Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stick

What part of Teddy Roosevelt's famous quote does Trump not get? Probably all of it. Then again, there is the Bad Cop Good Cop approach. Tillerson is the good cop being calm and rational while Trump is the bad cop talking about nuclear war. Tillerson says we just want to negotiate. Trump says we want to annihilate. Teddy Roosevelt knew that power backed by words was the answer. But not bragging backed by more bragging. If you have a Big Stick and speak softly then you probably wont have to use it. But if you shout and threaten and then don't use it, then everyone knows you are a bluffer.

Trump undoubtedly knows how to fight. He has done it all his life. From the schoolyard on where he would back down people with threats. When the justice department filed suit over a discrimination case Trump counter sued for millions. Punch and then counter punch. The folks at CNN are not used to this. They looked like they might puke as they contemplated nuclear war. Wolf Blitzer didn't look happy and Erin Burnett looked like she wanted to take her children and run for the hills. Trump has that affect on people.

But lets say Trump does get Teddy Roosevelt's famous edict. He knows he is backed up by a big stick and hes giving the guy with the bad haircut a little of his own. At a point a schoolyard bully is a schoolyard bully and you have to smack him back. It does take one to know one.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Did Teddy Roosevelt Hold off 5 Indians in the Badlands ?

Yes. It might have been four but no matter. The Dude newly arrived in the West was out looking for some horses when Indians appeared on the horizon and started galloping toward him. This is 1884 with Geronimo still on the loose and atrocities occurring on both sides. Men carried poison with them in case they were captured as stories of Indians cutting off men's organs while alive was well known. Enter Teddy Roosevelt to the Badlands fresh off the train from Manhattan. He had come out to find his piece of the West after his wife and mother died on the same day.

So the Indians with Winchesters raised charge Teddy. He swings down and puts his rifle across the pommel of his saddle and pins it to the center Indian. They stop and legend has it they professed they were friendly. The man with thick glasses from Manhattan would have none of it and told them to keep their distance. They then cussed at him and Teddy would later write he knew they had a good command of English then.

So how much danger was Teddy in? Possibly a lot. The Indians could have easily killed him and taken his horse and rifle and left his bones to rot in the Badlands. Cowboys were found many times scalped and worse after Indian encounters. So Roosevelt was smart to hold his ground. Apparently they then followed him but eventually gave it up. Teddy Roosevelt's stock went up in the West and the Roosevelt legend climbed just a little higher.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

How Teddy Roosevelt Cheated Death in the Badlands

I believe in destiny. I didn't before I wrote Forging A President. The fact is Teddy Roosevelt should have been killed many times over in his time out West. Anybody else would have not cheated death in the many ways the dude from the East escaped harm. Take the time the Indians rode up on him when he was alone. There had been atrocities and Geronimo was still loose . Roosevelt gets down off his horse and holds off the Indians until he is able to escape. Why the Indians didn't overwhelm the small man in the buckskin coat with glasses is amazing.

Or when he was confronted by an armed man in a saloon who demanded he buy drinks for the house. Roosevelt is sitting behind a stove and ignores the man but he persists with his six shooters drawn. Roosevelt stands up and knock his out with a right and a left. Again this is unbelievable for a man  who came from a patrician family in the East. The man easily could have shot him and we would not be discussing Teddy Roosevelt. Or the time he was a on roundup and went over a cliff with his horse and fell into the Missouri river. The horse flipped over and missed him by a foot. Roosevelt just got back on and continued riding.

Or when he chased armed men down a frozen river who stole his boat. Anyone else would have let the boat go but Roosevelt chases the men three days, captures them, then takes them on a journey of seven days to reach the nearest sheriff.  Or when a Grizzly confronted him and Roosevelt squeezes off a perfect shot between the eyes. Or the time he falls off the edge of a mountain and crashes through a pine tree then gets up without a scratch.

One time around a campfire a cowboy told him one day he would not be running cattle and he would become President. Roosevelt just laughed, but that cowboy saw something even Teddy didn't understand....destiny.

Forging A President

Teddy Roosevelt Faces Down a Gun Slinger in the Wild West

He was out looking for horses and it was getting dark. Teddy Roosevelt saw a town in the distance, small yellow lights peeking out in the Badlands. He went into town and looked for a room to bed down for the night. When he walked into a saloon he heard shots and saw a man with two pistols shooting up the bar. Teddy went and sat behind a wood stove to warm himself when the gunman saw him. What did he see? A man in a sombrero in a buckskin coat with thick glasses. A dude from the East. A target

Four eyes is going to buy the man bellowed. Teddy rubbed his hands and kept his head down. The man staggered over looking down at the skinny man behind the stove. I said four eyes is going to buy he shouted waving his guns. Teddy breathed deeply. Well if I have to I have to he said, standing up. Teddy cold cocked the man with a right hook and then a left. The gunman fell to the ground and Roosevelt sprung on him but he was out.

The people from the saloon hustled the man out and put him on a night train out of town. Teddy got his room and enjoyed the thanks of the town people. The dude from the East had just knocked out a badman and his reputation went a little higher that night. The Wild West had begun forging the man who would be President one day.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

The Wild West Is Vanishing From the Classroom

I gave a speech the other day on Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt at a school and I asked the students what they knew about the Wild West.  This was a middle school of eighth graders and they stared at me blankly. So I changed it a little. What do you know about the West? Blank stares. Then it occurred to me that my knowledge of the West had come down to me through movies and legend. No one sat me down and told me about the West. So for these eighth graders, the Wild West does not exist. Not even in legend.

It is a part of our history yet it is not taught the same way World War II or World War I is taught. The Wild West really only existed a very short time. From 1865 to 1890. Frederick Remington declared the West closed ten years before the beginning of the Twentieth Century and after the short rein of Billy the Kid and the James Brothers, Geronimo, Custer, it all came to an abrupt end. The car would take care of any remnants of the great plains horse culture.

And the Wild West was given to me and others through movies and television. But Westerns pretty much disappeared from the big screen in the seventies and John Wayne and company hung up their spurs. So kids today will not know about the West. They will not have that cultural marker. So after I asked the fourteen year olds about the West and I realized they did not know anything about it,  I put my book down and pulled up my chair, and said...

Let me tell you about a place called the Wild West.

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

The Day Teddy Roosevelt's Wife and Mother Died

                                                                             
Theodore Roosevelt clutched the two telegrams, shifting uncomfortably in the train—leaning forward, tapping his foot, trying to hurry on the frustratingly slow steam engine. Roosevelt was a man with a beautiful wife, a new baby, a brilliant political career, and the patronage and wealth of an aristocratic family behind him. Now, all this seemed in danger. The young assemblyman from Albany was making his way 145 miles south to Manhattan, where his wife and his mother both lay dying. On a clear day the train ride from Albany to Manhattan took five hours, but a heavy fog had been hovering over New York for days, seeming to portend what lay ahead for him. Teddy Roosevelt tapped his foot impatiently and stared at the first telegram. You have a baby girl. Congratulations. The second telegram told a much different story. Come at once. Mother and Alice gravely ill. The light went out for Roosevelt that day as he ran for the train. The man who valued action above all else could now do nothing but wait to be delivered to destiny.

Roosevelt stared out the window. The fog reminded him of when he was a boy and he would sleep sitting straight up because his asthma squeezed his small chest. On such nights, his father would take him out in his carriage. They would ride like the wind through the streets of New York. “Open your mouth Teddy! Open your mouth!” his father instructed. “Let the air in!” And, as in a primitive oxygen ventilator, he would open his mouth and feel the cool air go down his throat and inflate his lungs. The image of a man frantically driving a black, rain-slicked carriage through the night streets of New York, and a boy hanging off the side with his mouth open to the heavens—it was all his father could do, after walking up and down the hallway with him all night. The rich man’s son could get no air, and his father could only admonish the boy to open his mouth while he sped the horses savagely along. “Faster! Faster! For my son must breathe!” 

Now the train was pulling into Grand Central Station. The young dandy ran for his home in a fog so thick he could only grope his way toward 57th Street, where the lordly Roosevelt mansion commanded the street. Finally, he ran up the stairs to where his young wife, Alice, lay in bed. She was dying of Bright’s disease, an affliction of the kidneys causing fever, vomiting, terrible back pain, and bloody urine. They had just married the year before, but now the love of his life was dying in his arms. 

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