Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [133]
BACK IN GARDINER, bored members of the White House press detail fished, scavenged for elk antlers, and got drunk with mountain men. Their thirdhand reports of Roosevelt’s activities began to sound slightly testy. When word came that the President had watched Old Faithful erupting and its mist turning to hail as it fell, the New York World man called it “his only rival in intermittent but continuous spouting.”
Finally, on 24 April, a cloud of dust in the foothills signaled the President’s return. The train was shunted out of its siding, and Hell-Roaring Bill Jones brought in from the sagebrush, stark sober for the first time in years, for a quick reunion. Before leaving, Roosevelt dedicated a new arched gateway to the park, calling Yellowstone a “veritable wonderland,” and noted that Europeans seemed more interested in visiting it than were most Americans. He spoke feelingly about forest reserves, buffalo breeding, and Yellowstone’s “essential democracy.” Then, with a flash of teeth (his face dark tan with snow burn, his nose peeling), he swung aboard the Elysian and was gone. The train moved northeast, then southeast, descending to levels of hotter, thicker air.
On the flatland, it accelerated to maximum speed, crossing the Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska state lines in a single day. The succession of prairie hamlets blurred into a dreary pattern to travelers on board. Always a long, low depot, red-painted and sand-coated, with wide, rakish eaves; always a concentration of buggies and carts, iron filings magnetized on the papersheet plain; Roosevelt running out onto his platform and waving, sometimes with his table napkin. (“Those children wanted to see the President of the United States, and I could not disappoint them.”) Then the cheers suddenly stifled, as if a door had been slammed, and in dwindling retrospect, the sight of families turning their backs against whorls of white dust.
At whistle-stops, always the local dignitaries, with their furrowed eyes and crooked medals and drooping trousers, silver cornets playing “Hail to the Chief,” whiskery veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, a bobbing sea of bowlers and bonnets, and invariably, boys on telegraph poles screeching, “How are you, Teddy?”
Just as invariably, the President would rehearse his litany of McGuffey Reader virtues (“If I might give a word of advice to Omaha …”) until reporters no longer bothered to transcribe them. Only Roosevelt found new stimulation eight or ten times a day, thundering every platitude with the pleased air of having just discovered it. He was quite unapologetic: “Platitudes and iteration are necessary in order to hammer the truths and principles I advocate into people’s heads.”
Indistinguishable as the whistle-stops soon became, even to him, each was supreme drama to a little audience that had been looking forward to it for weeks. Some buggy travelers had come one hundred miles to perch on the platform and peer endlessly at the horizon, waiting for a smudge of smoke to signal that “Teddy” was imminent. Then a speck growing in the smoke, a crescendo of wind and wheels, a great locomotive advancing—too fast, surely, to stop? Despair as it indeed keeps moving. Relief when it halts, after all, under the water tank one hundred yards down the track. A general stampede toward the Elysian, where Roosevelt stands grinning in frock coat and vest. He leans over the rail, pumping hands and tousling cowlicks. “Dee-lighted!” Rearing back, he begins to orate, punctuating every sentence with palm-smacks and dental percussion, while his listeners stand mesmerized. The engine bell rings; the train jerks forward. Another grin, and a farewell wave. The Cheshire-cat flash of those teeth floats in the sky long after the train is a speck again.
“WHEREVER HE WENT, INFANTS WERE BRANDISHED AT HIM.”
The President on his cross-country tour, 1903 (photo credit 15.1)
THE “ESSENTIAL DEMOCRACY” of Yellowstone—its lesson that government can both