Theodore Roosevelt had an almost unbelievable thirst for adventure.

Frail and asthmatic as a child, Roosevelt threw himself into what he called “the strenuous life,” and through sheer discipline became the most adventurous President in American history. All of his life he sought out adventures with a zest that borders on mania. He surrendered himself totally to whatever he undertook, often to the point of recklessness. In the course of one of the most hectic lives in American history, he broke bones (arms, ribs, shoulders, etc.) with regularity and nonchalance. When he died on January 6, 1919, after sixty years of exhaustive activity, his son Archibald cabled the others: “The old lion is dead.”

On a fox hunt in 1885 he was thrown from his horse. In spite of facial lacerations and a broken arm, Roosevelt was able to catch up with the lead hunters “and I was in at the death.” “I looked pretty gay, with one arm dangling, and my face and clothes like the walls of a slaughter house,” he wrote his closest friend Henry Cabot Lodge.

“I am always willing to pay the piper when I have had a good dance,” he concluded, “and every now and then I like to drink the wine of life with brandy in it.”

Roosevelt’s lust for life was huge. He had gargantuan appetites—for food, for strenuous activity, for reading, for cultural experience, for power, and for love. He could not be sedentary. Even when the administrative and political burdens of the Presidency were greatest, Roosevelt played tennis, boxed, and practiced jujitsu. He instructed his Presidential boxing partner, an officer much younger and more skillful than himself, not to hold back in their sparring. When the officer struck Roosevelt so hard that he caused Roosevelt to go permanently blind in one eye, the President kept the knowledge to himself because he did not wish to upset his fellow pugilist.

His friend (and sometimes critic) Henry Adams called Roosevelt “pure act.” His friend Cecil Spring Rice, the British ambassador, told another bewildered diplomat that it was essential to realize that Roosevelt was “about six.” It is fitting that when the messenger brought word of President McKinley’s death to Vice President Roosevelt (September 13, 1901), he was found climbing the highest peak in New York state.

Roosevelt’s adventures include a yearlong safari in Africa (1909), the arrest of desperadoes at gunpoint (1886), a truly heroic assault on a Spanish-held promontory in Cuba (1898), wilderness hunting trips all over North America, and the exploration, in 1914, of the last major uncharted river in South America. Before the safari, TR wrote, “By George! I am as eager to go to Africa and to hunt . . . as a boy who has been reading dime novels and wishes to go West and fight Indians.”

He climbed the Matterhorn on his honeymoon.

To his son Kermit, Roosevelt wrote, “I always believe in going hard at everything. My experience is that it pays never to let up or grow slack and fall behind.”

Roosevelt’s love of adventure had two intellectual foundations.

As a sheltered boy, he had read widely in adventure literature—from the great national epics of European literature to the modern adventure novels of Sir Walter Scott. In spite of his own physical limitations, he was able to imagine himself as a central figure in what he called “Hero Tales,” and he was determined to make his body strong enough to enable him to seek out adventures, particularly in the American West.

He also had formulated what has been called the “Roosevelt Frontier Thesis,” which argued that the unique strength of the American character had been forged on the frontier by men like George Rogers Clark, Daniel Boone, and Davy Crockett. America had been renewed again and again, Roosevelt believed, by white civilization’s contact with wilderness, savagery, warfare, and the primitive energies and skills of survival in an inhospitable landscape. Now that the frontier was closing (1880-1910), it was not clear how American civilization would be able to renew itself by immersion into what was most American in the American experience. Roosevelt’s thirst for hunting adventures, for camping, for national parks and monuments, and for the protection of the nation’s natural resources, were direct results of his belief that some part of the Daniel Boone experience must be made available to his children’s—and his children’s children’s—generation.

It was principally his desire to have an authentic frontier experience before the frontier closed forever that led Roosevelt to the Little Missouri River Valley in 1883. The North Dakota years (1883-87) represent the first of Roosevelt’s great adventures.

The future President came to the Little Missouri River Valley in September 1883 to kill a buffalo. That proved to be very difficult, but with the help of his local guide Joe Ferris, TR man aged to get his first buffalo on September 21, 1883 near Pretty Butte north of today’s Marmarth, North Dakota. When Roosevelt approached the corpse of the great beast he did a spontaneous “Indian war dance,” and presented Ferris with $100 for his role in the hunt.

In the course of his hunting trip, Roosevelt fell in love with the badlands of Dakota, and impulsively invested $14,000 as seed money for the first of two ranches he would establish on the Little Missouri River.

Roosevelt’s time in Dakota Territory transformed him both physically and spiritually. When he first arrived he was a thin, often-ill New York dude, with an affected Harvard accent, dressed in designer buckskins and a knife hand carved by Tiffany’s. He was eager for everything, but adept at almost nothing. At first the rough local westerners made fun of him, and called him “four eyes” and “punkinlily.” But they underestimated the newcomer. By throwing himself unhesitatingly into every possible cowboy situation—from stampedes to barroom confrontations—Roosevelt proved that he was something more than a wealthy tourist seeking a flavor of the Old West.

In Dakota Roosevelt put on muscle and bulk. He faced down his insecurities, his fears, and his grief over the simultaneous death of his wife and mother on February 14, 1884. By the time he left the territory in 1887, he had created his famous adult persona and physique. He was, in short, ready to become one of America’s supreme leaders.

When the Marquis de Mores wrote a letter (September 1885) that seemed to threaten a duel, Roosevelt replied with courage. He carefully explained that he was not one of De Mores’ detractors, but that if the Marquis was seeking a meeting on the field of honor, “I too, as you know, am always on hand, and ever ready to hold myself accountable in any way for anything I have said or done.” The dispute fizzled out.

When the gunman E. G. Paddock circulated loose talk threatening Roosevelt with bodily harm, TR rode his horse over to Paddock’s cabin, knocked on the door, and said, “I understand that you have threatened to kill me on sight. I have come over to see when you want to begin the killing.” Paddock quickly backed down.

It is impossible to make sense of Roosevelt’s life without dividing it into the pre-Dakota and post-Dakota periods.

When Roosevelt ascended to the Presidency after the assassination of William McKinley, the nominal leader of the Republican Party in the United States, Mark Hanna of Ohio, said, “Now look, that damned cowboy is the President of the United States.”

Roosevelt was the first President to fly in an airplane. He was the first President to descend in a submarine. He was the first President to leave the United States in the course of his term. He visited the Panama Canal district and talked the engineers into letting him take the controls of one of the big digging machines.

As President (1901-09), Roosevelt refused to curtail his adventures, much to the chagrin of the fledgling secret service. He used to take friends, political subordinates, and diplomats on strenuous hikes through Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. These “point to point”

hikes delighted Roosevelt as much as they tried the patience of most of his companions, and simply appalled others. Once he tried to shame General Frederick Funston into swimming through a swollen canal in the park. “You are not afraid to swim the canal, are you?” Roosevelt barked. “No, I’m not afraid,” Funston replied, “and I am not a damned fool either.” Funston was one of the few men who dared defy Roosevelt.

On another occasion the President stripped off all of his clothes to swim in the Potomac River and insisted that his companions follow his lead. When the elegant French ambassador Jules Jusserand held back, Roosevelt browbeat him into compliance. Perhaps as a small gesture of defiance, Jusserand, otherwise naked, wore black kid gloves as he approached the river. When Roosevelt demanded an explanation, all Jusserand could muster was, “We might meet ladies.”

When he left office voluntarily in 1909, Roosevelt said, "I don't think any President ever enjoyed himself more than I did.”

In 1913, at the age of 55, and five years out of the Presidency, Roosevelt accepted invitations to deliver a series of lectures in South America. He had intended to embark upon a relatively civilized river journey through South America following his lecture tour, but a Brazilian official suggested that he replace that tame excursion with a heroic adventure, the exploration, with Colonel Candido Rondon, of the River of Doubt, the last major uncharted river in South America.

Roosevelt jumped at the chance. “It’s my last chance to be a boy!”

When officials of the American Museum of Natural History (TR’s sponsor) protested that the new journey was too dangerous, that they could not permit the former President to undertake so perilous a journey under their sponsorship, Roosevelt replied, “Tell Osborn I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know; I have had my full share, and if it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so.” The 1500 kilometer journey proved to be an ordeal. Three of Roosevelt’s companions died. Roosevelt himself nearly died of fever, an abcessed and infected leg, and malnutrition. He lost 58 pounds, a quarter of his body mass. He lived five years after his return from South America, but his health never fully recovered.

Roosevelt could not live on the sidelines. He had to be in the arena, if possible covered with sweat and blood. He squeezed more out of life than almost anyone in American history. No matter what else was going on, in his family, in politics, in the administrative offices he held, or in his life as a professional writer, Roosevelt found time to feed his appetite for strenuous outdoor experience. Theodore Roosevelt not only sought adventure; he had the wisdom to realize that life is the greatest adventure, and that it must be drunk lustily to the last drop.