May 28, 2006 - 02:08:24 CDT
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - This afternoon, at Harvard University, I held in my hands original snapshots that Theodore Roosevelt took with an early Kodak Brownie box camera at the Elkhorn Ranch site 35 miles north of Medora, Dakota Territory, probably in 1886.At least two of the nine photographs I examined in the rare book room of the Houghton Library at Harvard never have been published.
They were stout cardboard black-and-white prints, like half of a stereo-opticon slide, 4 by 6 inches, photographs that Roosevelt took, touched, preserved and, I think, probably developed himself in the field.
It was thrilling. I felt a chill run up my back as I happened upon the pictures in a plain manila envelope in a box of a 1940s Roosevelt biographer's research materials. For a geek, this is paradise - what meeting Michael Jordan or Cher, or winning the lottery signifies to a more balanced person. I wanted to shout out loud as I "discovered" the prints, or do one of those Macaulay Culkin arm-cocking gestures from "Home Alone," or a Jim Carrey pelvic rant, or, like Roosevelt at the site of his first buffalo kill, perform an "Indian war dance."
Today immediately became one of the great days of my life. I'm celebrating now, with a take-out Greek salad, extra feta, in a somewhat grimy motel room, by trying to find words to express my sense of joy and the humbling feeling one has in touching that which has been touched by the great. It won't be easy to sleep tonight - the excitement of the day will not wear off.
We North Dakotans are so fortunate that Roosevelt lived among us for a time. The Elkhorn Ranch was his second home. In some ways, it was more important than his base camp at Sagamore Hill on Long Island.
The project that brought me here is a book I will publish in a couple of years of Roosevelt's Dakota Letters. Roosevelt spent a portion of four years in Dakota Territory between 1883 and 1887. He wrote three remarkable books about his ranch and cowboy experiences, a bunch of articles and a few score of letters. The letters never have been published together. Some of them never have been published at all. I'm trying to track them down. Harvard is my first stop. The Library of Congress comes next.
My guide here is Harvard's wonderful Roosevelt curator, Wallace Dailey. He has seen lots of scholars come and go, including important and famous ones like Edmund Morris ("The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt") and David McCullough ("Mornings on Horseback").
Working with Dailey is a bit like getting to know a Buddhist master or engaging in a Japanese tea ceremony. Here at Harvard, the nation's central repository of Roosevelt's writings, you don't just toss what you think you might need on a copying machine and go home to sort it out. You sit in a temperature-regulated and dust-controlled room, touching historic documents as if they had been sprinkled with plutonium powder. Copies cost a minimum of 50 cents apiece - that is, if the document is deemed to be sufficiently unimportant to be safely copied. Waiting time on copies is long, for scans much longer. Rare book rooms discourage haste and scholarly impatience.
The North Dakota phase of Roosevelt's life has gotten a good deal of attention. Hermann Hagedorn published "Roosevelt in the Badlands" back in 1921. He interviewed people who had known Roosevelt in the Badlands years.
Those interviews, which I have not yet heard, are recorded on Dictaphone belts - red translucent rubbery plastic belts. They were high-tech once, and now they are no more than intellectual taffy, scarcely better than Edison cylinders.
Nobody at Harvard can listen to them. (If you have an old Dictaphone belt machine, please let me know.) Fortunately, Hagedorn transcribed the most important interviews. Later, Carleton Putnam studied the Badlands years with great care in preparing his marvelous "Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years" (1958) for the press. His papers are here, too.
So I sit here at Harvard reading Roosevelt's letters. My favorite so far, unrelated to my actual task, is one that TR wrote as president (1903).
"I took Kermit and Archie with Philip, Oliver and Nicholas out for a night's camping in the two row boats last week. They enjoyed themselves heartily, as usual, each sleeping rolled up in his blanket, and all getting up at an unearthly hour. Also, as usual, they displayed a touching and firm conviction that my cooking is unequaled. It was of a simple character, consisting of frying beefsteak first and then potatoes in bacon fat, over the fire; but they certainly ate in a way that showed their words were not uttered in a spirit of empty compliment." Who does not wish to have been on that camping trip? Who would not want such a father?
But I also held and read a letter Edith wrote from the hospital in Chicago in October 1912 when her husband lay fighting for life in the next room, an assassin's bullet lodged in his bull moose chest.
And the last letter TR wrote to his first wife, Alice, filled with sweet (even cloying) adoration. He wrote it on Feb. 6, 1884, thinking he and Alice were about to embark on the second phase of their marriage: the birth of their first child. He could not know, as he put pen to paper that spring day in Albany, that his wife would be dead eight days later, at the age of 22, and that the whole course of his life would change in one night. But I knew, as I read the letter, and I felt sad and awkward, like an intruder, almost like a peeping Tom. I got up to sharpen my pencil.
It's impossible not to like Roosevelt if you read these letters. He's so open to new experience, so eager, like Thoreau, to suck out all the honey of life, so affectionate to his mother, first wife, sisters Corinne and Anna ("Bamie," "Bysie," "Bye"), his best friend Henry Cabot Lodge, so candid and unselfconscious and forthright, even to perfect strangers.
Take this story - which I had never heard before - about a "man-killing broncho," told by North Dakotan Bill Dantz.
"Roosevelt mounted him, (the horse) braced himself, didn't buck, started off quietly until within a few feet of chasm, then lept in air like a shot deer, came down all four feet, bucked with him, a sun-fish buck, sideways, up in the air second time, switched ends. Roosevelt went off in baked alkali, struck the ground an awful jolt, lay there bleeding nose, got up unassisted, shook himself, remounted the horse. Afterwards horse bucked again. Roosevelt subjected him ten minutes quirt and spur. Roosevelt very pale, found two ribs broken, wouldn't dismount until horse thoroughly under control."
That was no tenderfoot on that horse, no eastern dude. He may have been an idiot, but he wasn't a dandy.
For three days I have worked eight (in one case 11) hours straight in a silent room at America's premier university, a room equipped with an Orwellian security system and librarians and guards who are paid to be suspicious and grumpy.
The rare books room here has the feel of a hospital operating theater or the vault at Fort Knox. Everyone speaks in hushed tones. Today, when my cell phone went off by mistake, I jumped on it the way Vic Morrow would a grenade in a World War II movie. Every time I hold one of TR's original letters in my hands, I shudder a little at the thought of damaging a unique document that one of the most important men of American history held in his stout and brilliant hands.
By the time I walk out of the Houghton Library in the early evening, I'm dazed. My fingers are numb. My brain is numb. I slur my words - fortunately there is nobody around to listen and judge. And all I can think about is, how soon does the library open tomorrow morning?
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. E-mail Jenkinson at Jeffysage@;aol.com. His second column of commentary on the Ward Churchill controversy will appear next Sunday.)
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