How the weather was when young Theodore Roosevelt and his family visited Switzerland 151 years ago

Posted Friday morning, June 26, 2020.

Detail form “Blue Rigi, Sunrise”, a watercolor by J.M.W Turner. 1842. Tate Galleries via Wikipedia.

One hundred and fifty-one years ago, the soon to be eleven-year-old Theodore Roosevelt’s mother and father took him and his sisters and brother on a grand tour of Europe. In September of 1869, they were in Switzerland, having, David McCullough reports in “Mornings on Horseback,” his chronicle of Roosevelt’s boyhood, youth, and young manhood, “the best time for everyone.” But when they reached Lucerne, Theodore and his sister Ellie were both sick, Theodore “depressed and homesick, but then the trip to the heights of the Rigi rapidly restored all spirits.” Mittie, by the way, was Roosevelt’s mother Martha….

Known as the “island mountain,” the Rigi stands by itself above Lakes Lucerne and Zug, and to many thousand “sensitive souls” of the day the spectacle of sunset and sunrise from its summit, the Rigi-Klum, was the climax of a visit to Switzerland. The “incredible horizon,” as Victor Hugo called it, takes in nearly three hundred miles, an utterly dazzling panorama of Alps on one side (to the southeast) and on the other, beyond the lakes, the lovely Zurich countryside reaching to the Juras. Traditionally one went to the top in time for sunset, as the Roosevelts did, then stayed the night at the hotel to be awakened before dawn by an alpine horn, which the morning of September 4 sounded at quarter to five.

Rose immediately [Mittie wrote], but did not get out in time to see the first pink lights before the sun rising. All the high Alpine peaks visible...Litlis and its glaciers, Finisterahorn, Schreckhorn, Wetterhorn, Jungfrau, and Silverhorn and Blumis Alps. The Wetterhorn was beautifully peaked and covered with snow. A mass of thick clouds laid at the same level all around. The Rigi in the early morning, looking something as a glacier, with its rifts of gray color, completely hiding the lower world.

---from “Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt ” by David McCullough.