CHAPTER 19 Hermann Hagedorn’s: The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt.

HE GOES OUT AFTER NEW ADVENTURES AND NEARLY FINDS  THE  GREATEST  OF  ALL

ONCE more Theodore Roosevelt had been defeated.  Being a wise observer of political currents, he had scarcely expected to win.  It was a Democratic year, with the Democratic party everywhere overwhelmingly victorious.  Republicans blamed Roosevelt bitterly for the Democratic landslide and for the complete disruption of their own party, refusing to see that the party had been disrupted not by Roosevelt, but by the reactionary forces which had turned it from the course in which Roosevelt as President had led it to success.  The winds of controversy continued to beat about his head.  Roosevelt let them blow and sat down and wrote his autobiography.  Through the Outlook he continued to swing his broadsword for progressive principles; and once in court he swung it most effectively in defense of his own personal reputation.  For an editor in Michigan had rashly expressed in print the charge that had been current here and there during the campaign, that Roosevelt was a hard and habitual drinker.  Roosevelt sued him for libel, supported by an array of "character witnesses" that included former Cabinet ministers and ambassadors, ministers of the Gospel, social workers and temperance workers, soldiers, editors, journalists, naturalists, hunters, secret service men, and household servants.  That lie he was determined to nail, and he nailed it. 

He disposed of the Michigan slanderer in June.  A month later he was on the rim of the Grand Canon of the Colorado with his younger sons, Archie and Quentin, hunting cougar.  He himself this time carried no gun.  This was their own particular holiday, and he who wished his sons to serve their apprenticeship in the great world of hardship and adventure was glad to leave the thrills of it to them.  From the gorgeous country above the canon, fresh with pine and spruce and clear springs, he led them into the grim desolation of the Navajo Desert.  It was a world of incredible wildness and desolate majesty, savage, grotesque, terrible.  Lizards and rattlesnakes were there, the only living things.  Only at the water-holes, ten or fifteen miles apart, they met an occasional group of Indians, watering their flocks. 

At Tuba they rested for a day, then moved north-ward through the parched, mountainous landscape to the upper reaches of cedar and pine at March Pass; and on, with their pack-train, past villages of the cliff-dwellers in ruins, through emerald valleys of magical luxuriance, to the foot of the Navajo Mountains; and again on, through an eerie wilderness over a perilous trail that was no trail at all by ghastly precipices, to the gorge of the Natural Bridge.  To right and left loomed enormous cliffs bounded each to each by a triumphal arch of inconceivable majesty. 

They bathed in the dark pool beneath. 

For three days they retraced their steps, then crossed the Black Mesa to climb at last the steep and narrow rock-ridge on whose summits in bold outline against the blue sky rose the three rock villages of the Hopi. 

In one of them a snake-dance was to be held. 

The villages were crowded with visitors, but of the men not of the tribe Roosevelt alone, as a former Great Chief at Washington, was admitted to the sacred room, the kiva, in which the snake-priests had for a fortnight been preparing for the sacred dance.  He entered the chamber through a hole in the roof.  Squatting on the floor were eight or ten priests, lithe, sinewy, naked, copper-red.  On a dais against the wall near by lay intertwined a moving mass of thirty or more rattlesnakes. 

A priest spread a blanket for him, and he sat down with his back to the snakes, scarcely three yards away.  A snake glided sinuously toward him.  He pointed him out to the guardian of the snakes, who stroked it gently with a fan of four eagle feathers until it turned and crawled back.  A half-dozen times other snakes drew silently near and were quietly repulsed.  One escaped the eye of the watcher and passed within six inches of Roosevelt's knee.  A priest on the other side threw a pinch of dust m its face.  The watcher stroked it, and it too withdrew. 
Two days later Roosevelt descended into the temple room for the ceremony of the washing of the snakes. 

There were twenty priests in the room, and eighty or a hundred snakes lay singly or in tangled groups about on the dais.  Two priests stood near the snakes, two stood beside a rude altar at the farther end of the room, a half-dozen surrounded a great wooden bowl of water in the middle. 

The chief priest near the bowl began to chant softly and the other priests swayed to the rhythm, uttering now and then a single word or exclamation in unison, shaking the sacred rattles.  Gradually their calm gave way to intense, restrained emotion.  The chanting increased in fervor.  Now the two men nearest the dais each picked up a handful of rattlesnakes and quietly handed them to two of the Indians squatting about the bowl.  The chanting continued.  The priests returned and picked up each another handful of the poisonous serpents and delivered them to one of the priests about the bowl; again they gathered a handful, and again and once again, until each squatting Indian about the bowl held three or four of the venomous snakes. 

Then suddenly the chanting quickened and rose to a scream, and at the same instant the priests plunged the snakes into the water, drew them as suddenly forth again, and hurled them half across the room on and about the altar. 

The snakes began to glide rapidly in every direction.  Priests with feather fans gently herded them back. 
The ceremony was repeated until all the snakes had been washed.  Then again the chief priest prayed and the others chanted, slowly and ever more slowly.  The noise of the rattles died.  The chant died.  The ceremony was over. 
Roosevelt returned home from the Southwest in August (1913).  Two months later he was aboard the Lamport and Holt S.  S.  Vandyck, steaming southward in quest of new adventures.  He had been invited to speak before certain learned societies in South America on the problems of government in a democracy, and had accepted with zest, seeing in the invitation an opportunity to carry out an old and cherished plan of his to explore the jungles of Brazil. 

He reached Rio de Janeiro the middle of October, and for six weeks traveled on the beaten trail southwest to Montevideo in Uruguay, and Buenos Aires in the Argentine; northwest to Tucuman; southwest again across the Andes to Valparaiso and Santiago de Chile; straight south to the borders of Patagonia; and then once more across the Andes by ox-train through wild and wonderful country northeastward back to Buenos Aires.  Much of the country was like the ranch country of the West he knew so well, but the inland cities were quaint and strange and the seaboard capitals had a mature beauty that was more like the Old World than the New. 

His journey might have been a continuation of his triumphant passage through Europe.  Every-where he was given the honors of a reigning sovereign and greeted by the crowds that lined the streets and thronged the squares with extraordinary enthusiasm.  Here as in Europe he spoke fearlessly and directly, wasting no breath on empty flattery.  Again and again he thrust at the habit of revolution as the worst foe of democratic progress; he discussed the Monroe doctrine; he eloquently defended his action in regard to Panama. 

They called him an hombre mundial, a world man, belonging not to one race or country, but to the whole of humanity; and again they said, "Roosevelt is the United States," typical of all that was best in a great progressive land.  "He speaks the truth," they said, "because he speaks from the heart. "

To Roosevelt this six weeks' succession of ever-changing scenes and men was one of absorbing interest; and years of popular favor had failed to make him blast to the cheering of great crowds.  But he loved adventure even more than he loved politics, and he was not sorry when, early in December, accompanied by Kermit, who was on engineering work in South America, and Father Zahm, himself an explorer, he left the cheering crowds of Buenos Aires behind him for Asuncion, and four days later left Asuncion and the civilized world for the jungles of Brazil. 

The President of Paraguay had put his own gunboat-yacht at the disposal of the Roosevelt party for the ascent of the Paraguay, and day after day they steamed northward through the level ranch country under the tropic heat, mooring now and again by picturesque old towns whose history went back three hundred years to the conquistadores, or stopping for wood at quaint settlements where scantily clad Indians gazed at them curiously.  At the Brazilian border they were met by Colonel Rondon, an intrepid explorer of the upper Amazon whom the Brazilian government had put at Roosevelt's disposal; and at Corumba by Fiala, Cherrie, and Miller, the naturalists assigned to the party by the Museum of Natural History, under whose auspices Roosevelt was to make his explorations.  From Corumba they took a week's hunting-trip up the Taquary after jaguar and peccary, then, on Christmas Day, again proceeded up the Paraguay in a shallow little steamer they had chartered to take them and their paraphernalia to the great wilderness, the matto grosso, of western Brazil.  After a day they branched off into the swirling brown waters of the Sao Lourengo, then into the Cuyaba.  Now, to right and left, was the dense foliage of the tropics, splashed here and there with brilliant flowers.  They passed the thatched huts of an Indian fishing-village half hidden under luxuriant branches, then came once more into open cattle country, where a ranch-owner welcomed them and for three days gave them hospitality and good hunting.  They returned to the Sao Lourengo and steamed slowly southward through wet and stifling weather, anchoring a day after, once more to hunt jaguar in the dense wilderness.  Through the jungle on foot, drenched with sweat, torn by the spines of innumerable small palms, bitten by mosquitoes and fire ants that swarmed in the humid thickets, a ad stung by the red wasps that on occasions had been known to kill, they followed the trail.  They waded up to the hips through the marshes, and twice, with their guns held over their heads, swam long bayous through marsh grass and slime.  The heat was terrific.  There was no breath of air.  They had left the camp at dawn.  It was after midday.  They had had nothing to eat. 

Fiala, who had remained on the boat, heard a call on the bank late that afternoon.  It was one of the Indians who had accompanied the hunting-party. 

"Burroo-gurra-harru," he muttered, fell into a corner, and went to sleep. 

Twenty minutes later another Indian stumbled out of the forest.  "Plenty work tired," he cried, and fell and also went to sleep.  A third Indian came and dropped on the deck. 

Worried for the safety of the hunters, Fiala started out with a relief party.  The sun was setting.  In a clearing a short distance from the river he came upon one of the Brazilian officers, lying exhausted on the ground, his clothes torn, his face and neck covered with dust and blood. 

They sent him to camp under the care of three natives, and pushed on.  In a clearing beyond, under the last slanting rays of the sun, they came on Roosevelt and Kermit, dragging another Brazilian officer through the jungle.  Roosevelt's clothes were in tatters, but on his grimy face was a look of warlike determination. 

"All right, Colonel?" called Fiala.  "I'm bully," answered Roosevelt. 

The Brazilians were laid up for two days, but Roosevelt and Kermit were about, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.  The Indians looked on them thereafter with a new awe. 

They returned to the Paraguay and steamed northward once more through marshy country to Sao Luis de Caceres, where they exchanged their little steamer for a launch and dugouts and moved northward again up the swift, clear water of the River of Tapirs.  Now and again they hunted in the dense forest that rose from the river-bank like a wall, the trees matted with vines, the lower growth an almost impenetrable jungle.  In one grove shoots of fig-trees were creeping murderously over the palms and slowly strangling them.  It was a sinister place, evil and dark and silent. 

Slowly they steamed northward, now and then passing a lonely ranch, now gliding through pitiless wilderness, now mooring by some clearing of exquisite beauty of palms and violet orchids and butterflies of gorgeous coloring.  The current became more rapid.  Here and there they ran into broken water. 

The middle of January they reached Tapirapoan and, leaving the river behind, proceeded with horses, pack-mules, and oxen into the highland wilderness.  Their course lay for a day through dense tropical forests where the machetes had to cut a trail for them as they went; then up on a high sandy plateau of coarse grass and stunted, twisted trees, where the air that blew over the limitless, rolling plains was cool and wonderful and full of vigor.  Day after day they moved forward, camping now and then by pleasant streams, with pampas-deer to eat and tales of marvelous adventure to exchange beside the camp-fire.  The weather was cloudy or wet, for the rainy season was on, but the desolate country had a charm of its own for one who loved great open spaces, and here and there were splashes of unexpected beauty. 

They came at last to a native village, where the Sacred River breaks in majestic, thunderous falls.  The natives were friendly, for Colonel Rondon was a counselor and guardian loved of old, and received the explorers without fear or shyness.  At this village they spent the night, then pushed on through pouring rain to the Falls of Utiarity, where the river dropped from a great shelving rock amid the towering growth of the tropical forest, three hundred feet to the gorge of swirling water below.  Here, too, there was a village where the natives played head-ball when the weather cleared at last, and danced and chanted in their honor. 

At Utiarity the party separated, Father Zahm returning to Tapirapoan and Fiala proceeding northward to explore the Rio Papagaio, while Roosevelt with the other members of the expedition turned eastward into the wild region of the naked Nhambiquaras.  Day after day now they crossed desolate country, passing skeletons of mules and oxen and little barbed-wire inclosures which marked the graves of men who had died on the road.  They drove a dozen steers ahead of them for food on their journey, but there was no forage.  The mules as well as the oxen weakened.  Nine of them dropped behind in the first three days.  They pushed on through tropical heat, now and then coming on parties of Nhambiquaras, some clad in a string of beads, most of them without even that adornment.  They saw the savages dance in the moonlight and heard them singing their weird, wailing chants. 

They crossed the headwaters of the Tapajos, ferried across by a native soldier who guarded the telegraph line which Colonel Rondon had constructed far up into the wilderness.  The country now became more hilly, with many swollen rivers which they waded or crossed by rude native bridges.  At last they came to a large basin cut into swampy valleys covered with tropical forest and rich pastures, into which the animals quickly turned.  There was respite here from the torment of the insects, and they rested a day; then moved on once more up and through steep valleys and broad basins where giant rubber-trees towered above the wild bananas.  Azure butterflies flitted through the sunny glades; bell-birds called through the huge silence of the forest.  Now through dreary wastes they went, now through fertile basins, now into dark forests and out into open cattle country.  At a cluster of huts called Bonifacio they paused for a day and once more divided the party.  Miller and three of the Brazilians moved on to descend the Gy-Parana to Manoas; Roosevelt, Rondon, Kermit, Cherrie, and two of the other Brazilians, with sixteen paddlers and seven dugouts, proceeded to the bank of the unexplored stream near by, known as the River of Doubt. 

On the afternoon of February 27th the Roosevelt party started down the river.  The swollen torrent was swift and brown, and of the canoes one was small, one was cranky, and two were old, waterlogged, and leaky.  All were overladen.  The paddlers, lithe as panthers and brawny as bears, were expert watermen. 

The expedition proceeded slowly, for Rondon and Kermit had undertaken the arduous task of surveying the river's tortuous course.  To right and left was dense forest with little wild life, only here and there a monkey and some bright-plumaged parakeet or venomous coral-snake.  Four days through varying weather they drifted leisurely down-stream, camping at the river's edge.  The silent forest had a deep fascination of its own.  Where they slowly went no white man had ever gone before. 

On the fourth day the current quickened.  They heard rapids ahead, and ran the unwieldy canoes ashore while they pushed forward on foot.  They found that the river-bed, which not a mile above was a hundred yards wide, here narrowed in one place to six feet or less, gushing torrentially through a craggy gorge. 

The rapids were far too wild to run in the canoes, and for two and a half days they labored, carrying the heavy dugouts, with their cargo, a mile through the dense jungle.  They chopped a road through the forest and, harnessed two by two on the rope, dragged the heavy boats along six-foot rollers, bumping and sliding.  It was laborious business, and the faces and hands of all were swollen with the bites and stings of countless insects. 

They started once more on the river that wound in and out in endless curves through scenes of captivating beauty; then came to rapids once more.  Three days they portaged, paddled half a day, and portaged another.  Then, one night as they were sleeping, the river unexpectedly rose, swamping two of the water-logged canoes, so that they broke from their moorings and were crushed.  Now followed days of sweating labor with ax and adz, making a new dugout from the trunk of a huge tree near the camp.  The forest round about was dense; there was no stir in the humid air.  The insects bit them and stung them until their whole bodies seemed to burn. 

They started out once more.  The current was swift, and here and there were whirlpools and threatening rapids where the water leaped into the clumsy dugouts and again and again threatened to swamp them.  The day following, drifting on smooth water, they heard once more the roar of broken water ahead.  Kermit, leading, was caught by a floating whirlpool and driven straight into the maelstrom.  With his two negro paddlers, he held the canoe upright, riding the rapids to their base.  There he made for the shore, but another whirlpool swept him back to midstream and upset the canoe.  One negro was drowned; Kermit and the other barely reached the shore in safety. 

They portaged the dugouts and came on other rapids immediately below.  As they were seeking a passage for the canoes along the shore one of the dogs in the thicket near by suddenly gave a howl of pain; then another.  They ran up to him.  He was dead, with two Indian arrows in his side. 

Cherrie stayed at the head of the portage and Roosevelt at the foot, as guards against attack.  One-third of their food was gone and they had covered probably scarce a sixth of their journey.  They had lost a man and four canoes; another man was down with fever.  They were in a country of wild Indians who could shoot.  They determined to push ahead, abandon some of their equipment, and let a dozen of the paddlers go on foot along the shore until they reached a place where they could profitably construct new canoes. 

In and out and around the whirling rapids they moved slowly on.  Once they came on the fresh tracks of Indians, and a moment later heard them near by; but the savages fled in panic.  Shortly after they came on a fishing-village, recently abandoned, and left propitiatory gifts. 

They built two new dugouts and again proceeded northward through the dripping and streaming forest, portaging four hours or more for every one they paddled.  It was slow, heartbreaking work, with ever in the backs of their minds the dread of disaster by starvation if they did not make haste, and ever the fear of disaster by drowning or the loss of their provisions if they took a chance in the rapids in order to gain time.  There was practically no game near by in the forest.  Fish were scarce.  Only at intervals they found cocoanut or wild honey, and now and then they shot a monkey.  Palm cabbage was the only steady item of diet the jungle contributed. 

They came to a long, deep gorge through which the river rushed at dangerous speed.  To take laden canoes through the gorge was out of the question; to portage them over the rock-strewn mountainside was likewise impossible.  Accordingly, they cut their baggage to the bone and bore what was essential laboriously over the rough trail they carved through the forest to the foot of the rapids, while Kermit directed the passage of the canoes, and with infinite labor and peril after four days brought them through with the loss of only one.  They started again, only to find another gorge ahead, and once more they bore their baggage over a craggy mountain, and once more they piloted their canoes through the wild cataract.  Again a canoe was lost. 

They made camp while the camaradas brought the loads from over the hill.  One of the men, named Paishon, brought in a carbine.  Another, a surly and ferocious man named Julio, who had frequently been reproached by Paishon, the sergeant, for shirking his work, dropped his load, picked up the carbine, and returned as though up-stream.  A minute later there was a shot.  Julio had taken a bloody vengeance. 

Paishon was dead when they reached him.  The murderer fled into the fever and famine of the wilderness. 

The exertions and privations were now beginning to wear on men scarcely ever more than half fed.  The camarodas were growing constantly weaker under the strain of exhausting labor; Kermit was ill with fever; Cherrie and Lyra were suffering from dysentery; Roosevelt bruised his leg against a boulder in the water and inflammation resulted.  A day later he, too, was down with fever. 

For forty-eight hours he was deadly ill, tormented by the heat, tormented by the venomous insects that hummed about him and crawled over him, biting and stinging; tormented most by the thought that the provisions were running low and they had far yet to travel, and that every hour's delay brought disaster just so much nearer to all.  He lay helpless on his broken, insect-riddled cot, not knowing whether he would be well enough to proceed in a day or two days or in a week. 

He felt that he was at the end of the tether.  Death had no horrors for him.  It scarcely had any regrets except for those who were dearest to him.  He had had a wonderful time in life; he had had a wonderful time on the expedition; he had done a scientific service that. was worth doing.  He was ready to pay with his body. 

But he could not bear the thought that his slow dying might mean slow death to his companions.  He begged Colonel Rondon to leave him behind and to save the rest of the expedition at least from disaster.  The fine old Brazilian warrior would not listen to him.  Roosevelt implored.  The Brazilian was obdurate. 

For forty-eight hours Roosevelt was on the very  verge of death.  Then the fever broke a little.  By a great effort he mustered what strength remained to him and said that he was well enough to go on.  He could barely crawl over the portages that day.  Kermit's fever grew worse, and one after another the camaradas sickened. 

Ahead of them loomed new mountains, with sinister promise of new, perilous, end grinding labor.  But for a day fortune favored them.  The hills gradually sank into a level plain; they made twenty miles on the swift-flowing, unimpeded current, and only at the day's end became aware of new cataracts ahead.  They bore their baggage around the stretch of swirling water and paddled on, again portaged, and again moved swiftly down smooth water.  The country was very lovely, for the river was bordered by exquisite palms and wound around hills cloaked in fresh green that glistened brightly in the sunshine. 

Then again they were among rapids, running ten minutes, all told, for eight hours that they portaged.  Again all the next forenoon they dragged their boats and their baggage through the tangled thicket, scarce able to drag their own bodies; then toward sunset they found respite at last.  The river began to run in tranquil reaches.  At the water's edge they suddenly came across cuttings, a year old, made evidently by pioneer rubber-men.  The next day, farther down, they came upon a post with the initials, "J.  A. ," and an hour later upon a palm-thatched house, cool and clean, guarded by two dogs. 

   Late that afternoon at the home of a rubber-man they saw the first human being outside their own party they had encountered in seven weeks.  They were once more among civilized men. 

The peril of disaster to the expedition was over.  But for Roosevelt himself the peril of death was still imminent.  The fever clung on, and the leg which he had hurt working in the rapids developed an abscess.  He hobbled about with difficulty, in racking pain.  But there was no halting even here on the outskirts of civilization.  He kept on his feet until the worst of the rapids were past, then succumbed and, while the canoes for ten days drifted downward on the wide, placid stream, lay stretched in the bottom of a dugout under the intolerable heat and the blinding storms, burning with fever and pain. 

The end of April they reached the hamlet of Sao Joao, and two days later arrived by steamer at Manaos on the Amazon.  They had discovered, explored, and placed on the map a river a thousand miles long.  A portion of it near its source had bee» known as the River of Doubt.  It was a river of doubt no more.  In ,the name of the Brazilian government it was rechristened the Rio Teodoro.