THE COWBOY PRESIDENT
The American West and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt
Michael F. Blake
Guilford, Connecticut
Helena, Montana
To
Nolan and Liam Dame,
my favorite Rough Riders,
and
Terry Shulman,
from Lincoln to TR and beyond.
A · TWODOT® · BOOK
An imprint of Globe Pequot
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Copyright © 2018 by Michael F. Blake
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ISBN 978-1-4930-3071-2 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4930-3072-9 (e-book)
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Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Preface
A Young Man in Motion
The Badlands
The Dude Goes West
Hunting the Shaggy Beast
The House with a Curse
Headin’ West
Dakota Rancher
A Strenuous Life
Roundup
Deeds, Not Words
Chance Meeting
A Matter of Justice
Entering the Arena
Dark Clouds
Wishing for a Chinook
New Horizons
That Damned Cowboy!
The Old Lion’s Autumn
A Lasting Memorial
The Romance of His Life
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West, the West of Owen Wister’s stories and Frederic Remington’s drawings, the West of the Indian and the buffalo-hunter, the soldier and the cow-puncher . . . It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman.
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1913
PREFACE
HE LED THE ROUGH RIDERS TO GLORY, CHARGING UP SAN JUAN HILL. As police commissioner of New York City, he instituted sweeping changes and fought corruption inside and outside the department. When he was governor, he served the people of the Empire State, not the wishes of the party bosses. As president, he took on J. P. Morgan’s railroad trust—and won. He pushed Congress to pass both the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, and he ended a devastating coal strike just before the onset of a harsh winter. He helped Panama gain its independence from Colombia, and started building the canal that would link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. To end the war between Russia and Japan, he brought them to the table and negotiated a peace treaty. For his efforts, he was the first US president to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
In his lifetime, he authored thirty-seven books and hundreds of magazine articles and editorials. As president, he preserved over 230 million acres of unspoiled land for the American public. He was a respected ornithologist, a big-game hunter, and an ardent conservationist. He spoke French and German and read a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina while pursuing boat thieves in the Dakotas. He loved boxing, and when he was blinded in one eye from a sparring match, took up judo, earning a third-degree brown belt. A sickly child, he long suffered from asthma and digestive problems, yet endorsed “the strenuous life,” partaking in hiking, rowing, swimming, horseback riding, and tennis. He disliked fishing, finding it too sedentary for his taste. An avid reader, he consumed two books a week and rarely went anywhere without a book at his side.
He was the inspiration for the beloved teddy bear.
When he walked into a room, his personal energy was that of a tornado blowing through. He was charismatic, magnetic, forceful, funny, egotistical, and moralistic. His eldest daughter, Alice, once described her father as wanting to be the “bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.”1 Even his enemies admitted he was a force to be reckoned with, but couldn’t help liking him despite his policies.
This was Theodore Roosevelt.
Throughout the years, numerous historians and biographers have highlighted all of these accomplishments and traits, as well as many others. However, lost in many of these texts is how and where Theodore, the reedy dude from New York, became the Theodore Roosevelt who gazes down at us from Mount Rushmore. When did he become the man who was known for saying “Walk softly, but carry a big stick”? Where did his love for the land turn him into an impassioned conservationist? Who inspired him to stand up for and defend the American people?
Historians properly note that Theodore’s father was a major influence in his life, but his actions over the course of his sixty years were not entirely dominated by the things his father had taught him. Something else had had a profound impact on his life and his actions. It is this entity that most biographers quickly breeze over, when writing about Theodore in the rush to detail his presidential years. In doing so, they do both Theodore’s memory and the reader a disservice in overlooking this major influence.
It was the American West.
Granted, his biographers explain how his time in the Dakota Territory helped him to overcome personal grief and strengthened his body. They also mention his dealing with a drunken cowboy and arresting some boat thieves. But Theodore’s time in the Dakotas did more than just heal his broken heart and bolster his physique. His time in the West was where the man carved on Mount Rushmore began to take shape—where he learned how to carry a big stick, and when to use it. It was in the West that Theodore learned firsthand about the importance of conservation.
Then there were the people. The men and women who lived in the West influenced and shaped his beliefs by example. Unlike the blue-bloods of Fifth Avenue or the questionable politicians of the New York Assembly, the people of the West were the type of individuals toward whom Theodore easily gravitated. Their integrity, courage, humor, and ability to adapt to harsh conditions resonated with him. They were, in many ways, spiritual allies, and the people of the Western lands were, allegorically, descendants of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, two of Theodore’s heroes. The people of the Dakotas had come to the West to start new lives, braving hardships and loneliness. They did not complain when things got tough. The strong survived; the weak perished. Theodore saw in these people a bit of himself. Many had little advance knowledge of how to survive on the prairies or in the mountains, but they learned by doing. When they survived whatever mishaps their mistakes brought them, they counted themselves lucky for having learned a valuable lesson and continued on.
In his lifetime, Theodore would come to know failure. Failure is one of life’s bitter lessons that all of us must learn from. He put it in perspective when he stated, “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”2
Theodore Roosevelt’s proving ground was the American West. Here he would test himself against what Nature had to offer. He loved a good fight, whether it was getting one of his policies enacted in Washington, riding his horse across a swollen river, or chopping down a tree and removing its stump. The tougher, the better. Meeting the challenge was what truly mattered to him, not necessarily the winning. If h
e failed but had fought an honorable fight, he accepted the outcome with dignity.
The West would shape him, his policies, and, eventually, a nation.
The men and women of the Western lands lived by their own code. This code was not written on a stone tablet, nor taught in a school. They learned it by doing. By living. It was passed on from family to family, cowboy to cowboy. This code was simple yet insightful. Like a cowboy, they were spare and to the point. You took pride in your work. A person’s word was their bond. You could be tough, but fair. You knew where to draw the line, and that some things could never be bought. And, most importantly, you rode for the brand.3
Theodore Roosevelt came to embody these unspoken commandments while living in the Dakotas. They were part and parcel of his everyday life. One may contend that Theodore was already living many of these edicts before he went west, and there are illustrations to support that theory. However, it wasn’t until he was in the West that they truly manifested themselves, cementing his foundation of beliefs. This code of honor would influence many of his decisions throughout his life.
His time in the West was not only an education, but also where he came to restore himself. Whether it was mending a broken heart or simply taking a break from the presidency, Theodore continually returned to the West. The Badlands, Yellowstone, and Yosemite allowed him to reconnect with what mattered most to him and brought him great joy. The wide-open spaces became his sanctuary, where he could lose himself riding alone for days on end.
The most important thing a person must understand about Theodore Roosevelt is that he was a romantic—not only in the sense of romance between a man and a woman, but also toward life itself. Theodore believed deep within his heart the romantic notions of honor and duty, much like the knights in the medieval era, and as found in the adventure novels he consumed as a child. Theodore always had one emotional foot in the romanticism of the era that was quickly passing, clinging to its creed as a guide in the waning years of the “modern” nineteenth century.
He had an ongoing love affair with the West ever since his childhood, when he read about hardy pioneers crossing the plains and the mountains. When he was old enough to visit those areas himself, they ignited a passion within him. Even in the harshest of conditions, he found beauty in the West. It became his adopted home, and he considered himself more of a Westerner than an Easterner. His love of the West is demonstrated not only in his actions, but also in his writing. When he writes about riding in the Badlands in the early hours as the sun is just breaking over the horizon, it’s not a picture he is painting for the readers; it is his heart, speaking the truth.
The American West transformed Theodore Roosevelt, and he returned the favor by protecting it and instilling in others the love he had for it.
A Young Man in Motion
I’m inclined to look back at it [childhood] with some wonder that I should have come out of it as well as I have!
AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-FOUR, THEODORE ROOSEVELT WAS HARDLY what anyone would have called “cowboy material”—let alone presidential. He was a beanpole of young man, adorned with glasses and a high voice, and was asthmatic and suffering from digestive problems.1
Erudite and highly moralistic, he wasn’t the type one would expect to embrace the rough-and-tumble life of the American West. When he came west, the locals of Medora called him “Rosenfelder,” “Four Eyes,” and “Storm Windows.” He didn’t help matters by dressing in what he thought was standard cowboy clothing of the day: buckskin shirt and pants (they were not made by Brooks Brothers), a silver Bowie knife made by Tiffany, a nickel-plated, engraved Colt pistol, and alligator-hide boots. Locals laughed over his enthusiastic usage of “By Jove!” and “By Godfrey!”
He was definitely different. But, as Theodore once noted, “It is always better to be an original than an imitation.” And original he was.
What he lacked physically in his young childhood, he countered with knowledge. A voracious reader all his life (he was known to finish a book within a day or two), young Theodore quickly fell in love with the written word. Theodore once noted that his parents did not compel him to read books, having “the good sense not to try to get me to read anything I did not like, unless it was in the way of study.”2 He was a boy filled with imagination of adventures in the faraway lands of the American West or the dark, unknown jungles of Africa. His health limited his physical activity at times, so Theodore lived vicariously through the heroes he found in books. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were two of his childhood favorites, as were the characters in James Fenimore Cooper’s trilogy of the American frontier. Heroes larger than life allowed the sickly boy to escape, at least in his imagination, by leading the charge of an army or fighting off Indians attacking a fort. Another author, Mayne Reid, made an important impression on Theodore with his 1853 book, The Boy Hunters,3 sparking Theodore’s early interest in natural history.
Unbeknownst to his parents, Theodore was tremendously nearsighted. The young boy had no idea how bad his eyesight was until one day, at the age of thirteen, he realized he could not read a billboard with huge letters. (Jack Willis, a hunter friend from Montana, recalled Theodore could not recognize anyone ten feet away without his glasses.4) Relaying this information to his father, he was fitted with a pair of eyeglasses. The optical lenses “literally opened an entirely new world to me. I had no idea how beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles.” The incident also imbued Theodore with a “keen sympathy” for children in school who were “often unjustly blamed” for being “obstinate, unambitious, or mentally stupid.”5
New York City in the 1850s and 1860s was hardly the optimal location for a child with asthma. The city’s poor air quality from the heavy use of burning wood and coal (primary sources for fuel and heat) certainly contributed to Theodore’s severe bouts, the first striking him at age three. Asthma is a chronic inflammation of the airways, causing shortness of breath, and for an adult, it can be irritating and frustrating. For a child, it is beyond frightening.
Theodore recalled numerous times in his childhood when he would sit up in bed, gasping for air. He remembered how his father would carry him in his arms, walking up and down in his room in an effort to soothe him. Sometimes, when the attacks came at night, Theodore’s father would bundle the boy up and take him for a ride in the family carriage, hoping the night air would provide relief. Unlike today, when medication can relieve an asthmatic attack, there was little in the way of treatment to help in Theodore’s era. His parents often filled him with coffee or made him smoke a cigar, the latter making him sick, thus breaching his asthma attack.6
Fortunately, Theodore’s parents could afford the best medical attention that money could buy. The Roosevelt family was part of a small group of wealthy New Yorkers whose forebears dated to 1649, when the area was known as New Amsterdam. (Theodore was the seventh generation of Roosevelts to be born in New York.) Theodore’s paternal grandfather, Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, ran the family firm, Roosevelt and Son, which dealt in finance and became a leading plate-glass supplier in the country. Theodore Roosevelt Sr., fifth son of Cornelius, born in 1831, joined the family firm twenty years later. He was placed in charge of the plate-glass division, where he did quite well, until the 1873 financial panic forced the company to divest its plate-glass business to focus solely on banking.
During a trip to Georgia in 1850, Theodore Sr. met Martha (“Mittie”) Bulloch, “a sweet, gracious, beautiful Southern woman.” Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1835, Martha and her family moved to a mansion (dubbed Bulloch Hall) near Roswell, Georgia, four years later. At their plantation, the Bulloch family owned thirty slaves who, by all reports, were treated much like family. (However, that feeling did not stop Martha’s half-brother, James, from killing a slave in a fit of anger.) During the Civil War, James served as the Confederacy’s chief agent in England, where he purchased ships and outfitted them with cannons and a crew to attack blockades and raid Union commercial ships. (It has been rumored
that some of Bulloch’s funds may have had a hand in the Lincoln assassination.7) In later years, James shared his knowledge of ships and naval fighting with Theodore, which proved useful when he authored his book on the War of 1812 naval actions.
Theodore Sr. and Martha married on December 22, 1853, in Bulloch Hall; after a honeymoon, the couple returned to New York City. They moved into a fashionable five-story brownstone at 28 East Twentieth Street, a gift for the newlyweds from Theodore Sr.’s father. Their first child, Anna (nicknamed “Bamie”), was born in 1855. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was born on October 27, 1858. (For most of his childhood his family called him “Teddie,” a name he disliked as he grew older.) Brother Elliott was born in 1860, and sister Corinne in 1861. Not only was Theodore a sickly child, but his siblings also suffered from ailments. As a baby, Bamie was accidentally dropped, which caused a lifelong spinal problem that forced her to wear a brace. Elliott suffered from headaches (and later epilepsy), while Corinne had to deal with her own bouts of asthma.
Martha Roosevelt was the quintessential Southern belle. She bathed twice a day, her skin was described as “moonlight white,” and, in any season, she dressed in white. Having expensive tastes, she decorated her homes with the finest furniture and sculptures. Although she was a loving mother, Martha suffered a setback with the end of the Civil War. Her beloved South was in ruins, her brothers were exiled in London, and her mother died, all at once. She became languid, almost brittle, falling into a childlike capacity that made her unable to handle even basic daily household duties.
By all accounts, the Roosevelt children had a happy relationship with their parents. Theodore adored his father, treasuring every minute he spent with him. Martha, albeit reluctantly, seems to have accepted that Theodore was his father’s favorite. As the oldest, Bamie came to help her younger siblings as time went on. Letters between her and Theodore indicate she became his confidante, especially as a young adult. Elliott lived in the shadow of his older brother, burdened with that age-old curse of always trying to be better, but the two boys remained close growing up. Corinne followed along wherever Theodore went.
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