The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [95]
That spring Roosevelt was reading Eugene V. Smalley’s History of the Northern Pacific Railroad, just released by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, the same firm that had published The Naval War of 1812 the previous year. Roosevelt had grown so enthralled with Putnam that he became a partner of the house, investing $20,000.6 The timing of Smalley’s book was propitious—near the end of the summer the second transcontinental railroad would open, with great hullabaloo. New Yorkers like Roosevelt could now easily travel to the northwest territories that Lewis and Clark had first bravely explored in 1803–1805.7 Dime novels had popularized past western heroes like Kit Carson and Jim Bridger as updates of the Leatherstocking sagas. Roosevelt wasn’t impressed by such hack writers as Ned Buntline or Prentiss Ingraham, but he touted western cowboys as the American equivalent of the British knights popularized by Sir Walter Scott. A mere train ride to the western edge of the Dakota Territory, Roosevelt hoped, would bring an array of Homeric pioneer characters into his fairly aristocratic eastern-centered orbit.
Everything about the Northern Pacific Railroad—a pet project of presidents Lincoln and Grant—enthralled an unabashed expansionist like Roosevelt. Linking Lake Superior to Puget Sound, the Northern Pacific was somehow more romantic than the first transcontinental line, the Union Pacific, which chugged from Omaha to Sacramento through the salt flats of Utah, where Mormon settlements were springing up. With the Northern Pacific, places like the Bighorns, Yellowstone National Park, the Cascade Mountains, and the Olympic rainforests were now more easily reachable from the Atlantic East. As a direct consequence of the connecting spike a greater number of emigrants and fortune seekers now departed for the Minnesota and Dakota territories in droves to grow wheat in the excellent prairie soil. Not only did History of the Northern Pacific Railroad include attractive black-and-white photographs of Pyramid Butte and a panoramic shot of the sediment-laden Little Missouri River (the largest tributary of the Missouri in the region); it also included a shot of a “Ranchman’s Log ‘Schack’” that exuded unvarnished frontier charm in a classic western landscape.8
Having already traveled on the Northern Pacific from Saint Paul to Moorhead, Roosevelt was now eager to take it farther west to a bizarre area that Smalley devoted an entire chapter to: the “Bad Lands.” Located in what is now western North Dakota,* the Badlands is a surreal jumble of scoria hills, towering buttes, buffalo wallows, grassy draws, and narrow valleys following the 560-mile Little Missouri River. Taken together the geography resembled a blasted-out Grand Canyon on a small scale. Created as the ancestral Rocky Mountains were being formed 60 million years ago, the Badlands were full of dinosaur bones and fossils, easily found on digs in sandstone beds and soft siltstone.9 (In 2007 scientists discovered in the Hill Creek Formation a rare “dinosaur mummy” of a 67-million-year-old fossilized duckbilled hadrosaur named Dakota; much of its tissue and bone was preserved in an envelope of skin.10) As in the Painted Desert of Arizona, petrified wood was scattered about the Badlands for hundreds of miles, with silica coating the dead tree trunks and old stumps.11
That spring of 1883 Theodore (with Alice) spent a lot of time at Tranquility in Oyster Bay, reading Smalley and other books pertaining to western exploration and Dakota wildlife while commissioning the architecture firm of Lamb & Rich to build Leeholm. During the workweek Theodore commuted into Manhattan on the Long Island Rail Road to take care of family business and give political speeches. At a Free Trade Club dinner in May at Clark’s Tavern, for example,