Part 3 (1/2)
RARE COMBINATION OF QUALITIES
The President unites in himself powers and qualities that rarely go together. Thus, he has both physical and moral courage in a degree rare in history. He can stand calm and unflinching in the path of a charging grizzly, and he can confront with equal coolness and determination the predaceous corporations and money powers of the country.
He unites the qualities of the man of action with those of the scholar and writer,--another very rare combination. He unites the instincts and accomplishments of the best breeding and culture with the broadest democratic sympathies and affiliations. He is as happy with a frontiersman like Seth Bullock as with a fellow Harvard man, and Seth Bullock is happy, too.
He unites great austerity with great good-nature. He unites great sensibility with great force and will power. He loves solitude, and he loves to be in the thick of the fight. His love of nature is equaled only by his love of the ways and marts of men.
He is doubtless the most vital man on the continent, if not on the planet, to-day. He is many-sided, and every side throbs with his tremendous life and energy; the pressure is equal all around. His interests are as keen in natural history as in economics, in literature as in statecraft, in the young poet as in the old soldier, in preserving peace as in preparing for war. And he can turn all his great power into the new channel on the instant. His interest in the whole of life, and in the whole life of the nation, never flags for a moment. His activity is tireless. All the relaxation he needs or craves is a change of work. He is like the farmer's fields, that only need a rotation of crops. I once heard him say that all he cared about being President was just ”the big work.”
During this tour through the West, lasting over two months, he made nearly three hundred speeches; and yet on his return Mrs. Roosevelt told me he looked as fresh and unworn as when he left home.
SLEIGHING AMONG THE GEYSERS
We went up into the big geyser region with the big sleighs, each drawn by four horses. A big s...o...b..nk had to be shoveled through for us before we got to the Golden Gate, two miles above Mammoth Hot Springs.
Beyond that we were at an alt.i.tude of about eight thousand feet, on a fairly level course that led now through woods, and now through open country, with the snow of a uniform depth of four or five feet, except as we neared the ”formations,” where the subterranean warmth kept the ground bare. The roads had been broken and the snow packed for us by teams from the fort, otherwise the journey would have been impossible.
The President always rode beside the driver. From his youth, he said, this seat had always been the most desirable one to him. When the sleigh would strike the bare ground, and begin to drag heavily, he would bound out nimbly and take to his heels, and then all three of us--Major Pitcher, Mr. Childs, and myself--would follow suit, sometimes reluctantly on my part. Walking at that alt.i.tude is no fun, especially if you try to keep pace with such a walker as the President is. But he could not sit at his ease and let those horses drag him in a sleigh over bare ground. When snow was reached, we would again quickly resume our seats.
[Ill.u.s.tration: SUNRISE IN YELLOWSTONE PARK.
From stereograph, copyright 1904, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.]
As one nears the geyser region, he gets the impression from the columns of steam going up here and there in the distance--now from behind a piece of woods, now from out a hidden valley--that he is approaching a manufacturing centre, or a railroad terminus. And when he begins to hear the hoa.r.s.e snoring of ”Roaring Mountain,” the illusion is still more complete. At Norris's there is a big vent where the steam comes tearing out of a recent hole in the ground with terrific force. Huge mounds of ice had formed from the congealed vapor all around it, some of them very striking.
OLD FAITHFUL
The novelty of the geyser region soon wears off. Steam and hot water are steam and hot water the world over, and the exhibition of them here did not differ, except in volume, from what one sees by his own fireside. The ”Growler” is only a boiling teakettle on a large scale, and ”Old Faithful” is as if the lid were to fly off, and the whole contents of the kettle should be thrown high into the air. To be sure, boiling lakes and steaming rivers are not common, but the new features seemed, somehow, out of place, and as if nature had made a mistake.
One disliked to see so much good steam and hot water going to waste; whole towns might be warmed by them, and big wheels made to go round.
I wondered that they had not piped them into the big hotels which they opened for us, and which were warmed by wood fires.
At Norris's the big room that the President and I occupied was on the ground floor, and was heated by a huge box stove. As we entered it to go to bed, the President said, ”Oom John, don't you think it is too hot here?”
”I certainly do,” I replied.
”Shall I open the window?”
”That will just suit me.” And he threw the sash, which came down to the floor, all the way up, making an opening like a doorway. The night was cold, but neither of us suffered from the abundance of fresh air.
The caretaker of the building was a big Swede called Andy. In the morning Andy said that beat him: ”There was the President of the United States sleeping in that room, with the window open to the floor, and not so much as one soldier outside on guard.”
The President had counted much on seeing the bears that in summer board at the Fountain Hotel, but they were not yet out of their dens.
We saw the track of only one, and he was not making for the hotel. At all the formations where the geysers are, the ground was bare over a large area. I even saw a wild flower--an early b.u.t.tercup, not an inch high--in bloom. This seems to be the earliest wild flower in the Rockies. It is the only fragrant b.u.t.tercup I know.