Great Heart The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt 6

Great Heart The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt 6

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.

 

 

 

 

IV

 

Champion of Women and Children

 

 

Many people misunderstood Roosevelt. Seeing the virile, fighting side

of his nature, they came to look at him as representing strength

without tenderness. On the contrary, no man was more tender to women,

children and animals. He always impressed his close friend, Jacob Riis,

as being as tender as a woman.

 

One day while Theodore Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy,

he prevailed on Mr. Riis to go home with him. In those days the

Roosevelt children were little. Instead of rushing upon Mr. Roosevelt

when he entered the door, as was their custom later, they waited their father’s coming in the nursery.