Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [226]
At any rate, Taft could be relied on. The President stayed in Washington just long enough to hand him a new, reorganized Isthmian Canal Commission. Then he quit town, leaving instructions that he be wired at any change in the international situation.
THE FIRST IMPORTANT telegram to reach him at “Camp Roosevelt,” outside New Castle, Colorado, was dated 18 April. It reported that Minister Takahira had been to see Taft, and dropped the merest hint that Roosevelt would be acceptable to the Japanese government as a mediator. Apparently, Delcassé was trying to insinuate himself into the negotiatory process. He had undertaken to bring the belligerents together, “provided that Japan would consent to eliminate from the negotiations certain conditions humiliating to Russia.” These included cession of territory and the payment of any indemnity.
Tokyo did not feel confident in the French Minister’s impartiality, since France was allied with Russia, and had ambitions in China herself. But the news that St. Petersburg was now willing to talk peace had prompted Takahira to say to Taft that his government recognized “that the friendly offices of some Power might be necessary” to initiate a peace conference. At the same time, the President of such a Power must understand that the Japanese would negotiate directly, or not at all, and under no advance pledges whatsoever.
Roosevelt wired back to Taft his agreement with Tokyo’s scruples, but added two of his own: Japan must continue her support of the Open Door in Manchuria, and press for full restoration of that province to China. He said nothing about “friendly offices,” since he had not yet been asked to provide them.
While awaiting Takahira’s reaction, he brooded upon an urgent letter von Sternburg had sent him about the Morocco matter. Wilhelm II, unaware that Roosevelt was high in the Rocky Mountains, cut off from the nearest telegraph office by thirty miles of snowdrifts and greasy mud, was asking him to find out if the British government intended to back up France in her attempt to dominate North Africa. Roosevelt detected a note of querulousness, familiar to him from the days of the Venezuela crisis, but was not unsympathetic to the Kaiser’s request. France certainly was abusing the independence of Morocco, as guaranteed by the 1880 Madrid Conference, and Britain, in his opinion, grossly overestimated German Foreign Office aims in Europe.
“I do not care to take sides between France and Germany in the matter,” he wrote Taft on 20 April. “At the same time, if I can find out what Germany wants, I shall be glad to oblige her if possible.” He authorized the Secretary to sound out Sir Mortimer Durand, if “the nice but somewhat fat-witted British intellect will stand it.”
With that, Roosevelt returned to the purpose of his presence in Colorado: the pursuit of bears. He had already killed a big black one (exactly the same weight as Secretary Taft), breaking both its hips with one bullet, and its back with another. In a departure for him, he was hunting with hounds and terriers, some of whom were so mauled by bobcats and lynxes that they could do little afterward but lie around and bleed. It was interesting to watch the pack get revenge when a cat fell off a dead branch, right into a circle of snapping jaws: the Tsar’s imminent predicament.
One little dog, a black-and-tan runt named Skip, adopted Roosevelt and took to sleeping at the foot of the presidential bed, growling at all comers.
The country was wild and steep and, because of its altitude, still in the grip of winter. White peaks massed above the camp—a clutch of tents and one log cabin, pitched in a grove of bare aspens and great spruces beside a rushing, ice-rimmed brook. Each day, Roosevelt and his hunting companion, Dr. Alexander Lambert of New York, rode out after an early breakfast, accompanied by guides and twenty or thirty dogs, and remained