CHAPTER FIVE
Edith Carow Roosevelt
Edith Carow in 1885, a year before her marriage to the widower Theodore Roosevelt.
IN THE DESOLATE MONTHS AFTER Alice Lee’s death, Theodore Roosevelt could never have conceived that within two years he would be secretly engaged to his childhood friend Edith Carow. Retreating to the “vast silent spaces” and “lonely rivers” of the Badlands following the tumultuous Republican Convention in the summer of 1884, he remained certain that his allotment of domestic bliss was “lived out.” The ecstatic love he had shared with Alice came only once in a lifetime. His own capacity for passionate feeling was exhausted, he believed, and he resolved never to dishonor the wife he had loved more than “any man ever loved a woman.” With an inexorable romantic idealism, he resigned himself to a bleak and isolate existence.
Leaving his four-month-old daughter with Bamie, who had sold the family’s New York town house and moved into her own home at 689 Madison Avenue, Theodore sought refuge from sorrows both personal and public. Privately, memories of his wife haunted every corner of the city. In the political arena, his support of the failed reform candidate against the triumphant machine nominee, James Blaine, had diminished his prospects and informed his decision not to run for a fourth term in the New York State Assembly.
He had fallen in love with the rugged landscape surrounding the Dakota Territory’s Little Missouri River during a hunting trip the previous September. He had hoped to return with “the head of a great buffalo bull” to hang in the home he and Alice were building in Oyster Bay, but while there, he had decided to invest in two open-range cattle ranches, the Elkhorn and the Chimney Butte. His purchase of 1,400 head of cattle for $85,000 reduced by more than half the sum his father bequeathed to him. He went into partnership with two local cowboys, Bill Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris, and convinced William Sewall and William Dow, two wilderness guides he had hunted with in Maine, to join the enterprise. As his vision of family happiness died with Alice, he seriously considered a career as a full-time rancher, residing and writing in the West, with only occasional visits back east.
When he first returned to the Badlands in the summer of 1884, the austere landscape seemed to mirror his melancholy. “The plains stretch out in death-like and measureless expanse,” he wrote. “Nowhere, not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains.” In the “noontide hours” of a scorching summer day, he remarked, “there are few sounds to break the stillness.” With every living thing immobile in the stifling heat, he heard only the “soft, melancholy cooing of the mourning-dove, whose voice always seems far away and expresses more than any other sound in nature the sadness of gentle, hopeless, never-ending grief.”
Just as he had frantically thrown himself into his labors in the assembly to alleviate the immediate anguish of Alice’s death, so he now immersed himself in the daily work of the ranch. He was often on his horse sixteen hours a day, riding after stray horses, hunting game, joining his men in the “hardest work,” that of “the spring and fall round-ups, when the calves are branded or the beeves gathered for market.” During roundups that covered over two hundred miles in four to five weeks, the cook began “preparing breakfast long before the first glimmer of dawn.” Shortly after three o’clock the men were roused from sleep and the day’s toil delegated. “These long, swift rides in the glorious spring mornings are not soon to be forgotten,” Theodore marveled. “As we climb the steep sides of the first range of buttes, wisps of wavering mist still cling in the hollows of the valley; when we come out on top of the first great plateau, the sun flames up over its edge, and in the level, red beams the galloping horsemen throw long, fantastic shadows.”
Relentless physical activity served him well. “Black care,” he wrote, “rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.” Once, constant activity had assuaged the pain of his father’s death; now, he hoped that by occupying every minute of his waking day, he could simply outride his depression. A two-week hunting trip in September, he reported to Bamie, had provided “enough excitement and fatigue to prevent over much thought”; he had “at last been able to sleep well at night.”
In Medora, he had a spacious ranch house built to share with his friends, Sewall and Dow, and eventually their wives. “The story-high house of hewn logs is clean and neat, with many rooms,” he wrote, “so that one can be alone if one wishes to.” The central room featured a massive stone hearth with trophy heads gazing down from the walls and buffalo robes covering the couches. His own chamber held a rubber tub for bathing and rough shelves for his favorite books—“Parkman and Irving and Hawthorne and Cooper and Lowell”—along with a growing assortment of volumes sent from New York by his devoted sister.
As the months passed and Roosevelt started to recover himself, he approached Century magazine with the idea of presenting a series of sketches highlighting hunting experiences on the Great Plains. In fits and starts at first, he began to compose during breaks in his work. Before long, he was writing steadily before “the flickering firelight” of the enormous fireplace. Organizing his manuscript around the different game he hunted—black-tailed deer, antelope, bull elk, buffalo, and grizzly bear—he fused a naturalist’s interest in the unique characteristics of each animal with a hunter’s thrill of the chase.
Daily labor on the ranch had given Roosevelt an acute awareness of the natural cycles and unique pleasures each season held. On summer evenings, he relaxed in his rocking chair on the wide porch of the ranch house, reading in the shade of the cottonwood and enjoying the “cool breeze” from the nearby river. As the crisp autumn temperatures began to transform the landscape, he particularly savored the long days in the saddle, whether hunting or rounding up cattle. “Where everything before had been gray or dull green there are now patches of russet red and bright yellow,” he noted. “The clumps of ash, wild-plum trees, and rosebushes in the heads and bottoms of the sloping valleys become spots of color that glow among the stretches of brown and withered grass.”
Even when the winter days “dwindled to their shortest” and the yapping wailing songs of coyotes echoed through the “never-ending” nights, Roosevelt took comfort in the camaraderie of housemates gathered round the fireplace to read, relax, or play chess. Soon enough, spring brought earlier daybreak to the Badlands and his morning rides took on “a charm all their own,” the bleached landscape becoming “a vivid green, as the new grass sprouts and the trees and bushes thrust forth the young leaves.” On those clear mornings, he thrilled to the sounds of “bird songs unknown in the East”—the lilting melodies of the Missouri skylark, the “rich, full notes” of the white-shouldered lark-bunting, the tuneful sweetness of the lark-finch. The green thickets and groves encircling his ranch house teemed with the songs of hermit thrushes and meadowlarks. This quickening of life in the Badlands awakened a corresponding energy in Theodore Roosevelt.
As his fits of depression subsided and publication of his book, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, drew near, Roosevelt’s thoughts turned east, toward the home and the people he had left behind. Memories of joyful days spent with his childhood friend Edith Carow increasingly intruded on his consciousness. The desire to renew their old and deep friendship, however, was coupled with a surge of guilt and anxiety when he contemplated anything that might compromise Alice’s memory. This thought lay on his conscience like a crime, and he instructed his sisters, who were still close to Edith, that she never be present during his visits. He traveled to New York in July 1885, when his book was published to excellent reviews. This work “will take a leading position in the literature of the American sportsman,” the New York Times reported. “Mr. Roosevelt writes most happily, tells naturally what he sees and does.”
Roosevelt remained in New York that summer, living for the first time in his recently finished country home at Oyster Bay, the planning and design for which had filled many happy hours with Alice. Completed and furnished under Ba
mie’s devoted supervision, the rambling twenty-two-room Queen Anne house stood atop a hill, surrounded by forests and grassy clearings, commanding a clear view of the Long Island Sound. Returning to Cove Neck must have recalled vivid memories of childhood summers at nearby Tranquillity, where “no day was long enough” to contain the myriad pursuits of Roosevelt’s lively family and friends.
Replicating those crowded childhood days, Bamie orchestrated a steady stream of houseguests to Oyster Bay, including Corinne’s childhood friend Fanny Smith. Fanny found Theodore’s new house, which he rechristened “Sagamore Hill,” as enchanting as she had once found Tranquillity. The Roosevelt homestead again became a social hub, but Theodore now assumed the central position his father had once occupied. “Especially memorable,” Fanny recalled, “were the battles, ancient and modern, which were waged relentlessly on the white linen tablecloth with the aid of such table-silver as was available.” Stunned by Theodore’s “familiarity with historical details of long past centuries,” Fanny admiringly noted that he made her “feel that Hannibal lived just around the corner.” Roosevelt’s Aunt Annie and her husband had recently completed a country house accessible to his by a dirt path through the woods, and nearby lived his cousin Dr. West Roosevelt, who had accompanied him to Maine when he first met Bill Sewall. Despite this renewed consolidation of the Roosevelt clan, Theodore managed to avoid one old friend. Although Edith had spent a week with Aunt Annie at “Gracewood” earlier that summer, she was noticeably absent from the group that gathered at Theodore’s new home.
These summer weeks were the most extended time Theodore had spent with his daughter, Alice, who was now nearly eighteen months old. Under Bamie’s loving guardianship, Alice had emerged as a lively, blond, blue-eyed toddler. Indeed, the warmth and affection that bound Bamie and her niece could not have been stronger if they were mother and child. “She was the only one I really cared about when I was a child,” Alice later remembered. Though crippled by curvature of the spine and seriously overweight, Bamie seemed to Alice marvelously larger than life, “a great big handsome man of a woman . . . but oh so attractive!” Even as a young child Alice observed that Bamie “had an extraordinary gift with people.” Her numerous friends adored her and felt completely at ease in her presence. Had “she been a man,” Alice believed, “she would have been the one to be President.”
Roosevelt returned to the Badlands in late August, but two months later he was back in New York. He arrived at Bamie’s Madison Avenue town house, where he routinely stayed while visiting the city, to find Edith Carow about to depart. Whether Theodore’s failure to signal his impending return or her delay in taking leave of Bamie brought about the reunion, long-hidden feelings surfaced before day’s end. Less than three weeks later, the two were secretly engaged. “You know all about me darling,” Edith told Theodore. “I never could have loved anyone else. I love you with all the passion of a girl who has never loved before.”
THE RESURRECTION OF HER RELATIONSHIP with Theodore offered Edith the prospect of happiness and security that had eluded her since childhood. Her father, Charles Carow, became an alcoholic after his family’s once-thriving shipping business fell into bankruptcy. The seventh of eight children born to wealthy merchant prince Isaac Quentin Carow, Charles had lacked no privilege growing up in his family’s St. Mark’s Place mansion. He dwelled in a world of private tutors, dancing lessons, and access to New York’s most exclusive clubs. At twenty-five, he had just begun work at Kermit & Carow, the family firm, when his father suddenly passed away.
Charismatic and eligible, Charles Carow seemed a perfect match for Gertrude Tyler. At nineteen, she had lately returned from two years in a fashionable Parisian girls’ school. Gertrude’s father, Daniel Tyler IV, had graduated from West Point and served in the Army before amassing a fortune in iron manufacturing. Following his marriage to Emily Lee, they moved to the sumptuous mansion in Norwich, Connecticut, where Gertrude was raised.
Intent that she become a poised and well-bred young lady, Gertrude’s father had insisted she attend boarding school in Paris. On the Continent, in contrast to America, he assured her, she would “find great attention paid to deportment and manners.” She would be schooled in “matters of carriage, such as walking, entering a room, sitting down and rising”; comportment that would signify a proper upbringing. “Do not my dear Gertrude undervalue or despise these matters,” he admonished. “They are important and it will be my pride to know and feel that both your mind and manners are formed on good and true standards. Now is the time for you to finish an education, mental and physical which will make you an ornament to society.” While Gertrude was often homesick and could not bear to spend the Christmas season abroad, she pledged to work hard at music lessons, study of French, and riding lessons. “Do not doubt,” she promised her mother, “that I shall do everything in my power to improve the advantages that you and Father have given me.”
Encountering Gertrude in New York soon after her return, Charles pursued her avidly. On March 7, 1859, he formally declared his intentions to her father: “My dear Sir, I have to ask of you the greatest favor that one man can ask of another. I have won Gertrude’s heart. Will you give me her hand?” The wedding took place two months later in the Christ Episcopal Church in Norwich, Connecticut, followed by a brilliant reception in the Tyler mansion.
The couple’s first child, a boy, died at six months. Then, the year the war began, the Carows welcomed their first daughter, Edith. Gertrude’s father rejoined the Army as a general, while Charles remained in New York endeavoring to steer the family shipping business through an abrupt decline precipitated by the Civil War. He had inherited the family enterprise on the brink of a crisis that made “the risk of sailing under the American flag . . . so great as to divert a large share of the carrying trade into foreign bottoms.” Buffeted by drastic financial reverses, Charles began drinking heavily and gambling. Soon he was no longer able to afford his own home and the family was forced to move in with his widowed sister, Ann Eliza Kermit. As the war came to an end, the Carow’s second daughter, Emily, was born in Ann’s large town house at 12 Livingston Place near Union Square.
When Charles was not drinking, he was an affectionate husband and an effusive, doting father. “My dear little girl,” he wrote Edith when he and Gertrude left to visit the Tylers in Norwich, “Papa hopes his dolly has been very good since he has been gone. . . . Papa & Mamma always say, before they go to sleep, ‘God bless little Edie,’ and again before they get up in the morning.” From the time she was young, Charles had sought to communicate to his “precious little monkey” his fascination with the theatre and love of literature. Edith proved an apt pupil. “Almost the first thing I remember,” she later told Theodore, “is being told about Sinbad the Sailor when I was a tiny girl and used to climb up on my father’s knee every evening and beg him to ‘spin me a yarn.’ ” As her father read aloud from the Arabian Nights, “a new world” opened up, “full of glowing Eastern light and colour.” Her early exposure to such frightful and wonderful stories spurred “a passion for fairy tales” later concisely distilled into her own verse: “Oh fairy tales, my fairy tales / Fantastic, weird and wild / I love you with a changeless love / A mother gives her child.”
When father and daughter were apart, Charles urged her to write him her thoughts and feelings without the monitor of self-consciousness, without worry over corrections. “I got your letter about 3 o’clock yesterday,” he wrote. “It was so nice & long. No matter about the spelling when you write to me. Say what you want to say and don’t lose time thinking how to spell the words. If I want I can beat you with a big stick when you come back—so just write whatever comes into your head.” When they were together, he took Edith on long walks, pointing out various wildflowers and teaching her to know them by color, shape, and habitat. This shared pursuit fostered an interest in the natural world that remained with her the rest of her life.
When Charles Carow was drinking, however, recrimination
and tension permeated the household. Gertrude began to suffer bouts of melancholy coupled with a mysterious series of nervous disorders. Still, the Carows managed to maintain a public facade of elegance and ease, spending their winters in New York with Mrs. Kermit and their summers at General Tyler’s country estate in New Jersey. Gertrude’s finishing school lessons in proper carriage and deportment helped her conceal private anxiety behind a veneer of propriety. And she imparted these lessons to her uncommonly poised little girl, Edith.
Edith was a toddler when she first met Theodore Roosevelt. The Kermit house on Livingston Place stood directly behind the 14th Street mansion of Theodore’s grandfather, Cornelius Van Schaak Roosevelt. Edith and Corinne Roosevelt were almost exactly the same age and they soon became, in Corinne’s words, “pledged friends.” Edith’s earliest memories revolved around the Roosevelts’ 20th Street household, where she frequently played with Corinne and developed a particular affection for Teedie, three years her senior. Far less did she enjoy their visits to her own house, where she anxiously struggled to hide her “old and broken toys.”
When she was five, Edith was invited to join the Roosevelt children in the home school taught by Mittie’s sister, Annie Gracie. Years later, Edith fondly recalled “the school room, the children around the table, and dear Mrs. Gracie training clumsy little fingers to write and teaching the earliest lessons in the primer.” She and Teedie cherished an illustrated children’s magazine called Our Young Folks, a compilation of stories, poems, and illustrations by celebrated writers and artists, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Winslow Homer, Henry Longfellow, and Charles Dickens. Later, “at the cost of being deemed effeminate,” Roosevelt confessed an early fascination with “girls’ stories,” such as Little Men and Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl. His ability to focus and withdraw into a book was equaled only in his friend, Edith Carow. “I think imagination is one of the greatest blessings of life,” Edith later wrote, “and while one can lose oneself in a book one can never be thoroughly unhappy.”