Dreams of El Dorado

PROLOGUE

FOR THEODORE ROOSEVELT IT WAS LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. Which was saying a lot, since Roosevelt’s first sight of the West didn’t show the region to best effect. The young New Yorker, plagued in boyhood by illness and a sense of physical insufficiency, had long dreamed of the West. Its explorers, hunters, soldiers and cowboys became his heroes, the models of the man he struggled to be. On a break from a budding political career, he took a Western vacation in 1883. He rode a train across the prairies west of Chicago and onto the high plains of Dakota Territory. In the middle of the night the Northern Pacific conductor deposited him at the scruffy hamlet of Little Missouri, where the rail line crossed the river of that name. “It was bitterly cold,” he wrote to his wife, Alice, though the calendar registered early September. “And it was some time before, groping about among the four or five shanties which formed the ‘town,’ I found the low, small building called the ‘hotel.’” Roosevelt hammered on the door and eventually roused the innkeeper, who cursed him for spoiling his sleep. The visitor was shown to a barracks room, where he spent the rest of the night amid snoring, snorting men the likes of which the silk-stocking Manhattanite had rarely seen, let alone slumbered with.

Morning made him wonder what had brought him to this locale. “It is a very desolate place,” he wrote, “high, barren hills, scantily clad with coarse grass, and here and there in sheltered places a few stunted cottonwood trees; ‘wash-outs,’ deepening at times into great canyons, and steep cliffs of the most curious formation abounding everywhere.” The scenery didn’t improve on closer examination. Roosevelt enlisted a guide to show him the Badlands, as the crazily eroded terrain was called. They rode mustangs—horses as wild in appearance as the land—around and through the gullies, hoodoos, buttes and cliffs. It was “frightful ground,” Roosevelt said. And utterly inhospitable. “There is very little water, and what there is, is so bitter as to be almost a poison, and nearly undrinkable.”

The weather was as dismal as the scenery. The autumn rains commenced upon Roosevelt’s arrival, and for days the leaden sky poured, drizzled and misted, turning ground that had been dusty days before into a sticky, bottomless gumbo. Roosevelt had come to Dakota to hunt buffalo; he had been told that some of the last remnants of the once uncountable herds had been seen on the Little Missouri. But his guide was reluctant to venture out into the slop. The buffalo knew enough to take shelter, he said; so should hunters. Yet Roosevelt insisted, and offered a bonus. Out they went. They got cold, soaked and muddy. And they found no buffalo. But Roosevelt, who equated tests of the body with tests of the soul, found the experience exhilarating. He had been slightly ailing before coming west. No longer. “I am now feeling very well, and am enjoying the life very much,” he told Alice.

Eventually the weather broke. His guide located a buffalo—a feat the nearsighted Roosevelt could never have managed on his own. Roosevelt skirted downwind of the beast, which was even more myopic than he was, and crawled close enough to get a shot. He fired once, then twice more. The buffalo took off running. Roosevelt thought he might have missed entirely. But he and the guide gave chase, and after crossing a ridge they discovered the buffalo lying dead on its side. Roosevelt whooped for joy and did a victory dance. He pulled out a hundred-dollar bill and gave the guide a bonus.

The experience persuaded Roosevelt to plant a flag in the West. His difficulty finding a buffalo drove home the fact that the West was changing; the indigenous bovines were being replaced by introduced ones: cattle. Roosevelt scouted the opportunities for investment in the cattle industry, and before he left Dakota he designated two locals as his agents, with instructions to buy him a cattle ranch. Believing Westerners more honest than the swindlers he knew in the East, where his political enemies included the grafters of New York’s Tammany Hall, Roosevelt wrote a check for fourteen thousand dollars and accepted no security beyond a handshake.

He got his ranch and became a cattleman. He struggled to master the arts of the cowboy. To Roosevelt, as to many of his generation in America, the cowboy was the embodiment of the West and of its spirit of rugged individualism. If Roosevelt could prove himself as hardy, as resourceful, as brave and strong as the cowboys who rode the Dakota range, he would have become the man he longed to be.

He made an odd figure for a cowboy. His laconic neighbors chuckled at the “Bully!” and “Deeelighted!” that burst from his mouth. His thick eyeglasses earned him the inevitable moniker “Four-eyes,” which alternated with “the Dude.” But his determination and stamina eventually won him the respect of his new comrades. He learned to ride like a cowboy, rope like a cowboy, herd cattle like a cowboy, stand up to thieves and other bad men like a cowboy.

He poured his inheritance into his Dakota ranch, and following the untimely death of his wife, he poured his heart into it. Alice had been his only true love, and he was devastated by her loss. He sought refuge on the ranch and in the solitude of the Badlands. He fell under the spell of the West. “I have been three weeks on the roundup and have worked as hard as any of the cowboys,” he wrote from the range to an Eastern friend. “But I have enjoyed it greatly. Yesterday I was eighteen hours in the saddle—from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m.—having a half hour each for dinner and tea. I can now do cowboy work pretty well.”

He dreamed of becoming a cattle baron, a Western equivalent of the business tycoons of the East. Many others had made fortunes in the West; why couldn’t he?

He learned soon enough. Winters in Dakota had been deceptively mild during the brief time since whites had begun settling there. The winter of 1886–1887 reverted to the mean, and then some. Rainfall had been scanter than usual that summer, and it didn’t pick up in the fall. The cattle became thin, rather than packing on the weight needed to carry them through the winter. And winter came early. A typical winter on the plains featured brief storms that dropped a few to several inches of dry snow on the ground and then abated. The air might be cold, but the snow wasn’t too deep for the cattle to paw aside, baring the cured grass beneath. This winter was different. The first storm came in November as a full-bore blizzard. It caught the cattle not only thin from the summer but lacking their winter coats. It dropped drifts of snow that defied the efforts of the hungry animals to dig through it. Where they did manage to penetrate to the bottom of the drifts, there wasn’t any grass, due to the summer’s drought.

This first storm was followed by another, and another. Temperatures plummeted far below zero. The cowboys, who normally thought nothing of risking their lives for the cattle, couldn’t leave their cabins without themselves freezing in minutes. The cattle sought shelter in creek bottoms and wherever the wind slackened. But it was in precisely these places that the snow drifted deepest, burying the cows until they couldn’t move or even breathe.

The winter went on and on. The cattlemen could only guess at the toll it was taking on the herds. When spring finally came, they got their answer. “In the latter part of March came the Chinook wind, harbinger of spring, releasing for the first time the iron grip that had been upon us,” recalled a neighbor of Roosevelt on the Little Missouri. “At last, it seemed, the wrath of Nature had been appeased.” The ice in the river broke apart, and the stream brought it down in big chunks. It soon brought something else, something the cattlemen could never have imagined. “For days on end, tearing down with the grinding ice cakes, went Death’s cattle roundup of the upper Little Missouri country,” Roosevelt’s neighbor continued. “In countless valleys, gulches, washouts, and coulees, the animals had vainly sought shelter from the relentless ‘Northern Furies’ on their trail. Now their carcasses were being spewed forth in untold thousands by the rushing waters, to be carried away on the crest of the foaming, turgid flood rushing down the valley.”

ROOSEVELT’S WESTERN DREAM DIDN’T SURVIVE THAT BRUTAL winter. He gradually retired from the West and returned to politics in the East. But he never lost his emotional connection to the West, nor his belief that the West, for all its ability to shatter dreams, was where the American spirit shone brightest and most true.

The evoking and shattering of dreams was one theme of Western history. A second touched Roosevelt less directly, but he benefited from it nonetheless. Roosevelt’s Dakota ranch lay two hundred miles from the battlefield where Lakota warriors under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse had annihilated a contingent of the U.S. 7th Cavalry led by George Custer a decade earlier. The victory had been a pyrrhic one for the Indians, for it prompted a federal response that broke the back of native resistance to white encroachment upon Indian lands. It was no accident that the demise of the Plains tribes coincided with the destruction of the buffalo, which had long been their sustenance. The violence against the Plains Indians and the buffalo was merely the latest, and, as it turned out, almost the last, manifestation of the persistent violence that had marked the West since before it became American.

Roosevelt was too sober-minded to appreciate a third theme of Western history. Irony is inherent in human endeavor and therefore human history, but in no area of American history has irony—in the form of paradox, contradiction and unintended consequence—been more central to the tale than in the West. The West was often viewed as the last bastion of American individualism, but woven through its entire history was a strong thread—at times a cable—of collectivism. Western individualism sneered, even snarled, at federal power, but federal power was essential to the development of the West. The West was America’s unspoiled Eden, but the spoilage of the West proceeded more rapidly than that of any other region. The West was the land of wide open spaces, but its residents were more concentrated in cities and towns than in most of the East. The West was where whites fought Indians, but they rarely went into battle without Indian allies, and their ranks included black soldiers. The West was where fortune beckoned, where riches would reward the miner’s persistence, the cattleman’s courage, the railroad man’s enterprise, the bonanza farmer’s audacity; but El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the East.

Its elusiveness simply added to its allure. Dreams of El Dorado inspired one generation of Americans after another to head west. Not all sought immense wealth, but most expected a greater competence than they could find in the East. Their dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame; their dreams also drove them to acts of violence against indigenous peoples, foreigners and one another that might have appalled them if they hadn’t been so hell-bent on chasing the dreams.

Any work of history must have a beginning and an end. This one commences with the Louisiana Purchase at the start of the nineteenth century, when the United States first gained a foothold—a very large one—beyond the Mississippi. It ends in the early twentieth century, when the West had become enough like the East to make the Western experience most comprehensible as a piece of the American whole rather than as a thing apart. Western dreams didn’t die; Hollywood and Silicon Valley would be built on such dreams. But the dreams were no longer as distinctively Western as they once had been.