The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [97]
Following a familiar pattern, Roosevelt started to crave wide-open spaces as a cure-all. A Catskills hotel simply couldn’t do the trick. Another month in New York and his entire nervous system would have short-circuited. Gorringe’s Badlands beckoned him more than ever. Also gnawing at him was the fact that Elliott had returned from hunting in the dense jungles of India and had brought tiger heads; it wasn’t right for an older brother like himself to be trumped like that. Adding insult to injury, Elliott had already been stampeded by frightened buffalo in the Staked Plains of Texas, nearly losing his life for a trophy head. (Later, Theodore would commission Frederic Remington to sketch his brother’s brave technique—splitting the herd—as an illustration for his 1888 book Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail.17)
With a tone of desperation, Roosevelt wrote Gorringe on August 23 to request that plans for their buffalo hunt be completed and the date set.18 Perhaps the fact that Alice was pregnant put him under additional stress. He was already equipped with two double-barreled shotguns—a No. 10 choke-bore made by Thomas of Chicago and a No. 16 hammerless especially made for him by Kennedy of Saint Paul. He also told Gorringe that he owned a .45-caliber Sharps, considered one of the finest buffalo guns.19
Inexplicably, however, Gorringe backed out of going, leaving Roosevelt companionless for the hunt. Still sick with asthma (but with Alice safely ensconced with her family in Massachusetts), Roosevelt left by himself for Chicago, then switched trains for Saint Paul. Writing his mother a quick letter, he boasted about “feeling like a fighting cock again.”20 Proudly heading west on the Northern Pacific, Roosevelt steamed past the Lake Park region of Minnesota and the wheat fields of the Red River valley across the billowy plains around Jamestown to nearly treeless Bismarck and on to the desolate Badlands of his dreams.
II
At around two o’clock in the morning on September 8, 1883, Roosevelt arrived in the hamlet of Little Missouri (called “Little Misery” by locals) on the western edge of the Dakota Territory. There was no waiting platform or porter to greet him; he was the sole passenger, disembarking in the still darkness. Along the Little Missouri River you could hear a rustle of cottonwoods like waves along a dock. Everything about the scene had an eerie, ethereal cast. Not far from where Roosevelt was standing, George Armstrong Custer had camped with his detachment in 1876 on his way to the fatal battle of Little Bighorn. And just a couple of days prior to Roosevelt’s arrival, the former president Ulysses S. Grant had passed through Little Missouri, riding the railroad west to Gold Creek, Montana, where he would celebrate the hammering of the gold spike connecting the Northern Pacific to the Pacific Coast. About 200 miles to the southwest, the pacified Hunkpapa leader Sitting Bull was now living on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation Agency, isolated in a patch of forlorn prairie along the present-day border between North and South Dakota; the U.S. government held him there as a prisoner of war.21 Either consciously or unconsciously, Roosevelt was about to insert himself into the closing act of the western frontier’s historical pageant.
As Gorringe had instructed, Roosevelt made his way in the pitch blackness along the main street to the Pyramid Park Hotel. The gruff manager let him in and ushered him to a cot in a large communal room. Roosevelt collapsed and fell asleep, happy to have made it to the real West at last. In the morning light, as he rose alongside touchy frontiersmen and saddle-sore wranglers, it all looked very primitive. The washbasin where he tried to shave was clogged with dirty water and stubble, and the hotel towel was