Matt lives next door to a police station around the corner from me in Chelsea. I call his apartment “the cabin,” an outpost of old-fashioned piney woodsyness nestled behind a forest of cop cars. I quizzed him once about his roughhewn interior decorating, and he wasn’t sure why he was drawn to musty quilts and things made out of logs. “Do I just like nineteenth-century America, or is it just a past I can’t have? If it were 1901 right now would I be gaga over tricornered hats and you would come into my apartment and tell me, ‘This is so colonial’?”
Recently, he bought an actual cabin, a fixer-upper in Maine. A native of the not particularly rustic Quad Cities of Illinois, Matt claims New York City brought out the backwoodsman in him. “Within six months of moving here, I wanted to buy a car and strap a canoe on top.”
Even though Matt is the sort of person who will mention his new rated-to-twenty-degrees-below-zero sleeping bag, the call of the wild is simply one of his many callings. He’s learning Spanish. He reads. He shops. On our last road trip together, I noticed that he is the sort of guy who will sing along with “Born to Be Wild” on the car radio while driving to an outlet mall from the FDR Presidential Library.
So one Friday night in November, I meet him after he gets off work and we drive toward the Adirondacks. We get as far as a hotel in Lake George. I go to bed early, resting up for the dreaded hike. At breakfast the next morning, I ask him, “What did you do last night?”
“I went to a bar. I ate a burger and drank a beer and read a book about string theory.” Just like Roosevelt on his North Dakota ranch, rustling steers by day, reading Poe after dark.
I have already reneged on the Mount Marcy climb. I looked it up and it’s a twenty-mile round-trip hike. Nearby Rooster Comb, five miles from the parking lot and back, is more my speed, though daunting nevertheless. Plus, I argue, we can’t see the top of Mount Marcy from the top of Mount Marcy. The smaller, shorter peak is supposed to have a great view of it, offering perspective on Roosevelt and perspective is why we’re here, right?
When McKinley was attacked, Roosevelt rushed from Lake Champlain to McKinley’s bedside in Buffalo. When the president appeared to be on the mend, McKinley’s advisors shooed Roosevelt out of town, thinking that the vice president’s removal sent a message of recovery and hope. So Roosevelt came to the Adirondacks, joining his wife and children who were already staying at a lodge called the Tahawus Club. When he got there, he was pleased to learn that his son, Theodore Jr., had just bagged his very first deer.
Roosevelt, a guide, and a few other Tahawus guests climbed Mount Marcy on September 13, 1901. It was raining. Today, it’s sunny but cold. There are patches of snow here and there up the trail, the very steep trail. There are plenty of switchbacks, and it’s beautiful, all forest and boulders and cliffs, but did I mention how steep it is? I love walking. Walking might be my favorite pastime. It’s one of the reasons I moved to the pedestrian paradise that is New York City. It’s hiking I try to avoid. To pace myself, I decide to pretend I’m walking in Manhattan, asking Matt to measure out the two and a half miles up the mountain that way. “Like, say I’m starting at Fourteenth Street, at Union Square, and I’m walking north. What street is the summit?”
“The top of Times Square? Maybe Broadway and Fifty-fourth?”
So that’s what I do to cheer myself on. At the halfway point — those Korean restaurants on Thirty-second — I know I’ll make it to the top. When Roosevelt reached the summit of Mount Marcy, he kept exclaiming, “Beautiful country! Beautiful country!” Me, I just wheeze.
“I wore the wrong gear,” Matt says. “I made the mistake of not wearing a wicking layer.” He looks around at the view, remembering why we’re here. “Teddy Roosevelt probably didn’t have a wicking layer, and I bet he wasn’t complaining.”
On Marcy, Roosevelt and his party stopped for a lunch at Lake Tear-in-the-Clouds, then thought to be the source of the Hudson River. Roosevelt happily dug in to a tin of ox tongue. (Matt’s mountain climbing reward is an organic cookie.) Roosevelt then spotted a man coming toward him. He later remembered that he “was looking forward to dinner with the interest only an appetite worked up in the woods gives you.” And how. I’m staring at one of the grandest views in the Northeast and all I can see is steak. Roosevelt continued, “When I saw the runner I instinctively knew he had bad news — the worst news in the world.” He was right. It was a telegram:
THE PRESIDENT IS CRITICALLY ILL
HIS CONDITION IS GRAVE
OXYGEN IS BEING GIVEN
ABSOLUTELY NO HOPE
Roosevelt, much to the dismay of the guy who sprinted uphill for twelve miles to deliver the telegram, sat back down and finished his lunch. After that, finally, he started the climb down from the mountaintop toward the trailhead that was the White House.
At the Tahawus Club, another bossier telegram, along with supper, was waiting for him:
THE PRESIDENT APPEARS TO BE DYING AND MEMBERS OF THE CABINET IN BUFFALO THINK YOU SHOULD LOSE NO TIME COMING
The Tahawus Club is still here. It’s very well kept, freshly painted yellow. Rocking chairs on the porch rock in the wind. When Roosevelt and his wife, Edith, were staying here, the other guests referred to their deer-slaying children as “the little Indians.” One of them, Archibald, remembered that on that 1901 trip he overheard women in the rocking chairs talking about how “Mr. McKinley had been shot in the abdomen. I remember puzzling over this word for quite a while and finally asking what it was. I was much disappointed when I found out that ‘abdomen’ was nothing but a stomach.”
It was almost midnight when Archibald Roosevelt’s father climbed into a buggy to ride down the mountain in the dark to the train station at North Creek, thirty-five miles away. Nowadays that road, 28N, is paved. It is named in his honor, the Roosevelt-Marcy Byway. Even with the asphalt, even in the daylight and in a car, it’s a tricky drive, narrow and curving, a corridor of trees.
On 28N, near Newcomb, a rock monument erected in 1908 marks the approximate spot where Roosevelt became president at 2:15 A.M. on September 14, 1901, McKinley’s time of death. It’s kind of shaped like a hug, listing the names of David Hunter, Orrin Kellogg, and Michael Cronin, the brave local relay drivers who were kind and/or demented enough to get the new president to his train.
Around three-thirty that morning, Kellogg dropped off Roosevelt at Aiden Lair, Cronin’s hunting lodge. The place still stands, but barely. Once, it must have been inviting and cozy, its tall rock chimney spitting smoke from the fireplace. Now, it sags. It’s falling in, falling down. The windows that weren’t boarded up are broken. “Looks like we can trespass readily,” says Matt, getting out of the car. Around back, there’s a lovely little brook, but also a better view into the lodge’s ripped-up insides — glass shards poking out everywhere, insulation oozing out of the ceiling, a crusty old pair of underwear wadded up next to a rusty beer can on top of what used to be the floor.
When Roosevelt arrived, Mike Cronin knew McKinley was already dead, but he kept the news from Roosevelt, thinking the trip itself was going to be worrisome enough. “It was the darkest night I ever saw,” Cronin remembered later, adding, “Mr. Roosevelt was one of the nerviest men I ever saw and I am not easily scared myself. At one place, while we were going down a slippery hill, one of the horses stumbled. It was a ticklish bit of road and I was beginning to get somewhat uneasy and began holding the team back, but Mr. Roosevelt said, ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter. Push ahead!’ ”
Driving down that road, Matt says, “I guess they must have had lanterns at the front of the buggy.”
“They had one lantern,” I say, “and Roosevelt was holding it.”
“How terrifying this must have looked at three A.M.,” Matt says, passing a sign that warns ROUGH ROAD.
At dawn, Cronin’s horses Frank and Dick clickety-clomped into North Creek. Roosevelt’s secretary was waiting for him at the train station, handing him another telegram from Secretary of State John Hay. “The president died at two-f
ifteen this morning,” it said.
That depot, a cute wooden building built in 1875, was once the northern terminus of the Adirondack railroad. It’s now a museum in Roosevelt’s honor, his “night ride to the presidency” being the biggest thing that ever happened around here. The museum is closed when Matt and I arrive, but there’s a whole exhibit about Roosevelt outside — a kiosk of photos (Cronin with Frank and Dick, Roosevelt at various ages) and text (the telegrams about McKinley, an endorsement from Governor Pataki, a believable quote in which Roosevelt brags, “No man has had a happier life than I have had, a happier life in every way”).
“There’s something Olympian about him,” Matt says. “Or Paul Revere. He’s Paul Revere riding down Mount Olympus, climbing the mountain by day, holding the lantern on a buggy on his way to becoming president and running the United States. That is a singular definition of power.”
The September 22, 1901, edition of the New York Herald headlined its Roosevelt - in - the - Adirondacks article thus: “That Wild Ride Down the Mountain Side. Leading a Charge of Troopers at San Juan Less Hazardous Than Spinning Through Darkness Along the Edge of Great Precipices.”
A couple of weeks earlier, when Roosevelt first heard the news that McKinley had been attacked, the then–vice president said of the assassin, “If it had been I, he wouldn’t have gotten away so easily. I think I’d have guzzled him.”
He’s probably right. In 1912, when Roosevelt was in Milwaukee campaigning as the Bull Moose presidential candidate, would-be assassin John Schrank shot him at close range with a .38. Schrank claimed the ghost of William McKinley came to him in a dream and said of Roosevelt, “This is my murderer. Avenge my death.” The bullet was slowed down by the contents of Roosevelt’s chest pocket, a steel eyeglass case and the thick, folded text of the speech he was about to give. (The dinged case is on display at the Roosevelt birthplace in New York; the dinted papers in the Smithsonian.) Though bleeding, Roosevelt delivered his speech, pulling the bloodstained papers out of his pocket, crowing, “You see, it takes more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose.”
Though the Roosevelt presidency had already begun Roosevelt-style in the mountains with the noisy racket of hoof-beats in the dark, Buffalo was muffled by McKinley’s death. Getting off the train, Roosevelt went straight to his friend Ansley Wilcox’s mansion, borrowed a proper coat, paid his respects to Mrs. McKinley, and then returned to Wilcox’s house to be sworn in. The house, with a pediment and columned porch, looks Greek enough to substitute for the usual ceremony amidst the columns of the U.S. Capitol. It’s now a museum administered by the National Park Service, the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site.
Roosevelt took the oath here in the library on the first floor, a warm, brown Victorian room with a fireplace and leather chairs. The Park Service has a video playing, a reenactment of the ceremony produced for its centennial. It’s quite effective, capturing the mournful silence of that moment. There are times when the loudest thing happening is the light shining through the windows. More than fifty people, including future president Woodrow Wilson, crowded in here to watch, reporters included (though they were forbidden to take photographs).
According to the following day’s Buffalo Courier, when Secretary of War Elihu Root started to administer the oath, he broke down weeping “and for fully a minute he could not utter another word,” which made everyone else bow their heads and tear up too. “The Vice-President’s eyes were moist and he clutched nervously at the lapel of his frock coat.”
“I shall take the oath at once in accord with the request of you members of the Cabinet,” Roosevelt said. He continued,
In this hour of our deep and terrible bereavement I wish to state that it shall be my aim to continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President McKinley for the peace, the prosperity and the honor of our beloved country.
The house displays the desk where Roosevelt wrote those words. It also features an exhibit of relics associated with Roosevelt and McKinley — the serpentine walking stick Roosevelt hiked Mount Marcy with, a Pan-Am commemorative plate decorated with the seal of North and South America holding hands, and, talk about sentimental, the “telegraph wires that were used to carry notice of McKinley’s death to local newspapers.”
The aforementioned nervously clutched black frock coat Roosevelt had borrowed for the swearing-in is also on display. Seeing the clothes in which Roosevelt became president reminds me of a letter Roosevelt soon received from Robert Todd Lincoln. Roosevelt had bumped into Lincoln here in Buffalo before heading to the Adirondacks. Lincoln had brought his family to town to see the Pan-American Exposition, never suspecting their vacation would see him reprise his cameo role as presidential assassination omen for the third and final time. Lincoln wrote to the new president, “I do not congratulate you for I have seen too much of the seamy side of the Presidential Robe to think of it as a desirable garment, but I do hope that you will have the strength and courage to carry you through a successful administration.” Roosevelt must have wanted to write back to Robert Todd — tod, the German word for death — Lincoln, “Well, since you brought it up, can I interest you in a diplomatic appointment in Katmandu?”
In downtown Buffalo, there’s a memorial to McKinley, an obelisk guarded by marble lions — the sorry - you - got - shafted shaft. My nephew Owen loved the lions so much he threw a weepy temper tantrum when we tried to leave. As my sister and I pried him off a marble paw he kicked us, screaming, “I want lions!” Coming between kids and their presidential monuments is like getting caught between a lioness and her cubs.
McKinley lay in state in downtown Buffalo before Roosevelt escorted his coffin back to Washington. Thousands stood in line in the rain to pay their respects, including James Parker, the black waiter who was standing in the receiving line at the Temple of Music and clocked Leon Czolgosz.
In one ultimate Pan-American moment, Geronimo himself strutted past the coffin. One of the Indians riding in the faux battles staged at the exposition, the sexagenarian Apache warrior who fought the Mexicans as a young man and then the Americans after they defeated the Mexicans was still technically a U.S. prisoner of war in the custody of armed guards. He enclosed a card with a memorial wreath for McKinley. He wrote, “The rainbow of hope is out of the sky. Heavy clouds hang about us. Tears wet the ground of the tepees. The chief of the nation is dead. Farewell.” Geronimo had probably buried so many people by then he could knock out a eulogy in his sleep. Four years later, he would ride in Roosevelt’s inaugural parade, cornering TR after the festivities and begging to be allowed to go back home to what was now New Mexico to die where he was born, pleading, “Great Father, my hands are tied as with a rope…. I pray you to cut the ropes and make me free. Let me die in my own country, as an old man who has been punished enough and is free.” To no avail — he passed away in 1909 in Oklahoma, incarcerated at Fort Still.
Unfortunately for Roosevelt, the McKinley assassination had a theme song. Reportedly among the dying president’s last words was the title of his favorite hymn, “Nearer My God to Thee.” So a quartet sang the song in the Milburn house before the body was ushered out, where a band across the street repeated it as the coffin was carried out the door. As Roosevelt accompanied his predecessor’s coffin from Buffalo to Washington and on to Canton for burial, mourners serenaded the train. At Harrisburg, for instance, thousands bellowed “Nearer My God to Thee” from the platform of the station. Then they played it at the White House, then again at the Capitol rotunda. Roosevelt must have groaned every time he heard the lines “Still all my songs shall be, nearer my God to thee.”
Soon enough, though, Roosevelt would be singing his own theme song, which I like to think of as an arrangement of the Kinks’ “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” butchered by a high school marching band. Roosevelt took the melody he helped McKinley compose, the idea that the United States was poised for global domination, and then he went electric. Roosevelt built the Panama Canal, earned a Nobel Prize brokering a pe
ace treaty between Russia and Japan, secured Moroccan independence, and sent the “Great White Fleet” of the U.S. Navy on tour around the globe to warn the world that the United States was a power to contend with.
When McKinley was attacked, Roosevelt complained that he didn’t want to get to the presidency “through the graveyard.” In 1904, the American people elected Roosevelt in his own right. To make up for the solemn silence of his first swearing-in, his second was a wingding of parties and parades. And on March 4, 1905, when Roosevelt took the oath of office for the second time, he wore a ring given to him by Secretary of State John Hay. The ring contained the hair of Abraham Lincoln.
Scenes from the life of Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath. Abraham Lincoln’s eldest son had the misfortune of attending his father’s deathbed after his assassination in 1865, witnessing the assassination of James A. Garfield in Washington in 1881, and detraining in Buffalo in 1901 to learn that William McKinley had been assassinated mere moments before his arrival. Robert Lincoln lived a long life, attending the Lincoln Memorial dedication ceremony in 1922.
Chapter Four
The America that Lincoln was bred in, the homespun and humane and humorous America that he wished to preserve, has nothing in common with the sedulously classic monument that was erected to his memory. Who lives in that shrine, I wonder — Lincoln, or the men who conceived it: the leader who beheld the mournful victory of the Civil War, or the generation that took pleasure in the mean triumph of the Spanish-American exploit, and placed the imperial standard in the Philippines and the Caribbean?