Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [130]
The grinning equivocations went on and on, wreathing through cigar smoke and sweet wine fumes, while smilax, asparagus vines, and American Beauty roses intertwined above his head, and a thousand lightbulbs drowsily heated the room. Champagne was served. Now the President was beating time to a German Trinklied, and joining in chorus after chorus:
Er lebe hoch! Er lebe hoch!
Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!
Further roars of “Hoch!” followed him as his train pulled out of the station. “Good song, that!” he shouted, and waved till darkness swallowed him up.
TARIFF POLICY IN ST. PAUL. Labor policy in Sioux Falls. Philippines policy in Fargo.… Roosevelt arrived at Bismarck, North Dakota, toward sunset on 7 April, and saw, opening out beyond the Missouri, the windswept landscape of his youth. Great balls of thistle spooled across the prairie. He gazed around him, visibly relaxing. “Good to breathe this free Western air again.”
He ate a barbecued-ox sandwich and drank a mug of cider, then returned to his train. Two of his old Badlands buddies, Sylvane and Joe Ferris, were waiting on the other side of the water, at Mandan. They climbed aboard the Elysian, their faces solemn with excitement.
For the next two hours, Roosevelt entertained them as the flat grassland swayed in his windows. He effortlessly recalled places and scenes, even the names of horses and dogs they had forgotten. At Dickinson, he manifested himself as a sort of deus ex machina to people who remembered him as a reedy young ranchman, running along the tops of cattle cars and jabbing at steers with a pole.
When the train drew near the Badlands, darkness already had descended. The President went onto his rear platform and watched coulees etch themselves into the grassland, black out of silver, like a giant printer’s block. Medora lay in the deepest cut of all, a clutch of houses by the sand-choked Little Missouri. Here, twenty years before, he had come to shoot his first buffalo, and found himself “at heart as much a Westerner as an Easterner.” But this time he did not have to drag his duffel bag alone across the sage. And the entire population of the Badlands, as far as he could see, had gathered to welcome him.
Joe Ferris was upset that Roosevelt would not take his old pony, Manitou, for a gallop through the buttes; security forbade it. The President stayed in Medora no longer than it took to say a few words, shake every hand, and endure some fond, erroneous reminiscences. Then he was on his way again, leaving the disappointed populace to cheer itself up with a dance. Why had he looked so stern, why had he not stayed the night?
Perhaps he sought to protect some dreamy nostalgia from present scrutiny. The free range of twenty years before was gone. He did not have to dwell on its eroded green and barbed-wire entanglements. Nor need he ever return.
Night shrouded the Château de Morès, home of his long-dead ranching rival; shrouded the ruins of his log house in the Elkhorn bottom; shrouded Nolan’s Hotel in Wibaux, Montana, where he had once knocked out the drunken bully who had called him “Four Eyes.” The train sped across Montana, hauling him away from what he still thought of as “Dakota.” No North and South then!
It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West.… It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lovely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman. It was a land of scattered ranches, of herds of long-horned cattle, and reckless riders who unmoved looked in the eyes of life or of death. In that land we lived a free and hardy life, with horse and with rifle. We worked under the scorching midsummer sun, when the wide plains shimmered and wavered in the heat; and we knew the freezing misery of riding night guard round the cattle in the late fall round-up. In the soft springtime the stars were glorious in our eyes each night before we fell asleep; and in the winter we rode through blinding blizzards, when the driven snow-dust burnt our faces.… We knew toil and hardship and hunger