Col. Theodore Roosevelt's Debt to Maine
By Col. Theodore Roosevelt
I owe a personal debt to Maine because
of my association with certain staunch friends in Aroostook
County; an association that helped and benefited me throughout
my life in more ways than one.
It is over forty years ago that I first
went to Island Falls and stayed with the Sewall family. I
repeated the visit three or four times. I made a couple of
hunting trips in the fall, with Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow; and
one winter I spent three or four weeks on snowshoes with them,
visiting a couple of lumber-camps. I was not a boy of any
natural prowess and for that very reason the vigorous out-door
life was just what I needed.
It was a matter of pride with me to keep
up with my stalwart associates, and to shift for myself, and to
treat with indifference whatever hardship or fatigue came our
way. In their company I would have been ashamed to complain! And
I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was rather tired by some of the
all-day tramps, especially in the deep snow, when my webbed
racquets gave me "snowshoe feet", or when we waded up the
Munsungin in shallow water, dragging a dugout, until my ankles
became raw from slipping on the smooth underwater stones; and I
still remember with qualified joy the ascent and especially the
descent of Katahdin in moccasins, worn because, to the deep
disapproval of my companions, I had lost one of my heavy shoes
in crossing a river at a riffle.
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Theodore Roosevelt on His First Maine Vacation.
From an Old Tintype Showing His Companions, Bill Sewall
and Dow on his left. |
I also remember such delicious nights,
under a lean-to, by stream or lake, in the clear fall weather,
or in winter on balsam boughs in front of a blazing stump, when
we had beaten down and shoveled away the deep snow, and kept our
foot-gear away from the fire, so that it should not thaw and
freeze; and the meals of venison, trout or partridge; and one
meal consisting of muskrat and a fish-duck, which, being
exceedingly hungry, we heartily appreciated.
But the bodily benefit was not the
largest part of the good done me. I was accepted as part of the
household; and the family and friends represented in their lives
the kind of Americanism, self-respecting, duty-performing,
life-enjoying, which is the most valuable possession that any
generation can hand on to the next. It was as native to our soil
as "William Henry's Letters to his Grandmother" I hope there are
still readers of that delightful volume of my youth, even
although it was published fifty years ago.
Mrs. Sewall, the mother, was a dear old
lady; and Miss Sewall, the sister, was a most capable manager of
the house. Bill Sewall at that time had two brothers. Sam was a
deacon. Dave was not a deacon. It was from Dave that I heard an
expression which ever after remained in my mind. He was speaking
of a local personage of shifty character who was very adroit in
using fair-sounding words which completely nullified the meaning
of other fair-sounding words which preceded them. "His words
weasel the meaning of the words in front of them," said Dave,
just like a weasel when he sucks the meat out of an egg and
leaves nothing but the shell;" and I always remembered ''weasel
words" as applicable to certain forms of oratory, especially
political oratory, which I do not admire.
Once, while driving in a wagon with
Dave, up an exceedingly wet and rocky backwoods road, with the
water pouring down the middle, I asked him how in Aroostook
County they were able to tell its roads from its rivers. ''No
beaver dams in the roads," instantly responded Dave.
At one of the logging-camps I became
good friends with a quiet, resolute-looking man, named Brown,
one of the choppers; and afterwards I stopped at his house and
was as much struck with his good and pretty wife as I had been
with him. He had served in the Civil War and had been wounded.
His creed was that peace was a great blessing, but that even so
great a blessing could be purchased at too dear a price. I did
not see him again until thirty-seven years later when he came to
a meeting at which I spoke in Portland. He had shaved off his
beard and was an old man and I did not at first recognize him;
but after the first sentence, I knew him and very glad indeed I
was to see him once more.
In the eighties I started a little
cattle-ranch on the Little Missouri, in the then territory of
Dakota, and I got Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow to join me. By that
time they had both married and they brought out Mrs. Sewall and
Mrs. Dow. There was already a little girl in the Sewall family,
and two babies, a small Sewall boy and a small Dow boy, were
born on the ranch. Thanks to Mrs. Sewall and Mrs. Dow, we were
most comfortable. The ranch-house and all the out-buildings at
the home-ranch, the Elkhorn, were made of cotton-wood logs and
were put up by Bill and Wilmot who were mighty men with the axe.
I got them to put on a veranda; and in one room, where I kept my
books and did my writing, we built a big fireplace, and I
imported a couple of rocking-chairs. (Only one would have made
me feel too selfish.) The veranda, the open fireplace, the books
and the rocking-chairs represented my special luxuries; I think
Mrs. Sewall and Mrs. Dow enjoyed them almost as much as I did.
We had stoves to keep us warm in the
bitter winter weather and bearskins and buffalo-robes. Bill and
"Wilmot and I and usually one or two cow-hands worked hard, but
it was enjoyable work and the hunting on which we relied for all
our meat was, of course, sheer fun. When the winter weather set
in, we usually made a regular hunt to get the winter meat and we
hung our game in the cottonwood trees which stretched before the
house. I remember once when we had a bull elk and several deer
hanging up and another time when we had a couple of antelope and
a yearling mountain-sheep. The house of hewn logs was clean and
comfortable and we were all of us young and strong and happy.
Wilmot was from every standpoint one of the best men I ever
knew. He has been dead for many years. His widow is now Mrs.
Pride; and her present husband is also one of my valued friends.
When I was President, the Sewalls and
Prides came down to Washington to visit us. We talked over
everything, public and private, past and present; the education
and future careers of our children; the proper attitude of the
United States in external and internal matters. We all of us
looked at the really important matters of public policy and
private conduct from substantially the same view-point. Never
were there more welcome guests at the White House.
Theodore Roosevelt
Sagamore Hill, March 20, 1918
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