We now enter upon the most adventurous part of Roosevelt’s Western
experiences. Of dash, adventure and excitement he had plenty in his
life as a ranchman, and yet through it all a still greater adventure
called him. About him lay the wilderness. In that wilderness lurked big
game. Roosevelt became a hunter. Something of the perils and hardships
of the wild life he was about to enter upon can best be illustrated by
the story he tells in his book “Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail” of
the experiences of two starving trappers.
These two men had entered a valley in the heart of the mountains where
game was so abundant that they decided to pass the winter there. As
winter came on they worked hard at putting up a log cabin, killing
just enough meat for immediate use. Winter set in with tremendous
snowstorms. Game left the valley, abandoning it for their winter
haunts. Starvation stared the trappers in the face. One man had his
dog with him. The other insisted that the dog should be killed for
food. The dog’s owner, who was deeply attached to the animal, refused.
One night the other trapper tried to kill the dog with his knife, but
failed. The scanty supply of flour the partners possessed was now
almost exhausted. Hunger was beginning to intensify their bad feelings.
Neither dared to sleep for fear that the other would kill him.
Finally the man who owned the dog proposed that, to give each a chance
for life, they should separate. He himself agreed to take one-half of
the handful of flour that was left and to start off in an attempt to
get home. The other was to stay. If one tried to interfere with the
other after the separation it meant a fight to the death. For two days
the man and his dog plunged through snowdrifts. On the second evening,
looking back over a high ridge, he saw his companion following him.
He followed his own trail back, lay in ambush and shot down the man
following him as if he had been a wild beast. The next evening he baked
his last cake and divided it with the dog. Only a short stretch of time
stood between them and death. Just then, however, the dog crossed the
tracks of a wolf and followed its trail. The man staggered after and
came at last to where the wolf stood over the body of a deer it had
killed. The meat of the deer replenished the strength of the trapper
and dog, and they continued their journey. A week later they reached a
miner’s cabin.
While Roosevelt in his hunting experiences never had an adventure so
harrowing as this, he nevertheless managed to crowd into his life as
many big moments as most professional hunters and trappers find in
a lifetime. At fifteen, an age when most boys are only dreaming of
becoming huntsmen, Roosevelt killed his first deer.
His brother, his cousin and himself were camping out for the first time
in their lives. Their camp was located on Lake St. Regis. The other
two boys went fishing. Roosevelt was not overly fond of this sport, so
he went off on a deer hunt. With him went the two guides, Hank Martin
and Mose Sawyer. The first day of the hunt he not only did not kill a
deer--he failed to see one that stood within range; and, on the way
home, shot in mistake for one a large owl that was perched on a log.
The next day, goaded by the teasing of his camp mates, he started
out again. This time he had better luck. As his canoe swung out from
between forest-lined banks into a little bay, he saw, knee-deep among
the water lilies that fringed the shore, a yearling buck. His first
shot killed him.
The youthful adventure helped to stimulate Roosevelt’s ardor for
hunting. One of the reasons why he went West was that he hoped to find
big game, and when he found himself upon the track of the grizzly he
was in his element indeed.
We find Roosevelt one day setting out from his ranch on a hunt for
grizzly on the Big Horn Range. His eagerness to come in close contact
with the grizzly was in no way dampened by the fact that a neighbor
of his, while prospecting with two other men near the headwaters of
the Little Missouri in the Black Hills country, had had a terrible
experience with one.
The neighbor and two other men were walking along the river. Two of
them followed the edge of the stream. The third followed a game trail
some distance away from them. Suddenly the second heard an agonized
shout from the third man, intermingled with the growling of the bear.
They rushed to the scene just in time to see their companion in close
contact with a grizzly. The bear was so close to the man that he had no
time to fire his rifle, but merely held it up as a guard to his head.
The immensely muscular forearm of the grizzly, with nails as strong
as steel hooks, descended upon the man, striking aside the rifle and
crushing the man’s skull like an eggshell.
Still another of the Colonel’s friends, while hunting in the Big Horn
Mountains, had pursued a large bear and wounded him. The animal turned
and rushed at the man, who fired at him and missed. The bear closed
with him and passed on, striking only a single blow, yet that blow tore
the man’s collarbone and snapped three or four ribs. The shock was so
great that he died that night.
With his interest stimulated by such accounts of grizzly hunting,
Roosevelt set out. It was early in September. The weather was cool and
frosty and the flurries of snow made it easy to track the bears. There
were plenty of blacktail deer in the woods, as well as bands of cow and
calf elk, or of young bull. There were no signs of grizzly however.
One day Roosevelt and Merrifield separated, but at last Roosevelt heard
the familiar long-drawn shout of a cattleman and dashed toward him on
his small, wiry cow pony. Merrifield announced that he had seen signs
of bears about ten miles distant. They shifted camp at once and rode to
the spot where the bear tracks were so plentiful.
As Roosevelt came home toward nightfall from a vain hunt, walking
through a reach of burned forest, he came across the huge half-human
footprints of a great grizzly which had evidently passed a short time
before. He followed the tracks in the fading twilight until it became
too dark to see them, and had to give up the pursuit as darkness closed
in about him. The next day, toward nightfall, as the two men were again
returning home without having caught sight of the grizzly, they heard
the sound of the breaking of a dead stick. It was the grizzly whose
tracks they had seen around the remains of a black deer that Merrifield
had shot. Again they had to postpone pursuit of him on account of
darkness, but they made up their minds that they would get him the next
morning.
Merrifield was a skilful tracker, and the next day he took up the trail
at once where it had been left off. After a few hundred yards the
tracks turned off on a well-beaten path made by the elk. The beast’s
footprints were plain in the dust. The trail turned off into the
tangled thicket, within which it was almost certain that the quarry
could be found.
Still they followed the tracks, advancing with noiseless caution,
climbing over dead tree trunks and upturned stumps and taking care that
no branches rustled or caught on their clothes. Suddenly Merrifield
sank on one knee, his face ablaze with excitement. Roosevelt strode
past him with his rifle at the ready. There, not ten steps off, the
great bear rose slowly from his bed among young spruces. He had heard
his hunters, but did not know their exact location, for he reared up on
his haunches and was sidewise to them. Then suddenly he caught sight
of them and dropped on his fores, the hair on his neck and shoulders
seeming to bristle as he turned toward them.
Roosevelt raised his rifle. The bear’s head was bent slightly down, and
when Roosevelt looked squarely into the small, glittering, evil eyes he
pulled his trigger. The bear half rose, then toppled over in the death
throes. The bullet had gone into his brain. He was the first grizzly
Roosevelt had ever seen, and a huge one at that. Naturally, he felt
proud that within twenty seconds from the time he had caught sight of
the game he had killed it.
Merrifield’s chief feeling was one of disappointment, not that he had
not killed the game, but that Roosevelt had shot and killed him before
the bear had had a chance to fight. Merrifield was reckless. He did not
fear a grizzly any more than he did a jackrabbit. He wanted to see the
bear come toward them in a typical grizzly charge and to bring him down
in the rush. However, Roosevelt, not so much a veteran at bear-hunting,
was quite contented in looking at the monstrous fellow to have brought
him down before his charge commenced.
Lieutenant-Governor William Francis Sheehan once told a story
illustrative of the Colonel’s whole-hearted spirit of adventure.
Repeating a conversation he had with Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Sheehan
described the former President as standing before the mounted skin of
a monster grizzly bear which he had shot at close range--so close that
the odds at one instant seemed greatly in favor of the grizzly. After
a description of the dramatic fight the Colonel suddenly turned to
Sheehan and said:
“But, Governor, I shall never be satisfied until I have killed a
grizzly bear with a knife!”
When one reads of Roosevelt in such surroundings one does not wonder
that the Roosevelt home at Sagamore Hill at times resembled a veritable
menagerie. At one time there were a lion, a hyena, a zebra, five bears,
a wildcat, a coyote, two macaws, an eagle, a barn owl and several
snakes and lizards. Kangaroo rats and flying squirrels slept in the
pockets and blouses of the Roosevelt children, went to school with
them and often were guests at dinner. While campaigning in Kansas in
1903 a little girl brought a baby badger, carried by her brother, to
Roosevelt’s train, whence it was later transferred to the Sagamore Hill
menagerie. There was a guinea-pig named Father O’Grady by the children,
but this proved to be of the softer sex. One day two of the children
rushed breathlessly into a room where the Roosevelts were entertaining
mixed company. “Oh! oh!” they cried. “Father O’Grady has had some
children!”
As a result of their closeness to nature Roosevelt’s sons became
sportsmen and naturalists worthy of their father.
Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., killed his first buck just before he was
fourteen, and his first moose, a big bull with horns that spread
fifty-six inches, just before he was seventeen. Both of these animals
were killed in the wilderness, on hunting trips which tested to the
utmost the boy’s endurance and skill.