The River of Doubt

On the forty-second page of “The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey” author Candice Millard wrote (emphasis added):

From there is neither East nor West,
Border nor breed nor birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
Though they come from the ends of the earth.

No longer a boy—he would turn twenty-four in just six days—Kermit was showing every sign of growing into the man that his father had always hoped he would be. He had not only carved out a life for himself under tough circumstances in Brazil, but he was earning his own way and was steadily establishing his independence. Concerned that his son was getting "down to such a very simple diet as a result of having no money at the end of the month," Roosevelt had resolved in April to send him two hundred dollars each quarter. By late July, however, Kermit was proudly tearing up his father's checks. "Unless things go very badly I shan't need money unless I happen to marry. I'm now getting something more than a living wage, and have about three hundred and fifty dollars in the bank," Kermit told his father. "I wrote you that I had torun up the first check and I have now torn up the second."

Although Kermit's pay had improved since he had first arrived in Brazil, the conditions under which he was working had not. Not only did he suffer from recurring bouts of malaria—a disease that he had endured since childhood, having first succumbed to it in Washington, D.C., in the days before the swamps on which the capital was build had been drained—but he worked in remote, sparsely populated locations near Indians who had had little interaction with white men beyond occasional, violent clashes. Kermit took the dangers in stride. In a letter he wrote home the previous fall, while he was working for the Brazil Railway Company, he mentioned offhandedly that they had had three derailments in a single week. "Twice it was a big box car that went off, and once it was the engine," he wrote. "Only one of them amounted to anything, and there we very nearly killed our cook." A few weeks later, he mentioned that he did not think he

More information about “The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Powell's Books
• Amazon.com
• Barnes & Noble

(Doubleday Books, October 2005. Hardcover, 416 pages. ISBN: 0385507968; EAN: 9780385507967.)

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