Hazelgrove - Forging a President: How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Copyright 2017 by William Hazelgrove

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First e-book edition 2017: ISBN 978-1-62157-558-0

Originally published in hardcover, 2017

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Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Now look, that damned cowboy is

President of the United States.

Republican insider Mark Hanna

The romance of my life began here.

Teddy Roosevelt, on returning to the West

T he romance of his life, as Theodore Roosevelt described his relationship with the American West, lasted from 1883 to 1887. He would write seven books on the West, and later, as president, he would set aside millions of acres of western land for future generations. The vigorous life that characterized Teddy Roosevelt had its roots in his time spent out West. The third transcontinental railroad, the Northern Pacific, made it possible for people to travel in comfort to the northwest territories (first mapped by Lewis and Clark in 18031805) while reading dime novels filled with Western heroes like Kit Carson and Jim Bridger. It put areas like the Badlands (a smaller Grand Canyon, carved out of the earth sixty million years ago) within reach of men like New Yorker Teddy Roosevelt.

There really would be no America without the West. It gave great scope to American avarice, later justified as Manifest Destiny. For many, the simple phrase, Go West, young man, was enough to send young men and women on their way into a virtually unknown world. The United States simply didnt have the manpower to control the land that came with Jeffersons Louisiana Purchase. Even today Americans are fascinated with the idea of people heading into the unknown. The movie Wild chronicles the story of a woman who hikes the Pacific Crest Trail after her life disintegrates. She emerges a year later a changed person. This is what the West offered people in the nineteenth century, even more so than nowa chance to start again and remake oneself.

We associate Theodore Roosevelt with what would become his famous, larger-than-life persona: the barrel-chested, teeth-snapping, Big Stickwielding, swaggering cowboy expansionist who exemplified the vigorous life of the early twentieth century. The vigorous life was the creed by which Roosevelt lived, and for him the cowboy was its apotheosis. Through Roosevelts influence the idea of the cowboy made an indelible mark on American culture. Peril and hardship, and years of long toil broken by weeks of brutal dissipation, draw haggard lines across their eager faces, but never dim their reckless eyes nor break their bearing of defiant self-confidence, he later wrote, elevating the cowboy to his ideal, a sort of Nietzschean plainsman.

Roosevelt himself was far from this cowboy ideal. He often pointed out that once a cowboy is a good roper and rider, the only other accomplishment he values is skill with his great army revolver. But even after years out West, Roosevelt never became really proficient with a lariat, though he once rescued an Englishman from a river with an amazing lasso throw; and his eyesight was such that he never became the dead-eyed shot of legend, though he did once manage to drill a grizzly between the eyes.

The truth is that Theodore Roosevelt became what he was nota cowboythrough sheer will. When he first came out West, he was a sickly, weak young man who suffered so much from asthma that, when he was a boy, his father would take him on fast buggy rides just to force air into his lungs. Many doubted he could survive to adulthood. But survive he did. Roosevelt became a delegate-at-large to the Republican National Convention and was a progressive reformer on the rise, when, in 1884, both his wife and his mother died within twelve hours of each other. The light in his life simply went out. Four months later, after a stinging political defeat, he headed out West and didnt give anyone a return date.

In 1890, the superintendent of the U.S. Census Bureau declared the American frontier finally closed. Frederick Jackson Turner affirmed this and claimed that the frontier experience, more than any other, had shaped Americas character; it had given the pioneer a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past. Teddy Roosevelt went to the Badlands of the Dakotas at the tail end of the Wild West. The asthmatic with thick spectacles who stepped off the train in the town of Little Missouri bore little resemblance to the man who would return years later thick of chest and ready to tackle the world. He came back as the Teddy Roosevelt we now recognize.

The West remade Roosevelt, just as it had remade the country. Basically lawless and churchless, the West offered freedom unbounded if you were tough enough to take it. As he later wrote, For cowboy work there is no need of special traits and special training, and young Easterners should be sure of themselves before trying it: the struggle for existence is very keen in the far West, and it is no place for men who lack the ruder, coarser virtues and physical qualities.... This held great appeal for young Roosevelt, who would find the essence of America in the frozen and baking terrain of the Badlands. Here the character of America presented itself to Roosevelt, and he essentially became that character.

The West delivered this one-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound man, this dude, a great adventure: he faced down gunmen, grizzly bears, thieves, rustlers, unscrupulous ranchers, ruthless outlaws, and Indians. He had the breath knocked out of him by overturned horses, cracked a rib, dislocated a shoulder, and nearly froze to death more than once, getting lost in the hell that is the Badlandsall while fighting chronic asthma and ignoring a physicians admonition to protect his weak heart and lead the sedentary life of a recluse.

To recover from the twin blows of losing both his mother and his wife on the same day, and in his quest to find his way again, Theodore Roosevelt would push himself to the point where his broken heart would either heal or stop forever. The West was just the place for such a contest.