iridescence, reached the summit at seven, and were down at the foot of the Matterhorn proper by one. It was like going up and down enormous stairs on your hands and knees for nine hours.”66
By making it to the top of the Matterhorn, Roosevelt, in essence, felt he had conquered Europe. He also climbed the Jungfrau, a peak only slightly less