Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [132]
Such a bosom of necessity must surge with overleaping ambition. There are passions ever impelling some righteous action and promptings which ever restrain these moral impulses.
Mr. Roosevelt is bold and fearless yet timid and wary; he is ambitious and striving, but circumspect and cautious. He is imperious in mind, but thoughtful and considerate in action. Whether or not these temperamental traits of Mr. Roosevelt give us a picture of the typical President of the future is doubtful, but certain it is that the nervous energy, the irrepressible ambition, the fascinating elements which predominate in Mr. Roosevelt’s nature represent the American character now in the making.
ROOSEVELT WAS NO stranger to Yellowstone, having first visited it in 1886. As founder of the Boone & Crockett Club, he had worked to save it from vandalism and exploitation, and he took pride in having been a motive force behind the National Park Protective Act of 1894. Only last year he had won an appropriation that made the Yellowstone bison wards of the federal government. Now he could enjoy the benefits of his work in solitude.
Or near solitude. John Burroughs caught cold the first day, and remained behind at Mammoth Hot Springs; but Major Pitcher stuck tight. Roosevelt bided his time. He passed several sociable nights with the superintendent, eating sardines and hardtack round the campfire, and helping wash up in the icy river. Each day, he rode deeper into the park, while snow dust boiled in the peaks and mountain sheep stared down at him, half veiled by their own breath. He feasted his eyes, long starved for the sight of game, on pronghorns and buffalo and black-tailed deer. A giant herd of elk enthralled him for four hours. His ear caught the counterpoint between a solitaire singing at the top of a canyon, and a water-ouzel perched a thousand feet below.
On 12 April, he suddenly said that, as it was Sunday, he wished to “take a walk alone.” Pitcher felt unable to deny a President’s desire for private devotion, so Roosevelt marched happily off and for six hours worshiped God in his own fashion.
There were rumors, later on, of rifle shots echoing in the park, and Roosevelt was definitely seen with a cartridge bruise on his cheek. But Pitcher announced that the President had merely indulged in “a little target shooting” back at camp and been wounded by an ejected shell.
Burroughs, who had rejoined the party, confirmed this. Roosevelt was sincere in his vow not to kill local wildlife, even such permissible prey as coyotes and cougar. He still lusted, or thought that he lusted, after big game, but nowadays it was the pursuit, rather than the quarry, that interested him. A new protective sensibility was notable in his account of these days in Yellowstone:
Every man who appreciates the majesty and beauty of the wilderness and of wild life, should strike hands with the far-sighted men who wish to preserve our material resources, in the effort to keep our forests and our game-beasts, game-birds, and game-fish—indeed, all the living creatures of prairie and woodland and seashore—from wanton destruction. Above all, we should recognize that the effort toward this end is essentially a democratic movement. It is entirely within our power as a nation to preserve large tracts of wilderness, which are valueless for agricultural purposes and unfit for settlement, as playgrounds for rich and poor alike.… But this end can only be achieved by wise laws and by a resolute enforcement of the laws.
Roosevelt expressed contempt for “the kind of game butcher … who leaves deer and ducks and prairie chickens to rot,” worse still market hunters and rich dilettantes who hunted by proxy.
Only once did he weaken, when a four-inch meadow mouse hopped across his path. He slew it in the interest