A few years ago I was interviewed on the farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina where I grew up. The reporter looked around at the old barn and the corn patch by the creek, and said, “Tell me, I’m curious, how did you ever get from here to Cornell University, because practically speaking, you can’t get there from here.” I told him I could understand why he would think that. After all, we were poor, didn’t have a car or truck or tractor, and plowed our land with a horse named old Nell, and kept our milk and butter in the spring house. My parents did not have a lot of formal education.

But in fact I had some distinct advantages for a future writer. Most important: I grew up among great story tellers. On the porch in summer and by the fireplace in winter, my grandpa told us chilling tales about ghosts and snakes, mad dogs and panthers, and sent us children to bed at night terrified of the dark and the noises in the attic. My dad, who loved to read and talk about history, recounted stories of the Civil War and the Revolution, family history, and the Cherokee Indians. He told us of the great victory of General Daniel Morgan over Bloody Tarleton at the Battle of Cowpens on January 17, 1781, in South Carolina.

My father, who was born in 1905, liked to point out that he was born during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was one of his heroes, and he compared every other president of the 20th century – unfavorably – to Teddy. My father, who loved to hunt and trap and tramp in the woods, admired Daniel Boone and Theodore Roosevelt more than any other Americans. He would often quote Boone about seeking “more elbow room” in the west, and Roosevelt about “speaking softly and carrying a big stick.” The fact that Roosevelt had been a rancher in North Dakota and a big game hunter in Africa recommended him as much as any of his political accomplishments. Roosevelt’s work to conserve our heritage of wilderness put him head and shoulders above other men who had lived in the White House in my father’s eyes. Roosevelt represented our country at its wisest and most decisive best. My father liked to quote a stump speaker from the election of 1916 who shouted, “Elect Charles Evans Hughes to the White House and he’ll send Teddy Roosevelt to Mexico and all we’ll see of Pancho Villa will be a cloud of dust.”

Scholars have pointed out that Theodore Roosevelt is the only president in American history who never used the pronoun “I’ in his inaugural address. While we do not think of Roosevelt as modest or self-effacing, this omission does seem to reflect his zealous commitment to his goals and ideals, rather than to his personal glory. He strove to focus all his considerable energies on the work he hoped to accomplish. His avoidance of the “I” was the mark of a supreme confidence and conscientiousness.

It has been observed that men of outstanding accomplishments often experience humiliating defeats, which they survive and learn from and then put behind them. Few renowned military leaders have suffered as many failures on the battlefield as George Washington, and yet he lived to accept Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in 1781, and to become the Father of his Country. Lincoln, after serving one term in Congress in 1847-49, returned to his law practice in Illinois, then lost out in the senate race of 1858 to his old nemesis Stephen Douglas, only to be elected president in 1860. Called by some “the ape from the West” he became our most esteemed leader.

In 1884, the year he turned 26, Theodore Roosevelt lost both his beloved wife Alice and his dynamic mother Mittie. To hide his grief and continue his political career, Roosevelt attended the Republican Convention in Chicago that summer to fight for the nomination of George F. Edmunds for president. His candidate lost to the loathed James G. Blaine, who was in turn defeated at the polls by Grover Cleveland. It was a series of set-backs that would have ended the political careers of most people. Many assumed it was the end of Roosevelt’s political aspirations.

Instead of returning to New York and the old life there, Theodore disappeared to his ranch in the Bad Lands of the Dakota Territory. And though he would return to the East for visits more than once over the next two years, he would pass most of that time in the open spaces of Dakota before returning to politics and marrying Edith Carow. It has been argued that Roosevelt’s two years in the Bad Lands were the most important time of his whole life. Certainly the way a person deals with catastrophic failure and adversity determines their character and often their future. Two years seems to be about the amount of time it takes some exceptional individuals to change their lives. It is the length of time Henry David Thoreau spent in the cabin at Walden Pond in 1845-47, the definitive period of his life. It is the amount of time Goethe spent in Italy in 1786-88, a period that changed his vision of his future work. And two years was the period Daniel Boone stayed in the wilderness of Kentucky, mostly alone, in 1769-1771, the time of his most important explorations and self-discovery. The Theodore Roosevelt who returned to the East after his sojourn in Dakota had a new confidence and determination, and was already dedicated to a career of reform, innovation, fairness, conservation, and glory.

Like Boone, and thousands of others before him, Roosevelt had always been drawn to the wilderness and to the West. While he was sickly as a boy and suffered from devastating asthma that weakened his body and limited his activities, he loved the study of birds and wildlife, and spent time in the forest and outdoors whenever he had a chance. He read Captain Mayne Reid’s adventure stories such as The Scalp Hunters, The Boy Hunters, and Hunter’s Feast. These stories were set in the West, and for young Teddy the West came to be equated with health, strength and freedom. Reid’s writing included particularly vivid descriptions of animal life, and the struggle of all living things for survival in the food chain and evolutionary chain from worms to human beings. From that time on young Roosevelt envisioned his life and his health as being intimately connected to wilderness and the West.

The Romantic and prophetic sense of the West is almost as old in our culture as recorded history. For the Romans the Golden West, the land of promise, was Gaul and Britain. Hope and treasure and a better life were to be found in the direction of the setting sun. For the Normans the places of mystery and glory were Wales and Ireland. For the Irish it was Iceland. For the Vikings it was Iceland and Greenland and Labrador. For the Spanish in Mexico it was the city of Cibola somewhere far to the north and west. For English settlers in Virginia and Pennsylvania in the 18th century it was the land beyond the Alleghenies, the valley of the Ohio River, called by the French la belle riviere. For Theodore Roosevelt’s generation it was the land west of the Red River of the North, in the Dakota Territory.

In his great essay called “Walking,” Thoreau had written, about the time Roosevelt was born, “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.” The sage of Walden Pond had said, “I believe that there is a subtile magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.” (175) And he added, “I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe,” (177) and “Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down.” (178) Echoing the Apostle’s Creed Thoreau asserts, “I believe in the forest, and in the meadow and in the night in which the corn grows.” (185). “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild.” (185) Like Theodore Roosevelt after him, Thoreau could exhort like a revival preacher on the themes he felt most deeply. “When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, –a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature.” (190)

Sick with grief and failure, weak in body and spirit, Theodore Roosevelt plunged into a new life in the Bad Lands and seemed never to look back. As a boy in 1872 he had been given his first gun, and the first pair of glasses for his near-sighted eyes. He began to hunt, but more important, he began to see. He became an acute and accurate observer of wildlife and the natural world. He collected and mounted birds. The spectacles transformed his world. They “literally opened up an entirely new world for me,” he later said. “I had no idea how beautiful the world was...” (McCullough, 118)

Roosevelt’s first foray into the West had come with a week’s hunt in Iowa in 1880 with his brother Elliott. They had gone all the way to the Red River at the edge of the Dakota Territory. Having been told by a doctor he had heart trouble, Theodore traveled and hunted with more vigor than ever. Between them the brothers killed more than 400 birds. (229) But Theodore complained that they had never reached “The Real West, the Far West.” Even so he returned to New York tanned and stronger than before. The health inspired by the West was not only of the body, but also of the mind. In the West Roosevelt found a larger perspective, the longer view, and sanity.

Roosevelt journeyed to the Dakota Territory in 1883 for two weeks in the “Real West.” But he was not just interested in hunting buffalo there. He invested $10,000 in a cattle ranch in Wyoming run by a Harvard classmate. He also bought a ranch in the Bad Lands, planning to become a cattleman himself. Back home in New York he told everyone about his “ranch in Dakota.” (250)

It has been said that the popular image of the cowboy was created by Roosevelt’s friend Owen Wister in The Virginian of 1902, by the paintings and writings of his friend Frederic Remington, and by the writings and public legend of Theodore Roosevelt. While there had been dime novels and adventure stories about the West before, about figures such as Kit Carson, and memoirs by some mountain men, it was these three authors and artists near the end of the 19th century who fixed forever in the mind of the public the image of the cowboy, as opposed to the scout or frontiersman.

Like most figures who become heroes, Roosevelt knew how to act the part, and also how to dress the part. According to David McCullough in Mornings on Horseback, “He spent a small fortune to look the part. Besides the big hat, the buckskin shirt, chaps, bridle, and silver spurs, he had fancy alligator boots, a silver belt buckle, beautifully tooled leather belt and holster, a silver mounted bowie knife by Tiffany. His silver belt buckle was engraved with the head of a bear; the silver spurs had his initials on them. His Colt revolver was engraved with scrolls and geometric patterns, and plated with silver and gold. On one side of the ivory handle were his initials; on the other side, the head of a buffalo to commemorate the one he had shot in 1883. The buckskin shirt, all beautifully patterned and fringed, had been made to order by a woman in the Bad Lands and was part of a complete buckskin suit.” (320)

It was the French-Canadian trappers of the 18th century who had named the Bad Lands, calling them les mauvaises terres a traverser, bad lands to travel through. It was a world that either repelled intensely or attracted intensely. To quote McCullough again, “It was as if the rolling prairie land suddenly gave way to a weird otherworld of bizarrely shaped cliffs and hummocks and tablelands, these sectioned and sliced every which way by countless little ravines and draws and by the broad looping valley of the Little Missouri River, which, unlike the Big Missouri, flowed north and in summer was not much more than a good-sized stream. It was a region of ‘startling appearances’, ‘of strange confusion’, extending some two hundred miles along the river, a kind of Grand Canyon in miniature, the work of millions of years of erosion on ancient preglacial sediments. Stratified layers of clay, clays as pale as beach sand, were juxtaposed against brick-red bands of scoria or sinuous dark seams of lignite. Some formations had the overpowering presence of ancient ruins. The leader of an early military expedition against the Sioux described the landscape as hell with the fires out – though in some places, where seams of lignite had caught fire, the ground literally smouldered.” (321)

It is fair to say that Theodore Roosevelt fell in love with the Bad Lands. Though he would only spend about one thirtieth of his lifetime there, his experience in Dakota, and his vision of the region, and of himself in the region, would inform much of his activities and thought for the rest of his life. It was in the Bad Lands, among the cattlemen and rustlers and visionaries such as Marquis de Mores, that Roosevelt defined himself, participating in grueling roundups, pursuing thieves and bringing them to justice, opposing the corporate bullies of the railroads and the world of finance. It would be hard to over-estimate the impact of his time in this region. The life in the Bad Lands revived in him a sense of purpose and a new sense of romance that led to his marriage to Edith Carow in 1886.

The sadness and loneliness and bareness of the landscape of the Bad Lands suited Roosevelt and inspired him. It was the frontier he had always dreamed of. He rode a beautiful horse named Manitou. For him the region was “the hero land.” Gliding on horseback over the rugged country, he breathed deeply the fresh, crystalline air, “...and the rapid motion of the fiery little horse combined to make a man’s blood thrill and leap with sheer buoyant lightheartedness and eager, exultant pleasure in the boldness and freedom of the life he is leading. As we climb the steep sides of the first range of buttes, wisps of wavering mist still cling in the hollows of the valley; when we come out on the top of the first great plateau, the sun flames up over its edge, and in the level, red beams the galloping horsemen throw long, fantastic shadows. Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.” (332)

Emerson had said “we are never tired, if we can see far enough,” and Roosevelt would agree that the vistas of the West combined with the speed of a good horse, made fatigue or depression seem impossible.

Theodore Roosevelt actually suffered from the fears and timidity most of us are prone to in strange places. But he attacked his fears and overcame them, even tracking down thieves. “By acting as if I was not afraid, I gradually ceased to be afraid,” he explained later. (336) The life in the West, the luminous, endless skies, the cottonwoods along streams in autumn forming columns of blazing gold, thrilled him. And the bareness somehow answered and assuaged the periods of depression and blues he was subject to. The place inspired him both in his life and in his writing. He began to write the books and articles that would make him famous as a man of letters, as well as a leader and politician. As a result of his rejuvenation in the West his writing took on a new verve and vigor that would ever after be the mark of his prose in such works as Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, in scores of articles from Century Magazine. (340) He felt the life in the Bad Lands reinforced his zeal to find and speak the truth.

“Meanness, cowardice, and dishonesty are not tolerated,” he wrote. “There is a high regard for truthfulness and keeping one’s word, intense contempt for any kind of hypocrisy, and a hearty dislike for a man who shirks his work.”

Roosevelt returned to the East a changed man. Not only was he physically much stronger, with broader shoulders, powerful chest, his very voice was different. Where before he had been laughed at for his high-pitched, sometime shrill voice, he now spoke with booming strength, “hearty and strong enough to drive oxen.” (341) The West had helped make him the Roosevelt we remember, Teddy Rough Rider, the man who would write The Winning of the West, bust the trusts, clean up the Civil Service, ensure that the Panama Canal would be made, broker peace between the Russians and the Japanese, and win the Nobel Prize. He would become the youngest president in American history after the death of McKinley, and one of our most successful chief executives. More than any president he would work to conserve the wilderness that is our heritage, increasing the area of the national forests by some forty million acres, creating five national parks, sixteen national monuments, four national game refuges, fifty-one bird sanctuaries. He inspired the nation to think about its natural treasures and their preservation. From his bully pulpit he called the Republic to take a longer view, and find a higher perspective from which to consider its wealth, resources and its future.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of Theodore Roosevelt’s work as president in conservation, reclamation and land management. With the help of Gifford Pinchot, his Chief Forester, and other scientists, he would change the way the nation thought about its heritage of land, water, forests, minerals, and other natural resources. Not since Jefferson, had a president combined such scientific interest with a vision of the future, to transcend party politics for the benefit of generations to come.

William Harbaugh writes, “For more than seven years, often against the avowed opposition of the most powerful leaders of his own party, and at the bitter end against the combined opposition of both parties, he pressed Congress and the states to place the future public interest above the current private interest. And though he was repeatedly criticized, rebuffed, and insulted, he refused to be thwarted or even to compromise significantly.” (Harbaugh, 318)

On June 17, 1902, Roosevelt signed into law a bill to create a reclamation service that would construct reservoirs and irrigation works in the West, including Roosevelt Dam in Arizona. His policies met such opposition from some timber, grazing, and mining interests that a huge protest convention met in Denver June 19, 1907, to denounce his actions. Unfazed, Roosevelt fought even harder for his conservation proposals.

“For all his zest for hunting, Roosevelt possessed both the naturalist’s compulsion to conserve and the democrat’s desire to share,” William Harbaugh would observe. In that particular combination of passions lies Roosevelt’s greatness. He believed in the wise use of the nation’s natural resources, but acted to save intact Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, Oregon’s Crater Lake, New Mexico’s Petrified Forest, and the dreamy, hazy slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He created National Monuments such as Devil’s Tower, Muir Woods, and Jewel Cave.

On May 13, 1908, at a Governor’s conference held at the White House, Roosevelt gave what is considered by many to be his finest address. He asserted that conservation was “the chief material question that confronts us, second only – and second always – to the great fundamental question of morality.”

“In the past we have admitted the right of the individual to ignore the future of the Republic for his own personal profit. The time has come for a change. As a people we have the right and the duty, second to none other but the right or duty of obeying the moral law, of requiring and doing justice, to protect ourselves and our children against the wasteful development of our natural resources, whether that waste is caused by the actual destruction of such resources or by making them impossible for development hereafter.” (Harbaugh, 334)

In speaking of Roosevelt’s work in conservation, Governor Charles Van Hise of Wisconsin would write, “What he did to forward this movement and to bring it into the foreground of the consciousness of the people will place him not only as one of the greatest statesmen of this nation but one of the greatest statesmen of any nation of any time.” (Harbaugh, 336)

When he wrote The Winning of the West Roosevelt would celebrate, among others, his great predecessor, Daniel Boone. Much of the inspiration for his ideas and ideals was embodied in the life and in the legend of the old frontiersman. There were many other celebrated figures, of course, including Simon Kenton, David Crockett, and Kit Carson, but Boone was the first frontier hero, the original.

In chapter three of The Winning of the West Roosevelt wrote:

“Finally, however, among these [long] hunters one arose whose wanderings were to bear fruit; who was destined to lead through the wilderness the first body of settlers that ever established a community in the far west, completely cut off from the seaboard colonies...

“With Boone hunting and exploration were passions, and the lonely life of the wilderness, with its bold, wild freedom, the only existence for which he really cared...

“His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face was the face of a man who never blustered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any wrong, and who had a limitless fund of fortitude, endurance, and indomitable resolution on which to draw when fortune proved adverse. His self-command and patience, his daring, restless love of adventure, and, in time of danger, his absolute trust in his own powers and resources, all combined to render him peculiarly fitted to follow the career of which he was so fond.” (18-19)