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

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