Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [131]
Shortly after noon on 8 April, Roosevelt found himself in Gardiner, Montana, at the entrance to Yellowstone Canyon. The park was not yet open for the season. Ten-foot drifts of snow glared in the Rockies. He looked forward to spending two therapeutic weeks here, before continuing with his tour.
When he emerged from his car, he was already wearing full riding gear and a Western hat. He was followed by a short, white-bearded, instantly recognizable figure: the wildlife writer John Burroughs, revered by millions of Americans for his sentimental essays on nature. Affable, placid, and malleable, “Oom John” had been invited along as a walking advertisement that the President would kill no animals in Yellowstone.
They were greeted by the park superintendent, Major John Pitcher, a small escort of cavalrymen, and some mule carts loaded with camping equipment. Roosevelt swung joyfully up onto a waiting gray stallion, while Burroughs, who had not ridden a horse in forty years, was helped into one of the carts.
“By the way, Mr. President,” Pitcher said as they rode through the gates, “an old friend of yours named Bill Jones has been very anxious to see you, but I am sorry to say that he has got so drunk that we had to take him out into the sage brush.”
Hell-Roaring Bill Jones! He of the happy triggers, the alkali thirst, and the transcendental cussing!
“I will try to have him meet you before we leave the park,” Pitcher promised. A guide led the way down the canyon, and Roosevelt passed out of sight. Reporters, forbidden to follow, were left hanging round the sidelined train, wondering what stories they could file for the next fifteen days.
A FEW HOURS AFTER the President disappeared, flash news reached Gardiner. Four judges of the United States Eighth Circuit Court in St. Louis had just upheld Roosevelt’s suit against the Northern Securities Company. The opinion came as a shock to most Americans, after more than a year of languid legal proceedings. It showed how the new Expedition Act had strengthened antitrust law. The court had ruled unanimously, in an astonishingly narrow interpretation of the Sherman Act, that mere power of a combination to restrain trade was earnest of intent, whether or not the power was exercised by its holding company.
“If this decision is upheld by the Supreme Court,” James J. Hill was quoted as saying, “no less than eighty-five percent of the railroad systems of the United States will be up in the air.”
William Loeb asked a soldier to hurry word of the court’s ruling along the President’s trail. No reply came back from the silent mountains.
THE NORTHERN SECURITIES opinion was Roosevelt’s fourth political victory in fewer than four weeks. He had also succeeded in winning reciprocity for Cuba, digging rights in Panama, and an equitable arbitration award for last winter’s striking miners. (Their wages had, as expected, been raised 10 percent by the Anthracite Coal Commission.) All these decisions, except the Commission’s, were subject to review: the Cuban treaty by the House of Representatives, the Panama Canal Treaty by the Colombian Senate, and the Circuit Court ruling by the Supreme Court. But America’s perennial flux and reflux of power from the executive branch to the legislative and back again seemed to have turned in his favor.
That did not mean it was anywhere near a full resurgence. His unpopularity on Capitol Hill and Wall Street—as a Chief Executive prone to rash impulses, self-advertisement, and fiscal irresponsibility—was extreme. Remarkably, though, the nation at large (outside the white South) regarded him quite differently, as political observers were everywhere conceding, not without bemusement. One of the most articulate attempts to explain this dichotomy of opinion was that of Henry Herzberg, a New Yorker writing for the Charleston News. He ascribed