CHAPTER 14
A Vanished Elder World

Come away! come away! you can hear them calling, calling,
Calling to us to come to them, and roam no more.
Over there beyond the ridges and the land that lies between us,
There’s an old song calling us to come!

THE COUNTY COURTHOUSE² in Marquette, Michigan, solidly dominated a high bluff on the south shore of Lake Superior. With its stained-glass dome and heavy mahogany paneling, it was intended to proclaim the importance of the little surrounding city as the manufacturing and export hub of one of the world’s richest repositories of iron ore. But its architects could not have conceived that nine years after its construction, a former President of the United States should seek it out for justice, accompanied by a phalanx of distinguished lawyers, doctors, diplomats, editors, and reporters, not to mention a zoologist, a trade unionist, a forester, and two secret service agents, one of whom was detached from Woodrow Wilson’s White House. In case the testimony of all these witnesses was not enough to convince a jury of³ his sobriety, Roosevelt also came armed with forty depositions, signed by persons as famous as Admiral George E. Dewey and as obscure as James Amos, his own black valet.

A jury of twelve local citizens was selected on the afternoon of Monday, 26 May, with Judge Richard C. Flannigan presiding. Attorneys for the defense, intimidated by Roosevelt’s thick-spectacled stare, challenged only one venireman wearing a blue Bull Moose badge. The resulting panel was about as varied as a provincial community could muster, consisting of four miners, three teamsters, two farmers, a lumberman, a fireman, and a gum-chewing blacksmith.

When the trial proper began on Tuesday morning, George A. Newett, owner and publisher of the Ishpeming Iron Ore, was escorted to a seat ten feet away from the plaintiff. With his steel-gray hair and oddly rigid posture, he looked as industrial as any product of Marquette County, except that the rigidity related to illness. Newett was due⁴ to be operated on as soon as the jury decided his fate.

He was a commanding figure nonetheless, registering no embarrassment when the full text of his 12 October 1912 editorial was read to the court. Apart from its accusations of drinking and cursing, it characterized the Colonel as paranoiac, mendacious, cowardly, and a sore loser. But there was a telling hint of political bias: “All that Roosevelt⁵ has gained he received from the hands of the Republican Party.”

Newett was a stalwart⁶ of the county and state GOP committees. Roosevelt probably did not remember appointing him postmaster of Ishpeming in 1905. Nor was he aware that Newett would have supported him in 1912 if he and not Taft had been renominated by the Party. The publisher, in other words, despised him for bolting. And if the language of the editorial was abusive, it was accurate in noting that Roosevelt himself was no slouch when it came to personal invective. “All who oppose him are wreckers of the country, liars, knaves and undesirables.” Perhaps for that reason, counsel for the plaintiff, led by James H. Pound, had decided to focus on the drunkenness charge—as Roosevelt did, when he took the stand as first witness.

I have never⁷ been drunk or in the slightest degree under the influence of liquor.… I do not drink either whiskey or brandy, except as I shall hereafter say, except as I drink it under the direction of a doctor; I do not drink beer.… I never drank liquor or porter or anything of that kind. I have never drunk a highball or cocktail in my life. I have sometimes drunk mint julep in the White House. There was a bed of mint there, and I may have drunk half a dozen mint juleps a year, and certainly no more.…

At home, at dinner, I may partake of a glass or two glasses of white wine. At a public dinner, or a big dinner, if they have champagne I will take a glass or two glasses of champagne, but I take it publicly just as much as privately.

Asked about his medicinal use of spirits, he said that he had suffered from occasional attacks of malaria since serving in Cuba in 1898. Once, when delirious on a bear hunt as President, he had been given a shot of whiskey by Dr. Alexander Lambert. In Africa he had had two recurrences of fever and swallowed, at the direction of Dr. Edgar Mearns, “about seven tablespoons”⁸ of brandy. There had been a case of champagne among his safari effects, but he had never broken open a bottle, not even to celebrate killing lions and elephants.

According to African Game Trails, Mearns had treated him with whiskey, not brandy, but Roosevelt’s very vagueness of recall testified to his lack of interest in alcohol. He was, manifestly to the four or five hundred reporters cramming the court, intent only on clearing his name. It was equally plain to the jurors, sitting so close to him that some of his gestures swished the air in front of their faces, why so many rumormongers had inferred over the years that Roosevelt was a toper. They stared at the red, contorting face, and listened in fascination to the unstoppable flow of speech.

HAD THEY NOT BEEN compelled to retire during the first recess, they would have heard him explain why he was so ruddy. Unable to resist the lure of newspapermen, he went over to the press table and sat on it like a boy, legs dangling. “Because of my⁹ high blood pressure, I guess, I’m always a great bleeder. I get hurt and bleed so often that Mrs. Roosevelt pays no attention to it.”

He proceeded to tell the kind of anecdote that Lawrence Abbott had tried in vain to have him include in his autobiography. “The other day at Oyster Bay the windmill, on a sixty-foot derrick, was squeaking. I got an oil can and climbed up to oil it, neglecting to shut off the mill. Just as I got to the top, the wind veered. The paddle swung around and took off a slice of my scalp. I started to climb down, but I’m big and clumsy and it took quite a little while. By the time I got to the house my face and shoulders were drenched with blood. Inside the door I met Mrs. Roosevelt. ‘Theodore,’ she said, ‘I wish you’d do your bleeding in the bathroom. You’re spoiling every rug in the house.’ ”

DOCTORS LAMBERT¹⁰, John B. Murphy, and Arthur D. Bevan, who had examined the Colonel during his prostration in Mercy Hospital the previous fall, proceeded to testify or depose that he was the opposite of an alcoholic patient, with sweet breath, clear urine, no enlargement of the liver, and no tremor. He had an untroubled temperament, a balanced nervous system, and “slept like a child.” Their consensus was that he was a man in splendid health, with no addictive tendencies.

A qualification to these rosy opinions was expressed by Dr. Presley Rixey, who had been his physician in the White House, and had not seen him for four years. Rixey felt that Roosevelt was in only “fairly good” shape, with a noticeable gain in weight, but confirmed that he had always been abstemious. “He is about¹¹ as moderate as a man could well be, and not be a teetotaler.” His appetite for food was another matter. Even with his vigorous exercise schedule in Washington, “I had to resort to extraordinary means to keep him down … to keep down the flesh.”

Roosevelt made no effort to hide his current paunch. He sat tilted¹² back, caressing the heavy watch chain that draped over it, as witness after witness testified to the main issue of the trial. Robert Bacon, Gifford Pinchot, James R. Garfield, Truman H. Newberry, Jacob Riis, Edmund Heller, Cal O’Laughlin, O. K. Davis, Lawrence Abbott, William Loeb, and many others assured everybody in the courtroom that the Colonel’s thirst for alcohol was only slightly greater than Carry Nation’s.

By mid-morning¹³ Wednesday, lawyers for the defense were so desperate that they resorted to holding up the proceedings with technical objections. Judge Flannigan, seeing that they had no evidence to offer beyond rumor, called a recess and allowed them to argue that the Iron Ore, “a little country newspaper, having a circulation of about three thousand,” should be forgiven for going only one step further than many big-city dailies in criticizing “the most talked-about man in the United States in the past year.” If not, their ailing client might have to pay as much as $10,000 in damages.

James Pound said¹⁴ that Roosevelt was entitled to demand five times that amount. “But my client peremptorily instructed me that I was not to sue for any such sum.” The Colonel had no wish to be punitive, and was not even interested in establishing malice. He merely wanted to stand on “the actual damages” to his reputation, “under the circumstances of the publication.” William Belden, Newett’s chief counsel, seized on this stand to claim that his client was protected by Michigan’s limit on nominal damages, which meant an award of six cents. The judge warned him that an absence of expressed malice did not necessarily imply absence of real injury. “It may be six cents, it may be sixty thousand dollars.”

Pound returned triumphant¹⁵ to the courtroom and the parade of witnesses for the plaintiff continued through Thursday. James Amos allowed that in ten years as Roosevelt’s manservant, “I never yet have served him with more than one full glass of champagne.” The Colonel never drank at family meals, and when sharing white wine with guests, would spritz his own glass with Apollinaris water. Cal O’Laughlin calibrated his consumption of this insipid fluid at “about an inch and a half to two inches.” Philip Roosevelt stated that when Cousin Theodore was raw-throated from too much public speaking, he would dose himself with “milk punch,” an infusion barely stronger than the dairy original.

Such repetitive testimony might have emptied the courtroom had it not been enlivened with details about Roosevelt’s personal and family life, few of which had yet appeared (or would appear) in his serialized autobiography. The blacksmith in the jury became so engrossed he frequently stopped chewing.

By Saturday morning¹⁶, George Newett had had enough, and asked to be sworn. Reading from a written statement, he described himself as somebody who had once considered Theodore Roosevelt to be “a great Republican leader,” and who had contributed money and editorial support to his campaigns. “I mention these facts as indicating the impossibility of my harboring any feeling of personal malice against the plaintiff.” In recent years, however, he had traveled the country and heard many authoritative-sounding stories that Roosevelt drank to excess. Newspapers on his exchange list seemed to confirm these stories, and he had come to believe them. As a loyal Republican, he had felt obliged in any case to oppose the Colonel’s Bull Moose candidacy. When Roosevelt passed through Marquette the previous fall, he had gone to hear him speak, and had been angered by “what I considered a most unjust attack upon our candidate for Congress, who was one of my lifelong friends.”

Newett’s mea culpa made clear that he had libeled the plaintiff for political, rather than personal reasons. Roosevelt had indeed attacked Rep. H. Olin Young as “a tool of the steel trust,”¹⁷ and the congressman had subsequently gone down to defeat.

The trial was won¹⁸ long before Newett admitted that none of the “reputable witnesses” who told him Roosevelt was a drunkard were able to provide evidence of their charges. To continue to believe them would be “an injustice” to the Colonel. Newett did not apologize for his article, but he implicitly retracted it, and he insisted that “in the publication I acted in good faith and without malice.”

Throughout, Roosevelt had¹⁹ leaned forward listening with intense concentration, occasionally casting a flash of spectacles at the gallery. When Newett finished reading he asked to be heard. “Your honor, in view of the statement of the defendant, I ask the Court to instruct the jury that I desire only nominal damages.”

AFTER IT WAS ALL OVER²⁰, and a nickel and a penny had been received by his lawyers, he pushed his way through a jostling crowd of congratulators. He was in a hurry to catch the 5:30 train and return home for what was left of the Memorial Day weekend. Charles Thompson of The New York Times managed to get close and ask, “Are you and Newett²¹ going to meet?”

Roosevelt looked back with an expression half surprised, half sardonic.

“Not if the advances are to come from me,” he said.

ROOSEVELT V. NEWETT²² WAS a front-page news story across the United States, and received wide coverage even in Britain. Comment on the Colonel’s Pyrrhic victory was generally supportive. The New York Times remarked that all Americans should be pleased to have seen libel rebuffed with honest truth. Satirists and cartoonists sharpened their pens. Hotels in Philadelphia reported a run on “Roosevelt punch.” The Fort Wayne News joked that the Colonel’s major achievement had been to disillusion those millions of Americans who thought he did not drink at all.

“I am very glad²³ I put the suit through,” Roosevelt wrote Kermit, “but of course it was an unpleasant expense.” Six cents would not significantly reduce his legal fees, let alone pay the travel costs of his dozens of witnesses. “The last eight months I have had three heavy expenses, the attempted assassination, Ethel’s wedding, and this libel suit.” His big book advance from the Macmillan Company was not due until the fall. “I shall have to make one or two speeches and write one or two articles before I start for Arizona with Archie and Quentin.”

It occurred to him²⁴ that Kermit was in far worse straits than himself. The young man had at last resigned from his underpaid railroad job, and was about to start work for a firm of bridge builders in the southern part of Brazil. But his new employers sounded shifty with money. Roosevelt fretted about Kermit not eating properly, in order to save enough milreis to marry Belle Willard. “Did you get the check for $200 which I sent you a couple of months ago? I’ll send you another next month, and you will of course let me know if you are short of funds.”

Kermit indeed had received the check, and proudly torn it up. He attached much more value to a hint that his father let drop in another letter: “Sometime I must²⁵ get down to see you.”

Roosevelt had in fact²⁶ decided to accept an invitation from the government of Argentina to lecture in Buenos Aires sometime in November. That meant a sea journey down the South American coastline, with an opportunity to stop off and see Kermit en route. He was sure of being officially welcomed in Brazil: Hermes da Fonseca, the president of that country, wanted to take him on a hunting trip.

Secretly, Roosevelt was planning something much more ambitious. The idea of a collecting expedition linking Brazil’s two great waterways, the Rio Paraguay and the Amazon, had begun to grow on him. He had long been curious about the interior of the subcontinent, working its paleontology into his theory of biological analogies in history. Now, with his political career ended (once again!), his autobiography written, and his reputation wiped free of stain, he thought he might embark on one more great adventure before he got too old. Undoubtedly it would be dangerous for a man of his age, but as he wrote in a tribute to the British explorer Robert Scott in The Outlook, “Great risks and hazards²⁷ are warranted by the end sought to be achieved.” People afraid to venture outside the pale of safety possessed “limited imaginative power.”

For a variety of reasons²⁸, not all of them conscious, he wanted to feel again as free as he had in Africa, and in those ecstatic days of youth when he could ride across the prairie and never see another human being. The spread of civilization across the earth’s waste spaces, which he had celebrated in The Winning of the West, was accelerating at such a rate that little remained of mystery in nature. Since he left the presidency, both the north and south poles had been trodden on. Automobiles and flying machines were changing the definition of distance; time and space had lost their separate identities (or so a German physicist claimed). Palpably and not altogether agreeably, modernism was asserting itself. An increasing number of “alienists” were preaching the new science of psychotherapy in the Sunday newspapers, while the eroticists of “modern art” treated sexuality and madness as subjects fit for public exhibition. In Paris, on the²⁹ day Roosevelt’s sips of milk punch were being itemized in Marquette, the choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky and the music of Igor Stravinsky had precipitated a riot among theatergoers.

Roosevelt no longer believed that civilization improved by expanding. On the contrary, it coarsened as it spread, and encroached on refined enclaves. He found his³⁰ own sanctuary on Cove Neck in Oyster Bay invaded by a new species, the “moving-picture man of vast wealth.” Somehow this mogul, J. Stuart Blackton, had managed to buy the estate next door, and gotten permission to extend a huge dock out into Cold Spring Harbor. Judging from the size of the stable he was building on a field that had once belonged to Sagamore Hill, he would soon follow up with a mansion that would rob the woods beyond of many trees.

The Colonel was not alone among the clan of fiftyish, self-styled Anglo-Saxon “gentlemen,” raised on both sides of the Atlantic, who felt a sense of social claustrophobia. For such men (restless Winty Chanler was an example, and Rider Haggard and Frederick Selous and Lord Delamere), there was little left to explore north of the equator except the El Dorados of economic, political, and scientific progress. Those parts of the Southern Hemisphere that were not ice or ocean still offered, here and there, opportunities for geographical exploration to persons no longer young. Roosevelt confided a few details of his Brazilian dream to Arthur Lee, admitting, “It is rather³¹ an ambitious trip for a stout, elderly, retired politician.”

If he could persuade Dr. Lambert that he was fit, and get official backing from the American Museum of Natural History, he would probably not be back home until the late spring of 1914. “I shall be glad³² to be out of the country for one reason, and that is the Progressive Party,” he told Lee. “The temptation is for the Progressives always to lie down on me, and in the unlikely event of the party continuing to exist, it has got to learn to walk alone.”

Another reason to leave home for six or seven months would be to spare himself from having to watch the Democrats pervert his political and social legacy. Here was President Wilson determined to remove all Negroes from the federal bureaucracy, and collaborating with Oscar Underwood, the House majority leader, on a tariff bill as pro-corporate as anything approved by Taft. The pious doctrines³³ of pacificism and prohibition had become fashionable in Washington—nowhere more so than at the State Department, where William Jennings Bryan had declared that nothing stronger than grape juice should be served at diplomatic receptions. The secretary also announced that he would continue to accept fees for delivering his famous chautauqua oration, “The Prince of Peace.” Roosevelt, disgusted, took advantage of a visit of some British pacifists to Sagamore Hill to preach a sermon of his own on the text, “Thou Shalt Not³⁴ Slop Over.”

He was sufficiently alarmed³⁵ at worsening relations with Mexico, and with Japan over the perennial problem of “yellow-peril” discrimination in California, to warn Franklin Roosevelt in the Navy Department that war with either country was not implausible. “In that case we shall be in an unpardonable position if we permit ourselves to be caught with our fleet separated.”

There was little more he could say to influence administration policy without sounding meddlesome. In the fall, he intended to write a single, statesmanlike appraisal of the current political situation, and publish it in the neutral pages of Century Magazine. Then he would sail south and out of the public eye. He was more likely to feel liberated in the jungle, with jaguars and anacondas and peccaries, than as a beneficiary of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom.

AS A FANTASY, Roosevelt’s South American project was not new. It had been implanted in his mind five years before, by one of the intellectual eccentrics he had enjoyed entertaining in the White House. Father John Augustine Zahm, C.S.C, Ph.D., was a former professor of physics at Notre Dame University, author of Sound and Music, a survey of the science of acoustics going back to Pythagorean times, and—more to the President’s taste—Evolution and Dogma. He was also the author of two travel books, Up the Orinoco and Down the Magdalena, and Along the Andes and Down the Amazon. Like David Livingstone³⁶ before him, Father Zahm was a globetrotter rather than a man of God.

If it had not been for the more powerful appeal of Africa in 1909, Roosevelt might have yielded to his suggestion that they together “go up the Paraguay,”³⁷ then cross Brazil’s central plateau and descend the Rio Tapajoz, a tributary of the Amazon. The two men had kept in touch, and Roosevelt had made a point of alluding to Zahm’s evolutionary theology in his essay on faith³⁸ and reason.

There was a certain³⁹ inevitability to him seeing the “funny little Catholic priest” at an American Museum lunch early in June. Frank M. Chapman, the museum’s director of ornithology, had gathered a group of naturalists to ascertain if any of them might like to accompany Roosevelt on his proposed expedition. Father Zahm did not quite qualify, but he was avidly anxious to participate, and had value as a multilingual scholar who knew Brazil well—or claimed to. Before the lunch was over, the Colonel and the sixty-two-year-old cleric were a team, and it remained only for Chapman to get Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the museum, to authorize their joint venture.

Osborn and Chapman were among Roosevelt’s closest scientific friends, and the expedition would cover ground unknown to collectors, so he approved them as a matter of course. Chapman suggested⁴⁰ the names of two professionals to go along, both veterans of tropical American forests: George K. Cherrie, an ornithologist and mammalogist, and Leo E. Miller, a field naturalist skilled at specimen retrieval.

Roosevelt reviewed⁴¹ their dossiers and thought that Chapman had chosen well. Cherrie was one of the best naturalist-explorers in the United States. Whipcord-tough at forty-seven, with a clipped, military manner, he had spent more than half his life south of the border. The mere fact that he had sired six children, one of them born along the Orinoco within pouncing distance of jaguars, was enough to recommend him. But Cherrie had the added credentials, irresistible to Roosevelt, of having once been a gun-runner in Colombia, and a two-time jailbird for revolutionary activities in Venezuela. Readers of The Wilderness Hunter and The Rough Riders were aware that the Colonel had a weakness for men who packed pistols, impregnated their wives regularly, and showed scant reverence for the law.

Miller was currently on assignment in British Guiana. But he had youth and Chapman’s word in his favor, so he was recruited⁴² sight unseen. Anthony Fiala, a⁴³ forty-four-year-old former Arctic explorer who ran the sports department at Rogers, Peet & Co., became the fifth member of the expedition, in charge of equipment, supplies, and transport. Just how much gear and extra personnel would be needed depended on the final itinerary, to be mapped out by Father Zahm. Fiala soon proved his worth by ordering two light, strong, cedar-and-canvas Canadian power canoes as backups to the eight-hundred-pound steel riverboats that Zahm seemed to think suitable for jungle travel.

By the end of June, Roosevelt had a pleased sense that another great trek, and maybe another great book contract, loomed ahead in the fall. With his autobiography now in syndication, his literary essays set in type, and Edith off to Europe to visit her sister, he was free to take Archie and Quentin to Arizona. “Thank heavens! I have never had more work than during the last eighteen months.”

NINETEEN YEARS OLD, graduated at last⁴⁴ from Andover, Archie had earned the luxury of seven weeks in his adored father’s company. He also loved being with “Quent.” The two boys had always been close, although they were as different as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Archie’s special schooling in Arizona gave him at least a destinational edge on his brother. Quentin, easygoing and uncompetitive at fifteen, did not mind where anybody took him, as long as he could investigate vehicular means.

On this jaunt it was a regular train of the Santa Fe Railroad, arriving in Silver City, New Mexico, on 10 July. Two days later⁴⁵, they met up with Archie’s other best buddy, Nicholas Roosevelt, in Williams, Arizona, and registered that night at the El Tovar Hotel overlooking the Grand Canyon.

Moonlit and mysterious⁴⁶, the enormous gorge filled the windows of their rooms, trivializing everything in the world that was not a million years old. One decade before—too momentary a flicker of time for the Colorado to have carved any deeper since—Roosevelt had come here and expressed his relief that the Santa Fe was not going to build another hotel at Rowe’s Point. He had stood on the South Rim and, ad-libbing to those around him, made the first great conservation call of his presidency: Leave it as⁴⁷ it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it—keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you.

Now it was a national monument, thanks to the Antiquities Act of 1906, and he was back with two of his own inheritors. Archie, that seasoned veteran of desert living, had seen the canyon before. But Quentin had not. Someday, perhaps, Roosevelt’s other sons and daughters would see it too, followed by Ted’s little “Graciekins,” and Ethel’s coming baby, and their children’s children.

THE MOON WAS FULL when they began their descent into the canyon at 2 A.M. on the morning of 15 July. Roosevelt, who had been assigned to write a serial travelogue for The Outlook, had arranged for guides, ponies, and pack animals to cover the 330-mile itinerary ahead of them. In the course of the next six weeks, he intended to give his sons a taste of some of the lessons he had learned in pursuit, survival, and acquaintance with the primeval, beginning with a cougar hunt on the high plateau of the North Rim, and ending with a trek through the Navajo Indian Reservation to Walpi, where they would attend the annual Hopi Snake Dance.

Thirty-two hours later, having gone so deep that they lost view of both the moon and the sun, they crested Buckskin Mountain, where it was still, improbably, spring. They spent the next two weeks in Kaibab National Forest, going after cougar and camping out at temperatures close to freezing. Roosevelt apologized for being old and “slow” on the chase, but Nicholas wrote in his diary, “He still has⁴⁸ the energy of a boy and is handicapped only by his weight.” He wanted his sons to do most of the shooting, although he killed one young female to gratify Archie. After the African lion, the mountain lion did not strike him as much of a threat; he was more afraid of losing Archie in reckless chases over the edges of the canyon. The bony youth seemed to have no fear. Roosevelt had taught all his children that courage could be developed like muscle, but Archie’s was uninhibited by imagination.

Lacking fresh meat, they ate a fat cougar and judged it as good as venison. Roosevelt indulged in⁴⁹ “elderly” things like washing up dishes and sitting alone, pondering the beauty around him. He was ravished by the sound of the silver-voiced Rocky Mountain hermit thrush, by the profusion of the stars at night, and by the vastness of the canyon’s views.

The first day of August found them shogging across the blindingly white and sterile wastes of the Paria Plateau east of Vermilion Cliffs. The soil was so arid⁵⁰, or poisoned, that it failed to grow grass even where a streamlet trickled, producing only clutches of coarse weed with tiny, flaring white flowers. Squinting into a heat haze that retreated as they advanced, disclosing nothing but more nothingness, Roosevelt was reminded⁵¹ of Joaquin Miller’s lines They saw the silences / Move by and beckon. At Lees Ferry, some mule-wagons were waiting to relieve the riders of their heavy gear, and they proceeded with lightened steps southeast to Tuba Agency, deep in the dry heart of the Navajo reservation. Far off to their right, the Painted Desert glowed. They rested for a day in Tuba, then swung northeast through heavy sand toward Kayenta. It took two and a half days to get there. Harsher terrain lay ahead. Roosevelt wanted to visit Rainbow Bridge, spanning one of the most impenetrable canyons in the Plateau Province.

Kayenta was⁵² a trading post run by John Wetherill, a member of the posse of white men that had “discovered” the Bridge only four years before. He had agreed to serve as the Roosevelt party’s local host and guide, and had guest rooms ready in his cedar-pole-and-rock house, surrounded by trees and lawns. It was well supplied with books and running water. Roosevelt admired Mrs. Wetherill’s taste in Navajo domestic design—she had decorated the walls of her parlor with delicate tei-bichai figures—and found her an impressively learned woman, versed in the lore of tribal ruins. It had been she, not her husband, who had first divined the existence of a rock buttress north of Navajo Mountain, from Indians protective of it as a sacrosanct place.

On 10 August⁵³ the excursion across the Utah border began, with Wetherill acting as guide and five pack horses carrying a minimum of supplies. Three days of the roughest possible riding ensued. At times the train had to pick its way along paths only six or eight inches wide, notched out of slickrock cliffs that fell hundreds of feet to stony bottoms. The boys learned to keep free of their stirrups when Wetherill pointed out the skeleton, far below, of a horse from which he had once parted company.

The immense arch eventually disclosed itself, bathed in late-afternoon sunlight while the gorge below filled up with shadow. There were pools of clear water beneath it, enticing to hot and dirty travelers. Roosevelt was soon floating on his back, amid ferns and hanging plants, looking up at the darkening sky and still darker bar holding apart the cliffs. Later, the leaping flames of a campfire threw it into relief against the stars, and whenever he awoke during the night he was conscious of its overhanging majesty.

He noted the next⁵⁴ morning that one of Wetherill’s two Indian helpers would not ride beneath the Bridge. The man was a Navajo, and took the long way around, rather than follow the rest of the party down the canyon. “His creed bade him never pass under an arch, for the arch is the sign of the rainbow, the sign of the sun’s course over the earth, and to the Navajo it is sacred.”

SO FAR IN ARIZONA, Roosevelt had gazed with little pity at the dark, dirt-poor sheepherders who crossed his trail, emerging like Africans from the most inhospitable crooks of the landscape. The blankets they wove might be superior to the designs of Duchamp, yet they seemed to have no desire to better themselves economically or socially. It was clear to him that until they forgot about their nomadic past, and listened to what the white man could teach them about ranching and stock-raising, they would languish in primitive poverty. He knew that a debate was dragging out in Congress over proposals to cut up and sell⁵⁵ parts of the overpopulated Navajo reservation, for the benefit of white stockmen and railroad land grabbers. Although he held no brief⁵⁶ for outside developers, his belief in a social “Square Deal” (first offered, ironically, to the Southwestern tribes, when he spoke at the Grand Canyon on 6 May 1903) persuaded him that aboriginals clinging to an antiquated way of life had no power to resist the facts of economics. “With Indians and white men alike it is use which should determine occupancy of the soil.”

Roosevelt’s attitude⁵⁷ toward “red” Americans differed from that of most of his kind only in that he had been willing, over the years, to moderate what had once been the harshest prejudice. As a young ranchman in Dakota Territory, he had blustered, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” Later, however, while researching The Winning of the West, he had developed a respect for Indian military heroes, and as a civil service commissioner touring reservations in the early 1890s, he had been shamed to anger at the government’s infliction of the spoils system on “a group of beings who are not able to protect themselves.” Some of his beloved Rough Riders had been Indians, and were therefore among the bravest of the brave.

As President⁵⁸, he had struggled against constant Congressional opposition to reorganize and moralize the underfunded Bureau of Indian Affairs. A passionate young musicologist, Natalie Curtis, made him see that its suppression of Indian songs and Indian art in government schools was impoverishing the national culture. He had protected⁵⁹ Miss Curtis from official harassment when she went into the reservations with a cylinder recorder, and coaxed nervous bards to sing for her. (“Be at rest, my friend, the great chief at Washington is father of all the people in this country.… He has given his permission for the writing of Hopi songs.”) As a result she was able to publish The Indians’ Book (1907), a luxury anthology of two hundred native lyrics, transcribed word for word and note by note. Roosevelt had contributed a short preface to it: “These songs cast⁶⁰ a wholly new light on the depth and dignity of Indian thought, the simple beauty and strange charm—the charm of a vanished elder world—of Indian poetry.”

AFTER FIVE DAYS the excursion party returned to Kayenta. Roosevelt spent a couple more nights under Louisa Wetherill’s hospitable roof before he and the boys set out for Walpi. He talked to her⁶¹ about the Navajo, and found that her expertise was not just to do with pots and cliff dwellings. Like Natalie Curtis, she was a scholar of the aboriginal soul. She copied out her own translation of a tribal poem for him to carry in his saddlebag across the Black Mesa:

Dawn, beautiful dawn⁶², the Chief,
This day, let it be well with me as I go;
Let it be well before me as I go;

Let it be well behind me as I go;
Let it be well beneath me as I go;
Let it be well above me as I go;
Let all I see be well as I go.

The poem was as moving as any in The Indians’ Book in its acceptance of the universe as a whole, spherical, yet infinite space of many dimensions—the circle of the horizon, the bowl of the sky, the complementary curves of sun, rainbow, moon, and arch—and in its concept of existence as a journey. Roosevelt decided⁶³ that when he wrote about his stay in Kayenta, he would recommend the establishment there of a cultural halfway house for aspiring young Navajos, where Mrs. Wetherill could realize her dream of bridging the nation’s ancient and modern cultures.

At mid-morning⁶⁴ on Tuesday, 19 August, the Hopi mesa rose out of the flat desert ahead, a ridge perforated with seven pueblo villages. Nicholas, Archie, and Quentin spurred their horses toward Walpi, leaving Roosevelt to plod along alone. When he rode up a sandhill below the village he was surprised to see, coming over the crest, a woman with a cup of gasoline in her hand. She was wearing clothes almost as dusty as his, and there was a black smear of axle grease on the front of her skirt. Her face was familiar, as was her voice when she called out to him, “Hail to the chief!”

It was Natalie Curtis⁶⁵, embarrassed to have been discovered in the act of cleaning herself up for his arrival. Roosevelt did not know that his announcement, some weeks back, that he would attend the Hopi Snake Dance festival had become a news sensation throughout the Southwest. Walpi was thronged with white visitors, and accommodations in the town were so scarce that Miss Curtis had been forced to camp out in a peach orchard. The cup of gasoline—vaporizing even as she explained her presence—was intended to cut the grease on her skirt.

“SHE CALLED OUT TO HIM, ‘HAIL TO THE CHIEF!’ ”
Natalie Curtis in Indian dress. (photo credit i14.1)

She could not help thinking, as she looked the Colonel over, that he could have used some of it as well. His khaki riding clothes were stained, and his face under a big Stetson was burned as red as the bandanna around his throat. But he was still the overwhelming presence she recalled from White House days, with a combination of drive and curiosity that had him quizzing her about the Hopi even before they moved on into town.

He told her he was writing some articles about his travels in Arizona, and wanted them to be full of information. “I am going to South America shortly, and I can stay here only a few days, so the sooner we talk the better.”

Natalie was only too willing to help. He was unaware that she had come to Walpi deliberately to waylay him and plead her continuing cause, against “the tide of Anglo-Saxon iconoclasm” that was sweeping away what was left of pre-Columbian culture. Nobody in government had ever been able to answer her question, “How much longer will the American people go to Europe for inspiration and destroy the art that is at their own door?”

Roosevelt had asked much the same thing himself, in his review of the Armory Show. Much as he had admired the quasi-American art of Robert Chanler (including representations of the Arizona desert and the Snake Dance), there was something effete about it, in comparison with the vibrant reality that now confronted him.

“Tell me what I ought to see,” he said to Natalie. “I always like to find students who have made a life study of certain subjects.… And I am glad to put forward ideas, for somehow people do listen to me. I have at least the faculty of making myself heard!”

They made a date to meet for an information session the following morning, before Chu’tiva, the Snake-Antelope ceremonials, got under way. Roosevelt then gave himself⁶⁶ over to the local officials who were to be his hosts over the next two days. He was flattered to hear that as “a former great chief,” he would receive privileges rarely accorded to white men. After lunch he climbed down a ladder festooned with eagle feathers into the kiva, an antechamber of the underworld where the snake priests were preparing themselves for Thursday’s dance.

THE SENSE OF THE strangeness that had possessed him ever since his stay in Kayenta mounted as he stepped off the ladder and found himself in a spacious skylit room, one end of which—the end nearest his ankles—undulated with rattlesnakes. Cigar-puffing priests kept them at bay by stroking them with feather wands. He was intrigued by the sinuous movements of both man and reptile. They seemed to share a temporary accord in which, however, the threat of sudden violence lurked. He was made to sit on the floor with his back to the snakes, about eight feet away, and did not feel at all comfortable. A pot nearby imprisoned—he hoped—some dangerous-looking ribbon snakes. There were about forty rattlers along the line of the wall, some writhing in a tangle, the others free to move at will. One wriggled toward him, and he had to ask for it to be stroked away.

Meanwhile, near-naked acolytes, their coppery bodies daubed with splotches of white paint, were stitching and beading dance costumes. Their moccasins respectfully avoided a sandpainting of a coyote, framed with rainbow lines and pinned at each corner with black thunder-sticks. A priest who spoke some English informed Roosevelt that the east wall beyond it was an altar of sorts, that the prayers offered before it were for “male and female rain,” and that the snakes were being courted as “brothers of men,” who through their soft bellies would telegraph to the underworld gods that the Hopi craved water.

He had seen tribal ritual before—in Africa, on Döberitz Field, in the Chicago Coliseum, at Mrs. Astor’s Fifth Avenue balls when he was fresh out of Harvard. But nothing as mystic as this, nothing as symbolic of “an almost inconceivably remote and savage past.”

ON WEDNESDAY MORNING⁶⁷ he closeted himself with Natalie Curtis in a schoolhouse. If he expected a lecture on Hopi mythology, he was disappointed. She was more intent on criticizing the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ latest folly, the substitution of European-style houses, with rain-shedding, hot tin roofs, for the flat, cool, adobe-walled architecture that spread so naturally around him. She talked about the inability of most white men to understand either the beauty or the fitness of Indian aesthetics. She complained about Congress’s failure ever to have made “a systematic study” of the whole Indian problem, ethnological, environmental, and educational. Until some great foundation like the Carnegie or the Rockefeller should finance such a study, she said, efforts to improve the lot of the tribes would be like the rain-shedding roofs—“misfits in spirit as in fact.”

Roosevelt listened and memorized⁶⁸ with a receptivity not far short of Natalie’s own as a song transcriber. But he was too old, and too much of a white man himself, to admire pagan values as much as she. He went no further in his commitment to her cause than to agree that there should be “an interchange of ideas between the two races.”

At dawn the following day⁶⁹, she went to the Colonel’s quarters with a bottle of hot coffee. She had promised to take him to the crest of the ridge, so that he could see the Hopi runners coming across the plain as heralds of the great Snake Dance. But his bedroom was empty. He had already heard the call of the crier and climbed the highest butte above town in pitch darkness. By the time she found him, the “yellow line” of Pueblo cosmology was widening in the east, silhouetting Roosevelt’s bulk against the sky. When the runners appeared below, they seemed aware of his importance, and leaped up the side of the escarpment as if they had not already run five miles. Painted children accompanied the winner’s final, easy-breathing rush.

Roosevelt applauded, privately wishing⁷⁰ that he could enter such a splendid athlete in the next Olympic marathon.

All thoughts of common humanity faded, however, when he returned to the kiva for the Washing of the Snakes. Nicholas, Archie, and Quentin were permitted to climb down the ladder with him. The ensuing drama moved beyond strangeness into the realm of dream.

About twenty Hopi took part in it, naked except for breechclouts. The number of snakes on the floor around them had increased to about a hundred, with many of the more venomous breeds now at large. Again feather wands stroked errant ones away, as the oldest priest puffed smoke and sprinkled cornmeal over a huge tureen filled with water. In deep silence, he mumbled a prayer, and the other Indians punctuated it with what sounded to Roosevelt like “a kind of selah or amen.” The chant grew louder and the copper bodies began to sway, but there was little hint of any rising passion. Acolytes reached casually into the tangle of snakes and passed them, coiling and waving, to the priests around the bowl.

When each priest⁷¹ had a couple of fistfuls, the chant rose to a scream, the snakes were dunked in the water, and then hurled halfway across the room so violently that several thunder-sticks were knocked flat. Roosevelt boggled at their willingness to be abused. The phrase he had used in endorsing Natalie Curtis’s book came to him. He was being granted a glimpse into “an elder world.”

At five o’clock⁷² the climactic Snake Dance began in the village. Antelope priests and snake priests, their faces daubed, chanted and stomped in a rhythm intended to reverberate to the center of the earth. Plumed headdresses tossed and leather kirtles flapped as they circled the rock Archie had climbed. At its foot, little girls dusted the newly washed snakes with corn meal. Then the dancers broke into couples, one of each scooping up a snake and putting it in his mouth. A particularly daring priest clamped his jaws around two narrow sidewinders. The flat triangular heads were left to float free and strike at will. Roosevelt saw no bites to the face, although he judged by a definite nervousness in the dancers that such an accident was possible. Both men and snakes seemed to be moving in tandem, caught up in the universality of the dance.

At last all the snakes … were thrown at the foot of the natural stone pillar, and immediately, with a yell, the dancers leaped in, seized each of them, several snakes, and rushed away, east, west, north, and south, dashing over the edge of the cliff and jumping like goats down the precipitous trails. At the foot of the cliff, or on the plain, they dropped the snakes, and then returned to purify themselves by drinking and washing from pails of dark sacred water—medicine water—brought by the women.

Roosevelt left Walpi with the boys by automobile later that evening, but not before he had set down in longhand a three-thousand-word account of the day’s experiences. “If I don’t write⁷³ the article now I never will,” he told Natalie Curtis, “because my life is too full.”

He explained that in two days’ time he would be taking the California Limited from Gallup, New Mexico, en route home. Then he must write four lectures for delivery in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. The governments of the latter countries were demanding that he address their learned societies as well as the one in Buenos Aires. Inevitably, his forthcoming itinerary had had to be extended.

“I can never afford⁷⁴ to be in arrears,” Roosevelt said.

Natalie complimented him on his orderliness and dynamic drive.

“I like the strenuous life, you know,” he said, smiling, “and I am going to South America now because I very much want to make that exploring trip.” He figured he had about six more years of real energy left. “I am nearly fifty-five.… I suppose that after sixty it won’t be well for me to tax my resistance in the same way.”

THE COLONEL RETURNED⁷⁵ to Oyster Bay on 26 August to find Edith back from Europe. He was overjoyed⁷⁶ when she agreed to accompany him on the official part of his tour, linking São Paulo and Rio to Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Santiago. She declined to contemplate a return crossing of the Andes by ox wagon. If he was determined to see Patagonia, from whatever altitude, he could do it without her. Her plan was to sail home from Valparaiso, Chile, at the end of November, and await the birth of Ethel’s baby, due early the following March. By then, she hoped, her husband’s jungle adventure would be over, and they could face old age in peace. One of her favorite quotations⁷⁷, recalled from the story of Troilus, was, “Life is short—let us spend it together.”

This appeared also to be the sentiment of the veterans of Armageddon, querulous about Roosevelt’s long-term loyalty. “I am having⁷⁸ my usual difficulties with the Progressive Party, whose members drive me nearly mad,” he told Quentin. “I have to remember, in order to keep myself fairly good tempered, that even though the wild asses of the desert are mainly in our ranks, our opponents have a fairly exclusive monopoly of the swine.”

He did what he could to console Party members for deserting them at the start of the new political season. On 27 September⁷⁹ he attended the New York Progressive convention in Rochester, roundly attacked William Barnes Jr., and the state GOP, and forced the nomination of Learned Hand for chief judge of the court of appeals. He published his long-delayed commentary on the national political situation in the October issue of The Century, but the writing was tired: it was little more than an update of his campaign platform of the year before.

Finally he allowed⁸⁰ 2,350 wildly applauding Progressives to give him a farewell dinner in the roof garden of the New York Theater on 3 October. He promised that before he went into the Brazilian jungle, he would impress their ideology upon the intellectual and political elite of South America. “Next spring I shall return to devote myself with whatever strength I have to working with you for the success of the Progressive Party and of the great principles for which the Progressive Party stands.”

VARIOUS OTHER SERPENTS had to be stroked before Roosevelt felt free to board the SS Vandyck, southbound on 4 October. Lyman and Lawrence Abbott were distressed to be losing their star columnist, so he sold⁸¹ The Outlook the rights to his four South American lectures, and a like number of travel articles, for $5,000. He assuaged Charles Scribner’s chagrin over his defection to Macmillan by signing a $15,000 contract for a book about his coming expedition. As with African Game Trails, it would be prepublished serially in Scribner’s Magazine, then put out in hardback with a 20 percent royalty. Roosevelt kept quiet about the speaking fees he would earn in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, but Edith privately informed Ethel that they would total “about $10,000.” Even after deducting all his travel and equipment costs, he expected to clear $20,000 over the next six months.

Quentin and Archie⁸² bade their parents goodbye with adolescent equanimity, and went their separate ways to school and college. Alice was more⁸³ clinging. Still childless, she had been emotionally fragile since the announcement of Ethel’s pregnancy, and had to be persuaded not to sue her depressed, philandering husband for divorce. The only salvation for the Longworths, as Edith saw it, was for Nick to win back his cherished seat in Congress.

In his last literary task before leaving, the Colonel composed an introduction to the book version of his memoirs. “Naturally,” he wrote⁸⁴, “there are chapters of my autobiography which cannot now be written.”

Then for the second time in his life, he dropped below the equator.