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Roosevelt’s river
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"The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey," by Candice Millard
Special to the Daily
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By SAM MASSA
Special to the Daily
March 26, 2008
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“The River of Doubt” is the thrilling, true tale of one of America’s most popular presidents and his search for relief and redemption outside of American politics. After suffering a stunning defeat by Woodrow Wilson in November of 1912, Teddy Roosevelt walked away from the political arena. Shunned by his high-society Republican friends for having run as a Bull Moose Party candidate, and generally lampooned by everyone else for losing by such a wide margin, he quickly accepted an invitation to South America.
Roosevelt, ever the adventurer, turned his agenda toward a poorly-prepared trip down an unexplored tributary of the Amazon River.
For the unfaltering Roosevelt, the adventure was not a media stunt however, nor the start to a long comeback campaign. It was a form of self-imposed therapy. Roosevelt had been a weak, sickly child.
He had overcome asthma and early illness by embracing any physical challenge that might come his way. Whenever he was hit by despair, he collected himself and embarked on what he termed “the strenuous life.”
There was no question about Roosevelt’s stamina. While campaigning for the 1912 election, he had been shot in the chest prior to an engagement.
Although wounded (one bullet was embedded five inches under the skin), Roosevelt insisted on speaking at the function. Standing at the podium and making it possible for the unbelieving audience to see his wounds, he shouted, “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose!”
Initially, he was invited to Latin America to deliver a series of political speeches.
Typically uninterested in public speaking (except for spectacle’s sake) the thought of unknown adventure, as well as his third son Kermit residing at the time in Brazil was enough to convince him to make the trip.
The river Roosevelt had set his determination on was a course of rapids and bubbling white water, behind whose banks hid all the dangers of the Amazonian rain forest. But for Roosevelt, the jungle also provided the therapy he sought, making his usual world of American politics seem distant and trivial.
The endless succession of calamities (the result of ill-planning and sheer bad luck) would have been enough to distract anyone. Notable setbacks included terrible illness and the loss of canoes and supplies to the treacherous rapids. By the end of it, the party was so worn down that even the slowest advance was an ordeal.
The team members were emaciated, crippled by disease and fatigue and trapped by rapids. The president was no exception.
One night George Cherrie, the naturalist and Amazonian expert on the crew, took a good look at the sweat-soaked figure before him. He confided in his diary that he had little hope that Theodore Roosevelt would survive until morning.
The possibility of death hovered over him as he faded in and out of delirium, reciting over and over a couplet from Coleridge: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.”
Roosevelt made a full recovery and lived to see the river renamed Rio Roosevelt in his honor, which any reader can be certain of its merit.
Sam Massa works at Weber’s Books and Drawings in Breckenridge where this title can be found.
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CLOUDY 42° 
