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This is the sort of thing that makes me skeptical of
log cabin restorations. I mean, when they start taking out logs and replacing
them, and reconstructing major features, and especially when they do that
thing of disassembling the whole works and moving it, but of course, they
carefully numbered each piece so as to get it back together exactly right—well,
you could throw cats through the credibility gaps in this story of provenance.
And then, when they put the thing on wheels and move it from place to
place, as if place itself meant nothing, as if a historic building were
just some knickknack to be exhibited wherever, well, there just isn’t
much historical sense left to it.
Now I’m going to interrupt my own rant, inspired by the story of
Theodore Roosevelt’s log cabin, because as I read it—as told
by Mike Thompson in his self-published book, The Travels and Tribulations
of Theodore Roosevelt’s Cabin—I’m sensing something else,
another kind of historical sense, gauche and tacky, but powerful, nevertheless.
I’m sensing the power in that popular impulse to get a piece of the
legend—I mean literally, get a piece of it, because souvenir hunters
did make off with chunks of TR’s old Maltese Cross cabin.
And I’m thinking, who cares how much of that cabin the National Park
Service has set up out by Medora is the real deal? If it invokes the historical
spirit of that “damned cowboy” president, as Mark Hanna once
called him, then maybe that’s enough.
Travels and tribulations, as the author Thompson puts it—the Roosevelt
cabin sure had them. This was the ranch residence built for TR in 1883-84
by his foreman and friend, Sylvane Ferris, from pine logs cut for railroad
ties in the Short Pine Hills, washed away by the flooding Little Missouri
River, and salvaged for construction use. It was relatively spacious and
had an unusually high gable and loft for ranch houses of the time. Here
Roosevelt wrote one of his best books, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman.
Subsequent owners and occupants took off the high gabled roof and otherwise
modified the cabin. Then the greater indignities commenced, as in 1903,
during Roosevelt’s presidency, the state of North Dakota bought the
cabin and exhibited it at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.
It was part of the agricultural exhibit, with stuffed animals and cornshocks
on the roof. Countless visitors carved their initials into it. The cabin
next traveled to the Lewis and Clark Exposition, in Portland, thence back
to the fairgrounds in Fargo, where the reconstruction was badly bungled.
In 1908 the state placed the cabin on the capitol grounds in Bismarck.
Here it got some loving care from the Daughters of the American Revolution.
In 1927 the legislature provided funding for a fence, which was ornamented
by a beautiful, ornate, somewhat inappropriate iron gate fashioned by
the master blacksmith of North Dakota Agricultural College, Haile Chisholm.
The state historical society still has this gate hammered out by Chisholm
in storage, and I need to go see it, because judging by photographs, it
is an amazing piece of work. It just looked a little silly in the middle
of a chain-link fence in front of a log cabin.
The travels of Roosevelt’s cabin finally ended in 1959, when the
park service brought it out to Medora. There still were some tribulations,
though, in the form of major reconstructive surgery. “Today,”
writes Thompson, “the Maltese Cross Ranch Cabin looks exactly as
it did when Theodore Roosevelt lived in it over 120 years ago.”
We often do silly things with historic buildings, and we almost always
do silly things with celebrities, and so it was to be expected that silly
things would be done with the historic cabin of a celebrity president.
May it rest in peace.
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