Theodore Roosevelt

#1On February 14, 1884, 25-year-old Theodore Roosevelt was inside his family's New York home. His first child had been born two days earlier, but there was nothing to celebrate. His mother, Mittie, was dying of typhoid fever. His wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, was gravely ill too.

#2His mother died early that morning.

#3Alice died that afternoon.

#4Same house. Same day.

#5Roosevelt drew a huge X across his diary page and wrote, “The light has gone out of my life.”

#6And yet there was a newborn daughter upstairs.

#7So what did he do next?

#8Within months, he was back in the Dakota Badlands.

#9There's an important twist here.

#10Roosevelt didn't discover Dakota because of the tragedy. He'd already gone there in 1883 to hunt bison. He liked the country enough to invest money in a cattle ranch.

#11The deaths didn't send him somewhere completely new.

#12They sent him deeper into a place he already knew.

#13In the summer of 1884, he returned and established the remote Elkhorn Ranch. He rode horses, worked cattle, hunted, and wrote.

#14It sounds like a dramatic reinvention.

#15Except Roosevelt had been practicing a version of this response since childhood.

#16As a child, Roosevelt suffered from severe asthma. There were nights when breathing itself became a struggle.

#17His father, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., told him he had the mind but needed to build the body to match it.

#18So Roosevelt trained. He boxed. He exercised. He wandered outdoors collecting and studying animals.

#19When weakness showed up, his instinct became action.

#20Then his father died in 1878.

#21By the time Roosevelt lost Alice and his mother six years later, physical exertion wasn't some new therapy he discovered in Dakota. It was already part of how he confronted things he couldn't control.

#22This time, he took that instinct west.

#23There's another person missing from the usual image of Roosevelt riding alone into the Badlands.

#24His sister Anna Roosevelt, known in the family as Bamie.

#25While Roosevelt moved back and forth to Dakota, Bamie cared for his baby daughter Alice. She also oversaw work on Sagamore Hill, the house Roosevelt had been building on Long Island.

#26One person went west.

#27Another held onto his child and his home.

#28Roosevelt's supposedly solitary reinvention depended on people who weren't in the saddle with him.

#29Roosevelt was hard to miss out west.

#30He was a wealthy Harvard-educated New Yorker with spectacles and an eastern accent.

#31In other words, he could look like exactly the sort of eastern tenderfoot western cattlemen might mock. And sometimes they did, including jokes about his glasses.

#32Roosevelt responded by doing the work.

#33He rode long distances. He worked cattle. He hunted. He learned ranch life by joining it.

#34Then somebody stole his boat.

#35And Roosevelt decided that was a problem he was going to solve personally.

#36In the spring of 1886, three thieves stole a boat from Elkhorn Ranch and escaped downriver.

#37Roosevelt didn't just wait for someone else to catch them.

#38He and two trusted companions, Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow, built another boat and went after them through a river breaking up with spring ice.

#39Days later, they caught the men.

#40Roosevelt could have stopped there. But he was also serving as a deputy sheriff, so he meant to deliver the prisoners to the authorities.

#41That created another problem: staying awake while guarding them.

#42His solution was very Roosevelt.

#43He read.

#44A rancher chasing thieves through an icy river, then sitting with a book so he wouldn't fall asleep while transporting his prisoners—that's the Badlands Roosevelt in miniature.

#45Elkhorn wasn't really a one-man wilderness retreat either.

#46Sewall and Dow were men Roosevelt already trusted from Maine. They came west, helped build the ranch house, and helped run the operation.

#47Eventually their wives and children came too.

#48Sewall's little daughter Kitty was around the age of Roosevelt's own daughter Alice, who was still back east.

#49As the other men's families filled the ranch, Roosevelt began to feel a little like a stranger in his own home there.

#50Around the same period, he reconnected with Edith Kermit Carow, a woman he'd known since childhood.

#51They married in 1886.

#52And just as Roosevelt was beginning a new family life, the ranching world he'd built in Dakota was about to collapse.

#53Roosevelt and Edith were honeymooning in Europe when the brutal winter of 1886–87 hit the northern plains.

#54The cattle were already vulnerable after drought and overgrazing. Then came relentless snow, wind, and cold.

#55Animals died across the region.

#56Roosevelt lost more than half his herd and a large amount of money.

#57He began getting out of the cattle business.

#58That's worth stopping on, because it's easy to turn the Badlands years into a neat transformation story: grieving young man goes west, conquers the wilderness, returns stronger.

#59But Roosevelt didn't conquer ranching.

#60His ranching venture failed.

#61Something else survived.

#62Roosevelt wrote about his western experiences. The riding, hunting, ranching, and people of Dakota became material for books and articles.

#63Then he went deeper into public life.

#64Not every attempt worked. He ran for mayor of New York City and finished third.

#65After that came the U.S. Civil Service Commission, then the New York City Police Board, where he became known for going out at night to see whether officers were actually at their posts.

#66Then he became assistant secretary of the Navy.

#67The offices kept changing.

#68The instinct to go where the action was didn't.

#69In 1898, war gave him a much bigger place to do it.

#70When war broke out between the United States and Spain, Roosevelt resigned his Navy Department job.

#71He wanted to fight.

#72He helped organize a volunteer cavalry regiment, but he didn't insist on commanding it from the start. Leonard Wood, who had more military experience, became colonel. Roosevelt entered as lieutenant colonel.

#73The regiment became famous as the Rough Riders.

#74Its membership almost looked designed around Roosevelt's own life.

#75There were western cowboys, hunters, and frontiersmen.

#76There were eastern college athletes and men from elite backgrounds.

#77Harvard and the Badlands, riding together.

#78Then they reached Cuba and discovered a problem: most of their horses hadn't made the trip.

#79A cavalry regiment was going to do much of its fighting on foot.

#80Wood was soon promoted to command a brigade, leaving Roosevelt in charge of the regiment.

#81Then came the fighting around Kettle Hill and the San Juan Heights.

#82Most of the Rough Riders advanced on foot.

#83Roosevelt went forward mounted.

#84It was exactly the kind of image that stuck.

#85But the victory wasn't a solo Rough Riders achievement. U.S. regulars, including the Black soldiers remembered as the Buffalo Soldiers, fought in the same larger battle. Multiple units helped take the heights.

#86Public memory wasn't distributed so evenly.

#87Newspapers loved Roosevelt's story. Roosevelt himself wrote about the war. The bespectacled New Yorker who had once looked out of place in Dakota now returned from Cuba as a nationally recognizable cowboy soldier.

#88Politics moved fast after that.

#89In 1898, Roosevelt ran for governor of New York.

#90He won.

#91His war fame made him valuable to the Republican Party. Governing him turned out to be harder.

#92One of the most powerful figures in New York Republican politics was Thomas C. Platt, a party boss accustomed to influencing appointments and controlling the political organization.

#93Roosevelt wouldn't simply follow instructions.

#94They clashed over appointments. They clashed over taxes on corporations.

#95Keeping Roosevelt in the governor's office was becoming inconvenient.

#96So an odd solution emerged.

#97Move him up.

#98President William McKinley was running for reelection in 1900, and the Republicans needed a vice-presidential nominee.

#99For Platt, moving Roosevelt into the vice presidency had an obvious appeal. The office had little independent power and was often treated as a political dead end.

#100Roosevelt didn't want it.

#101But by then, his popularity had become bigger than New York machine politics. Platt wasn't the only force behind the nomination, and the Republican convention ultimately put Roosevelt on the ticket.

#102Another Republican power broker, Mark Hanna, was deeply uneasy about it.

#103Because once Roosevelt became vice president, there was only one life between him and the presidency.

#104That became more than a political worry the following year.

#105On September 6, 1901, McKinley was shot.

#106At first, he seemed to be recovering.

#107Then his condition worsened.

#108He died on September 14.

#109Roosevelt hurried to Buffalo, New York, and took the presidential oath that day.

#110He was 42.

#111That made him the youngest person ever to assume the U.S. presidency. He hadn't been elected president yet—that would come later.

#112And there was no straight line from the deaths of 1884 to that room in Buffalo.

#113War fame had helped make him governor. His clashes as governor helped push him toward the vice presidency. Then an assassination nobody had planned made the vice president president.

#114In between were a failed ranch, a lost mayoral race, political appointments, a war, party maneuvering, and choices made by people Roosevelt couldn't control.

#115In 1900, while campaigning as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Roosevelt returned to Medora in the Dakota Badlands.

#116He was back where he'd ridden, hunted, and worked cattle as a young man.

#117There, he said:

#118“Here the romance of my life began.”

#119It was the place he'd returned to after losing his wife and mother.

#120The place where he'd lost money and watched his ranching ambitions collapse.

#121And now he was back as a candidate for vice president of the United States.

#122The ranch had failed.

#123The life that began around it hadn't.

#124Thomas C. Platt had good political reasons for wanting Theodore Roosevelt out of the New York governor's office. Sending him to the vice presidency looked like a way to put a troublesome politician somewhere with very little power.

#125Months later, that supposedly safe place put Roosevelt in the White House.

#126How did one of New York's most powerful political bosses end up helping move the man he couldn't control one step from the presidency?