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Tempered by the West - Teddy Roosevelt
On the anniversary of what would have been his 150th birthday, we pay tribute to the Western legacy that made Theodore Roosevelt the greatest cowboy president this nation has ever known.
By Dale L. Walker
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Roosevelt on roundup in 1885 |
In the spring and summer of
2008, the Autry National
Center in Los Angeles presented
an exhibit titled
“Cowboys and Presidents” featuring
such examples as:
Calvin Coolidge, 30th president,
a native of Vermont who
had three claims to cowboyhood.
He owned an electrically operated horse given to him as a
gift; he once had the cowboy movie star Tom Mix to the
White House as a dinner guest; and in 1929, on vacation in
the Black Hills of South Dakota, he was photographed wearing
a tall Hoot Gibson-style hat, Western shirt, neckerchief,
and outsized batwing chaps over his presidential trousers.
Lyndon Johnson, 36th president, who as a youngster
spent part of his summer vacations on his uncle’s ranch on
the Pedernales River. As an adult LBJ wore a Stetson and
was occasionally photographed sitting uneasily on a horse,
a rein in each hand. He had cattle on his acreage 50 miles
west of Austin and thus could not be accused of being “all
hat and no cows,” but he was a full-time, life-long professional
politician and at best an absentee “rancher.”
And Ronald Reagan, 40th president, born in Tampico, Ill.,
who appeared in some Western movies (notably as Custer in
Santa Fe Trail in 1940) and Western TV dramas (Death Valley
Days, Zane Grey Theater), owned the 688-acre Rancho Cielo in
Santa Barbara County, Calif., looked great on horseback wearing
a jaunty Western hat and a big grin. He was the beau ideal
image of a cowboy. But the fourth and final president on the
Autry Center’s list, the least likely of the several possible candidates,
is the only one who actually earned the title. A New
Yorker, a Harvard graduate, and eventual Nobel Prize laureate
and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, he was the 26th
president and the youngest (not yet 43 years old) when he took
office: Theodore Roosevelt.
The energetic, ebullient figure whose colorful career would
lead to eventual enshrinement on Mount Rushmore was like
no one else who tread such a large stage in American politics.
This October witnesses the 150th anniversary of the birth of
the most-cowboy of cowboy presidents, an outdoors-loving
soul who said that his experiences out West turned him into
the man he would become.
He came out west for the first time in the summer of 1880,
soon after he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. He and
his younger brother, Elliott, hunted in Iowa and Minnesota and
within a month bagged more than 400 various animals
between them. Back in New York, on Oct. 27, 1880, his 22nd
birthday, he married his “star of heaven,” Alice Hathaway Lee,
age nineteen, daughter of an eminent New England banker.
Theodore made his second venture west in September, 1883.
Now a New York State Assemblyman, a captain of the New
York National Guard, and author of The Naval War of 1812, he
stepped off the train at the Little Missouri station (called
“Little Misery” by locals) in Dakota Territory, intending to
hire a guide and kill some buffalo. He wore a Derby hat, a
Brooks Brothers suit, and thick pince-nez eyeglasses, and
soon the scattered denizens of the Badlands were calling him
“Four-Eyes.” They snickered at his Harvard accent, his spurning
of tobacco and hard liquor, and at his notion of cussing—
an occasional “Damn!” or a “By Godfrey!” uttered between
clenched teeth in a raspy tenor voice.
He killed a buffalo that fall, danced and whooped over
the carcass, and telegraphed Alice—who was probably horrified
at the news—that he was shipping the animal’s stuffed
head home. He had fallen in love with the wild open range
country of far western Dakota Territory, and ended up investing
in it. He spent $85,000—a fortune in that era —in the cattle
business there and in purchasing two ranches—the Chimney
Butte, also known as the Maltese Cross, and the Elkhorn—near
the town of Medora, a few miles from the Montana border.
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At a whistle stop during campaign days |
Now in his mid-twenties, he had found contentment—a joy
so far removed from his childhood years of sickness and
despair that he seemed to have lived two separate lives. In
those sad, early days as a chronic asthmatic, housebound and
struggling to breathe, he was rescued by his beloved father,
who forced him to combat his weaknesses through vigorous
daily workouts and “wind-building” exercises. “Teedie,” as he
was called, outgrew his infirmities and, by the time the elder
Roosevelt died in 1878, Theodore, Jr., had transformed into a
skilled boxer, swimmer, and outdoorsman.
Now, he had a wife he adored, a baby on the way, a budding
political career, health and limitless energy—and suddenly
faced a test of his fortitude that made his youthful ordeals pale
by comparison.
On February 12, 1884, Roosevelt was at work in his office in
the state capital of Albany, N.Y., when he received a telegram
that Alice had given birth to their daughter at the Roosevelt
family brownstone in Manhattan. A few hours later, an emergency
message arrived summoning him home. When he
arrived he found his wife stricken with the kidney failure called
Bright’s disease, and his mother in the throes of typhoid fever.
Martha Bullock Roosevelt died at 3 a.m. and Theodore spent
the next eleven hours holding Alice in his arms. She died at 2
p.m. He drew a large X on the Thursday, February 14, page of his
diary and the stark words, “The light has gone out of my life.”
“It was a grim and an evil fate,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend a
month after the tragedies at home, “but I never have believed
it did any good to flinch or yield for any blow, nor does it lighten
the blow to cease from working.”
He never ceased working. Between duties in Albany he
returned often to Dakota Territory and, after his three terms
as Assemblyman ended in 1884, he spent the following two
years working on his Elkhorn Ranch on the Little Missouri.
He found solace in the West, still a great blank land in the
1880s where a man could lay aside his sorrows and lose himself
in its lonely grandeur.
He learned to rope and brand steers, stay aboard a
bucking horse, and breathe trail dust through a bandanna. He
slept under the stars, wakening before dawn to prairie dogs
chattering; he hunted, killed and dressed antelope, elk, sage
hen, prairie chicken, duck, and rabbit, and even shot a ninefoot-
tall, 1,200 pound grizzly “through the brain.” By campfire
light he read aloud from the copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
he kept in his saddlebags. He learned to ride long distances
and long hours and while he never sat a horse with the confident
ease of a cowpuncher, he won a grudging admiration for
his willingness to ride any horse brought to him.
In this period, while working furiously to make his ranch
profitable, he found time to serve a stint as deputy sheriff of
Billings County under “Hell-Roaring” (for his profanity) Bill
Jones and made a respectable record as a lawman. One of his
most talked-about exploits occurred after thieves stole a $30
boat from his Elkhorn spread. Roosevelt and a small posse
trailed the three thieves for several days, captured them, and
delivered them to the sheriff ’s office in the town of Dickinson.
Clay S. Jenkinson, the authority on Roosevelt’s Dakota days,
states that the New Yorker “refused to consider any labor
beneath his dignity, however dirty, dangerous, or unpleasant it
was.” On one occasion, Jenkinson writes, Roosevelt “was in
the saddle for 40 hours straight, on five different horses,”
helped stop a stampede, took part in the first-ever general
roundup in the Little Missouri River Valley in June, 1884, and
the next year “participated in the spring roundup for 32
straight days, along with 60 other men, more than 300 horses,
and thousands of cattle. In five weeks he rode more than a
thousand miles up and down the Little Missouri River.”
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With Muir at Yosemite, 1903 |
After a time, cowmen along the Little Missouri got used to
“Four-Eyes,” with his tinny voice, his habit of telling a story as
if on the stump exhorting for votes, pounding his fist into his
hand, his big grin full of blunt white teeth, and his blue-gray
eyes flashing behind the pince-nez.
Roosevelt returned east early in 1886, “as brown and tough
as a hickory nut,” to campaign as Republican candidate for
mayor of New York City. That year he married his childhood
playmate Edith Kermit Carow, and moved into their newly
built home at Sagamore Hill near Oyster Bay, Long Island.
To his closest friends he revealed his dream of military glory
and he searched for a potential enemy of the United States
who might give him a chance to lead men into battle. He wrote
of “problems” with the British, the Germans, the French; with
the “Yellow Peril” of the Orient, with Mexicans in Mexico, the
Spanish in the West Indies. He told his confidantes of his
dream of raising a cavalry regiment from among the “harumscarum
rough riders of the West,” to go to war if necessary.
As fate would have it, his dreams came true in the summer
of 1898 when he not only raised a regiment, mostly from the
Western territories, but led it, as Colonel Roosevelt, into victorious
battle at San Juan Hill in Cuba on July 1. The regiment,
formally the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, became popularly
called the “Rough Riders.” (In 2001, Roosevelt was
awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroic
service in Cuba, 103 years before.)
He sold his ranching interests and property in 1897, but
returned to the West many times in the years to come. The
land and its people never failed to invigorate him.
He hunted all his life but never considered hunting contradictory
to conservation. During his presidency, he created 150
national forests, 51 national wildlife refuges, five national parks,
50 bird sanctuaries, and several national bison preserves.
He advocated the “strenuous life” and never ceased
working. He served as governor of New York, vice-president,
and, following the assassination of William McKinley, as president
of the United States from September 14, 1901 to March 4,
1909. When the Ohio Senator Mark Hanna heard the news he
told a friend, “Now that damn cowboy is president.” Roosevelt
said wistfully late in his life, “If I hadn’t gone to Dakota I would
never have become President.” He published 35 books, including
his four-volume The Winning of the West, hunted big game
in Africa, and explored in South America. He was instrumental
in the building of the Panama Canal—he was the “man” in the
old palindrome, “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!”—and
served as mediator in the Russo-Japanese War, for which work
he was awarded the 1907 Nobel Peace Prize.He was not only the
first American Nobel laureate, but was the first president to fly
in an airplane, first to submerge in a submarine, first to own a
car, first to have a telephone in his home, and the first president
to invite an African-American (Booker T. Washington) to dinner
in the White House. He shared a mountain with George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln when
Gutzon Borglum’s massive sculptures on Mount Rushmore, in
Roosevelt’s beloved South Dakota, were unveiled in 1941.
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Col. Roosevelt occupies the center in this pose with his famed Roudhg Riders regiment |
Memories of the Little Missouri and the Western territories
lingered in Roosevelt’s mind to the end of his life. “It was still
the Wild West in those days, the Far West of Owen Wister’s
stories, and Frederic Remington’s drawings, the soldier and
the cowpuncher,” he wrote in 1894, “and in that land we led a
hardy life. Ours was the glory of work and the joy of living.”
On October 6, 1918, just three months before his death at
age 60 at Sagamore Hill, he stopped in Bismarck and Fargo,
N.D., on a national speaking tour and said, “I owe more to the
times when I lived out here and worked with the men who
have been my friends than to anything else.”
Time magazine writer Richard Lacayo recently wrote of
Theodore Roosevelt, whose 150th birthday arrives on October
27, 2008: “It’s not just that he was excited to be an American.
He made it more exciting to be one.”
Dale L. Walker is past president of the Western Writers of
America and the author of numerous books, including The Boys
of '98: Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders.
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