We spent two nights in our Tower Falls camp, and on the morning of the
third day set out on our return to Fort Yellowstone, pausing at
Yancey's on our way, and exchanging greetings with the old
frontiersman, who died a few weeks later.
While in camp we always had a big fire at night in the open near the
tents, and around this we sat upon logs or camp-stools, and listened
to the President's talk. What a stream of it he poured forth! and what
a varied and picturesque stream!--anecdote, history, science,
politics, adventure, literature; bits of his experience as a ranchman,
hunter, Rough Rider, legislator, civil service commissioner, police
commissioner, governor, president,--the frankest confessions, the most
telling criticisms, happy characterizations of prominent political
leaders, or foreign rulers, or members of his own Cabinet; always
surprising by his candor, astonishing by his memory, and diverting by
his humor. His reading has been very wide, and he has that rare type
of memory which retains details as well as mass and generalities. One
night something started him off on ancient history, and one would have
thought he was just fresh from his college course in history, the
dates and names and events came so readily. Another time he discussed
palaeontology, and rapidly gave the outlines of the science, and the
main facts, as if he had been reading up on the subject that very day.
He sees things as wholes, and hence the relation of the parts comes
easy to him.
At dinner, at the White House, the night before we started on the
expedition, I heard him talking with a guest,--an officer of the
British army, who was just back from India. And the extent and variety
of his information about India and Indian history and the relations of
the British government to it were extraordinary. It put the British
major on his mettle to keep pace with him.
One night in camp he told us the story of one of his Rough Riders who
had just written him from some place in Arizona. The Rough Riders,
wherever they are now, look to him in time of trouble. This one had
come to grief in Arizona. He was in jail. So he wrote the President,
and his letter ran something like this:--
"DEAR COLONEL,--I am in trouble. I shot a lady in the eye,
but I did not intend to hit the lady; I was shooting at my
wife."
And the presidential laughter rang out over the tree-tops. To another
Rough Rider, who was in jail, accused of horse stealing, he had loaned
two hundred dollars to pay counsel on his trial, and, to his surprise,
in due time the money came back. The ex-Rough wrote that his trial
never came off. "_We elected our district attorney_;" and the laughter
again sounded, and drowned the noise of the brook near by.
On another occasion we asked the President if he was ever molested by
any of the "bad men" of the frontier, with whom he had often come in
contact. "Only once," he said. The cowboys had always treated him with
the utmost courtesy, both on the round-up and in camp; "and the few
real desperadoes I have seen were also perfectly polite." Once only
was he maliciously shot at, and then not by a cowboy nor a _bona fide_
"bad man," but by a "broad-hatted ruffian of a cheap and common-place
type." He had been compelled to pass the night at a little frontier
hotel where the bar-room occupied the whole lower floor, and was, in
consequence, the only place where the guests of the hotel, whether
drunk or sober, could sit. As he entered the room, he saw that every
man there was being terrorized by a half-drunken ruffian who stood in
the middle of the floor with a revolver in each hand, compelling
different ones to treat.
"I went and sat down behind the stove," said the President, "as far
from him as I could get; and hoped to escape his notice. The fact that
I wore glasses, together with my evident desire to avoid a fight,
apparently gave him the impression that I could be imposed upon with
impunity. He very soon approached me, flourishing his two guns, and
ordered me to treat. I made no reply for some moments, when the fellow
became so threatening that I saw something had to be done. The crowd,
mostly sheep-herders and small grangers, sat or stood back against the
wall, afraid to move. I was unarmed, and thought rapidly. Saying,
'Well, if I must, I must,' I got up as if to walk around him to the
bar, then, as I got opposite him, I wheeled and fetched him as heavy a
blow on the chin-point as I could strike. He went down like a steer
before the axe, firing both guns into the ceiling as he went. I jumped
on him, and, with my knees on his chest, disarmed him in a hurry. The
crowd was then ready enough to help me, and we hog-tied him and put
him in an outhouse." The President alludes to this incident in his
"Ranch Life," but does not give the details. It brings out his mettle
very distinctly.
He told us in an amused way of the attempts of his political opponents
at Albany, during his early career as a member of the Assembly, to
besmirch his character. His outspoken criticisms and denunciations had
become intolerable to them, so they laid a trap for him, but he was
not caught. His innate rectitude and instinct for the right course
saved him, as it has saved him many times since. I do not think that
in any emergency he has to debate with himself long as to the right
course to be pursued; he divines it by a kind of infallible instinct.
His motives are so simple and direct that he finds a straight and easy
course where another man, whose eye is less single, would flounder and
hesitate.
One night he entertained us with reminiscences of the Cuban War, of
his efforts to get his men to the firing line when the fighting began,
of his greenness and general ignorance of the whole business of war,
which in his telling was very amusing. He has probably put it all in
his book about the war, a work I have not yet read. He described the
look of the slope of Kettle Hill when they were about to charge up it,
how the grass was combed and rippled by the storm of rifle bullets
that swept down it. He said, "I was conscious of being pale when I
looked at it and knew that in a few moments we were going to charge
there." The men of his regiment were all lying flat upon the ground,
and it became his duty to walk along their front and encourage them
and order them up on their feet. "Get up, men, get up!" One big fellow
did not rise. Roosevelt stooped down and took hold of him and ordered
him up. Just at that moment a bullet struck the man and went the
entire length of him. He never rose.
On this or on another occasion when a charge was ordered, he found
himself a hundred yards or more in advance of his regiment, with only
the color bearer and one corporal with him. He said they planted the
flag there, while he rushed back to fetch the men. He was evidently
pretty hot. "Can it be that you flinched when I led the way!" and then
they came with a rush. On the summit of Kettle Hill he was again in
advance of his men, and as he came up, three Spaniards rose out of the
trenches and deliberately fired at him at a distance of only a few
paces, and then turned and fled. But a bullet from his revolver
stopped one of them. He seems to have been as much exposed to bullets
in this engagement as Washington was at Braddock's defeat, and to have
escaped in the same marvelous manner.
The President unites in himself powers and qualities that rarely go
together. Thus, he has both physical and moral courage in a degree
rare in history. He can stand calm and unflinching in the path of a
charging grizzly, and he can confront with equal coolness and
determination the predaceous corporations and money powers of the
country.
He unites the qualities of the man of action with those of the scholar
and writer,--another very rare combination. He unites the instincts
and accomplishments of the best breeding and culture with the broadest
democratic sympathies and affiliations. He is as happy with a
frontiersman like Seth Bullock as with a fellow Harvard man, and Seth
Bullock is happy, too.
He unites great austerity with great good nature. He unites great
sensibility with great force and will power. He loves solitude, and he
loves to be in the thick of the fight. His love of nature is equaled
only by his love of the ways and marts of men.
He is doubtless the most vital man on the continent, if not on the
planet, to-day. He is many-sided, and every side throbs with his
tremendous life and energy; the pressure is equal all around. His
interests are as keen in natural history as in economics, in
literature as in statecraft, in the young poet as in the old soldier,
in preserving peace as in preparing for war. And he can turn all his
great power into the new channel on the instant. His interest in the
whole of life, and in the whole life of the nation, never flags for a
moment. His activity is tireless. All the relaxation he needs or
craves is a change of work. He is like the farmer's fields, that only
need a rotation of crops. I once heard him say that all he cared about
being President was just "the big work."
During this tour through the West, lasting over two months, he made
nearly three hundred speeches; and yet on his return Mrs. Roosevelt
told me he looked as fresh and unworn as when he left home.
We went up into the big geyser region with the big sleighs, each drawn
by four horses. A big snow-bank had to be shoveled through for us
before we got to the Golden Gate, two miles above Mammoth Hot
Springs. Beyond that we were at an altitude of about eight thousand
feet, on a fairly level course that led now through woods, and now
through open country, with the snow of a uniform depth of four or five
feet, except as we neared the "formations," where the subterranean
warmth kept the ground bare. The roads had been broken and the snow
packed for us by teams from the fort, otherwise the journey would have
been impossible.
The President always rode beside the driver. From his youth, he said,
this seat had always been the most desirable one to him. When the
sleigh would strike the bare ground, and begin to drag heavily, he
would bound out nimbly and take to his heels, and then all three of
us--Major Pitcher, Mr. Childs, and myself--would follow suit,
sometimes reluctantly on my part. Walking at that altitude is no fun,
especially if you try to keep pace with such a walker as the President
is. But he could not sit at his ease and let those horses drag him in
a sleigh over bare ground. When snow was reached, we would again
quickly resume our seats.
As one nears the geyser region, he gets the impression from the
columns of steam going up here and there in the distance--now from
behind a piece of woods, now from out a hidden valley--that he is
approaching a manufacturing centre, or a railroad terminus. And when
he begins to hear the hoarse snoring of "Roaring Mountain," the
illusion is still more complete. At Norris's there is a big vent where
the steam comes tearing out of a recent hole in the ground with
terrific force. Huge mounds of ice had formed from the congealed vapor
all around it, some of them very striking.
The novelty of the geyser region soon wears off. Steam and hot water
are steam and hot water the world over, and the exhibition of them
here did not differ, except in volume, from what one sees by his own
fireside. The "Growler" is only a boiling tea-kettle on a large scale,
and "Old Faithful" is as if the lid were to fly off, and the whole
contents of the kettle should be thrown high into the air. To be sure,
boiling lakes and steaming rivers are not common, but the new features
seemed, somehow, out of place, and as if nature had made a mistake.
One disliked to see so much good steam and hot water going to waste;
whole towns might be warmed by them, and big wheels made to go round.
I wondered that they had not piped them into the big hotels which they
opened for us, and which were warmed by wood fires.
[Illustration: SUNRISE IN YELLOWSTONE PARK.
From stereograph, copyright 1904, by Underwood & Underwood,
New York.]
At Norris's the big room that the President and I occupied was on the
ground floor, and was heated by a huge box stove. As we entered it to
go to bed, the President said, "Oom John, don't you think it is too
hot here?"
"I certainly do," I replied.
"Shall I open the window?"
"That will just suit me." And he threw the sash, which came down to
the floor, all the way up, making an opening like a doorway. The night
was cold, but neither of us suffered from the abundance of fresh air.
The caretaker of the building was a big Swede called Andy. In the
morning Andy said that beat him: "There was the President of the
United States sleeping in that room, with the window open to the
floor, and not so much as one soldier outside on guard."
The President had counted much on seeing the bears that in summer
board at the Fountain Hotel, but they were not yet out of their dens.
We saw the track of only one, and he was not making for the hotel. At
all the formations where the geysers are, the ground was bare over a
large area. I even saw a wild flower--an early buttercup, not an inch
high--in bloom. This seems to be the earliest wild flower in the
Rockies. It is the only fragrant buttercup I know.
As we were riding along in our big sleigh toward the Fountain Hotel,
the President suddenly jumped out, and, with his soft hat as a shield
to his hand, captured a mouse that was running along over the ground
near us. He wanted it for Dr. Merriam, on the chance that it might be
a new species. While we all went fishing in the afternoon, the
President skinned his mouse, and prepared the pelt to be sent to
Washington. It was done as neatly as a professed taxidermist would
have done it. This was the only game the President killed in the
Park. In relating the incident to a reporter while I was in Spokane,
the thought occurred to me, Suppose he changes that _u_ to an _o_, and
makes the President capture a moose, what a pickle I shall be in! Is
it anything more than ordinary newspaper enterprise to turn a mouse
into a moose? But, luckily for me, no such metamorphosis happened to
that little mouse. It turned out not to be a new species, as it should
have been, but a species new to the Park.
I caught trout that afternoon, on the edge of steaming pools in the
Madison River that seemed to my hand almost blood-warm. I suppose they
found better feeding where the water was warm. On the table they did
not compare with our Eastern brook trout.
I was pleased to be told at one of the hotels that they had kalsomined
some of the rooms with material from one of the devil's paint-pots.
It imparted a soft, delicate, pinkish tint, not at all suggestive of
things satanic.
One afternoon at Norris's, the President and I took a walk to observe
the birds. In the grove about the barns there was a great number, the
most attractive to me being the mountain bluebird. These birds we saw
in all parts of the Park, and at Norris's there was an unusual number
of them. How blue they were,--breast and all! In voice and manner they
were almost identical with our bluebird. The Western purple finch was
abundant here also, and juncos, and several kinds of sparrows, with an
occasional Western robin. A pair of wild geese were feeding in the
low, marshy ground not over one hundred yards from us, but when we
tried to approach nearer they took wing. A few geese and ducks seem to
winter in the Park.
The second morning at Norris's one of our teamsters, George Marvin,
suddenly dropped dead from some heart affection, just as he had
finished caring for his team. It was a great shock to us all. I never
saw a better man with a team than he was. I had ridden on the seat
beside him all the day previous. On one of the "formations" our teams
had got mired in the soft, putty-like mud, and at one time it looked
as if they could never extricate themselves, and I doubt if they could
have, had it not been for the skill with which Marvin managed them. We
started for the Grand Canyon up the Yellowstone that morning, and, in
order to give myself a walk over the crisp snow in the clear, frosty
air, I set out a little while in advance of the teams. As I did so, I
saw the President, accompanied by one of the teamsters, walking
hurriedly toward the barn to pay his last respects to the body of
Marvin. After we had returned to Mammoth Hot Springs, he made
inquiries for the young woman to whom he had been told that Marvin was
engaged to be married. He looked her up, and sat a long time with her
in her home, offering his sympathy, and speaking words of consolation.
The act shows the depth and breadth of his humanity.
At the Canyon Hotel the snow was very deep, and had become so soft from
the warmth of the earth beneath, as well as from the sun above, that
we could only reach the brink of the Canyon on skis. The President and
Major Pitcher had used skis before, but I had not, and, starting out
without the customary pole, I soon came to grief. The snow gave way
beneath me, and I was soon in an awkward predicament. The more I
struggled, the lower my head and shoulders went, till only my heels,
strapped to those long timbers, protruded above the snow. To reverse
my position was impossible till some one came and reached me the end
of a pole, and pulled me upright. But I very soon got the hang of the
things, and the President and I quickly left the superintendent
behind. I think I could have passed the President, but my manners
forbade. He was heavier than I was, and broke in more. When one of his
feet would go down half a yard or more, I noted with admiration the
skilled diplomacy he displayed in extricating it. The tendency of my
skis was all the time to diverge, and each to go off at an acute angle
to my main course, and I had constantly to be on the alert to check
this tendency.
Paths had been shoveled for us along the brink of the Canyon, so that
we got the usual views from the different points. The Canyon was nearly
free from snow, and was a grand spectacle, by far the grandest to be
seen in the Park. The President told us that once, when pressed for
meat, while returning through here from one of his hunting trips, he
had made his way down to the river that we saw rushing along beneath
us, and had caught some trout for dinner. Necessity alone could induce
him to fish.
Across the head of the Falls there was a bridge of snow and ice, upon
which we were told that the coyotes passed. As the season progressed,
there would come a day when the bridge would not be safe. It would be
interesting to know if the coyotes knew when this time arrived.
The only live thing we saw in the Canyon was an osprey perched upon a
rock opposite us.
[Illustration: THE PRESIDENT ON A TRAIL
From stereograph, copyright 1905, by Underwood & Underwood,
New York]
Near the falls of the Yellowstone, as at other places we had visited,
a squad of soldiers had their winter quarters. The President called on
them, as he had called upon the others, looked over the books they had
to read, examined their housekeeping arrangements, and conversed
freely with them.
In front of the hotel were some low hills separated by gentle valleys.
At the President's suggestion, he and I raced on our skis down those
inclines. We had only to stand up straight, and let gravity do the
rest. As we were going swiftly down the side of one of the hills, I
saw out of the corner of my eye the President taking a header into the
snow. The snow had given way beneath him, and nothing could save him
from taking the plunge. I don't know whether I called out, or only
thought, something about the downfall of the administration. At any
rate, the administration was down, and pretty well buried, but it was
quickly on its feet again, shaking off the snow with a boy's
laughter. I kept straight on, and very soon the laugh was on me, for
the treacherous snow sank beneath me, and I took a header, too.
"Who is laughing now, Oom John?" called out the President.
The spirit of the boy was in the air that day about the Canyon of the
Yellowstone, and the biggest boy of us all was President Roosevelt.
The snow was getting so soft in the middle of the day that our return
to the Mammoth Hot Springs could no longer be delayed. Accordingly, we
were up in the morning, and ready to start on the home journey, a
distance of twenty miles, by four o'clock. The snow bore up the horses
well till mid-forenoon, when it began to give way beneath them. But by
very careful management we pulled through without serious delay, and
were back again at the house of Major Pitcher in time for luncheon,
being the only outsiders who had ever made the tour of the Park so
early in the season.
A few days later I bade good-by to the President, who went on his way
to California, while I made a loop of travel to Spokane, and around
through Idaho and Montana, and had glimpses of the great, optimistic,
sunshiny West that I shall not soon forget.