Colonel Roosevelt (65 page)

He was sufficiently alarmed at worsening relations with Mexico, and with Japan over the perennial problem of “yellow-peril” discrimination in California, to warn Franklin Roosevelt in the Navy Department that war with either country was not implausible. “In that case we shall be in an unpardonable position if we permit ourselves to be caught with our fleet separated.”

There was little more he could say to influence administration policy without sounding meddlesome. In the fall, he intended to write a single, statesmanlike appraisal of the current political situation, and publish it in the neutral pages of
Century Magazine
. Then he would sail south and out of the public eye. He was more likely to feel liberated in the jungle, with jaguars and anacondas and peccaries, than as a beneficiary of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom.

AS A FANTASY
, Roosevelt’s South American project was not new. It had been implanted in his mind five years before, by one of the intellectual eccentrics he had enjoyed entertaining in the White House. Father John Augustine Zahm, C.S.C, Ph.D., was a former professor of physics at Notre Dame University, author of
Sound and Music
, a survey of the science of acoustics going back to Pythagorean times, and—more to the President’s taste
—Evolution and Dogma
. He was also the author of two travel books,
Up the Orinoco and Down the Magdalena
, and
Along the Andes and Down the Amazon
.
Like David Livingstone before him, Father Zahm was a globetrotter rather than a man of God.

If it had not been for the more powerful appeal of Africa in 1909, Roosevelt might have yielded to his suggestion that they together “
go up the Paraguay,” then cross Brazil’s central plateau and descend the Rio Tapajoz, a tributary of the Amazon. The two men had kept in touch, and Roosevelt had made a point of alluding to Zahm’s evolutionary theology in
his essay on faith and reason.

There was a certain inevitability to him seeing the “funny little Catholic priest” at an American Museum lunch early in June. Frank M. Chapman, the museum’s director of ornithology, had gathered a group of naturalists to ascertain if any of them might like to accompany Roosevelt on his proposed expedition.
Father Zahm did not quite qualify, but he was avidly anxious to participate, and had value as a multilingual scholar who knew Brazil well—or claimed to. Before the lunch was over, the Colonel and the sixty-two-year-old cleric were a team, and it remained only for Chapman to get Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the museum, to authorize their joint venture.

Osborn and Chapman were among Roosevelt’s closest scientific friends, and the expedition would cover ground unknown to collectors, so he approved them as a matter of course.
Chapman suggested the names of two professionals to go along, both veterans of tropical American forests: George K. Cherrie, an ornithologist and mammalogist, and Leo E. Miller, a field naturalist skilled at specimen retrieval.

Roosevelt reviewed their dossiers and thought that Chapman had chosen well. Cherrie was one of the best naturalist-explorers in the United States. Whipcord-tough at forty-seven, with a clipped, military manner, he had spent more than half his life south of the border. The mere fact that he had sired six children, one of them born along the Orinoco within pouncing distance of jaguars, was enough to recommend him. But Cherrie had the added credentials, irresistible to Roosevelt, of having once been a gun-runner in Colombia, and a two-time jailbird for revolutionary activities in Venezuela. Readers of
The Wilderness Hunter
and
The Rough Riders
were aware that the Colonel had a weakness for men who packed pistols, impregnated their wives regularly, and showed scant reverence for the law.

Miller was currently on assignment in British Guiana. But he had youth and Chapman’s word in his favor, so
he was recruited sight unseen.
Anthony Fiala, a forty-four-year-old former Arctic explorer who ran the sports department at Rogers, Peet & Co., became the fifth member of the expedition, in charge of equipment, supplies, and transport. Just how much gear and extra personnel would be needed depended on the final itinerary, to be mapped out by Father Zahm. Fiala soon proved his worth by ordering two light, strong, cedar-and-canvas Canadian power canoes as backups to the eight-hundred-pound steel riverboats that Zahm seemed to think suitable for jungle travel.

By the end of June, Roosevelt had a pleased sense that another great trek, and maybe another great book contract, loomed ahead in the fall. With his autobiography now in syndication, his literary essays set in type, and Edith off to Europe to visit her sister, he was free to take Archie and Quentin to Arizona. “Thank heavens! I have never had more work than during the last eighteen months.”

NINETEEN YEARS OLD
,
graduated at last from Andover, Archie had earned the luxury of seven weeks in his adored father’s company. He also loved being with “Quent.” The two boys had always been close, although they were as different
as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Archie’s special schooling in Arizona gave him at least a destinational edge on his brother. Quentin, easygoing and uncompetitive at fifteen, did not mind where anybody took him, as long as he could investigate vehicular means.

On this jaunt it was a regular train of the Santa Fe Railroad, arriving in Silver City, New Mexico, on 10 July.
Two days later, they met up with Archie’s other best buddy, Nicholas Roosevelt, in Williams, Arizona, and registered that night at the El Tovar Hotel overlooking the Grand Canyon.

Moonlit and mysterious, the enormous gorge filled the windows of their rooms, trivializing everything in the world that was not a million years old. One decade before—too momentary a flicker of time for the Colorado to have carved any deeper since—Roosevelt had come here and expressed his relief that the Santa Fe was not going to build another hotel at Rowe’s Point. He had stood on the South Rim and, ad-libbing to those around him, made the first great conservation call of his presidency:
Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it—keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you
.

Now it was a national monument, thanks to the Antiquities Act of 1906, and he was back with two of his own inheritors. Archie, that seasoned veteran of desert living, had seen the canyon before. But Quentin had not. Someday, perhaps, Roosevelt’s other sons and daughters would see it too, followed by Ted’s little “Graciekins,” and Ethel’s coming baby, and their children’s children.

THE MOON WAS FULL
when they began their descent into the canyon at 2
A
.
M
. on the morning of 15 July. Roosevelt, who had been assigned to write a serial travelogue for
The Outlook
, had arranged for guides, ponies, and pack animals to cover the 330-mile itinerary ahead of them. In the course of the next six weeks, he intended to give his sons a taste of some of the lessons he had learned in pursuit, survival, and acquaintance with the primeval, beginning with a cougar hunt on the high plateau of the North Rim, and ending with a trek through the Navajo Indian Reservation to Walpi, where they would attend the annual Hopi Snake Dance.

Thirty-two hours later, having gone so deep that they lost view of both the moon and the sun, they crested Buckskin Mountain, where it was still, improbably, spring. They spent the next two weeks in Kaibab National Forest, going after cougar and camping out at temperatures close to freezing. Roosevelt apologized for being old and “slow” on the chase, but Nicholas wrote in his diary, “
He still has the energy of a boy and is handicapped only by his weight.” He wanted his sons to do most of the shooting, although he killed one young female to gratify Archie. After the African lion, the mountain lion did not strike him as much of a threat; he was more afraid of losing Archie in
reckless chases over the edges of the canyon. The bony youth seemed to have no fear. Roosevelt had taught all his children that courage could be developed like muscle, but Archie’s was uninhibited by imagination.

Lacking fresh meat, they ate a fat cougar and judged it as good as venison.
Roosevelt indulged in “elderly” things like washing up dishes and sitting alone, pondering the beauty around him. He was ravished by the sound of the silver-voiced Rocky Mountain hermit thrush, by the profusion of the stars at night, and by the vastness of the canyon’s views.

The first day of August found them shogging across the blindingly white and sterile wastes of the Paria Plateau east of Vermilion Cliffs.
The soil was so arid, or poisoned, that it failed to grow grass even where a streamlet trickled, producing only clutches of coarse weed with tiny, flaring white flowers. Squinting into a heat haze that retreated as they advanced, disclosing nothing but more nothingness,
Roosevelt was reminded of Joaquin Miller’s lines
They saw the silences / Move by and beckon
. At Lees Ferry, some mule-wagons were waiting to relieve the riders of their heavy gear, and they proceeded with lightened steps southeast to Tuba Agency, deep in the dry heart of the Navajo reservation. Far off to their right, the Painted Desert glowed. They rested for a day in Tuba, then swung northeast through heavy sand toward Kayenta. It took two and a half days to get there. Harsher terrain lay ahead. Roosevelt wanted to visit Rainbow Bridge, spanning one of the most impenetrable canyons in the Plateau Province.

Kayenta was a trading post run by John Wetherill, a member of the posse of white men that had “discovered” the Bridge only four years before. He had agreed to serve as the Roosevelt party’s local host and guide, and had guest rooms ready in his cedar-pole-and-rock house, surrounded by trees and lawns. It was well supplied with books and running water. Roosevelt admired Mrs. Wetherill’s taste in Navajo domestic design—she had decorated the walls of her parlor with delicate
tei-bichai
figures—and found her an impressively learned woman, versed in the lore of tribal ruins. It had been she, not her husband, who had first divined the existence of a rock buttress north of Navajo Mountain, from Indians protective of it as a sacrosanct place.

On 10 August the excursion across the Utah border began, with Wetherill acting as guide and five pack horses carrying a minimum of supplies. Three days of the roughest possible riding ensued. At times the train had to pick its way along paths only six or eight inches wide, notched out of slickrock cliffs that fell hundreds of feet to stony bottoms. The boys learned to keep free of their stirrups when Wetherill pointed out the skeleton, far below, of a horse from which he had once parted company.

The immense arch eventually disclosed itself, bathed in late-afternoon sunlight while the gorge below filled up with shadow. There were pools of clear water beneath it, enticing to hot and dirty travelers. Roosevelt was soon
floating on his back, amid ferns and hanging plants, looking up at the darkening sky and still darker bar holding apart the cliffs. Later, the leaping flames of a campfire threw it into relief against the stars, and whenever he awoke during the night he was conscious of its overhanging majesty.