CHAPTER 9 Hermann Hagedorn’s: The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt.

THE  END   OF   THE  IDYL

THE season which began with Finnegan and company proved poor from a business stand-point, but rich in varied experiences.  The cattle had not come through the winter well.  Many of the weaker animals had died.  The price of beef, meanwhile, remained low.  But though Roosevelt was not getting much financial return on his rather generous investment, he was getting other things, for him at this time of far greater value.  He who had been weak in body and subject to racking illnesses had in these three years developed a constitution as tough and robust as an Indian's.  He had achieved something besides this.  Living, talking, working, facing danger, and suffering hardships with the Sewalls and the Dows, with Merrifield and the Ferrises and Hell-roaring Bill Jones and countless other stalwart citizens of the Bad Lands, he had come very close to the heart of the ''plain American. ''

He loved the wild country, he loved the vigorous life, but, most of all, he loved the "plain Americans" as he came to know them in Dakota. 

And it happened that they also loved him Even Finnegan.  For Finnegan, who had cried out, before they parted, "If I'd had any show at all, you'd have sure had to fight, Mr.  Roosevelt," wrote him a few weeks later,'' Should you stop at Bismarck this fall, make a call at the prison.  I should be glad to meet you. "

It was. no wonder that Roosevelt wrote his brother-in-law that July, " If I continued to make long stays here I should very soon get to practically give up the East entirely. "

Roosevelt wrote much that summer, putting the finishing touches on his Life of Benton; but more than half the time he was in the open, working on the various round-ups, riding among the line camps, hunting, breaking colts.  He broke other things besides colts a rib on one occasion when the pony bucked him off on a rock.  He made a speech to a Fourth of July crowd of cowboys and grangers at Dickinson; he opened a hop with the wife of a notorious gun-fighter at Medora; he pronounced a friendly benediction on two babies which arrived at Elkhorn Ranch within a week of each other; and once, when he was alone on the prairie, he successfully repulsed a small band of Indians. 

The Indian adventure happened this way.  He had been traveling along the edge of the prairie on a solitary journey to the unexplored country north and east of the range on which his cattle grazed, and was crossing a narrow plateau when he suddenly saw a group of four or five Indians come up over the edge, directly in front.  As they saw him they whipped their guns out of their slings, started their horses into a run, and came toward him at full speed. 

He reined up instantly and dismounted. 

The Indians came on, whooping and brandishing their weapons. 

Roosevelt laid his gun across the saddle and waited.  When they were within a hundred yards he threw up his rifle and drew a bead on the foremost rider. 

The effect was instantaneous.  The Indians flung themselves over the sides of their horses, scattered, wheeled, and doubled on their tracks.  At some distance, they halted and gathered, evidently for a conference. 

Thereupon one man came forward alone, making the peace sign first with his blanket and then with his open hand.  Roosevelt let him come to within fifty yards.  The Indian was waving a piece of soiled paper, his reservation pass. 

"How! Me good Indian!" he called. 

"How!" Roosevelt answered.  "I'm glad you are.  But don't come any closer. "

Now from the right and the left the other Indians began almost imperceptibly to draw toward him. 

Roosevelt whipped up his gun once more, covering the spokesman.  That individual burst into a volume of perfect Anglo-Saxon profanity; but he retired, which was what he was supposed to do.  Roosevelt led the faithful Manitou off toward the plains.  The Indians hovered about, but he was watchful, and they knew that he had a gun and that he was not afraid.  They vanished in the radiant dust of the prairie. 

He had another adventure that summer, and it came uncomfortably close to costing him his life.  It was in September and he had gone west to the Coeur d'Alene Mountains with Merrifield and a guide an extraordinary woodsman but a man of more than dubious morals for a fortnight's chase after white goats.  The country through which they hunted was a vast wooded wilderness of towering peaks on every side, and valleys that lay half in darkness between timbered slopes or steep rock walls.  Wild torrents sprang down through the chasms. 

They camped far up in the mountains, hunting day after day through the deep woods just below the timber-line.  The climbing was very hard, and the footing was treacherous.  There was endless underbrush, thickets of prickly balsam or laurel but there were no goats. 

At last, one mid-afternoon, as he was supporting himself against a tree, half-way across a long landslide, Roosevelt suddenly discovered one of the beasts he was after/a short distance away, waddling down a hill, looking for all the world like a handsome tame billy.  He was in a bad position for a shot, and as he twisted himself about he dislodged some pebbles.  The goat, instantly alert, fled.  Roosevelt fired, but the shot went low, only breaking a foreleg. 

The three men raced and scrambled after the fleeing animal.  It leaped along the hillside for nearly a mile, then turned straight up the mountain.  They followed the bloody trail where it went up the sharpest and steepest places, skirting the cliffs and precipices. 

Roosevelt, intent on the quarry, was not what Bill Sewall would have called "over-cautious" in the pursuit. 

He was running along a shelving ledge when a piece of loose slate with which the ledge was covered slipped under his foot.  He clutched at the rock wall, he tried to fling himself back, but he could not recover himself. 

He went head first over the precipice. 

There is probably something in the theory of guardian angels.  Theodore Roosevelt's particular guardian angel that day took the form of a clump of evergreens in the ravine forty or fifty feet below.  The angel whoever he was caught the falling huntsman in a tall pine, sent him bouncing through it, and brought him up, finally and reasonably comfortably, in a thick balsam, somewhat shaken and scratched, but with no bones broken and with his rifle still clutched in his hand. 

From far above came the hoarse voice of the guide, "Are you hurt?"

"No," answered Roosevelt, a trifle breathlessly. 

"Then come on!"

Roosevelt "came on," scrambling back up the steep height he had so swiftly descended, and raced after the guide.  He came upon the goat at last, but, winded as he was and with the sweat in his eyes, he shot too high, cutting the skin above the spine.  The goat plunged downhill and the hunters plunged after him, pursuing the elusive animal until darkness covered the trail. 

Roosevelt brought him down next day at noon. 
He returned to Elkhorn to find that, during his fortnight's absence, two important things had happened. 

The first was the arrival of a letter notifying him that a non-partisan organization, including the most prominent citizens of New York City, Democrats as well as Republicans, intended, with his consent, to make him their candidate for Mayor at the coming election. 

The other was the return of Wilmot Dow from Chicago with the report that the best price he had been able to secure for the hundreds of cattle he had taken to the market there was less by ten dollars a head than the sum they had cost to raise and transport. 

Roosevelt had gone into the cattle business against the urgent advice and remonstrances of his family and his other friends.  He did not like to admit that he had not "made good. " He was not at all sure, in fact, that with ordinary luck he might not yet succeed.  But he recognized that Sewall had been right that first evening at Chimney Butte.  The Bad Lands were not a good region for cattle.  The winters were too severe for the young stock.  He might yet win through, and he might not.  The thing was a gamble in any event.  He himself could afford to take the risk.  Sewall and Dow could not. 

He called them to his room.    He had made a verbal agreement with them the year previous, stipulating that if business were prosperous they were to have a share in it; if not, they were to have wages in any event. 

"What do you think of that, Bill?" Roosevelt had said. 

"I call that a one-sided trade," Sewall had answered.  "But if you can stand it, I guess we can. "

In his room that day, a year later, Roosevelt told them that he had been "figuring up things. " He would stand by his agreement, he said, if, facing an uncertain outcome, they wished to remain; but, if they were willing, he thought they had better '' quit the business and go back. "

Sewall and Dow did not hesitate.  They said they would go back. 

"I never wanted to fool away anybody else's money," Sewall added.  "Never had any of my own to fool away. "

"How soon can you go?" asked Roosevelt. 

Sewall turned and went into the kitchen "to ask the women folks. " Their babies known to their families and to an endless succession of cowboys who came from near and far to inspect them, as "the Bad Lands babies" were just six weeks old. 

"They say they can go in three weeks," Sewall reported. 

"Three weeks from today," answered Roosevelt, "we go. "

And so the folks from Maine who had made a rough and simple house in a desolate country into the only home Theodore Roosevelt had known in almost three years, began to gather together their belongings and pack up.  It was the end of what had been a wonderful idyl whose impermanence Wise old Bill Sewall had been the only one fully to recognize. 

"You'll come to feel different," he had said the year before, when Roosevelt had been lonely and despondent, "and then you won't want to stay here. "

Sewall had been right.  Life, which for a while had seemed to Theodore Roosevelt so gray and dismal, had slowly taken on new color.  He had become engaged to Edith Carow, the "Eidieth" of the portrait which had '' stired up " in him '' homesickness and longings for the past which will come again never aback never," that far-away November in Paris when he was just eleven.  His interest in politics reawoke. 

And yet during those last weeks at Elkhorn he was not at all sure that he wished to re-enter the turmoil of politics.  He rode out into the prairie one day for a last "session" with Bill Sewall shortly before the three weeks were up.  He told Sewall he had an idea he ought to go into law. 

"You'd be a good lawyer," said Bill, "but I think you ought to go into politics.  Good men like you ought to go into politics.  If you do, and if you live, I think you'll be President. "

Roosevelt laughed.  "That's looking a long way ahead. "

"It may look a long way ahead of you," Sewall declared, stoutly, "but it isn't as far ahead as it's been for some of the men who got there
 
"I'm going home now," said Roosevelt, "to see about a job my friends want me to take.  I don't think I want it.  It will get me into a row.  And I want to write. "

Roosevelt went East a day or two after, leaving his cattle in charge of Merrifield and the Ferrises, on shares.  The Sewalls and Dows, with the little girl and the "Bad Lands babies," followed within a week. 

Neither Roosevelt nor the "folks from Maine" were sentimentalists.  They shed no tears, but they were all aware that for all of them a "golden age" had come to an end.  The women were conscious of it, but it was the men who felt it most keenly. 

There were six of them Bill Sewall and Will Dow, Joe Ferris and his brother Sylvane, Joe Merrifield, most daring of all, and Theodore Roosevelt.  They had bunked together and eaten together; hunted together and ridden on the round-up together; suffered hunger and thirst together on the parched plains and among the scraggy buttes of the Bad Lands; struggled against the fierce storms of winter when there was no such thing as turning back and every step forward was sheer, aching misery; risked their necks together and called it the "day's work"; and on winter evenings sat before the blazing fire together in the warm security of the ranch-house and talked of poetry and adventure and of the needs and the great past of their country. 

For five of them it was a joyous experience to remember to their dying day and to tell their children about, and their children's children so much and no more.  But for the sixth it was a decisive factor in his life, that transformed an Eastern aristocrat with a Northern father and a Southern mother into a democratic American, whom thereafter no section could claim exclusively, because in his spirit he was akin to all. 

Theodore Roosevelt accepted the nomination of the independents for Mayor of New York City, believing that the non-partisan organization which had offered him the nomination actually represented a fusion of large and important elements in the Democratic and Republican parties.  When the Republican organization indorsed his nomination, he decided that there was a real chance that he might win, and leaped whole-heartedly into the campaign. 

But he had misjudged the situation.  A new "United Labor Party" had nominated Henry George on a single-tax platform; Tammany Hall had resorted to camouflage and nominated Abram S.  Hewitt, an admirable and public-spirited citizen.  The fight was hopeless from the start.  The thoughtful elements in the city, on whose support against the radicalism of Henry George on the one hand, and the corruption of Tammany on the other, he had believed he could safely count, became panic-stricken at the possibility of a labor victory and gave their votes to Hewitt. 

Roosevelt conducted a lively campaign, and here and there among his audiences the spark of his enthusiasm for just and honest government began to kindle the hearts of young men to a fervor more profound and lasting than the effervescence of ordinary election excitement. 

For the first time young men, under the spell of the hot sincerity of Theodore Roosevelt, aged twenty-eight, began to say, "That's the man for me!"

He was not elected; in fact, he ran third.  

"But, anyway," he said, cheerfully, "I had a bully time. "

He went abroad immediately after election, and in December, at St.  George's, Hanover Square, London, he married Edith Kermit Carow. 

Theodore Roosevelt and his wife returned to America early in the new year and immediately moved into the new house on Sagamore Hill, at Oyster Bay, which Roosevelt had built two years previously and which, with its wide view over woods and waters, was to be "home" thereafter.  Aside from certain work in the Republican organization, Roosevelt took no part in politics.  He thought of himself, in fact, not as a politician at all, but as a man of letters.  His Life of Benton had been published the previous autumn and had quickly run into a second and third edition.  He was now at work on its successor, the Life of Gouverneur Morris, and was already gathering material for what was to be his greatest historical work, The Winning of the West. 

Meanwhile, the news from Dakota was bad.  The winter had been terrible in its severity.  The snow-fall had been unprecedented, beginning in November and, day by day, piling the drifts higher and higher until the ravines were almost level.  The cattle on the hills died by hundreds and thousands of starvation and the cold.  Half of Roosevelt's herd was destroyed. 

It was a severe blow.  He went West in April to see for himself how great the loss was. 
You cannot imagine anything more dreary than the look of the Bad Lands when I went out there [he wrote to Sewall on his return].  Everything was cropped as bare as a bone.  The sage-brush was just fed out by the starving cattle.  The snow lay so deep that nobody could get around; it was almost impossible to get a horse a mile.  In almost every coulee there were dead cattle.  There were nearly three hundred in Wads-worth bottom.  Annie came through all right; Angus died.  Only one or two of our horses died; but the OX lost sixty head.  In one of Monroe's draws I counted in a single patch of brushwood twenty-three dead cows and calves.  

The losses are immense; the only ray of comfort is that I hear the grass is very good this summer.  You boys were lucky to get out when you did; if you had waited till this spring I guess it would have been a case of walking. 

During his flying visit to the Little Missouri in April he moved the Ferrises and Merrifield down from Chimney Butte to Elkhorn.  In the autumn he was again at the ranch to assist in the round-up of a train-load of cattle which he subsequently sold at Chicago (again at a loss, for the prices for beef were even lower than the previous year).  He went on a brief hunt after antelope in the broken country between the Little Missouri and the Beaver; he fought a raging prairie fire with the blood from the split carcass of a steer; and, feeling very fit, returned back to his family and his books. 

A month later, his son, Theodore Roosevelt, Junior, was born. 

He was now increasingly busy with his writing, completing that winter a volume of vigorous sketches of the frontier called Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, besides his Life of Gouverneur Morris and a book of Essays on Practical Politics.  He took some part in the Presidential campaign that summer, but in September he was again at Elkhorn and again on the chase, this time in the Selkirks in northern Idaho, camping on Kootenai Lake, and from there, on foot, with a pack on his back, ranging among the high peaks with his old guide, John Willis, and an Indian named Ammal, who was pigeon-toed and mortally afraid of hobgoblins.  He brought down a black bear and a great bull caribou, and returned East only to throw himself into a struggle of another sort.  The political campaign was drawing to a close.  President Cleveland was running for re-election against Benjamin Harrison, the Republican nominee.  Harrison was elected. 

Roosevelt was now living, winter and summer, at Oyster Bay, writing and studying, gathering material for his new book, and keeping in physical trim by playing polo (not well, but as well as he could) with certain neighbors of his who, like himself, cared more for the sport than the exact science of the game.  In the same spirit he hunted with the Meadowbrook hounds and was regularly in at the death, not because he was a good rider on a good horse, but because, though only a respectable rider riding an ex-buggy horse, he would not allow even a broken arm or the fact that his horse might take it into his head to throw him at every fence to interfere with the day's business.  He led a life of varied activity, but still he was half uncertain whether he had actually found his proper career.  More than once he was impelled to go into business.  He felt that he must in self-respect leave to his children a heritage either of wealth or a widely honored name.  He had grave doubts whether his books would bring him either.  The critics took particular pains to point out to him, not altogether correctly, that, though his writings were interesting, they were not "literature. "

The new Administration was inaugurated in March, 1889.  In May, President Harrison offered Roosevelt a place on the Civil Service Commission.  'Roosevelt had hoped that he might be appointed First Assistant of Blaine, who was Secretary of State, but Blaine was afraid of the younger man's rather aggressive independence. 

The position of Civil Service Commissioner was not one to appeal to an active and ambitious man.  It was in a sense a graveyard where many a good man had been deposited by his friends to be heard of no more.  It led nowhere except to oblivion, for the conflict which a Civil Service Commissioner must carry on unceasingly with Congressmen on questions of patronage is not of a character to make smooth the road of political advancement. 

Roosevelt's friends advised him earnestly not to accept the place.  He would be side-tracked for life, they said. 

He believed heartily in civil-service reform.  He was restless, moreover, for some definite work into which he could fling his superabundant energy, besides study and the making of what the critics stubbornly refused to call "literature. "

He accepted the offer, to the despair of his counselors, and immediately set out for Washington to take over his new duties.