My Brother, Theodore RooseveltRobinson, Corinne Roosevelt
History
My Brother, Theodore Roosevelt
Robinson, Corinne Roosevelt
Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
“From Washington, I turned southward, and when I struck northern
Montana, again came to my old stamping grounds and among my old
friends. I met all kinds of queer characters with whom I had hunted and
worked and slept and sometimes fought. From Helena, I went southward to
Butte, reaching that city in the afternoon of May 27th. By this time,
Seth Bullock had joined us, together with an old hunting friend, John
Willis, a Donatello of the Rocky Mountains,--wholly lacking, however,
in that morbid self-consciousness which made Hawthorne’s ‘faun’ go out
of his head because he had killed a man. Willis and I had been in Butte
some seventeen years before, at the end of a hunting trip in which we
got dead broke, so that when we struck Butte, we slept in an outhouse
and breakfasted heartily in a two-bit Chinese restaurant. Since then I
had gone through Butte in the campaign of 1900, the major part of the
inhabitants receiving me with frank hostility, and enthusiastic cheers
for Bryan.
“However, Butte is mercurial, and its feelings had changed. The wicked,
wealthy, hospitable, full-blooded, little city, welcomed me with wild
enthusiasm of a disorderly kind. The mayor, Pat Mullins, was a huge,
good-humored creature, wearing, for the first time in his life, a top
hat and a frock coat, the better to do honor to the President.
“National party lines counted very little in Butte where the fight
was Heinze and anti-Heinze, Ex-Senator Carter and Senator Clark being
in the opposition. Neither side was willing to let the other have
anything to do with the celebration, and they drove me wild with their
appeals, until I settled that the afternoon parade and speech was
to be managed by the Heinze group of people, and the evening speech
by the anti-Heinze people; and that the dinner should contain fifty
of each faction and should be presided over in his official capacity
by the mayor. The ordinary procession, in barouches, was rather more
exhilarating than usual, and reduced the faithful secret service men
very nearly to the condition of Bedlamites. The crowd was filled with
whooping enthusiasm and every kind of whiskey, and in their desire to
be sociable, broke the lines and jammed right up to the carriage....
Seth Bullock, riding close beside the rear wheel of my carriage, for
there were hosts of so-called ‘rednecks’ or ‘dynamiters’ in the crowd,
was such a splendid looking fellow with his size and supple strength,
his strangely marked aquiline face, with its big moustache, and the
broad brim of his soft dark hat drawn down over his dark eyes. However,
no one made a motion to attack me....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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