The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [96]
Deeply civic-spirited, Gorringe had supported Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt’s reformist initiatives in New York to clean up tenement buildings and improve sanitation, including the clearing of snow.12 Roosevelt and Gorringe had more in common than their interest in Oliver Hazard Perry and reformist politics: they shared a romanticized view of hunting and ranching along the Northern Pacific Railroad line. Gorringe planned to open a hunting lodge and cattle ranch in the Badlands, taking over a cantonment abandoned by the U.S. government along the languid Little Missouri River. The cantonment was originally built to protect railroad workers from Indian attacks, but Gorringe now envisioned it as a sportsmen’s resort. Roosevelt told Gorringe that he was dying to bag a free-ranger “while there were still buffalo left to shoot.”13
The response from Gorringe was a salesman-like “no problem.” Recently, newspapers such as the Bismarck Tribune and Dickinson (North Dakota) Press had boasted that a couple of hunters there had bagged ninety deer and fifteen elk in a few weeks. Gorringe was already part owner of the Pyramid Park Hotel, which he was also hoping to make into a sportsmen’s resort, in Little Missouri, a village along the Northern Pacific Railroad route. Since the days of Lewis and Clark the Little Missouri area had been considered excellent hunting country (for bears, elk, antelope, beavers, black-tails, and white-tails) by the Crow, Sioux, Arikara, Mandan, Cheyenne, and Gros Ventre Indians.14 Now, Gorringe said, it was time for the white man to take advantage of such happy grounds.
Unbeknownst to Roosevelt was that finding buffalo to shoot anywhere—even in the Badlands—was nearly impossible. For example, an outfit in Miles City, Montana, that very September had corralled wagons, bedrolls, horses, tents, pots and pans, playing cards—all the necessary provisions for a high-end Dakota-Montana buffalo hunt. It had signed up numerous eastern clients, promising the head of a 2,000-pound buffalo (plus an immense hump of the delicious muscle that supported the huge skull) for a high fee. Clearly Roosevelt wasn’t the only New York hunter craving the ultimate wall trophy, and buffalo steak by campfire under a starry sky. The Miles City outfit, however, couldn’t deliver on its sales pitch; disappointed clients, in fact, feeling ripped off, demanded a full refund.
That summer buffalo herds were disappearing from the entire northern range. One of Minneapolis’s legendary fur buyers, for example, sent able scouts trudging over the northern plains in buckskins and mackinaws looking for buffalo hides. Finding them proved to be almost impossible. Back in 1881 one Montana dealer had acquired more than 250,000 buffalo hides for his little operation; now, just two years later, he was lucky to get ten. The buffalo hunter himself was becoming extinct. “Almost every wild buffalo had been done away with,” the historian Tom McHugh lamented in The Time of the Buffalo. “All that remained was the conspicuous leftover of carrion rotting on the prairie.”15
Weeks after the Free Trade Club dinner where he met Gorringe, Roosevelt fell ill again with both asthma and cholera. Even escaping to an upscale Catskills resort in Richfield Springs didn’t help his breathing much. Although he said enthusiastically that the “scenery was superb,” being a convalescent made him feel puny. “For the first time in my life, I came within an ace of fainting when I got out of the bath this morning,” he wrote to his sister. “I have a bad headache, a general feeling of lassitude,