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

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