In a matter of two months, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. was dead. Cancer had quickly devoured the father of one of America’s most famous presidents. The son, a 19-year-old eventual executive, was crushed by the loss of his father, a man who was a founder of the American Museum of Natural History and whom the son viewed as “the best, wisest and most loving of men.”
It was Theodore Roosevelt Jr.’s father who had pushed for him “to make his body” in order to combat his sickliness, specifically his asthma. He vowed to do so in order to pursue all that his mind wished to do but his frail body wouldn’t allow. His workout regimens began what he would term “the strenuous life.” “Teedie,” as he was known as a child, was curious about nature, especially birds. Though his childhood body often prevented the strain of even mild adventure, it didn’t stop him from studying and sketching nature’s subjects. At the age of 14, while his family vacationed on the Nile River, he and his father would hunt along the banks, killing, dissecting, preserving, and labeling the specimens.
Roosevelt had the gift of hyper-focus, which allowed him to block out other thoughts and distractions and focus solely on his task at hand. Shortly after his father’s death, his grief could be stifled only by the intellectual demands of his studies at Harvard College. “It has been a most fortunate thing for me that I have had so much to do,” he wrote in his diary. “If I had very much time to think, I believe I should almost go crazy.”
Six years later almost to the day, Roosevelt would endure such emotional heartache that the rigors of city life would prove insufficient. On Valentine’s Day 1884, his mother, Mittie, and wife, Alice Lee, would die in his house of typhoid fever and kidney failure respectively, just two days after the birth of his first child, Alice. That day, he wrote one line in his diary: “The light has gone out of my life.”
Restoration in the Dakota Territory
At the time of the deaths, he was a Republican state legislator in the New York State Assembly. Still in a state of grief, he would finish his third one-year term, drop his political career, and flee to the untamed West of the Dakota Territory, leaving his daughter in the care of his sister, Bamie.
Upon his arrival, he appeared unprepared for the demands of the wild. A Pittsburgh Dispatch journalist noted that Roosevelt looked like “a typical New York dude.” Roosevelt was undeterred. His interest in nature had become an unbridled passion. His grief had driven him to isolation. He had overcome his past physical frailties through perseverance, and he would overcome his grief and anything else nature brought his way through the same virtue.
Roosevelt’s strenuous life would come into full force. He devoted himself to being a rancher, investing half of his inheritance in two ranches. He was constantly on the move, working the land, herding cattle, stopping stampedes—at times spending 16 hours a day in the saddle. He hunted and fished and fought in bars. During a spring flood, he covered 300 miles of river to pursue and arrest three armed thieves who had stolen his rowboat. While devoting himself to his land and cattle, Roosevelt still found time to write “Hunting Trips of a Ranchman.” The book indirectly led to Roosevelt founding the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887 with George Bird Grinnell, editor of the Forest and Stream magazine, with the purpose of promoting hunting and conservation.
His time in the Dakota Territory proved extraordinarily cathartic, and, in a sense, historic. “I would not have been President had it not been for my experience in North Dakota,” he once stated. “It was here that the romance of my life began.”
Over the course of two years, the outdoorsman fell deeper in love with the great outdoors: the rigor, the beauty, the freedom. He returned to New York occasionally. Though he had made it abundantly clear that his love life died that Valentine’s Day in 1884, romance nevertheless awaited. A chance encounter with his childhood friend Edith Carow led to a rekindling of an old flame. The two would marry on December 2, 1886, in London.
Love, Politics, and Conservation
He had gained a new lease on love, but his ranch would suffer a very different fate. The winter storm of 1886 to 1887 would kill thousands of cattle across the Dakota Territory, leading Roosevelt to relinquish most of his ranch holdings. He would return every so often to the Dakotas, but his life in politics and his new family would demand much of his time. He would move back and forth between New York and Washington, D.C., taking positions as U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, New York Police Commissioner, New York state governor, vice president of the United States, and soon thereafter, president of the United States after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901. He would win reelection in 1904.
His love of the outdoors never diminished. He had always paid close attention to the desolation of forestries, the pollution of cities, and how various species were being driven toward extinction. His concern for the future of America’s natural beauties coincided with his political power to do something about it. During his time as governor, he promoted the preservation of forests. As president, he developed the United States Forest Service within the Department of Agriculture with the purpose to protect wildlife and public lands. He signed the Antiquities Act of 1906 into law, which set aside 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reservations, five national parks, 18 national monuments, and four national game preserves. By the time he left office on March 4, 1909, Roosevelt had secured nearly 230 million acres of land for federal protection, which included Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon.
“I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is,” Roosevelt said of the Grand Canyon in 1903. “I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American if he can travel at all should see.”
In many ways, Roosevelt’s romantic view of the Canyon was his doctrine on nature’s beauty and mystery. He not only worried that people would mar her beauties, but that they would miss seeing them.
Hunter as Nature Lover
Roosevelt believed that hunting and fishing were all part of the act of conservation. They were a way to show appreciation for the fruits of nature and respect for wildlife. He believed in “fair chase,” a term he helped coin with Grinnell in 1887. He sought the thrill of the chase, for without it, hunting was merely self-indulgence hinging on cruelty. He exhibited this belief when he was on a bear hunt in Mississippi. The hunt had been unsuccessful until the hunting party cornered a black bear and tied it to a tree. Roosevelt not only viewed the situation as unsportsmanlike and refused to shoot the bear, but the story also led to the creation of one of the most famous stuffed animals in history: the Teddy Bear.
Roosevelt hoped that American hunters and fishermen would follow his lead. He and Grinnell had founded their hunting club in response to the extermination of species during the 19th century. One of those species was the buffalo, which had been so numerous as to seem inexhaustible. By 1893, there were only 500 left.
“All hunters should be nature-lovers,” Roosevelt said. “It is to be hoped that the days of mere wasteful, boastful slaughter are past and that from now on the hunter will stand foremost in working for the preservation and perpetuation of wildlife, whether big or little.”
For the politician-turned-rancher, the great outdoors had made him the man he was. Indeed, it had saved him during those years in the Dakota Territory. The rancher-returned-to-politics had now done his best to return the favor.
This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
