The house at Pine Knot consists of one long room, with a broad piazza, below, and three small bedrooms above. It is made of wood, with big outside chimneys at each end. Wood rats and white-footed mice visit it; once a weasel came in after them; now a flying squirrel has made his home among the rafters. On one side the pines and on the other side the oaks come up to the walls; in front the broom sedge grows almost to the piazza and above the line of its waving plumes we look across the beautiful rolling Virginia farm country to the foothills of the Blue Ridge. At night whippoorwills call incessantly around us. In the late spring or early summer we usually take breakfast and dinner on the veranda listening to mocking-bird, cardinal, and Carolina wren, as well as to many more common singers. In the winter the little house can only be kept warm by roaring fires in the great open fireplaces, for there is no plaster on the walls, nothing but the bare wood. Then the table is set near the blazing logs at one end of the long room which makes up the lower part of the house, and at the other end the colored cook—Jim Crack by name—prepares the delicious Virginia dinner; while around him cluster the little darkies, who go on errands, bring in wood, or fetch water from the spring, to put in the bucket which stands below where the gourd hangs on the wall. Outside the wind moans or the still cold bites if the night is quiet; but inside there is warmth and light and cheer.
There are plenty of quail and rabbits in the fields and woods near by, so we live partly on what our guns bring in; and there are also wild turkeys. I spent the first three days of November, 1906, in a finally successful effort to kill a wild turkey. Each morning I left the house between three and five o’clock, under a cold brilliant moon. The frost was heavy; and my horse shuffled over the frozen ruts as I rode after Dick. I was on the turkey grounds before the faintest streak of dawn had appeared in the east; and I worked as long as daylight lasted. It was interesting and attractive in spite of the cold. In the night we heard the quavering screech owls; and occasionally the hooting of one of their bigger brothers. At dawn we listened to the lusty hammering of the big logcocks, or to the curious coughing or croaking sound of a hawk before it left its roost. Now and then loose flocks of small birds straggled past us as we sat in the blind, or rested to eat our lunch; chickadees, tufted tits, golden-crested kinglets, creepers, cardinals, various sparrows and small woodpeckers. Once we saw a shrike pounce on a field mouse by a haystack; once we came on a ruffed grouse sitting motionless in the road.
ROSWELL BEHAVES LIKE A GENTLEMAN
From a photograph, copyright, 1907, by Clinedinst
The last day I had with me Jim Bishop, a man who had hunted turkeys by profession, a hard-working farmer, whose ancestors have for generations been farmers and woodmen; an excellent hunter, tireless, resourceful, with an eye that nothing escaped; just the kind of a man one likes to regard as typical of what is best in American life. Until this day, and indeed until the very end of this day, chance did not favor us. We tried to get up to the turkeys on the roost before daybreak; but they roosted in pines and, night though it was, they were evidently on the lookout, for they always saw us long before we could make them out, and then we could hear them fly out of the tree-tops. Turkeys are quite as wary as deer, and we never got a sight of them while we were walking through the woods; but two or three times we flushed gangs, and my companion then at once built a little blind of pine boughs in which we sat while he tried to call the scattered birds up to us by imitating, with marvellous fidelity, their yelping. Twice a turkey started toward us, but on each occasion the old hen began calling some distance off and all the scattered birds at once went toward her. At other times I would slip around to one side of a wood while my companion walked through it, but either there were no turkeys or they went out somewhere far away from me.
On the last day I was out thirteen hours. Finally, late in the afternoon, Jim Bishop marked a turkey into a point of pines which stretched from a line of wooded hills down into a narrow open valley on the other side of which again rose wooded hills. I ran down to the end of the point and stood behind a small oak, while Bishop and Dick walked down through the trees to drive the turkey toward me. This time everything went well; the turkey came out of the cover not too far off and sprang into the air, heading across the valley and offering me a side shot at forty yards as he sailed by. It was just the distance for the close-shooting ten-bore duck gun I carried; and at the report down came the turkey in a heap, not so much as a leg or wing moving. It was an easy shot. But we had hunted hard for three days; and the turkey is the king of American game birds; and, besides, I knew he would be very good eating indeed when we brought him home; so I was as pleased as possible when Dick lifted the fine young gobbler, his bronze plumage iridescent in the light of the westering sun.
Formerly we could ride across country in any direction around Washington and almost as soon as we left the beautiful, tree-shaded streets of the city we were in the real country. But as Washington grows, it naturally—and to me most regrettably—becomes less and less like its former, glorified-village, self; and wire fencing has destroyed our old cross-country rides. Fortunately there are now many delightful bridle trails in Rock Creek Park; and we have fixed up a number of good jumps at suitable places—a stone wall, a water jump, a bank with a ditch, two or three posts-and-rails, about four feet high, and some stiff brush hurdles, one of five feet seven inches. The last, which is the only formidable jump was put up to please two sporting members of the administration, Bacon and Meyer. Both of them school their horses over it; and my two elder boys, and Fitzhugh Lee, my cavalry aide, also school my horses over it. On one of my horses, Roswell, I have gone over it myself; and as I weigh two hundred pounds without my saddle I think that the jump, with such a weight, in cold blood, should be credited to Roswell for righteousness. Roswell is a bay gelding; Audrey a black mare; they are Virginia horses. In the spring of 1907 I had photographs of them taken going over the various jumps. Roswell is a fine jumper, and usually goes at his jumps in a spirit of matter-of-fact enjoyment. But he now and then shows queer kinks in his temper. On one of these occasions he began by wishing to rush his jumps, and by trying to go over the wings instead of the jumps themselves. He fought hard for his head; and as it happened that the best picture we got of him in the air was at this particular time, it gives a wrong idea of his ordinary behavior, and also, I sincerely trust, a wrong idea of my hands. Generally he takes his jumps like a gentleman.
Many of the men with whom I hunted or with whom I was brought in close contact when I lived on my ranch, and still more of the men who were with me in the Rough Riders, have shared in some way or other in my later political life. Phil Stewart was one of the Presidential Electors who in 1904 gave me Colorado’s vote; Merrifield filled the same position in Montana and is now Marshal of that State. Cecil Lyon and Sloan Simpson, of Texas, were delegates for me at the National Convention which nominated me in 1904. Sewell is Collector of Customs in Maine; Sylvans and Joe Ferris are respectively Register of the Land Office and Postmaster in North Dakota; Dennis Shea with whom I worked on the Little Missouri round-up holds my commission as Marshal of North Dakota. Abernathy the wolf hunter is my Marshal in Oklahoma. John Willis declined to take any place; when he was last my guest at the White House he told me, I am happy to say, that he does better with his ranch than he could have done with any office. Johnny Goff is a forest ranger near the Yellowstone Park. Seth Bullock is Marshal of South Dakota; he too is an old friend of my ranch days and was sheriff in the Black Hills when I was deputy sheriff due north of him in Billings County, in the then Territory of Dakota. Among the people that we both arrested, by the way, was a young man named “Calamity Joe,” a very well-meaning fellow but a wild boy who had gone astray, as wild boys often used to go astray on the frontier, through bad companionship. To my great amusement his uncle turned up as United States Senator some fifteen years later, and was one of my staunch allies. Of the men of the regiment Lieutenant Colonel Brodie I made Governor of Arizona, Captain Frantz, Governor of Oklahoma, and Captain Curry Governor of New Mexico. Ben Daniels I appointed Marshal of Arizona; Colbert, the Chickasaw, Marshal in the Indian Territory. Llewellyn is District Attorney in New Mexico. Jenkins is Collector of Internal Revenue in South Carolina. Fred Herrig, who was with me on the Little Missouri, where we hunted the blacktail and the bighorn together, and who later served under me at Santiago, is a forest ranger in Montana; and many other men of my old regiment have taken up with unexpected interest occupations as diverse as those of postmaster, of revenue agent, of land and forest officers of various kinds. Joe Lee is Minister to Ecuador; John McIlhenny is Civil Service Commissioner; Craig Wadsworth is Secretary of Legation at the Court of St. James; Mason Mitchell is Consul in China, having already been Consul at Mozambique, where he spent his holidays in hunting the biggest of the world’s big game.
ROSWELL FIGHTS FOR HIS HEAD
From a photograph, copyright, 1907, by Clinedinst