Lost in the Shadow of Fame Read online

  In June, prior to the Republican convention, he lunched with a Mr. Hunt to “…talk over a South American railroad plan that has just come up, and which is a chance I want to take and father wants me to.”21 The position with the Brazil Railway Company, working as a railroad engineer appealed to Kermit for many reasons. At 23 as a Roosevelt with a number of years traveling around the world as a youth, hunting big game and socializing with the famous explorers, military leaders and sporting personages of the time, he needed to establish his mark in his father’s eyes and quench his thirst for solo adventure travel. Besides, laying track in the wilderness jungle of Latin America would be good fun and much preferred over a stuffy office job. His father looked upon this new adventure with guarded support. Eventually he would develop a worrisome yet proud outlook on Kermit’s independence and involvement in a dangerous pursuit.

  Before beginning his career, Kermit spent the early summer of 1912 at Sagamore Hill developing a relationship and falling in love with Belle Willard, a young, blue-eyed blond haired socialite who would become his future wife. His diary for that period is filled with time spent in outdoor activities with Belle: swimming, playing tennis and rowing; he even taught her to shoot his .38 revolver.

  At the end of July, Kermit journeyed to South America via stopovers in Europe where he visited in England with the famous African big game hunter Frederick Courtney Selous and lunched with British author Rudyard Kipling, who became a life-long correspondent and friend. From Spain he boarded the steamer Aragon with one of the railroad executives, a Mr. Egan; the voyage afforded him the leisure time to learn Portuguese, the spoken language of Brazil. Kermit was to begin a career in one of the most booming economic and yet inhospitable regions in the early 20th century.

  As one of the largest territorial land masses in Latin America, much of central and western Brazil in the early 20th Century was devoid of any transportation infrastructure with the north and western regions being undeveloped and uncharted tropical wilderness. Even the coastal regions contained large tracts of steep, hilly land and steamy tropical bush with minimal railroad development. The majority of interconnecting rail service extended from Rio De Janeiro south through Sao Paulo22 continuing to Uruguay with only minimal connecting lines extending west.

  In the years leading up to 1912, Brazil was experiencing a boom both economically and demographically. Grain and cattle were big business with coffee dominating much of the economy. The nation’s commercial center, Sao Paulo, was a growing cosmopolitan city with an immigrant population increasing from 35,000 in 1883 to 350,000 in 1907 23. Transporting stock and raw materials from the interior was problematic with coastal shipping the prime method of moving goods north and south. Spurred by the country’s growing economy versus the inadequate transportation network through the interior enticed primarily European but also American business enterprises and entrepreneurs to invest; a railroad building boom resulted. Indeed, thanks largely to the savings generated by railroad investments in the early twentieth century Brazil emerged from decades of stagnation to become one of the Western world’s fastest growing economies25. The key player in Kermit’s new employer, the Brazil Railway Company, was American railroad tycoon Percival Farquhar, who was called the South American Harriman24. Farquhar was a New Yorker and former Albany politician before entering the world of big business in pursuit of railroad building.

  Hardly the position for a Harvard graduate, Kermit’s first railroad assignment in Brazil was at Barra Funda near Sao Paulo working on a steam shovel for the construction of a station yard. Living and working conditions were abominable for Kermit. Continuous rain with the resulting mud while difficult to contend with were no match for the incessant mosquitoes. His living accommodations were in a leaking railroad car with his laborer coworkers. One of them came down with tick fever. Kermit was already suffering from malaria contracted in his younger years in Washington where mosquito infested swamps still existed.

  Kermit’s diary of the time records numerous mishaps; derailment and wrecks were a constant danger while causing numerous delays in construction progress.

  9/12/1912: “Cook car ran off the rails badly, I was in charge of the dirt car and ran over a horse and just missed some cows which ran ahead on the tracks. Cook car ran off the rails with engine.”26 9/16/1912: “Passenger train wreck out at kilometer 117 stopped us getting-in six loads to-day.”27

  9/21/1912: “The equipment car went off the tracks, but not seriously.”28

  During the remaining months of 1912, he built a bridge and cribbing in water noting in his diary with typical understatement that the miserable process was only: “hardwork.” Disaster was their constant companion, “Four cars off the track”. On another occasion his shovel car and engine were derailed. On another, a car was “badly derailed but got it back on the track all right.” On 12/18, “Lots of work. Four cars off the track…” Unfriendly Indians in this undeveloped wilderness were another source of concern. In a letter home he wrote “for the indians are up, and have killed several engineers with their long arrows.”29 Small wonder any progress was made at all. Despite the hazardous, back-breaking work on the line, Kermit found time to hunt armadillos and take trips to town. Having already developed a taste for alcohol and carousing, on one visit he was requested to referee a barroom prize fight between “an American and a Jamaican negro.”30

  Kermit’s railroading adventures with the Brazil Railway Company were short lived. In 1913 he gained a more lucrative employment with a bridge-building firm, the Anglo-Brazilian Forging Steel Structural and Importing Company, where he supervised the construction of a large span over the Paranapanema River in Piraju, a small, remote town approximately 340 kilometers west of Sao Paulo. The danger of his bridge-building activities surpassed even his hair-raising escapades on the railroad when he managed the construction of a bridge across a gorge that collapsed, pitching him forty-feet to the rocks below. His father recorded:

  “…while on top of a long steel span, something went wrong with the derrick, he and the steel span coming down together on the rocky bed beneath. He escaped with two broken ribs, two teeth knocked out, and a knee partially dislocated…”31

  He was amazingly missed by the collapsing debris as he and the steel mass beneath his feet tumbled into the ravine below. His young, athletic build coupled with a tough Rooseveltian constitution enabled him to quickly recover from the disaster.

  However, this incident, coupled with his persistent malaria and many other future cases of physical abuse would eventually waste and ultimately destroy his body in later life.

  NOTES:

  1 Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt biography, White House History

  2 National Park Service

  3 Time Magazine, January 19, 1931

  4 Lawrence F. Abbott, Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt, 1920, pg. 303

  5 Speech before the Hamilton Club, April 10, 1899

  6 Theodore Roosevelt letter to Kermit, White House, Oct. 2, 1903

  7 Kermit and Belle Roosevelt Papers, Kermit’s 1912 diary, Library of Congress

  8 The Lion’s Pride, page 106, Edward J. Renehan Jr.

  9 Groton School, Douglas V.D. Brown Archivist

  10 Kermit and Belle Roosevelt Papers, Kermit’s 1906 diary, Library of Congress

  11 Groton School, Douglas V.D. Brown Archivist

  12 N.Y. Times, August 23, 1905

  13 Ibid., September 29, 1905

  14 Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library

  15 Theodore Roosevelt letter, Oyster Bay N.Y., July 21, 1908

  16 Theodore Roosevelt letter, The Outlook, N.Y. September 1, 1911

  17 Dean Hurlbut letter to Colonel Roosevelt, Harvard University, May 23, 1912

  18 Kermit and Belle Roosevelt Papers, Kermit’s 1912 diary, Library of Congress

  19 Ibid.

  20 The Hooker Chemical Company became a Federal Superfund site in 1983.

  21 Ibid.

  22 Today, Bras-Roosevelt is the name of a principa
l commuter Metro-Station near San Paulo, Brazil

  23 Britannic.com

  24 N.Y. Times, September 22, 1912

  25 Government, Foreign Investment, and Railroads in Brazil, 1854-1913, William R. Summerhill III quote, Stanford University Press

  26 Kermit and Belle Roosevelt Papers, Kermit’s 1912 diary, Library of Congress

  27 Ibid.

  28 Kermit and Belle Roosevelt Papers, Kermit’s 1912 diary, Library of Congress

  29 The River of Doubt, pg 43, Candice Millard

  30 Kermit and Belle Roosevelt Papers, Kermit’s 1912 diary, Library of Congress

  31 Through the Brazilian Wilderness, pg 5, Theodore Roosevelt

  Chapter II – Safari in Africa

  TO

  KERMIT ROOSEVELT

  MY SIDE-PARTNER

  IN OUR

  “GREAT ADVENTURE”

  (Theodore Roosevelt’s dedication

  to his son in his account of their African safari:

  African Game Trails)

  President Theodore Roosevelt left the White House in March, 1909 as the youngest president to serve as the nation’s leader; entering private life with the same unbounded gusto he displayed as a charging cavalry colonel or controversial leader of the nation. Following the life of a politician, author, historian, naturalist, cowboy, soldier and hunter, he was not ready to settle into a life of sedentary leisure in early middle age; he craved continual action and embarked on the expedition that he had been contemplating for years.

  Mounting a shooting safari to Africa appealed to this fifty-year old human dynamo for many reasons. Two decades before, he withdrew to the western badlands to sooth his devastated emotional condition following his loss of both mother and wife on the same day, along with retreating from the sting of his first political defeats. In Dakota Territory he punched cows and chased bad men, weathered blizzards while hobnobbing with cowboys, sheriffs and ranchmen. In this western wilderness the unique physical activity and social relationships discovered by this eccentric northeastern Harvard dandy calmed his emotions while hardening his muscles. Now once again he needed an escape to organize his post-presidency life and recharge his enormous energy.

  He additionally wanted to distance himself from his personally anointed successor to the White House, William Howard Taft, and quell any talk in the newspapers of running again for the presidency. Publicly he wished to avoid upstaging his protégé by not being available to the press during Taft’s first year in office. He consciously realized that being isolated in the African wilderness would suppress his natural tendency to critique and second-guess the new president’s initial performance and decisions. Publicly grandstanding in the most animated manner was always a known Roosevelt trait. While in Africa he wrote to his sister Corinne, “I am happy to say that I know nothing whatever of politics at home, and I hope to keep in the same blessed state of ignorance until I return next June.”1

  Big game hunting on the continent was not a new activity in 1909. In fact, sportsmen, commercial ivory hunters, explorers and adventurers were on the chase in Africa for many years prior to the Roosevelt trip. African legends such as Fredrick Courtenay Selous and William Cornwallis Harris had combined big game hunting with the study of field natural history since the mid-nineteenth century. In 1810, William Burchell, for whom the Burchell’s Zebra is named, sailed for Cape Town to begin the first real Safari. The word safari, in Swahili meaning to engage in a trip or travel, is somewhat understated in describing TR and Kermit’s nine month journey across central and northern Africa.

  In 1909, the East African bush was little changed from the time when the first white explorers ventured to the interior of the Dark Continent, so named from the dark patches on the 19th Century maps denoting the unexplored regions at that time. Zebra still roamed the streets of Nairobi, a small white settlement in British East Africa, now known as Kenya. Settlers on the outskirts of town lost their pet dogs to the occasional leopard. Chasing buffalo from the vegetable garden was a common occurrence. Man-eating lions decimated the work crews and halted the building of a regional railroad just a decade before TR and Kermit rode its rails.

  On the outskirts of town spread thousands of square miles of jungle, open savanna, and mountain ranges whose valleys and plains contained enormous herds of elephant, buffalo, antelope, zebra and prides of the ever predatory lion. Rivers teemed with crocodile and hippopotamus. Scattered across this vast wilderness were numerous tribes of natives, many still wandering the huge tracts of land herding cattle and hunting and gathering for their existence as they had been for countless centuries while a few tribes were stationary, engaged in seasonal agriculture. Many of the natives were adorned with slit earlobes containing various trinkets; others went mostly naked and some covered themselves with mud while others filed their teeth to points wearing ostrich feathers, leopard skins and lion mane headdresses, adorned with little or no clothes beyond a blanket. The Masai herded cattle, their most valuable possessions but still hunted lion with spear and sword, their men sustaining horrid injury but gaining the honored title of warrior. Warlike tribes like the Nandi and Sambruru still roamed over portions of the continent. Only thirty years earlier Zulu impis (military units) waged a major war and slaughtered 1,200 British troops at the Battle of Isandlwana in Southern Africa. The Mau Mau uprising in Kenya was still four generations in the future.

  Communications, commerce, law enforcement and a justice system were almost nonexistent. However, in British East Africa and other regions under the Union Jack, a marginal degree of civilization was beginning to take hold. Disease, drought and wild animals frequently decimated or forced relocation of entire native villages while tribal war still occurred in many areas. Scattered territorial administrators and missionaries attempted to provide law and order, medical care and religion in a spotty, haphazard manner across the vast bush wilderness. The small trickle of incoming white colonists began clearing and cultivating land only a decade earlier in what was considered “white man’s country.” Before that, only explorers and hunters braved this threatening land.

  Similar to the British in the north, south of the equator the German Empire was penetrating inland into what was called German East Africa or in local vernacular, Tanganyika, now present day Tanzania. Within a few short years, both of these territories would be locked in a bush war as an adjunct to the massive world conflict raging between the European powers farther north. Both Kermit and his African settler friends would later participate in this great struggle in the Middle East and on the African continent.

  Pursuing the great animals of Africa in the mysterious regions of this still unknown continent greatly appealed to TR’s adventurous nature. He characterized Africa as the “greatest of the world’s great hunting grounds.”2 Since childhood, TR was keenly interested in ornithology, taxidermy and field natural history. His ongoing study of wildlife and frequent hunting travels across the United States enabled him to become one of the most knowledgeable and authoritative persons on the big-game mammals and birds of North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

  The prospect of investigating the flora and fauna of the world’s greatest wildlife habitat for TR while at the same time being challenged by the world’s most dangerous animals was irresistible. However, having reached a rotund middle-age, with poor eyesight and the typical diminishment of strength and stamina most desk-bound men of fifty years experience, TR wisely decided to enlist Kermit as his personal companion. At nineteen, Kermit was lean and tough as whipcord. He was a skilled horseman, fair shot and bubbling with energy, curiosity and courage. He was capable of pursuing the wild game in a manner that TR could not. An example of Kermit’s athletic ability was demonstrated when galloping after a giraffe on horseback, his mount became too winded to continue. Kermit jumped off and ran after the giraffe on foot for over a mile until the wounded animal dropped from fatigue. The big drawback and TR’s growing concern was Kermit’s careless indifference to danger and his willingn
ess to take unnecessary risks. A newspaper in 19083 reported an account on Long Island of Kermit risking life and limb to race down on horseback a run-away carriage containing a frightened mother and her two daughters as the driver was pitched out of the vehicle from a mishap:

  “Young Roosevelt was careful not to swerve the bays from their course into the gutter, where an upset would have been avoidable. Thus they pounded through the streets of the town, while dozens of people rushed out of their houses to watch the sight. Finally the boy’s efforts began to tell, and slowly but surely the animals were brought to a standstill.”

  Kermit and his father on African Safari.

  Following this hair-raising stunt, Kermit said little and simply rode away departing in his usual nonchalant manner.

  An added advantage to the African expedition was the assignment of Kermit as the expedition’s official photographer. His role in this capacity enabled the trip to be recorded for the public and in the many images TR used to illustrate his serialized magazine articles and later his personal account of the trip.

  To finance their trip billed as the Smithsonian-Roosevelt Expedition, Roosevelt relied upon funding from the Smithsonian Institution and private sponsors, including Andrew Carnegie also paying the way for himself and Kermit’s participation by writing a serialized account of the adventure for Scribners magazine. The articles were later consolidated in his voluminous safari account: African Game Trails. Typical for the era, the safari was established as a scientific expedition with the goal of supplying game mounts and nature settings for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington with the prospect also for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. To provide the necessary scientific bench skills, the Smithsonian enlisted three naturalists to accompany the expedition. The skinning and hide preparation of the huge bag of animals was assigned to Edmund Heller of California, a noted explorer and curator of mammals at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology of the University of California; J. Alden Loring of Oswego, New York, was to have charge of the small mammal collecting and Edgar A. Mearns was selected as head naturalist and bird-collector.4