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Home  »  Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen  »  Page 85

Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.

Page 85

grazed yet in scattered bands in the mountain recesses far from beaten trails; the last great herd on the plains had been slaughtered, but five years later Mr. Roosevelt tracked an old bull and his family of cows and calves in the wilderness on the Wisdom River near where Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana come together. He trailed them all day and at last came upon them in a glade shut in by dark pines. As he gazed upon the huge, shaggy beasts, behind which towered the mountains, their crests crimsoned by the sinking sun, there mingled with the excitement of the hunter a “half-melancholy feeling at the thought that they were the last remnant of a doomed and nearly vanished race.” It did not prevent him, however, from eating the grilled meat of the old bull that night at the camp-fire, with a hungry hunter’s relish. The great head of the mighty beast hangs over the fire-place at Sagamore Hill, an object of shuddering awe to the little ones. None of them will in their day ever bring home such a trophy from the hunt.
  I looked past it into the room where the piano stands, the other day, and saw two of them there, Ethel giving Archie, with the bewitching