The day Uncle Scott met Teddy Roosevelt

(I recently had an article in the Bee telling of a visit by Teddy Roosevelt to Sandpoint. In a speech before a standing room only crowd, Roosevelt alluded to an incident that happened on a previous visit to this area. He jokingly recalled the night that he had an argument with a man about who would sleep in the only bed found in a shack across the tracks from the local hotel. I received a call asking me if there was a full story about the incident and if it really happened. The late Dale Selle told me the following story and I want to share it with you.)

 Family tradition of the Hawkins family who came to Sandpoint, Idaho, in 1881-882 and who settled on “Hawkins Point” at Sunnyside on the north shore of Lake Pend Oreille in 1885, maintained that William E. Hawkins’ half brother, Winfield Scott Monhart (“Uncle Scott”) who came to Sandpoint in 1884, once “slept in the same bed with Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt” in Sandpoint in 1888. There is enough documentation to support the claim that this traditional story is indeed based on facts. From all of the evidence, it appears that the Hawkins family story sprang from true events which went something like this:

In August, 1888, 29-year-old author and civil servant, Theodore Roosevelt, left his home in New York to take a break from writing a history entitled “The Winning of the West.” Roosevelt traveled west to his “Elkhorn” ranch in Dakota Territory (just north of the town of Medora, North Dakota) to check on things there. Then, bound for a caribou hunting trip in the Selkirk Mountains, he and some friends rode a Northern Pacific train to Idaho Territory. He arrived at the village of Kootenai on the north side of Lake Pend d’Oreille in the last week of August, 1888. The village of Kootenai was then located on “Mud Slough” (which was later called Boyer Slough) a mile east of the present town. Kootenai was the starting point of the “Wild Horse Trail” which went north to the gold fields of British Columbia and Fort Steele. Teddy Roosevelt and his companions planned to hire guides to take them up Pack River on the Wild Horse Trail and over the divide to the Kootenai River. They would float down the Kootenai River in a small boat to Kootenai Lake where they would camp and hunt caribou.

Since the hunters had to lay over until they could line up horses and experienced packers, Roosevelt and his friends decided to trek the four miles into what is now Sandpoint, Idaho, but what was then the village of Pend d’Oreille (although it was referred to as “Sandy Point” or “The Point”). This “town” consisted of a cluster of wooden buildings along both sides of the Northern Pacific railroad track (on the East Side of Sand Creek). More than half of the places were saloons and gambling houses. There was a restaurant and a lodging house which was loosely referred to as a hotel. The men went to this hotel and saloon owned by George and Delia Holton. The other men secured rooms in the hotel immediately, but apparently Teddy Roosevelt did not. After dinner the men undoubtedly did some drinking, and when it finally came time to go to bed, there was not a single bed left for Roosevelt.

Scott Monhart, who worked as a packer on the Wild Horse Trail, had a shack across the street (and tracks) from the hotel, where he stayed when he was in town. When he was out of town on a pack trip, he left the key to his shack with Delia Holton and he told her that she could rent his bed out, if she ever needed to, when her beds were full and he was away. Scott was out of town that night and had been gone for some time, so Mrs. Holton rented Scott Monhart’s shack to Teddy Roosevelt.

About midnight, twenty eight year old Scott Monhart, who had been drinking himself, came home to his shack. Mrs. Holton was already in bed, so instead of bothering her for his key, Scott crawled through a window and started to get into his bed   only to discover that someone was already in it. No one knows for sure what kind of argument ensued or what sleeping arrangements were finally made, but apparently the two men worked something out. According to Teddy Roosevelt’s later accounts, Roosevelt ended up with the bed rather than, as the Hawkins story claimed, sharing the bed with Monhart.