8/25/2009:
Young Kermit Roosevelt eagerly awaited letters from his father. They were filled with detailed images, sketched in words, of his father's adventures in the Dakota Badlands. All the Roosevelt children gloried in the stories of ranching and hunting contained in what they referred to as "picture letters," and literally read them to pieces. Although few of those letters survived, the pictures they painted in Kermit's imagination endured.
By his early teens, he planned his first hunting trip to the west. Busy with the duties of the presidency, Theodore Roosevelt could not accompany Kermit, but instead arranged for his longtime friend Seth Bullock to take his son camping in the Black Hills. Kermit had the time of his life, hunting and fishing. He determined his first trip west would not be his last. Two years later, Kermit once again headed to the Black Hills; but this time he also wanted to see his father's former ranch in North Dakota. So Seth Bullock and Kermit concluded the trip by traversing the trail from Deadwood to Medora upon which Theodore Roosevelt had first met Bullock two decades earlier.
For the 16-year-old Roosevelt, it was an adventure to rival any of his father's. The party lost their horses the very first night and only successfully retrieved a few of them. The mosquitoes were so big, Bullock noted in a journal that one party member "shot three mosquitoes with a six-shooter." Then rain turned the trail to mud and proved a constant irritant. Kermit later wrote in his autobiography, Bullock's horse had "a very rapid walk which proved the bane of my existence. My pony, Pickpocket, had no pace that corresponded, and to adapt himself was forced to travel at a most infernal jiggle that was not only exceedingly wearing, but shook me round so that the rain permeated in all sorts of crevices" that otherwise would have remained "water-tight." But not wanting to appear soft or un-Western, "I suffered in silence" while "inwardly heaping every insult I could think of upon the Captain's mount." Of course the fishing and hunting more than made up for the discomfort, as did Bullock's reminisces about the old days.
Finally, on this date in August of 1906, the travelers reached Medora, completing their seven day overland ride from the Black Hills. After spending the afternoon at his father's former ranch in the North Dakota Badlands, Kermit Roosevelt headed for home.
Dakota Datebook written by Christina Sunwall
Sources:
Irwin, Will, ed. Letters to Kermit from Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1908. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946.
"Kermit Roosevelt Finishes His Ride." The New York Times August 27, 1906, 2.
Roosevelt, Kermit. The Happy Hunting-Grounds. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920.