Teddy Roosevelts Prescription for all Ails Still Holds

Teddy Roosevelt was not well as a child or a young adult. He had acute asthma, Crones disease, insomnia. He was weak, thin, prone to depression and doctors didn't believe he would make it to adulthood. But his father famously told him, "Teddy you have the mind but not the body."  Enter Dr. Salter. Salter had a radical belief for the late eighteenth century and it said that the internal organs did not do well with the sedentary life. "Organs were made to work." Salter proclaimed and that meant action or the "vigorous life" as Roosevelt would later dub the life of action.  Teddy's father then added, "Without the body the mind cannot go far."

Roosevelt had his charge.  He began to box. He began gymnastics and weightlifting. This was at a time when few people exercised. Many believed exercise led to illness and certainly the Victorian upper classes of New York did not believe in getting sweaty. A constitutional consisted of walking to ones office or strolling into the parlor for some brandy and cigars. Cigars were what Teddy's parents had been giving him to ward off attacks of asthma that nearly suffocated the boy. That along with black coffee, opium, marijuana, Castor oil. Anything to stop the spasms of acute asthma. Nothing worked and so Teddy Roosevelt began the regimen his father and Salter prescribed and he began to slowly remake himself. Then he went West to the Badlands and for three years lived the wild life of a cowboy that completed Roosevelt's evolution into a man of action.

It is interesting that with all the hype over working out today we still see articles in the New York Times about the benefits of exercise. The latest said that strenuous exercise will slow down aging, ward off Alzheimer's. make us look and feel younger. It as if we are still trying to convince ourselves over a hundred years later that what Teddy Roosevelt found in the 1870s as a remedy to his ailments still holds. Without the body the mind cannot go far. True then and now.

Forging a President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

What I learned After 31 Barnes and Noble Signings

The first thing I learned is people just want to hear a good story. In fact they are dying to hear a good story that will take them out of their everyday life for even a minute. I cant tell you the amount of times people came in looking for another book and walked out with mine. Especially when they are looking for a book to give someone. Many times people would buy all three of my titles after I spoke to them about my newest book. It is as if once they had stopped and started to listen then all sorts of possibilities opened up.

The second thing I learned after 31 signings in two months is that people don't care about price. Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair lists out the door at 36 dollars and my other two nonfiction titles Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson and Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt lists out the door at about 32 dollars  On an average I would sell every signing 20-50 hardcovers. I can count on one hand the number of times people did not buy because of price. If the story is good and people want the book then people are willing to pay.

Women seem to buy more than men. They just do. Men are more reluctant to stop. Lets call it the hunter gather syndrome. Women are just more open to something new while many times men wont even stop to consider. Women think of others and are always considering what might make a great gift although many women buy for themselves. Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson was a surprise buy for many women who were caught up in the story of our First Woman President. Saying that, men did buy and  Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt was a favorite. I learned never to assume. Many times I was surprised at who was a reader of history and who was not.

People want something for free. Even if it is something small. It is an icebreaker if nothing else. I give them a small business card with the name of my book on it and that initiates a conversation.  It is nothing really but a reason to stop and if they don't buy they take it with them and there is a chance they may buy later. I have had many people circle back later and buy a book. Also I learned people you don't think will buy will surprise you every time. So I give everyone a card and I cant tell you the amount of times I was floored when someone I assumed would never buy my book would do it.

Authors are their own best salesmen. A signed copy of a book by the author is coveted. People like having their book inscribed to them or to someone they will give it to. Many times people told me they had never met an author before. I am literally surrounded by bestsellers when I am selling books and yet they just lay there and people breeze right past them. I know my book. I can talk to anybody about Al Capone, The Worlds Fair, Sally Rand, Edith Wilson or Teddy Roosevelt. The biggest advantage Barnes and Nobles has over Amazon is that it is full of human beings who interact with other human beings. People like talking to an author who is dressed up in a tie and a vest and who has a story to tell and will also listen to a story.  I can't tell you the amount of stories I have heard about Al Capone from people who bought my book.

Finally people seem to buy during the day more than the evening. If I arrived around eleven AM then there seemed to be a sweet spot right up to about 4PM. Usually I stayed in the store four hours. By then I usually ran out of books or out of gas. Evenings were hit and miss and yet I have been in a Barnes and Noble when it was absolutely dead and sold all my books. More books are better than a few. It is better to stack up fifty or a hundred books than twenty. At one Barnes and Noble outside of Chicago there were 65 books stacked on a single table and they all sold. More books implies a successful author who has come to the store to sign his or her latest.

 In the end I chewed through thirty packs of gum. Ruined three ties with coffee. I was probably asked where the bathrooms were fifty times where the calendars were twenty times and where the Starbucks was at least ten. I gave out four thousand cards and bumped into that many people. I sold over 600 hardcovers in the last two months of my three nonfiction titles It was hard work and I have a real appreciation for the Barnes and Noble employees and the managers who do this for eight hours straight. But it was also fun.

What I learned finally is that  it isn't price that sells books and it isn't having an online store at your fingertips. You just need to tell a good story. Believe me... people will listen.

William Hazelgrove

Why Leonardo DiCaprio Should base his film on what happened to Roosevelt Out West

Teddy Roosevelt is a hard character to handle much less make a movie about. Leo DiCaprio has been trying for some time to get a movie made about Teddy. The problem with Roosevelt is the same as all historical figures. What part of your life do you pick? Most people go with the charge up San Juan Hill and call it a day. Some will take on Roosevelt the trust buster and the man who took on JP Morgan. Others go with Roosevelt the outdoors man or the pugnacious politician who sunk the Republican party in 1912 by splitting the ticket and letting Woodrow Wilson win.

But if you are to make a film about Roosevelt I would say there is only one part of his life that lends itself to the redemption story that Hollywood loves. It is no surprise DiCaprio and Scorsese have been having trouble getting TR onto the big screen. Movies can only handle a slice of a persons life that has to be emblematic of the whole. Take Lincoln and the struggle to get the amendment freeing the slaves passed. It was a small part of a an amazing life but it told us so much about Lincoln.

The real story with Teddy Roosevelt is overcoming what happened to him in 1883. On the same day his wife and mother died and left him with a baby girl. Roosevelt who had been a sickly asthmatic his whole life then left for the Badlands and was gone for three years. It was in the hell of the \Badlands he transmuted his grief into something bigger than himself and emerged as the barrel chested Roosevelt we know today. He would remarry and then ten years later become President.  The amazing story of course is what happened to him out West. It would have killed anyone else.

Now all I have to do is a get a book to Leo.


Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt Would Thrash the Cad

It is an old term. Woodrow Wilson told some reporters that if they did not quit reporting on his first wife Ellen Wilson he would thrash them. It makes us think of a man with gloves slapping another man or someone whipping someone else. The technical definition is to beat someone with a stick or a whip. In the old Victorian sense of the word someone was thrashed for a slight on insult or an injury to honor. A thrashing was the warm up for a duel the ultimate settling of a slight. So now we really have a situation where someone needs to be thrashed.

Maybe Jeffry Lord on CNN should be thrashed for saying it is alright to imply that women are menstruating everywhere and bleeding from everywhere. Theodore Roosevelt would thrash Lord for that if not beat him to a pulp. Roosevelt confronted more than a few men who implied he was a coward and demanded retribution and even offered himself available for a duel. He in fact bought dueling pistols when he was a student at Harvard.

Another great word is cad. Definition: a man who misbehaves dishonorably especially toward a woman.  Cads are always thrashed sooner or later. There were certain lines that were not to be crossed. And when they were crossed the cad was thrashed. Lord says equality demands that men and women be treated equally and women should be able to take being insulted by powerful men.

What a cad.

Forging a President

Roosevelt and Churchill in the Heroic Age

I have been reading Hero of the Empire by Candace Millard and it hit me that the similarities between Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt are many. Both men came of age in the Heroic Age of Shackleton and Scott the two polar explorers who set the bar for suffering and death with their exploration of the South Pole. The Heroic Age can be defined as men of a certain patrician class feeling it is their destiny to explore, fight, or rule. The heroic man knows not fear and usually puts himself in grave danger.

Take Winston Churchill in the Boar war where he is attacked on a troop train and by all rights should have died there. This is when he was a war corespondent who really should not have even been fighting but he wanted to find war and test himself and he ended up being captured. Once captured Churchill makes a daring escape and goes on the run. The fact he could be shot and killed at any moment is negated by the heroic mans feeling that he is special and Gods Will shall keep him safe. In Churchill's case this seems to be true.

Much the same for Teddy Roosevelt who goes west after his wife and mother die on the same day in 1883 and ends up in the Badlands ;a place Custer called hell with the fires out and then puts himself through every test a young dude from the East could find with the possibility of death or great injury. Fighting Indians, badmen, blizzards, heat, stampeding cattle, swollen rivers, wild horses, Roosevelt cheats death at every turn...yet he comes out unscathed. He has the sense he will not be harmed and three years later he returns to the East to eventually become President as  Churchill returns to become England's greatest prime minister.

The Heroic Age ended as modernism moved in. Men were no longer heroic, they were mortal. Such a pity.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt's Neurasthenia

A man named Charles Beard came up with a theory in the late nineteenth century to account for the sudden increase in people becoming depressed. To Beard this coincided with the closing of the American West. In 1890 the frontier was declared closed but this had not stopped men like Teddy Roosevelt from going West. Teddy went West to get away from the depression  and heartache of losing his wife and mother on the same day. Charles Beard saw what Roosevelt did in a bigger context.

Beard believe people were getting sick because they were using the mind over the body. He attributed nervousness, impotence, cancer, heart attacks, depression to the fact people were now working in offices in the East. Beard believed we had fundamentally changed from a people who were out working under Gods light in the fresh air to a people huddled away in offices who ran from work to home only to return the next day. We had become a people who rarely exercised and were bound up in knots The real life Beard said was out West. He called this disorder... neurasthenia.

Buffalo Bills Wild West show was built around people who pined for the frontier. William Cody's show basically said the real men were out there on horses saving people from the Indians not working in cramped offices. Teddy Roosevelt and others took this to heart and found themselves in the wide open plains of the West. Today we know Beards neurasthenia is real. And we know that  being outside in  nature is good and sitting in offices is not a a great thing.

Teddy Roosevelt returned after three years in the West a different man. The magic elixir of the West had cured his neurasthenia. Then he set aside millions of acres for future generations who would deal with the same malady under a much shorter name....stress.


Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Doing Radio Interviews for a Book

You have only fifteen minutes maybe less except for the shows that let you roll thirty minutes. Those are the ones where you can stretch your legs and get into the meat of the book but for  many drive time shows you have less than ten minutes to get your point across and if you blow it there is no do  over because it is live. And so you wait for the phone to ring and set yourself up in a quiet room and tell everyone you are on the radio and please don't open that door or call out my name while I'm on the phone.

So you have your coffee and your notes and you have to be careful not to ramble and not speak too fast but you don't want to squander your time either. Getting a book down to sound bytes that will come across while someone is driving down the expressway is tricky. You have to hit the high points and your book may be three hundred pages but you can only get across a few moments that will stay with the listener  and hopefully get him to buy your book.

So it is one minute now. You have two phones ready in case one fails. The producers usually call right on the minute. And there it is. Hi, Is this William? Yes. Ok. Sixty seconds and you are on. So now you can hear the show. It is buzzing in your ear. A commercial. And then you are on. You will either do this or not. The show sounds distant and then it gets loud, there is a long hiss and now you are live. And we have author William Hazelgrove and his new book Forging A President to tell us about Teddy Roosevelt, William, welcome to the show!

You're on.

The Marc Bernier Show interview on Forging

Order Forging A President

The Day Your Book Comes Out: Forging A President

My book is out today. Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt is finally for sale. A release day is a funny thing. There has been a lot of anticipation, suspense, heartache, highs and lows, and then, then, the book comes out. And it does have a bit of anticlimax. There should be bells and shouting from the rooftops and of course that is why you do media. But in reality your book coming out is the end of a very long journey that began years before when you had the idea to put pen to paper or fingers to screen.

In the case of Forging A President I was intrigued by a biography of Teddy Roosevelt when I learned his mother and wife died on the same day and he went West for three years to the Dakota Territory or the Badlands. It is an amazing thing to think that this vigorous President had such tragedy at such a young age (26) and then went to the West to essentially become someone else. Add to this that he was a sickly asthmatic who literally had to fight for every breath prompting his father to once observe, "you have the mind but not the body Teddy, and without the body the mind cannot go far."

And from that moment I wanted to find out what happened to Teddy Roosevelt out West and how did it create this barrel chested persona who comes down to us through history. I do believe in destiny, anyone else would have been killed by the falling horses, the arrows from Indians, the six shooters pointed his way by bad men. And so you write the book, push the book, and then finally it comes out.  And like a child that grows up, the best you can do is give your book a good push... and let it go.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

How Barnes and Noble Can Survive and Thrive

Barnes and Noble has been under siege for some time by Amazon. They just hired another CEO to get sales moving in the right direction. They are scratching their head on how to compete against people clicking away on their books. Barnes and Noble is not exploiting their biggest advantage, their physicality and the physicality of their authors. Let me explain what I mean.

I do a fair amount of book signings at Barnes and Noble. My book Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson came out in the fall and my latest is out May 1 Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt. So I have been in the stores. Here is what I tell the manager. Put me in during your busiest days if you can if not I will take whatever time you have. When I am in the store I usually sell every copy of my books. And I don't have people coming to the store to see me. In fact I sell all my books to people who had not even heard of my books when they walk in. How do I do it?

What I do is when people pass my signing table I talk to them. I tell them about my book about the story of our First Woman President Edith Wilson who took over the White House in 1919 and ran the government for two years. I tell them about Teddy Roosevelt losing his wife and mother on the same day and then going West for three years. People want to hear a good story. They want to read a good book. And then I tell them I will sign the book and it is game over. A sale. It doesnt matter if I have 5 books to sell or 20...I can sell them all by just talking to people.

If I was the powers that be at Barnes and Noble, I would have authors in the store every day of the week and surprise people by having them talk to people about their books. I would not have them sitting behind a table and waiting for people to talk to them. Have them rove the store. The very advantage of a physical store over the internet is that it is full of real live people. I see people walking around in Barnes and Noble looking for a good book. Imagine if  "surpise authors" all over the country were chatting it up in the stores with customers. The books would fly off the shelf. No one is more motivated to sell their book than an author.

Believe me, I know.

William Hazelgrove Website

Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson
Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

We Could Sure Use A Teddy Roosevelt Today

We could sure use Teddy Roosevelt about now. Think of a man who just lost his wife and child and who heads West to remake himself. He is then plunged into the Badlands and ends up facing down a badman in a saloon who calls him four eyes and demands he buy him a drink. Teddy Roosevelt is small and just there from New York and yet he stands up and knocks out the man cold.

Or when he goes to cross a river that is overflowing with ice and moving swiftly. Everyone tells him not to do it but he takes his horse and tries to cross it anyway and ends up being knocked off his horse and managing to cross the river anyway and not freeze to death. Or when he lassos another man and saves him from a swiftly moving river and hauls him to the shore.

Or when he goes after three  men who have stolen from him and follows them all across the Badlands and then captures them and takes them all the way back to the sheriff. Or when he faces down five Indians by himself and manages to hold them off and escape. What is it? Courage. Grit. Destiny. Fortitude. Morality. Take your pick.  But Teddy Roosevelt embodied the man who did what he believed was right regardless of the cost.

We could sure use a Teddy Roosevelt now.

Forging a President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

How the Wild West Remade Teddy Roosevelt

In 1890, the superintendent of the U.S. Census Bureau declared the American frontier finally closed. Frederick Jackson Turner affirmed this and claimed that the frontier experience, more than any other, had shaped America’s character; it had given the pioneer “a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past.” Teddy Roosevelt went to the Badlands of the Dakotas at the tail end of the Wild West in 1883 to recover from the death of his wife and his mother.  The asthmatic with thick spectacles who stepped off the train in the town of Little Missouri bore little resemblance to the man who would return years later thick of chest and ready to tackle the world. He came back as the Teddy Roosevelt we now recognize.

The West remade Roosevelt, just as it had remade the country. Basically lawless and churchless, the West offered freedom unbounded if you were tough enough to take it. As he later wrote, “For cowboy work there is no need of special traits and special training, and young Easterners should be sure of themselves before trying it: the struggle for existence is very keen in the far West, and it is no place for men who lack the ruder, coarser virtues and physical qualities. . . . ”This held great appeal for young Roosevelt, who would find the essence of America in the frozen and baking terrain of the Badlands. Here the character of America presented itself to Roosevelt, and he essentially became that character. The West delivered this one-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound man, this “dude,” a great adventure: he faced down gunmen, grizzly bears, thieves, rustlers, unscrupulous ranchers, ruthless outlaws, and Indians. He had the breath knocked out of him by overturned horses, cracked a
rib, dislocated a shoulder, and nearly froze to death more than once, getting lost in the hell that is the Badlands—all while fighting chronic asthma and ignoring a physician’s admonition to protect his weak heart and lead the sedentary life of a recluse.

To recover from the twin blows of losing both his mother and his wife on the same day, and in his quest to find his way again, Theodore Roosevelt would push himself to the point where his broken heart would either heal or stop forever. The West was just the place for such a contest.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt Facing Down a Grizzly Bear

Roosevelt and Merrifield spent the long night with fingers on their rifle triggers, but the bear did not come back. The next morning Merrifield picked up the bear’s trail over the pine needles and moss and led them through the woods. The hunters breathed in the cold, clean scent of pine needles as they crept forward. Roosevelt was following Merrifield “when in the middle of the thicket we crossed a breastwork of fallen logs, and Merrifield, who was leading, passed by the upright stem of a great pine,” Roosevelt wrote later.6 “As soon as he was by it, he sank suddenly on one knee, turning half around, his face fairly aflame with excitement; and as I strode past him, with my rifle at the ready, there, not ten steps off, was the great bear, slowly rising from his bed among the young spruces.”

 To Merrifield’s surprise, Roosevelt walked past him briskly. The nine-foot, twelve-hundred-pound grizzly had already heard them and was back on his haunches, baring his needle-sharp teeth. “He had heard us but apparently hardly knew exactly where or what we were,” Roosevelt continued, “for he reared up on his haunches sideways to us, then he saw us and dropped down again on all fours, the shaggy hair on his neck and shoulders seeming to bristle as he turned toward us. As he sank down to his forefeet, I had raised the rifle.”8 Roosevelt’s heart was pounding and his mouth was dry as he faced down the fiercest creature in the West. He lifted his rifle, feeling his heart, telling himself that this was the moment; this was where the man confronted himself.

If he missed, he would be dead. Roosevelt aimed between the fierce gleaming eyes and fired. “Doubtless my face was pretty white,” he later wrote his sister, “but the blue barrel was as steady as a rock as I glanced along it until I could see the top of the bead fairly between his two sinister-looking eyes . . . ”

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt's First Time West

Commander Gorringe had decided at the last minute not to go, and this left Teddy Roosevelt to hunt buffalo alone.  When he switched to the St. Paul Express for the twenty-four-hundred mile journey, Roosevelt wired his mother, Mittie, that he felt “like a fighting cock again” as he left the United States for the Dakota Territory for the first time.

The darkness masked the geological malformations of the Badlands passing by his window, with its glowing lignite fires and ancient waters that had carved stone, blasted gullies, and formed rivers. Then Roosevelt was blinking in the darkness of two a.m. after the warmth of the Pullman car—a dapper young man who stepped off the train directly into the wet sagebrush of Little Missouri in the Dakota Territory. The train rolled away, leaving white smoke and the train whistle’s lament. Roosevelt breathed heavily, his asthmatic wheeze not unlike the huffing steam locomotive fading into the night. His new boots were stiff, his hat tight, his collar itchy. The new clothes he had bought in New York felt all wrong, but they were the latest in Western outdoor apparel.

There was no sound save for the yips of coyotes out in the darkness beyond the town. The town wasn’t much. Little Missouri had come of age rapidly when the railroad arrived and would die just as quickly. Such was the boom and bust of railroad towns in the West. Roosevelt stared at a dilapidated sign reading “PYRAMID PARK HOTEL,” behind which slouched a recently painted white structure leaning toward the street. Roosevelt hoisted his Sharps rifle and duffel bag and began to walk in the cool darkness. A coyote howled in the distance again; then he heard the thin musical note of running water. Roosevelt saw moonlight glimmering on the Little Missouri River, whose waters whispered softly in the night. The train had since faded into the darkness, heading for the heart of the Badlands. Teddy Roosevelt was in the middle of nowhere with a recommendation to see a man who might be able to help him.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt Was Shot in the Chest...and just kept on talking

Teddy Roosevelt had just finished dinner at the Gilpatrick Hotel in Milwaukee and was walking to his car—he was to give a speech in the Milwaukee Auditorium. The election of 1912 had been vitriolic with Roosevelt bolting the Republican Party and forming his own third party, the Bull Moose Party. Roosevelt was sure he could beat the incumbent William Howard Taft and the Democratic candidate, the former Princeton President, Woodrow Wilson. He reveled in giving speeches and attacking Taft as incompetent, and Wilson as an egghead who had the demeanor of a “druggist.” He now planned to deliver another rousing speech and had the fifty-page manuscript stuffed in his coat pocket, folded twice behind his steel glasses case.

John Schrank, a thirty-six-year-old psychotic and former New York saloonkeeper, approached Theodore Roosevelt. Schrank believed that deceased President McKinley had spoken to him in his dreams, proclaiming that no man should run for a third term. Schrank had bought a fourteen-dollar Colt .38 and fifty-five cents worth of bullets, and had
been following Roosevelt through New Orleans, Atlanta, Charleston, and Tennessee, ever since the dead McKinley had risen in his coffin and pointed to him and said, “Avenge my death.” While waiting to shoot Roosevelt in Milwaukee, he had passed the time drinking beer in a local bar and smoking Jack Pot cigars. Now his opportunity came. Roosevelt had just sat down in an open car in front of the hotel. Schrank approached him and Roosevelt rose to shake his hand when the assassin raised the .38 caliber pistol and fired. Roosevelt fell back into the car as the bullet entered his chest after piercing the steel glasses case and the folded manuscript pages of his speech. The bullet entered under his right nipple and lodged in his ribs.

The ex-President immediately took out a handkerchief and dabbed his mouth to see if his lungs had been hit. He then proclaimed he wouldn’t go to the hospital, but would deliver his scheduled speech. Dr. Terrell, his physician, insisted he go to the hospital. Roosevelt would have none of it. “You get me to that speech. It may be the last one I shall deliver, but I am going to deliver this one!” Theodore Roosevelt went to the auditorium and spoke for more than ninety minutes while bleeding under his coat—thundering to the crowd the immortal line, “It takes more than a bullet to stop a bull moose!”1 The crowd loved it.

And when Roosevelt went to the hospital, the doctors opted to leave the bullet lodged in his chest. He sent a telegram to his wife Edith, informing her that he was not nearly as badly hurt as he had been falling from a horse. He boarded a train for a Chicago hospital and changed into a clean shirt and asked for a hot shave. He hummed as he shaved and then climbed into the train compartment bed and fell asleep, sleeping like a child. In the press, people expressed astonishment that a man who had been shot at point-blank range could give a speech for an hour and a half. But they truly expected no less from Teddy Roosevelt. The sickly, asthmatic son of a rich man in Manhattan was born in the East; the Bull Moose who spoke for an hour and a half with a .38 caliber bullet lodged in his chest, he was born in the West.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

How Teddy Roosevelt Became A Cowboy

In 1883 Teddy Roosevelts mother and wife died the same day. Three months later he left for the South Dakota Territory.  By 1890, the superintendent of the U.S. Census Bureau would declare the American frontier finally closed. Frederick Jackson Turner affirmed this and claimed that the frontier experience, more than any other, had shaped America’s character; it had given the pioneer “a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past.” Teddy Roosevelt went to the Badlands of the Dakotas at the tail end of the Wild West. The asthmatic with thick spectacles who stepped off the train in the town of Little Missouri bore little resemblance to the man who would return years later thick of chest and ready to tackle the world.

He came back as the Teddy Roosevelt we now recognize. The West remade Roosevelt, just as it had remade the country. Basically lawless and churchless, the West offered freedom unbounded if you were tough enough to take it. As he later wrote, “For cowboy work there is no need of special traits and special training, and young Easterners should be sure of themselves before trying it: the struggle for existence is very keen in the far West, and it is no place for men who lack the ruder, coarser virtues and physical qualities. . . . ” This held great appeal for young Roosevelt, who would find the essence of America in the frozen and baking terrain of the Badlands. Here the character of America presented itself to Roosevelt, and he essentially became that character.

The West delivered this one-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound man, this this “dude,” a great adventure: he faced down gunmen, grizzly bears, thieves, rustlers, unscrupulous ranchers, ruthless outlaws, and Indians. He had the breath knocked out of him by overturned horses, cracked a rib, dislocated a shoulder, and nearly froze to death more than once, getting lost in the hell that is the Badlands—all while fighting chronic asthma and ignoring a physician’s admonition to protect his weak heart and lead the sedentary life of a recluse. To recover from the twin blows of losing both his mother and his wife on the same day, and in his quest to find his way again, Theodore Roosevelt would push himself to the point where his broken heart would either heal or stop forever. The West was just the place for such a contest.

Forging a President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

                                                                        Prologue
                                                                            1884


Roosevelt swung down from his pony Manitou and raised his Winchester. He positioned himself behind his horse. The five Indians riding in a deadly gallop were almost upon him. It had been ten years since Custer’s Last Stand at the Battle of Little Bighorn, and Geronimo was still on the run. The Indian Wars had simmered down, but atrocities still occurred on both sides. Roosevelt would later write, “There is always danger in meeting a band of young bucks in lonely, uninhabited country—those that have barely reached manhood being the most truculent, insolent, and reckless.”

Roosevelt knew he might die if he stood his ground, but he would surely die if he gave up his rifle or tried to outrun the Indians. He cocked his Winchester and took aim over the saddle of his horse. His glasses hit the stock and sweat tickled his nose. His hat was pulled low. The Indians whooped and shrieked with their rifles over their heads. Roosevelt breathed in the heated air of the Badlands and the ropy smell of his saddle. Later he would write, “The level plain where we were was of all places the one on which such an onslaught could best be met.”3

Being in the open gave him an advantage. Roosevelt drew a bead on the Indian in the middle. Men who knew they might die would think twice before charging someone with a rifle aimed at their chest. Still, Roosevelt knew the Indians had the odds. He might take one of them—but of course the others would kill him. Maybe take his scalp or hack him to pieces as they had left others. All he could really do was wait. He was a man from New York who just a year earlier had frantically taken a train in the middle of the night to find his destiny. It was a murderous world there, too.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt