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THEODORE ROOSEVELT
1919

CHAPTER 5 

RANCH   LIFE

THIS Harvard graduate, this brilliant young statesman, needed another important factor to make him the great man that he was, and that was, the tuition of nature herself. And so, impelled by his instincts and judgment, he entered the great university of the "Wild West, graduation from which was as necessary as from Harvard, to make him the ideal leader of the century. He had a playful spirit which reveled in sport, and was passionately fond of nature. His father knew how good the country was for the boy's body and mind and he arranged it so that all his summers were spent in the country with the birds, with the flowers and fields, and forests, and river, and bay, and horse, and oar, and gun. And when he got older, he sought the solitudes of the mountains and of the woods, making hunting trips during his vacation at Harvard for deer and elk to the Adirondacks and the big woods of Maine. These trips were an excellent preparation for the limitless ranges of the Wild West, for the paradise of the nature lover or the "grizzly" hunter. While he was a member of the Legislature, he broke away, beguiled irresistibly by the charms of Western life, and made a hunting trip for Buffalo in North Dakota. In his "Wilderness Hunter" he thus states the impression made by Western nature scenes upon the one visiting them: "In after years there shall come forever to his mind the memory of endless prairies shimmering in the bright sun; of vast, snow-clad wastes, lying desolate under gray skies; of the melancholy marshes; of the rush of mighty rivers; of the breath of the evergreen forest in summer; of the crooning of ice-armored pines at the touch of the winds of winter; of cataracts roaring between hoary mountain passes; of all the innumerable sights and sounds of the wilderness and of the silences that brood in its still depths."

He liked the rugged hunters, ranchmen and cowboys, as much as he did the plains and mountains and the free air of the West. He hunted, camped, rode and mingled with them on their plains and fell in love with them, so much so that before he returned home from his trip he had purchased the Chimney Butte Ranch near Medora, North Dakota, for $45,000, giving his check on the spot for the first payment of $10,000.

In the year 1884 a double sorrow fell upon Mr. Roosevelt, the death of his mother, and within two months of that time, the death of his first wife, Miss Alice Hathaway Lee, of Boston, whom he married just after his graduation. She died after she had given to him a daughter, who is now Mrs. Alice Longworth. In his sorrow he flew to God's book and spirit for comfort, and then his impulses drew him out into the solitude and stillness of nature that he might commune with nature's God, and rest his spirit in the chase. In the same year his fight for Edmunds against Blaine in the convention had completely eliminated him as a political leader and he had the time and disposition to betake himself to the wide spaces, solitudes and the strenuous hunting of the West. So he went out to live with the cattle and with those hearty men and with those big beasts that roam the forests. On the place he bought, on a side overlooking the Little Missouri, he found the skulls of two huge elks with horns interlocked; both had died in their last desperate fight. Just here he built his log house and called it Elk Horn Ranch.

The late Julian Ralph in an interview with Mr. Roosevelt reports him as saying: "A man with a horse and a gun is a picture or idea that has always appealed to me. Wayne Reid's heroes and the life out West also always appealed to me. I wanted to see the rude, rough, formative life in the Far West before it vanished. I went there just in time. I was in at the killing of the buffalo, in the last big hunt, in 1883, near Pretty Buttes, when the whites and the Sioux from Standing Rock and Pine Ridge were doing the killing. I went West while I was in the Assembly, in the long vacations—went hunting—went to the Bad Lands and shot elk, sheep, deer, buffalo, and antelope. I made two hunting trips, and in 1884 I started my cattle ranch. After my term in the Legislature, and until I was appointed Civil Service Commissioner, I lived most of the time out West in the summers and spent only the winters in New York. I never was happier in my life. My house out there is a long low house of hewn logs, which I helped to build myself. It has a broad veranda and rocking-chairs and a big fireplace and elk skins and wolf skins scattered about,—on the brink of the Little Missouri, right in a clump of cotton woods; and less than three years ago I shot a deer from the veranda. I kept my books there,—such as I wanted,—and did a deal of writing, being the rest of the time out all day in every kind of weather."

He was not a gentleman ranchman, but was an actual, practical cowboy, an expert cowpuncher, with long hours in the saddle, with strenuous and annoying struggles with contrary cattle in the round-ups and at other times. He never spared himself doing all that he required of the cowboys he hired, and more too. And for recreation he went out into the deep forests and rugged mountains and hunted for big game.

Colonel Roosevelt told me a story connected with his ranch life which was thoroughly amusing. He said, on returning from the East to his ranch, he found that the boys gave him condensed milk for his coffee. He asked the cook, "What does this mean, condensed milk with hundreds of cows with calves in the herds?" The cook replied, "Boss, will you go milkin' with the boys to get some cream for to-morrow?" And he said, "I certainly will." "We got our ponies and ropes and went out to the herd," he continued. "We picked out a fine, healthy-looking creature that we thought would give us the supply we needed. She looked right up into my face and in her eye said to me, 'I know what you are after, and you're not going to get me.' And in a flash she darted off, running as fast as she could, and we boys after her as fast as our ponies could go. One of the men threw the lasso, catching her head at the horns and held her; we threw her down on the ground, tied her legs together and by actual force took the milk away from her. I never had much more fun in my life than I did at that milking bee. The fun was worth all the trouble, but I never after that asked for milk fresh from the cow for my coffee." Whether this is the same celebrated old roan cow, the story of which has made so many millions laugh, I do not know, but he told it with a relish and hearty laugh which made it one of the funniest I ever heard.

In his life on the plains he met with many tough characters, some of whom undertook to impose upon him, but always with damage to themselves. The following incident records one of these encounters:
In the public room of a frontier hotel where he was to spend the night, Roosevelt was reading one evening after supper, shortly after his arrival in the West. The room was dining-room, bar-room, office and living-room, and it was crowded. A swaggering fellow stepped up to the bar and ordered everybody to drink. Only Roosevelt remained seated. He continued reading.

"Who's that fellow?" demanded the man at the bar.

"He's a tenderfoot," was the response.

"Hey, you, Mr. Four-eyes!" shouted the Westerner, "I asked this house to drink. D'you hear?"

No reply came from Roosevelt. The Westerner pulled his pistol, fired across the room and advanced on the tenderfoot with his smoking weapon.

"When I ask a man to drink with me I want him to do as I ask," he declared.

The young Roosevelt, who had watched the advance across the room from under his eyelashes, glanced up and asked to be excused.

"Not much," was the reply. "That don't go down here. Order your drink."

The young man from the East got up easily from his
chair, remarking: "Very well, if I must, I	"

With the pause in the words came a full right swinging jolt that took the Westerner on the point of the jaw and laid him on the floor. He was astride him and pinioned his arms. Then he threw the bully's pistol across the room and, staring at him through his glasses, snapped through the teeth that later were to become so familiar to the American public: "And when I intimate that I don't care to drink with you, just understand that I don't care to drink."

   Referring to this incident Roosevelt himself made this comment: "I was never shot at maliciously but once. My assailant was a broad-hat old ruffian of a cheap type. The fact that I wore glasses, together with my evident ardent desire to avoid a fight, apparently gave him the impression —a mistaken one—that I would not resent an injury."

What enormous exertion was involved in climbing those rugged mountains and in pursuing those large and dangerous wild beasts! Yet he did it all with eagerness because he loved it. This cowboy ranchman in scuffing with his herds, this mighty hunter with his gun, built up one of the most powerful bodies in America and at the same time contributed to the building up of one of the greatest minds in America. The vigor of that out-of-door life got into his every muscle and nerve, into his every word and into every act he performed in after life.

It so happened that Theodore Roosevelt, up to the time of his election, was the only man but one who was born in a city who ever became President, and that was Hayes, who was born in Dayton, Ohio. Since his time two other city-bred men have occupied the White House—Taf t, who was born in Cincinnati, and Wilson, who was born at Norfolk, Virginia. If Theodore Roosevelt had stayed in New York or even had gone only to Harvard, likely, he never would have been President. The life of the cowboy and the hunter was necessary to fit him for the Presidency. The silence and solitude and life of nature developed the creative faculty as nothing else could. It was because Lincoln was such a simple child of nature, and was with nature so much in its silence and solitude, that the reflective faculty was so strongly developed in him, that faculty so necessary for the highest type of leadership among men.

Mr. Roosevelt's life in the West brought him into contact not only with cattle and cowboys and guides and "grizzly" bears, but it brought him into contact with the virility and progress of a pioneer civilization. One of the most statesmanlike acts of any President was the Louisiana Purchase, negotiated by Thomas Jefferson in December, 1803, for $15,000,000. He bought of France the territory embraced by the modern states of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota west of the Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, nearly all Kansas, and Oklahoma, the portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Rocky Mountains, and Louisiana west of the Mississippi, but including New Orleans. It would take very many billions of dollars to buy this territory now with its abundant crops and precious mines. This was the great empire which appealed to the young Roosevelt, which he thought about, wrote about in his "Winning of the West," and which he knew thoroughly by residence in it and his active participation in its affairs.

In his address at the laying of the cornerstone of the Lewis and Clark memorial at Portland, Oregon, May 21st, 1903, he thus refers to the population entering upon this Northwest Territory:'' We come here to-day to lay the cornerstone of a monument that is to call to mind the greatest single pioneering feat on this continent, the voyage across the continent by Lewis and Clark, which rounded out the ripe statesmanship of Jefferson and his fellows by giving to the United States all of the domain between the Mississippi and the Pacific. Following their advent came the reign of the fur trade; and then, some sixty years ago, those entered whose children and children's children were to possess the land. Across the continent in the early 40's came the ox-drawn, canvas-topped wagons bearing the pioneers, the stalwart, sturdy, sun-burned men, with their wives and their little ones, who entered into this country to possess it. You have built up here this wonderful commonwealth, a commonwealth great in its past and infinitely greater in its future. The men gave us this region because they were not afraid, because they did not seek the living of ease and safety, because their life training was not to shrink from obstacles, but to meet and overcome them."

Roosevelt, the ranchman, had a prophet's eye and saw the great material, mental and moral civilization that was to possess that empire; he knew what busy men would till the ground over which his cattle grazed; and what thrifty cities would occupy the vast plains; and what a population would adorn them. Up to the time he went out to his ranch on the plains, the Eastern people knew very little about the prairies of the West. Until about 1850 little was known about the prairies by American authors, who for the most part were men of the Atlantic seaboard, who had seldom if ever passed the Alleghanies. Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier knew the old West* only by hearsay. Only Irving and one or two other prominent literary men had some personal knowledge of it. The men of the West were too busy taming the wilderness to write romance or poetry about the new home of literature. To the literary people of the country the prairie was the great American desert. The settler without capital took the treeless prairies in hand because they were cheap and treeless land, and found that they would grow grass and grain. The railroads came and brought them fuel and a market for their crops. The sod house or hut of cottonwood logs gave way to the square pine house of one story, and then a house like the one they had left in the East; and now has come the home of fine architecture and interior decoration and lovely grounds. Those vast, monotonous, marshy districts have been transmuted into a veritable garden. The social evolution of the prairie has been as marked as its material progress. It is an empire of hardy, intelligent, industrious, thrifty and virtuous people, who fear God and love men, who want the school and church, but who will not tolerate the saloon.

The evolution of the forest and the mountain has been almost as great as that of the prairie. Sharp axes have turned the forest into productive farms, and the rugged hand of industry has turned many mountain districts into fruitful farms with thrifty cities.

Roosevelt wrote about the "Winning of the West" —he, himself, won the West as no other one man ever did. He knew intimately its geography, its farms, its forestry, its mines, its population, its characteristics and the wild creatures that inhabit it. No man living ever interpreted that western life as well as he, and no one ever incarnated it in his thought and action as he did—that irresistible strenuousness greater than that of any man of our time was literally a fresh breeze from the West, its prairies, its mountains, its sea.

After eighteen years of home life, four years at Harvard, three years in the Assembly, he was fortunate in having this post-graduate course of three years in the university of the great West to fit him for the supreme place in our nation.