Nov 23, 2008 - 04:05:28 CST
What could be more deee-lightful than seeing Theodore Roosevelt's Sagamore Hill with the superintendent of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Valerie Naylor? Well, I can think of one thing, actually, but he has been unavailable since Jan. 6, 1919, when he died in his bed, at his beloved Sagamore, of an embolism.As I write this, I'm trying to imagine being greeted at the door by Colonel Roosevelt himself. He loved visitors from out west, particularly North Dakotans, especially if they were packing pistols. In fact, Roosevelt had a strange tolerance, even affection, for murderers, as long as they were sheepish about it, as long as there was some mitigating fact or circumstance, and automatically if they were former Rough Riders.
I'm a North Dakotan, raised in Dickinson, a town of legendary importance to Roosevelt, for that was where he took the boat thieves in April 1886 and where he delivered his first great speech, on July 4, 1886. Unfortunately, I am not a murderer, though if you fly enough these days, you can certainly imagine the satisfaction. The minute he heard the word Dickinson, Roosevelt could be expected to tell the story of the boat thieves for the umpteenth time - how he loved to talk about making a citizen's arrest of "desperadoes" in the middle of nowhere and sleeplessly marching them overland to justice, in a spring blizzard. The Dickinson doctor who looked at his beat-up feet after the ordeal said Roosevelt, whom he had never before met, "was all teeth and eyes."
Roosevelt could be expected, too, no matter where his guests were from, to exaggerate the amount of time he spent in North Dakota - at some points later in life he said it was up to 10, even 15, years, when, in fact, the total accumulated time came to something like 359 days spread over four years between 1883 and 1887. Roosevelt was, among many other things, a fabulous storyteller. But we get it: North Dakota really, really mattered to Roosevelt, and he wanted others to know just how much.
Superintendent Naylor and I were on a fact-finding mission involving Roosevelt documents and photographs. This was my first visit to Theodore Roosevelt's "other" home. I have made the pilgrimage to the Elkhorn Ranch several dozen times over the years. The Elkhorn cabin is now nothing but grass and your imagination. Sagamore Hill is a ramshackle Queen Anne style house, beautifully-maintained by the National Park Service, on a hill overlooking Oyster Bay on Long Island. Depending on how you count, for there are closets larger than my bedroom, Sagamore consists of 23 rooms, all stuffed with Rooseveltian stuff. When you enter the house, it feels as if the colonel has just walked out for a few minutes to kill a hippopotamus or something. The house does not have a mausoleum feel to it like Mount Vernon. It feels as if it is still being lived in by an eccentric, larger-than-life figure, who enjoys hunting and reading in about that order.
Up till now, my standard for presidential homes has been Monticello in Virginia. The contrast is so profound that you wonder how Jefferson and Roosevelt can stand having to share Mount Rushmore through eternity. Monticello is a Palladian brick mansion with a neoclassical dome, an expression of the Enlightenment, an airy, light-gathering structure with 13 skylights, the interior walls painted in eggshell pastels. The owner was dedicated to reason.
How to describe Sagamore? It's mahogany-dark. It feels like the medieval hunting chalet of a very wealthy, very well-traveled and educated, very lethal, hyper-masculine man. Every room exhibits mounted heads of wild animals bagged all over the planet. Roosevelt's first buffalo, shot north of Marmarth in September 1883, is on display in the North Room. Remarkable pelts of lions, tigers, bears and other quadrupeds are strewn around the house like throw rugs. There is a large bronze rhinoceros in the entrance hall. It was my first rhino bronze - who knew there even was such an art form? Virtually every raised flat surface in the house is cluttered with bronzes - mostly of the "stopping the stampede" variety. Sagamore feels like a warehouse of Remington knockoffs. At one time, there were more than 100 animal trophies in the house. A few dozen have been removed to other Roosevelt sites, though no cosmetic adjustments could lessen the offense to PETA.
This is the home of the Alpha Male.
Two thoughts kept crossing my mind. First, Roosevelt's wife Edith must have been a very strong woman. Early on, she must have realized that being married to Theodore meant, in a sense, that she would be setting up housekeeping as best she could in his life, rather than attempting to create her own ambience. I've never seen a home where the yin and yang of gender balance is so out of whack. At Sagamore, you enter the receiving room, the North Room (added in 1905), through a gateway of two gigantic elephant tusks, said to be the largest on display anywhere, the gift to Roosevelt from the king of something or other.
The second thought that kept coming into my head was, "There had better not be karma." I saw an inkwell made out of a rhinoceros foot and a wastebasket fashioned out of the foot of an elephant. It reminded me of what the financier J.P. Morgan said when Roosevelt left the United States on his yearlong safari in 1909: "Wall Street expects every lion to do its duty."
As you walk through the house, you sense what a force of nature Theodore Roosevelt was. If ever there was a larger-than-life character in American history, it was Roosevelt, who punched out ruffians in frontier bars, went on a yearlong safari in Africa to relax after his presidency and who explored one of the last uncharted rivers in South America on a whim. "It's my last chance to be a boy," he said in the spring of 1914, before undertaking a journey that in some respects makes Lewis and Clark look like weekend strollers, a journey which nearly cost Roosevelt his life. He climbed the Matterhorn on his honeymoon. He took diplomats and Cabinet officers skinny-dipping in the Potomac and Rock Creek.
There are books everywhere in the house. Roosevelt is said to have read a book a day, in addition to all of the physically strenuous things he did. He drank coffee in oceans. He wrote more than 150,000 letters. He wrote more than 35 books, some of them American classics.
You also can sense the children in the house, for Roosevelt was, of all presidents, the most dedicated family man. Six children - all full of beans, especially Alice - and cousins, nieces, nephews, friends, hangers-on, plus pets of an eyebrow-raising variety of species, including the "pet" badger given to Roosevelt on his 1903 conservation trek through the American West.
Eventually we were shown the bedroom and the bed, where Roosevelt died on Jan. 6, 1919. It was a really moving experience, and somehow excruciating, to think that a man so full of life in every way, a man the contemporary historian Henry Adams called "pure act," could ever actually die. I could not look at the bed for more than a few seconds. I remembered that when TR died, his son Archibald cabled the others with a simple and profound notification: "The old lion is dead."
Woodrow Wilson's Vice President Thomas R. Marshall said, "Death had to take him sleeping, for if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight."
(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He is also the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Clay at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)
Hannah Deutscher wrote on May 17, 2009 3:13 PM:
Al Mettler wrote on Mar 13, 2009 2:03 PM:
N wrote on Feb 22, 2009 1:42 PM:
DakotaHarold wrote on Nov 24, 2008 6:40 AM:
Sally wrote on Nov 23, 2008 12:19 PM:
Thanks for the memory trip! "
Robert Murph Myhre wrote on Nov 23, 2008 9:49 AM:
grass! I used to visit it and the State Museum on the Capitol Grounds several times a week in the 1930's.
I have read a number if his books, he was an incredible writer. His "Winning of the
West" series (4 books) is amazing and very enlightening!!
I have felt honored to have shared his 'Birth Date' ~~~ October 27th ~~~ for these
past 82 years!! I wish I could have accompanied you thru Sagamore Hill. "
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