CHAPTER 14 Hermann Hagedorn’s: The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt.

HE   INAUGURATES  A  NEW  ERA

HE arrived at Buffalo at three o'clock that afternoon.  The members of the Cabinet, he was told, were awaiting him at the house of Ansley Wilcox, on Delaware Avenue, where he had stayed earlier in the week; but he asked to be driven first to the house where the body of William McKinley was lying.  The crowds on the streets were dense, and cheered him as he was driven swiftly by.  He drew back to the rear of the coach.  It did not seem to him the time for cheering. 

He found the members of the Cabinet assembled at the Wilcox house, when he arrived.  Only Secretary Gage and Secretary Hay were absent.  There were, besides, twenty or thirty personal friends in the room.  Elihu Root, Secretary of War, drew him aside.  With arms on each other's shoulders they conversed in whispers in the bay-window. 

Judge Hazel of the Federal Circuit Court drew near. 

The two men at the window turned.  Then the Secretary of War spoke. 

"Mr.  Vice-President" he began.  His voice broke.  "I" He dropped his head and was silent for what seemed an endless time.  The silence was oppressive.  No one stirred.  A bird chirped suddenly outside. 

Roosevelt's eyes were brimming with tears and his face was set in a stern effort at self-control.  The Secretary of War raised his head.  His voice when he spoke was tremulous with feeling, but his words were deliberate and clear.  The members of the Cabinet, he said, wished that, for reasons of state, he should take the oath at once. 

Roosevelt, too, had difficulty in controlling his emotion and governing his voice.  '' I shall take the oath at once in response to your request," he said.  "And in this hour of deep and terrible bereavement I wish to state that it shall be my aim to continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President McKinley for the peace and prosperity of our beloved country. "

Then Judge Hazel administered the oath. 

"I do solemnly swear," Roosevelt repeated, holding his hand high, "that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. "

And to that he added, with what one of the men present called his "terrible earnestness" "And thus I swear. "

A half-hour later he held his first Cabinet meeting. 

"I wish each of you gentlemen," he said, "to remain as a member of my Cabinet.  I need your advice and counsel.  I tender you the office in the same manner that I would tender it if I were entering upon the discharge of my duties as the result of an election by the people, with this distinction, however, that I cannot accept a declination. "

There were no declinations, though the Secretaries had their own notions concerning the possibility of a McKinley Cabinet becoming a Roosevelt Cabinet. 

And so the country again had a President.  The anarchist had with his crime shaken the American people to the depths, but not for an instant had he shaken the structure of orderly government.  A week passed by.  The new President returned from the funeral of his predecessor and took up his residence at the White House.  The business of the nation went on without a break. 

It was only after months had passed that men began dimly to realize that during the night of that wild ride from Tahawus to North Creek an era had ended. 

Theodore Roosevelt, suddenly the center of the world's attention, walked up and down his new study and began to dictate his first message to Congress. 

It was delivered on December 3d.  The last faint rumors that the new President was a wild revolutionist died amid the chorus of praise which the message evoked.  Europe recognized that a great constructive statesman was at the helm in America and paid enthusiastic tribute.  Only the papers of Vienna and Berlin growled.  They did not like the references to the Monroe Doctrine.  A London paper quoted the Kaiser as saying that the "American peril" was the great question of the future. 

Roosevelt's main interest, at the moment, was not in international affairs, but in the intelligent adjustment of the relations of capital and labor.  He saw, as few others saw it, that the era of unhampered, cutthroat competition, which had followed the Civil War, was ended.  Under pioneers like Morgan, Harriman, and James J.  Hill vast stretches of country had been opened to settlement and agriculture, and trade had wonderfully expanded.  Not these men only, but all their countrymen had, through their prosperity, prospered in turn.  The individualism of the pioneers had brought evils with it.  A generation ago the benefits of their activities had far outweighed the evils.  Gradually the balance had shifted.  The enormous growth and extension of the power of the financial and industrial leaders had given them an almost despotic control over vast numbers of their fellow-citizens.  Some of these leaders regarded themselves as above the law.  Governors, legislatures, and judges were their tools; college presidents, preachers, and the editors of the greatest newspapers in the country their agents and defenders.  Their grip on both great political parties seemed absolute.  An insurrection in one of them, such as the free-silver crusade in 1896, served by its crude excesses only to make more firm than before their control over the other. 

Meanwhile, the rapid increase in population caused congestion in the cities, and conditions approaching slavery in the mines and large industries.  The great mass vaguely known as "the working-class" muttered and protested.  There were strikes and riots, put down with ruthless violence by troops under the direct or indirect command of the employers.  Laws that were passed to better the conditions of the employee or to curb the greed of the employer were either never enforced or flatly declared unconstitutional by judges controlled by the financial interests, or out of touch with actual conditions. 

During the last decade of the nineteenth century the country was in grave danger of becoming a plutocracy, with tyrannical power in the hands of a small group of selfish and unscrupulous men.  That it did not become such a plutocracy is due largely to the clear vision and unfaltering leadership of Theodore Roosevelt. 

Roosevelt demanded that corporations be supervised and regulated.  He insisted, moreover, that they be punished, not for their size, but only for their misdeeds.  He promised capital, as he promised labor, even-handed justice, a "square deal. "

He discovered with somewhat of a shock that a "square deal" was not the sort of thing that either side wanted.  Both wanted favors at the expense of the other party. 

Roosevelt's first great action against the intrenched forces of capital was taken against the Northern Securities Company, a merger of five great railways in the Northwest.  The merger had been formed in good faith on the basis of a decision made by the Supreme Court in a case involving the Sugar Trust.  Roosevelt believed the decision unwarranted.  He knew, moreover, that if it were allowed to stand as a precedent, the hands of the government would be forever tied in its dealings with the trusts.  He ordered the Attorney-General to bring suit against the Northern Securities Company for dissolution. 

The "interests" protested wildly.  They knew what vital matters were at stake.  Roosevelt himself knew that on the decision of the court depended the question whether or not the government had power to deal with the great corporations.  The case went its leisurely way;   the  President  and  the country waited. 

Meanwhile, a new spirit was invading the official world of Washington.  Men going to the Capital with ideas in their heads no longer wandered from department to department, hunting in vain for some one to take them seriously.  They went straight to the White House, certain to find a welcome there.  

The President was a busy man, conferring with Senators and Congressmen, dictating messages and speeches and letters by the hundred, receiving deputations by the dozen, entertaining men from the four corners of the earth, a prince from Germany and a negro from Alabama, riding, boxing, playing tennis, unveiling a monument here, opening an exposition there, reading novels, history, poetry, and scientific treatises on the side, romping jubilantly with his children down the dignified corridors of the White House or up the crags of Rock Creek Park, fighting always at the drop of the hat for a good cause. 

Presidents in the past had all too often been slightly animated statues.  The new President was a throbbing machine.  He was a tireless worker, because by nature he loved work.  He reached out for information in a thousand directions; he poured out his gospel with unabating ardor. 

The Oldest Inhabitant declared that no President had ever flung himself with so much energy and enthusiasm into so many divergent activities; yet, nevertheless, he was accessible at all times to friends and opponents alike.  Cabinet officers, ambassadors, admirals, generals, and travelers from afar dropped in at the White House, confident that the President would have time for a word and a handshake; and Otto Raphael, police sergeant in New York, and Seth Bullock, marshal in South Dakota, rang the bell without waiting for an invitation, knowing that "the Colonel" would turn his back on princes and potentates with a cheer, to ask them about the wife and the babies.     Representatives of capital came, and representatives of labor came. 

"At last," said one of the "labor men" at luncheon one day, "there is a hearing for us fellows. "

"Yes!" cried the President, emphatically.  "The White House door, while I am here, shall swing open as easily for the labor man as for the capitalist and no easier,"

White men and black men, educated men and men with no education at all, rich men and poor men, men of every religion and men of none, were welcomed by the new President, not from any sense of duty, but from an inveterate hunger for understanding.  To him every man who crossed his line of vision was important.  He sought to learn from them all, from one a new point of view, from another a new method of approach, from a third, perhaps, the psychology of some dangerous prejudice which only clear vision and sympathy could overcome. 

He made himself accessible to the thoughts and feelings of every section of the American people; in countless ways he endeavored to find out their reaction to the problems of the time.  Then, with a clear understanding of their needs and their prejudices, he led them not where they, in their lethargy or their blindness to the true issues, desired to go, but where he, standing on the vantage-point of the Presidency, saw that they ought to go. 

He knew the compelling power of the line of least resistance.  He knew men's natural tendency to seek the easiest grade, and, being a good leader, he inspired the people with a desire to climb.  

The nation felt the new impulse before Roosevelt had been half a year in office.  Under its spell a new type of public servant began to appear here and there, a type vastly removed from the hard and callous politician to whom Washington was accustomed.  They were men who wanted neither money nor personal honor, but only the opportunity to serve; men of vision who realized that fate had suddenly thrust upon the country a man not only of power, but of constructive imagination. 

Two such men called on him the day he arrived in Washington after the funeral of President McKin-ley.  He had not yet taken up his residence at the White House, and they went to the house of his brother-in-law, Captain Cowles, where he was staying, to lay before him their plans for the reclamation and irrigation of the arid lands of the Southwest and the consolidation of the forest work of the government in the Forestry Bureau.  The men were Frederick Hayes Newell and Gifford Pinchot. 

Roosevelt had since the ranch days been a warm believer in reclamation, and immediately asked them to prepare material on the subject for use in his forthcoming Message.  They did so. 

"The forest and water problems," he declared in that Message, '' are perhaps the most vital problems of the United States. "

On the day the Message was read a committee was organized in Congress to prepare a Reclamation bill.  A bill was drawn up.  Roosevelt worked over it, revised it, fought for it against the forces of privilege who saw their interests threatened.  Before he had been President nine months the bill was passed. 

One of the greatest movements of the time, under the spur of his enthusiasm and determination, had developed in less than a year from a vague dream into a living and moving actuality. 

Congress had passed the Reclamation bill not without a struggle, for the men who were willing to sacrifice public to private interest were strong; but still, Congress had passed it, not realizing fully the far-reaching effect of the movement of which it marked the beginning.  On the control of corporations, however, Congress stood firm.  Roosevelt asked that they be legalized under restraint such as the Interstate Commerce Commission already exercised over the railroads. 

Congress turned a deaf ear.  It refused to create the Department of Commerce and Labor; it rejected reciprocity with Cuba. 

The President was not the man lightly to accept defeat.  He went over the head of Congress to the people.  He traveled hither and thither, making clear his attitude on the great questions of the day, especially '' big business'' and its regulation.  Everywhere, enormous crowds gathered to hear him.  Radicals and conservatives alike saw in his views, but most of all in his attitude of mind, a hope for the solution of the vexing problem.  The "common people" greeted him as their champion. 

"Under the old regime," said an admirer at the time, "the people got the impression that it was useless to fight against the influence of corporations and machine politics, but Roosevelt gave them back their hope and made them think that a fight was indeed worth while. "

In April he was at Charleston, in June at Pittsburg, in August and early September in New England (escaping death by a miracle at Pittsfield in a crash with a trolley-car that smashed his carriage, flung him on his face by the roadside, and killed the Secret Service guard on the box); three days later he was in West Virginia, then in Ohio, in Tennessee, in Indiana; then home again at the White House because of an abscess in his leg due to the Pittsfield accident, going through the busy round of his activities on crutches, and, in a new Message, reiterating his demands on Congress with the confidence that he had the people behind him.  Less than a week later, with his bandaged leg on a chair, he was moving to end the greatest strike in history. 

Early in the spring the workers in the anthracite coal-mines in Pennsylvania, under the leadership of John Mitchell, president of the United Mine Workers of America, had struck for higher wages, and during the succeeding months practically no coal whatever had been mined.  The miners and the operators became deeply embittered, and between them the public stood helpless.  Coal rose in September to twenty-five dollars a ton.  Unless coal should be promptly available a frightful calamity threatened the country, as terrible, Roosevelt knew, as an invasion of a hostile army of overwhelming force.  

Coal was a necessity of life, and he could, as he wrote Mrs.  Cowles, "no more see misery and death come to the great masses of the people in our large cities and sit by idly because under ordinary conditions a strike is not a subject for interference by the President," than he "could sit by idly and see one man kill another without interference because there is no statutory duty imposed on the President to interfere in such cases. "

Toward the end of September he communicated with the operators and with the miners, asking them to agree to the appointment of a commission of arbitration and to promise to accept its findings, the miners to go to work as soon as the commission was appointed, at the old rate of wages. 

The miners agreed, but the operators flatly refused. 

Thereupon, on October ist, the President invited the operators and representatives of the miners to the White House for a conference.  Two days later the conference was held.  Mitchell, speaking for the miners, repeated their acceptance of the President's proposal; but the operators were stubborn.  They said that they would far rather die of cold than yield on such a high principle as recognizing arbitration with the striking miners. 

The trouble with the excellent gentlemen was [wrote Roosevelt to his sister two weeks later] that they were not in danger of dying of cold.  They would pay extra for their coal and would get insufficient quantities and would suffer discomfort, but the poorer people around about them would and could get no coal, and with them it would not be discomfort, but acute misery and loss of life.  In other words, those people really meant that they would rather somebody else should die of cold than that they should yield.  Such a position was impossible. 

The conference broke up without result.  The operators exultantly announced that they had "turned down" not only the miners, but the President. 

Roosevelt refused to accept the rebuff, for he recognized that he had not only justice and right on his side, but also the majority of the American people.  From here, there, and everywhere came expressions of hearty support of his action and rage at his adversaries.  The country was losing patience.  In endless conferences with representatives of the operators he tried in vain to make clear to them that, in their own interest, they must yield or be completely overwhelmed. 

In his first Message he had said, "The American people are slow to wrath, but when their wrath is once kindled it burns like a consuming flame. "

Roosevelt saw, what the operators refused to see, that in a winter of coal famine lay the menace of revolution. 

Day in, day out, he worked for an agreement. 

"May Heaven preserve me," he exclaimed in a letter to his sister at that time, "from ever again dealing with so wooden-headed a set, when I wish to preserve their interests!"

At last, after two weeks, the operators, seeing dimly the writing on the wall, yielded, agreeing to arbitrate. 

"Yes, we have put it through," wrote the President to Governor Crane of Massachusetts.     "But, heavens and earth! it has been a struggle. "

Roosevelt did not tell the operators until long after that if they had not voluntarily yielded he would have taken action which they would have long remembered.  His plans for the emergency were complete.  Major-General Schofield, supported by United States troops, would have taken over and operated the mines as a receiver while Grover Cleveland and a special commission arbitrated the miners' claims. 

The President had made up his mind that the American people were not to be without coal. 

Roosevelt brought the coal strike to an end the middle of October.  A month later he was hunting bears (unsuccessfully) in Mississippi.  A month later, again, he came suddenly face to face with Germany and the prospect of war. 

The crisis arose over the same troublesome nation which had come so near to precipitating war between the United States and England in 1895.  Venezuela was now under the dictatorship of a shrewd and unscrupulous adventurer named Castro, who, secure, as he believed, in the protection of the United States under the Monroe Doctrine, was cheerfully defying half of Europe.  Venezuelan citizens owed large sums of money to Germany, England, and Italy.  Collection of these debts proved difficult.  Castro intimated that Europe might come and get the money if it wanted it. 

Germany, always on the alert for an opportunity to gain a foothold in South America, as, a year or two previous, she had gained a foothold in China, now approached the governments of England and Italy with a view of effecting joint intervention to protect the interests of their citizens in Venezuela.  Both nations agreed to co-operate, and all sent gun-boats to blockade the Venezuelan coast.  Castro protested vociferously to the United States. 

John Hay, Secretary of State, answered that the Monroe Doctrine did not mean that the United States would preserve any South American nation from the consequences of its own financial indiscretions. 

The so-called "pacific blockade" continued for a year.  Numerous neutral vessels were sunk.  Hay lodged an emphatic protest and urged arbitration. 

The allied nations refused, and on December 8, 1902, England and Germany broke off diplomatic relations with Venezuela, intimating that the next move would be the bombardment of Venezuelan towns and the occupation of Venezuelan territory. 

At this point President Roosevelt took charge of the negotiations.  He saw that in the invasion of a weak debtor state by a naval or military expedition lay a threat against the Monroe Doctrine.  He advised the nations to come to an understanding. 

England and Italy expressed their willingness to do so, but Germany refused, declaring that any occupation of territory would be only "temporary. "

Roosevelt, having notions of his own about the probability of Germany's relinquishment of any territory on which she had once planted her flag, summoned to the White House Doctor von Holleben, the German ambassador.  An American squadron, under Admiral Dewey, was off the coast of Cuba, he told him.  Unless Germany consented to arbitrate her Venezuelan claims he would order Dewey at noon, ten days later, to proceed to the Venezuelan coast and prevent, by force of arms, if necessary, the landing of a German expedition. 

The ambassador-whom Hay had described as a man "absolutely without initiative and in mortal terror of his Kaiser" protested that the Emperor had refused to arbitrate and could not change his mind now. 

"I am not arguing the question," answered the President.  "The arguments have all been gone over and no useful purpose is served in repeating them.  I am merely giving you information which you may consider important to transmit to Berlin. "

The ambassador was suave.  Of course, he would transmit the information, he said, though he knew what the answer would be.  It was evident that he was not perturbed.  He thought he knew the great American game of bluff. 

A week later he called again on the President.  He talked on various matters.  The one matter, however, that he did not touch on at all was Venezuela. 

When he rose to go Roosevelt asked him bluntly what answer he had received from his government. 

Von Holleben was light-hearted about the matter.  "You did not expect me to take your statement seriously?" he remarked.  His government, he said, had not communicated with him. 

The President snapped his teeth together.  

"Very good," he said.  "I shall instruct Admiral Dewey to sail not in three days, but in two. "

The ambassador was thunderstruck.  His whole manner changed.  He knew at last that he had made the most fatal mistake a diplomat can make  he had miscalculated the intention of his opponent.  He protested that the Kaiser could not give in. 

"Do you realize," he cried, in extreme agitation, "that this means war?"

' ' It means war," answered Roosevelt, "if Germany tries to land troops in Venezuela.  But not a stroke of a pen has been put on paper.  If the Emperor agree to arbitrate, I will heartily praise him for it and treat it as taken on German initiative.  But I must have an offer to arbitrate in forty-eight hours, or Dewey sails. "

Within thirty-six hours the ambassador returned to the White House, wreathed in smiles.  A despatch had just come from Berlin, he said, saying that the Kaiser would arbitrate. 

Roosevelt did as he promised and commended the Kaiser publicly for being so stanch a friend of arbitration.  Holleben was almost immediately recalled by his government.  The affair evidently rankled in the Emperor's mind.  But his attentions to America and Americans increased in fervor.  From the Venezuelan affair dated his almost romantic devotion to Theodore Roosevelt.  The President had spoken in the only way William the Second understood; and in his curious, medieval heart the Emperor loved Roosevelt for the very qualities which had revealed him as his master. 

Two weeks after the settlement of the Venezuelan affair in January, 1903, another international controversy which had for years been dragging its way up and down the corridors of diplomacy came before Roosevelt for action. 

Like the Venezuelan imbroglio, this affair also involved England.  After her initial mistake in allying herself with Germany in the so-called "peaceful blockade" of the Venezuelan coast, the British government had, in response to public sentiment in England, behaved extremely well.  In this other controversy, also, England showed her evident desire to keep on terms of close friendliness with the United States. 

The affair dealt with Alaska, whose eastern boundary along the strip above the 54° 40' line had been a matter of dispute for generations.  After endless delays, negotiations were reopened in January, 1903, for the settlement of the matter by a commission of three Americans and three Britishers. 

Up to this time Secretary Hay had had charge of the discussions.  At this point, however, President Roosevelt, who thought Hay's attitude indecisive, if not actually timid, took command. 

"The claim of the Canadians for access to deep water along any part of the Alaska coast," he wrote in a note intended indirectly for the British Cabinet, "is just exactly as defensible as if they should now suddenly claim the island of Nantucket. "

He would not arbitrate the possession of the large sections of Alaska which the Canadians demanded, he went on, but there were minor questions, topographical trifles, which they might discuss. 

''Go ahead and arbitrate,'' he said.  "But there is the map. "

Thereupon, he did two things.  He appointed as American members of the commission three of the most vigorous "fighting men" of the time, Lodge, Root, and ex-Senator Turner of Washington; and without ostentation, but openly, for England to observe, sent American troops into the disputed territory. 

Where upon, having done all he could, for the moment, to secure the rights of the American people abroad, he turned his attention once more to securing the rights of the American people abroad, he turned his attention once more to securing their rights at home. 

Congress, which had been stiff-necked during the previous session, had during the recess heard from the folks at home, and scrambled to pass the bills it had haughtily rejected.  The President appointed Cortelyou, the private secretary he had inherited from McKinley, Secretary of Commerce and Labor, and set the new Bureau of Corporations to work gathering material to form the basis of new legislation.  Roosevelt was eager to secure the creation of a Federal commission "to prevent monopoly, if possible, and uproot it when discovered," to "control and regulate all big combinations," and to "give honest business certainty as to what the law was and security as long as the law was obeyed. "

Congress balked, but, under the spur of the President, passed a law forbidding the railroads to grant rebates to favored customers.  The Attorney-General had, at the President's order, brought suits, meanwhile, against fourteen railroads in the West and numerous roads in the South for violation of the Anti-Trust law and the law relating to interstate commerce. 

Wall Street, led by the Standard Oil Company, protested wildly that the President was a radical who would overthrow the Constitution.  Roosevelt replied that the Constitution was elastic enough to be made to cover the new needs of the people under changing conditions.  If it was not strong enough to deal with the new problems, he asked that it be strengthened. 

But Roosevelt's interference in the coal strike had angered some and sincerely disquieted others among the believers in the supreme sanctity of private property.  This feeling of opposition was strengthened by the announcement in April of the decision of the United States Circuit Court, ordering the dissolution of the Northern Securities Company.  The case was appealed, but the court's decision foreshadowed what the final verdict would probably be; and Wall Street was up in arms, with a curious lack of logic blaming Roosevelt instead of the court which had rendered the decision. 

Roosevelt's prestige with the people grew as the opposition of the forces of privilege became evident.  In the spring the "promotion mania" which had seized the country in 1901 began to show its effects.  Stocks which had been sold at a high figure, though they represented no actual, tangible property, began rapidly to decline.  Newspapers controlled by the business interests complained that the shrinkage in values was due alone to the President's unnecessary agitation. 

Roosevelt could afford to smile at the sullen growls of the "interests," for during that spring of 1903 he had an opportunity to discover how firm a place he had made for himself in the affections of the American people.  Late in March he began a tour through the country which took him to the Pacific.  His purpose was obvious.  He had had difficulties with Congress; he foresaw that worse difficulties lay ahead.  His only hope of success lay in appealing directly to the people, for he had learned long ago that the people were always quicker to appreciate new ideas than their representatives in Congress.  His friends had suggested that he should coerce his opponents in Congress by withholding patronage.  He replied that, if coercion had to be used, he preferred that not he, but the constituents of the stubborn Congressmen, should exercise it. 

Day after day, again and again, in great halls to thousands of his fellow-citizens and at water-tank stations to a handful, he expounded the policies of his Administration.  He spoke of the Monroe Doctrine; of the need of building up the navy; of corporations and their control; of the army and the General Staff, newly created; of reclamation, conservation, public service; and over and over again of the pioneer virtues, the heroic virtues of courage and hardihood; the need for fellowship, for, "in the long run, and as a whole, we are going to go up or go down together"; the need for individual consecration, for "it lies with us ourselves to determine our own fate. "

He was greeted everywhere with extraordinary enthusiasm, for, more than any of his predecessors, he seemed to the people, with his aggressive, militant and fearless spirit, to typify America.  The very qualities which the more serious-minded folk in the East criticized, his occasional loudness of action or utterance, his undisguised delight in driving the "band-wagon," his familiarity with all sorts of men, his lack of Presidential pomposity, endeared him to the Western folk.  The words he spoke were simple words which they could all understand, and the matters he talked about were the matters which were closest to their own hearts.  Their own forebodings and aspirations for the first time became intelligible to them through his words.  He crystallized their cloudy musings. 

It was natural that, giving utterance as he did to the best that was in their hearts, he should strike there a spark of that high spirit of national service which burned so fiercely in his own being.  Under his spell men rediscovered their country and took pride in her and came to feel a personal responsibility for her welfare and honor.  He made them desire, not safety, but the doing of difficult things.  He made them want to do their duty.  He made them ashamed not to want to do their duty.  He stung their consciences to life. 

Roosevelt spoke at Chicago, Milwaukee, St.  Paul, Sioux Falls, Fargo.  At Medora he stopped to see old friends.  The Ferrises were there, but Hell-roaring Bill Jones had begun celebrating too early and was "all in. " The wild and fantastic landscape made his eyes wistful as the train sped on. 

"I know all this country like a book," he said to John Burroughs, who was at his side.  "I have ridden over it in all seasons and all weathers, and it looks like home to me. "

At Gardiner, Montana, at the entrance to Yellowstone Park, he left the world of politics and speeches and reporters and Secret Service men behind and with John Burroughs, and a squad of the park guards for escort, gave himself up to solitude and the wilderness. 

For two weeks he roamed through the park, now on snow-shoes or skees, laughing boisterously when he took a header in the deep snow; now on foot, crawling stealthily after a flock of mountain-sheep to spy on them for hours from some covert, or following a strange bird from glade to glade until he had identified his song; now on horseback, dashing after a herd of elk, delighted as a boy, when he rounded them up for his naturalist-companion to see.  Shooting in the park was forbidden and he did no hunting, but he pursued the deer and the agile antelope with a zest that knew no weariness. 

A brief trip through the Grand Canon of the Colorado, then three days in the Yosemite with another naturalist, John Muir. 

The first night was clear [he wrote later] and we lay in the open, in beds of soft fir boughs, among the huge cinnamon-colored trunks of the sequoias.  It was like lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man.  Just at nightfall I heard, among other birds, thrushes which I think were Rocky Mountain hermits the appropriate choir for such a place of worship.  Next day we went by trail through the woods, seeing some deer .  .  .  mountain-quail and blue grouse . . .  a white-headed woodpecker.  . . .  A snowstorm came on toward evening, but we kept warm and comfortable in a grove of splendid firs near the brink of the wonderful Yosemite Valley.  Next day we clambered down into it and at nightfall camped in its bottom, facing the giant cliffs over which the waterfall thundered. 

He emerged from the wilderness to take up his Paul Revere-like passage from coast to coast.  His audiences, cheering wildly the strenuous fighter for equal justice, never dreamed that less than a day before he had been listening to bird-songs as though there were nothing else in the world.