A Bully Explorer
Since many of you expressed interest in reading my paper on Theodore Roosevelt's time spent in North Dakota that I mentioned in my previous entry, I am posting it here. Keep in mind that this paper is nine years old, written by a teenager. I'm adjusting formatting but otherwise leaving it in its original form. It also seems to be missing its citations. I recall that of the sources I used, the two that were most heavily referenced were the book "Mornings on Horseback" by David McCullough, and Theodore Roosevelt's autobiography. With that said, let's begin!
Cowboy. Naturalist. Explorer. Rancher. Police commissioner. Deputy sheriff. Family man. Writer. Governor. President. Quite a long list of accomplishments for anyone. Shocking that all this could be on one’s “resume” when one is only forty-two years old. But at that age, Theodore Roosevelt could claim all these things—and more. As president, he is remembered for many things, but what is often considered his most significant contribution was his conservationist acts. These ideas of his did not come from just anywhere. As Roosevelt himself claimed after exploring all those career options, “If it had not been for my years in North Dakota, I never would have become President of the United States.” Although Theodore Roosevelt arrived in North Dakota a beaten, broken hearted man, what he learned from his experiences while ranching would later serve him well as president and would impact the lives of all Americans even to this day.
While Roosevelt might have been a larger-than-life man during his years as president, his youth was quite different. Young “Teedie” was a frail, sickly boy, and was often unable to breathe due to his asthma. Thanks to his condition, he was a semi-invalid, educated by private tutors. To help their son get stronger, his father, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., and his mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, often had to rush him to the country for a breath of fresh air. It was probably during these country trips that Teedie developed a love for nature. He sketched birds and small mammals, and collected specimens for his “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History”, which he founded at the age of eight. The curious child received specimens for his museum from his traveling family, and paid his friends money to get specimens for his museum. Some of his specimens he later donated to the American Museum of Natural History.
After a trip to Europe when he was ten years old, Teedie’s asthma attacks grew worse and worse. Finally, sick to death of it all, Teedie’s father told him, ‘Theodore, you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery… but I know you will do it.” Teedie accepted his father’s challenge and launched a vigorous workout routine, which built him up considerably stronger. He still kept his love of nature. He constantly visited the museum either with his siblings or by himself and read books about the American frontier. His curiosity was fueled even more with the outings he took with his family, which went everywhere from small hostels in New York to a winter spent in Egypt, where Teedie collected, i.e. shot with his new shotgun, between one hundred to two hundred birds.
Thanks to his childhood, Theodore Roosevelt grew into a strong, intelligent young man, and he attended Harvard University. It was there, in the year 1978, just before he turned twenty, when he met Alice Hathaway Lee, a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl with curled blonde hair. They were married on Theodore’s twenty-second birthday, October 27, 1880. Alice was nineteen. After their wedding, Theodore attended law school, but got bored with that and instead won election to the New York state assembly. It was then when Alice became pregnant. Roosevelt was at an assembly meeting on February 13, 1884 when he received a telegram announcing the birth of a daughter. His happiness, however, was short lived. Hours later, he received another urgent telegram and rushed off to his house, where both his mother and his wife were dying. Roosevelt arrived at 11:30 that night. His mother died at three o’clock the next morning of typhoid. Alice died at two in the afternoon of Bright’s disease. That day, February 14, 1884, he wrote a single sentence in his diary—“The light has gone out of my life.”
Roosevelt threw himself into his work to forget his grief, but it did not work. After a few months, he retired from politics and turned his sights elsewhere—the Dakota Territory.
Roosevelt’s interest in the Badlands had been around before Alice died. He had taken a trip to the West in 1883, arriving in the Bad Lands on September 7, 1883, near Medora, North Dakota. The cattle business was big, and Roosevelt could see that there was a good future in ranching. He bought 450 cattle for $14,000—not an enormous amount of animals, but a comfortable start, at least.
The Bad Lands proved to be a “bully” experience for Roosevelt. His guide, a friend named Joe Ferris, struggled to keep up with the pace that the enthusiastic Roosevelt set. Rain and thin rations could not even dampen his mood. And when he shot his first buffalo, Roosevelt “broke into a wild facsimile of an Indian war dance and handed Ferris a hundred dollars”.
Roosevelt clearly loved the place, and after retiring temporarily from politics, he left his infant daughter Alice with his sister Bamie and moved out on his cattle ranch on the Little Missouri River, with two old friends—William Sewall, a kindly man Roosevelt had met in Maine, and Wilmot Dow, Sewall’s nephew. Roosevelt was very happy at the beginning and, in a letter to Bamie dated June 23, 1884, he wrote, “For the last week I have been fulfilling a boyish ambition of mine—that is, I have been playing at frontier hunter in good earnest, having been off entirely alone, with my horse and rifle on the prairie…. I felt as absolutely free as a man could feel.”
The romantic notions of the old west and cowboys living there were deeply impressed upon Roosevelt’s mind. Upon arrival, he immediately purchased a ludicrous looking buckskin outfit, which no cowboy actually wore. Roosevelt, however, wanted to look the image of a traditional cowboy… despite his beautifully hand crafted gun and knives, which only a man of high-society upbringing could have.
Life on the ranch was never dull. Roosevelt, with his aristocratic upbringing, his skinny frame, his spectacles, and his piercing voice (which, when he hollered to his companions, “Hasten forward quickly there!” caused them to burst out with laughter), was often ridiculed—at first. When Roosevelt was out miles from his ranch searching for lost horses, he stopped to spend the night at a shady looking hotel. A man who Roosevelt described as “a bully who for the moment was having things all his own way” caught sight of the bespectacled cowboy and shouted loudly, “Four-eyes is going to treat!” Roosevelt at first laughed it off, but the man continued to mock him and leaned down right next to his face, standing with his heels close together, leaving him unstable. Taking notice of this, Roosevelt punched him in the jaw three times, causing the man to fall, hit his head against a bar rail, and be knocked unconscious. He was brought to a barn, did not wake until the next morning, and then left town in a hurry.
Another incident proved that Roosevelt did not have to use his fists to get people to stop bullying him. A man consistently went out of his way to pick on Roosevelt and call him a “dude”, and when Roosevelt realized that the man was doing this because he thought Roosevelt was a coward, he marched right up to him and said, “You’re talking like an ass! Put up or shut up! Fight now, or be friends!”
Surprised and embarrassed, the man said, “I didn’t mean no harm. Make it friends.”
Roosevelt also built up a reputation for honesty, and expecting it of his cowhands as well. When he and one of his best cowhands were riding on the property of a man named Gregor Lang, they spotted a maverick steer. Since the animal was not branded, the law stated that it belonged to the man on whose range it was. Roosevelt’s companion, however, was about to brand the animal with Roosevelt’s brand. Roosevelt told him to stop, but the cowhand still continued. “Drop that iron and go to the ranch and get your time. I don’t need you any longer.”
Confused, the cowhand asked, “Say, what have I done? Didn’t I put on your brand?”
“A man who steals for me will steal from me,” explained Roosevelt. “You’re fired.”
Roosevelt obviously lived in great respect for the law, as other adventures that he had proved. In March of 1886 he had a rowboat stolen. It was only worth about $30, used primarily for crossing the Little Missouri river to tend the horses on the other side, and easily replaceable, but “dealing with such men was the first step towards decent government.”iii Roosevelt had a pretty good idea of who they were too—three men who lived about twenty miles upstream and had been earlier accused of stealing horses. Since there were no law enforcement officers nearby, Roosevelt had Sewall and Dow build him a new boat so he could give chase to the crooks, and set off downstream to catch them.
They had an uneventful first day, and a second day in which the temperatures dropped to about 0 degrees Fahrenheit. On the third day out, after eating breakfast, they suddenly noticed the boat tied against the riverbank. Roosevelt and his cowhands caught the guard immediately and captured the other two when they arrived. At this point, Roosevelt could have lynched them right then and there, under the Code of the West. But he had respect for the law, so he continued to take them downstream. To keep the thieves from running off, Roosevelt set up an around-the-clock guard—he worried that if he tied their hands and feet together, they would freeze in the low temperature. He still didn’t trust their leader, the hot-tempered Thomas Finnegan, however, so he took away his boots. If Finnegan managed to escape, he wouldn’t get far in his stocking feet.
It took them eight days to get down the river. Finally they met a cowboy who told them they could rent a wagon to take to the town of Dickinson, about forty-five miles away. Roosevelt let Sewall and Dow go back home, but he himself went with the thieves to make sure they were brought to justice. Not trusting the hired driver to keep the crooks from running off, Roosevelt stayed awake the whole thirty-six hours of the trip to keep a close eye, or four, on them. At the journey’s end, two of the men were sentenced to three years in prison; the third Roosevelt considered too foolish to know right from wrong and withdrew charges from him. For his actions, Roosevelt received $50 for performing duties of a deputy sheriff.
The Bad Lands had completely reshaped Roosevelt’s life. He had moved out there feeling as if he had nothing to live for. When Sewall reminded him during one of his earlier bouts of depression that he had a child to live for, Roosevelt answered sadly, “Her aunt can take care of her a good deal better than I can. She never would know anything about me, anyway. She would be just as well off without me.” By the time he left North Dakota, however, he was, as Sewall remembered, “as husky as almost any man I have ever seen…. He weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, and was clear bone, muscle, and grit.” The long hours and hard work spent as a rancher had built up his puny body with “boundless energy and robust strength.” Roosevelt also learned valuable lessons in the nature of mankind. As he told his old friends while campaigning in the Bad Lands for the presidency, “I had studied a lot about men and things before I saw you fellows. But it was only when I came here that I began to know anything, or measure men rightly.”
And, of course, there was his love of nature, which greatly inspired him as President. This passion had been around since he was a boy, but his explorations in the Bad Lands intensified it. The beauty of “the keen, fresh air, the breath of the pine forests, the glassy stillness of the lake at sunset, the glory of sunrise among the mountains, the shimmer of the endless prairies, the ceaseless rustle of the cottonwood leaves where the wagon is drawn up on the low bluff of the shrunken river” that he had seen as he explored the Bad Lands remained with him his whole life. After he remarried and had more children, he spent summers teaching them outdoor life. As Theodore Roosevelt Jr. later remembered, “We spent our days riding and shooting, wandering through the woods and playing out-of-door games. Underlying all this was Father’s desire to have all of us children grow up manly and clean-minded.”
Roosevelt’s children were not the only ones who he encouraged to appreciate the outdoors. During the early 1900’s, when he was president, the people of the United States generally did not think about whether the resources they were using up so quickly would ever run out. Roosevelt, fortunately, was far-sighted enough to foresee that these resources would quickly disappear if nothing was done. He believed that the land should be wisely used, and under that belief he established the Reclamation Service in 1902. This act irrigated areas that had previously been too dry to farm. He also understood that some land should be just be left the way it was. During his presidency, he created five National Parks, eighteen National Monuments, fifty-one bird reservations, and added 151 million acres to the National Forests, preserving those lands for years to come.
If one had seen that lone cowboy exploring the wonder of the Bad Lands around his ranch in the 1880’s, he never would have guessed the impact his cowboy years would have later in his life—and on the rest of America. Thanks to Theodore Roosevelt and his rancher explorations, the natural beauty of our land is preserved for generations. Every time a president creates a new National Park or Monument, Roosevelt’s legacy lives on. If he were alive today, he would certainly consider that “bully”.
Cowboy. Naturalist. Explorer. Rancher. Police commissioner. Deputy sheriff. Family man. Writer. Governor. President. Quite a long list of accomplishments for anyone. Shocking that all this could be on one’s “resume” when one is only forty-two years old. But at that age, Theodore Roosevelt could claim all these things—and more. As president, he is remembered for many things, but what is often considered his most significant contribution was his conservationist acts. These ideas of his did not come from just anywhere. As Roosevelt himself claimed after exploring all those career options, “If it had not been for my years in North Dakota, I never would have become President of the United States.” Although Theodore Roosevelt arrived in North Dakota a beaten, broken hearted man, what he learned from his experiences while ranching would later serve him well as president and would impact the lives of all Americans even to this day.
While Roosevelt might have been a larger-than-life man during his years as president, his youth was quite different. Young “Teedie” was a frail, sickly boy, and was often unable to breathe due to his asthma. Thanks to his condition, he was a semi-invalid, educated by private tutors. To help their son get stronger, his father, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., and his mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, often had to rush him to the country for a breath of fresh air. It was probably during these country trips that Teedie developed a love for nature. He sketched birds and small mammals, and collected specimens for his “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History”, which he founded at the age of eight. The curious child received specimens for his museum from his traveling family, and paid his friends money to get specimens for his museum. Some of his specimens he later donated to the American Museum of Natural History.
After a trip to Europe when he was ten years old, Teedie’s asthma attacks grew worse and worse. Finally, sick to death of it all, Teedie’s father told him, ‘Theodore, you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery… but I know you will do it.” Teedie accepted his father’s challenge and launched a vigorous workout routine, which built him up considerably stronger. He still kept his love of nature. He constantly visited the museum either with his siblings or by himself and read books about the American frontier. His curiosity was fueled even more with the outings he took with his family, which went everywhere from small hostels in New York to a winter spent in Egypt, where Teedie collected, i.e. shot with his new shotgun, between one hundred to two hundred birds.
Thanks to his childhood, Theodore Roosevelt grew into a strong, intelligent young man, and he attended Harvard University. It was there, in the year 1978, just before he turned twenty, when he met Alice Hathaway Lee, a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl with curled blonde hair. They were married on Theodore’s twenty-second birthday, October 27, 1880. Alice was nineteen. After their wedding, Theodore attended law school, but got bored with that and instead won election to the New York state assembly. It was then when Alice became pregnant. Roosevelt was at an assembly meeting on February 13, 1884 when he received a telegram announcing the birth of a daughter. His happiness, however, was short lived. Hours later, he received another urgent telegram and rushed off to his house, where both his mother and his wife were dying. Roosevelt arrived at 11:30 that night. His mother died at three o’clock the next morning of typhoid. Alice died at two in the afternoon of Bright’s disease. That day, February 14, 1884, he wrote a single sentence in his diary—“The light has gone out of my life.”
Roosevelt threw himself into his work to forget his grief, but it did not work. After a few months, he retired from politics and turned his sights elsewhere—the Dakota Territory.
Roosevelt’s interest in the Badlands had been around before Alice died. He had taken a trip to the West in 1883, arriving in the Bad Lands on September 7, 1883, near Medora, North Dakota. The cattle business was big, and Roosevelt could see that there was a good future in ranching. He bought 450 cattle for $14,000—not an enormous amount of animals, but a comfortable start, at least.
The Bad Lands proved to be a “bully” experience for Roosevelt. His guide, a friend named Joe Ferris, struggled to keep up with the pace that the enthusiastic Roosevelt set. Rain and thin rations could not even dampen his mood. And when he shot his first buffalo, Roosevelt “broke into a wild facsimile of an Indian war dance and handed Ferris a hundred dollars”.
Roosevelt clearly loved the place, and after retiring temporarily from politics, he left his infant daughter Alice with his sister Bamie and moved out on his cattle ranch on the Little Missouri River, with two old friends—William Sewall, a kindly man Roosevelt had met in Maine, and Wilmot Dow, Sewall’s nephew. Roosevelt was very happy at the beginning and, in a letter to Bamie dated June 23, 1884, he wrote, “For the last week I have been fulfilling a boyish ambition of mine—that is, I have been playing at frontier hunter in good earnest, having been off entirely alone, with my horse and rifle on the prairie…. I felt as absolutely free as a man could feel.”
The romantic notions of the old west and cowboys living there were deeply impressed upon Roosevelt’s mind. Upon arrival, he immediately purchased a ludicrous looking buckskin outfit, which no cowboy actually wore. Roosevelt, however, wanted to look the image of a traditional cowboy… despite his beautifully hand crafted gun and knives, which only a man of high-society upbringing could have.
Life on the ranch was never dull. Roosevelt, with his aristocratic upbringing, his skinny frame, his spectacles, and his piercing voice (which, when he hollered to his companions, “Hasten forward quickly there!” caused them to burst out with laughter), was often ridiculed—at first. When Roosevelt was out miles from his ranch searching for lost horses, he stopped to spend the night at a shady looking hotel. A man who Roosevelt described as “a bully who for the moment was having things all his own way” caught sight of the bespectacled cowboy and shouted loudly, “Four-eyes is going to treat!” Roosevelt at first laughed it off, but the man continued to mock him and leaned down right next to his face, standing with his heels close together, leaving him unstable. Taking notice of this, Roosevelt punched him in the jaw three times, causing the man to fall, hit his head against a bar rail, and be knocked unconscious. He was brought to a barn, did not wake until the next morning, and then left town in a hurry.
Another incident proved that Roosevelt did not have to use his fists to get people to stop bullying him. A man consistently went out of his way to pick on Roosevelt and call him a “dude”, and when Roosevelt realized that the man was doing this because he thought Roosevelt was a coward, he marched right up to him and said, “You’re talking like an ass! Put up or shut up! Fight now, or be friends!”
Surprised and embarrassed, the man said, “I didn’t mean no harm. Make it friends.”
Roosevelt also built up a reputation for honesty, and expecting it of his cowhands as well. When he and one of his best cowhands were riding on the property of a man named Gregor Lang, they spotted a maverick steer. Since the animal was not branded, the law stated that it belonged to the man on whose range it was. Roosevelt’s companion, however, was about to brand the animal with Roosevelt’s brand. Roosevelt told him to stop, but the cowhand still continued. “Drop that iron and go to the ranch and get your time. I don’t need you any longer.”
Confused, the cowhand asked, “Say, what have I done? Didn’t I put on your brand?”
“A man who steals for me will steal from me,” explained Roosevelt. “You’re fired.”
Roosevelt obviously lived in great respect for the law, as other adventures that he had proved. In March of 1886 he had a rowboat stolen. It was only worth about $30, used primarily for crossing the Little Missouri river to tend the horses on the other side, and easily replaceable, but “dealing with such men was the first step towards decent government.”iii Roosevelt had a pretty good idea of who they were too—three men who lived about twenty miles upstream and had been earlier accused of stealing horses. Since there were no law enforcement officers nearby, Roosevelt had Sewall and Dow build him a new boat so he could give chase to the crooks, and set off downstream to catch them.
They had an uneventful first day, and a second day in which the temperatures dropped to about 0 degrees Fahrenheit. On the third day out, after eating breakfast, they suddenly noticed the boat tied against the riverbank. Roosevelt and his cowhands caught the guard immediately and captured the other two when they arrived. At this point, Roosevelt could have lynched them right then and there, under the Code of the West. But he had respect for the law, so he continued to take them downstream. To keep the thieves from running off, Roosevelt set up an around-the-clock guard—he worried that if he tied their hands and feet together, they would freeze in the low temperature. He still didn’t trust their leader, the hot-tempered Thomas Finnegan, however, so he took away his boots. If Finnegan managed to escape, he wouldn’t get far in his stocking feet.
It took them eight days to get down the river. Finally they met a cowboy who told them they could rent a wagon to take to the town of Dickinson, about forty-five miles away. Roosevelt let Sewall and Dow go back home, but he himself went with the thieves to make sure they were brought to justice. Not trusting the hired driver to keep the crooks from running off, Roosevelt stayed awake the whole thirty-six hours of the trip to keep a close eye, or four, on them. At the journey’s end, two of the men were sentenced to three years in prison; the third Roosevelt considered too foolish to know right from wrong and withdrew charges from him. For his actions, Roosevelt received $50 for performing duties of a deputy sheriff.
The Bad Lands had completely reshaped Roosevelt’s life. He had moved out there feeling as if he had nothing to live for. When Sewall reminded him during one of his earlier bouts of depression that he had a child to live for, Roosevelt answered sadly, “Her aunt can take care of her a good deal better than I can. She never would know anything about me, anyway. She would be just as well off without me.” By the time he left North Dakota, however, he was, as Sewall remembered, “as husky as almost any man I have ever seen…. He weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, and was clear bone, muscle, and grit.” The long hours and hard work spent as a rancher had built up his puny body with “boundless energy and robust strength.” Roosevelt also learned valuable lessons in the nature of mankind. As he told his old friends while campaigning in the Bad Lands for the presidency, “I had studied a lot about men and things before I saw you fellows. But it was only when I came here that I began to know anything, or measure men rightly.”
And, of course, there was his love of nature, which greatly inspired him as President. This passion had been around since he was a boy, but his explorations in the Bad Lands intensified it. The beauty of “the keen, fresh air, the breath of the pine forests, the glassy stillness of the lake at sunset, the glory of sunrise among the mountains, the shimmer of the endless prairies, the ceaseless rustle of the cottonwood leaves where the wagon is drawn up on the low bluff of the shrunken river” that he had seen as he explored the Bad Lands remained with him his whole life. After he remarried and had more children, he spent summers teaching them outdoor life. As Theodore Roosevelt Jr. later remembered, “We spent our days riding and shooting, wandering through the woods and playing out-of-door games. Underlying all this was Father’s desire to have all of us children grow up manly and clean-minded.”
Roosevelt’s children were not the only ones who he encouraged to appreciate the outdoors. During the early 1900’s, when he was president, the people of the United States generally did not think about whether the resources they were using up so quickly would ever run out. Roosevelt, fortunately, was far-sighted enough to foresee that these resources would quickly disappear if nothing was done. He believed that the land should be wisely used, and under that belief he established the Reclamation Service in 1902. This act irrigated areas that had previously been too dry to farm. He also understood that some land should be just be left the way it was. During his presidency, he created five National Parks, eighteen National Monuments, fifty-one bird reservations, and added 151 million acres to the National Forests, preserving those lands for years to come.
If one had seen that lone cowboy exploring the wonder of the Bad Lands around his ranch in the 1880’s, he never would have guessed the impact his cowboy years would have later in his life—and on the rest of America. Thanks to Theodore Roosevelt and his rancher explorations, the natural beauty of our land is preserved for generations. Every time a president creates a new National Park or Monument, Roosevelt’s legacy lives on. If he were alive today, he would certainly consider that “bully”.